UNIT 2 HAGER AND THE THEME OF SELF-

ALIENATION
Structure

Objectives
Introduction
Hagar Shipley - A Character Portrait
The Stone Angel as Vollendungsroman
Self-Alienation of the Elderly and The Stone Angel
Let Us Sum Up
Glossary
Questiofis
Suggested Readings

2.0 OBJECTIVES

The purpose of this unit is twofold: to introduce and discuss the enigmatic yet
hcinating character of Hagar, the protagonist in The Stone Angel and to establish
how this classic work, by making the ninety year old Hagar its heroine, has joined the
newly emerging literature that deals with the lives of the aging and the elderly.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

Clara Thomas in her pioneering work Margaret Laurence argues that the deepest well
of Laurence's creative vision is her interest in and understanding of human beings,
her respect for them and her compassion for their everlasting terrors. The Stone
Angel the first of ~aurence'sManawaka works has received more critical attention
than any of her other writings. Opinions are divided as to the success of the novel's
technique but critics are unanimous in their praise for Laurence's creation of the
novel's central character, Hagar Shipley, who reigns as queen of all characters,in
Canadian literature. According to Professor Read "Hagar ... finally transcends fiction
to the world of supra-reality inhabited by literature's great characters." He further
remarks "It is the creation of Hagar Shipley that clearly marks for me at least the
emergence of Margaret Laurence as a fine novelist. For the first busiiless of a serious
novelist is the creation of character. When any character slips, almost imperceptibly
perhaps, beyond the realm of obvious fiction into the works of reality then the summit
of the novelist's art has been achieved. Such is Hagar. She belongs in that great
company that begins with Chaucer's Monk and Pardoner, Prioress and Wife of Bath
and stretches through the works of the great, down to our present day. At times
vicious and vulgar, irascible and prideful, stubborn and independent, she is by no
means lovable; but she is capable of profound feelings and in the end demands
respect." (A Place to Stand On. p.42) Laurence agrees with Virginia Woolf s famous
assertion that the novel exists above all to express character because only there, can
the drama of life, and reality itself be seized. For Laurence the novel strives "tocatch,
vast and elusive life." To put down life or one's consciousness, fiction must dramatize
the intimate. vital, and contradictory working of the human mind. A great literap
work portrays theFhuman individual" who is inhcrcntly paradoxical amazingly strong
yet often weak--the source of both wonder and pity. It celebrates his or her
uniqueness by exploring his or her inner most being. This is what Margaret L.aurence
has done in The Stone Angel.
The Stone Angel

According to Michael Peterman, Hagar is characterised in terms of the prairie. She

lives as a struggling farmer's wife for some twenty four years, a rugged kind of
experience known by none of Laurence's other Manitoba born but town raised
protagonists. Having endured the deep rooted quarrel of her marriage and having
struggled t o raise her children often under difficult and impoverished conditions.
Hagar feels much put upon and threatened by others in The Stone Angel. "I've never
had a moment to myself, that's been my trouble," she thinks, but her real trouble.
which she struggles to understand and to put into words, is that "she is strangely cast."
Hers is a temperament tom between impulses of order and disorder, refinement and
toughness, propriety and desire and impulses justified in her own mind by her pride in
her family and the urgency of her own passions. The struggle of her last days is not
only a struggle to maintain independence and control: it is an almost "inadvertent
plumbing of the junkyard of her memory." In so doing she finds herself at last able to
measure the extent of her misjudgements of those closest to her and to break out, to
some small extent, of the prison of her nature.

Like her biblical namesake, Hagar wanders in a wilderness and like the stone angel in
the Manawaka cemetery, the prairie town where she grew up, "she was doubl!. blind,
not only stone but unendowed with even a pretense of sight." (p.3) At ninety. when
the book begins, she is grotesque with the fat ugliness of her old age. and her nature is
twisted and distorted by the self-willed tragedies of her life. She is a proud, bitter.
sick, and frightened old woman with a whip-lash tongue to cut and mock, even at
herself. Above all, she is "rampant with memory": and she is still: and desperately.
rampant with life. We share in her last short and bitter struggle to maintain her
independence; more important, we share in her halting. unwilling, rebellious journey
toward self-knowledge and, finally, peace.

The actual events of the novel take place over a short time s p a M w o . perhaps three
weeks. But in the sharp struggle of these last days, %gar recalls. defends. quest~ons.
and finally accepts and understands all the events and the feelings that have a l ~ a y s
been important to her. She moves from the present to the past and back again. w ~ t han
ease that is completely fnmiliar to those who have listened to and watched the old.
The anxiety, lest she conhses past and present and so prove herself to be as "queer"
and incapable as her own son and daughter-in-law think her to be, is familiar too. To
one caught up in her stn~ggle,her climaxing, temporar?; defeat-and-release in
irrationality, when she confuses past and present and speaks the healing. forgiving
words to her companion in flight (whom she mistakes for her dead son, John). IS quite
simply, unbearably moving.

