Extended Essay - English A1

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                 Extended Essay

An exploration of Canadian identity through Margaret Laurence’s characterization

of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel

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English A1

Abstract

This essay investigates the extent to which Margaret Laurence establishes a unique Canadian identity through her characterization of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel. It does so by asserting that Laurence demonstrates the Western Canadian identity in Hagar. The scope of this investigation is limited to the novel in question; however secondary sources from critics are consulted to supplement the arguments made.  This includes works by Debra Lynn Dudek, Douglas R. Francis, Hildegard Kuester, and Enoch Padolsky.

            After the birth of Canada in 1867, a notion has since entered the international consciousness that characterizes Canada with ambiguity –a lack of identity that is often described by the remnants of colonial Britain and the influence of present-day America. Margaret Laurence is among Canadian authors that have attempted to define a national identity through literature. The arguments in this investigation are established by analyzing Laurence’s use of images, symbols, Hagar’s internal monologue and the description of events in Hagar’s life. It firstly examines Hagar’s struggle with identity and how it parallels that of her own nation. Then the quintessentially Canadian aspects of Hagar’s character are analyzed: first with Hagar’s emotional isolation and its reflection of Canadian prairie life; and second, the development of Hagar’s strength as a necessity for survival in the prairies. The main secondary source used was the article “Regionalism, Landscape, and Identity in the Prairie West” by Douglas R. Francis, which explores the development of a Canadian identity through literature and landscape.

            The investigation concludes that Laurence demonstrates the Western Canadian identity within Hagar, thereby establishing that a unique Canadian identity exists as a collection of various regional identities.

Word Count: 270

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract..........................................................................................................................................1

Research Question: To what extent does Margaret Laurence demonstrate a unique  
            Canadian identity through her characterization of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel?

            Thesis: Margaret Laurence demonstrates the essential components of the Canadian
            identity in her characterization of Hagar Shipley, as Hagar struggles to define herself as a
            woman against the backdrop of a pioneering Western Canadian society.

Body

Introduction......................................................................................................................... 3

Argument 1: The struggle for identity................................................................................ 4

Argument 2: Isolation..........................................................................................................7

Argument 3: Strength........................................................................................................ 10

Conclusion........................................................................................................................ 13

Bibliography..................................................................................................................................15

Word Count................................................................................................................................3934

            The Stone Angel is the first in the Manawaka cycle, a series of novels by Margaret Laurence which are connected not in plot, but location. Laurence wrote these novels during a defining period for Canada throughout the 1950s and into the 1970s; her nation was struggling to emerge from its post colonial era with a national identity of its own, distinct from a British or American identity.  She is considered a transitional figure in Canadian literature; alongside authors such as Margaret Atwood and Robert Kroetsch, Laurence was among the first to truly address the question of national identity in her fictions. This investigation will explore the extent to which Margaret Laurence demonstrates a unique Canadian identity through her characterization of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel. The nature of Laurence’s contribution to the issue is contested by critics: Enoch Padolsky of Carleton University treats her works as an exploration of British-Canadian culture, giving weight to the influence of Canada’s imperial parent (31). Debra Lynn Dudek from the University of Saskatchewan suggests the contrary however by establishing that Laurence parallels Canada’s desperate call for a reinvention of her colonial identity through the characters in her Manawaka novels (24).

            Consequently, an understanding of the “Western Canadian” as a symbol is required in order to follow the development of Laurence’s protagonist, Hagar Shipley. Prof. R. Douglas Francis from the University of Calgary states that Canada must be considered a collection of regions, where Laurence’s writing reflects the experience of the Western Canadian region (32). Francis, borrowing from the words of Frederick Jackson Turner, asserts that a landscape shapes the behaviour of the settlers who attempt claim it, and from this rises the Western Canadian identity (30). The landscape of the West is defined by vast, rolling plains with an abundance of flat, solitary wilderness. It is abundant in its barrenness, and this solitary abundance can be overcome only through a total exhaustion of the settler, as he works towards taming the land in order to survive (7). In attempting to tame a harsh and unyielding land, its people become harsh and unyielding as well. This identity of a strong but solitary people developed as the West underwent settlement in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

            In her novel, Laurence illustrates a portrait of Hagar Shipley to reflect the Western Canadian identity. Hagar’s journey for self-reinvention closely parallels that of her native Canada –she is a woman who struggles to emancipate from her roots and establish herself as an individual. Throughout her lifetime, Hagar faces an emotional isolation that reflects the physical isolation encountered by the Canadian pioneer. She exhibits a strong, persevering will and this aspect of her character allows her to survive in her environment. Margaret Laurence demonstrates the essential components of the Canadian identity in her characterization of Hagar Shipley, as Hagar struggles to define herself as a woman against the backdrop of a pioneering Western Canadian society.

