The Stone Angle - Margaret Laurence (a Canadian Writer)

 

The Stone Angel - Introduction

The Stone Angel is Hager Shipley’s personal account of the last few days of her life. The novel’s structure follows her imagination, it’s a full composition of her flashbacks occurring in a progressive chronological pattern and alternating with the present time.

In the beginning of the novel, Hagar is blind, like the statue of the stone angel in the manawaka cemetery. Now, Hager lost her mother when she was born and since then the statue of the stone angel has been preventing the heritage in Manawaka, Manitoba. All her life Hager has been struggling in hiding her emotions from the world, she thinks that’s for someone weak. It’s a constant display of pride which drags her towards self-alienation, which is also one of the themes in the novel.

Self sufficient isolation

Hager didn’t had a matriarchal influence over her, rather she was under her father’s patriarchal influence, and in those times being materialistic and patriarchal went hand in hand with each other. She inherited those strict and stubborn traits from Jason Currie, being authoritarian, afraid to show love, being irritated most of the times, possessing notions of bigotry, having ambition, industriousness, being dutiful etcetra. Hager had not been able to express or accept love in her life. Her relationship with men in her life is extremely disturbing. Part of her goal in her life is to live with some show of dignity and values until she dies. She has always put a hook on people, manipulated them as per her needs, in a way she is never free herself.

The pride, financial success and religious teachings:

The novel showcases the elements of pride in financial success, the idea of getting ahead in life and its inextricable inter-linkages with the religious upbringing in Manawaka. The small group of people in a vast land contributes as one of the factor in maintaining a town’s own personality.

Jason Currie repeatedly made his sons Matt and Dan aware of his growth, him starting off with a bean and pulling himself up by his bootstraps to earn the wealth, dignity that he earned today and which will be inherited by his children in future.

These grim articles of faith of nineteenth and early twentieth century, still has some residue left in crude but powerful form. The old, passionately-argued, Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and the elect and the man with his own labor who has made a place in this world were all succeeded in God’s term.

Hagar Shipley- A Character Liquidation

Hager Currie, later Shipley is a ninety year old character in a new emerging literature that deals with aging and elderly. One can safely assume that majority of her personality is shaped that has dribbled down from her father, Jason Currie. Hagar is the product of the prairie. She loves the old Scottish battle cry, “Gainsay who Dare.” Hagar Shipley is stubbornly concentrated in preserving her pride and dignity, which seemingly turns and portrays her cold and aloof. This behavior of hers has made her irascible almost all the time. Her relationship with people close to her remains always in conflict.

Hagar and her marriage with Bram Shipley

Hagar was attracted to Bram Shipley for his ruggedness. But in later years of life, her limitations and confinements in showing her love towards her husband and even rejoicing in his love, strained the relationship.

Hagar and her two sons:

Hagar has always preferred her younger son John over her elder one Marvin. Though, when she is gripped by the confines of old age, suffering from gastrointestinal and arthritic issues, Marvin and his wife takes care of her. Hagar had always thought that John will take over the inheritance of her legacy, like her father preferred her over his two sons, in Hagar’s definition, her two brothers Matt and Dan are two uninspiring boys. But, Hagar drowned in pride, couldn’t accept and resist Arlene the love of her son John, she is jealous to see confident Arlene, who is capable of being strong yet able to rejoice the sweetness of love from John. John dies in a foolish, drunken rebellious act, when he couldn’t get Arlene, for which Hagar is majorly responsible Hagar is living with her oldest son Marvin and his wife Doris, though she resents their company, the fact that they have moved into her home, and the concerned way they talk to and handle her. Hagar begins to suspect that Marvin and Doris want to be rid of her, and when she comes across an advertisement for a nursing home left out on the kitchen table, she knows her time is limited. Hagar takes one of her social security checks and runs away, boarding a bus bound for the coast. As she hides out in the coastal forests, she declines even further, and her moments of lucidity grow farther and farther apart as she reflects on her strict father’s dominion over her and her brothers’ childhoods, the end of her marriage, years ago, to the crass, coarse farmer Brampton Shipley, and the chaotic life and tragic death of her second, favorite son John. Hagar is eventually rescued and brought to a hospital, where she lives out her final days in a haze of stubborn resistance and, eventually, conscious attempts to overcome her own stubborn personality and finally give her family the kindness they have long deserved. Hagar’s life is a rich tapestry of indecision and wrong decisions, dependence and independence, as well as love, lust, and loss. Her complicated life is the basis for several of the novel’s major themes: womanhood, choices and identity, and the twinned love and resentment that often coexist within—and can even come to define—one’s life with one’s family. The novel present the element of Tragicomic at various points.

The Stone Angel – A Vollendungsroman

The vollendungsroman, a term which was proposed by the literary critic Constance Rooke in 1992, is known as the novel of completion or winding up. Rooke notes that “the task of the Vollendungsroman is to discover for its protagonist and the reader some kind of affirmation in the face of loss.” The old people in these texts generally experience the feelings of loss and regret and know that death is an inevitable fact, but they appreciate life despite their past mistakes and decisions. Hagar’s life has been more mistaken than most-her story more unspoken and misspoken-but the distance she feels between what her life had been and what it would have been is entirely typical of the Vollendungsroman.

The Stone Angel – The Monumental Motif

Since the start the narrator has used the figurine as a animate object, “She viewed the town with sightless eyes. She was doubly blind.” The Stone Angel is an expensive luxury bought by Jason Currie, though its projected to be in the memory of the narrator protagonists mother, but all it symbolizes the cold, closed, pride of Currie family. There are three primary areas where the stone angel is used to symbolize characters in the novel. They are: the Currie family pride as a symbol of egoism and materialism, Hagar's lack of compassion for her family and friends as symbolized by a heart of stone, and Hagar's blindness to the feelings and needs of the others as symbolized by the blindness of the angel.