Abducting Mary and Carol: Reading Carol Shields’s Swann and the Representation of the Writer Through Theories of Biographical Recognition

Abstract

ABDUCTING MARY AND CAROL: READING CAROL SHIELDS’S SWANN AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE WRITER THROUGH THEORIES OF BIOGRAPHICAL RECOGNITION HELEN M. BUSS University of Calgary E a r l y in the pages of Carol Shields’s Swann, her feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, announces that she is the only one who can protect the reputation of the dead poet Mary Swann from the deprecations of the patriarchy. She is worried that men such as Willard Lang, whom Sarah calls “swine incarnate ... capable of violating ... [Mary] for his own gain” (31), will abduct Swann for his own nefarious purposes. Even Sarah’s seeming ally, Morton Jimroy, the biographer, is seen by her as abducting Mary by “tryfing] to catch her out or bend her into God’s messenger or the handmaiden of Emily Dickinson; or else he’ll stick her into a three cornered constellation along with [Jimroy’s other biographical subjects] poor impotent Pound and that prating penis­ dragging Starman” (31-32). Sarah feels that only she can save Mary Swann from being pigeon-holed into a minor literary star category by academic men. She feels that her “Mary Swann is going to be big, big, big. She’s the right person at the right time ... a woman, a survivor, self-created” (32). For Sarah her male counterparts are academic “scavengers, Brutes.” “This is a wicked world,” says Sarah, “and the innocent need protection” (32). Carol Shields’s Swann is a satiric critique of the economy of literary pro­ duction and literary criticism in general, but since the subject is an obscure Canadian woman poet who dies practically unknown, it is particularly a cri­ tique of the biographical enterprise that attends the entry of such a figure into the canon. I use the word “enterprise,” with its attendant entrepreneurial and economic emphasis, to evoke the commodification process that William Epstein describes in his book Recognizing Biography. Epstein maintains that the eighteenth century saw a basic shift in the way that lives are represented, from the “sacred” form (lives of saints, heroes, and the like) to a “secular” form, whereby biography became “an individualizing tactic through which the mass consumer market of the modern state could materially reproduce the individual” for public consumption (71). According to this theory, the process by which biographers “recognize” their biographical subjects is not a “proof of existence” (78) but a demonstration of “just how easily the English St u d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 4, Dec. 1997 emerging consumer society could reinscribe the biographical subject in its new ‘pattern book’ ” (79). When Epstein turns to twentieth-century biographical practice in his arti­ cle “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” he examines the way in which women subjects are particularly badly served by this cul­ tural “recognition” process, proposing that Norman Mailer’s “novel biogra­ phy” of Marilyn Monroe demonstrates the “reinscripción of] Eve Sedgwick’s and Luce Irigaray’s emplotments of the recurrent scene of patriarchal cul­ ture— a homosocial bonding between men (even, or especially, if they are rivals) that triangulates and victimizes women as it eroticizes, commodifies, and exchanges their bodies” (217-18). Epstein names this process “abduc­ tion,” a complex process by which biographers, while seeking to represent their subjects, must, by necessity, exclude and/or revise portions of the sub­ ject so that she can be “recognized” by current commodification standards. I wish to use Epstein’s theorization of the “recognition” and “abduction” processes for two different purposes: to explicate the satiric effect of Carol Shields’s Swann and to point to abductive processes that effect the biograph­ ical construction of the writer Carol Shields. By Epstein’s standards, the biographer Morton Jimroy is certainly out to abduct Mary Swann. In the past he has written two biographies of men and, while doing so, he has had an increasingly difficult time liking his subjects. After five years spent studying Pound, “Jimroy observed the disgust he felt, and indeed he recognized a moral ungainliness in himself that vibrated with a near-Poundian rhythm. His original attraction to the old fart, he supposed, must lie in this perverse brotherly recognition. Like persons who in secret...