            Hagar struggles to define herself throughout her lifetime, and this aching for internal reinvention parallels the identity struggle present within Canada. As she attempts to shed her role as daughter and wife, Hagar realizes that her life is intricately tied to the men who give her these titles. Hagar’s father Jason Currie is the quintessential image of a Canadian settler who holds true to the virtues of imperial Britain, Canada’s colonial parent; he embodies Anglo-Saxon superiority and reflects moral progress within his nation through the economic success he achieves. He is a founding member of Manawaka, opening the first store in town. He is stubborn but dutiful, and especially weary of showing his emotions to others.  Though Hagar admits “I didn’t want to resemble him in the least ...I was sturdy like him,” because Jason Currie is the mould for her own character (Laurence, 8). She respects him, but sees her father as authoritative and bigoted. Jason Currie is a traditional framework imposed into a new environment, whereas Hagar is born a Canadian. She refuses to be a simple transplantation of colonial Britain onto Canadian soil. Hagar’s longing to sever herself from her father’s domination parallels the slow shift towards greater independence in Canada after the turn of the twentieth century.  Incidentally, both Hagar and her nation are born within the same decade, the 1860s, and their subsequent transformations follow the same approximate timeline. This is a recurrent theme in Laurence’s Manawaka novels, as in the character of Brooke in The Diviners.  The critic Hildegard Kuestar explains that Brooke “is a colonial man” who suppresses his wife, paralleling Hagar’s suppression by her father and thereby reinforcing the “significance of the country’s struggle to gain complete independence from Great Britain” in “defining ...Canadian identity” (140). Jason Currie is unable to realize the clear comparison of both father and daughter that Laurence provides the reader, so he never appreciates the reflection of himself in Hagar. Consequently, Hagar is driven to severe from her father. Similarly in timeline, it is not until the twentieth century and after the advent of the First World War that Canada begins to prove itself as an emerging power. Against this post-war backdrop, Hagar sheds the role of daughter in an ultimate act of defiance when she marries Brampton Shipley, Jason Currie’s antithesis. In the very last conversation between father and daughter, Jason Currie declares Bram Shipley to be “common as dirt” and reiterates to Hagar that there is “not a decent girl in town that would wed without her family’s consent …it’s not done” (Laurence, 49). To this, Hagar replies “it’ll be done by me” (49). To make a literal comparison, Canada’s goal to establish greater independence after the post-colonial age culminated with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which reinforced the young nation as an equal to Great Britain by allowing Canada to govern over her own legislative and foreign affairs. By making the decision to tie herself to Bram, an unpolished and indulging rural boy, Hagar takes the final step to emancipate herself from her father and this severs her relationship with him permanently. If Jason Currie represents the merchant pioneer of Canada, Bram Shipley is the rural pioneer. His nature is in stark contrast to the righteousness and rigidity of Jason Currie and this is what attracts Hagar to him. She “revelled in his fingernails with crescents of ingrown earth that never met a file …he looked like an Indian, so brown and beaked a face” (45).  Hagar’s marriage to Bram is the grafting of a more earthly component to herself, reminiscent of the natives who were scattered across Canada before settlement. Bram becomes a useful tool to help Hagar redefine herself and stray from the influence of her father. Hagar ultimately realizes that a combination of both the Currie and the Shipley name characterize her identity. It is also the archetypes of the Currie and Shipley pioneers, the ambitious merchant and the hard working farmer, which exemplify the qualities necessary for survival in the Western prairielands and this characterizes the Western Canadian identity. This is alluded to at the very beginning of the novel, in Laurence’s image of prim peonies and wild cowslips along the Manawaka cemetery. Hagar describes the “funeral-parlour perfume of the planted peonies, dark crimson and wallpaper pink, the pompous blossoms hanging leadenly …bowed down with the weight of themselves and the weight of the rain” (4). This foreign flower is planted along the side of cemetery by men, not nature; they serve to “civilize” the land. This image is contrasted by Hagar’s description of the cowslips, whose “scent would rise momentarily” through “the hot rush of disrespectful wind… They were tough-rooted… wild and gaudy flowers, and although they were torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking by could catch the faint, musky, dust tinged smell of things that grew untended and had grown always” (5). The image of these flowers evoke the contrast of civilized versus uncivilized, foreign and native, Jason Currie versus Brampton Shipley.  Though Hagar understands that the planted peonies must be left to decorate the earth, she has a subtle inclination towards the wild and musky cowslips. But despite her inclinations, both are now a part of the cemetery’s surroundings. Though Jason Currie represents the kept and upright values that helped to civilize Manawaka, Bram is something more liberating and closer to the earth. Hagar signifies the connection of both natures within herself when she joins their names on her family plot in the cemetery, “so the stone said Currie on one side and Shipley on the other”, connected by the hyphen that is Hagar (184).  This is the symbol of two pioneering families brought together for the purpose of growth, transformation, and reconciliation. Hagar is the medium between the two archetypical extremes, which represents the essence of the prairie pioneer. By the very fact that Hagar is a woman coming into her own, she reflects the notion of a young country coming of age. Struggling between English and French, native and foreign, Canadian and not British or American, Canada similarly establishes itself with its own identity. It has become a nation of pluralistic elements, integrating the histories of century-old settlers alongside newly received cultures to create an ever-changing “meta-culture” that continues to evolve even today.

