The Invisible Woman Narrative Strategies in the Stone Diaries

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The "Invisible" Woman: Narrative Strategies in The Stone DiariesWeese, Katherine L.

Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2006,

pp. 90-120 (Article)

Published by Eastern Michigan UniversityDOI: 10.1353/jnt.2006.0022

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The Invisible Woman:Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries

Katherine Weese

To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover theplace of exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself tobe simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herselfinasmuchas she is on the side of the perceptible, of matterto ideas,in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by mas-culine logic, but so as to make visible, by an effect of playfulrepetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-upof a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also

means to unveil the fact that, if women are such good mimics,it is because they are not simply reabsorbed in this function.They also remain elsewhere. . . . (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which

Is Not One , 76)

Giving voice to the voiceless and making visible the invisibleare two prime maneuvers in feminist poetics. (Rachel Blau Du-Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 41)

1. Introduction

Carol Shieldss novel The Stone Diaries presents the reader with achallenging narrative puzzle: the extraordinary violations of storytellingconventions include not only rapid shifts between rst- and third-personnarration but also a rst-person narrator who both recounts details of herbirth to which she could not realistically have access and appears to speak

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 36.1 (Winter 2006): 90120. Copyright 2006 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.


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even after the moment of her death. Generated from a seemingly impossi-ble narrative perspective, the novel prompts the reader to wonder who is

telling this story. Many of the novels critics have concluded that the maincharacter, Daisy Goodwill Flett, is simply not a sophisticated, self-conscious enough narrator to have generated the whole of The Stone Di-aries, positing instead that multiple voices weave the story of her life.However, reading the novel through feminist theories of narrative and the-ories of womens autobiography provides a different answer to the ques-tion of who tells this story. I would like to consider The Stone Diaries as actional autobiography, narrated throughout by Daisy herself, who adopts

multiple voices in the act of employing various feminist narrative strate-gies to restore voice and visibility to her apparently voiceless, invisiblecharacter. Although Daisy initially appears to be thwarted by social con-structions of femininity, she might instead be viewed as a highly self-conscious narrator of her life story who distances herself from the charac-ter caught in a version of her life, pinned there (147). In Irigaraysterms, she ultimately remains elsewhere in the narrative, outside of theconventional denitions that she seems at times to adopt.

The plot of The Stone Diaries is difcult to summarize because so lit-tle of it focuses directly on the main character, whose narration containscountless digressions into the lives and minds of other characters. But suf-ce it to say that Daisys story begins with her own birth and her mothersdeath during the process of childbirth, and then progresses through herchildhood. Before being reunited with her father, Cuyler Goodwill, at ageeleven, Daisy is raised by a neighbor, Clarentine Flett, and the neighborsson Barker, whom Daisy later marries, following a disastrous rst mar-

riage. The sections of the novel that recount her childhood and two mar-riages also give a great deal of information about Daisys friends, aboutthe Flett family, and about Cuyler Goodwill. The novel then turns toDaisys experiences as a mother, her subsequent work as a gardeningcolumnist, the death of her husband Barker, a period of depression inDaisys life, her later travels with her niece to pursue family history, hermove to a retirement community, her old-age illness, and nally her death.Each section of the novel, each major segment of Daisys life, modulates

in its narrative perspective, at times seeming to generate from Daisysrst-person, autobiographical voice, and at other times seeming to gener-

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ate from the other characters and/or from a third-person, omniscientnarrator.

For readers to make their way through the narrative maze of The Stone Diaries , the work of Simone Vauthier on point of view and the curiousshifts between rst- and third-person narration in The Stone Diaries pro-vides a helpful starting place, though I would like to substantially reviseVauthiers conclusions about the narrative perspective. According to heranalysis, readers take the novel rst as autobiography, accepting the lapsesinto third-person narration in the Childhood chapter as a strategy thatallows the narrator to render the sick childs disorientation (182); yet the

categories soon blur, leaving readers confused as to whether they are read-ing a ctional autobiography or ctional biography. Ultimately, Vauthieridenties two third-person voices: one an outside biographer, an internallyfocalized, extradiegetic narrator who recounts events of Daisys life; andanother that Vauthier terms the voice of the critic (184), a hidden authorwho comments self-reexively on the narrative limitations of both biogra-phy and autobiography. Both these voices are separate entities fromDaisys rst-person, homodiegetic narrative voice. All three generate the

text of The Stone Diaries . Rejecting the idea that the split voices all be-long to Daisy, Vauthier concludes that the novels complicated narrativestructure seems too much of a burden for a character like Daisy, whomthe epigraph denes thus: Nothing she did/or said/was quite/what shemeant (184). Vauthier even goes so far as to suggest that the I who ap-pears throughout the narrative might not always be Daisys I:

curiously enough, in the narrating process, the biographer-narrator becomes herself a presence, however elusive; sheoften addresses her narratee . . . and almost as often uses ageneralizing we . . . so that we get a sense of the I thatstands even behind impersonal narration (Genette). . . . Asa result, it is sometimes difcult to decide about the iden-tity of the speaking I: . . . is this I the outside biographer,or the inside autobiographer? (185)

Vauthier, then, does not grant Daisy herself much of the novels narration,

which, she writes, destabilizes the authority of the narrating voices(177). Winifred M. Mellor takes a similar view, writing that the plurality

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of diaries in the title The Stone Diaries suggests that there is not only onestory and not only one teller (98), and concluding that the novel under-

mines Daisys authority to tell her own story (103). 1But perhaps the epigraph might be interpreted differently, not to sug-

gest Daisys lack of storytelling prowess but to hint at her abilities as amanipulator of language. It concludes, but still her life/ could be called amonument/ shaped in a slant/ of available light/ and set to the movement / of possible music. As a character in a story about a conventionalwomans life, Daisy seems limited because the social circumstances of herday severely circumscribe her role, but as a narrator who speaks from

some ambiguous point in time and space, she is capable of articulatingmore about her life, and that morethe available light, the possiblemusiccomes through in the narrative complexities of her ctional auto-biography. I would like, then, to take a different tack from Vauthier andMellor by suggesting that Daisy is in fact the only narrator of The Stone

Diaries , that Daisy splits her own narrative voice into rst and third per-son in ways that coincide with feminist theories of narrative, and that thespeaking tone and the kinds of knowledge evidenced in the different nar-rative voices might be understood not ironically as a gap between the au-tobiographical narrators lesser and the biographical narrators greaterknowledge (Vauthier 184), but as an effect of Daisys relationship to herown story and to language itself, her self-consciousness about her socialposition as a woman. 2 When she seems to exist on a different ontologicalplane than does the character Daisy, the narrator Daisy is able to grasp andto convey to the reader the ways in which dominant ideology has denedher, and ultimately to exceed those bounds.

