The "Invisible" Woman: Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries

Abstract

The "Invisible" Woman:Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries Katherine Weese (bio) To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible,' of 'matter'—to 'ideas,' in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make 'visible,' by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means 'to unveil' the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply reabsorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere. . . . (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 76) Giving voice to the voiceless and making visible the invisible are two prime maneuvers in feminist poetics. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 41) 1. Introduction Carol Shields's novel The Stone Diaries presents the reader with a challenging narrative puzzle: the extraordinary violations of storytelling conventions include not only rapid shifts between first- and third-person narration but also a first-person narrator who both recounts details of her birth to which she could not realistically have access and appears to speak [End Page 90] even after the moment of her death. Generated from a seemingly impossible narrative perspective, the novel prompts the reader to wonder who is telling this story. Many of the novel's critics have concluded that the main character, Daisy Goodwill Flett, is simply not a sophisticated, self-conscious enough narrator to have generated the whole of The Stone Diaries, positing instead that multiple voices weave the story of her life. However, reading the novel through feminist theories of narrative and theories of women's autobiography provides a different answer to the question of who tells this story. I would like to consider The Stone Diaries as a fictional autobiography, narrated throughout by Daisy herself, who adopts multiple voices in the act of employing various feminist narrative strategies to restore voice and visibility to her apparently voiceless, invisible character. Although Daisy initially appears to be thwarted by social constructions of femininity, she might instead be viewed as a highly self-conscious narrator of her life story who distances herself from the character "caught in a version of her life, pinned there" (147). In Irigaray's terms, she ultimately "remains elsewhere" in the narrative, outside of the conventional definitions that she seems at times to adopt. The plot of The Stone Diaries is difficult to summarize because so little of it focuses directly on the main character, whose narration contains countless digressions into the lives and minds of other characters. But suffice it to say that Daisy's story begins with her own birth and her mother's death during the process of childbirth, and then progresses through her childhood. Before being reunited with her father, Cuyler Goodwill, at age eleven, Daisy is raised by a neighbor, Clarentine Flett, and the neighbor's son Barker, whom Daisy later marries, following a disastrous first marriage. The sections of the novel that recount her childhood and two marriages also give a great deal of information about Daisy's friends, about the Flett family, and about Cuyler Goodwill. The novel then turns to Daisy's experiences as a mother, her subsequent work as a gardening columnist, the death of her husband Barker, a period of depression in Daisy's life, her later travels with her niece to pursue family history, her move to a retirement community, her old-age illness, and finally her death. Each section of the novel, each major segment of Daisy's life, modulates in its narrative perspective, at times seeming to generate from Daisy's first-person, autobiographical voice, and at other times seeming to generate [End Page 91] from the other characters and/or from a third-person, omniscient narrator. For readers to make their way through the narrative maze of The Stone Diaries, the work of Simone Vauthier on point of view and the curious shifts between first- and third-person narration in...