Hearts of Stone: Quarrying the Canadian Shield in Recent Canadian Women's Writing

Too long sacrifice Can make of heart. William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916 Take away our hearts o' stone, and give us hearts o' flesh! Sean O'Casey, Juno and Paycock Recent Canadian women writers quarry human heart, but find where flesh should be. Canadian Shield--a Precambrian rock formation that composes nearly half Canadian landmass, stretching from Atlantic Ocean through prairie provinces and from Arctic Ocean to United States and beyond--provides literal landscape and rich lode of metaphor for writers to mine. Canadian women novelists employ as central symbol of psychic ossification, emotive memorializing, or narrative symbolism. From ancient Rosetta to fabulous philosopher's stone, rock has been man's method of inscribing his story--like fossils embedded in limestone, history's shorthand. Roseann Runte argues, in Reading Stones: Travels to and in that writers want to interpret rocks themselves, to read their own oracular messages in land. (1) Limestone, so rich with fossils--the traces of prehistoric plants and animals embedded in sedimentary rock--provides symbols for writers like Carol Shields in her Stone Diaries. Thus, fossils have become metaphor for fiction, as novelists have become paleontologists. Isabel Huggan views stones as stories: Dry in sand, stones were silent as old bones, but wet, they told stories. (2) Huggan sees fossils as fictions: Like fossils set in limestone, words impress themselves on paper, syllables shrinking history into legible construct. Real fossils are time's shorthand, abbreviated geology (25). Jane Urquhart employs fossils as symbol of history in her 1993 novel Away, for very stones underfoot are filled with etched memories of previous life forms. (3) As Anne Compton states, any landscape, narratives of lives lived there are fossilized in landscape. (4) Urquhart frames her narrative with rock quarry that will engulf O'Malley Robertson's family home at Loughbreeze Beach on shores of Great Lakes. At beginning, Esther thinks of million-year-old fossils that decorate these stones and how limestone record of their extermination has brought about demise of her own landscape, enormous hole in earth (20-21). At conclusion, the fossilized narratives of ancient migrations are crushed into powder (356) by machines that fragment land and carry away its history in form of stone. In Urquhart's 2001 novel, Stone Carvers, artisan Klara Becker, disguised as man, assists Canadian sculptor Walter Allward in carving names of fallen, including her lost lover, Eamon, into Canadian First World War Monument at Vimy, France, like fossils in rock. Urquhart quotes Walter Allward's statement as an epigraph to Stone Carvers: have been eating and sleeping for so long it has become an obsession with me. (5) marble monument, a memorial to grief and prayer for peace (377), is surmounted by an enormous woman who is hooded and draped in manner of medieval mourner (1), recalling Margaret Laurence's angel. Joy Kogawa, in her 1981 novel Obasan, dedicated to Issei, first generation of Japanese immigrants to Canada, employs this quotation from Revelations as her epigraph: To him that overcometh will I give to eat of hidden manna and will give him white and in new name written ... (2:17). (6) In her poetic prologue, sound of silence is symbolized by stone. beginning was word, it is written in Genesis, but narrator writes, The word is stone.... I hate stone.... Unless bursts with telling there is in my life no living word. In concluding chapter, however, Naomi Nakane accepts long silence of her mother: My loved ones, rest in your world of stone (246). …

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