In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival.

HOWELLS, CORAL ANN

Abstract

The concept of the carnivalesque is redefined in Carol Shields's recent short story collection, though its traditional promises of celebration, disruption, and excess are nevertheless obliquely fulfilled. Focusing on the title story and 'Dressing Down', this essay argues that Shields's postmodern versions of carnivalesque are written not in the indicative but in the subjunctive mood, signalling openness and unrealized possibilities. Her stories trace subjective patterns of fantasy and desire, and social collectivity is reconstructed through narrative frameworks.

Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities.[1]

Any fiction with 'carnival' in its title promises some kind of challenge to traditional structures of social order and possibly of literary convention, 'dressing up' in anticipation of celebration and festivity, where for a brief space of time dailiness is transcended, split open to allow other more chaotic energies to express themselves. These celebratory gestures may be collective and robustly corporeal as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his study of Rabelais,[2] or they may be more individualistic and subjective in our own fragmented contemporary world, which Carol Shields calls 'this torn, perplexing century',[3] though in either case resistance to prescribed limits is the promise of the carnivalesque. In her most recent short story collection Shields acknowledges the impulses towards celebration and (modest) abandonment, by writing in what she has described as the 'subjunctive mode', looking at what human beings may do or might have done or would do, which is the territory of 'dreams, possibilities and parallel realities'. In the language of traditional grammar describing the modalities of verbs, 'The indicative presents an event as a fact, whereas the subjunctive expresses it, as for example, a possibility or an aim, or calls it into doubt or denies its reality, or expresses a judgement on it.'[4] By invoking the subjunctive, Shields opens up possibilities for shifts of emphasis, not only cracking open the 'diurnal surfaces' of realism but also writing beyond the 'phantom set of rules about what a story should be and how it must be shaped'.[5] It is the odd association between the carnivalesque and the subjunctive mood that I shall explore in my readings of the two stories framing Shields's most recent collection, 'Dressing Up for the Carnival' (the title story at the beginning) and 'Dressing Down' at the end.

Carol Shields is a Canadian writer, an immigrant from the United States, born and brought up in Oak Park Illinois, who met her Canadian husband when on a student exchange to Exeter in the late 1950s and who has lived in Canada ever since (in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg) interspersed with longish visits to Britain and Europe. Since the first British publication in 1990 of her novel Mary Swann,[6] Shields has gained a wide readership this side of the Atlantic. The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, Larry's Party won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1998, and all her fiction (seven novels and three short story collections) are currently available in Britain. Her fictions cross national borders, moving easily between North American and European locations, just as her novels cross generic borders (between fiction, history, biography, and popular romance) and between genders (Happenstance, The Stone Diaries, and Larry's Party). However, it is with her experiments in the short story genre that I am concerned here. Shields has written about how in the early 1980s she broke away from the traditional short story structure, which she describes with a sly hint at its gender affiliations as 'that holy line of rising action that is supposed to lead somewhere important, somewhere inevitable, modelled perhaps on the orgasmic pattern of tumescence followed by detumescence, an endless predictable circle of desire, fulfilment, and quiescence'.[7] In the next paragraph of the same essay she elaborates on the alternative structures that seem to characterize women's storytelling: 'I noticed that women tended to deal in the episodic, to suppress what was smoothly linear, to set up digressions, little side stories which were not really digressions at all but integral parts of the story' (p. 248). The result of Shields's resistance against linear plots and conventional narrative expectations was her collection Various Miracles.[8] Of course, as she rightly observed, short story writers had been breaking the phantom rules 'forever', and she rolls out a list of her predecessors of both sexes: 'John Cheever, William Gass, Ursula Le Guin, Clark Blaise, Alice Munro, not to mention Nathaniel Hawthorne and Anton Chekhov'.[9] But my interest here is in the consequences of Shield's own deliberately squinting view in Dressing Up for the Carnival, where the stories both individually and collectively display a subversive carnivalesque energy while offering new inflections on the concept of carnival itself. As one reviewer has commented: 'Dressing Up for the Carnival, far from being an inventory of the quotidian, is crammed full of oddity and downright peculiarity, stories of outlandish inventiveness, jostling with pieces of sly knowing comedy and tender, pathos-filled tales of loss and grief '.[10]