Hagar lives with her son, Marvin, and his wife Doris, both of them well into their
sixties, in a house in Vancouver which she worked for and bought: a house which is
the sum of all her achievements. Its familiarity. its possession, and thc tokens it holds
from the past--the oak chair that belonged to her father, Jason Curie: the cut glass
decanter, her wedding gift from Bram Shipley are the only solid evidences of identit!
that Hagar now possesses: "If I am not somehow contained in them and in this housc.
something of all change caught and fixed here, eternal enough for my purposes. thun I
do not know where I may be found at all." (p.36)

But she is ill, stabbed with a pain under her ribs that grips her without warning:
grotesquely fat and uncertain on her feet; sometimes incontinent; unable to care for
herself and yet resentful of Doris and Marvin's fussy care and bumbling concern:
con~pletelyat the inercy of her physical debility and revolted at its manifestations: and
yet merciless toward those who try to help and capable of merciless honesty toward
her physical self "I give a sideways glance at the mirror, and see a puffed face
purpled with veins as though someone had scribed over the face with an indelible
pencil. The skin itself is the silverfish white of the creature one fancies must live
 under the sea where the sun never reaches. Below the eyes the shadows bloom as Hager and The
I though two soft black petals had been stuck there. The hair which should by rights be
black is yellowed white, like damask stored too long in a damp basement." @. 79)
Theme of Self-
Alienation
t
Hagar is repellent physically and just as ugly in her cruelty toward Doris, "That
Doris,. .. she heaves and strains like a calving cow." (p.3 1) and blind and mistaken in
her judgement of Marvin "There is a boy who never gets upset, not even at what
happened to his own brother. (p.65)" But she demands and compels sympathy, a
grudging admiration and the tension of partisanship which one always accords the
gallant fighter fated to lose. Only her body has aged: her spirit is indomitably young
and brave. "I never got used to a single thing," she says: and her unchanging dark
eyes symbolize the stubbornly vital, flaming spirit: "for when I look in my mirror and
beyond the changing shell that houses me, I see the eyes of Hagar Currie, the same
dark eyes as when I first began to remember and to notice myself.. . The eyes change
least of all." (p.38)

The sensual aspect of Hagar's character refuses to change. Hagar at ninety is still
delighted by her senses' gratification. In fact she is often greedy for them. She loves
colour: the back-garden yellow with forsythia; her lilac silk dress, "a real silk, mine.
spun by worms in China, feeding upon the mulberry leaves." (p.29) She grudingly
admires Doris' food and heartily enjoys it, whatever the cost to her tired digestive
system. "I eat well. My appetite is usually very good. I have always believed there
could not be much wrong with a person if they ate well. Doris has done a roast of
beef, and she gives me the inner slices, knowing I like it rare, the meat a hint,
brownish pink. She makes good gravy, to give her due. It's never lumpy, always
silken brown. For desert we have peach pie, and I have two helpings. Her crust's
little richer than I used to make, and not so flaky, but quite tasty nevertheless." (p.67)

Colours, sounds, smells come to her as vividly as they ever did, from her past and
from her present; and the old woman is still almost miraculously identifiable as the
same Hagar who had begun to enjoy sex very soon after her marriage, though she was
too proud to let Brarn, her husband, know it. When she had finally taken John and
left Manawaka and Bram, "I'd waken, sometimes, out of a half sleep and turn to him
and find he wasn't beside me, and then I'd be filled with such a bitter emptiness it
seemed the whole of night must be within me and not around or outside at all. There
were times when I'd have returned to him, just for that." (p. 160)

Clara Thomas rightly argues that it is an enormous affirmation of living and feeling
that Hagar makes, and to its energy one cannot help responding. Nor can one help a
response compounded of pity and wonder at her stubborn gallantry and at the pathos
and irony of a recurrent double-exposure image of Hagar-ld, ugly, chained. and
earthbound by her physical disintegration and young, vivid, strong, as untamed as a
hawk: "yet now I feel that if I were to walk carefully upto my room; approach the
mirror softly, take, it by surprise I would see there again that ~ z ~ awith
r , the shining
hair, the dark-maned colt off to the raising ring, the young ladies' academy in
Toronto." (p.42)

Hagar lives in battle, pitted against everyone who comes close to her and. tragically.
she betrays them all-her father, her brothers, her husband and her sons, even John,
the younger one, whom she loves and would have helped. But by that time her pattern
is set*and she does not know the way. The pride that destroys her relations with
others is established in the first paragraph of the novel as her father's error also. Like
her father's enormous will, Hagar's too is directed towards mean objects, towards
"getting a h e a d and being a name and a force in the microcosmic. claustrophobic
world of Manawaka.

She takes and treasures the ancient battle-cry of the Currie clan. "Gainsay who Dare."
but ironically, her "daring" is the destructive defiance of her marriage to Braln
Shipley, against her father, against the town which she pretends to despise, and very
The Stone Angel shortly against Bram himself. She thinks her son. John 1s hen to the old splrlt of the
battle-cry, but she betrays h ~ mIn the name of "common-sense-' and "gett~ngahead "

So John dies, dar~ngall right, as does Arlene whom he loves. but In a stupld.
pointless, drunken dare-in hopeless rebell~onagalnst hostlle circumstances nhrch
Hagar has partially contrived

William New describes Hagar as an essentially tragic figure, and her moment of truth
as the deepest point of her tragedy: "Joy is for the Sarhhs of the world: but she is
Hagar. Her identity will not allow it." (Infrodt.ictiony . 1 ~Patricia
) Morle does not
endorse this view of Hagar. According to her this interpretation of the biblical
archetype slights the tension in Hagar's character. It also.disregards the novel's
tragicomic tone and most important, Hagar's movement tonards freedom in the
closing chapters. "Tragic narrative ends in the isolation of the protagonist, while
comedy depicts the social integration of the individual. Integration includes an
advance in self-knowledge." (Margaret Laurence: The Long Jotirney Hor?ie)

