Attempt a detailed character sketch of Hager Shipley in the novel The Stone Angel.

1. After returning from Africa, Laurences, lived in Vancouver for five years. 

2. It was during this period that : 

(i) Laurence completed most of her African fiction work and 

(ii) wrote the first draft of The Stone Angel. 

(iii)She made acquaintance with Ethel Wilson. 

3. In 1962: 

(i) She separated from her husband and 

(ii) went to live in London where she took her two children. 

4. She revised the draft of the Stone Angel and it appeared in 1964. 

5. This work, mature as it was like her African work, was firmly rooted in the Canadian soil. 

6. By her admission, she was a member of the second generation of the Canadian writers. 

7. The first generation included : 

(i) Morley Callaghan (ii) Sinclair Ross (iii)Hugh Macllennan and (iv)Ernest Buckler. 

8. The writers refused to follow the foreign models, such as : 

9i) British models, (ii) American models. 

9. Of these, the writer who most impressed Laurence was Ross. 

10. The influence of “As For Me and My Husband” (1941) by Ross is quite discernible in The Stone Angel. 

11. On the other hand, the latter novel has greatly influenced the Young Canadian writers. 

12. Here, she is not so much concerned with social realism as paradoxes of human individual. 

13. Dave Godfrey says of Laurence :

“At that time, I was writing very assiduously for Margaret Laurence. I had never met her, but I had this idea of an educated, sensitive, experienced reader who knew the tradition of the story and recent developments and yet was a Canadian with a feel for myth and for all those repressions and fears which hang up twelve Canadian out of ten. So I wrote for Margaret Laurence.” (Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 53, Gale Research Inc. Detroit, London, 1986 p. 265)

14. (i) The narrator, in the Stone Angel is a ninety year old woman, Hager Shipley. 

(ii) The narration is her personal account. 

(iii)She has a disordered memory with which she describes her past coming over to the present which is nothing but painful. 

(iv)Her processes of mind determine the structure of the novel. 

(v) As such entire work comprises flashbacks which take place in a chronological pattern. 

(vi)They alternate with the scenes in the present. 

15. We find Hagard, at the start, blind in the manner the statue angel in the Manawaka cemetery. 

16. Her life has been a life of : 

(i) self-sufficient isolation. (ii) display of pride and (iii)struggle to hide her emotions. 

17. She has ever been incapable of : 

(i) expressing herself 

(ii) accepting love or 

(iii)ability to be happy because of her effort to hide her inner failure. 

18. It is only towards the end, that she gives up her pride and gives more importance to need. 

19. Laurence herself said about Hagar in an interview : 

“Part of her goal is simply survival to survive until the moment she dies, with some kind of dignity and some kind of human value. She always tried to put the hooks on people, to influence people, to manipulate them, her husband and her sons, and she has never really allowed them to go free, so she has never been free herself : this is what she comes to understand in the very last days of her life.”

20. The Stone Angel is set in Laurence’s grand-parents’ generation. 

21. A Jest of God – 1966 

(i) This novel is set in Laurence’s own generation. 

(ii) It won her Governor General's Award. 

(iii)The narrator-protagonist is a 34 year old single woman, Rachel Cameron. 

(iv)She is a school teacher, who longs for love. 

(v) She had a summer affair with her schoolmate, Nick Kazlik, which comes to a sudden end. 

(vi)This has a positive effect, according to Graeme Gibson :

 “We are not God, but what Nick did for Rachel was to enable her to reach out, hold and touch another human being, which was what the sexual experience meant for her. It was the reaching out to another person and making herself vulnerable, as Rachel was able to do ultimately, with Nick, which led her to be able – to some limited extent – to liberate herself.”

22. (i) In 1968 Warner Bros produced a film “Rachel” based on Laurence's novel. 

(ii) The same year, it was republished as “Now I Lay Me Down.” 

Hagar Shipley – A Character Portrayal

 1. Hagar is a struggling farmer's wife. 

2. She has lived her married life for twenty four years and has raised children in utterly impoverished conditions. 

3. As regards her temperament, it is torn between : 

(i) order and disorder (ii) propriety and desire (iii)refinement and toughness. 

4. She, however, justifies her temperament because of the pride she takes in her family. 

5. She is the product of the prairie : 

(i) wandering in a wilderness like the biblical Hagar and 

(ii) like the stone angel in the Manawaka cemetery, “she was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even a pretense of sight.” (p. 3) 

6. When the book starts, she is 90. 

7. She is : (i) fat (ii) ugly (iii)proud (iv) bitter (v) sick (vi)frightened (vii)grotesque (viii) bowed down by tragedies of life, mostly self-willed.

