Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

ABSTRACT

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Fiction
• (auto)biography
• parody
• intertextuality
• subversion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Stone Diaries (75, my emphasis, and 123). Beckman-Long terms The Stone Diaries “a casse-tête, or narrative puzzle, that challenges readers’ interpretive skills” (2015, 86).

2. In “Carol Shields and auto/biography,” Chiara Briganti emphasizes “the reclaiming of the maternal body” (2003, 185). Shields writes, “Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull” (Shields 1987, 52).

3. Laurence’s husband, Jack Laurence, an engineer, disliked these modernist aspects of the novel and advised Margaret to rewrite The Stone Angel in the third person and in chronological order. In “Assembling Identity: Late Life Agency in The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries,” Patricia Life (2014) compares The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries as the protagonists deal with aging: “Both novels illustrate the aging-as-decline narrative that became pervasive following the middle of the twentieth century, and in its presentation of an alternative definition of identity, Shields’s text mixes the influence of the decline narrative with some aspects of a more contemporary, aging-as-progress narrative” (Shields 1994, 99).

4. See Nora Foster Stovel’s “Thirteen Hands: A Power Play by Carol Shields.” (Stovel 2014).

5. In “Making stories, making selves: ‘Alternate versions’ in The Stone Diaries,” Williams writes, “Daisy drafts ‘alternate versions’ of her obituary” (Williams 2005, 26). Shields reads obituaries to expand her sense of “narrative possibilities” (Shields, 2003, 20).

6. Shields says of the word “feisty”: “The New Yorker never used to allow that word. And I can see why because it replaces about ten other words, graduations of feistiness” (Henry 2002, 20). She explains these epithets: “I wanted to have a lot of other voices filtering in and out, representing Daisy’s fantasies of what other people imagined about her” (Penguin n.p.).

7. Camillo Cavour, the Italian unification figure that Daisy writes about in college, reflects essays that Shields wrote in school, which can be read in her National Library archives.

8. See Stovel’s “Colors of Speech”: Margaret Laurence’s Juvenilia (2000), “Embryo Words”: Margaret Laurence’s Juvenilia (1997), “‘Love and death’: Romance and reality in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House,” (1999) and “(W)Rites of passage: The typescript of The Diviners as shadow text” (2001).

9. Shields quotes Isak Dinesen’s phrase, “the business of being a woman” in “Narrative hunger and the overflowing cupboard” (2003, 19). La Memoire Des pierres, the title given to the novel by a French translator, is indeed appropriate (Briganti 2003, 196, 200).

10. Tyndall limestone was used for the University of Winnipeg, where Shields was Chancellor.

11. Shields recalls, “I realized there was a double spine to the book, the stones and the flowers”; so she exchanged them, “to create some disorder in that symbolic ordering, so that there wasn’t male: stone and female: flower working against each other. So there’s a lot of cross-representation—the fact that Barker is a botanist and not a quarry worker, the fact the Daisy, although she’s a gardener, turns to stone in the end” (Thomas 1993–94, 60).

12. “These received thoughts, sometimes tragically, make a life” (xix), Shields comments: “Others tell her story. That was the trick I had to keep in mind as I was writing” (Parini 1994, 3).

13. Laurence made this comment in a 1961 letter to Adele Wiseman that Wiseman quotes in her 1988 Afterword to the NCL edition of The Stone Angel (312).

14. Shields comments, “I see this as the antithesis of the nineteenth-century novel, where characters struggle to find themselves—and she doesn’t find herself” (Thomas 1993–94, 60). Beckman-Long judges, “Unlike Laurence, Shields’ works are more ironic than tragic, with a parodic edge that is Austen-like and rapier-sharp” (Beckman-Long 2010, 13).

15. Shields recalls, “When I got there, finally, on the second-to-last page, I was reluctant to register those words. My wont had always been to find harmony and reconciliation, but the phrase pressed on my consciousness—and my conscience. Finally, I committed it to print. I’ve learned to live with that hard choice” (Shields 1994, xxi).

16. See Stovel’s (2013) “‘Excursions into the sublime’: A personal reminiscence of Carol Shields.”

17. Malcolm Ross convened this conference at the University of Calgary in 1982. Laurence topped “List A,” heading the best 100 books, and she book-ended “List B,” framing the top ten Canadian novels, with The Stone Angel as number one and The Diviners as number ten. See Charles Steele’s (1982) Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel (150).

18. Robert Thacker writes, “Shields treats biography in a very postmodern way, appropriating it in order to question the very foundation on which the biographical project is based” (Thacker 2014, 377).

19. “Biography is the least exact of the sciences” (1976, 53), Shields quotes Leon Edel as saying in Small Ceremonies.

20. Shields recalls, “I found the photo of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club at a small country museum here in Manitoba. The photos of Daisy’s grandchildren are actually of my own children. I asked them for permission, of course” (Anon.)

21. “Because the book leans, in that postmodern sense, on some of the art of biography, I wanted some of the elements of traditional biography to be there—like a family tree and these photographs” (Shields 1987, 59), Shields recalls.

22. In “Late Bloomer,” Shields says, “I’m interested in […] how we tell life stories with any truth. You’ve always got an unreliable narrator, so much gets enhanced, so much gets erased, so much has to be imagined” (Kaufman 1995).

23. “All the methods that autobiography uses to convince us of the authenticity of its narrative can be imitated by the novel, and often have been imitated,” Philippe Lejeune explains in “The Autobiographical Pact” (1989, 13).

24. Constance Rooke asserts, “In Canadian literature, Hagar is reigning still as Queen of all the characters” (1982, 25).

25. See Stovel’s (2008a) “‘Because she’s a woman’: Myth and metafiction in Carol Shields’s last novel, Unless.”

26. Williams concludes, “each of her narrative choices illuminates what it means to be a series of multiple selves that has come in the postmodern era to supplant a Cartesian model of unified, autonomous identity” (Wasmeier 2005, 17).

27. Shields explains, “I didn’t think there were enough novels about women who didn’t make the historical record” (Anon. Penguin).

28. Shields says, “I think of course of my mother’s generation, who are more voiceless even than we are, but I think we remain fairly voiceless and powerless” (Thomas 1993–94, 60).

29. “The novel’s undermining of Daisy’s authority to tell her own story shows how the voices of women have been perpetually silenced” (1995, 103), argues Winifred Mellor.

30. Before her death, Carol Shields told her family that she did not want any biographies.

31. Carol Shields Fonds, National Library, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nora Foster Stovel

Nora Foster Stovel is Emerita Professor at the University of Alberta, where she taught in the Department of English and Film Studies 1985–2014. She has the Honors BA, Honors MA, and PhD from McGill, Cambridge, and Dalhousie Universities respectively, followed by SSHRC and University of Calgary Postdoctoral Fellowships. She has published books and articles on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Drabble, and Carol Shields, including Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings (2008). She has edited Margaret Laurence’s Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists (2001) and Heart of a Stranger (2003). She has also edited Jane Austen Sings the Blues (2009) in honor of the late University of Alberta Emeritus Professor Bruce Stovel and Jane Austen and Company: Essays by Bruce Stovel (2011). She is composing “Sparkling Subversions”: Carol Shields’s Vision and Voice and Women with Wings: The Romantic Ballerina. She is editing “Recognition and Revelation”: Margaret Laurence’s Essays and The Creation of iGiselle: 19th-century Ballet Meets 21st-century Videogames, and planning an edition of “My Miniature Art”: The Poetry of Carol Shields.