10 Anglophone Canadian Novel; Margaret Laurence: The Stone Angel

Dr. Swagata Bhattacharya

Content

• Biographical details of the author
• Plot of the novel
• Themes of the novel
• Significance of the title
• Central character of the novel
• Literary significance
• Awards and recognition

Biographical Details of the Author: Margaret Laurence (1926 – 1987)

Jean Margaret Wemyss was born in 1926 in the prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba. She lost her parents at a very young age and was raised by her maternal grandfather. Margaret began writing professionally in 1943 when she got a summer job as a reporter for the town newspaper. In 1944, she enrolled herself in the English honours program at Winnipeg’s United College. After graduating, she became a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen. In 1947, she married Jack Laurence. In 1949, Margaret Laurence moved to Somalia with her husband and lived in Africa till 1957. She wrote a number of short stories on African subjects and maintained a great interest in African literature. In 1957, Margaret Laurence returned to Canada and settled in Vancouver. After separating from her husband in 1962, she moved with her two children to England. It was at Elm Cottage that Laurence completed four of her five Manawaka books, of them the first being The Stone Angel (1964). The great critical acclaim and commercial success of her novels as well as her consistent output of essays and articles solidly established Margaret Laurence as one of the most important and beloved literary figures in Canada. In 1971, she was named a Companion of the Order of Canada. She received the Governor General’s Award twice, first for A Jest of God (1966) and again for The Diviners (1974). Her book of essays Heart of a Stranger was published in 1976 and her memoir Dance on the Earth was published posthumously in 1987. Laurence had also written The Olden Days Coat (1979), Six Darn Cows (1979) and The Christmas Birthday Story (1980) for children.

During the last decade of her life, Margaret Laurence was actively involved in speaking and writing about issues that concerned her such as nuclear disarmament, the environment, literacy and other social issues. She died on January 5, 1987 and was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery in Neepawa, Manitoba.

Plot of the Novel

The Stone Angel, published in 1964, is set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba in the early 1960s.

In The Stone Angel, there are two interdependent plots. In terms of the present time, it is the story of an old woman in her 90s whose physical breakdown has made her dependent, and who realizes that her son and daughter-in-law are planning to send her to an old people’s institution. Her pride rebels against such an identification with the helpless aged, and one day she escapes from her Vancouver house to spend a couple of days in an abandoned fish cannery. Inevitably, she is recaptured and taken to a hospital which shall be her last home. It is in the hospital that she realizes that all her life she has been a victim of her pride. She dies not long after this realization.

Within this primary plot which lasts only a few days set in the 1960s, goes another plot in which the old lady Hagar Shipley recollects her long life in a series of flashbacks. There is one crucial period of two years that, in contrast to the other vividly remembered periods, goes virtually undescribed. This is the two years when old Jason Currie, Hagar’s father decided to spend his money on educating Hagar in an academy in Toronto. The effect of these two untold years is evident throughout the novel. In her long inner monologue, Hagar expresses herself in a way quite different from her Manawaka contemporaries and quite unlike Marvin, her son and Doris, his wife, the people to whom in old age her circle has slowly narrowed down. It was her educated mind within her gross and worn out body which acted the way Hagar behaved with the people surrounding her. So, the plot of The Stone Angel, keeps something hidden and open to conjecture. In this way it draws readers into the heart of the novel by alerting them to the possibility that Hagar may be telling the truth as she sees it, but it is not necessarily the whole truth. Readers need to recognize that her telling is based on her memories and that memories, like opinions, can be biased. The novel is, in fact, somewhat like an autobiography.