'Dressing Up for the Carnival': the title story is like an overture to the collection, a sequence of apparently random moments in the lives of eleven people of different ages and sexes all of whom are out on the streets of an unnamed North American city on a spring day. A short introductory sentence sets the tone of eager anticipation that some kind of social celebration or fancy-dress party is about to begin: 'All over town people are putting on their

costumes', and it is the narrator's promise that provides a thematic linkage between the heterogeneous anecdotes that compose the story.[11] The narrative voice is heard throughout, selecting and introducing this collection of people, though it quickly slips away from diurnal surfaces into something more subjective via indirect interior monologue. We are led through ordinariness into private worlds of dream and unspoken desire and where the inner life of the streets assumes new dimensions in its celebration of possibilities.

The first segment begins with a rush of optimism. It is early morning and we are introduced to a young woman who is getting dressed to go to work: 'Tamara has flung open her closet door; just to see her standing there is to feel a squeeze of the heart. She loves her clothes. She knows her clothes. Her favourite moment of the day is this moment' (p. 1). Already the italicized words generate Tamara's excitement and energy and as she chooses a yellow cotton skirt and a white blouse, the narrator (squinting deliberately) gives the impression that this young woman is creating the sunny morning herself: 'She never checks the weather before she dresses; her clothes are the weather' (p. 2). Through her imagination Tamara invents the world she wants to live in, and as she waits at the bus stop the narrator lets us see a small miracle of transformation. Skipping over the limits of her daily life as a clerk-receptionist into the spaces of daydream, Tamara becomes a glamorously seductive figure: 'A passionate woman dressed in yellow. A Passionate, Vibrant Woman About to Begin Her Day. Her Life' (p. 2). The repetition with its slight variations creates the effect of a star's grand entrance as Tamara begins her private performance in the theatre inside her head. (Virginia Woolf described a similar moment in her early short story 'The Mark on the Wall' as 'dressing myself up in my own mind', and it seems to me that Woolf 's modernist sketches provide a suggestive intertext for Shields's story.)[12]

The second segment has no connection with the first, but it attracts the narrator's attention because it is an odd sight. A young man ('Roger, aged thirty, employed by the Gas Board' as the narrator informs us) is walking along the street at mid-morning carrying a mango in his hand, having just bought that instead of an apple. The short anecdotal history of the purchase, told through Roger's indirect interior monologue, emphasizes the appeal of unfamiliarity and the exoticism of the fruit as he tries to find an image that fits it. Is its 'tight seamless leather skin enclosing soft pulp' like a 'first-class league ball' or is it like an 'elliptical purse'? Enticed by his speculations beyond the normal boundaries of the morning, Roger suddenly catches a glimpse of himself in a new light and breaks out into the festive mood of a Latin American carnival where the mango in his left hand is transformed into a 'set of castanets' and his feet itch to begin the cha-cha-cha. Like Tamara, Roger sees himself outside the story of his 'shrivelled fate' of ordinariness, and although his carnivalesque vision outside the Gas Board will fade as soon as he walks in the door, nevertheless that moment of surprise generates a kind of inexplicable joy. As Margaret Atwood has remarked: 'And who is better at delineating happiness -- especially the sudden, unlooked-for, unearned kind of happiness -- than Carol Shields? [. . .] It's her descriptions of joy that leave you open-mouthed.'[13]

In all the segments, some of which are longer and more detailed than others, ranging from short anecdotes of three sentences to mini-narratives of five or six paragraphs, there is a similar pattern of surface reportage followed by indirect interior monologue. All of them open out into moments of escape from dailiness, as men and women imagine themselves either being someone else or being elsewhere. There are the Borden sisters in the third segment, teenage girls back from a ski-ing holiday a month ago, still carrying the thrill of 'powder snow and stinging sky' in their healthy young bodies and still wearing their ski passes on their jackets as written evidence of their experience: 'I SKIED HAPPY MOUNTAIN'. Repeated twice like 'a kind of compulsion' this slogan is the magic incantation that lifts them soaring above the city streets and the parking lot back to the remembered, already legendary snow slopes.