Shields herself, when asked in an interview about the split between the

rst- and third-person voices, commented that it was my intention thateverything in The Stone Diaries should be ltered through the conscious-ness of Daisy Goodwill. . . . Sometimes at least once in every chapterDaisy has a moment of clarity, and it is in those sections that I used rstperson. But mostly, she is a bafed, seeking, third-person character, everwandering through the construct that she calls her life story (Hollenberg347). Shields, then, claims to produce a certain kind of ctional autobiog-raphy, one in keeping with Sidonie Smiths comments about the typical

nineteenth-century womans autobiography. Describing those women pro-ducing autobiographical prose prior to the twentieth century, Smith writes



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that the ideology of gender makes of womans life script a nonstory, asilent space, a gap in patriarchal culture ( Poetics 50), and further, that

the woman autobiographer must negotiate . . . [the] sets of stories thatare all written about her rather than by her ( Poetics 51). 3 Even thoughShields, unlike some of her critics, does grant Daisy the central conscious-ness of the novel, she sees her own character as nonetheless limited, cir-cumscribed by her story. Yet the novel provides much evidence for read-ing it against the grain, for construing Daisys voices, both first- andthird-person, more positively than does Shields herself, just as there ismuch evidence for reading it against the grain of many of Shieldss critics,

for not taking at face value Daisys repeated claims about the limitationsof her own narrative voice. In considering this evidence through theoriesof womens autobiography and through feminist narrative theories, readersof the novel can discern several types of rst- and third-person voices em-ployed by Daisy: her use of a subversive semiotic voice undermines theseemingly conventional third-person voice, as do her self-conscious, rst-person voice, her authorial rst-person voice, and her extrarepresenta-tional (Lanser) third-person voice. These different types of narratingvoices do not emerge one by one in any particular order in the novel;rather they are scattered throughout the narrative from beginning to end.Ultimately, the narrative combines all these different voices as Daisy re-sists patriarchal language and narrative practice.

2. The nineteenth-century woman autobiographer/ the third-person representational voice

The characteristics of pre-twentieth century female autobiography

seem initially to describe the dynamic at work in Shieldss novel. From thestart, The Stone Diaries comments explicitly upon language and its rela-tionship to gender in a way that suggests the limitations of the femalevoice as compared to the strength of the male voice. Daisy herself, alongwith other women in the novel, is denied access to symbolic language atmany points in the narrative. When she writes to her future husbandBarker, for example, she elects the language of childhood, deliberatelynaive (149); in these letters, at least half her sentences are apocalypti-

cally incomplete, engineered with portentous dashes and dots, leaving himshaken, excited, exasperated. Her syntax is breathy, her diction uneven;

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and while Daisy has saved every one of Barker Fletts letters, . . . her let-ters to him have not survived (145). Similarly, Daisys step-mother

Marias language lacks social register: she jabbers and jabbers, and noone understands one word she saysexcept for her husband who claimshe can usually get the gist (129). Daisys mother Mercy possesses ahelplessness with words and with the difcult forms the real world im-poses (60), being described throughout the portions of the narrative thatconcern her primarily in terms of her immense body. The physically slightCuyler, in contrast, is described largely in terms of his voice: when he isreunited with Daisy, it seemed to her that his voice continued all night

long (90); he felt, rightly, that he owed her a complete accounting of hisyears of absence. Owed her the whole of his story (91). Daisys father-in-law, Magnus Flett, who in his old age memorizes whole books, is de-scribed as a pump primed with words (101).

Daisys relationship to language, then, appears to be a troubled one,her autobiography to resemble those typical of the nineteenth-centurywomen writers that Sidonie Smith describes. It is from this impression thatsome critics are reluctant to attribute to Daisy much, if any, narrative au-thority. On the surface, it appears that Daisy is a representative of tradi-tional femininity, a woman who adopts patriarchal cultures denition of her role and becomes invisible, a seless and un-self-conscious wife,mother, and housekeeper. She refers constantly to her own emptiness, herown hollowness (330); notes that even her dreams release potent fumesof absence (281); and observes that her autobiography, if such a thingwere imaginable, would be, if such a thing were ever to be written, an as-semblage of dark voids and unbridgeable gaps (756). A diarist whosewritings include almost no details about her own experience of the world,she seemingly accepts the stripping of her subjectivity by masculine con-structions of femininity, her life story appearing to be determined by a se-ries of abstract positions or stages of life: birth, childhood, love, marriage.Summarizing Georg Mischs work on autobiography, Smith points out that

For Misch, the normative definition of autobiographyand the criteria used to evaluate the success of any particu-lar autobiography lie in the relationship of the autobiogra-

pher to the arena of public life and discourse. Yet patriar-chal notions of womans inherent nature and consequent



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social role have denied or severely proscribed her access tothe public space; and male distrust and consequent repres-

sion of female speech have either condemned her to publicsilence or profoundly contaminated her relationship to thepen as an instrument of power. ( Poetics 7)

As Daisy herself puts it, the acts of her life form a sequence of deni-tions ( Stone 148). Many theorists who see narrative itself as genderedcomment on this phenomenon. For example, Sally Robinson writes, nar-ratives, in the broad sense in which I mean that term, address readers ingender-specic ways and very often seduce women readers into complic-ity with the erasure of female subjectivity, seduce women into becomingWoman (18). Or in Smiths terms, participating in a certain conservativetruthtelling, the autobiographer might constitute a truth consonant withthe regimes of truth operating culturally and temporally by conguring ex-perience according to established conventions and practices (ConstruingTruths 1556).

Often Daisy seems unable to break out of these conventional narra-tives. For example, after the unexpected early death of Daisys rst hus-band, she thinks of a new story involving her soon-to-be second husband,Barker Flett. She sets out on a trip to Canada, noting in her journal, I feelsomething might happen to me in Canada (132). She is attracted to leav-ing her home in Indiana and returning to the place of her birth, since thenew place seems a healing kingdom where no one . . . knew her story(133). Yet soon the possibilities for this new story cave in on her, reinforc-ing cultural stereotype. Daisy is referred to as a captive in her owndrama who is likely to touch up [her own] image more than a little

(145), someone who compares herself to movie stars of the time, takingher image of herself from cultural icons of femininity (146). The begin-ning of the new story that Daisy constructs for herself leads simply to an-other marriage, further compliance with convention, and more absencefor Daisy.

In many sections of the narrative that seem at rst glance to be in keep-ing with theories of nineteenth century womans autobiography, Daisy em-ploys what Susan Snaider Lanser identifies as the representational

voice, a narrator who engage[s] exclusively in acts of representationthat is, who simply predicate[s] the words and actions of ctional charac-

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ters (16). According to Lanser, this voice make[s] a more limited claimto discursive authority (17) than do other types of narrative voices, types

discussed in more detail below. Daisys third-person voice frequently en-gages in simple acts of representation, whether she is describing her ownthoughts and actions or whether the narration is focalized through thethoughts of another character, as it often is. In this mode, Daisy appears tobe caught inside her story. A prime example of this mode is found in thechapter titled Motherhood, which contains virtually no self-consciousnarrative commentary until the nal pages. In the early parts, Daisys dailyroutine and her relationships with her children are described in the third-

person voice, with one section being told from each childs narrative pointof view. Daisy is referred to throughout as Mrs. Flett and indeed is de-ned in the chapter through her relations to others: deeply, fervently, sin-cerely desiring to be a good wife and mother, Mrs. Flett reads every issueof Good Housekeeping (185). In the vast majority of this chapter, Daisysthird-person voice simply describes the life and thoughts of Daisy Good-will Flett, the un-self-conscious social construct that I will call the nar-rated self. Though the novel begins with an autobiographical IMymothers name was Mercy Stone Goodwill (1)it quickly changes to thethird person representational voice, and Daisy is presented to us as ashe. According to critic Joanne Frye, if a female pronoun recursthroughout a text, it repeatedly reminds us of cultural expectations forwhat it means to be female; it reminds us, inevitably, of the femininitytext (65), or cultural expectations about the role of women accepted astruths. Daisys slippage into the third person representational voice, then,seems to be in compliance with assumptions of both the femininity textand the nineteenth-century womans autobiographical voice, concepts thatare closely related to one another.