            Throughout her lifetime, Hagar faces a self-inflicted emotional isolation that can be likened to the harsh physical isolation of life in the prairies. Hagar values her independence over her relationships with others, and this sternness of character damages her relationship with her two brothers. When her brother Matt asks Hagar to act as their mother during the final moments of Dan’s life, she refuses to do so even though it would comfort Dan. “To play at being her –it was beyond [Hagar] ... [she] was crying, shaken by torments he never even suspected, wanting above all else to do the thing he asked, but unable to do it, unable to bend enough” (25). Hagar’s inability to “bend” causes her relationship with her brothers to deteriorate because she is not willing to make a sacrifice or compromise her own strength for their sake. She becomes as solid as stone. Her actions reflect the inevitability of solitude in the prairie lifestyle, because the strength of character necessary for survival in the West could be secured only in isolation (Francis, 5). Hagar takes after her father, who is harsh and unyielding, whereas her brothers Matt and Dan take after their mother and exhibit a frailty that Hagar detests. As children, the boys “tried to please [their father] but rarely could” (Laurence, 7). Instead, Hagar is Jason Currie’s pride, for she “bore his hawkish nose and stare” (8). Jason Currie respects Hagar over his sons because she embodies the qualities that brought him so much prosperity in the prairie town of Manawaka; she has the ability to be as successful as him. Though Hagar may be the source of her own isolation, –just as her father had been for himself, who never remarried after his wife’s’ death, and never had a lasting relationship with any of his children–this isolation provides her with the ability to subsist in her environment. Consequently, Hagar uses isolation as a means of protection. Laurence demonstrates this tendency of Hagar’s when she loses her two sons: first Marvin, who leaves for World War I, and with John, her cherished boy who passes away in a tragic accident. As Hagar and Marvin await the train for his departure, Hagar feels an inclination to embrace her son and “to beg him to look after himself ...all at once to hold him tightly, plead with him, against all reason and reality, not to go” (129). She does not do so however, since “the moment eluded [her]” and “she did not want to embarrass the both of [them]” (129). Instead, she addresses Marvin with characteristic practicality, assuring him that things around the house will be taken care of just fine without him. It is easier for Hagar to repress her emotions rather than wholly experience them.  Addressing Marvin with the composed disposition that he has come to expect of his mother helps Hagar protect herself, but in the process Hagar distances herself from her son. In the case of John, Hagar admits that on the night he died she “turned to stone and never wept at all” (243). She did so to hide her guilt for the part she played in his death, since his tragic accident occurred when John acted out in defiance to Hagar’s disapproval of his sweetheart. At the moment of John's death in the hospital, Hagar says “I straightened my spine and that was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do …to stand straight then.  I wouldn’t cry in front of strangers, whatever it cost” (242). This is the most tragic moment in Hagar’s life. Even in this instant, Hagar makes it a priority to keep her pride intact.  Hagar sidesteps the potential for honesty in this moment, and addresses it instead with characteristic coldness. Reflecting on her reaction to John’s death, Hagar states that she “couldn’t collapse. Who’d see to me?” (243). She admits that her stone-like exterior is a means of self protection. She has to be strong and self-sufficient in order to survive, for only she could secure her own well-being. Hagar adapts to reflect a true inhabitant of the Canadian prairielands, as she employs a self-inflicted emotional isolation to secure herself. This can be likened to the physical isolation in which prairie workers were submerged as they worked to tame Western frontiers far away from the familiarity of community. The isolation of the prairielands is an integral component of the Western Canadian lifestyle because it allowed for the strength of the prairie pioneer to develop. Laurence solidifies this notion in the symbol of the stone angel. Though the stone angel is used to mark the grave of Hagar’s mother, it is more accurately a representation of the qualities within Hagar herself. “At a terrible expense… it was pure white marble”, and so it remains, solid and unchanging throughout the decades (3). So too, does Hagar’s character attempt to remain constant through her lifetime with a deeply rooted pride and stubborn disposition. “Summer and winter," the angel “viewed the town with sightless eyes. She was doubly blind” (3). As the angel watches over her town without ever knowing the faces of its inhabitants, so does Hagar, drifting through her life without ever truly connecting with others –not her father, her brothers, her husband, or her sons. Hagar remains unable to sympathize with the emotions of others for fear of compromising herself in the process, and so she becomes fortified by solitude.  Furthermore, the angel’s “wings in the winter were pitted by snow and in the summer blown by grit” (3). The changing seasons attack the wings of the angel. Similarly, Hagar’s life comes at her as if in a total siege towards her constitution. Hagar believes she must appear strong so as not to let her foundations falter, and therefore carries herself as if she is narrowly withstanding the weathering from her day to day experiences. The strength of the stone allows the structure to withstand time and remain erect as “the first and the largest” angel within the cemetery (3). Despite the consequence of solitude that maintaining a stone-like disposition demands, Hagar assumes its qualities and this allows her to be a constant and unchanging figure throughout her lifetime. She does not show weakness and this keeps the pride inherited from her father intact. The stone angel summarizes the inevitability of Hagar's inclination towards an isolated lifestyle and in this way Hagar exemplifies the quintessential Canadian pioneer. The scholar Francis states that in the wilderness of the Canadian West, “individuals confronted the frontier in an isolated fashion,” spending countless hours toiling away in an effort to tame the earth in a great lone land, which resulted in incredible mental and physical exhaustion (5). The success of an individual was in direct proportion to the effort he put into his land, and so an individual became “stone” to secure the success of his work and his land. The pioneer achieved this through the solitude of prairie life. The strength of a stone-like character was passed on in the pioneering tradition of the Currie lineage to be demonstrated now in Hagar, attesting to their necessity in securing survival for the pioneer.