With the long fourth segment about 'Wanda from the bank' the tone changes as fantasy shifts into a different dimension, closer to pathos than to celebration. Wanda, 'an awkward woman, who was formerly an awkward girl' can be seen walking along the pavement pushing a large new English pram 'high-wheeled, majestically hooded, tires like a Rolls Royce' (p. 4). Wanda is not a mother but a bank employee; the pram is empty, and it does not belong to her but to the bank manager who has bought it for his baby son (on impulse, like Roger's mango) and she has been asked to deliver it to the manager's home. Gradually the narrative slips into the rhythms of this woman's thoughts, tracing her shifts of feeling as she advances from unfamiliarity with the pram to a new sense of authority and harmony, encouraged by the smiles and admiring comments of passers-by, so that she takes the final corners of her journey with 'grace'. It is towards a moment of grace that Wanda has been walking, as we realize when she bends down into the empty pram to settle an imaginary baby: 'Shhh,' she murmurs, smiling. 'There, there, now' (p. 6). Wanda's masquerade of maternity belongs to what Shields would call the 'subjunctive mode'. There may be nothing there, but the dream gesture lingers like Wanda's own smile, observed by no other eyes than the ones 'inside her head'.

It is the word 'smiling' that provides the associative link between Wanda's story and old Mr Gilman's in the next segment, though the two stories share a more significant similarity for they both focus on gestures closer to fantasy than to reality and on possibilities always deferred but always hoped for. Anyone glancing at Mr Gilman on the street late in the afternoon would notice only one remarkable thing about this old man: he is carrying a large bunch of daffodils wrapped in green paper, and it this 'blaze of yellow in his arms' that the narrative investigates. Why should he be carrying them, and who are they for? Gliding straight into the old man's consciousness, the narrative hints at a chronicle of loss, for Mr Gilman at the age of eighty has become one of life's 'leftovers', like the meal to which his inhospitable daughter-in-law has apparently invited him. The flowers are for her, and they are his 'offering', his 'oblation' (p. 7). They may not win the daughter-in-law's heart, but these flowers are shown to have remarkable powers, for they are the agents which transform Mr Gilman's day. Carrying the daffodils about with him (and one wonders how fresh they will look by the evening), Mr Gilman finds himself cast in a new role. Like Wanda with the pram, he is cheered up by people's courtesy and casual friendliness and suddenly finds that he has become somebody else in the eyes of others: 'He is clearly a man who is expected somewhere, anticipated', and preening himself on the bus he is lifted out of his isolation for a brief space, fancying himself 'a charming gent, elegant and dapper [. . .] bearing gifts, flowers' (p. 7).

The remaining segments all recount momentary self-transformations and invented roles, like a ten-year-old girl called Mandy Eliot racing along the street carrying her adored elder brother's football helmet, who in a moment of sympathetic identification becomes the school hero herself; or more enigmatically, Jeanette Foster who is seen 'sporting a smart chignon' and so prompts the narrator's unanswered question, 'Who does she think she is! Who does she think she is?' (p. 9). This question, repeated with different emphases lends its provocation to the final figure of the story, Mr X, 'an anonymous middle-aged citizen' who likes dressing up in his wife's lacy nightgowns when she is out at bingo. (Who does he think he is?) However, by now the narrative has moved off the streets behind closed doors as the evening draws in. Mr X is not part of the street parade we have been witnessing, though in many ways he is the most transgressive and carnivalesque figure of all. Instead, he is an unseen watcher who lifts the corner of the bedroom blind an inch, viewing the world outside with a kind of 'deliberate squint', occupying a position analogous to that of the reader and the narrator. It is he who offers a kind of metafictional comment on the action: 'We cannot live without our illusions' (p. 9). Seen through his eyes the story opens out in new directions: 'Everywhere he looks he observes cycles of consolation and enhancement, and now it seems as though the evening itself is about to alter its dimensions, becoming more (and also less) than what it really is' (p. 9). Consolations, yes; but reality is not easily or permanently transformed by the imagination. As the phrase in parenthesis suggests, there is an inevitable thinning down and surely the night is about to descend.

