SOURCE: "Formal Strategies in a Female Narrative Tradition: The Case of Swann: A Mystery," in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 19-32.

My department, like many others, is debating how best to incorporate minority authors, marginalized texts, and unconventional genres into the canon—into the canon, that is, which we teach our sophomore majors in a two-semester course entitled "Traditions of English Literature." At a departmental discussion on whether to include Adrienne Rich in this syllabus, one of my colleagues, a narrative theorist and stalwart formalist, said he would gladly teach Rich's poetry in the context of her feminism—but only if he was persuaded that her feminism was expressed in the form as well as the content of her poetry.

I, too, am a formalist. I am also a feminist. I believe that women do write differently than men—because, as women, they respond differently to a literary tradition which is primarily composed by men, for men, and of men, and in which women appear often as muses and mistresses but seldom as readers or writers. Such a masculine tradition, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, prompts intensely divided emotions in a female writer: "feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors … her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention." More important, a female writer may feel ambivalent toward language itself, toward the very acts of reading and writing—since they are both the measure of her powerlessness and the means for her to articulate it. And this ambivalence is expressed in the form and content of the narratives she writes.

Because, as Lawrence Lipking says, "a woman's poetics must begin … with a fact that few male theorists have ever had to confront: the possibility of never having been empowered to speak," feminist theorists must first give a name to the silence surrounding female art. In "Toward a Feminist Poetics," Elaine Showalter coins the term "gynocritics" for such a poetics of women's writing. Josephine Donovan warns that "a women's poetics" should reflect "a woman-centered epistemology" and an awareness of the diversity of women's experiences; Jane Marcus describes a "feminist aesthetic" as the "obstinacy and slyness" with which women write for their silenced sisters, and overcome their own anxious authorship, "by keeping a hand in both worlds"—one of masculine discourse, the other of everyday feminine tasks. Rachel Blau DuPlessis defines a "female aesthetic" more precisely as "the production of formal, epistemological, and thematic strategies by members of the group Woman, strategies born in struggle with much of already existing culture." In women's writing, DuPlessis explains, these strategies include speaking in multiple voices, inviting the reader's participation, "not seeking the authority of the writer," and articulating a "both/and vision born of shifts, contraries, negations, contradictions". Susan Lanser calls for a feminist narratology which would address the surface and the subtext of such feminine texts, as well as the narrative frame that binds them. Reading an anonymous feminine text, Lanser points out that "beneath the 'feminine' voice of self-effacement and emotionality … lies the 'masculine' voice of authority that the writer cannot inscribe openly."

Many feminist theorists, then, have helped to articulate a female aesthetic. I hope to extend their work by describing a female narrative poetics: specific narrative strategies with which women represent their ambivalence toward reading and writing. Many feminist critics have helped to reconstruct a female literary history which demonstrates a female aesthetic; I hope to extend their work by showing how these narrative strategies define a distinctly female narrative tradition.

Any female narrative poetics must take into account Virginia Woolf's artful essay A Room of One's Own, which began as a lecture on "women and fiction." Woolf explains that the female writer usually produces novels, not poems or plays—because for centuries she could observe and record human nature only in the sitting-room, and because "the novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands." In her novels, moreover, she developed a "natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use," which Woolf elsewhere calls the "psychological sentence of the feminine gender": "capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes." Men sometimes use such sentences, of course; but women design them specifically to "descend to the depths and investigate the crannies" of female consciousness. The feminine sentence—which expresses the most tenuous and shadowy extremes—shows how women manipulate narrative form in order to represent anxious power.

A Room of One's Own also imagines a female literary history, which ranges from "a lost novelist, a suppressed poet … some mute and inglorious Jane Austen" to a series of women named "Mary": Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and finally Mary Carmichael, an experimental novelist like Woolf herself. In order to delineate the formal characteristics of a female narrative tradition, I would like to cite another Mary: Mary Swann, the shadowy heroine of Swann: A Mystery, Carol Shields' satirical novel about the posthumous discovery of a female writer. If the name "Mary" evokes women's common experiences, then "Swann"—with its Proustian allusion—suggests that which is lost or forgotten. Indeed, Shields uses her fictitious "suppressed poet" to reconstruct yet another female literary history—one that includes Emily Dickinson, to whom Swann is compared; Pearl Buck and Edna Ferber, her favorite writers; and a contemporary feminist critic, who discovers her. Like Woolf in A Room of One's Own, then, Shields describes women's ambivalence toward language in a fictive history of female reading and writing.

