“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-
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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.
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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’ ” ().
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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. So Zeus decreed a compromise: the girl would spend half the year with her Neumann says the narcissus, described in the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” is a phallic symbol and “the pomegranate symbolizes the woman’s womb, the abundance of seeds its fertility” ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 54 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM husband, Hades, in the Underworld, and half the year with her mother on the earth. As Shields observes in “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” “e stories that take their roots in mythology or in our scrip- tures establish their legitimacy by their divine origins or ethical purpose” Thus, the (). us, the Demeter–Persephone myth demonstrates to mankind the divine origin of the natural rotation of the seasons. Demeter– Kore is the archetypal disappearing woman, a figure Shields explored initially in Swann: A Mystery () and again in Unless: Persephone like Kore and Mary Swann, “Norah disappeared” (). Deme- ter, of course, is the archetypal grieving mother. Together, Demeter myth (Ceres in Roman lore) and Persephone (Proserpina in Latin) repre- sent “the Goddesses” of Greek mythology, as they are termed in the demonstrates Homeric “Ode to Demeter,” and the Eleusinian Mysteries are their rite. e Demeter–Persephone story, the major mother-daughter myth to mankind the in our modern western lore, can help to illuminate recent women’s fic- tional portrayals of mother-daughter relationships, such as Margaret divine origin of Laurence’s e Diviners (), Margaret Drabble’s e Realms of Gold (), or Toni Morrison’s Beloved (), which complement the son’s the natural search for a spiritual father that distinguished modernist novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses (). Indeed, Helen Buss’s Mother and Daugh- rotation of the ter Relationships in the Manawaka Works of Margaret Laurence () demonstrates how “the myth of Demeter and Kore informs Laurence’s seasons. fiction” (). Modernist writers like H. D. in her poem “Demeter” and postmodernist authors like Meridel Le Seur in her story “Persephone” or Atwood in her Double Persephone have re-visioned this myth. Recent women theorists also employ this myth as an archetype. e Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time (), edited by Christine Downing, is a collection of poems, stories, and essays; Persephone Returns: Victims, Heroes, and the Journey from the Underworld () is by Tanya Wilkinson, a psychotherapist who employs the myth in her case studies of female victims; and Demeter and Persephone: Lessons from a Myth () is by Tamara Agha-Jaffar, who uses the myth to chart her vision of the women’s studies program she founded. ese scholars recognize the significance of the myth of the Goddesses to the empowerment of women, for the Goddesses are related to the Great Mother Archetype described by Carl Jung in his essay, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” where he connects this archetype to “all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. e place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother. On the
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Foster_Stovel.indd 55 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM negative side, the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate” (). Jung adds that the mother’s attributes are “her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths” ().⁹ In e Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (), Erich Neumann explains, “e one essential motif in the Eleusinian mysteries and hence in all matriarchal mysteries is the heuresis of the daughter by the mother, the ‘finding again’ of Kore by Demeter, the reunion of mother and daughter” (). is myth applies particularly well to Unless, which pivots on “the inescapable perseverance of blood ties, particularly those between moth- ers and daughters” (), as Shields puts it in Swann. Norah reflects the disappearing daughter, Kore, and Reta her mourning mother, Demeter. Reta Winters displays seasonal associations, from her name to her novels’ titles, and Norah goes under ground figuratively, mimicking Kore’s literal journey, following her abduction by Hades, or Pluto. Shields does not apply the Demeter–Persephone myth literally, of course: the Winters’s good-natured golden retriever, Pet, is hardly Cer- berus guarding the gates of the underworld. Instead, she revisions and revises the myth, like so many feminist writers, to emphasize the fact that women have been excluded, as illustrated by the repeated crucial clause, “Because she’s a woman” (). In adapting the ancient myth to a feminist purpose, Shields also revises the myth itself. Critics have observed how Shields adapts traditional patterns, revising and critiquing them in the process. For example, Faye Hammill observes in her essay “e Republic of Love and Popular Romance,” “Just as Swann revises the narrative form of the detective mystery, so e Republic of Love revises the romantic novel” (–). Similarly, Unless revises the archetypal myth of the goddesses. Norah is a Persephone figure. Reta realizes Norah has swallowed, like the fatal pomegranate seed, the Old English word wearth meaning not “worth” but “outcast”: “It is the word wearth that Norah has swallowed. is is the place she’s claimed, a whole world constructed on stillness” (). Similarly, Reta swallows Westerman’s theory whole: “Goodness but not greatness. Whenever, and for whatever reason, these famous words fall into my vision, I feel my breath stuck in my chest like an eel I’ve swallowed whole” ()—again recalling Persephone’s pomegranate seed. “How can