Themes of the Novel

Pride: The most prevailing theme of The Stone Angel is that of pride. As John Moss states, “What gives Margaret Laurence’s vision the resonant dimensions of universal truth is the interlacing of the destructive and constructive effects of Hagar’s recalcitrant pride. Pride is a double-edged sword”. Indeed, Hagar’s great pride helps her to cope with the many difficulties she faces throughout her life. This pride, however, also separates and detaches her from others resulting in several strained relationships which she was unable to mend. Hagar’s pride repeatedly imprisoned her within the confines of thwarted affections and misdirected emotion. More specifically, her pride caused such things as an unhappy marriage with Brampton Shipley and a severance of all ties with her father Jason and her brother Matt. Her pride served her best in her dying days when she was determined not to submit to frailty and raged against the fading light with the same stubbornness that she had always displayed.

The novel has its first reference to pride in the very second sentences as it begins. Hagar described the Stone Angel as “my mother’s angel that my father bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty…” (3) Hagar’s father Jason Currie was a very proud man himself, a trait that was passed on to his daughter. He took immense pride in the terribly expensive statue created for his wife. He also prided himself in his abilities and had excessive self-esteem. Because he worked very hard, he took great pride in his store. Hagar says, “Father took such pride in the store – you’d have thought it was the only one on earth. It was the first in Manawaka, so I guess he had due cause.” (9) Hagar inherited her father’s pride and exhibited it as early as age six when she said, “There was I, strutting the board sidewalk like a pint-sized peacock, resplendent, haughty, hoity-toity, Jason Currie’s black-haired daughter.” (6) This pride grew as Hagar grew up. She was frustrated at her lack of co-ordination and her arthritis which caused her to fall.

The alternation that runs through Hagar’s life between rebellion and conformity is a result of her pride. Her pride, in its turn, has a paradoxical quality. On the one hand she is sustained by her pride and on the other she is humiliated “hourly and daily” by the vulnerability her age has imposed on her. In the unbending pride of her spirit there is an enormous strength. She comes to her final hospital bed and along with it she also comes to her moment of truth and liberation, the recognition of the force that warped her own life and her love for others. That force is her pride. The author leaves no doubt that Hagar’s pride is the spiritual pride that was regarded as one of the seven deadly sins by the medieval theologians. The readers are not told, but perhaps they can surmise that her snatching of the cup of water in her last moment is a symbol of her release from the agony of memory into the great peace beyond life.

Time: In The Stone Angel, time is the most important factor in determining the structure of the novel. The assertion of temporal dominance occurs a number of times in the novel. Hagar, leaving Bram, and at the same time leaving her hometown, comments on her departure: “Then we were away from Manawaka. It came as a shock to me, how small the town was and how short a time it took to leave it, as we measure time” (147) It is through her sense of time that Hagar measures the space of Manawaka. And then, coming to Vancouver, she voices a sentiment: “You begin again and nothing will go wrong this time.” (155) For it is time, not place, that manifests itself in change arising from a change of mind or heart rather than a change of place, and time is mind’s dimension.

The novel consists of alternating passages from a past and a present, both of which exist within Hagar’s mind. She is either remembering or perceiving the world around her with an old woman’s suspicious eyes which give her observations their special twist and colour. It opens with Hagar recalling the stone angel in her rich and racy inner prose, the prose of thoughts readers are expected to believe are addressed to them. And then Hagar describes the cemetery and suddenly switches to the present. From this beginning until about the last quarter of the book, The Stone Angel maintains parallel chronological patterns, the present following sequentially the last days of Hagar’s life, and the flashbacks following, also sequentially, the course of her life as it appears in her memories.

In terms of action, this is a book of narrow compass, the narrative of an old woman’s thoughts and memories on the eve of death, with a single quixotic escapade, to break the pattern. Death circumscribes the whole pattern, for the novel begins with memories of a cemetery and ends with Hagar’s last expectant thought – “And then-”.

Survival:

In ‘Ten Years’ Sentences’, Margaret Laurence has stated: “With The Stone Angel, without my recognizing it at the time, the theme had changed to that of survival, the attempt of the personality to survive with some dignity, toting the load of excess mental baggage that everyone carries, until the moment of death.” (32) Three years after Laurence wrote this essay, Margaret Atwood’s Survival appeared (1972). Though Atwood has made only three brief references to The Stone Angel in her book, Laurence considers her novel a story of liberation and frustrated attempts at liberation in a generational context. Hagar’s long life is an often failing effort to find and be herself, and in that sense to achieve liberation. In reality, survival itself is a kind of conditional and limited liberation from the prime necessity of human existence, which is death.