The content of Swann (what narrative theorists would call its story) concerns the problems of becoming a female writer and of being included in the literary canon. Mary Swann—already dead before her story begins, like many female writers in women's narratives—was a poor and abused farmer's wife, geographically and culturally isolated in rural Ontario, unschooled, and apparently unversed in any literary tradition except for the two popular romances she borrowed each week from her town library. The two most significant facts of Swann's life are that it ended when her husband shot her, dismembered her body, and then shot himself; and that she left behind 125 haunting poems whose compression, resonance, and use of common meter recall Emily Dickinson. Fifteen years after her death, when a young feminist scholar discovers her only book (a cheap pamphlet entitled Swann's Songs), Swann suddenly becomes a literary phenomenon—the inspiration for MLA sessions, PMLA essays, a Mary Swann Memorial Room in her hometown, even a Swann Symposium. Yet she remains elusive. Her biographer can find no useful information on her life; no two readers can agree on a poem's meaning; and even the few proofs of her existence (her photograph, her pen, her notebook, her unpublished love poems, the remaining copies of Swann's Songs) mysteriously disappear. The content of Shields' novel, then, expresses her anxiety about the production and interpretation of women's writing by recounting the life and posthumous reception of a female writer.

More important, the narrative form of Swann (what narrative theorists would call its discourse) reflects this same anxiety. In Swann, Shields uses formal strategies that reveal her ambivalence toward reading and writing: interrupted, indirect, or dialogic narration; mixed genres and embedded texts (in particular, feminine texts which are absent or illegible); depictions of a feminine text's composition, publication, and interpretation; and an ambiguous ending.

The experimental narration of the novel's five sections reveals its ambivalence toward narrative authority. Each of the first four sections focuses on a different character (Sarah Maloney the feminist scholar, Morton Jimroy the biographer, Rose Hindmarch the town librarian, and Frederic Cruzzi the publisher of Swann's Songs); and each is narrated from a different point of view, organized in a different format, and written in a different prose style. The narration of the fifth section is even more playfully self-reflexive: it takes the form of an imaginary screenplay, "The Swann Symposium," in which characters' voices become audible and inaudible in a cacophony of "random phrases", "fragments of conversation," "overlapping voices", and interrupted or misunderstood speech:

GINGER PONYTAIL: … splitting headache—

CRINKLED FOREHEAD: … was a trifle disturbed by his remarks regarding—

BIRDLADY: … blatantly sexist—

GREEN TWEED SUIT: Slash, slash—

GINGER PONYTAIL: Jesus, the smoke in here's thick enough to—

WOMAN IN PALE SUEDE BOOTS: … and the noise—

SILVER CUFFLINKS: … sorry, I didn't catch—

The extravagant multiplicity of narrative voices in the five sections of Swann—whether it takes the form of interrupted discourse, free indirect discourse, or dialogic narration—reflects, I think, a peculiarly feminine ambivalence toward narrative authority. It is as if Shields divides responsibility for telling her story among as many narrators as possible. And yet such attempts to disguise or diffuse narrative authority actually draw attention to her own authorial power. This ambivalence is clearly articulated in the "Director's Note" that introduces the screenplay:

The Swann Symposium is a film lasting approximately 120 minutes. The main characters … are fictional creations, as is the tragic Mary Swann, poète naïve, of rural Ontario. The film may be described (for distribution purposes) as a thriller. A subtext focuses on the more subtle thefts and acts of cannibalism that tempt and mystify the main characters. The director hopes to remain unobtrusive throughout, allowing dialogue and visual effects (and not private passions) to carry the weight of the narrative.