Recent feminist scholars, such as Susan Rowland in Jung: A Feminist Revision, have critiqued Jung’s “goddess feminism.” In Survival: A ematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Atwood notes that “Nature as woman keeps surfacing as a metaphor all over Canadian literature” ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 56 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM she go on living her life knowing what she knows, that women are excluded from greatness, and most of the bloody time they choose to be excluded?” (–), Reta asks rhetorically. us, Norah’s disappearance clearly has already alerted her mother to issues of gender and power. e narrator, “I, Reta Winters (neé Summers)” (), as the name implies, suggests a seasonal Ceres or Demeter figure. Born Reta Sum- mers, suiting her “sunny” () nature, she meets her other half, Tom Winters, making a yin and yang duo: “We could become a standing joke, or one of us could change seasons” (), Reta reflects. Predict- ably, Reta changes, from Summers to Winters, reflecting the rotation of the seasons and the traditional submission of the female to the male. Indeed, Reta rejects sunniness. When Margot Offenden—donor of the Offenden Prize (the name suggesting bland literature that will offend no one), which “recognizes literary quality and honours accessibility” () —croons, “It’s heaven to find that sunniness still exists in the world” (), Reta rejects the label: “I don’t consider myself a sunny person. In fact, if I prayed, I would ask every day to be spared the shame of dumb sunniness” (). Instead, she wishes to be dark, like the crone Danielle Westerman, that Hecate figure,¹⁰ with her haggard elegance and crimson nails: “Don’t hide your dark side from yourself,” Danielle urges Reta; “it’s what keeps us going forward, that pushing away from the blinding brilliance” (). Norah’s disappearance plunges her mother into darkness: “I’m sup- posed to be Reta Winters, that sunny woman, but something happened when her back was turned” (), Reta reflects. Like Hecate, Demeter’s alter ego, Reta turns her dark side forward and switches her narrative from first to third person, a technique she employed ine Stone Diaries. Her “sunny daughter Norah” () has also turned her dark side, plung- ing the world into winter. But life goes on—“as if our small planet was on course, as though the seasons would continue, autumn about to move into winter” (). “Winter’s harder,” Reta discovers, fulfilling the destiny of her chosen name. Reta emphasizes the rotation of the seasons by specifying the time of year at the start of each chapter. She begins her confessional narrative in the summer of the year with the tragedy of her daughter’s defection and concludes with the comic resolution of Norah’s recovery in the early
Hecate, viewed as Demeter’s obverse, was the guardian of the crossroads and the threshold between the underworld and the earth. She helps inform Deme- ter of Kore’s abduction by Hades. In Survival: A ematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Atwood notes that Hecate “is only one phase of a cycle; she is not sinister when viewed as part of a process” ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 57 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM spring of with the turning point occurring at the New Year. Unless is thus a millennial novel, a study of before and after tragedy—a tragedy as real to Reta as the loss of her breast to Shields. Shields composed Unless in the summer of , in a rush of well-being, revising it in the autumn and Shields reflects publishing it in the spring of . e nine-month arc of the narrative parallels the human gestation period and the term of Shields’s composi- the floral tion. Norah’s birthday is May Day, a spring ritual, and she is recovered in the new year, suggesting a fertility figure—reflecting the cycle of death emphasis of the and rebirth embodied in the Persephone myth. Zeus decrees in “e Homeric Hymn to Demeter”: “When the earth blooms in spring with Homeric myth all kinds of sweet flowers, then from the misty dark you will rise again, a great marvel to gods and mortal men” (). Shields reflects the floral in Reta’s emphasis of the Homeric myth in Reta’s predilection for flowers and seeds. Following her devastating cancer diagnosis, Shields began writing predilection a novel about cancer but then jettisoned the idea because it was too auto- biographical: “I got this book off on the wrong foot, writing about breast for flowers and cancer because I had all this information. But it was just making me sad. I had to pick the book apart with jeweller’s tweezers—which always breaks seeds. your heart a bit. But now it feels like I’m soaring” (), she commented to Anne Dowsett Johnston.¹¹ She transformed her grief over the loss of her breast into mourning for a lost child, as she explained to Maria Russo (). Johnston says, “Cancer is the thread Shields dropped in writing this novel, one she replaced with the estrangement of Norah” (). Unless allows read- ers to witness the artistic alchemy by which Shields transforms fact into fiction, as the mother-daughter myth replaces cancer to provide a more womanist focus. “e whole sense of sadness, of the end of things, of the broken vessel—everything is there,” as Shields remarked to Lev Grossman in May (). Grossman called Unless “a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss” ()—an image that suggests the mythical mother mourning her daughter buried in the dark void of death. Reta enters the winter of her discontent when her daughter goes under- ground, as the “gravity of mourning” () draws “the grieving mother” () down into a spiral of depression, reflecting Norah’s “ellipsis of mourn- ing” (). Reta and Tom walk hand in hand through the cemetery, search- ing for their lost child among the stone angels and frozen cherubs (). Reta believes they have all become “actors in Norah’s shadow play” ().
