Title: The Stone Angel Author: Margaret Laurence Creation Date: 1964 Location: Toronto, Canada Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Margaret Laurence was born Jean Margaret Wemyss in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Her mother died when she was four. Her father died when she was nine. She was raised by a stepmother in conditions of emotional austerity that would surface, decades later, in the voice of a ninety-year-old woman who had been taught from infancy that to feel anything visibly was to fail. Laurence published The Stone Angel in 1964 — the first and most celebrated novel in her Manawaka cycle, a sequence of five books and one story collection set in a fictional prairie town stitched together from Neepawa's bones. By the time of her death in 1987, she had received two Governor General's Awards and chaired the Writers' Union of Canada. The Stone Angel had become the cornerstone of Canadian literature courses and the book against which subsequent prairie writing measured itself.
The novel is narrated by Hagar Shipley, ninety years old and dying, speaking in two registers at once: the present tense of her failing body in her son Marvin's house, and the past tense of her entire life — childhood as the daughter of a prosperous Scottish-descended merchant in Manawaka, marriage to the rough farmer Bram Shipley whom she loved and was ashamed of in equal measure, her possessive love for her younger son John, and decades of rigidity and emotional silence. The stone angel of the title is a marble statue her father imported from Italy to mark her mother's grave — blind, beautiful, sightless — and Hagar's identification with it is the novel's central image: pride and endurance purchased at the cost of human connection.
Laurence writes in prose simultaneously rooted in prairie realism and suffused with modernist psychological depth, her sentences carrying the stripped economy of a landscape where ornamentation does not survive the winters. Hagar's voice — abrasive, funny, sharp-tongued, self-deceiving, devastatingly clear in moments of honesty — is one of the great narrative creations in English-language fiction.
The National Voice
The Canada of The Stone Angel is the Canada of the prairies — the flat, enormous, wind-scoured landscape stretching from the Great Lakes to the Rockies that shaped its settlers as implacably as the winters defining its calendar. Manawaka is a small prairie town rendered with the precision of someone who grew up in Neepawa and understood that small-town geography is also sociology: grain elevators, a main street, the cemetery on the hill, the river at the bottom, who lives on which street and the exact distance between respectable houses and the rough farms beyond the town limits.
Hagar's voice is the novel's most distinctive Canadian quality — a voice of restraint, not gentility but discipline: a woman taught that feeling is weakness who has spent ninety years perfecting the art of not showing what she feels. The sentences are short, declarative, stripped of ornament. The metaphors arrive from the landscape: cold as prairie wind, dry as August dust, hard as the stone angel itself. This emotional economy is the novel's claim about Canadian character — the Scots Presbyterian settlers who survived by suppressing everything that did not contribute to survival.
They endured the winters, the isolation, the Depression. What they did not survive was their own emotional discipline: the habit of silence became so entrenched that by the time external conditions eased, internal conditions had calcified. Canada recognises itself in Hagar with the uneasy recognition of people seeing their own stoicism diagnosed as pathology — the national virtue of endurance revealed as the national wound of emotional repression, the cost of building a country on the principle that needing nothing from anyone is the highest form of strength.
The Historical Ground
Hagar's life spans the twentieth-century Canadian experience. Born in the 1870s, she grows up during prairie settlement — immigrants from Scotland, England, Ukraine, and Scandinavia homesteading the western provinces under conditions of extraordinary isolation and physical hardship. Her father's prosperity represents the commercial class servicing the agricultural economy that wheat made possible — the merchants, the storekeepers, the men whose capital was the town itself rather than the land around it.
Hagar's marriage to Bram crosses the class line dividing prairie towns into respectable and disreputable — a distinction one generation old but fiercely policed, because in communities so recently carved from the empty land, social position was the only inheritance anyone had. The Depression devastated the prairies with particular severity: the wheat economy collapsed, dust blew, communities emptied, and the generation that had built the towns watched their children leave for the cities. World War II accelerated that depopulation. By the novel's composition in the early 1960s, Neepawa was a town whose best years were behind it, and Manawaka carries this knowledge — the sense of a community surviving past its prime, sustained by habits formed in harder times that no one can quite abandon.