Freedom: 

Freedom is linked to survival and also linked to the theme of hostility between settlers and hunters that has dominated the entire history of North America. The contrast between Bram Shipley and Jason Currie which appealed to Hagar is that between the rigidities of the invading mercantilism represented by her father, a strict Presbyterian self-made man and the vanishing liberties of the frontier represented by Bram. In Bram, she sees all those qualities which are different from her father and it is those very qualities which she begins to detest when she goes to live with him. Again, the pride factor comes in the way of liberty and freedom. It is this pride which leads to her isolation and eventual destruction of all her personal relationships.

Significance of the Title

In the novel The Stone Angel, the stone angel is a symbol, an object which has a special role. It symbolizes Jason Currie’s pride when he sets it up, nominally as a monument to his dead wife, but really to “proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied”. (3) It is the dynasty which, in a bitterly ironic twist of fate, expires with him. But, the statue also symbolizes Hagar’s blind refusal to recognize her own nature and the consequences of her pride: “She was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even a pretence of sight. Whoever carved her had left the eyeballs blank.” (3) Finally, the statue symbolizes the way in which Hagar shares the obstinate, arrogant disposition of Jason Currie, and even his attitudes to life. Pride is the besetting sin of both of them, which makes them often strangely unfeeling. The idea of those unmoving eyes recurs when Hagar’s son John is killed and she says: “The night my son died I was transformed to stone and never wept at all”.

Central Character of the Novel

Margaret Laurence herself wrote, “I wrote about Hagar as one individual old woman who certainly came out of my own background. But I was astonished when a number of other Canadians wrote to me or said to me that this was their grandmother. And I didn’t know that it was going to turn out to be everybody’s grandmother.” Readers identified Hagar Shipley as the type of the arrogant old woman fighting against age and death.

Hagar Shipley is sustained by her pride and she is made monstrous by her pride. She is ninety years old when her voice is heard for the first time, and she bitterly describes herself as grossly fat, ugly and clumsy. Her body has grown as grotesque as her unforgiving spirit. She is by turns agonizingly bitter, snarling and sarcastic or weak, vulnerable and weeping. Her son Marvin and daughter-in-law Doris, themselves in their sixties, have to bear with her hour by hour and day by day. They have to bear her stubborn, intractable temper and her massive, unmanageable body. She is humiliated hourly and daily by being so vulnerable, and yet she is impeccably unyielding to them in their honest efforts. She is unhappy for her age, her weaknesses, and for the failures in her life. Yet, in the unbending pride of her spirit there lies an enormous strength. She journeys through memory to recall her life, face its failures and admit her betrayals, and she makes one last desperate bid for escape from the chains of illness and age. She comes to her final hospital bed, but she also comes to her moment of truth and liberation, the recognition of the force that worked her own life and her love for others: “Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free…”

Hagar’s pride is a factor of her background, both ancestral and historical. Her father Jason Currie was a relentlessly proud man. The little western Canadian town, Manawaka, was built by Jason Currie and other Scottish immigrants like him and was made secure by the pride of its builders. Manawaka was also potentially a prison for its people who were ruthlessly restricted by its propriety.

Readers are never allowed to look directly into the minds of Jason Currie or Bram Shipley in The Stone Angel. They are seen only through Hagar’s eyes, heard through her ears. Readers know about them what Hagar chooses to let them know. She often describes their appearances and eccentricities and sheds some light on their special ways of speaking. Hagar does not turn either her father or her husband into mere puppets in her memory or her imagination. Yet, she always shows them as her foils, the others by whom, in her great egotism, she defines herself. She never has an unreservedly good word to say about any of them. In her vision of life, everybody else is a minor figure. Consequently, the novel has no real dialogue. The characters never truly converse. They exchange statements that are embedded in the great sprawling continuum of Hagar’s memory, and their encounters are stylized in recollection. Everything readers know about them is secondary, filtered through the principal character’s thoughts.

