Reviewing The Novel The Stone Diaries English Literature Essay

The protagonist, Daisy, was born in 1905, on a kitchen floor of a stonemason’s cottage in a small quarry town in Manitoba, Canada. The flow of life has swung her a lot: she spent her childhood in Winnipeg under the protection of a kind woman who had witnessed Daisy’s birth and her mother’s death. As an adolescent and a woman, she spent her life in Bloomington (another Quarry town). She married twice, became a mother, lost her husbands (her first husband died while he was trying to open the window for his wife to breathe the clean air when they were staying in a hotel for their honey moon and the second one left her alone out of his serious illness) and attempted to find a job in Ottawa. During these phases, she experienced the roles of a child, daughter, girl, wife, widow, mother, nurse, editor, gardener, and advisor hoping to find her genuine role in the society. Unable to draw an appropriate conclusion, she took refuge in writing a novel about her own life story and found the limitations of writing an autobiography. Daisy’s life is full of incidents, but at the time of weaving the strands together to form a coherent whole, she feels powerless. It sounds as if she were not able to find some connections between the happenings of her life. Carol Shields wrote her autobiography in The Stone Diaries, but unlike her heroine, Daisy, did not feel she led an unfulfilled life. As Clare Colvin in The Independent newspaper on 18 July 2003 quoted Carol:” I don’t feel I’ve missed out at all, I’ve got my friends, my family, my writing.… I think I’ve done pretty well.”

The Stone Diaries, the imaginary autobiography about the disastrous birth of Daisy, her different remote travels, and her various individual roles as a wife, mother, and widow up to her death, as it first seems is based on a series of trivial details such as her memories, dreams, letters, recipes and many lists. On a higher level, it concentrates on Daisy’s attempts to challenge the obsolete male rules of the society, its norms and laws, and pillars of genre to reveal the meaning of identity or her definite self.

Some critics, mostly male, observing just Daisy’s meandering life categorize it as women’s novels retelling tedious tale of womanly domestic life. Many criticize it because of the frank characters, their apparently optimistic view of life and the occasional happy ending, and dreadfully dismiss this novel from literary fictions.

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The other group and unexpectedly Daisy herself find the other faults of this self narration. They insist on the impossibility of being able to tell a true story especially and paradoxically when the story is the narrator’s own life story. As Daisy herself says, any attempt to write someone’s life story will result in a narrative that is full of gaps and voids.

Observing the traces of feminism both in the plot of novel and in Carol’s own ideas involving female authorship, genuine female identity, women vital roles in the society, her dependence on a woman as a protagonist and her life incidents as central subjects in the novel, the researcher tries to reread The Stone Diaries in the light of feminism.

Carol’s marriage led her to a new phase as a typical or a domestic woman. She was interested in this domesticity up to the time of reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in which the silent frustration of millions of women was given voice. Influenced by this book, her aim was not just domesticity in her life anymore. She required an essential transition from her previous ordinary life to open new horizons for herself. Being a good wife, mother and housekeeper, she yearned to do her MA studies. Then she began writing career and her masterpiece, The Stone Diaries, accomplished the American Pultizer Prize and the Canadian Governor General Award. It is the only book which has acquired this honor up to the present time.

The Stone Diaries was celebrated in the universities and academic literary circles and unbelievably between common people and brought her writer an international fame. On the contrary, it was classified as women’s fiction and its characters as ordinary. This was the source of irritation for Carol and in an interview in The Independent newspaper on Friday, 18 July 2003, she expressed: “Most novels are about ordinary people. There is a gender prejudice here. When men write about ordinary people they are thought to be subtle and sensitive. When women do so, their novels are classified as domestic.”

Carol Shields is known as a prolific writer. She has written in different genres such as novel, drama, short story, poetry and movie scripts. However, her fame mostly is heightened by her successful novels. Among her different novels, The Stone Diaries is outstanding and has gained The American Pulitzer Prize and Canadian General Governor Reward.

In The Stone Diaries, the chronicle of a Canadian woman life, Daisy Flett narrates her bewildering quest on finding her identity, role, and contentment through marriage, motherhood and out-of-home career. In spite of her sufferings, she never truly understands herself, her story and destiny.

Carol Shields’ feminist ideas and emphasis on a female protagonist’s life (Daisy) mirror her general feminist theories. “Feminism, as a collection of social theories, political movement, and moral philosophies” concerning the liberation of women has been an interesting field for many readers, writers and specially critics. Although it has a long history and in comparison to other literary theories is not a new approach, its general orientation and multilateral supportive attitudes toward woman surpass time borders and keep it up to date (Seldon 207).

