Dance of the Senses in “Red Dress—1946”

Drawing on Halliday’s socio-semiotics and systemic functional linguistics, this essay inspects multisensorial configurations of meaning in Alice Munro’s “Red Dress—1946”. It argues that the language of the senses is used expressively, rather than descriptively, as it negotiates emotional and affective concerns, rather than aiming at a realist and documentary stance. In order to sustain this line of argumentation, the grammar systems of passivity and activity, transitivity and taxis have been considered. The following questions have been raised: Which senses are present and predominant in the short story? What functions do they have in the narrative? Which linguistic strategies are adopted in order to articulate and express a language of the senses? How are they negotiated within the narrative stance (with a first-person homodiegetic narrator)? Finally, the language of the senses will be read in its potential for storytelling, seen as the ultimate aim and expression of Munro’s art.