Hagar’s prejudices and her resentments stand out for all to see, and readers are on guard all the time for the bias that sooner or later emerges in all her statements. Her fear and suspicion of the world colour her relationships with everyone. Whatever she says is based on her memory and people like Hagar remember the distant past with great vividness. But are the memories of old people, however vivid, the real past? In all works of fiction that are based on remembering the past, the readers must regard memory itself as the first creator of fiction. But whatever that past may really have been, it has made Hagar into what she is, the woman whose voice is brilliantly introduced in the first pages of the novel. It is this voice that sings throughout the novel till she goes through her last rite. As Hagar is laid to rest Mr. Troy, the minister, sings: “All people that on earth do dwell.” and readers realize that throughout her life Hagar has not recognized the need for joy. It can only be hoped that in the last moment of her life her mind had been enlightened and her heart opened up.

Literary Significance 

The Stone Angel is important for it came at a crucial stage in the development of Canadian fiction, which was moving forward from its formative stages. It was moving away from the stylistic clumsiness of writers like Frederick Philip Grove, who sought to see prairie life in terms of an outdated European naturalism and from the didactic earnestness of writers like Hugh MacLennan who, in novels like Two Solitudes, had given lessons in the rise of a Canadian national consciousness. Published in 1964, The Stone Angel is a study of the enclosed “garrison culture” of North American settlements and of the religion that supported and often distorted the spirit of their people. W.H. New remarked that Margaret Laurence explored the essential differences between middle class expectations and other values, articulated a female perspective, and offered evidence to many young writers to affirm the simple fact that being alive was a political act.

Laurence came at a time when MacLennan’s didacticism had served its purpose, and myths were needed to sustain the Canadian imagination. In creating her fictional town of Manawaka, Margaret Laurence offered a powerful myth of Canada in the imaginations of artists and responsive readers. Her role as a woman novelist at that time was also crucial. She built on the pioneering achievements of earlier writers like Sarah Jeannette Duncan and Ethel Wilson to shift the literary point of view from a dominatingly male one to the activity and significance of women in Canada.

Finally, there are changes in attitude to form that began to appear in Canadian fiction during the 1960s. Margaret Laurence as a creative writer was ahead of the fashionable critical trend of the 1960s which tended to based on the identification of themes. Her novel harps on an idea, the idea of survival. Thus, for many reasons, The Stone Angel stands as an influential book in the development of Canadian literature during the 1960s and the subsequent decades. The Stone Angel has survived because Hagar Shipley is a universal personification of the urge to survive. Both Hagar and Manawaka, though fictional, have survived in the memories of the readers as symbols of the Canadian spirit of survival.

Awards and Recognition

The Stone Angel is one of the selected books in the 2002 edition of Canada Reads. The novel has also been adapted into a movie called The Stone Angel by Kari Skogland in 2007. Ellen Burstyn as Hagar Shipley had won the Genie Award for best performance by an actress in a leading role in 2008.

References

• Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974
• “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel” in George Woodcock ed. A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1980.
• New, William H. ‘Introduction’ The Stone Angel. New Canadian Library 59. Toronto: McClelland&Stewart, 1968. iii-x.
• Margaret Lawrence: The Writer and Her Critics. Critical Views on Canadian Writers. Toronto: McGraw, 1977.
• Thomas, Clara. The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: McClelland &Stewart, 1975.
• Margaret Laurence. Canadian Wrtiers’ Series 3. Toronto: McClelland&Stewart, 1969.
• Woodcock, George. Introducing Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. Ontario: ECW Press, 1989.
• The World of Canadian Writing: Critiques and Recollections. Vancouver: Douglas Press, 1980.