Laurence herself had lived in Somaliland and Ghana from 1950 to 1957, and the encounter with British colonial Africa sharpened her view of her own country. Two African books preceded the Manawaka novels. When she returned to the prairie material she had grown up in, she returned to it as someone who had seen settler-colonial structures from the outside — a woman who recognised that the discipline her grandmothers had imposed on themselves was the same discipline by which the empire had organised its silences.
The Literary Landscape
Margaret Laurence stands alongside Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler as one of the most important Canadian novelists of the twentieth century. Her Manawaka cycle — The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners — constitutes the most sustained exploration of Canadian prairie experience in fiction, comparable in ambition to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha or Hardy's Wessex.
Before Laurence, Canadian prairie fiction was defined by Frederick Philip Grove, Sinclair Ross — whose As for Me and My House depicted small-town claustrophobia — and W.O. Mitchell. None brought to the material the psychological depth Laurence found in Hagar. Hugh MacLennan addressed Canadian identity directly in novels like Two Solitudes; Davies brought a Jungian sensibility to his Deptford Trilogy; Richler wrote Montreal's Jewish community with satirical energy; Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013, shared Laurence's attention to the emotional lives of women in small-town Ontario.
The principal contenders for Canada's representative novel include Munro's collected work, Davies's Fifth Business, Ondaatje's The English Patient, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse for Indigenous experience. The Stone Angel holds its position through the precision of its diagnosis — the emotional structure of settler-colonial Canada, the stoic Protestant character that built the country and broke its builders — and through the sheer force of Hagar's voice, among the most fully realised narrative creations in English-language fiction. The novel demonstrated that a Canadian novel could achieve universality precisely through its fierce provincial specificity.
The Reading
The angel in the cemetery
The stone angel stands in the Manawaka cemetery, and she is doubly blind — not only because she is stone but because my father bought her in pride without knowing one kind of angel from another, and she is not even the right kind to mark a grave. She is large and portentous, carved of white marble, her wings spread wide. She was brought from Italy at what must have been a terrible cost for a man who ordinarily watched his money as though it might take flight. Yet he never flinched at the price, I am certain of that. She marks my mother's resting place, and my father was not a man to stint on public gestures. It was the private ones that were beyond him, and beyond me, too, I suppose, if I am honest, which I am not always inclined to be.
I am ninety. I will be ninety-one if I make it to the spring, which seems unlikely. My son Marvin and his wife Doris have had me in their house this past while, and Doris means well, I give her that, though her meaning well has always had the particular quality of a woman who organises charity drives — thorough and impersonal and slightly put out by the recipients' lack of gratitude. She has arranged for me to enter a hospital, and I have made it known that I will not go. Not known gently, either. I have never done anything gently in my life, and I do not propose to start now.
Jason Currie's daughter
My father was Jason Currie, who came from Scotland with nothing and built his store on the main street of Manawaka into the most prosperous enterprise in the district. He was a self-made man, and he wore the fact like armour. He was granite-hard and granite-proud, and he raised me in his image, which was the image of someone who would rather die than show weakness. When my mother died — I was too young to remember her — he did not weep where anyone could see him. I cannot say whether he wept where no one could see him, because I did not know him that well, and no one did. He instructed me in the virtues of self-reliance with the thoroughness of a man who truly believed he was doing his child a kindness, and perhaps he was, in his way. The world was not gentle, and Manawaka was not gentle, and the Manitoba winters were not gentle, and what use was a daughter who could not stand them?
But there were things he failed to teach me, or taught me too well by their absence, and the principal one was this: that it is possible to need another person without being diminished by the needing. He sent me to a ladies' college in Toronto, which was not the usual thing for a girl from Manitoba in those years, but he was not a usual man. He expected me to acquire polish, which I did, and to return to Manawaka prepared for a marriage that would consolidate the Currie name, which I did not. I returned with my education like a weapon I did not know how to sheathe, and the town received me back with the particular wariness small towns reserve for their own who have been elsewhere and come home changed.