This self-reflexive passage reveals Shields' conflicting desires: "to remain unobtrusive throughout" the novel, on the one hand; and obtrusively to assert her authority as its "director," on the other.

Swann reveals Shields' ambivalence not only about narrative authority, but about narrative itself. It combines various forms of narrative (autobiography, biography, epistolary novel, romance, ghost story, detective story, university novel) as well as other genres (poetry and drama). And it not only alludes to other texts that remain unwritten, such as Rose's letter to Morton Jimroy; it even embeds some of them, such as Frederic Cruzzi's "(Unwritten) One-Sentence Autobiography," "Short Untranscribed History of the Peregrine Press," and "Unwritten Account of the Fifteenth of December, 1965." Swann presents itself, then, as many different narrative and non-narrative texts—but also as a text that cannot be written or, according to Kristeva's definition of the feminine, as "that which is not represented, that which is unspoken, that which is left out."

In addition to mixing narrators, genres, and embedded texts, then, Shields reflects her ambivalence toward reading and writing by representing texts—in particular, feminine texts like Swann's poems—as "left out," illegible, blank, or altogether absent. Swann's body of work is dismembered, like her physical body, during the course of the narrative. Her love poems, for example, are hidden beneath her kitchen linoleum, only to be appropriated by one scholar, stolen by another, and never published at all. Her other poems, published posthumously in Swann's Songs, are written in an ink called "washable blue"—which, when the poems are accidentally soaked, results in "a pale swimmy smudge, subtly shaded, like a miniature pond floating on a white field. Two or three such smudges and a written page became opaque and indecipherable, like a Japanese water-colour." The novel thus represents the feminine text—Swann's manuscript—as an indecipherable image, a blank page, a missing sign.

Not surprisingly, Swann's inscrutable poems resist interpretation and confound her readers. Consider one poem whose meaning becomes less clear each time it is quoted:

     Blood pronounces my name,
     Blisters the day with shame,
     Spends what little I own,
     Robbing the hour, rubbing the bone.

In a series of self-reflexive passages (what Gerald Prince would call "reading interludes"), several characters (whom Naomi Schor would call "interpretants") try to make sense of this embedded feminine text. Sarah Maloney, the feminist scholar, reads it as a poem about "the inescapable perseverance of blood ties, particularly those between mothers and daughters." Morton Jimroy, the biographer, thinks it describes "the eating of the Godhead," "a metaphysical covenant with an inexplicable universe." Rose Hindmarch, the town librarian, thinks it concerns menstruation. And Frederic Cruzzi, the publisher, remembers deciphering the poem's almost illegible manuscript with his wife on the day of Swann's death:

The last poem, and the most severely damaged, began: "Blood pronounces my name." Or was it "Blood renounces my name"? The second line could be read in either of two ways: "Brightens the day with shame," or "Blisters the day with shame." They decided on blisters. The third line, "Spends what little I own," might just as easily be transcribed, "Bends what little I own," but they wrote Spends because—though they didn't say so—they liked it better.

What Mary Swann wrote on the page—let alone what she meant to say—remains obscure. Swann also represents ambivalence toward reading and writing, then, in the fate of this embedded feminine text, whose transcription, editing, and publication is so unreliable, and whose readers' interpretations are so hopelessly contradictory.

When Swann's poems literally disappear at the end of the novel, it becomes clear that such feminine texts must be read differently than masculine texts. The last scene of "The Swann Symposium" shows a meeting room in a hotel, "but there is no one at the lectern and no one, seemingly, in charge. People are seated in a sort of circle, speaking out, offering up remembered lines of poetry, laboriously reassembling one of Mary Swann's poems." The novel's ending describes the effects of reading the feminine text in this new way:

The faces of the actors have been subtly transformed. They are seen joined in a ceremonial act of reconstruction, perhaps even an act of creation. There need be no suggestion that any one of them will become less selfish in the future, less cranky, less consumed with thoughts of tenure and academic glory, but each of them has, for the moment at least, transcended personal concerns.

