Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Issue 4 (1st October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Foster Stovel, Nora
• Is Part Of: American review of Canadian studies. Volume 46:Issue 4(2016)
• Page Start: 513
• Page End: 531
• Publication Date: 2016-10-01
• Subjects: Fiction -- (auto)biography -- parody -- intertextuality -- subversion; Comparative civilization -- Periodicals; Canada -- Civilization -- Periodicals; Canada -- Periodicals; United States -- Periodicals; 971
• DOI: 10.1080/02722011.2016.1250796
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0272-2011

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett's life story in Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. "Death, " the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy's demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, "I'm still in here" (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy's death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields's postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence's modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields's title clearly references Laurence's. Two decades after Williams's insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.