The closing chapters chronicle Hagar's gradual reconciliation with her world and
herself. At Shadow Point, where Murray Lees's story of losing his infant son in a fire
releases her memories of John's death, Hagar speaks to Murray the apolog!. she owes
to her son. Sensing her confusion, Murray plays John's role just as Hagar's brother
Matt had taken on their mother's role when Dan died. In this replaying of the past.
Hagar is permitted to tell JohnIMurray that his lover Arlene is. after all. welcome in
their house. Hagar's descent into her shadow self. a kind of rites de passage, ends
with repentence, confession, and peace: "I could even beg God's pardon this
moment, for thinking ill of Him sometime or other." (p.248) In Laurence's words one
can almost equate inner freedom with growth. While Hagar fails to reach this inner
freedom she is never a pathetic victim. Although she is too old and obdurate to
change, she does come to understand herself - her pride, her fear, loneliness and her
lack of freedom. At the end she recalls doing only two 'Truly free'' acts, ~vhichshe
calls a Joke and a Lie. , Clearly, Hagar refers to fetching the bedpan for the girl in her
hospital room; and blessing Marvin, assuring him that he has been a better son than
John and stands first in her affection. These two acts are altruistic: directed outlvards
in the effort to comfort another person.

Hagar's free acts are actually far more numerous. They include many small gestures
in the closing chapters. Hagar gives her saphire ring to her grand-daughter Tina. She
forgives Murray for betraying her hiding place in the cannery. She thanks the
clergyman, despised earlier, for singing in the hospital and tells Doris that she has
done her good. This is not to say that Hagar's pride is banished. She calls herself
unregenerate: "the same touchiness rises within me at the slighest thing." (y.293)

Towards the end of the novel Hagar admits that she aiways wanted "simply to
rejoice" (p.292) But she never could do that because "pride was my wilderness, and
the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never
free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all
I touch. Oh my two, my dead. Dead by your own hands or by mine? Nothin'g can
take away those years." (p.292) The Stone Angel does not end in this revelation
though it is the tragic climax for Hagar, the moment of truth for her and for the reader.
the moment of a cathartic release. There is, in the short time left hefore her ston.
ends, time and opportunity for her to take the steps towards restitution which she
needs and to accept the evidence of love that she has always wanted. Mawin cannot
rise above the hackneyed common place in speech, but Hagar, who always despised
his inarticulateness as she hated his father's vulgarity of language, can now see
through the words to the spirit 'and is, at last, able to rejoice.

A pause, and then Marvin rcaplies.

"She's a holy terror," he says.
Listening, I feel it is more than I could now reasonably have expected out of
life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness. @. 305)
r
! A strongly-marked sacramental pattern moves with benign irony through the novel. Hager and The
The spirit of the religion which m g a r had known only in an emptiness of form takes Theme of Sdf-
her through repentance and confession, from the prison of self to the moment of Alienation
knowledge pointing towards freedom, and on to the simple but single acts of
restitution which do give her a sense of freedom. And the pattern culminates as
Hagar does lose her life to find it, in the splendid, strongly-marked symbols of the
final lines-a fighting, dying, stubborn old woman, a glass of water, the cup of life,
the grace of God: "I wrest from her the glass, full of water to be had for the taking. I
hold it in my own hands. There There And then.. ." (p.308)

Life does not often offer us such a rounded completeness of pattern, though life does
1 most strangely answer the demands of the will. Fortunately, there is art, opening up
glimpses of the whole, burning away fear and pity to make places for acceptance,
charity and the bower to go on. JI
2
.

!
Symbolically, Hagar is, of course, a wanderer in the wilderness through her own
u~illfullness.Like the biblical Hagar, the second wife of Bram Shipley, resents and
despises the memory of the first one just as the biblical Hagar resents Sarah,
Abraham's wife. Bram Shipley, with his failure farm, is no patriarch-though sadly
and ironically, he wishes to be one and hopes their first child will be a boy: "It would
be somebody to leave the place to," he said. "I saw him with amazement that he
wanted his dynasty no less than my father had." (p.101) Hagar flees Bram and the
farm and lives self-exiled with her son John.

Hagar is a tragic figure finally redeemed. But more than that she is real, with an
energy of presence that does burst the frame it is held in, to communicate its power,
its pathos and its vitality directly, like a blow or a sh&p cry.' She is also, as her story
begins, grotesque, as the stone angel in the Manawaka cemetery, erected' from pride
and not from love. Hagar's is a grotesquerie within the real, not beyond its bounds in
fairy-tale. Hers is a distortion of normality, the form monstrous without its
appropriate spirit; only with hard-won humility does she moderate from enormity to
humanity. Patricia Morley rightly argues that, "Seeking freedom, Hagar forges more
chains, seeking community she builds psychic walls. Her final self-knowledge
accompanies the breaking of these bonds, as Hagar is released into love, death and the
new life suggested by images of rebirth and transformation". (Margaret Laurence:
The Long Journey Home)

George Eliot spoke of the process of writing a novel as a movement towards

conceiving "with that directness which is no longer reflection but feeling-an idea
wrought back to the directness of sefise." In her conception of Hagar and in her telling
of Hagar's story, Margaret Laurence has done just that-and her subject required the
particular directness which Laurence commands best. Hagar exploited a talent that
rushed to her creation with the flamboyant vigour and perception and completely
answered the requirements of Hagar's total reality.

