According to a global survey conducted by Ipsos MORI, a leading research company, in March 2017, one in five people around the globe find women to be inferior to men. This statistic strengthens the notion of current inequality between genders that is found at the core of Carol Shields’ book, Unless. The novel is narrated by Reta Winters, a middle-aged Canadian author who lives a fairly comfortable, unremarkable life until her eldest daughter, Norah, abandons university to pursue a life of vagrancy. The only clue Norah offers as to what has driven her to life on a street corner is the sign she wears around her neck reading ‘GOODNESS’. As Reta struggles to find the meaning behind Norah’s ambiguous poster, she comes to assume that her daughter…show more content… She is fundamentally troubled by the fact that even in the forward-thinking world of the twenty-first century, society continues to view women as being inferior to men. Prior to dropping out of university and abandoning her apartment for the streets, Norah remarks to her mother that both attending her classes and completing her exams are “‘sort of pointless’” (131). She sees no value in aspiring to anything when she is sure to be hindered on the basis of her gender. As Reta attempts to uncover the motives behind Norah’s actions, she considers the possibility that “Norah half knows the big female secret of wanting and not getting” (97). Reta understands her daughter’s discontent with society and the author validates the idea that some of things women yearn for are simply unattainable to them because they are women. Shields further acknowledges the validity of this belief when Reta discusses Norah’s existential crisis with her friends asking, “How can she go on living her life knowing what she knows, that women are excluded from greatness?”…show more content… She finds fault in an advertising company that proclaims the great minds of the Western intellectual world to have been “Galileo, Kant, Hegel, Bacon, Newton, Plato, Locke, and Descartes” (134), effectively omitting the names of female contributors. In her letter to the company, she confides that she fears Norah may one day come across their advertisement and understand “how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe” (137). In another letter penned to an accomplished columnist, Reta expresses despondency over a recent article of his that included a list of numerous literary geniuses, all of whom were male. She bemoans the effect his subconsciously prejudiced article is sure to have on his audience asserting that he must “certainly understand that the women who fall even casually under [his] influence are made to serve an apprenticeship in self denigration” (165). Reta also criticizes another author who names women as being the “miniaturists of fiction” (247) and laments the fact that Norah “has been driven from the world by the suggestion that she is doomed to
