Get Out of My Psychic Space!: Biographical Recognition and “Response-Ability” in Carol Shields's Fiction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes These are not Shields's only works that focus on biography or "biographical recognition," but the ones that mostly clearly dramatize encounters between "biographer" and subject. Small Ceremonies and the short story "Collision," as well as Shields's biography of Jane Austen also help to focus the themes I examine here. Buss raises the interesting question of the extent to which Carol Shields, cognizant of such dangers, allowed herself to be offered up for the "sacrifice" as her characters are. Buss concludes that the solution to the "risk of abduction…always present in biographical plots" of women "lies not in avoiding either plot [the often juxtaposed "'erotic' and 'ambitious' plots" (436) but rather in the finely balanced act of partaking of both with the hope of negating the worst aspects of biographical abduction" (440–1). Buss believes Carol Shields herself managed to do so in her encounters with the press. Lorraine York, in a more recent article, argues that for Shields, "[d]omesticity functions…as one means of resisting the over-the-top conversion narrative of success" (247). York astutely points out that the "danger" of Shields's "tactic" of balancing literary celebrity with domesticity "is that it can be taken up by others…and used to confirm gendered stereotypes: the woman writer who is really a homebody at heart and not too unfemininely ambitious" (248). Oliver works to "transform" "the very terms of psychoanalysis…into social concepts" (xiv). She clarifies "the distinction between subjectivity and subject position as the difference between one's sense of oneself as a self with agency and one's historical and social position in one's culture" (xiv), noting that [s]ubject positions are our relations to the finite world of human history and relations – the realm of politics. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is experienced as the sense of agency and response-ability constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness—the realm of ethics. And although subjectivity is logically prior to any possible subject position, in our experience, the two are always interconnected. (xv) Looking at the colonial relationships that still exist between dominant and subordinate, she argues that "only a theory that incorporates an account of the unconscious can explain the dynamic operations of the affects of oppression" (xxi–xxii). Oliver argues against earlier and contemporary psychoanalytic theorists who "presuppose an antagonistic relationship between self and other, between subject and object, between individual and society" (xvii), as she believes that "[a]lienation and melancholy are not definitive of subjectivity; rather, they undermine the very conditions of possibility of subjectivity and agency" (197). Believing otherwise renders "resistance" to domination "futile" (Oliver 8). Oliver is careful to distinguish "singularity" from "individualism"; she sees the latter as "a defense against our profound and fundamental dependence on others" (175). Singularity, on the other hand, "connotes [an] eccentricity, oddness, and strangeness" that "undermines" this "notion of the indivisible individual" who, through ongoing "negotiation," can "gain a sense of itself as a subject who means" (174). All four characters refer to the "redemptive" (22) power of the quotidian in Swann's stanza: A morning and an afternoon and Night's queer knuckled hand Hold me separate and whole Stitching tight my daily soul. (21) But Rose has earlier made Swann conform to certain "standards" of her own, as she recognizes distinctions that are lost on the other scholars; she and her friends agree that Swann was "ashamed of how she looked, those clothes of hers…. Sort of countrified, if you take my meaning" (142–3). She covers up this and other information about Swann to gain Jimroy's "friendship, his confidence, [which] is the anointing she has longed for" (153). But first she illustrates the breakdown of their certainties, of their colonizing framings of the "other." As several critics have noted, nowhere is the satire of biographical/academic practices clearer than in the competing readings of Swann's "Blood" poem. (See, for example, Briganti 180–1, Barbour 270–1, Brian Johnson 224–6) Each interpretation of the poem hints at the particular source of shame for each interpreter and, thus, prevents him or her from forming a dialogue with the others. While we learn of each character's "shame," Mary Swann's apologetic manner seems to carry the most poignant affect, particularly in Cruzzi's description of his only encounter with her. He describes the "cringing within" that Bartky associates with shame, "[h]er flow of apology…mumbled and unintelligible. So sorry. Such a bother. She refused to meet his eyes. Her head bobbed and shook. She was taking up his valuable time, she said.…It wasn't proper. It wasn't right" (211). Shields patterns inflation and deflation into the language of the scene; entering the hotel, Brenda imagines her mythical stature while "beating out a poem on the brass grating of the vestibule. 'O snow, O Love, O Victory'" (129). Her rather humorous reduction to self-loathing in her drunken state uses parallel syntax: "Oh good God, Oh Christ, son of Mary" (130). Her neighbor is a forerunner of Clarentine and Daisy Flett, whose art form is also gardening. Reta's creator seems to have shared this awareness. In a letter to a friend, Shields describes her attempts to lose ten pounds before giving a talk about Larry's Party; she writes "[y]ears ago Val Ross described me in The Globe as 'still slender.' Her next piece, a couple of years later, described me as 'fiftyish.' So you see, I am doing this for Val's eyes. Oh, dear. And for me, too." (Howard 363). The reference to "macramé" seems somewhat off-key for a "soixante-huitard" in her early forties in the year 2002. Gender politics in the novel are, at times, ones that I associate with that generation of women born between the wars, the generation that Shields has had such an abiding interest in and to which she belonged. Some reviewers have found the politics of the novel to be "resolutely old-fashioned…. Even the themes are old-fashioned: feminism, sisterly solidarity, a hippy search for purity (of a non-specific kind)" (Brookner 39).The subject of macramé surfaces elsewhere in Shields's writing and interviews, including references in Happenstance and in an interview with Donna Krolik Hollenberg. Sometimes its value as craft is affirmed, but, as when Reta Winters compares her early writing to macramé, Shields can adopt a dismissive tone, describing it in terms of "dabbl[ing]" (4); Shields's description of the "macramé group" in the Krolick Hollenberg interview also dismisses the form itself as something not worthy of holding their interest. I have some sympathy with the arguments of Kate Sterns, who points out in her unfavorable review of Unless that, in defending Norah as "victim," Shields "appropriates" another "woman's tragedy—the true experience…of a Muslim woman who publicly immolated herself—as a mere narrative device" (283). It is somewhat surprising that Shields fails to "recognize" this other woman in any way. Unlike Sterns, however, I do not believe that readers must "infer" from this neglect that, in the novel, "being Muslim equals being oppressed" (283), or that Norah is portrayed as simply a "victim." Like Sterns, however, I agree that Norah's passive quest for "goodness" remains very abstract. Reta is clearly aware of dangers of interdependence: she wonders if her mother-in-law's "growing silence has become an uncanny reflection of Norah's silence…. I wonder sometimes if we have all—Tom, Natalie, Chris, Lois—become actors in Norah's shadow play" (234). Additional informationNotes on contributorsElizabeth ReimerElizabeth Reimer is an Assistant Professor in the department of English at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia where she teaches and publishes in the areas of Women's Fiction, Auto/biography, and Children's Literature. She has a special interest in the works of Carol Shields and is currently writing about Shields's biography of Jane Austen.

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