One fragment of her “breast cancer” () novel remains in Reta’s outrage against the character that is repelled by the sight of a mastectomy brassiere ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 58 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Tom abandons his research on trilobites—prehistoric arthropods that protect themselves by enrolment (rolling up into a ball to shield their soft underbellies), a symbol of Norah’s alienation—to study traumatic stress syndrome. Even Tom’s mother, the widow Lois Winters, withdraws into silence after Norah’s disappearance. Realizing she has been living in a fool’s paradise ’til now, Reta writes a feminine Paradise Lost. “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life” (), Reta realizes.¹² Powerless to intervene or to understand Norah’s defection from life, Reta is forced to “count [her] blessings” (). And she does, chapter by chapter, in a rite of self-therapy or a ritual of recovery. Unless is composed of thirty-seven brief chapters chronicling vari- ous aspects of Reta Winters’s life—her home, her family, her friends, her work. In true Shields fashion, the surface is composed of domesticity and dailiness: “Fiction demands such pitiless enumeration” (), complains Reta. But beneath that engaging surface lie subversive questions about human society, and especially about women in this essentially feminist novel—Shields’s “sparkling subversion” ( ).¹³ Each chapter has a title—words like once, nearly, only, hardly, hence, and nevertheless—the glue of grammar: “A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of loca- tion or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, there- tofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet” (). For example, Reta reflects, “[T]he Christian faith is balanced on the wordsalready and not yet. Christ has already come, but he has not yet come” (). She par- allels this Christian faith with her own feminist belief: “But we’ve come so far; that’s the thinking. So far compared with fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, no, we’ve arrived at the new millennium and we haven’t ‘arrived’
Shields repeats this image in “Being Happy—”: “Happiness […] was the lucky pane of glass you carried about in your head[.] It took all your cunning just to hang on to it” (CC ). In “e Republic of Love and Popular Romance,” Faye Hammill quotes Shields as saying, in Bookclub on BBC Radio , broadcast March , .., presented by James Naughtie: “I love structure and I love usurping traditional structures. I don’t know how I came to be so rebellious because I’m not in my everyday life. But if the novel is going to continue, I think it has to be subverted, and I’m interested in trying to make some new shapes that fit our life” (, ).
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Foster_Stovel.indd 59 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM at all” (). e last chapter of Unless is titled, significantly, “Not Yet.” e chapter titled “Unless” offers a clue to the myth: “Unless you’re lucky … you go down in the darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light” (), suggesting Persephone’s escape from the realm of darkness. Reta emphasizes the concept by noting, “Ironically, unless, the lever that finally shifts reality into a new perspec- tive, cannot be expressed in French” (). Reta adds, “Unless is a miracle of language and perception, Danielle Westerman says in her most recent essay, ‘e Shadow on the Mind’” ().¹⁴ e word “unless” also provides a clue to this metafictional mystery. Reta reflects, “Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior ‘discourse,’ but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they’re just so much narrative crumble. Unless, unless” (). Reta’s fiction rewrites reality, just as Shields revises myth: “e conjugation and (some- times) adverb unless with its elegiac undertones, is a term used in logic, a word breathed by the hopeful or by writers of fiction wanting to prise open the crusted world and reveal another plane of being” (). is definition of the novel’s title provides a clue to Reta’s metafictional quest. Like Demeter, Reta is primarily a mother figure. She defines herself first and foremost as a wife and mother and only secondarily as a writer: “I’m Reta Winters, the doctor’s wife (that fine man!), the mother of three daughters, the writer.[…] My life as a writer and translator is my back story, as they say in the movie business; my front story is that I live in this house on a hill with Tom and our girls and our seven-year-old golden retriever, Pet” (, ). After Norah’s defection, however, Reta identifies herself, like Demeter, as the mother of a missing daughter: “I am the mother of Norah Winters, such a sad case” (). Christine calls Reta “a martyr to the cause of motherhood” () and implies her smothering mother act has driven Norah to depart on a “guilt trip” (). Reta interprets “Norah’s dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother” (). Contemplat- ing her daughter’s sexual relationship with her boyfriend, Ben Abbott, a perfect stranger months before, “I recognized that I was one of those mothers who has difficulty with her child’s becoming a woman” (). is concept concerns the daughter’s separation from the maternal bond and entrance into a marital union, as in the Demeter–Kore myth. Reta takes Norah’s defection as a sign of her failure as a mother and their fail-
Reta, translator of texts from French to English, frequently uses the issue of translation to emphasize important points, such as Norah’s realization of the powerlessness of women ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 60 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM ure as a family: “We had failed in our effort to live our happy life” (). Appropriate for a Demeter figure, this “grieving mother” () loves flowers and seeds: “From my mother I developed my love of flowers. eir shapes came folded inside tiny seeds” (), although she real- ized, as a child, when all the blossoms were stolen from her mother’s hydrangea bush, that “the missing flowers signified a greater evil and a part of a larger design, which might ultimately lead to death” (), like the flower that Persephone plucks when the ground opens beneath her feet and swallows her. Reta’s fictions are presented as springtime efflorescences. As Jung explains, in “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” the mother archetype is often associated with “fer- tility and fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden” (). Reta’s first novel is titled My yme Is Up, a romantic comic fiction. e title pun, suggesting the springing of crops, is appropriate for a Demeter figure but painfully ironic regarding Shields’s own illness and premature death. A reviewer of My yme Is Up charged the author with “being ‘good’ at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard” (). Reta’s new editor, Arthur Springer, says, “As the no- longer-quotable Woody Allen once put it, the writers of comedy are