George Woodcock calls Laurence a "Canadian equivalent to Tolstoy." Both writers,

Woodcock argues, have a panoramic sense of space and history, an ability to preserve
lost times and worlds so that outsiders can imaginatively apprehend them. He argues:
". . . their characters are as impressive as their settings, and their best revelations are
achieved not.. . by explicit statements of historic themes, but rather by the vivid,
concrete yet symbolic presentation of crucial points of instinct in individ~~al lives,
such as... the moment in Margaret Laurence's The S~oneAngel when the despised
minister, Mr.Troy, sings the first verse of the Doxology to Hagar Shipley during her
last.days in hospital.. . " (A Place to Stand On)

.
WOOdcock
I , , concludes that Hagar's recognition of her need to rejoice and her
~fihrbltln~ are intensely personal, yet at the same time one can generalize her
situation into a description of the state of mind of a whole generation of English
The Stone Angel speaking Canadians. To quote Patricia Morley again: "Hagar Shipley is the first in a
series of memorable women. In five closely connected works of fiction Laurence
presents universal concerns in terms of Canadian experience over four generations.
She allows us to see into the hearts of her individual characters, their society. and
ourselves." (A Place to Stand On)

To provide us an opportunity to.peep into the psychic tumult of her protagonist

Margaret Laurence opts for the first person narrative. It can be a limiting device in
the hands of a lesser artist but Laurence uses it to the hilt as it provides her an
opportunity to reveal to the reader more of Hagar than she knew herself. as her
judgements about everything are so plainly and strongly biased. For the same
purpose the flash-back method is employed. Laurence belieyeed that the flash-back
method suited an elderly protagonist who lives largely in the past. The chronological
structuring of Hagar's memories provides clarity and unity to the novel and an
immediacy to the past. A more pressing reason for depending on Hagar's voice is its
poetic quality. Laurence admits "I finally came to the conclusion that even people
who are relatively inarticulate, in their relationships with other people, are perfectly
capable within themselves of perceiving the world in more poetic terms. So 1 let her
have her way." ("Gadgetry or Growing...p.6)

2.3 THE STONE ANGEL AS VOLLENDUNGSROMAN

Vollendungsrornan as defined by Constance Rooke is the novel of "completion" or

"wlnding up." The Stone Angel is regarded as the central or prototyp~calexample of
the genre, for a number of reasons. One of the most distinguishing aspects of
"Vollendungsroman, in The Stone Angel is the kind of alliance between the elderl!
character and the author--as language itself becomes the agent of affirmation." says
Rooke. (Crossing the River. p. 3 )

A special intensity (resulting from the proximity to darkness) characterizes the

Vollendungsroman. The writer's imagination is challenged by the prospect of the
character's demise, and by the need to "capture" a life before it vanishes. Behind this.
and quite apart from the question of the author's own age, is undoubtedly the spectre
of the writer's own aging and prospective death. Writing is always an act directed
against death; it may become that more specifically and more urgently when the
writer's subject is old age. Thus, we feel strongly the need that Laurence feels to let
her elderly protagonist speak "before [her] mouth is stopped with dark".

The act of speech operates in the Vollendungsroman in several ways. Broadly or

metaphorically speaking it is all of the writing performed on the protagonist's behalf
by the novelist; more literally, it includes the inner (silent) discourse of the
protagonist; finally, of course, it is all speech performed out loud by the elderly
protagonist. Speech of this most literal kind may be divided further. Often there is
something that must be said to other characters in order to free them for their own
lives; this is illustrated by Hager's statement to Marvin that he has been "good to
[her], always. A better son than John". @. 304) And it is typical of the
Vollendungsroman that the truth of this crucial speech is gone. An imprecise
formulatiorr--even a lie, though Hagar speaks more truly than she knows-is not only
preferable to silence, but all that can be hoped for. If Hagar fails "to speak the heart's
truth", she fails in part because we all necessarily fail-and because language fails
always. Still it is what we have. Through language, we communicate some portion or
version of "the heart's t r u t h and so become visible, assuming a more or less reliable
shape in one another's eyes--so that Marvin, in his turn, can remark to the nurse that
his mother is "a holy terror", @. 304) and Hagar can feel this accolade as "more than
[she] could reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger
and such tenderness." @. 304) However imperfectly, Hagar and Marvin connect in
time through language and such moments have a heightened importance in thc Hager and The
Vollendungsroman, where time is running out. Theme of Self-
Alienation
It is also characteristic of the Vollendungsroman that t5e elderly protagonist is
tormented by the memory of characters who have died before some vital message
could be delivered or received. Thus, Hagar wants Bram to know she loved him and
wants John to know that she regrets the plot to separate him from Arlene. And it is
too late. But The Stone Angel, like other Vollendungsromans, supplies amelioration
through delayed and displaced speech, as figures like Murray Lees appear to take the
words that Hagar needs to give. None of this can change the damagc she has done to
others in the past; "Nothing can take away those years", as Hagar knows h l l well,
unleashing the savage irony that she hears in the minister's words of comfort. Yet
language can begin to repair the damage Hagar has done to hersclf. Speech acts,
exchanged with surrogate figures, help her to see what might have been and what she
is capable of being even now. They collapse time, even as they enforce its tragic
necessity, and reveal to Hagar her continuing potential for connectedness in the
human family. They point both to the past in which she might have spoken thus, and
to the present in which she does.