The carnival so eagerly anticipated in the title and the opening sentence is already over. And yet it has happened; the story assures us of that with all its anecdotes of street performances, such as Tamara's dressing up, Roger's metaphorical castanets, and the masquerades of Wanda and Mr Gilman. So what is missing? It is perhaps Shields's comment on the fragmentation of contemporary urban life that there is no shared sense among these people of any communal activity, for all the acts of celebration are performed silently and in isolation. Taken together, they represent a collective social revelry, though it requires the fiction writer's 'deliberate squint' with its sharpness beyond ordinary vision to project the necessary framework of sympathy through which the concept of the carnivalesque might be reconstructed in its etiolated postmodern form.

'Dressing Down': the final story, 'Dressing Down', would seem to be the opposite of 'Dressing Up', and the carnival ends here with the death of two grandparents. This is a grandson's first-person narrative about his grandparents' marriage; significantly it is not a grand-daughter's, so it is not surprising that the opening emphasis is on the grandfather, a famous Canadian ('He was, of course, a social activist of national reputation' (p. 232)) whose biography has already been published. That grandfather was also 'the first serious nudist in southern Ontario, the founder of Club Soleil, which is still in existence, still thriving, on the shores of Lake Simcoe, just north of Toronto'. This explicitly Canadian context offers a new perspective on the carnivalesque, for what of Bakhtin's grotesque bodies and collective festive excess when relocated in the rigidly Protestant Ontario of the 1920s?

The grandson, like so many of Shields's protagonists (and like Shields herself) is fascinated by the problems of biography and by the unanswered questions about the lives of the dead: 'How had my grandfather become a nudist in the first place? [. . .] And, another question, how did he reconcile his nudist yearnings with his Wesleyan calling, with his eleven-months-a-year job as YMCA director for Eastern Canada?' (p. 233). Some of these questions are answered, like his conversion to naturism as a young man at a beach on the Atlantic coast of France, where for the first time this young Canadian experienced the 'untethering miracle' (p. 235) of exposing his whole body to sun, wind, and water, and felt that he had entered paradise. He is presented as a heroic figure in the high Protestant moral mould and certainly not as a carnivalesque one, though his grandson's alternative description of the 'miracle' as 'that pants-dropping moment' suggests a certain scepticism that borders on the mock heroic. The focus at the beginning is almost exclusively on the grandfather's worldly achievements: not only his successful efforts to establish his nature camp in Ontario but also to affirm his social reputation as a respectable upright citizen. Again irony creeps in, for as the grandson notes, an important factor in his success in that puritanical society was his sexuality, made all the more provocative by the contrast between what was seen and what was famously hidden. While his public image was that of 'suited, shirted, necktied manliness' (p. 237), everyone in the community was aware of the 'imagined presence of this young, muscular, unclothed body, released to nature, to prelapsarian abandonment' every summer. Word had got around about his nudist camp, just as his young wife had predicted it would, and he is described as 'clever and compelling -- especially to women'.