The ending suggests, then, that reading a feminine text appropriately—unlike the earlier solipsistic interpretations of "Blood Pronounces My Name"—empowers readers by allowing them to transcend "personal concerns" and unite with others. Indeed, this collaborative reconstruction resembles the "intersubjective encounter" that Patrocinio Schweickart describes in her feminist theory of reading.

Yet the novel also seems ambivalent about the validity of such feminist reading. Shields embeds this scene of collaboration within a series of unreliable narrative frames: Swann's absent text is reconstructed by a group of academics, who are played by hypothetical actors in a screenplay, which is produced only in the reader's imagination. More important, the text that results from this reading remains ambiguous. The poem that these readers reconstruct, line by line, is reprinted on the novel's last page under the heading: "LOST THINGS By Mary Swann." It comments ironically on Swann's life, her art, and the elusive feminine text:

     … As though the lost things have withdrawn
     Into themselves, books returned
     To paper or wood or thought,
     Coins and spoons to simple ores,
     Lustreless and without history,
     Waiting out of sight
 
     And becoming part of a larger loss
     Without a name
     Or definition or form
     Not unlike what touches us
     In moments of shame.

This meditation on "lost things" reflects the novel's sense of women's writing and provides a satisfying closure. Yet it is also an appropriately ambiguous ending: because the poem appears only as it was reconstructed, it may not be the poem Swann wrote. The ending of Swann, then, leaves us with another embedded feminine text that remains both absent and present—thus raising additional questions about its interpretation and authorship, and about the nature of female reading and writing.

Carol Shields' self-reflexive narrative strategies suggest her ambivalence toward appropriating the power of language. Those same strategies recur throughout the history of women's narrative: disguised or deferred narrative authority (what in this volume Christine Moneera Laennec, after Christine de Pizan, calls "writing-without-having-written"); dialogic or interrupted narration (what in this volume Patricia Hannon calls "writing by addition" in seventeenth-century French fairy tales); mixed genres, modes of discourse, and mises en abyme; narrative codes, secrets, and subtexts (what Bonnie TuSmith describes, in this volume, as Maxine Hong Kingston's "strategy of ambiguity"); self-reflexive accounts of the composition, publication, or interpretation of a feminine text (such as the mother's story in Caroline Lee Hentz' Ernest Linwood or the handmaid's tale in Margaret Atwood's eponymous novel); descriptions of the dismemberment of female writing; embedded feminine texts that are both legible and illegible (such as the bewildering pattern in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the white bedsheet in Dinesen's "The Blank Page," or the ghostly letters in Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed"); and unresolved or ambiguous endings. The formal strategies that Christine de Pizan, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Jane Barker, and other early female writers used to express their anxious power thus anticipated the characteristics of contemporary experimental fiction by Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, and others: dialogic narration, cross-genre writing, metafiction, and "writing beyond the ending" (as DuPlessis calls it). Indeed, the recurrence of these formal strategies—from de Pizan's fifteenth-century prose to Shields' 1987 novel—defines a distinctly female narrative tradition.

This reading of Swann: A Mystery not only confirms the existence of a female poetics, but outlines a narrative tradition in which women represent their ambivalence toward reading and writing. It also suggests that a combination of critical approaches (narrative theory, reader-response criticism, and feminist theory) can serve critics as the "asbestos gloves," in Adrienne Rich's phrase, with which to handle the question of woman's language about which feminist theory itself is so ambivalent. Finally, in emphasizing the hidden authority of women's narrative, this reading of Swann indicates, as Lanser says, "that the powerless form called 'women's language' is … a potentially subversive—hence powerful—tool."

And to return to my colleague's implicit question: yes, the female writer's struggle with the social construction of femininity does shape the form as well as the content of her writing. In narrative, it has even produced a female tradition of experimental, ambiguous, and self-reflexive narrative strategies—a tradition which is legible to anyone who can be persuaded to read "otherwise" (in Molly Hite's phrase), to heed voices that "never [have] been empowered to speak". That such persuasion remains necessary explains why women are still so anxious about the power of their words.