Hagar thinks that she is "unchangeable, unregenerate. I go on speaking in the same

way, always"; (p.293) thus her problem with speech is as much with what she says as
what she fails to say, and her problem is that in both ways she separates herself from
others. Following this self-accusation, however, Hagar withdraws her dismissive
remark about the minister- "We didn't have a single solitary thing to say to one
another"- and admits to Doris that "He sang for me, and it did me good." (p.293)
Interestingly, the hymn that Hagar had requested of Mr.Troy is the one "that starts out
all people that on earth do dwell", (p.291) thus the "single solitary" state of alienation
and failed speech is pierced by chords addressing all. The song here-as often in the
Vollendungsroman-seems to bridge the gap between silence and speech, bringing
into consciousness the individual's yearning for community. It propels Hagar into the
kind of recognition which occurs most frequently for the elderly protagonist, a need to
shake off the "chains within" and welcome joy.

Words that arc delivered to surviving characters, messages that are routed to the dead
through intermediaries (so that the elderly character may be delivered from the burden
of silence or mistaken speech), talk in which the aged protagonist may exercise a freer
version of the self---these are some of the speech acts that point toward affirmation in
the Vollendungsroman. Always, they are imperfect or imprecise. But that is
necessarily the case, since the Vollendungsroman negotiates between speech and
silence, between the lived and unlived life since desire is never satisfied. What seems
to matter is that it be expressed.

Hagar's life has been more mistaken than most--her story mope unspoken and
misspokerebut the distance she feels between what her life has been and what it
would have been is entirely typical of the Vollendungsroman. Constance Rooke has
coined this German neologism for the novel of old age, of "completion" or "winding
up," with a certain measure of irony, since a characteristic of these texts is the
recognition that human projects are never completed. Time runs out, as pages do.
Only rarely does such a text conclude with a ringing endorsement of what the
developmental psychologist Erik Erikson refers to as the old person's "one and only
life." The Stone Angel, in which Hagar is struggling desperately to change and grow,
in which categorically she rehses to gloss over her mistakes and depdvation, is a
typical case. Art here reflects and seeks to compensate for the incompletion of a
human life.

Simone de Beauvoir, however, in The Comzng ofAge, takes a very different view of
the uses of the elderly in fiction: "If an old man is dealt with in his subjective aspect
he is not a good hero for a novel; he is finished, set, with no hope, no development to
bc looked for . . . Nothing that can happen to him is of any importance." (Essays in
l'he Bone Angel honour ofMargaret Lnurence. p.210) Novels like The Stone Angel prove her wrong.
But what is particularly striking in this statement is the notion that elderly
protagonists cannot engage our interest if "dealt with in [their] subjective aspect..'
For this is exactly the "aspect" of old age that contemporary fiction chooses to reveal.
When the closed subject becomes an open book, when the mask of stereotypical old
age is tom away and the icon stirs, when the elderly character in fiction is allowed to
reveal herself as subject, we discover that indeed there is "development to be looked
for." In the case of The Stone Angel, that development is "looked for'' by all-author.
character, and reader.

The Stone Angel gives us the elderly protagonist from the inside. A cantankerous old
women, Hagar' Shipley is an obstacle and a problem for her family; but we take her
side to a remarkable degree, because we are given access to it. We see what Hagar
says and does and the effect she has on others-and much of that we .wouldjudge
harshly; but because Hagar is allowed to tell her own story, because we enter her
consciousness and live there, we can respond to her more fairly. We learn to value
her rich sensuality and the free play of her wit; we see the other side of the coin, the
capacity for joy, all the positive qualities that have been so tragically denied in
Hagar's presentation of self to the world. We come to understand as well the social,
familial, patriarchal, and puritanical- which have led her to this distortion. And that
very pride which we deplore in its outer workings, as well as for Hagar's sake, is
revealed to us as a means of survival.

Constance Rooke argues that the subject of old age is a powefil one for other reasons
too. The invisibility or marginalization of old people, their reduction to stereotype, I

their occupation of a zone behind the mask-all of this provide special impetus to one
of the writer's most crucial drives, which is to see other human beings clearly. The
indignities suffered by the e l d e r l y k their bodies betray them, as memo3 fails. as
social power is stripped away and condescension mounts- may also stimulate the
writer's need to proffer dignity through art. Any reader of The Stone ~ n ~will e l
recall how Laurence moves us inexorably from a puerile assumption of the "we''-
"Well, how are,wetoday? he inquires" (p.277)- to a truer sense of the tribulations of
old people.

Questions such as these relate to the elderly person's claimupon a writer's empathy
or compassion. But the elderly character is also attractive for a number of more
'technical' literary reasons. To begin with, she makes available to the writer nearly
the whole span of a life history-as opposed to just that truncated, glibly predictive
bit before the heroine decides whom to marry. She picks up the human story at a
pivotal and richly dramatic point, when the evaluation of life seems most urgent, and
when the old dramatic question of what comes next is most especially poignant. She
may also function for the writer as a touchstone (and victim or champion) of social
attitudes that have shaped our past and that operate still, even in a climate of radical
revision. All of this, Hagar clearly does.