            Hagar Shipley demonstrates the characteristic Western Canadian qualities of perseverance and strength throughout her lifetime. In the short reverie which opens the novel, Laurence subtly characterizes Hagar’s stern foundations with the image of her mother’s angel in the Manawaka cemetery.  The angel stands “in memory of [the mother] who relinquished her feeble ghost,” as Hagar “gained [her] stubborn one” (3). To Hagar, her mother is the epitome of a “feeble” character –a passive and weak-willed woman who enters death because she does not show the strength to remain in life. This is in contrast to the “stubborn” Hagar, who, now at the age of ninety, is raging against her own death. Contempt towards the meek is blatantly reinforced as Hagar’s description of the cemetery shifts from her mother’s angel to the nearby tomb of Regina Weese, who by now is a long forgotten member of Manawaka. Hagar feels that in her death, this woman had “only herself to blame, for she was a flimsy, gutless creature, bland as egg custard” because she cared with “a martyred devotion for an ungrateful fox-voiced mother year in and year out” (4). Despite the nobility in Regina’s sacrifices, Hagar receives her actions with scorn. To Hagar, Regina is merely perpetuating weakness by extending the life of a woman who is unable to care for herself by her own strength–thereby forfeiting her own “gutless” existence through a lack of strength within herself, which prevents Regina from leaving from her mother’s bedside. The stone angel of Hagar’s mother and the small tomb of Regina Weese sit adjacent to each other, reinforcing the lack of fortitude possessed by women who escape life to enter death. Those who outlive these women, such as Hagar or Regina’s “fox-voiced” mother, do not exhibit this lack of fortitude. Hagar’s strong contempt for the weak rests in her belief that weakness is synonymous to death, because “the West is a metaphor for death” (Francis, 17). This was the understanding in Western prairie societies during the time of settlement because a strong character was needed to overcome the harshness of the environment. Consequently, Hagar’s character is moulded by the patriarchal and pioneering image of her father, Jason Currie. He is a cold and authoritative figure, a proud Highlander who constantly reminds the members of his lineage that he has “pulled himself up from his bootstraps …But he’d come of a good family” (Laurence, 14).  Hagar’s father exemplifies the quintessential image of a Canadian pioneer who works to civilize the plains of the West; his success is a product of his unyielding character. These qualities are passed on to Hagar, to whom Jason Currie reminds: “You take after me …you’ve got backbone” (10). The Currie name is moulded by the conditions of the Canadian West, where “backbone” was necessary for survival. This aspect of Hagar is reinforced in the contrast between herself and her brothers. Hagar explains that her bothers, Matt and Dan, were “graceful, unspirited boys” who “took after our mother” (7). On his deathbed, Hagar is unable to comfort Dan because “all I could think of was that meek woman …from whom he’d inherited a frailty I could not help but detest” (25). Furthermore, when Hagar learns of Matt’s passing and how “he didn’t struggle to breathe or hang on … I found it harder to bear than his death,” questioning why he had not “writhed, cursed, at least grappled with the thing” (60). Throughout the novel, Hagar views the submission to death as the ultimate display of weakness, since now in her old age she is fighting to postpone her own death. Her contempt for the weak remains intact even among the members of her own family. Matt and Dan exemplify the feeble character of their mother, unfit for survival in the harsh prairielands. Consequently, both boys pass away when they are still only young men while Hagar exhausts her life to the age of ninety. This contrast reinforces the strength and endurance needed for survival in the Canadian West. With increasing age, Hagar comes to realize an increasing helplessness within herself and makes a final, rebellious step against the inevitable consequences of aging.  She flees to a deserted shack in the wilderness of Shadow Point to escape admittance into a nursing home. In her shack, Hagar meticulously watches an injured seagull, which “has so much strength. It’ll never drop. It flounders, half rises, sinks, batters itself against the floor in a terrible rage of not being able to do what it is compelled to do. Finally it drags itself onto a pile of nets and lies there throbbing aloud” (218). The image of the seagull is a brusque summarization of Hagar’s own life’s course. The seagull is an image associated with freedom, and therefore as it dies this freedom is surrendered. Hagar’s impenetrable willpower and strength make her unwilling to blindly submit her independence and freedom throughout various instances in the novel –be it to a subduing nursing home, or to the arthritis plaguing her body “more frequently as of late” (31). Like the seagull, Hagar’s insistence to “never drop” even in the face of her worst moments–the death of her son, the separation from her husband–has rewarded her with a long life. The scholar Francis explains that since the “West is a metaphor for death”, a character such as Hagar’s is necessary for survival within its borders (17).  Now in her old age, her fight against a death that seems so imminent is at its climax and she will remain “throbbing aloud” into her very final moments for she knows that “I can’t help it–it’s my nature” (308). 

