Conclusion

Abstract

It seems appropriate, after my investigations into the multiple ways in which identities are being refigured in contemporary English-Canadian women’s fiction, to end with the words of an American-born Canadian writer who has never subscribed to a Canadian cultural nationalist agenda and whose novels constitute a radical critique of any foundational fictions of identity, either national or personal. Yet those matters are almost peripheral to the assertions in this statement that is focused on the importance of the writing activity itself. Yes, fiction is a response to the real often “untenable” world in which the writer finds herself, but it is also an act of transformation where telling stories reinterprets the world from different angles, reclaiming secrets from the past or hidden within personal histories, reshaping and enlarging the dimensions of imaginative possibility through which readers, like writers, inhabit their worlds. Carol Shields emphasizes both the urgency and the compulsiveness of fiction writing with its double dimension of aesthetics and social morality, for the novelist’s activity as she conceives it is an act of hope or at least a gesture toward psychological survival. This attitude toward fiction is shared by all the writers whom I have been discussing, though expressed in a variety of ways.

This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it.

(Carol Shields, Unless)¹