SOURCE: Howells, Coral Ann. “In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival.” In Yearbook of English Studies 31, pp. 144-54. Leeds, Eng.: Maney Publishing, 2001.

In the following essay, Howells discusses two stories from the collection Dressing Up for the Carnival, asserting that Shields's writing displays “a subversive carnivalesque energy.”

Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities.¹

Any fiction with ‘carnival’ in its title promises some kind of challenge to traditional structures of social order and possibly of literary convention, ‘dressing up’ in anticipation of celebration and festivity, where for a brief space of time dailiness is transcended, split open to allow other more chaotic energies...