Yet this story is not only about the grandfather; it is about the grandmother as well, and her attitude to her husband's passion for naturism raises other more troubling questions in the narrative. When her views are taken into consideration the emphases are subtly shifted, so that instead of its being the story of an exceptional man, it becomes a story about sexual politics within a long marriage contracted shortly after the First World War, or even the untold story of a wife's humiliation, anger, and revenge. None of this sounds very carnivalesque, though I think we are encouraged to see the Club Soleil as a kind of carnival observed with a 'deliberate squint' and the story finally recuperates many traditional features of the carnivalesque, albeit within the subjunctive mode. (And that, we may remember, is the 'territory of dreams, possibilities and parallel realities'.)

The grandmother's resistance to her husband's enthusiasm for summertime nudity is signalled several times early in the narrative, though it only takes central place after his credentials have been established. Her attitude is unambiguous: 'My grandmother's disinclination for nudity would not have surprised those who knew her well. Her interest was in covering up, not stripping down' (p. 237). Her clothes and her household furnishings all expressed the traditionally feminine notions of modesty which might have been expected in a gently brought-up girl from a wealthy Ontario farming family. She was happiest when enclosed in 'layers of underclothes, foundation garments, garters and stockings, brassieres, camisoles, slips, blouses, cardigans, lined skirts, aprons, and even good aprons worn over the everyday aprons' (p. 238). For a woman whose identity was defined by established social decorums of dress and behaviour, nudity was not only a social transgression, it was a sin: 'Naturism was not her nature. Nudity was the cross she bore.'

There follows an extraordinary account of a heated argument about Club Soleil between the young husband and wife, when she raises her objections to it on social, hygenic, and religious grounds, only to have them all overruled. Though at first he 'reasons' with her 'gently', she is finally defeated by his announcement that they would abstain from sexual intercourse during all their time at camp. Shocked into submission, she rightly feels that she has been trapped, and that this is a very 'bad bargain'. I have called this an extraordinary account for several reasons: for its sexual explicitness and not less for the fact that a father of that generation would tell his son about that private quarrel many years later (which is how the narrator learned it from his own father). Yet it is most extraordinary for the ironies it generates around issues of nature and culture. The grandfather's naturism is revealed to be a very puritanical concept which recognizes the body as a 'holy temple' but denies its sexuality. Apparently what shocks the young wife most is her husband's reason for prescribing abstinence: 'To prove to you, conclusively, that going unclothed among those we trust has nothing to do with the desires of the flesh' (p. 242).

What did his grandmother really think about this? 'All right' she is supposed to have said (p. 243), but the tone in which she said it is one of the crucial gaps in the story which the grandson can only speculate upon in the light of his grandmother's subsequent behaviour. Such teasing puzzles are the fate of the biographer, as Shields remarked when discussing her novel Small Ceremonies (about a woman who is writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie):

One of the interesting things about Susanna Moodie is the silences in her work, the things that she doesn't say. . . . How do you retrieve someone who is dead and try to build up with the nib of your pen that personality who was, in a sense, voiceless about things that mattered?[14]

Enough has been recounted of the two voices in that argument to suggest that neither husband nor wife could have thrown off their socially constructed masculine and feminine identities just by throwing off their clothes, for gender identity is a complex network of acquired behavioural characteristics that constitute 'the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes'.[15] In Gender Trouble Judith Butler defines gender as 'the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (p. 33). Her theoretical discussion is very relevant here, though Shields's investigation takes an altogether different direction. Whereas Butler focuses on the extent to which social practices of gender formation constitute identity and on the instabilities within these constructions, Shields's scenario from the 1920s emphasizes the power of cultural assumptions around gender identity within a traditional marriage relationship. Ironically, the husband wins the argument for nature by replicating patriarchal strategies endorsed by his society. He is the one who makes the rules, and it is he who insists on renouncing sex at camp, while his wife, trapped inside her own feminine conditioning, can do nothing except cry and submit unwillingly to a long succession of summers without clothes and without sex. As her grandson shrewdly assumes, 'a jolt of anger must surely have accompanied her acquiescence, the beginning of a longer anger' (p. 243).