always asked to sit at the children’s table” (). As Margaret Atwood remarked of Shields, “Because she’s a comic writer and genuinely funny, early on, she was put in the ‘sweet’ box, where she does not belong. e fact is, there’s a dark thread in everything she writes” (Russo ). My yme Is Up began as a “seed” that grew in a Burgundy garden: “I meant to write a jokey novel. A light novel. A novel for summertime […] Naturally the novel would have a happy ending. I never doubted but that I could write this novel, and I did, in —in a swoop, alone, during three dark winter months when the girls were away all day at school” (). Just as My yme Is Up began as “a seed” (), appropriate for a Demeter figure, so yme in Bloom just “popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn” (). us, Reta incubated this comic, summery novel during the dark days of winter, like a bulb growing underground. Reta’s role as a provider of food fits the Demeter role perfectly. Her “empty-fridge dream” () is a comical reversal of the Biblical par- able and an indication of her commitment to the role of nurturer. In the dream, she is standing in front of the fridge, preparing a meal for guests, but the fridge only contains a single egg and maybe a tomato. She interprets: “[T]he scarcity of food stands for a scarcity of love, that no matter how I stretch that egg and tomato, there will never be enough of Reta Winters for everyone who needs her” (). e egg reinforces
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Foster_Stovel.indd 61 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM her role as creator, like the nest on which she broods before her Apple.¹⁵ Her dream reflects the “reflex embedded in my role as mother, the pro- vider of nutrition, the server of balanced meals” ()—a Ceres figure. e mourning mother inscribes “My heart is broken” () on a wash- room cubicle and draws a heart crossed by a jagged line: “My heart is broken. My mouth closed on the words, and then I swallowed” ().¹⁶ Swal- lowing grief, like Persephone’s pomegranate seed, Reta commits herself, like Demeter, to the quest for her disappearing daughter. e quest leads her on a path through ethics, feminism, and metafiction in Shields’s radi- cal revision of the archetype. Reta’s quest involves an exploration of goodness, the word that Norah has chosen to represent herself. Norah was always a “Good girl. After her mother’s heart” (), Reta reflects: “Norah embodies invisibility and goodness, or at least she is on the path.[…] the path to goodness” (). Reta realizes that if she is to discover her daughter she must follow her along the path to goodness. Ethics is a central concern in this novel. “If I am sincere about achiev- ing genuine goodness in my life and thereby finding a way to reconnect with Norah” (), Reta realizes she must work at it. e first thing she does, after she discovers Norah’s whereabouts and her GOODNESS sign, is to read Ford-Helpern’s e Goodness Gap (). Reta writes to the author, “Yes, goodness is exactly what she is seeking, the nature of goodness, how we learn to be good and what that means” (). Reta decides to write about goodness: “I switch on my computer and get down to work. I have the sense that if I am serious about this business of ‘being good,’ this is the only place in the world I can begin, snug in my swivel chair, like a hen on her nest” (), hatching the egg of goodness. But Reta’s kaffee klatch is not optimistic about ethics. “Goodness is a luxury for the fortunate” (), Lynn says. “Goodness, but not greatness” (), Reta responds, quoting Westerman, citing that principle as Norah’s reason for withdrawal (). Reta poses the ethical question of whether or not women can constitute a moral centre in life and in literature. Sally observes, “It’s as though I lack the moral authority to enter the conversation. I’m outside the circle of good and evil” (). Ben Abbott recalls that Norah “was thinking about goodness and evil” () before she disappeared.
Neumann notes that the enthroned goddesses, represented as “the twofold aspect of the mother-daughter unity,” are usually accompanied by symbols of “flower, fruit, egg, and vessel” (). Mavis Gallant wrote a collection titled My Heart is Broken (), in which a character in the title story makes that statement.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 62 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Ethics becomes a central concern for the heroine in yme in Bloom when Reta wrestles with the question of how Alicia can save her indepen- dence, “secure her own survival” (), without hurting the man she loves, without “bringing corrosion and damage to an existence that has been underpinned with natural goodness” (). “Goodness is not guaranteed” So Reta’s (), Reta realizes; in fact, “goodness has no force; none” (). Ultimately, Reta questions the efficacy of goodness because “it has emptied itself of reflection on vengeance, which has no voice at all” (). Like Norah, who has swallowed silence, goodness is passive, but Reta’s newfound feminism requires action. ethics is Reta recalls a previous quest, in her earlier age of “innocence,” when she thought “tragedy was someone not liking my book” (). With an transformed afternoon at her disposal after a book-signing session at “Politics and Prose” () during her first writer’s tour, she sets off on a shopping spree into a feminist through Georgetown’s boutiques on a quest for the ideal silk scarf for Norah’s birthday. She desires to find the perfect gift for Norah, her manifesto. “brave little soldier daughter” (). is “dream of transformation, this scrap of silk” () gives Reta a sense of power, the power to please. She finds a perfect scarf, a scarf that Reta’s old friend, writer Gwen Reid- man, assumes is a gift for herself: “Finding it, it’s almost as though you made it. You invented it, creating it out of your own imagination” ().¹⁷ Recalling this episode catalyzes Reta’s epiphany: “Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. I had suspected this for years, and now I believe that Norah half knows the big female secret of wanting and not getting. Norah, the brave soldier. Imagine someone writing a play called Death of a Saleswoman. What a joke” (). Reta realizes, “We are real only in our moments of recognition” (). She concludes that this “female secret” is the source of Norah’s depression: “She is alienated from our family and from society. We don’t know the cause of Norah’s malaise, but I am more and more persuaded that she is reacting—mor- ally, responsibly, the only way she can—to a withholding universe. What she sees is an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors” (). So Reta’s reflection on ethics is transformed into a feminist manifesto. Unless is actually filled with explicit references to feminism, such as Reta’s recollection of Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman” () from the early sixties, when “[f]eminism was in its chrysalis stage” (). Goodness versus greatness raises the issue of morality versus power.