Bram Shipley
I married Bram Shipley. That sentence has the sound of a verdict, which I suppose it was. I married him against my father's wishes, against the advice of everyone whose opinion might reasonably be consulted, against the social geography of Manawaka, which placed the Curries on one side and the Shipleys on the other with a distance between them measured not in yards but in respectability. Bram was big and rough and he smelled of horses and his fingernails were never entirely clean, and he said things in company that made me clench my teeth with the particular agony of a woman who believes she has standards and whose husband will not meet them. I wanted him. That is the truth of it, plain and undecorated. I wanted him in a way that I had been taught to consider beneath me, and the wanting was the most honest thing about our marriage, though I could not have told him that if my life depended on it. My life, in a manner of speaking, did depend on it. And I could not.
I spent decades being ashamed of him. Not privately — privately, I sometimes loved him, loved his broad shoulders and his lack of pretence, loved the way he moved through the world without apology, the way he laughed without checking first to see who was listening. But publicly, in Manawaka where the eyes of Jason Currie's town were always upon me, I performed my distance from him with the discipline of someone guarding a position that was all she had. I corrected his grammar. I did not take his arm on the street. I maintained a dignity that looked, from outside and eventually from inside, indistinguishable from contempt. The contempt, practised so faithfully, became real. The love, denied so consistently, became unreachable.
We lived in the Shipley place, which was not the house I had expected to live in and which I scrubbed and ordered and tried to make into something it was not, the way I tried to make Bram into something he was not, and the house resisted me as he did, settling back into its own nature the moment I turned my attention elsewhere. He died without my giving him what he needed from me, which was only to be seen for what he was, which was a decent man who had married above his station and knew it and bore the knowing with more grace than I ever gave him credit for. I know this now. I have known it for years. Knowing it has not been what you could call a comfort.
John
John was the one I loved. My younger son, the one who had Bram's charm and Bram's recklessness and something of my own stubbornness, though he would not have thanked me for the observation. Marvin was the elder — steady, responsible, the son who would drive you to the doctor and remember your pills and never once make you feel that the world was larger than the room you sat in. I loved him too, I suppose, in the way one loves furniture — something there, solid, reliable, taken for granted precisely because it will not break. But John — John I loved the way you love a fire, leaning toward it for the warmth and not thinking about what happens when you lean too close.
I loved him wrong. That is the confession I have been circling for ninety years, and I might as well say it plain: I loved him with such ferocity and such possessiveness that the love was a cage rather than a gift. I wanted him to be what I needed — educated, refined, a Currie in Shipley clothing — and he was what he was, which was his own creature, wild and laughing and careless, and my wanting crushed him as surely as if I had taken him in my hands and squeezed.
He died young, in an accident compounded by recklessness and drink, and the question I cannot answer and will carry with me when I go is whether a different kind of love — a looser, kinder love, the love of a woman capable of letting go — might have made him value his own life enough to save it. There was a girl he loved, Arlene Simmons, and I disapproved of her, which was my right and my habit and my great unforgivable error, because the disapproval helped drive the two of them toward the recklessness that killed them both. That is a thing I know and cannot unknow and would give the remaining days of my life to undo, except that the remaining days are few and the undoing is not available among the options the world provides.
Marvin
Marvin has endured. He has driven me to appointments. He has tolerated Doris's management of me and my management of Doris and the whole weary triangle of obligation that passes for family life when the love has been distributed unequally and everyone knows it. I have treated him as the lesser son, and he has borne it with the patience of a man who does not know how to insist on his own worth, or who has given up insisting, which amounts to the same thing. I am not proud of this. But pride has been exactly the problem, has it not? I have been proud of the wrong things and incapable of the right ones.
He went to war — the trenches, the gas, the mud, the things men of that generation came back from without speaking of. I hardly registered his going. I was occupied with the more interesting son, the one whose absence would have been a wound; Marvin's absence was simply an absence, like the absence of weather between storms. He came back. He worked. He married Doris, who was suitable in the way Marvin was suitable — not exciting, not impressive, but reliable. He has waited his whole life to be loved by his mother in the way I loved John, and he has known, through every year of the waiting, that the love would not arrive.