8. She uses her tongue to cut and mock, even at herself. 

9. She is then : (i) “rampant with memory” and (ii) rampant with life. 

10. She struggles hard to : (i) maintain her independence (ii) attain self-knowledge and peace in which she finally succeeds. 

11. For this, she has had to lead a hard, unwilling, rebellious life. 

12. The real events in the novel occur only in two or three weeks.

13. Like any old person she oscillates between the past and present, present and past and present again. 

14. She is even worried to confuse past and present. 

15. She lives with : (i) her son, Marvin and (ii) his wife, Doris. 

16. They are both well in their sixties. 

17. She lives in a house in Vancouver which she bought and is her life-time achievement. 

18. In it there are : 

(i) the oak chair belonging to bar father, Jason Currie. 

(ii) cut glass decanter, her wedding gift from Bram Shipley. 

19. These are the only things which pronounce her identity. 

20. She is ill : 

(i) she gets sudden pain under her ribs 

(ii) she is awkwardly fat 

(iii)she is sometimes incontinent. 

21. She does not like Doris and Marvin's :

 (i) Noisy care of her and (ii) humbling concern for her. 

22. On page 79 of the novel we have :

“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 blooms as 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.” (p. 79)

23. She says about Doris : “She heaves and strains like a calving cow.” (p. 31) 

24. She says mistakenly about Marvin : “There is a boy who never gets upset, not even at what happened to his own brother.” (p. 65) 

25. She looks old physically, but her spirit is young and indomitable. 

26. We have on page 38 : 

“I never got used to a single thing, 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)

27. Even at this age, she has a sensuous liking for things. 

“a real silk, mine, spun by worms in China, feeding upon the mulberry leaves.” (p. 29)

29. She says : (p. 67) :

“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 faint, 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)

30. She is still fond of colours, sounds and smells. 

31. On page 160 of the novel, we have her experience with her husband after their marriage :

“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)

32. At page 42 we have a glimpse into her feeling of life still like a young woman :

“yet now I feel that if I were to walk carefully up to my room, approach the mirror softly, take, it by surprise I would see there again that Hagar, with the shining hair, the dark-maned colt off to the raising ring, the young ladies' academy in Toronto.” (p. 42) 

33. She is pitted against all who come to her and betrays all : 

(i) her father (ii) her brothers (iii)her husband, Bram (iv) her sons. 

34. Surprisingly, even John is given the same treatment, although he is the youngest and most loved of all. 

35. It is the element of pride in her which spoils her relations with all. 

36. She loves the ancient battle-cry of the Currie clan : “Gainsay Who Dare.” 

37. She hates the town she lives in. 

38. (i) She thinks that John is heir to the old spirit of the battle-cry. 

(ii) Still she betrays him in the name of : (a) “common-sense” and (b) “getting ahead.” 

39. The result is that John dies in a foolish, drunken rebellious daring against circumstances for which Hagar is partly responsible. 

40. (i) According to William New, Hagar is an essentially tragic figure. 

(ii) Her moment of truth is the deepest point of her tragedy. 

41. The novel has a tragiconic tone. 

42. It is towards the closing chapters that Hagar moves towards freedom and self -knowledge. 

43. It happens when she is gradually able to reconcile herself with her world.

 44. She admits towards the end that she always wanted “simply to rejoice.” 

45. She admits: “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? Nothing can take away those years.” (p. 292) 

46. Hagar hated Marvin's : 

(i) inarticulateness and (ii) hackneyed common place in speech. 

47. She also disliked the vulgarity of his language. 

48. We have on page 305 :

A pause, and then Marvin replies.

“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. (p. 305)

49. In the novel we have : 

(i) a strongly marked sacramental pattern. 

(ii) A gentle irony runs through this pattern. 

50. Hagar is led by the spirit of religion though 

(i) repentance and confession 

(ii) from self-prison to the moment of self-knowledge leading to her freedom. 

51. (i) She is a stubborn, fighting, dying old woman :  

“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)

(ii) The glass of water is : (a) cup of life (b) grace of God. 

52. (i) Bram Shipley is her husband with his failure farm.

(ii) She flees him and the farm and bads a self-exiled life with her son, John. 

53. Patricia Morley remarks : 

54. George Woodcock calls Laurence a “Canadian equivalent to Tolstoy.” 

55. According to him :  

“...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 individual lives, such as .... the moment in Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel 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)

56. According to Patricia Morley :

“Seeking freedom, Hagar forges more chains, seeking community she builds psychic walls. Her final selfknowledge 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) 

57. The first person makes it easier for us to keep into her psychic turmoil. 

58. The flashback method serves the same purpose. 

59. Hagar has a poetic quality about her Laurence herself says, “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 I let her have her way.” (Gadgetry or Growing .... p. 6)  

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