is catalytic episode derives from Shields’s short story, “e Scarf” (DC –), which provided the inspiration for the novel Unless, where it is repeated verba- tim, just as her story “e Coat” provided the inspiration for her novel, Larry’s Party, where the story is, again, repeated verbatim.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 63 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Reta theorizes that “the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as noth- ing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang” (). Reta’s vivid metaphor reflects the violence of her recognition of issues of gender and power inspired by Norah’s loss. Reta pursues “the woman question” ()—the burning issue of nineteenth-century novels, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Char- lotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—in the next chapter: “I need to speak further about this problem of women how they are dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements” (). Instead, “We’ve been sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear. No one is so blind as not to realize the power of the strong over the weak and, following that, the likelihood of defeat” (). Like Kore, Norah personifies the woman dropped into a black hole in the masculine game of pool, female power undermined in patriarchal culture. Reta begins her “bean-counting”: she writes letters to the authors of articles that exclude women from lists of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers, protesting the absence of women. She creates her own lists, recalling her own achievements. Work is Reta’s salvation. She “count[s her] blessings” () literally by enumerating all the texts she has published, beginning with her translations of Danielle Westerman’s memoirs—L’Isle, translated as Isolation in ; Pour Vivre, translated as Alive in ; Les femmes et le pouvoir, translated as Women Waiting in (the transla- tion suggesting women have not yet achieved power); as well as Eros: Essays, translated in —and finishing with her own fictions. Her original editor, the suitably named Mr Scribano, rescued Reta by encouraging her to write a sequel to her successful first novel,My yme is Up. Reta practises “the art of diversion” (), as the story of Alicia, a fashion editor, and Roman, an Albanian trombonist with the Wychwood Symphony, fills her mind and pages: “I am focusing on the stirrings of the writerly impulse, or the ‘long littleness,’ to use Frances Cornford’s phrase, of a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages” (), filling the void left by her daughter’s defection, composing alternate scripts for her life, taking “an athlete’s delight in the piling of clause on clause” ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 64 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Reta employs fiction to rewrite reality, to fill the gap left by Norah’s dis- appearance. Writing is “a strategy for maintaining a semblance of ongoing life, an unasked-for gift, une prime,” she discovers: “Writing a light novel is very much as Mr. Scribano promised: a diversion, a forgiving place with fine air and moisture and attractive people seen through nicely blurred light. I can squeeze my eyes shut, pop through a little door in the wall, and stand outside my child’s absence” (). Her new creation becomes “my darling baby, my greatest distraction. e only efficient way I had to pal- liate my worry about Norah was to melt into an alternative reality, to hie myself downtown to Wychwood City” (–). In fact, Reta enters her own fictional microcosm when she signs one of her unsent letters “Renate Winters, e Orangery, Wychwood City” (). “e kind of shallow inven- tion this particular genre demands is as healing as holy oil” (), she says. us, Reta’s metafictional confection forms a comic counter to her tragic narrative, just as the Demeter–Persephone myth provided a fictional alter- native to Shields’s severed breast. Indeed, Shields implies in interviews that the composition of Unless had the same value as an antidote to her illness as the creation of yme in Bloom has for Reta’s depression. Reta’s quest for Norah is a literal and a literary quest, then. As an antidote to her daughter’s defection, Reta creates a sequel to My yme Is Up, calling it yme in Bloom, “reserving Autumn yme in the event I decide to go for a trilogy” (). yme in Bloom provides a metafictional parallel to Reta’s quest: chronicling the romance of her creatures, it reflects Reta’s own dilemma. “e first sentence is already tapped into my com- puter: ‘Alicia was not as happy as she deserved to be’ ” (), recalls Reta’s own depression. e first chapter ofUnless concludes, “is will be a book about lost children, about goodness, and going home and being happy and trying to keep the poison of the printed page in perspective. I’m desperate to know how the story will turn out” (), demonstrating that the writer, as well as the reader, can feel the pangs of “narrative hunger.” Reta Winters is scripting her own life. “My own life was never enough for me,” Shields said in conversation, “I needed other people’s stories.” She finds “a hunger for narrative, for storytelling,” despite the overflowing cupboard, in human history in “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard.” Reta echoes the sentiment as she counterpoints her autobio- graphical account of her life and her fictional creation, underlining the parallels. For example, after talking about her group of women friends, who give her purple silk knickers to celebrate the publication of her novel, she says it is important to give her characters friends in her challenge to modernism: “[T]he modernist tradition has set the individual, the con-
