“Because She's a Woman”: Myth and Metafiction in Carol Shields's Unless
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“Because she’s a woman”: Myth and Metafiction in Carol Shields’sUnless Nora Foster Stovel University of Alberta T C P (), Linda Hutcheon observes the Iinherent conflicts between postmodernism and feminism. But Carol Shields succeeds brilliantly in combining her feminism and postmodernism in Unless (). Her last novel, Unless is her most explicitly feminist and her most intensely postmodernist text. She remarked, “I think I was the last feminist to wake up in the world.”¹ She was braver about expressing her feminist beliefs in Unless because she did not think she would be alive to read the reviews. e narrator of Unless echoes these sentiments: “I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I’m just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always.”² As Wendy Roy writes, “Unless is Shields’ most explicitly feminist novel” ().³ Shields’s Shields made this comment in a conversation with Nora Foster Stovel in Victoria, May . Unless otherwise stated, all references to Carol Shields’s remarks will be to this interview. is essay was composed as a work of mourning fol- lowing Shields’s death on July . Unless, . Unless was short-listed for the Mann Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Wendy Roy calls Unless a brave, strikingly feminist examination of goodness, loss, fam- ESC . (December ): – Foster_Stovel.indd 51 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM feminism embraces egalitarian liberalism, however, not radical, militant feminism. For example, Shields and her Unless heroine both practise “bean-counting”—noting the exclusion of women from lists of the mod- N F S ern world’s greatest thinkers and writers.⁴ In her “Playwright’s Note” to is Professor of English at her play irteen Hands (), Shields asserts her commitment to the the University of Alberta, “redemption of women artists and activists” and her desire to reclaim these where she women, “to valorize those lives.” Shields’s daughter, writer Anne Giardini, teaches twentieth- confirms her mother’s mission to address the “erasure” of these “invis- century literature. She ible” women, “lost heroines,” because this “obliteration is a tragedy” (). has published books and Shields employs myth and metafiction to convey her feminism inUnless : articles on Jane she revises myth in a manner employed by feminist writers from H. D. to Austen, D. H. Lawrence, Atwood, and she employs metafictionality, fiction about the art of fiction, Margaret Drabble, and to critique women’s place in a “withholding universe” (). All Shields’s Margaret Laurence. novels are metafictional—beginning with her first novel, Small Ceremo- Divining Margaret nies (), in which Judith Gill is writing a novel, through Swann, in Laurence: Her Complete which critics cannibalize the poet Mary Swann, to e Stone Diaries, in Writings will be which Daisy Goodwill Flett, who writes under the pen name Mrs Green published by McGill- umb, narrates her own autobiography—but Unless is her most explicitly Queen’s in . She metafictional novel, for her narrator uses fiction to reflect and resolve her is composing “Sparkling real-life dilemma. While all Shields’s heroines are writers, the heroine of Subversion”: Carol Unless writes novels, like Shields herself: in contemplating her heroine’s Shields’s “Double Vision.” destiny, she revises her conception of the “happy ending” of marriage for women. Shields employs myth to present the problem in Unless and metafic- tionality to seek a solution. In “Literature and Myth,” Northrop Frye defines literature as a “developed mythology” (). To convey this, her most feminist fiction, Shields draws on that most female of myths, the ancient Greek tale of the fertility goddess Demeter’s search for her miss- ing daughter Persephone.⁵ ily love, and the process of putting words to paper. […] Unless is Shields’ most explicitly feminist novel, one in which she delib- erately, self-consciously, and courageously ties together feminist threads from the novels and short stories she has written over the past twenty-five years, and in which she expresses more forcefully and openly than she has ever done before her concerns about the continued marginalizing and silencing of women in contemporary society. (–) In her essay “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” Carol Shields mentions that as late as Northrop Frye wrote an essay listing “dozens of male fiction writers” (). Demeter’s daughter is called “Kore” before her abduction by Hades and “Perse- phone” afterward. | Foster Stovel Foster_Stovel.indd 52 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Shields frames this quest as a mystery in Unless. Reta Winters appears at age forty-three (the oldest point at which a woman could still exert sexual allure, as Shields then thought)⁶ to have it all: three engaging teen- age daughters named Norah, Natalie, and Christine; a twenty-six-year-old loving partnership with their physician father, Tom; a sprawling one-hun- dred-year-old farmhouse in Orangetown just one hour north of Toronto; and a successful career as translator and novelist. But suddenly her eldest daughter, Norah, the most thoughtful and literary of the three sisters, drops out—out of university, out of her Annex apartment with her boyfriend, Ben Abbott, out of her family, and out of life—to sit in silence on a street corner with its own “textual archaeology” (), beneath the lamppost where a Muslim woman recently immolated herself—with a begging bowl and a sign around her neck reading “GOOD- NESS” (–).