The cannery by the sea
I ran away. I do not say that figuratively. I packed what I could carry and went to an abandoned fish cannery by the sea, because even at ninety a person needs to make at least one gesture of absolute defiance before she dies. I sat on the beach eating soda crackers from my handbag, and I felt — what did I feel? Free, I think, though the word sounds foolish for an old woman sitting on damp sand. Free of Doris and her arrangements and Marvin's worried face and the bedroom with its narrow bed where I was expected to lie down and wait for death as though death were a bus that would arrive on schedule.
A man came — Murray Ferney Lees, a stranger with his own freight of grief, and we talked. We sat in the abandoned building with the smell of old fish and the sound of the ocean and we talked the way people talk when there is nothing left to protect. I told him things about John. I told him things I had not told Marvin, not told the minister, not told myself in so many words. He listened, and I listened to him, and for a brief space in that collapsing place by the sea I was something I had not been in ninety years of stubborn, wilful, wrongheaded living — I was simply a person in the company of another person, without the armour, without the stone angel's sightless dignity, without anything at all except the words and the willingness to say them.
The hospital
They found me, of course. Marvin came, and his face was white with worry and red with exasperation, the two colours fighting for dominance the way they always have when he deals with me. I had been foolish and I had been magnificent and I had been a ninety-year-old woman sitting on a beach in the rain, and there is no dignity in that, though there is something else, something I cannot quite name, that might be worth more than dignity.
They took me to the hospital. The indignity of it — the white gown that ties at the back, the nurses who call you dear, the roommate who breathes too loudly in the night. I am reduced to a body in a bed, and the body is failing in the ways bodies fail at ninety — the bladder that will not hold, the legs that will not carry, the eyes that see less each morning — and I cannot pretend any longer that the will that sustained me through Manawaka and Bram and the Depression and everything after is sufficient to sustain me through this. The will is still there. It has always been the last thing to go. But the will without the body to execute it is a horse without a road, and I am learning, too late, what it means to be dependent on the kindness of people I have never been kind to.
The minister comes. He offers the consolations of his profession, and I receive them with the graciousness of a woman who has been sitting in church pews for eighty years without ever quite believing what was said from the pulpit. I am not a woman of faith, though I am a woman of church, which is a different thing, and the minister knows it, and we maintain the fiction between us with the mutual courtesy of people who have agreed not to discuss what they both know.
The sentence I finally say
Near the end I say a thing to Marvin. I say it poorly, because I have no practice. I tell him he has been a better son than I deserved. The words come out rough and graceless, nothing like the speeches people make in books, but Marvin hears them. I can see that he hears them. His face does something it has not done in my presence for years — it opens. That is the only word for it. He opens, like a door I have kept shut for decades, and what comes through the opening is not dramatic or large but simply the recognition of a man who has waited a very long time to be seen by his mother.
I have lied to him, of course. I have not been telling him he was the better son in the sense that John was the lesser, because I still cannot quite manage that admission, and the truth I do manage is approximate. But the approximate truth, said badly to the right person at the right moment, is sometimes the most honest sentence a life produces. The sentence cracks something. Not the pride — the pride will go to the grave with me — but the wall behind the pride, the wall that kept me from knowing what was on the other side, which was only this: the ordinary human need to be known, and to know, and to say so.
The glass of water
I hold a glass of water. A nurse offers it, and Doris reaches for it, but I take it myself. I hold it and I drink from it and the water goes down, cool and real. I am Hagar. I have been wrong about nearly everything that mattered, and I have hurt the people I should have loved most, and I am dying in a hospital bed in a gown that does not close properly at the back. And in the last of it, in the very last of the long, stubborn, stone-blind life of Hagar Shipley, something cracks — not the pride, exactly, for the pride will go to the grave with me, but the wall behind the pride, the wall that kept me from knowing what was on the other side, which was only this: the ordinary human need to be known, and to know, and to say so.
The stone angel stands in the Manawaka cemetery with her sightless eyes. I am not she. I am Hagar, and I have seen.
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The University of Chicago Press paperback — the standard North American edition of Margaret Laurence's first Manawaka novel, with its stripped prairie prose intact.
The University of Chicago Press paperback — the standard North American edition of Margaret Laurence's first Manawaka novel, with its stripped prairie prose intact.
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