Innovation and Reflection in the New Millennium

“I think we all dress up every day of our lives....” (Wachtel 102). So declared Carol Shields upon the publication of Dressing Up for the Carnival. Its title story suggests a postmodernist philosophy, presenting a series of unrelated characters who project themselves into different roles, simply by pushing an empty baby carriage, carrying a mango, or donning a football helmet: public subjects shaped by a communal gaze. The omniscient narrator concludes that these “cycles of consolation and enhancement” are as natural as “sunset” is to “day” (8). In the shape of her fiction, and its view of human nature, Shields writes as a postmodernist. Yet Shields has been noted for her “aesthetics of the domestic” (Dvorak 133), for in her desire to capture “reflective” women, Shields has mined realism to do justice to women's silences. Shields combines postmodernist practice with feminist passion to create a “double voice.” In “Mirrors,” also from Dressing Up for the Carnival, she writes an “anti-Narcissus myth” (Ventura 133), replacing the archetypal story of self-love with one of an enduring marriage's nurturing of the intimate self. In the couple's rejection of mirrors at their summer home lies a resistance to the communal gaze; instead, there is an uncanny recognition of each other as strange yet familiar. So husband and wife go beneath the “surface” to see each other, to quote the title story, as “more (and also less) than what [they] really [are]” (8). In her twenty-first century fiction, Carol Shields both innovates change and reflects tradition. People used to use the expressions “getting in touch with my feelings, getting in touch with myself,” and I always wondered what on earth they meant by this. Did they mean the self you were yesterday or the day before yesterday? The self never seems to me to be a static thing. It's ever-changing and literally changing from moment to moment, as the rest of the world bounces off us. I'm not quite sure of the stability of the self. (Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Random Illuminations 106)

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