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Foster_Stovel.indd 65 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM flicted self, up against the world” (). Reta wishes to celebrate the com- munity of women in her fiction, just as Shields herself does. Reta, like Shields, sees life as a novel. Shields said cancer was not the end of her life’s story but “a chapter on its own” ( ). Reta sees Norah’s Ironically, withdrawal as a deviation from the script, “a detour from ‘the story thus far’ ” (). at’s why Reta is driven to create an alternative reality: “is Unless forms matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it” (). eorizing that “a novel, in the a similarly crudest of terms is a story about the destiny of a child” (), Reta wants to rewrite “the story of a childhood” () in Norah’s case. metafictional Reta takes a similarly novelistic approach to her daughter’s defection: “How did this part of the narrative happen? We know it didn’t arise out hall of mirrors, of the ordinary plot lines of a life story” (). Her goal is to discover the plotline Norah is tracing. e question is: Is it a tragic or a comic arc? as Shields’s own In making her heroine a writer, Reta, like Shields, no doubt, realizes that she is in “incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about writing career a woman writer who is writing” (). She toys with the idea of having Alicia go back to school to write a doctoral thesis on Chinese women’s is reflected in poetry, abandoning the fashion world for academe. But then, Reta real- izes, “I would become a woman writing about a woman writing about Reta’s fictions women writing, and that would lead straight to an echo chamber of infinite regress in company with the little Dutch girl on the bathroom about a writer. cleanser, the vision multiplied, but in receding perspective” (). Ironically, Unless forms a similarly metafictional hall of mirrors, as Shields’s own writing career is reflected in Reta’s fictions about a writer. “Following,” Shields’s twenty-first chapter, conveys a context for “Roman and Alicia, my two lost children” (), as a way of discovering Norah, who is also “lost”—“gone to goodness” (). Reta sculpts “their life’s predica- ment—they long for love, but selfishly strive for self-preservation” () in a classic conflict between the individual destiny and the microcosm of marriage that sparks the deconstruction of the characters’ relationship and catalyzes Reta’s feminist epiphany. Unless counterpoints reality and fiction. Norah’s state leads Reta to rethink the arc of a novel: I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into
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Foster_Stovel.indd 66 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time. ()
After contemplating Norah’s situation, however, she realizes that “my idi- otic two-dimensional pop-fiction airhead, Alicia” () is vapid and vain: “such fatal vanity, such a lack of suffering” (). us, personal tragedy has inspired Reta to rethink and revise the patterns of her comic fiction. Reta’s attempt to understand Norah’s dereliction helps her rethink Alicia’s intended marriage. “Happy endings are her specialty” (), as Reta remarked about her librarian friend who changed the ending of the story of Bluebeard and the dancing princesses to accommodate the young Norah Winters. But Reta realizes marriage may not be the happy ending after all. She recalls, Norah, the most literary, the most mercurial of the three […] mumbled that [My yme Is Up] might have been a better book if I’d skipped the happy ending, if Alicia had decided on going to Paris after all, and if Roman had denied her his affection. ere was, my daughter postulated, maybe too much over-the-top sweetness in the thyme seeds Alicia planted in her widow box. ()
Contemplating Norah’s feminist perspective in real life catalyzes Reta’s revolutionary realization in fiction: Suddenly it was clear to me. Alicia’s marriage to Roman must be postponed. Now I understood where the novel is headed. She was not meant to be partnered. Her singleness in the world is her paradise, it has been all along, and she came close to sacrificing it, or, rather, I, as novelist, had been about to snatch it away from her. […] e novel, if it is to survive, must be redrafted. Alicia will advance in her self-understanding, and the pages will expand. I’ll start over tomorrow. is thought pulsed in my throat. Tomorrow. (–)
