“The Alchemy of Re-Imagined Reality”: Biographical Gothicism in Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery

Abstract

In “‘The Alchemy of Re-Imagined Reality’: Biographical Gothicism in Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery” Cynthia Sugars argues that Shields’s 1987 novel Swann: A Mystery offers a parodic take on the interrelations of biography and fiction, a topic that was central to many of Shields’ published meditations on the art of writing. This self-reflexive interest in biographers and writers informed her fascination with the sheer unknowability of others. Indeed, a fixation on the “otherness” of others constitutes the core of Swann: A Mystery. Here, academics and biographers gather to discuss the life and oeuvre of another “othered” and fictionally disguised figure—that of Mary Swann herself. This elusiveness of the fictional biographical subject is echoed on a metatextual level as the novel plays with two Canadian literary intertexts: the fictional poetess of Paul Hiebert’s 1947 novel, Sarah Binks, and the real-life poet of the 1970s, Pat Lowther. In its portrayal of the academics and biographers who grapple over the reputation of Mary Swann, the novel offers a satirical reworking, forty years later, of the early Canadian literary satire by Hiebert, Sarah Binks, about the fictional and dubiously talented “songstress of Saskatchewan.” At the same time, Shields’s Mary Swann conjures elements of the real-life poet Pat Lowther, who, like Swann, was violently murdered by her husband in 1975. The multiple levels of biographical disguise in Swann are tantalizing, as Shields tackles questions of literary influence and biographical fictionalization, particularly as she conjures the ghosts of Canadian literary predecessors through her presentation of the uncanny bio-critical afterlife of Mary Swann.

[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

—Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (148)

We are as writers responsible—or are we?—for our offered up passions and for our buried themes, even those buried out of sight of our own eyes…

—Carol Shields, “What You Use and What You Protect” (51)