It would seem, then, that like Daisys relationship to language itself,Daisys relationship to narrative is troubled, passive, as she allows herself to be consumed/ constructed by others stories for her, especially societysstory for women of her time. As Daisy observes,

she knows that when the train arrives in Ottawa all thesemen will hurry off into the contained nexus of their real

lives, while she is about to hurl herself into whatever acci-dent of fortune awaits her.



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She will accept it without protest, without questions, forwhat choice has she? She is powerless, anchorless, soft-

tissueda woman. Perhaps that is the whole of it, that sheis a woman. Yes, of course. (150)

But as Sally Robinson goes on to note after describing how narrative cancircumscribe women, narrative can also become a tool whereby womenconfront their erasure, creating self-representations rather than acceptingtheir place as sign or representation in masculinist narratives. Womenwriters exist both inside and outside hegemonic discourseto be insidehegemonic representation of gender means to be framed within/by the sex-ual differencethat is, Womans difference from Man. To be outsidedoes not mean to occupy a space that is somehow objective, free fromideology; rather, it means to occupy, self-consciously and critically, a po-sition of marginality that enables womens self-representation (19). Thislatter dynamic is what takes place in The Stone Diaries as Shields manip-ulates the narrative voice. In keeping with Robinsons comments aboutwomen confronting their erasure in narrative and self-consciously occupy-ing a position on the margins, Shields writes of Daisy, she lives outsideher story as well as inside (123). Here Daisy emerges as a narrating self ,a self that is evidenced in several different kinds of narrative voices thatshe employs, alternatives to the self-effacing voice typical of the nine-teenth-century woman autobiographer.

3. The twentieth-century woman autobiographer

Even Daisys self-effacing statements quoted above reveal her self-

consciousness about her gendered representation and her relationship tothe narrative that patriarchal culture has constructed about her life. To ap-preciate the narrative complexities of The Stone Diaries , readers mustmove beyond Daisys repeated claims about her own absence in her c-tional autobiography. She is, after all, a (ctional) twentieth-century auto-biographer. Whereas the pre-twentieth-century female autobiographermight, in Smiths terms, tell a truth consonant with established culturaltruths, as Daisy seems to do at many points in The Stone Diaries, a more

sophisticated autobiographer might engage in what Smith calls contesta-tory truthtelling:

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[This] form of truthtelling in womens autobiographyderives from an individuals recognition . . . that the speci-

cities of an individuals experience may be non-identicalwith the cultural knowledges and their formal and ideolog-ical lineaments, that the words must somehow be made herown. Thus the autobiographer might also engage in contes-tatory truthtelling since that which seems to be truthfulto regimes of truth many in fact be false; and that which ap-pears to be untruthful may in fact be another kind of truthtelling. (Construing Truths 156)

In Shieldss novel, Daisys various other voices emerge to contest thetruth told by the voice that seems merely to reinforce cultural stereo-types about women. We can see at least two ways in which Daisy chal-lenges her own self-proclaimed voicelessness: rst, in the ways in whichthe novels narrative forms and modes of discourse might be dened assubversively semiotic; and second, in the narrative voices self-conscious-ness about narratives shaping role and the moments in the novel that em-phasize Daisys own narrative power (rather than the narratives that over-

power her). Shieldss The Stone Diaries melds what might be termedalternative, semiotic ways of speaking for women with acts of overt au-thoriality, yielding a novel that explores the difference of womens rela-tionship to language without sacricing womens access to symbolic usesof that language. 4

i) the semiotic voice

Smith, even as she acknowledges the problematic nature of French the-

ories of womens language, refers to Kristevas semiotic, noting that thesubject position from which woman speaks may be, like the voice of themother, outside time, plural, uid, bisexual, de-centered, nonlogocentric(Poetics 58). Indeed, the narrative of The Stone Diaries does seem to em-anate from a point outside time, since Daisy appears as a witness at herown birth and apparently concludes her narrative from a point in time afterher death. When it seems that Daisy has in fact died, a rst-person voicemakes statements such as Im still here, inside the (powdery, splintery)

bones, ankles, the sockets of my eyes, shoulders, hip, teeth, Im still here,oh, oh (352). Marjorie Fee concludes that Daisy assumes the narrating



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role when she is in her eighties, during the portion of the novel that de-scribes her illness and decline (174).While the date of Daisys death is left

as a blank in the novel (343, 347), and while Shields herself commented inan interview that Daisys construct is still in place before she dies, soshes just imagining what is happening to her after her death (Thomas58), the position of the narrator in time and space seems less clear cut thanthese comments would suggest. One might say that just as DuPlessis notesvarious strategies whereby twentieth-century women authors write be-yond the ending of marriage or death usually reserved for women charac-ters in nineteenth-century ction, so too Shieldss main character writes

beyond her ending. Certainly the uidity of the narrative voice and theplurality of modes in which Daisy speaks might be accounted for by theo-ries of womens language and the semiotic. 5

In addition, and in keeping with theories of the semiotic and theories of womens twentieth-century narrative, Daisy seeks a connection with herdeceased mother. Overtly, Daisy tries to reconnect with her biological fa-ther and her father-in-law, traditional, Oedipal father quests that wouldseem to undermine her feminist sensibility. Nonetheless, Daisys nieceVictoria, who does not herself care about fathers, entertains the suspicionthat her aunt is really in search of her mother, that the preoccupation withher two fathers is only a kind of ruse or sly equation (269). Shields her-self undermines the father quests, for they prove fruitless. The fact that thenovel is titled The Stone Diaries reminds us of Daisys connection withher mother, whose pre-married name is Stone. When, for example, Daisyspeaks of the moment of her death, she says, in keeping with theoriesabout the connection between mother and child that characterizes theimaginary order, stone is how she nally sees herself . . . she loves [the

image], in fact, and feels herself merge with, and become, nally, the stillbody of her dead mother (359). The family tree on Mercys side extendsback no farther than Mercy herself, whose father is indicated only with aquestion mark on the genealogical chart that begins the novel, so thatStone cannot be traced to any particular father and is associated, as aname and sense of identity, only with Mercy. The stone of the title of course also refers to the numerous references to literal stone that ll thenovel, and especially to Cuylers career as a stone cutter. Yet in Daisys

mind, the image of stone connects her nally to her mother.6

Rather thanfollow the sequential oedipal plot, Daisy instead returns to a maternal at-

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tachment. As Rachel DuPlessis points out, some female quest plots loopbackward to mother-child attachments as women writers undertake a re-

assessment of the process of gendering by inventing narrative strategies. . . that neutralize, transcend, or minimalize any oversimplied oedipaldrama (37). The novels ironic treatment of the father-quest thus illus-trates another strategy identied by Sidonie Smith as characteristic of thetwentieth-century female autobiographer, tracing ones origins to themother ( Poetics 57).

