Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic by Brenda Beckman-Long (review)

‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do’. Helene Cixous’ famous essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) sounds the keynote for this study of Carol Shields as writer-critic, recontextualising and ‘reinterpreting Shields’s novels as a body of work that represents a significant and sustained political project’ (p. 10). That project, as Beckman-Long reads it, braids together Shields’s feminist and cultural critique with her narrative experimentalism, for this critic argues that Shields’s fiction chronicles, indeed prefigures, significant shifts in feminist thinking and critical theory over thirty years, as she moves towards the wider affective and ethical concerns of third-wave intersectional feminism.

Beckman-Long examines Shields’s contribution to the tradition of women’s life writing, reading through the lens of contemporary feminist theoretical studies of biography and autobiography. These are the two traditionally masculine genres which Shields deconstructs in her investigation of the politics of women’s self-representation through writing. This study selects six of Shields’s novels, all of them versions of auto/biography featuring women writers: Small Ceremonies, The Box Garden, Swann, The Republic of Love, The Stone Diaries, and Unless, as it traces the arc of her evolving feminist critique. (But what about Shields’s wider interest in gender identities, such as Larry’s Party?) Every chapter focuses on problems which Shields investigates as she refashions autobiographical and critical discourse: ‘The Problem of the Genre’, ‘The Problem of the Author’, ‘The Problem of the Body’, ‘The Problem of the Subject’, and ‘The Problem of the Subject of Feminism’.

‘The Problem of the Author’ is illustrated in Swann, for Mary Swann, the subject of this auto/biography, is already dead. Beckman-Long suggests a real-life parallel between the fictitious Swann and the Canadian poet Pat Lowther, both women writers murdered by their husbands, and both illustrating the danger of women’s silencing. The absent author raises questions of author-construction, for the author’s reputation is at the mercy of editors, publishers, biographers, and academic critics. Shields’s novel becomes a parody of biography and autobiography, and it ends in farce as scholars reinvent both the woman and her lost poems, an ironic illustration of Swann’s (and possibly Lowther’s) re-membering and commemoration. The Stone Diaries illustrates ‘The Problem of the Subject’, for this is a postmodern version of autobiography, whose very title suggests that this is not one diary but several diaries by multiple narrators, where the woman diarist is in danger of being written out of her own life story. Narrative strategies of irony, multivoicing, and textual ambiguity expose the autobiographical form as a cheat, and yet this ‘apocryphal journal’ is also one of Shields’s narrative acts of ‘redemption’. In her last novel Unless, as Beckman-Long shows, these acts of redemption, ‘redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women’, assume new social and ethical resonance through a woman’s trauma narrative, thus repositioning Shields as a precursor of intersectional feminism.

This is a valuable contemporary reappraisal, convincingly arguing that for Shields writing is a social and political act, ‘the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen’ (Unless).