The Stone Diaries
by
Carol Shields
For my sister, Babs
A number of people have read the manuscript for this book and offered encouragement and suggestions. I thank Blanche Howard, Joan Clark, Jim Keller, Anne Giardini, Catherine, Meg and Sara Shields, and, especially, Miss Louise Wyatt of London, Ontario.
Nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music (From “The Grandmother Cycle” by Judith Downing, Converse Quarterly, Autumn)
About Author
Carol Shields (1935–2000) is the author of Dressing Up for the Carnival; Larry’s Party, which won the Orange Prize; and The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden, and Small Ceremonies.
Penelope Lively is the author of numerous award-winning novels, including The Photograph, Consequences, and the Booker Prize — winning Moon Tiger. She lives in London.
INTRODUCTION
The best fiction surprises — and withholds. Each time that I read The Stone Diaries I see it differently. It is a story, first of all — the story of a woman, Daisy Goodwill, later Daisy Goodwill Flett. It is also many stories — those of her family and her friends. You read it first as such, drawn in at once by the compelling opening pages, and then keen to know what is going to happen — to Daisy, to the rest of them. Subsequently it becomes a view of how one woman — many women — lived in the twentieth century, what they expected and what was expected of them. It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence — the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers.
And if you are interested in how a novel is made, it turns into an exercise in narrative technique. And, perhaps, airily — a demonstration of how a novelist can successfully juggle a cast of twenty characters and more over time and space without bewildering the reader.
Here is a story that opens in Manitoba in 1905 and ends in Florida in the 1990s. From birth to death — the parabola of a life, a North American life, with brief excursions to France, to Orkney. Daisy is born into a world that has known neither of the world wars, and in which a woman is required to be first and foremost a domestic support system. She leaves another one in which the globe has contracted and women expect to work outside the home. Her father-in-law sails the Atlantic as a young immigrant from Orkney: At the end of the century Daisy will fly the ocean to trace him. She has experienced the century in a temporal sense, but, as we learn in one of the novel’s deft commentaries, she has never known nude bathing, pierced ears, body massage, and much else that could be seen to characterize the age. Born in “the murderously hot back kitchen” of a Manitoba stone-worker’s home, she will spend her last years in a three-bedroom Florida condo, a Florida bluehead in a turquoise pantsuit.
Kitchens are rich with significance in the novel — kitchens and what is done in them. The vivid opening chapter has the kitchen as the scene of both birth and death, with the Malvern pudding that Daisy’s mother, Mercy, is cooking as an emblem of domestic labor and achievement — the thickly cut bread, the oozing fruit juices, the sugar. Many years later, Daisy prepares supper for her family — husband, three children — in an Ottawa kitchen (summer heat once more, so a cold meal): jellied veal loaf, sliced tomatoes, potato salad, raspberries again, but in little glass bowls. There is care and attention: the formality of a tablecloth, and before her husband’s return from work Daisy “fixes” herself — housedress off, fresh clothes, earrings, lipstick. We are told that Daisy desires — deeply, fervently, sincerely — to be a good wife and mother. She is an assiduous reader of women’s magazines, in support of this ambition. In one of the novel’s many significant asides — how others see Daisy — we are given the possible contrasting reactions of a visiting friend of her girlhood, Fraidy Hoyt, herself unmarried and childless. She is perhaps grimly envious — of the distinguished husband, the big house, the beautiful children; or, is she pityingly contemptuous of this woman drowning in domesticity, child-ridden, who probably hasn’t read a book in ten years?
Teasingly, we are not told which view Fraidy holds, but this is 1947, and it is tempting to see Fraidy as the voice of the future, ahead of her day, already with the assumptions of the postfeminist woman.
Throughout the novel, the authorial voice alternates with those other voices, creating a deliberate ambiguity. We know what happens to Daisy, and frequently she speaks for herself, but we see her also as others see her, and no two people see her in the same way. Was she happy as a domestic goddess? Maybe not, for in the next, and crucial section of the book — significantly called “Work, 1955–1964”—she is shown, entirely obliquely, through a sequence of letters written by others, as immersed in a new role as Mrs. Green Thumb, gardening correspondent for the local paper, and eventually devastated and plunged into a lengthy episode of depression when she gets the sack. So was domestic life not work? This section is one of the most powerful in the novel — clever and funny — and it gives much pause for thought, as we see Daisy’s life of that time shimmer behind the words of other people, and it becomes clear that this is the point at which Daisy has achieved some kind of fulfillment and discovers in herself a capacity of which she had been unaware. She strove to be a good wife and mother, but was she in fact stifled by that role?
The whole novel is a cunning tapestry of evidence. Any novelist is of course in the happy position of being omniscient — of knowing everything about everybody, and deciding just how much information to release to the reader. The Stone Diaries is a virtuoso discussion of the nature of evidence itself, of the ways in which it is unreliable and conflicting. In a revealing sequence, we are given a whole slew of opinions about Daisy — those of her children, of her cousin, of Fraidy Hoyt once more. Fraidy believes her to have suffered from sexual starvation — citing her own fifty-four lovers as though this were a more normal record. Her cousin thinks the children drained her. Her daughter Alice sees her — from the viewpoint of a young woman of the 1960s — as without self-esteem in her domestic days: “She functioned like a kind of slave in our society.” This analysis is taking place during Daisy’s period of depression after she loses her journalistic job, and as a coda to the alternative views we are given an authorial glimpse into Daisy’s own state of mind: “Sleeping inside her like a small burrowing creature is the certainty that she’ll recover.” Nobody else has mentioned resilience, the capacity to survive. Maybe this is the key to Daisy’s personality.
After Daisy’s death these conflicting voices are once again heard, but interwoven now with another kind of evidence — the cool and indisputable facts of her life: the sequence of addresses at which she has lived, the illnesses from which she has suffered, the organizations to which she has belonged, the list of her bridal lingerie at her 1927 wedding. These flat lists are indeed evidence of a kind — a biographer could make good use of them — and they serve as a neat indication of the times in which she has lived, but they are also bland and uninformative without the color of an accompanying voice. They are there to demonstrate that facts alone can be both revealing and uncommunicative.