Mimicry is another strategy by which Daisy undermines the conven-tional she or femininity text, a strategy identied by Sidonie Smith as

one that feminist autobiographers adopt in exposing cultural truths(Construing Truths 158). According to Irigaray, on whom Smith drawsin her article, women can indirectly challenge masculinist constructions of femininity through mimicry; Irigaray views direct challenges as demand-ing [that women] speak as a (masculine) subject (76). But mimicryavoids this perceived problem of not acknowledging sexual difference inlanguage: One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which meansalready to convert a form of subordination into an afrmation, and thus tobegin to thwart it (76). Even some portions of the narrative that initiallyseem to emanate from Daisys conventional self might be viewed insteadas moments when Daisy deliberately adopts a feminine role for the pur-pose of undermining that construction. For example, Shields at one pointwrites,

She had a golden childhood, as shell be happy to tell you.Her loving adopted Aunt Clarentine, her adoring UncleBarker. Warmth. Security. Picnics along the river. A garden

full of owers. And then at age eleven nding her real fa-ther, a remarkable (everyone said so) self-made man whoshowered her with material plenty, as well as the love of hisheart.

Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in ction.Which is why you want to take Daisys representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.

. . . She does insist on showing herself in a sunny light,

hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitionswe all experience. And, oh dear, dear, she is cursed with the



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lonely womans romantic imagination and thus can supportonly happy endings. (1489)

Moments in the passage suggest that Daisys happy recollections, merelyctions, belong again to the category of the socially constructed narrative.But her very typical childhood experience and the comments about her fa-ther that derive from public opinion (everyone said so) suggest herawareness of and resistance to the narrative imposed upon her by others.Moreover, the claims made in this passage are often heavily ironic: weknow from the narrative that has preceded and from what follows thatmuch of what is said in this passage about Daisys construction of herself and her past is simply not true; the material of the novel is in fact strik-ingly less sunny than we are led to believe here. In the claim about theromantic imagination and the happy ending, Daisy adopts the typical fem-inine role, but does so in language that qualies itself exactly in the man-ner Irigaray suggests. Indeed, readers can nd one unromantic counterex-ample to this claim later in the novel when the rst-person Daisy reectsupon her second husbands death: How much of her available time bendsbackward into the knot of their joined lives, those twenty connubial years?To be honest, very little. There, Ive said it (230). The Stone Diaries nar-rative voice calls into question the reality of Daisys conventional narra-tive inuenced by patriarchal society and creates for Daisy an alternatesubjectivity, a voice which through mimicry actually makes visible theotherwise invisible story of the experiential rather than idealist Daisy.

In this example and others, we see evidence that, in Irigarays terms,Daisy remains elsewhere in than narrative, other than where she initiallyappears to be, caught inside her story ( Stone ) or trapped in Fryes fem-

ininity text. Several features of Daisys discourse raise the possibility thatthere is more to Daisy than meets the eye; subversive moments in her nar-rative suggest that she has evolved a way of asserting herself as a speakingsubject while seeming not to. Another good example of semiotic discoursemanifests itself in the chapter Work, where Daisy takes over her de-ceased husbands gardening column. Her narrative is indirect: the chap-ter consists solely of letters authored by others to Daisy, and not a singleword of Daisys own. Yet others regale her with praise for her linguistic

ability: she is frequently commended for clever turns of phrase, and oneadmirer writes, for example, youve got a real gift for making a story out

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of things (222). When the job is taken away from her after eleven years,the letters written to Daisy all express concern about her silence: she has

in effect lost her voice againto a man who wanted her job and who wasallowed to take it because of a policy on the newspaper granting writerschoice of columns according to seniority. While many critics have viewedthis chapter as evidence of Daisys absence and lack of narrative prowessbecause she never speaks directly herself, readers do in fact get a verystrong sense of Daisy at work. From the letters written to her, the readeractively reconstructs the letters and columns that Daisy must have written.And when she feels wronged when her job is taken away, we can hear in

the editors replies to her letters Daisys hurt, her sense of loss and injus-tice. Even though we dont see her writing itself, the narrative compels usto imagine it and thus renders it present. One might argue that Daisy hasevoked herself in the very act of not writing directly about herself, creat-ing an absence so strong that it is felt as a presence and rendered so in un-usual modes of discourse. As Daisy herself realizes early in her life, theabsent are always present (90). 7

Other characters observe of Daisy, theres some wily subversiongoing on (251) whereby Daisy manages to achieve this presence. Theending of the novel provides more concrete instances of this phenomenon.Gaps in Daisys life story are lled in after her death, when we see herchildren going through her possessions and discovering things abouther that they never knew while their mother was alive, including herscholarshipthe college notes she has bequeathed to her son Warrenand her trousseau from her rst brief marriage, each item embroideredwith a signature daisy (350). From beyond the grave, Daisy as narrator iswitness to others discoveries about her, and from this position as an ob-

server, she is able to sneak into the narrative information that has seem-ingly been omitted. Thus when Warren, speaking earlier about Daisysscholarship, concludes that someone yanked out her tongue (252), thenarration reveals his misreading of his mother and to some extent replacesthis lost language by working into the story some of the facts aboutDaisys writing and her intellectual self.

Ones rst impression in reading The Stone Diaries is an impressionshared by the children: Daisy is a woman with so little sense of herself that

she purports to write her own diary while telling us almost exclusivelyabout other people. But after one nishes the novel, one suspects that



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Daisy, more wily than it initially appears, has in a subtle way written aboutherself under the guise of writing about other people. One way of account-

ing for the seemingly disproportionate amount of Daisys autobiographydevoted to stories other thanbut connected toDaisys own is throughSusan Stanford Friedmans claim about the construction of the female au-tobiographical self. Drawing on Nancy Chodorows psychoanalytic theo-ries of female development, and paraphrasing Mary Masons early work on womens autobiography, Friedman observes that womens sense of self exists within a context of a deep awareness of others (43). 8 Or, inconsidering the degree to which Daisy seemingly disregards her own

story, the reader might also recall a comment made by one of Daisys chil-dren: evasion can be a form of aggression (346). This insight provestrue, for Daisys semiotic narrative strategies have the effect of making thereader search for hernot Daisy the socially constructed wife and mother,but some other Daisy. Daisys daughter Joan understands that she is des-tined to live two lives, one existence that is visible to those around her andanother that blooms secretly inside her head (172). Daisys secret exis-tence is subtly evoked through the ways in which the narrative makes herabsence a felt presence.

However, these alternative (non)-narrative strategies, many of whichseem to rely upon a technique that has been termed writing-without-having-written (Laennec 35), are paradoxically encompassed within actional autobiographical text that at times possesses an extraordinary de-gree of self-consciousness about storytelling and discourse. 9 At one point,for example, reecting on the limitations of the narrative, the narrator tellsus still, hers is the only account there is, written on air, written with imag-inations invisible ink (149). Yet this statement, while it accurately ac-

counts for some aspects of Daisys covert narrative, is also highly ironic,for at other moments Daisy speaks in a commanding, authorial voice. Weare constantly reminded of her own reliance on narrative self-conscious-ness to render herself, her story, visible. For example, Daisys connectionwith the still body of her dead mother (359) discussed above representsnot merely a moment of physical connection with the mother, for as Daisyhas written earlier, tonight Mrs. Flett is even touched by a lament of sensation linking her to her dead mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill . . .

which, curiously, suddenly, reverses itself to reveal a ash of distortionthe notion that Mrs. Flett has given birth to her mother, and not the other

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way around (190191). This passage thus reminds us of the creative lin-guistic power that Daisy has developed as an authorial presence in the nar-

rative of her life. That is, rather than thinking of herself as a physical/bio-logical creation of her mother, Daisy thinks of herself as the author of hermothers life, as evidenced in the rst chapter of the novel when Daisy, inrecounting her mothers life story, speaks from the unusual position of anomniscient, rst-person narrator.

