Shields provides refreshing look at education

It was such a pleasure to see the article on Carol Shields and her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel\n"The Stone Diaries" in the Oct. 3 issue of Home Pages. Her interest in limestone, emphasized in the article, is certainly very relevant in Bloomington, which has historically been noted for its limestone quarries.\n"The Stone Diaries" is a multicultural triumph, however. It won not only a Pulitzer Prize but also the National Book Critics Circle Award, Manitoba Book Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award, and was a finalist for Britain's Booker Prize.\nCarol Shields was not only a novelist, she was also a good storyteller who could write domestic fiction. She was also a writer whose works are full of charm and symbolism, and include serious issues, besides, such as "reverse immigration."\nIn addition, she appears to have been an important theorist. Many of her short stories and novels appear to advertise the importance of post-secondary education as a way of life. Vocational and higher education in her writings are often not a way to escape from the common herd or something to be disillusioned about but extended sociological hypotheses or semi-political planning of a civilization that is set up and filled in by literate institutions and literate activities. It is heartening to see writing done that has this perspective.\n"The Stone Diaries" opens with two families, both neighbors. The men work in limestone quarries a little west of Winnipeg. The wife of one dies in childbirth when the narrator of the novel is born. The youngest son of the other neighbor obtains a scholarship and later becomes a professor of botany at a college in Winnipeg. His research results in the development of a new wheat hybrid.\nThe father of the newborn narrator, a stonecutter, sets up his wife's gravestone himself, and adds additional ornamentation to it over the years. It receives a lot of publicity in newspapers and magazines in the novel. One visitor from the crowds who come to see it even compares it to the Taj Mahal. And a letter comes from the Indiana Limestone Company of Bloomington, Ind., saying it has an urgent need for expert stone carvers, and offering an extravagant wage.\nThe narrator, now 11 years old, moves with her father to Bloomington. She is educated at Tudor Hall in Indianapolis and Long College for Women on the Ohio River. Her father, by then a partner in his own sub-contracting firm, delivers the commencement address at her graduation from Long College. She is uncomfortable when she listens to his praise of the high quality Indiana "freestanding" limestone which has no bias when split. The pieces will split equally when cut.\nParts of this account are snide:\n"There are educated Bloomingtonians," wrote Shields, "who have never heard of the province of Manitoba, or if they have, they're unable to spell it correctly or locate it on a map."\nThe botany professor becomes a civil servant in Ottawa, a director of agricultural research. His father becomes part of Canada's "reverse immigration" upon retiring and returns to the Orkney Islands. When the narrator at 22 marries a Bloomingtonian in Bloomington, the former professor in Canada sends her $10,000 from his own mother's previous florist business and an edition of "Wild Flowers of Canada." \nChapters follow about her children's lives and her very old age, showing Carol Shields' interests in limestone, gardens, and the effects of literate activities.