The grandmother's opposition casts a critical light over the activities of the Club Soleil, which seemed to her like childish games, 'Playing Adam and Eve at the beach', as she had described it in that memorable early argument (p. 241). The grandfather may have won the argument, but it is clearly her view that was passed on to their son. (He always took his family on fully clothed summer holidays to Muskoka Lodge, on a different lake.) That same view is adopted by the grandson. As he describes it, the nature camp becomes a site of conflict, not only between his grandparents but also between the concepts of nature and culture, for the gender hierarchy is reinscribed there with his grandfather as the personification of patriarchal order, 'Lord of his own domain' (p. 246). Life at the Club emphasizes nothing so much as the artificiality of constructions of the natural for its worldly cliente `le, 'city lawyers, physicians, charity organisers, household matriarchs' (p. 234), as they make their way carrying their daily ration of one clean towel between the flower and vegetable beds and the volleyball court towards the dining hall.

Indeed the Club might be seen as a kind of carnival in reverse. There are naked bodies in abundance, but these are described in rather unsavoury terms as dishes of cooked meat (not available on the Club's vegetarian menu): 'living hams and haunches' or 'white-jellied breast flesh jiggling in the Ontario sunlight' (p. 234). The female body is described with its 'pale protrusions, its slopes and meadows and damp cavities', but this is the suffering young wife's body and implies no joy at all, just as the earlier description makes a very doubtful appeal to the appetite for food. Notably, any hints of sexual appetites and eroticism are erased. The Club encourages communal activities of sun worship and summer rituals, but the overwhelming impression is that its celebrations are so rigidly codified in practice and so shadowed by self-consciousness that the carnivalesque spirit is outlawed. Possibly this critical perspective, which is the grandson's, may have been affected by his own embarrassment when he was first taken to the camp as a ten-year-old boy by his grandfather. Schooled to regard nakedness as an awkward joke ('buck-naked, stark-naked. Starkers' (p. 245)), he finds the spectacle of sexual difference not liberating but distressing, and he is plunged into an agony of self-consciousness and shame. Again, social codes of dress, or what the grandfather might call the deformations of 'cultural ignorance', are shown to be as powerful for identity construction in the adolescent male as in the grown-up female: 'Naturism was not his nature' either. His visit is shadowed by his grandmother's refusal to come to the camp that year and to appear naked before her grandson, and that refusal serves to underline her silent agonies of humiliation over so many summers.

The last section of the story switches in time and location from summers at Lake Simcoe to the grandparents' funerals, with dead bodies on display and a late return to the carnivalesque mode. The shifts in tone here are very complex, registering first the sight of the grandfather's naked dead body lying in its bare coffin without any covering at all, and secondly the grandson's note that this was at his grandmother's insistence. How do we read that harsh decree of hers and her attempt to forbid one of the Club's most devoted women members to attend the funeral, except as an expression of hostility towards her late husband? Everyone in the family assumes that to be the case, but 'by then all of us had learned to shrink from the anger that deformed her last years' (p. 248). With her own death eighteen months later, the word 'grotesque' is used for the first time, referring not to her dead body but to her bizarre request that she too would lie unclothed and that her coffin should be left open, so making a spectacle of herself at her own funeral. (The family did not obey her wish, and the coffin was closed after all.) The grandson is faced with the problem of how to interpret his grandmother's final and uncharacteristic request. Was it an act of defiance and a kind of revenge for all those summers spent against her will at Camp Soleil? 'That's what I thought at the time', the narrator confesses. However he continues, 'Now I think of that final gesture differently' (p. 248), representing a shift of feeling reminiscent of Alice Munro's revisions of narrative perspective over long periods of time.

His second interpretation is far more optimistic, for he has come to believe that his grandmother's 'grotesque' gesture might have been an extravagant act of acquiescence to his grandfather's wishes, a gesture she was unable to make in her lifetime. That story ends with his imagining her vision of heaven as a restaging of the Club Soleil in a space beyond the binaries of flesh and spirit where the naked lovers would greet each other 'rapturously' and embrace 'without restraint' (p. 249). That glimpse of transcendent eroticism is perhaps the ultimate carnivalesque, belonging as all those verbs with 'would' in them seem to indicate, to the space occupied by a parallel but forever indeterminate reality.