While Irigaray might view direct challenges to patriarchal construc-tions as putting woman in the position of speaking like a man, other femi-nist theorists adopt a different perspective on voice and womens writing.

Susan Snaider Lanser, for example, drawing precisely on Irigarays dis-course on mimicry, argues that female voice is not an essence but avariable subject position whose I is grammatically feminine. The partic-ular characteristics of any female voice, then, are a function of the con-text in which that voice operates (12). For Lanser, an authorial femalevoice can be a powerful tool for dislodging an existing authority (278),as can a female narrators personal voice, both strategies employed in TheStone Diaries alongside the semiotic strategies already discussed.

ii. The narrating female I and the femininity text

In sorting out the various types of voices Daisy employs when sheseems to be very self-consciously and overtly (rather than covertly) chal-lenging womans place in patriarchal culture, it is useful to turn again totheories of womans narrative voice advanced by Joanne Frye and SusanSnaider Lanser. Earlier, in accounting for ways in which Daisys narrativeseems simply to acquiesce to cultural constructions of femininity, I drew

upon Fryes observations about the representation of woman as she innarrative and Lansers comments about the third-person, representationalvoice, with its limited claims to authority. Yet each theorist also exploresways in which womens voices gain narrative authority. In order to seehow The Stone Diaries accomplishes this end, we need to return to ananalysis of the novels shifts between rst- and third-person narration, ex-ploring their relationship to Daisys position as a self-conscious author of her own story and her resistance to the stories written about her.

Joanne Frye, for example, writes about how a woman characters Ifunctions subversively to undermine the socially constructed she: The



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she can easily lull us into complacent and conventional expectations; theI keeps us conscious of possibility and change (65). One way to account

for some of Daisys modulations between rst- and third-person narration,then, would be to consider the she or third-person Daisy as the culturallyconstructed Daisy, while thinking of the I as Daisys personal voice, thevoice of a self that rejects the construct. In The Stone Diaries, we see nu-merous examples of Daisys rapid modulation between rst and third per-son especially toward the end of the novel. In her old age Daisy at timesrefuses to identify herself with the woman whose existence has been de-ned by patriarchal culture. Im not myself (324), she says. At one point

she wonders, after making a comment to her daughter, Does GrandmaFlett actually say this last aloud. Shes not sure. Shes lost track of whatsreal and what isnt, and so, at this age, have I (329). Though I andGrandma Flett are literally the same person, Daisy posits them as two,her narrating self distancing and refusing to claim her narrated self. Theversions of herself which she would reject have been peeled away by thenovels end when Daisys act of splitting herself in two deconstructs con-ventional notions of womanhood, or what Frye calls the femininity text.Similarly, on the last page of The Stone Diaries , Shields gives us two clos-ing statements. We encounter the closing benediction, read by Warren M.Flett, Memorial Service: Daisy Goodwill Flett, wife, mother, citizen of our century: May she rest in peace (361). Yet Daisy Goodwills nal(unspoken) words are I am not at peace. 10 Here again is a kind of sub-versive fracturing of Daisy into two: the conventional Mrs. Flett, distancedby the use of the third person, may be put to rest; but Daisy Goodwill,whose ghostly presence haunts the story of her life, will not sleep quietlyin her grave. Warren and others who attend the funeral are like the naive

narrator of Wuthering Heights , Lockwood, who wonders to himself howanyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quietearth (320). But unlike Brontes Catherine who declares Heathcliff to bemore herself than she is and is buried so that their bodies will comminglein death, Daisy is secretly not much bothered by either of her husbandsdeaths, and she has composed her own tombstone inscription: She madethe decision/After prolonged reection/ After Torment/ With MisgivingsWith Difficulty With Apologies With/ Determination/ To lie alone in

death (347).Frye, who valorizes the rst-person voice in womens ction, argues

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that while the narrating I resist[s] and redene[s] the premises of repre-sentation, it also allows a woman character to represent herself in ways

that imply authorship and authority (55), rather than eschewing represen-tation itself, as do many experimental narratives: the narrating female Ihas the capacity to engage the normative and simultaneously to elude andcritique it, to evoke realities at the same time that it interrogates our waysof dening them (55). Like other women narrators whom Frye describes,Daisy might be said to nd in her life experiences those capacities thatthe culture text has denied and use them to develop an alternative narrativeexplanation, in effect re-emplot[ting] her life story to make it her own

rather than the cultures (59). Indeed, Daisy notes at one point:men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honoredby the stories that erupted into their lives, whereas womenwere more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Whyshould this be? Why should men be allowed to strut underthe privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like abreastful of medals, while women went all gray and silentbeneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to

women blow themselves up big as balloons and cover overthe day-to-day measure of their lives. Well, this particularirony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad. . . whos still living in the hurt of her rst story, a motherdead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, ahusband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, Isuppose I should say. Wherever she goes, her storymarches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancelsher true self. (121)

In this passage where the narrative voice shifts four times between I andshe, the rst-person narrative voice begins by pointing out the culturaldiscrepancy between the value attached to mens and womens stories. Inthis register, the rst-person Daisy is aware of the way in which this dis-crepancy has affected her, slipping back into the third person voice whenshe says this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy GoodwillHoad. Signicantly, Daisy at this point bears the name of her rst hus-

band. The narrator refers to his honeymoon, but then the rst-personvoice quickly corrects this language by pointing out that it is their hon-



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eymoon. We know from the narrative that it was in actuality more hishoneymoon than theirs, but here the rst-person voice offers precisely

the kind of critique Frye discusses where the narrating female I callsinto question the ways we dene realities, or stories for women. The pas-sage ends with another representation of Daisy in the third person: herstory, or her cultures story for her, declares and cancels her true self,but the very presence of the narrating I in the passage challenges theculturally constructed story and makes clear that Daisy is not simply en-capsulated by ither true self might be said to emerge in the I whoexplicitly critiques the way womens stories, including Daisys, are repre-

sented in the culture.

iii. The third-person extrarepresentational voice

Yet in the slippery narrative world of The Stone Diaries , the questionof voice and narrative authority becomes more complex still, for many of Daisys authoritative statements about womens relationship to narrativesof femininity issue from a third-person rather than a rst-person voice.Susan Sniader Lanser, in Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Nar-

rative Voice , likewise argues that feminist narratives do represent the fe-male self even while challenging conventional representation, but shecomplicates some of Fryes claims about the personal voice. Placing struc-turalist narratology within a feminist perspective, Lanser draws on thework of Gerard Genette to dene the personal voice as belonging to thoserst-person narrators who are self-consciously telling their own histo-ries and who are the protagonists of the stories they narrate (1819. Shepoints out that while the personal voice remains a structurally superior

voice mediating the voices of the other characters, it does not carry the su-perhuman privileges that attach to authorial voice, and its status is depen-dent on a readers response not only to the narrators acts but to the char-acters actions (19). In addition, personal voice may compromise theauthority of a woman narrators claims if the act of telling, the story shetells, or the self she constructs through telling it transgresses the limits of the acceptably feminine (19). In other words, the rst-person voice mightsimply be dismissed by the culture if it doesnt conform to existing cul-

tural constructs about femininity. Thus the authority of personal voice iscontingent in ways that the authority of authorial voice is not (Lanser 19).

