The purpose of this research is to examine The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx as an articulation of a narrative strategy that lends legitimacy to the feminist social critique by way of the aesthetic power of representation behind modern female social and psychological experience. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in The Shipping News in general terms and then to discuss, with reference principally to the character Aunt Agnis Hamm, means by which the novel articulates women's experience and legitimates that experience as feminist social critique.
The action of The Shipping News does not focus mainly on Agnis but rather on her nephew Quoyle, a lumbering hulk of a widower whose faithless wife Petal had done a lot of emotional damage to him and their two daughters before selling the daughters to a pornography photographer and then being killed in an automobile accident with her lover. When Quoyle accepts Agnis's invitation to leave upstate New York to resettle (with his rescued children) in her childhood home, a big old "saltbox" house on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, the relocation is an emotional exercise--more exactly exorcism, given the events leading up to the move--for him as much as it is a physical fresh start: Some time before Petal's death Quoyle's terminally ill parents had committed suicide, explaining their reasons by leaving a dispassionate message on Quoyle's answering machine. Agnis sets up housekeeping and transfers her yacht-upholstery service to the little town of Killick-Claw. Her reason for moving turns out to be the recent death of her longtime lesbian companion Warren.
What is important about the narrative scene that Proulx describes is that it establishes the bleak and empty landscape not only of Newfoundland but also of the emotional lives of the main characters. That is, the narrative establishes that the characters' emotional content is for the most part without cont...