The Stone Angel is a prototypical example of the Vollendungsroman also in its

extensive use of the most characteristic imagery of old age. Consider, for instance,
the image of the house with which Laurence plays so elaborately,in using
"tonehouse"as Aunt Doll's surname (to forecast Hagar's tenure as housekeeper in
Mr.Qatley's Stone House) and in having Marvin sell housepaint ( to imply an interest
in appearances, which Hagar forswears when she claims the weather beaten house at
Shadow Point as her own). Laurence begins her manipulation of this image wlth the
old woman's characteristic fear of dispossession. The house is then developed as an
image of the self, the societal construct and the body. What Hagar must do in
preparation for her death is what Saul Bellow's elderly heroine in "Leaving the
Yellow House" and countless others must do. She must wean herself from that
cocoon, that entrenched idea of the self, and "admit" the forces of nature.
Understandably, she is afraid. Her fear of intruders in the house is the fear of death
that Laurence explores in many strands of the novel's imagery.
Other images that are typical of the Vollendungsroman include the sea (which is Hager and The
opposed to the house, as the site of dissolution and rebirth) and the transitional Theme of Self-
identification of Hagar as a gypsy (who makes her home in nature). Angels as figures Alienation
poised between two worlds, as messengers and mediators--are also surprisingly
common. Another is the mirror, which Laurence uses (again typically) in two
opposing ways. On the one hand, she holds the mirror up to a literal and appalling
truth-as Hagar sees in it "a puffed face purpled with veins as though someone had
scribbled over the skin with an indelible pencil" (p.79-d on the other hand, she
permits Hagar to "feel that if [she] were to walk carefully up to [her] room, approach
the mirror softly, take it by surprise [she] would see there again that Hagar with the
shining hair.. . " (p.42) In these examples (and others I might have chosen), the power
of the image is unleashed by a sense of rich imagery particularly-as if the image had
been minted just for Hagar--and by a sense of universality.

Perhaps the most common feature of the Vollendungsroman is the life review in
which narrative time is divided between past and present. The past-in which the
characteristic matter of the Bildungsroman is recapitualated-typically approached
and controlled through the operation of the elderly protogonist's memory. The
present "mirrors" the past in a number of complex ways, as the protagonist's most
basic identity themes are both reasserted and deconstructed in the final phase of life.
Very o f t e e a s happens at the point of John's death-the narrative of the past will
break off sharply, leaving a gap between that period and the narrative present. At
such junctures the possibilities of life appear to close down, the seal of failure is
imprinted, and a desirable version of the self seems unattainable. The elderly
protagonist will often repress this juncture at which vitality was lost; its eventual
approach, however will be another kind of turning point a courageous breaking of the
seal, releasing her into a new sense of possibility.

If the character's old age is purely a framing d e v i c e i f little or no attention is paid to

development in the present or to the experience of being old-then the novel is not by
Rooke's definition a Vollendungsroman. There are also a number of contemporary
novels that focus primarily on the present time of elderly protagonists. Thus, a
Vollendungsroman like Muriel Spark's Memento Mori or Paul Scott's Stay~ngOn
will contain elements of the life review without being structured by the process in the
way what The Stone Angel clearly is. Generally however, a considerable portion of
the narrative time is spent in the past. In this respect as in many others, The Stone
Angel is a kind of template for the genre.

The life review is more than a structural device. It has philosophical implications that
take us to the heart of the Vollendungsroman and the lives of elderly people. In 1963
one year prior to the appearance of Ilhe Stone Angel, Robert N . Butler pqblished an
essay called "The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged," in
wh~chhe posited "the universal occurrence in older people of an inner experience or
mental process of reviewing one's life." He was arguing against the custom
prevailing at the time, which was "to identify reminiscence in the aged with
psychological dysfunction." Butler suggests that "the life review Janus-like, involves
death as well as looking back" and that "potentially [it] proceeds towards personality
reorganization. Thus, the life review is not synonymous with, but includes
reminiscence." It includes also, as The Stone Angel does, a vital concern with the
possibility of change.

Many of Butler's insights and clinical observations are relevant to the case of Hagar.
He remarks for instance, that "imagery of past events and symbols of death seem
frequent in waking life as in the dreams suggesting that the life review is a highly
visual process." Inherently, then, the life review is a highly literary process as well;
and Butler may be cited as supplying evidence for the interpenetration of life and art
that helps to characterize the Vollendungsroman. The verisimilitude of Hagar's
"poetic" voice, as register of visually proliferating images--birds and eggs, for
The lrYone Angel example, images that we associate with death and captivity and rebirt&is vindicated
by Butler's work.

Butler's essay is also concerned with the question of therapeutic value in the process
of the life review. He rejects the position of certain pyschotherapists that old people
should not be encouraged to engage in life review, since they will only be devastated
by their failures and their incapacity to repair them. He argues instead for the
inherent value of "truth and for the possibility of change at any point in the life
cycle; he believes in the inevitability of the life review. Yet Butler acknowledges the
risk of three kinds of people: "those who always tended to avoid the present and put
great emphasis on the future... those who have consciously exercised the human
capacity to injure others [and those who are] characterologica~lyarrogant and
prideful". Although harsh and incomplete this might serve as a thumbnail sketch of
Hagar Shipley. It sounds logical to agree with Constance Rooke's final statement that
life review has benefitted Hagar. She says, "Margaret Laurence, however would not
be dissuaded any more than Hagar is herself. At risk in all these ways, Hagar profits
nonetheless (and we profit) from her life review. She proceeds towards personality
reorganisation." (Essays in honour ofMargaret Laurence. p. 39)

2.4 SELF-ALIENATION OF THE ELDERLY AND THE

STONE ANGEL

The portrayal of elderly characters as self-alineated is one of the major concerns for
many modem writers. Rosalie Murphy Baun has examined Margaret Laurence's
fictional protrayal of women in A Jest of God, The Stone Angel, A Bird m the H O Z I S ~
and argues that the women's pattems of behaviour in old age are simply variations of
a neurotic pattern of self-alienation. What Marcia Westkott identifies as a "core
dependent character" which is gender-neutral in our culture. begins In childhood. and
can continue indefinitely in a parent-child-parent cycle.

