CanLit’s Ossiferous Fictions: Animal Bones and Fossils in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries

This chapter examines “ossiferous” processes in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man (1979) and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries (1993). In these two novels, representations of animal bones and fossils illuminate the sexual politics of reproduction and the legacies of settler colonialism. In the first part of the chapter, I show that sexual reproduction (or the “making of bones”) in Atwood’s novel is represented as a problem of precedence or succession, while in Shields’s novel it allows for the transference of life and serves as the basis for women’s (auto)biographical writing. Turning to settler colonialism in the second half of the chapter, I examine how animal bones and fossils in these novels serve as symbols of loss but can also open up ways of understanding the evolutionary histories of prehistoric animals as a persistent material record that continues to shape Canadian landscapes.