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While Frye views the omniscient narrator who speaks in a publicvoice as necessarily dependant upon the oppression of dominant ideolo-

gies (51), Lanser explores the positive possibilities for a female narratorwho employs the omniscient, authorial voice, a term she uses to identifynarrative situations that are heterodiegetic, public, and potentially self-ref-erential. . . . Since authorial narrators exist outside narrative time (indeed,outside ction) and are not humanized by events, they conventionallycarry an authority superior to that conferred on characters, even on narrat-ing characters (1516). 11 The authorial voice, not to be confused with thehistorical authors voice, grants powers of authorship to the narrator. In

discussing third-person narrators, Lanser further distinguishes between thethird-person representational voice (described earlier in conjunction withmy discussion of The Stone Diaries convergence with conventions of nineteenth-century womens autobiography) and narrators who undertakeextrarepresentational acts: reections, judgments, generalizations aboutthe world beyond the ction, direct addresses to the narratee, commentson the narrative process, allusions to other writers and texts (1617.)Lanser concludes that narrators who engage in such extrarepresentationalacts, which expand the sphere of ctional authority to nonctional refer-ents and allow the writer to engage, from within the ction, in a culturesliterary, social, and intellectual debates possess the quality of overt au-thoriality (17). In Shieldss novel, these debates are precisely the debateabout gender and mens and womens roles in the society. When Daisy en-gages in extrarepresentational narrative acts, she challenges head-on mas-culinist narratives and thereby gains a kind of narrative authority differentfrom that of both the semiotic voice and the rst-person voice.

In The Stone Diaries , then, Daisys narrating self is evidenced not only

in the autodiegetic, personal voice, but also in a version of the third-personvoice. That is, Daisys third-person voice often assumes a different regis-ter than the representational voice discussed above (the voice in whichDaisy as narrator speaks in ways that coincide with what Frye calls thefemininity text), slipping into what Lanser terms the extrarepresenta-tional acts of an authorial narrator. The voice thus becomes a strange hy-brid of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration, a character/narratorwho adopts a perspective that distances her from the character construct

and allows her to engage in critical commentary on the substance of herown life rather than simply to report it. (This is the voice that Vauthier



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identies as the critic [184] but that I argue is another manifestation of Daisys own voice.) In other words, while Daisy frequently represents her-

self in third person as she would be represented in the biography of a con-ventional woman, at times she steps outside that representation, calling at-tention in another third person voice to its status as a fiction andundermining it as a completely truthful portrait of her existence. In themidst of a passage quoted earlier to illustrate the semiotic strategy of mim-icry, for example, Daisys third-person extrarepresentational voice alsoemerges: Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. Itleaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in ction. Which is why you want

to take Daisys representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt . . . Daisy Goodwills perspective is off (148). Thus Daisys critical,authorial third-person voice, as well as her personal voice, frequently chal-lenges the conventional third-person voice that Daisy often adopts.

Another good example of this self-consciously narrative, authorialvoice is found toward the end of the Motherhood chapter, when thethird-person Daisy notes, she carries the cool and curious power of occa-sionally being able to see the world vividly. . . . The narrative maze opens

and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her ownlifeshe knows this for a fact and has always known itbut she pos-sesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternate ver-sions (190). This passage echoes one from much earlier in the novel, dur-ing Daisys childhood illness, when she realizes that she always has livedand always will live blinded, throttled, erased from the record of her ownexistence. She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all,she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplement-

ing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections (76). Whilemany readers of the novel might say that these musings simply call intoquestion the truthfulness of Daisys life story, such passages might be in-terpreted instead as evidence of Daisys awareness of cultural construc-tions of femininity, evidence of how she is able to live outside the storyconstructed for her by constructing alternative versions, including not

just alternative ways of telling-while-not-telling her life story, but also al-ternative ways of self-consciously wresting narrative control of her story,

of assuming the role of overt author. Indeed, according to Lisa Johnsonscommentary on this passage, Daisy, as author of her own life . . . reects

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on the tricks of consciousness [190] and recognizes her ability to counterthe ofcial stories that would erase her (213). 12

By having Daisy shift from personal to authorial voice, by granting hera voice which seems to come from outside the ction, Shields confers onher an authority greater than that of Daisy the narrating character. At thesame time, Daisys I frequently blurs the boundaries between personaland authorial narration. Because of the violations of traditional narrativemodes, often Daisys rst-person voice, as well as her third-person voice,might be seen as authorial rather than personal. That is, Daisy almost im-mediately assumes the superhuman privileges (Lanser) of the authorial

voice even before the reader encounters the rst reference to Daisy as ashe rather than an I. Information about other characters privatethoughts is focalized through Daisys rst-person perspective, so that shenarrates events to which she couldnt realistically have access as a charac-ter, as would an omniscient narrator. By having Daisy engage in extrarep-resentational acts in either mode, rst or third person, Shields allows herto participate, in Lansers terms, in the social and intellectual debates of her time, thereby placing her narrative strategies squarely within the sym-bolic realm as she calls attention to cultural constructions of femininityand explores through the complicated narrative strategies questions aboutwomens identity in patriarchal culture.

4. Conclusion

Critics who have attributed the novels narration to several narratorshave generally concluded that the complexities of the narrative voice chal-lenge the notion of the unied self and have interpreted the novel within

the framework of one version of postmodernism, stressing its decenteringof the subject and its calling into question the reliability of the narrative. 13There is no doubt that as a ctional autobiography, The Stone Diariescomplicates notions of the self. Smith, for example, identies strategieswhereby the woman autobiographer gestures toward the ctiveness of theI that seems to speak in autobiography, thereby disrupt[ing], con-sciously or unconsciously, the surface of the unied, authoritative, essen-tial self, a ction of a regime of truth that would specify identity, contain

it, capture it, universalize it, essentialize it (Construing Truths 162).But theories of womens autobiography that urge a middle ground be-



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tween the humanist and the postmodern subject, in conjunction with femi-nist theories of narrative, provide a way for readers to understand The

Stone Diaries as a ctional autobiography narrated only by its centralcharacter, a means to explore the relationship between the novels depic-tion of the female self and the multi-faceted narrative voice that weavesDaisys story without concluding that, for example, disparate voices inthe mosaic narrative reinforce Daisy as a nexus lacking presence(Slethaug 68). Rather, as numerous theorists of womens autobiographycaution, readers need to conceive the female self in a way that neither sim-ply essentializes women nor retreat[s] into a pure textuality that consigns

womanin a new mode to be sureto an unrecoverable absence(Brodzki and Schenck 14). 14This position on female subjectivity occupying a middle ground be-

tween postmodernism and essentialism coincides with the position of fem-inist narrative theorists who argue that contemporary womens ction oc-cupies a middle ground between postmodern experimentation and realism.Rather than labeling the novel postmodern in such a way as to stress un-certainty and call into question narrative reliability, we might more fruit-fully apply Joanne Fryes argument, summarized earlier, about the statusof representation in the contemporary novel in order to produce a differentreading of the novels project as regards the self. Gayle Greene makes anargument similar to Fryes, positing that contemporary women authorsthematize ctionality through characters who critique the ending andcontemplate their relation to the plots of the past but who nonethelessreaffirm a knowable reality (19). Writing specifically about CarolShields, Susan Billingham draws on the theories of Linda Hutcheon, em-ploying the term self-conscious realism to describe Shieldss work, and

noting that while her texts sometimes include postmodern elements, shealso maintains a humanist focus upon the internal consciousness and dailylives of her characters (276). 15