Karon Homey a Third Force psychologist in her famous work Our Inner (?onflicr.s
focuses largely upon three basic pattems of neurotic behaviour which the "core
dependent 'character" can take--the complaint or dependent, the aggressive or
domineering, and the detached. All three forms are found in Laurence's fiction. For
example, Mrs.Cameron, Rachel's mother in A Jest of God, is a good example of an
elderly woman in whom complaint ("moving toward") tendencies dominate. Such a
person frequently controls others through his or her need of them; he may take the
stance that "You must love me, protect me, forgive me, not desert me, because 1 am
so weak and helpless." Hagar Shipley, Marvin's mother in The Stone Angel, offers a
good example of the aggressive type ("moving against"), who denies his or her softer
feelings, abhors helplessness, and seeks independence or mastery. Hagar is a superb
example of two varieties of the type which Homey identifies as the perfectionist and
the arrogant-vindictive and is Laurence's supreme achievement in characterization.
Mrs.Macleod, Ewen's mother Vanessa's grandmother in A Bird in the House. offers
an excellent example of the detached person ("moving away from"). Such a person
feels a strong need for superiority and usually looks at those around him with
condescension. He or she frequently suppresses emotion and realizes hislher need for
superiority in a world essentially of isolation.

Laurence's portrayal of these three elderly women and their families offers a bleak
view of human potential and, more especially, of the moth,er-childrelationship.
Although Homey indicates quite clearly that an individual can become neurotic
because of the neurotic elements of his or her society and culture-for example. the
contradictions between competition and brotherly love or between "conspicuous
consumption" and "the reality of limited economic resources," she also feels that
appropriate parenting (that is parenting which successfully struggles with the neurotic
culture) could make a difference. In Laurence's novels, it is obvious that the neurotic
character in the early childhoods of Mrs.Cameron, Grandmother Connor, and Hagar Hager and The
Shipley has made it impossible for them to offer such parenting. Theme of Self-
Alienation
According to Homey, the greatest problem in character development occurs when a
child has a "neurotic parent", one for example whose insecurity and vulnerability to
the ideals and stresses of a competitive society create within the family itself the very
conditions of the society and culture. Most destructive of all is the pattern of treating
a child as a narcissistic extension of the parent's idealized self, a situation in which
the child is made to feel, usually covertly, that his "right to existence lies solely in
living up to the parents expectations, measuring up to their ambitions for him,
enhancing their prestige, [or] giving them blind devotion." (SelfAnalysis. p.44)

By examining Hagar Shipley in the light of Karen Homey's work on neurosis, an

attempt is made to focus on the neurotic manner in which she interacts, actually
conflicts. overtly or covertly with her son, Marvin with whom she is living. It is
important, however, to make clear from the beginning that in no way does Homey
suggest that conflict in and of itself, whether it is clashes between ourselves and
others or within ourselves, is neurotic. Rather, conflict occurs within and between all
of us, the nonneurotic and the neurotic; within the neurotic personality, however, the
conflict is distinctive and self-destructive.

The symptoms of an impoverished personality appear with great clarity in the

children of Laurence's elderly heroines. However, the pretenses which Homey
emphasizes are necessary for the neurotic personality---the pretense of love, the
pretense of goodness, the pretense of interest and knowledge, the pretense of honesty
and fairness, and the pretense of suffering--are most vivid in Laurence's elderly
women.

At the opening of The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley is about ninety, an outrageous,
difficult woman being cared for by her son Marvin and daughter-in-law, Doris. She
has difficulty remembering what happens from one minute to the next and sometimes
confuses events of the past with those of the present; she cries easily, screeches at her
daughter-in-law with little or no cause, and is churlish or combative much of the
time. In addition, she wets the bed and insists upon smoking in bed even though she
frequently falls asleep with a burning cigarette; her arthritis makes her clumsy; and
she suffers pain under her ribs, which is later diagnosed as cancer. At the time that
she is experiencing these humilations of old-age and inflicting them, without
gratitude, upon her son and daughter-in-law she is "rampant with memory" that is, she
relives, through memory, her entire life. In so doing, she recalls her great pride and
her fear of emotion. She reviews the many times she has shown strength and control
over others, the times she has refused to allow her emotions to show, and the times
she has allowed "proper" appearances rather than genuineness or caring to rule her
life. In her last days she realizes how pride has been her "wilderness" and fear her
"demon". She has lost the two men she loved most in life through her pride: never
did she allow her husband, Bram, to see the love and sexual attraction she felt for him,
thereby contributing to his alcholism and death; never did she allow her son John to
live his own life until her interference actually led to his death. Hagar realizes in her
last hours that she & never really lived, never simply rejoiced. Her life has been all
pride and pretense, including many of the pretenses discussed by Homey.

Hagar's son Marvin, with his wife, has devoted the last seventeen years of his life
caririg for his elderly mother, He has served her in every way he could, cringing from
the bickering and recriminations between her and his wife, feeling guilty about the
great burden that his wife has to bear from both the physical needs and unkind attitude
of his, mother. At ond point, as he realizes that his wife simply cannot continue to lift
his mother when she falls, he is able for a short time to consider placing his mother in
a home for the aged; but his "Hopeful desperation" that she will like the place
succumbs quickly to his mother's rehsal. As a child, Marvin had also tried to serve
his mother well, doing his chores ably and hanging around her, fruitlessly hoping for
The Stone Angel words of praise or affection. But he has never been important to his mother. Only in
her last hours, when Hagar comes to realize something of the emotional desert her life
has been, does she see Marvin as a loving, caring, responsible child begging for a
blessing from a parent who has always ignored him. With this insight, Hagar blesses
him, saying, "you have been good to me, always" b . 3 0 4 ) and she deliberately and
caringly lies to him by adding that he has been "a better son than John", her favourite
son. Thus, Hagar l i b from Marvin his sense of weakness and worthlessness, and he
believes her. Who would tell a lie on her deathbed? A son whose impoverished
personality with its neurotic dependency has struggled responsibly throughout a
lifetime of hard work and little joy, Marvin is one of the luckier children in Laurence:
he has had limited joy with his wife, Doris, and their children, Tina and Steven, and
he receives hls mother's blessing and release when she is ninety and he is in his
sixties.

