Out of the realm of immanence : women's work and transcendence in the novels of Carol Shields

Abstract

Carol Shields has not always been acknowledged as a feminist thinker by scholars, but an examination of women’s work and art in her novels shows how her novels employ the feminist theories of Simon de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan in the creation of her own feminist philosophy. De Beauvoir’s ideas on transcendence and immanence find expression in Shields’s novels, A Fairly Conventional Woman, The Stone Diaries, and Unless, as her female characters use work (both domestic and artistic) to transcend powerlessness.