Yet the story does not end there. It returns to a recognition of the inevitable duality of the human condition: 'It might have become one of their perishable secrets, part of the bliss they would one day gladly surrender' (p. 249). We are led back into the grandparents' story again (for the grandson's earnest wish is to believe in their eventual reconciliation), and then we are seduced by the word 'bliss' into the joys of sexual love in this world. We must finally pay attention to the grandson who has been telling the story. He longs to be able to fill in the gaps in his grandparents' story and to write a celebratory ending, but that parallel reality can only be imagined in the subjunctive mood.

So, what does 'carnival' mean in these frame stories? As we ask the question we may hear the grandfather's voice shouting the word 'Semantics' at us. ('My grandfather, it must be remembered, lived in the day when to snort out the word semantics was enough to win any quarrel' (p. 240)). Certainly, these stories are marked by the absence of any noisy collective celebration, and there is no evidence of physical excess or those other traditionally carnivalesque features listed by R. J. Howells: 'rituals, feasting, exchanging, fighting, talking, narrative; sexual and all other kinds of intercourse [. . .] practical jokes and laughter'.[16] Yet these narratives express a longing for disruption, a dissenting urge to burst out of the skin of everyday order, so that taken together all the isolated fragments add up to a collective figure of male and female desire. This represents, I would suggest, Shields's postmodern version of the carnivalesque, in the subjunctive mood.

My warmest thanks to Faye Hammill, University of Liverpool, who lent me her unpublished annotated Carol Shields bibliography while I was preparing this essay.

[1] Carol Shields, 'Arriving Late: Starting Over', in How Stories Mean, ed. by John Metcalf and J. R. (Tim) Struthers (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 1993), pp. 244-51.

[2] For a brief discussion of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the 'carnivalesque' developed in his study of Rabelais, see Robin Howells, Carnival to Classicism: The Comic Novels of Charles Sorel (Paris, Seattle, and Tubingen: Biblio, 17, 1989), pp. 9-12.

[3] Carol Shields, 'Mirrors', in Dressing Up for the Carnival (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 68. All further page references to this volume will be included in the text.

[4] L. S. R. Byrne and E. L. Churchill, rev. by Glanville Price, A Comprehensive French Grammar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 342.

[5] Carol Shields, 'Arriving Late: Starting Over', p. 246.

[6] Carol Shields, Mary Swann (London: Fourth Estate, 1990); first published in Canada as Mary Swann: A Mystery (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987).

[7] Carol Shields, 'Arriving Late: Starting Over', p. 248.

[8] Carol Shields, Various Miracles (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985). For two penetrating critical discussions of this collection, see Simone Vauthier's essays, 'Closure in Carol Shields's Various Miracles', in her Reverberations: Explorations in the Canadian Short Story (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1993), pp. 114-31, and '"They say miracles are past" But They Are Wrong', Prairie Fire, 16.1 (Spring 1995), 84-104.

[9] Carol Shields, 'Arriving Late: Starting Over', p. 247.

[10] Alex Clark, 'Sapphire and Steel', Guardian, Saturday Review (5 February 2000), p. 9.

[11] This story shares many of the structural features and narrative functions of the title story in Various Miracles, and I am indebted in my reading to Simone Vauthier's analysis of that story in '"They say miracles are past"', in Prairie Fire.

[12] Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall' and 'Kew Gardens', in A Haunted House and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

[13] Margaret Atwood, 'In Praise of Shields: Hilarious Surfaces, Ominous Depths', National Post (22 October 1999), p. A19.

[14] Eleanor Wachtel, 'Interview with Carol Shields', Room of One's Own, 13, 1/2 (1989), 5-45 (pp. 30-31).

[15] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 6.

[16] Robin Howells, p. 10.