Examining Karen Homey's three basic patterns of neurotic behaviour with reference
to the parent-child relationships created by Laurence in three of her works of fiction,
is especially appropriate because of the very nature of neurotic trends. As Homey
points, out, the neurotic is highly dependent upon other people, whatever form his
neurosis may have assumed. He depends upon people for moving toward, moving
against, 'or moving away from. One could almost say that the parent-child
relationship offers a particularly revealing (if unfortunate) labaratory for examining
the variations of neurotic behaviour since the parent-child relationship, by definition,
involves two people bound together by the physical and emotional needs of the
younger. Laurence's fiction is also especially appropriate for examining such
neurotic patterns because Laurence, in the words of John Moss, "celebrates life while
lamenting the limitations placed upon it by personality."(The Canadzan Novel)
Laurence's fiction indicates qu'ite clearly that the neurotic bonds established in
childhood remain throughout life, even in a case like Marvin, who left home at
seventeen, when Hagar was in her early forties, and lived away from her for thirty
years. ~bwever,The Stone Angel also suggests that when the mother-figure has a
strong personality like that of Hagar Shipley, the child's personality appears even
more impoverished than that of the parent; and the child is certainly a less interesting
fictional character than the parent. Hagar's discovery at the end that life's purpose is
to rejoice-is ultimately Homey's definition of the goal of therapy--to create
"wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put
the whole of oneself into one's feelings, one's work, one's beliefs". (Our Inner
Conjlzcts p.242) But since it is the neurotic character-especially the grand dame of
them all, Hagar-who holds the attention of readers, we cannot help being gratehl for
such neuroses, at least in fiction if not in life.

2.5 LET US SUM UP

This unit has taken up the discussion of three different yet interconnected aipects of
The Stone Angel. The first part has studied in detail the complex but memorable
personality of the protagonist Hagar Shipley. While highlighqg the peculiar and
distinguishing qualities of Hagar's character an effort has been made to establish how
her ancestry and upbringing plays a vital role in makifig her extremely proud and a
staunch believer in keeping up appearances. This belief has ruined her Chances of
enjoying freedom and joy within the framework of familial relationships even.
Growth and self-knowledge are the two important aims of all major characters in
Laurence's fictiod Hagar also, during her last days in the hospital, is blessed with the
knowledge of her limitations and the strengths of others with whom she has
interacted. She musters up the courage to view them as they are and admits that her
own temperament has been her undoing.

Since Hagar Shipley is an old woman of ninety and she is the protagonist of the novel,
the novel is discussed as a typical example of Vollendungsroma - a novel of
 'completion' or 'winding up'. Another related aspect of the novel - the theme of Hager and The
self-alienation of the elderly has also been taken up for discussion. Theme of Setf-
Alienation

2.6 GLOSSARY

Irascible: susceptible to ire or anger, imtable

I Incontinent: not restraining natural discharges or evacuations.

I Restitution: restoration
b
Amelioration: ' to make better

Protypical: an original type or model

Truncated: short, maimed

1

Recapitulate: to go through the stages of one's life history

Template: a mould shaped to the required outline from which workmen

execute moulding.

Proliferating: to grow by multiplication of parts

Vindicated: justified

Therapeutic: healing, curative

2.7 QUESTIONS

1 Establish how pride has been the undoing of Hagar Shipley.

2. The Stone Angel is Hagar Shipley's progress towards inner freedom. Discuss.
3. What are the distinguishing features of Vollendngsroman? Enumerate them
with special reference to The Stone Angel.
4. Which type of neurotic personality does Hagar represent? Can you blame her
ancestry and upbringing for it? Give reasons.

2.8 SUGGESTED READINGS

Homey, Karen. SelfAnalysis. New York: W.W.Norton, 1942.

-----Homey, Karen. Our Inner Conflicts. New York. W.W.Norton 1945.

Laurence, Margaret. "Gadgetry or Growing? Form and Voice in the Novel," Lecture
at the University of Toronto, Fall, 1969.

Morley, Patricia:Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home. McGill-Queen's

University Press, Montreal and Kingston 1991.

Moss, John, ed. The Canadian Novel: Here and Now. Toronto: NCP, 1983.
New, William. Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel: Introduction.'New Toronto.
1968.

Read, S.E. 'The Maze of Life: The Works of Margaret Laurence" in A Place to Stand
On. ed. George Woodcode. (Edmonton: Newest Press, 1983).

Rooke, Constance. ''Hagar's Old Age: The Stone Angel as VoHendungsroman" in

Crossing the River: Essays in honour ofMargaret Laurence. Winnipeg:
Turnstone Press, 1988.

Thomas, Clara. Margaret Laurence. McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1969
I
Woodcock, George, ed. A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret
Laurence. Edmonton: Newest P, 1983.