Ultimately, she decides to cancel the “doomed wedding” planned for yme in Bloom. After Reta’s beloved editor Scribano dies from a fall downstairs at night, Reta’s new editor, Arthur Springer, a comic Hermes—the messen- ger of the gods, who was sent by Zeus to Hades to demand that he release Persephone and return her to Demeter—demands to see her manuscript.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 67 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Invading her home at New Year’s, this deus ex machina figure, well named to spring her free from her spell, tries to persuade her to revamp her novel. Dismissing her heroine Alicia as good, but not great, he insists on “Roman being the moral centre of this book” (), because “Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role” (). He believes Reta is writing a “pilgrimage” () about “Roman’s search for identity” (): “Identity is the dominant mystery of our lives, the numinous matter of self, and it can’t help but surrender to its own ironic destiny. Which is this: the self can never be known” (). He insists, “A reader, the serious reader that I have in mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a seri- ous work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speak- ing” ()—Shields’s wicked parody of criticspeak. He wants to retitle yme in Bloom simply Bloom, recalling Leopold Bloom, the everyman hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, and to rename Reta “R. R. Summers,” obscuring her female identity, recalling Pound’s renaming Hilda Doolittle “H. D.” Reta’s resolution to retain the feminist thrust of her novel is expressed by the repeated phrase, “Because she’s a woman” (, ), which is placed emphatically at the end of one chapter and repeated at the start of the next. Acting as an “Open Sesame,” the phrase magically leads to the recovery of Norah, for the moment she speaks the words the telephone rings, and Tom announces that Norah has been discovered, hospitalized with pneumonia. Reta departs forthwith, abandoning her editor to spring her mother-in-law, the Widow Winters, free from her spell of depression caused by Norah’s disappearance with the simple words, “Tell me all about yourself, Lois” (). Like any good mystery, Unless offers clues that sharpen the reader’s narrative hunger: the Muslim woman’s self-immolation at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, Norah’s red, rashy wrists, and gardening gloves. But the most literary clue is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Norah’s pro- fessor, Dr Hamilton, says, “Norah saw Madame Bovary as a woman blandly idealized by Flaubert, and then reduced to a puff of romanticism, and capable of nothing else but kneading her own soft heart. Your daughter’s view, and it is a perfectly viable view, was that Madame Bovary was forced to surrender her place as the moral centre of the novel” (), just as Reta’s editor wants to do with Reta’s fictional heroine Alicia. Reta’s fantasy comes true when she watches her missing daughter asleep, “Snow White in her glass case” (), with her family clustered around her “like curious dwarves” (). Just as in the fairy tale, Norah awakens, but it is her mother, not the prince, who kisses her and speaks her name. Norah
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Foster_Stovel.indd 68 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM smiles, touching her mother’s hand. “You’re awake,” says Reta, and Nora answers, “Yes” (), the magic word of comedy.¹⁸ Reta says, “Norah is recovering at home, awakening atom by atom, and shyly planning her way on a conjectural map. It is bliss to see, though Tom and I have not yet per- mitted ourselves wild rejoicing” (). e lost daughter has returned to her mother, as in the heuresis of the Eleusinian Mysteries. us, Shields revises the Grimm’s fairy tales of the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, replacing the prince with the mother, privileging the mother-daughter bond over the marital union, so that they parallel the Demeter–Persephone myth. Norah’s father’s trauma-theory is borne out by the burns that Norah received while attempting to beat out the flames of the Muslim woman who immolated herself in April , presumably in protest against the plight of women in Islam, although Shields leaves her motivation a mys- tery.¹⁹ rough “the artifice of coincidence” (), the novelist places her in “a moment in history” (). Reta endorses history in her narrative: “[W]e have to live inside the history we’re given, but must resist, like radicals, being made into mere creatures of a mere era” (). e firemen who rescue Norah bodily from the blaze, “lifting her bodily in a single arc, then strapping her into a restraining device” (), just before she “disap- peared” (), echo Hades, who abducted Kore as she plucked her flower and bore her to the realm of the dead. “Ah, strong were his arms to wrest / slight limbs from the beautiful earth,” as H. D. writes in “Demeter.” Norah too is trapped in a living death until her trauma becomes “a memory of a memory” (). Danielle Westerman is discovered to be suffering from post-trau- matic shock syndrome too. She admits that her mother tried to strangle her when she stayed out too late one night—presumably as a protest against her daughter’s developing sexuality, like Reta’s resis- tance to Norah’s adulthood—a portion of her life she has repressed from memory and excluded from her memoirs, which begin with her arrival in Paris at eighteen to study at the Sorbonne. Finally, she writes her mother into her memoir, for “a memoir must have a mother”: “e two identities she never reconciled—daughter, writer—are coming together” (), just as Reta’s identities as mother and writer reunite.