            The life of Hagar Shipley is a reflection of growth within the Canadian identity. Through her use of images, symbols, Hagar’s internal monologue and the description of events within Hagar’s life, Laurence characterizes her protagonist to inherently reflect the quintessential Western Canadian. Laurence achieves this by taking the reader through a journey of self-discovery and reinvention in Hagar, which parallels the century-and-a-half long identity struggle present within her nation. Along her journey, Hagar is emotionally annexed, and this reflects the notion that solitude is an inherent aspect of the Western Canadian identity. Her emotional isolation can be likened to the physical isolation that is integral to the prairie lifestyle. Through her isolation, Hagar is able to assume the strength and willpower needed to secure her survival in the harsh prairielands, since a rigid and stone-like disposition was needed in the settlers of the West in order to tame their frontier. Though some critics may argue that Laurence demonstrates the “British-Canadian” culture within her novel, an analysis of Hagar Shipley makes it clear that this is not her intention. Instead, Laurence establishes the existence of a Western Canadian identity which consequently affirms that there is a unique identity which encompasses the entirety of Canada, distinct from that of an American or British identity. In the words of Giuseppe Mazzini –the Italian patriot who pressed for the unification of his nation while Canada was proclaiming its own, a country’s territory “is its foundation,” while “the country is the idea which rises upon that foundation”.  Laurence’s Hagar Shipley reflects the Western Canadian territory, a single but fundamental component of the “Canadian” idea which culminates alongside a multitude of components to produce the mosaic of Canada.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dudek, Debra Lynn. Creative Displacement and Corporeal Defiance: Feminist Canadian
            Modernism in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka Novels. Saskatoon: U of Saskatchewan P, 
            2000.

Francis, Douglas R. “Regionalism, Landscape, and Identity in the Prairie West”. Challenging
            Frontiers. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2004.

Kuester, Hildegard. The Crafting of Chaos: Narrative structure in Margaret Laurence’s “The
            Stone Angel” and “The Diviners”. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1988.

Padolsky, Enoch. “Cultural Diversity in Canadian Literature: A Pluralistic Approach to Majority
            and Minority Writing in Canada”. New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Peterborough:
            Broadview Press, 1997.