In addition to its old age, it covers a broad domain of thoughts and includes numerous diverse branches. Among these variations the second wave feminist criticism, started by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and concentrated on women’s experience and sexual difference, French feminist critical theory, the capable advocate of breaking down conventional male-constructed patterns and Hélène Cixous’ discussions for a positive representation of femininity and her theory ‘écriture féminine’ are very influential in the research. Moreover, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, dominant in French feminism and Cixous’ theory particularly, has an extended application.

V)Methodology and Approach:

Feminism is a combination of different approaches. Although some approaches like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Post structuralism, which contribute to feminism are diverse, they share common assumptions that investigate the sexual biases, literary language and topics revisited in literary works particularly those written by male writers. Through emphasizing different aspects of different approaches, feminists attempt to discover, understand, and define themselves as true women in their own terms.

French Feminism, one of the latest approaches of feminist studies, attracts more attention. It is the key part of second wave feminism originated in France and influenced by Simon de Beauvoir’s perception of women as the “other” (Seldon, 222). It deals with two aspects: on language as the cultivated land in which male-constructed stereotypes are grown and women’s language as the scythe by which these constructions are harvested. “It has been deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, especially by Lacan’s reworking of Freud” (Selden, 222).

Among the advocates of this approach, Hélène Cixous is an influential figure in this research. She follows Lacan’s psychoanalytic paradigm in which “the child arrives at a sense of identity by entering the ‘symbolic’ order of language, which is made up of relations of similarity and difference” (Seldon 224).

She is critical of phallogocentric Western cultural systems and structures and believes that they are based on the priority of special concepts in the set of binary oppositions such as “Activity/passivity, Sun/Moon, Culture/Nature, Day/Night, Father/Mother,… (Bertens 164), in which the first terms are more significant than the second terms; “for Cixous, this never-ending privileging of the masculine, which results from what she calls ‘the solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism’, damages us all, female and males alike, because it curbs the imagination and is therefore oppressive in genera (Bertens 166).

She believes in the differences between men’s and women’s unconscious and their sexual, psychological attributes. Therefore, she encourages women to collapse masculine ideologies and establish their own ones. As a result, she herself coins the phrase ‘écriture féminine’ to discuss this notion of feminine writing. She does not consider ‘écriture féminine’ the women’s exclusive domain and expects both men and women to find it an appropriate field for trying to improve women’s condition in Western society.

According to Ian Blyth, “She distinguishes écriture féminine from existing forms of speech/writing, and in so doing she is associating feminine writing with existing non-linguistic modes” (44).

With an overall look, two strategies are very useful in studying this novel. These attitudes involve a woman writer and a womanly writing.

A decade ago, noticing the condition of women in the society, a woman made her mind, identified her goal, took her pen, held it firmly and started writing a story about another woman who could be the representative of women not only in a special society but all over the world. These facts make appropriate reading this novel from a female critic’s point of view who believes writing is that somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition of the patriarchal system (Blyth and Sellers).

On the other hand, a prevalent spirit is sensed between the author, protagonist and critic. All of them always challenge the worn out conformities and reject the patriarchal boundaries of Western ideology. They are seeking a new possibility or a different framework to express themselves. They desire an open shutter which is closed on fixed one-dimensional masculine discourse. Perhaps they want a new language with fluid concepts and multiple, unstable meanings.

Applying both of these opinions, female and feminine writings, the study of traces of French Feminism in The Stone Diaries consists of five chapters. The introduction is concerned with the general background, the statement of the problem (argument) and the definition of key terms mentioned in the research. The second chapter presents an investigation through the French Feminist approach and imposed social constructs especially on the women. In the third and fourth chapters, the novel will be scrutinized within the framework of Cixous’ theory and the achieved findings of French Feminism will be highlighted. And the last chapter offers the conclusion.

VI)Review of Literature:

Hooks in Ain’t I a woman: Black Woman and Feminism defines feminism as “female or male’s liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression; thus it is a movement to abolish the domination, pervasive in Western culture for the benefits of the whole society” (195).

Christopher Lehman Haupt’s obituary of Carol Shields introduces her chronologically and at the same time describes her works such as novels, short stories, poems. It expresses the changes in her views and life, the crisis she has undertaken and the responsibilities she had to carry on her shoulders, almost lonely.

Charming Fictions and Guilty Repetitions by Emily Carson is a dissertation which compares the two modes of authorship from non-Western and Western points of views. It states the two positions of the authors in the process of writing, to show the shared interest in a storytelling or to demonstrate charming resistance to it.

In The Invisible Woman: Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries, Katherine Weese is focusing on the speaking strategies which are incompatible in the portrayal of Daisy’s narrative voice. The writer believes that in Carol’s novel the narration has a both/and position rather than either/or.

The writer of Fictional Fossils: Life and Death Writing in Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, tells that the complex relationship between life, death and text is at the center of Carol Shields’ fictional (auto)biography. The Stone Diaries reflects on the limits and responsibilities of life writing, of life becoming text, and the story of her life in her own voice.