Carol Shields has always fit in the same box in my brain as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence - older Canadian women who write stories for other older Canadian women whose lives have mostly passed them by and are looking for comfort, representation, and mirrors held to their past in their reading. Needless to say, it's high time to unpack that box.
I inherited this 1977 novel from my grandmother's cottage stash. In fact, my copy is so dated, I can't find a photo of its cover online. To me, that makes it a treasure - a piece of art hidden from the prying eyes of AI and hack Amazon publishers trying to make a buck off other people's work.
"Charleen Forrest's husband has left her. Gone, not only from her own life, but apparently off the face of the earth. Charleen is left with his name and their marvellously uncomplicated son, Seth. She also has a fair talent for poetry, and a job on The National Botanical Journal which brings her in touch with the mysterious Brother Adam - a man with a contagious passion for silence and grass.
The Box Garden celebrates Charleen's resourcefulness, creativity and tenacity in the face of little money and few resources. Her piercing gifts of observation are wonderfully balanced with her intermittent bouts of all-too-familiar feelings of incompetence that are as tenderly observed as her gifts for love and survival."
In reading reviews on Carol Shields' The Box Garden, I'm struck by the terms "ordinary" and "domestic". I am also struck by how few reviews exist for one of the first novels written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author (for The Stone Diaries, in 1995). The press she received appeared to highlight, again, her capturing of ordinary, domestic women and their lives, marvelling at her ability to turn the mundane extraordinary. For being such an individualistic society here in the Western world, to reduce her writings to mere portraits of regular, might-as-well-be-nameless women seems a gross underselling. Having only read The Box Garden, which doesn't appear to have been a mass success, I would say that while there are elements of domesticity in the story given the protagonist is playing the role of mother, ex-wife, girlfriend, sister, and daughter, she is first a person, then a woman. The story is not all domestic either - there is a cross-country trip, a mystery taking place through letters signed "Brother Adam", and a kidnapping. If it were a man experiencing these events, it would be an adventure. Instead it's labelled "women's fiction".
And that is not a crack at women's fiction. It is important to read stories about women, by women. It was important to carve out that piece of the publishing pie, especially when women struggled to get traditionally published at all. I wrote previously about gothic romances and their place in allowing women the freedom to expand their reading choices while still remaining in the realm of the socially acceptable. Maybe the case was the same in 1977, where women authors could weave other genres into their fiction, and women could read and share it without fear. I'm not sure, I wasn't there.
"When people say, for example, that I am a woman's writer, I mean, what does that mean really? Does it mean I write about women? Certainly that is true. I do. Are my readers women? Well, yes. I think there are more male readers than there used to be, but I know that the readers of my fiction are mostly women of different ages. And so if that's what it means to be a women's writer, what I was concerned about is that women characters are so seldom placed as the moral center of the novel, and if one puts a male character there instead of a woman, the novel always seems to be taken more seriously... So I think it's very hard writing novels seriously about serious women." - Carol Shields
That said, as we grow and learn and change as a society, it may be time to revisit our classification system. As demand grows for representation in traditional publishing, which has brought us newly expanded genres such as LGBTQIA+ fiction and POC fiction, it may be time to introduce men's fiction. I have a sneaking suspicion that most men veer away from anything marketed as women's fiction (and let's not talk about the other two), so it is only right we provide them with their own genre - and more importantly, separate the underlying assumption that fiction, unless otherwise stated, = men's fiction. Books such as The Box Garden deserve a wider readership, but the damage has been done as far as Carol Shields' books go - of which she was no doubt proud, as she successfully carved out space for women on an international scale.
“Now, though as never before, it seems important that men and women understand each other’s experience. That experience, those selves, are abundantly available through the agency of fiction.” - Carol Shields
The first line of the Pulitzer Prize page describes The Stone Diaries as "one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life". The novel had also been surmised to be loosely autobiographical - which Shields herself had to explicitly deny. As someone who has never read it, the description brought to mind The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. Yes, his novel was written in the stream-of-consciousness style, he explores different themes, and there 80 years between them - but the similarities between the subject matter warrants some research into how his novel is categorized. It is considered a classic, somewhat autobiographical, and his protagonist feels distant and detached from the world. It focuses on psychological growth, and has become mandatory reading for any self-respecting (predominantly male) member of the literati (ie. educated - dare I say overly-educated? literary hipsters). All that to say, if you slap the term men's fiction on that bad boy, or most of the classics, I think we'd all have to rethink how we perceive what is classified as women's fiction - and it may yet shake the idea that it is less than. Men's fiction isn't a perfect solution, however - it still reinforces a gender binary, and people shouldn't be limiting what they read to fit with their perceptions of their own gender. But it may be a step in raising awareness of the hypocrisy of this type of limiting labelling, and force the book industry to come up with more descriptive and compelling categories.
Carol Shields passed from complications from breast cancer in 2003. Her legacy lives on through the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is awarded to women and non-binary writers in North America.
3.5 stars.
Happy reading (outside of your experience),
Holly
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