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Articles

Volume 20, Number 2 (1995)

"The Simple Container of Our Existence": Narrative Ambiguity in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

  • Winifred M. Mellor
Soumise
mai 22, 2008
Publié-e
1995-06-06

Résumé

Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries foregrounds the problems of writing a woman's autobiography; the novel is a metafictional container for the pitfalls and inadequacies of constructing a speaking (female) subject. The ostensible subject, Daisy, occupies a cavern of vacancy at the centre of the text: she is faceless, silent, ambiguous. Although wholly constituted by language, Daisy, as a post-structuralist subject, has no existence outside of language, but rather is a language construct. The narrative ambiguity in the text results from shifting narrative points of view, gaps in information, and the questioning of language itself to tell a subject's story.