Likewise, Shieldss novel occupies a middle ground insofar as it meldsalternative, semiotic ways of speaking with acts of overt authoriality. The-ories of womens autobiography, especially those of Sidonie Smith, illu-minate The Stone Diaries when one sees how the many different speakingstrategies of the twentieth-century woman autobiography manifest them-

selves in this ctional autobiography. Speaking strategies often consideredmutually exclusive or incompatible exist side by side in Shieldss compli-

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cated portrayal of Daisys narrative voice; the novel, like other contempo-rary womens novels, adopts a both/and rather than an either/or position

with regard to semiotic and symbolic narrative practices. 16 On the onehand, Daisy remains elsewhere (Irigaray) as a subversive, covert narra-tor on the margins of her story. Yet her authorial voice is everywhere cen-tral to the generation of the novel, and she also remains elsewhereoutside the conventional narrativein the sense that her narrative voicequite self-consciously calls attention to the limits of the mimesis in whichshe often times seems to be simply caught. This voice emerges through thenovels use of self-reexive narrative moments and manipulations of nar-

rative perspective that call attention to its presence. Daisys presence inthe novel thus derives not only from Daisys wily or sly, roundaboutways of writing herself into her story while seeming not to, but also fromher powerfully present authorial voice. The Stone Diaries violations of narrative conventions and the multi-faceted voice of its central charactercan be accounted for by a range of feminist perspectives that illuminateways in which women writers resist dominant modes of representation.Daisy Goodwill Fletts narration reveals the constructedness of the con-

ventional female self and allows her to reclaim herself from the realm of the voiceless and the invisible. Looking beyond the Daisy who seemswholly dened by others, the absent center of her own story, readers cansee through to the Daisy who seems quite conscious of the way in whichher society positions her and whose various narrative strategies fracturethat representation.

Notes

1. Other critics concur. For example, Clara Thomas writes that the shifting voice of thenarrator, [is] often Daisys herself, but by no means always (158), and Billinghamcomments on the readers construction of the narrative voice, stating that where thethird-person narrator is closely afliated with Daisys rst-person autobiography, thethird person might be understood as an alter ego , the dissociative perception of self asother, or a poststructuralist play on the inevitable fragmentation of the subject. Wherethe text appears to be focalised through a consciousness other than Daisys, the narra-tor could readily be mistaken for the omniscient narrator of realist convention (284).

Hans Bak addresses the highly tenuous and problematical status of Daisy Goodwill asa narrating self, emphasizing Daisys weak sense of self (15). Many reviewers



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reach similar conclusions about the narrative voice. Fitzgerald focuses upon Daisysfailure to nd a language and contrasts her with the novels narrator (19); Sherman

writes that Daisy, unfortunately, never nds her own voice (23); and Parini refers toMs. Shieldss several diarists (3). Among those reviewers who see Daisy as speak-ing for herself are Clayton, who notes a discrepancy between Daisys outer and innerlives and who senses she is at last beginning to live for herself, to write her ownstory (19); McGill, who notes that by writing her life in the third person she be-comes her own observer, knowing that the outer person and the inner self often di-verge (34); and Fee, who distinguishes between the domestic Daisy and the liber-ated Daisy, concluding that only the reader hears the voice of the liberated Daisy(174).

2. Readers should see the middle section of Vauthiers article (182187) for a carefulconsideration of evidence suggesting that Daisys voice and the third-person voice arenot the same. However, it seems to me that instances in which the narration changesfrom rst- to third-person in mid-sentence suggest that only Daisy is speaking: for ex-ample, The long days of isolation, of silence, the torment of boredomall thesepressed down on me, on young Daisy Goodwill and emptied her out (75). Likewise,one passage following a long section of the narrative focalized through othercharactersDaisys children, her father Cuyler Goodwill, and her friend Fraidy

Hoytreads, she feels, for instance, the force of her childrens unruly secrets, of herfathers clumsy bargains with the world around him, of the mingled contempt andenvy of Fraidy Hoyt . . . (190). These lines would also seem to provide evidence thatthese internally focalized sections of the novel can be attributed to Daisy as a third-person narrator. Cf. Williams, who shares the view that many sections of the novel nar-rated in third person about characters other than Daisy are product[s] of Daisys ownimagination (136). Later Williams queries, was the absent autobiographer everreally so absent? Or was her virtual absence more likely a sign of her omnipresence asa third-person omniscient narrator? (138). Likewise Dianne Osland, in an intriguing

article about parallels between The Stone Diaries and Jane Eyre, suggests that Daisymight be the primary narrating consciousness (95 and 109, n. 20); though she does notfully explore the narrative strategies that give her this sense, Osland concludes that if,as I have been arguing, Daisy herself . . . is the product of Daisys imagination making,then the glittering joke that is buried with Daisy is Sheildss own wily subversionof a narrative tradition that makes it seem as if people like Daisy have had their headscut off or their tongues yanked out (252) (105).

3. Wendy Roy, in her insightful article Autobiography as Critical Practice in The Stone

Diaries also analyzes Shieldss novel in light of theories of womens autobiography,arguing that Shields turns autobiography into critical practice by engaging with femi-

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nist theories of life writing (114). On the question of narrative voice, Roys view ap-proaches my own: Whether Daisys is the controlling consciousness of the narrative

remains ambiguous, although the repeated references to her autobiographical projectstrongly suggest that she is imagining others responses, as well as events in her lifeand others lives, as she writes her autobiography with invisible ink (121). ChiaraBriganti likewise engages with the novels relationship to autobiography, with especialattention to Shieldss reclaiming of the maternal body and the elaboration of its rela-tion to language in a genre that has traditionally banished the body from representa-tion (185).

4. In thinking about the ways in which the novel employs these two kinds of narrativestrategies, I was aided a great deal by Kristin Kings reading of Marilynne Robinsonsnovel Housekeeping , to which The Stone Diaries bears some interesting resemblances.King explores the ways in which Housekeeping s feminist charge resides equally inthe tension it sustains between the symbolic and semiotic realms and in the ways thenarrator is able to appropriate the symbolic for her own ends (565), in effect re-claiming the symbolic from a place outside (566). Like Housekeepings narrator RuthFoster, Daisy Goodwill Flett reclaims access to symbolic, authorial expression from aplace outside the story written for her by the culture.

5. Readers interested in learning more about this aspect of the novel and especially its re-lation to the theories of Julia Kristeva should consult Brigantis work on The Stone

Dairies.

6. Cf. Howells, who makes a similar point (87), as do Roy (131) and Briganti (195).

7. Shieldss strategy for portraying Daisy resembles Marilynne Robinsons strategy in Housekeeping for portraying that novels invisible characters, Ruth and Sylvie. Thework of Jean Wyatt on Housekeeping has shaped my reading of The Stone Diaries.Drawing on the theories of Kristeva, Wyatt argues that at the novels end, the negativ-

ity of the language, the descriptions of all the things the main characters do not do,have the effect of making the reader imagine them doing precisely those things. House-keeping s semiotic strategies make emptiness palpable, concrete (Wyatt, Recon-structing Desire 100). One might say of Daisy that like the characters and readershaunted by Ruth and Sylvie at the end of Housekeeping , the readers of The Stone Di-aries are thronged by [Daisys] absence ( Housekeeping 219).

