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.
