Changing Roles In Changing Society

Carol Shields (1935-2003), a Canadian American writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is one of the most renowned contemporary writers in Canada. She has until her last days published three poetry books, four short stories and nearly ten novels. Her masterpiece The Stone Diaries won the 1993 Booker Prize, the 1993 Governor General's Award for Fiction, the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Enjoying great fame in her country together with Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, Shields is the only Canadian writer who won so many glittering prizes within two years. It is her The Stone Diaries which pieces together a woman's life from historical fragments and conjectural fictions that makes her world renowned in the literature community.Based on the theories in The Second Sex written by Simone de Beauvoir and attached to Canada's social realities in the 20th century, the dissertation is set to have a detailed analysis of the major roles in the novel from a perspective of feminism, aiming to sketch a picture of Canadian women's living status in the 20th century and the evolvement of feminism in the country. The dissertation will divide the females in the novel into three categories in order to well explain that a woman is not born but shaped. Most impressively, the novel reveals a changing society and the complexity of the inner world of the characters although there is just an account of everyday life in it. A research into The Stone Diaries from the angle of feminism may set a historical background and thus make readers understand better about the implied social significance in Canada and even beyond, namely, changing roles in changing society. Considering the perspective of the research into the work, a historical study of empirical research will be employed. Besides, textual analysis will also be used. The Stone Diaries features depictions of average men and women and everyday life or even trifles. This dissertation, however, is to set the stories into a historical environment and use feminism to analyze the characters in a changing Canadian society. By doing so, it is expected that readers can probe into a deeper social significance behind the accounts of "odds and ends".