“Yes” is the last word of James Joyce’s modernist, and essentially comic, novel Ulysses. Shields does not address the cause of the woman’s self-immolation or the relevance of her religion in Unless but only the effects of witnessing the death on Norah Winters, presumably her despair at this shocking symbol of the powerlessness of women to make their voices heard.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 69 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM e umbilical cord uniting mother and daughter is reflected comi- cally by the absurd plight of Gwen Riedman, who had her navel surgically closed to placate her husband and whose “navel-less state […] became a symbol of regret and anger. She spoke of erasure, how her relationship to her mother […] had been erased, along with the primal mark of con- nection” (), Reta recalls. Gwen plans to have her navel reconstructed, reaffirming her connection to her mother. is comical but telling incident privileges the mother-daughter bond over the marriage union. us, Shields employs a comic as well as a serious echo to emphasize the mother-daughter heuresis. But Reta believes her feminist theory is also correct: “My own theory […] was that Norah had become aware of an accretion of discouragement” (). Reta reverses the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale when she speculates that Norah “awakened in her twentieth year to her solitary state of non-belong- ing, understanding at last how little she would be allowed to say” (–). But she acknowledges that “it is also probable that I was weighing her down with my own fears, my own growing perplexity concerning the world and its arrangements, that I had found myself in the middle of my life, in the middle of the continent, on the side of the disfavoured” (). us, the mother’s quest for her daughter leads to Reta’s own discovery of the dis- empowerment of women under patriarchy. Christine Downing, editor of e Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time, explains the urge to remember the Demeter–Persephone myth of “an imagined prepatriarchal world to help us imagine forward to a possible postpatriarchal world” (). By recalling a matriarchal paradigm, the goddesses direct us to a feminist possibility. Reta concludes her narrative with a comic crescendo in fact and in fic- tion. It is spring, and her family is safe at home ().²⁰ Shields embeds the mother-daughter myth in the Happy Families structure that she favours. Reta says, “I have brought yme in Bloom to a whimsical conclusion” (); as Norah recovers, so, Reta says, “Alicia triumphs, but in her own slightly capricious way” (): “Everything is neatly wrapped up at the end, since tidy conclusions are a convention of comic fiction” (). Ironically, My yme Is Up, which earned Reta the label “bard of the banal” (), is “analyzed exhaustively” in “a surprise reappraisal and appreciation” for e Yale Review by an octogenarian academic, who notes its “subversive
Carol Shields said she wanted to conclude Unless with the sentence, “Everyone in the house was asleep,” but her editor persuaded her to change it. She planned to end Segue with that sentence.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 70 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM insights” () and judges it a “brilliant tour de force” ()—hitching his academic star to her fictional wagon in Shields’s parody of litcrit. “I become convinced that everything is going to be all right” (), Reta says, in an echo of harried housewife-heroine Stacey Cameron MacAindra’s mantra, “Everything is all right” in Margaret Laurence’s e Fire-Dwellers ( ) and Dame Julian of Norwich’s maxim: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” (). us, the limited indi- vidual arc of tragedy is subsumed in the infinite cosmic circle of comedy. Meanwhile, Reta is already planning the last novel in her yme trilogy, Autumn yme, in which Alicia is metamorphosed into a true feminist heroine: Alicia is intelligent and inventive and capable of moral resolu- tion, the same qualities we presume, without demonstration, in a male hero. It will be a sadder book than the others, and shorter. e word autumn taps us on the head, whispering melancholy, brevity, which are tunes I know a little about. A certain amount of resignation too will attach itself to the pages of this third novel, a gift from Danielle Westerman, but also the heft of stamina. ere you have it: stillness and power, sadness and resignation, contradictions and irrationality. Almost, you might say, the materials of a serious book. () Unless, despite its comic resolution, is that serious book. Margaret Atwood judges, “is ability to strike such two different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’ writing—the iridescent, often hilarious surface of things, but also the ominous depths. e shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx” (quoted by Martin) is an image that reflects Reta’s “arabesque over the abyss” of her daughter’s disappearance. Shields’s “double vision” ( ) allows Reta to appreciate “the comedy of her tragic role” ( ). Shields’s epigraph from George Eliot’s Middlemarch provides a clue to the mystery of Unless: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”²¹ Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Rachel in Laurence’s A Jest of God, Norah has stepped across to the other side, and what she saw there traumatized her. If if is the lever that plunges one down to despair, unless is the “trapdoor, a tunnel into the George Eliot’s passage from Middlemarch () concerns her protagonist Dorothea Brooke’s realization of the otherness of other persons during her honeymoon with Casaubon in Rome ().
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Foster_Stovel.indd 71 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM light” (). Unless discovers the tragedy that lies on the other side of silence but offers the condolence of comedy as it debates the eternal struggle between good and evil, hope and despair. us, Shields revises the myth of the goddesses to comment on the moral dilemma of mod- ern woman in this tale of joy and despair, disappearance and rebirth.
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Foster_Stovel.indd 72 4/27/2008, 11:14 AM Johnston, Ann Dowsett. “Her Time To Roar.” Maclean’s. April : –. Joyce, James. Ulysses. ; Harmondsworth: Penguin, . Jung, Carl. “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” Four Arche- types. Trans. R. F. Hull. Princeton: Princeton , . Laurence, Margaret. e Fire-Dwellers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, . ———. A Bird in the House. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, . Martin, Sandra. “She crafted beauty out of the ordinary.” e Globe and Mail. July : R. Neumann, Erich. e Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton , . Rowland, Susan. Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge: Polity Press, . Roy, Wendy. “Unless the World Changes: Carol Shields on Women’s Silenc- ing in Contemporary Culture.” Carol Shields: e Arts of a Writing Life. Ed. Neil Besner. Prairie Fire (): –. Russo, Maria. “Final Chapter.” e New York Times Magazine. April : –. Shields, Carol. “Afterword.” Dropped reads: What We Aren’t Told. Eds. Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson. Toronto: Vintage, . –. ———. Coming to Canada: Poems. Ottawa: Carleton , . ———. “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard.” Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction. Eds. Edward Eden and Dee Goertz. Toronto: University Toronto Press, . –. ———. e Republic of Love. New York: Viking, . () ———. e Stone Diaries. Toronto: Vintage, . () ———. Swann: A Mystery. Toronto: Stoddart, . ———. irteen Hands and Other Plays. Toronto: Vintage Canada, . [] ———. Unless. Toronto: Random House, . Wilkinson, Tanya. Persephone Returns: Victims, Heroes, and the Journey from the Underworld. Berkeley: Pagemill, .
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