8. Roy takes a somewhat different approach to this feature of Daisys autobiography, not-ing that as a way of illustrating this sacrice of individuality, The Stone Diaries con-

structs Daisy Goodwill Flett almost entirely in relation to others. Because this con-struction both reveals and obscures her, Shieldss book exemplifies ideas that a



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womans self-representation is necessarily fragmented and her life relational, and atthe same time critiques the notion that portraying a woman through her place within

relationship can be an effective way to represent her life (124125).

9. Sidonie Smith comments on how the twentieth-century woman autobiographer em-ploys both semiotic strategies and also others which are not outside time and history(Poetics 58). Rather, she may claim the legitimacy and authority of another subjectiv-ity (59).

10. Vauthier claims that Daisys last wordsI am not at peaceare recorded by an-other voice, reinforcing her view that Daisy is voiceless, like many women of herclass and generation (186). Yet if one interprets the split voices as emanating fromDaisy herself, these contradictory statements provide a way for her to articulate herown feelings.

11. Here Lanser, drawing on Franz Stanzel, further distinguishes between authorial andgural modes: while authorial narrative permits what I am calling narrative self-ref-erence, in the gural mode, all narration is focalized through the perspective of char-acters, and thus no reference to the narrator or narrative situation is feasible (16). InThe Stone Diaries , which one reviewer calls deliciously unclassiable (Stephens 3),Daisys narration becomes an odd amalgamation of the personal, authorial, and gural

modes.

12. Johnson emphasizes throughout Daisys authority in her narrative and seeks quite ex-plicitly to counter the criticism of the novel that stresses Daisys absence, arguing thatreaders must focus less on what isnt there . . . , attending instead to what is (202).She views the split or multiple narration . . . as a critique of sexist inequality (218)though she does not necessarily argue that Daisy is the sole narrator, at one point men-tioning, for example, the novels many narrators (220).

13. For example, Vauthiers main concern is not with feminism but with the novels rup-tures and its relationship to theories of chaotics and postmodernism. Gordon Slethaugsimilarly employs chaos theory to examine Shieldss treatment of the self and of nar-rative (62). While Slethaug is interested in Daisys socially gendered position (64)and the feminist issues that novel raises, he ultimately does not consider The Stone Di-aries in light of feminist theory. Mellor does examine the novel from a feminist per-spective and discusses the ways in which Daisy is a textual creation (103), but shenever views Daisy as recuperating a sense of self outside of social constructs of femi-ninity and instead emphasizes what she sees as the novels poststructural dismantling

of the notion of self. For a refreshingly different view of the novels relationship topostmodernism, readers should see Lisa Johnsons A Postmodernism of Resistance in

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The Stone Diaries , where Johnson considers the troubled relationship between femi-nism and postmodernism and argues that the novel offers a much more positive ver-

sion of the female self than many prior critics allow, with its trajectory toward hopeand self-knowledge (202). Shields, she writes, approaches the postmodern novel . . .not as an apolitical renunciation of reality, but as an act of love (222).

14. Similarly, Susan Stanford Friedman observes that for women, nor is the self a falseimage of alienation, an empty play of words on the page disconnected from the realmof referentiality, as a Lacanian and post-structuralist critic of autobiography might say.Instead, the self constructed in womens autobiographical writing is often based in, butnot limited to, a group-consciousnessan awareness of the meaning of the cultural

category WOMAN for the patterns of womens individual destiny. Alienation is notthe result of creating a self in language, as it is for Lacanian and Barthesian critics of autobiography. Instead, alienation from the historically imposed image of the self iswhat motivates the writing, the creation of an alternate self in the autobiographical act.Writing the self shatters the cultural hall of mirrors and breaks the silence imposed bymale speech. (4041) See also Shirley Neuman who observes that the answer formany recent critics is the adoption of a theory of the subject that accepts neither theontological nor post-structuralist positions but negotiates a space and a subject be-tween them by acknowledging the specic epistemologies behind the speaking/writ-ing I (34). Helen Busss article addresses the split nature of the self in severalwomens autobiographies; her argument about doubled discourse works nicely in con-

junction with the ctional autobiography The Stone Diaries as well.

15. Hans Bak also observes that the novel blends postmodernism and traditional realism,calling the novel a curiously hybrid or amphibian book (13).

16. In addition to the essay by Kristin King on Robinsons Housekeeping referencedabove, readers should also see Jean Wyatts essay Giving Body to the Word: The Ma-ternal Symbolic in Toni Morrisons Beloved for an intriguing examination of theways in which that novel combines both modes of discourse, imaginary and symbolic.

Works Cited

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Briganti, Chiara. Fat, Nail Clippings, Body Parts, or the Story of Where I Have been:Carol Shields and Auto/biography. Eden and Goertz 175200.

Brodzki, Bella and Celeste Schenck. Introduction. Life/Lines: Theorizing Womens

Autobiography. Eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca and London: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1988.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights . New York: Signet, 1959.

Buss, Helen M. Reading for the Doubled Discourse of American Womens Autobiogra-phy. a/b: Autobiography Studies 6.1 (Spring 1991): 95108.

Clayton, Laura Van Tuyl. Rev. of The Stone Diaries . The Christian Science Monitor 30March 1994: 19.

Du Plessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Eden, Edward and Dee Goertz, eds. Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilitiesof Fiction. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Fee, Marjory. Auto/biographical Fictions. Rev. of The Stone Diaries . Canadian Litera-ture 144 (Spring 1995): 173174.

Fitzgerald, Penelope. Sunny Side Up. Rev. of The Stone Diaries . London Review of Books 9 September 1993: 19.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Womens Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice. ThePrivate Self: Theory and Practice of Womens Autobiographical Writings . Ed. ShariBenstock. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Frye, Joanne. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experi-ence . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition . Bloomington: In-diana University Press, 1991.

Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. An Interview with Carol Shields. Contemporary Literature39.3 (Fall 1998): 339355.

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Howells, Coral Ann. Contemporary Canadian Womens Fiction: Refiguring Identities .New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One . Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1985.

Johnson, Lisa. She Enlarges on the Available Materials: a Postmodernism of Resistance inThe Stone Diaries . Eden and Goertz 201229.

King, Kristin. Resurfacings of The Deeps : Semiotic Balance in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping . Studies in the Novel 28.4 (Winter 1996): 565580.

Laennec, Christine Moneera. Christine Antygrafe: Authorial Ambivalence in the Worksof Christine de Pizan. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing and Ambivalence in Narra-tive by Women . Ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Albany: State Uni-versity of New York Press, 1993. 3550.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice . Ithacaand London: Cornell University Press, 1992.

McGill, Allyson F. A Tangle of Underground Streams. Rev. of The Stone Diaries . Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10.1 (Fall 1994): 32, 34.

Mellor, Winifred M. The Simple Container of Our Existence: Narrative Ambiguity inCarol Shieldss The Stone Diaries . Studies in Canadian Literature 20. 2 (1995):96110.

Neuman, Shirley. Autobiography and Questions of Gender: An Introduction. Autobiog-raphy and Questions of Gender . Ed. Shirley Neuman. London and Portland, Oregon:Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1991. 111.

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Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

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Roy, Wendy. Autobiography as Critical Practice in The Stone Diaries . Eden and Goertz113146.

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