⁷ e question is Why? Unless is a novel of interpretation—how to inter- pret Norah’s defection from life. eories abound. Each member of Reta’s kaffee klatsch—a parody of the ancient Greek chorus—has a theory: “A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is sure the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal” (). A psychiatrist calls it “a behav- ioural interlude in which she is either escaping something unbearable or embracing the ineffable” (), but he cannot say which. Tom, Norah’s father, a medical doctor addicted to “the idea of diagnosis and healing,” the “rhythmic arc of cause and effect” (), proposes a scientific interpreta- tion: Norah is suffering “post-traumatic shock” (); if they identify the trauma, the remedy will be apparent. Reta can’t believe in “the thunderclap of trauma” (), but Norah’s sisters agree with their father: “What terrible thing happened to her?,” they ask; “ere has to be a thing” (). Reta hopes that Norah is simply in “a demented trance”: “she’ll snap her fingers and bring herself to life” ()—a Sleeping Beauty who can kiss herself awake. One compelling theory comes from Danielle Westerman, French “feminist pioneer, Holocaust survivor, cynic, and genius” (), whose book, Les femmes et le pouvoir, Reta translates as Women Waiting. Westerman, “poet, essayist, feminist survivor, holder of twenty-seven honorary degrees” (), Reta’s French Professor at the University of Toronto, is her moral Shields remarked to me that she had rethought the age issue and had decided to make the poet-protagonist of Segue, the novel that she was composing in , her own age of sixty-seven. In her essay “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” Carol Shields recalls seeing a street person sitting on a pavement in France with a sign around his neck saying “ ‘J’ai faim’ ” (). “Because she’s a woman” | Foster_Stovel.indd 53 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM mentor—a cross between a Kantian categorical imperative and Faustus’ Good Angel. “Would Danielle approve?” (), Reta asks herself: “She is the other voice in my head, almost always there, sometimes the echo, sometimes the soloist” (); “I had acquired a near-crippling degree of critical appreciation for the severity of her moral stance” (). Westerman, her names implying gender issues, represents the feminist pole of the nar- rative. Danielle thinks Norah is responding to the powerlessness of women in patriarchal society: powerless to achieve everything, she chooses to embrace nothing. “Subversion of society is possible for a mere few; inver- sion is more commonly the tactic for the powerless, a retreat from society that borders on the catatonic” (), as Danielle writes in Alive. “Norah has simply succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety. In doing nothing, she has claimed everything” (), she states. Forbidden greatness, reserved for men, Norah pursues goodness: “Norah took up the banner of goodness—goodness, not greatness,” as Reta echoes Westerman, “Perhaps because there was no other way she could register her existence” (). While all these theories prove to have validity, underlying her fictional theories is Shields’s own revision of the archetypal myth of Demeter and Kore, the mother-daughter goddesses of Greek legend. Demeter, daughter of Cronus and Rhea, was the Corn Goddess, or Mother Goddess of the Earth, and Kore was her daughter by Zeus. One day, when Kore gathered flowers with her nymphs on the plains around Etna in Sicily, she plucked the flower (in some sources a lily, symbol of purity and spirituality, and in others a narcissus, a phallic symbol⁸) of Gaia, the Earth, and the earth opened. Her uncle, Hades, king of the dead, emerged and abducted her to his kingdom in the Underworld. Demeter wandered the earth, searching for her lost daughter, a torch in either hand. e grieving mother refused to take her seat on Olympus or to fulfill her function as the goddess of fertility. e earth was devastated: winter reigned perpetually, and the crops would not spring. Helios, the sun, had witnessed Hades’ abduction of Kore, and told Hecate, goddess of the night, seen as Demeter’s obverse, who informed the mourning mother. Zeus ordered his brother Hades to release Kore, but Hades had already persuaded the girl to eat the seed of the pomegranate, food of the dead, binding her to his kingdom forever.