Margaret Laurence, Canadian Writer 1926 - 1987

The déjà vu is already creeping up my spine before I go upstairs. The house itself seems so familiar--the kind of huge late-Victorian three-storey brick house with wide verandas, wood floors, and lathe-turned spindles decorating the archways. But upstairs, I stop short. There is MY old lamp, burgundy with mock French Provincial white and gold trim, the one my aunt gave me. And there it is sitting on MY old oak typewriter table, an exact duplicate of the one I bought with my first freelancing cheque, the one that holds my keyboard today.

I didn't expect to find my things in a stranger's house. Yet, how appropriate. This old brick house in Neepawa, Manitoba, fifty miles from my hometown, was Grandfather Simpson's house. It was here, after her parents died, that Jean Margaret Wemyss lived for the ten years until she completed high school, before she moved to Winnipeg for university, married, travelled, wrote, and became Margaret Laurence, Canadian writer. So you've been in this house too, if you've read any of her Manawaka stories in books such as: A Bird In the House, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, or The Diviners.

I read The Stone Angel (published in 1964) when I was still a student. Because copyright laws and budget constraints often decree that no contemporary novelists or poets are ever studied in public schools, finding and reading a book just published in my own country by a living writer was one of those defining moments in my life. My world turned inside out, and I was never the same again.

In The Stone Angel, 90-year old Hagar Shipley, living in Vancouver, is beginning to lose it. Her elderly son and daughter-in-law can no longer manage her in their home and some other arrangement must be made. Hagar runs away and gets lost. She confuses strangers she encounters with people from her past as her life flashes before her--her mother's death petrifying her in grief, her lusty husband Bram, her two unmothered sons, her public faces, and her personal failures. You can tell, from my brief summary, how well dementia works as a literary device, bringing the real world we know into the magic world of literature to entertain and enlighten.

By making her Old Woman cold and disagreeable, critical and unloving, Laurence avoids the stereotype of "sweet little old lady." Her Hagar is strong but Laurence goes beneath the surface to explore her flaws--their origins in abandonment and grief, in ignorance and innocence. Hagar is controlled by a society that sees wedlock as more to do with bondage than with love. Pitted in a life and death battle with Nature, too busy to think about it, she lacks the skills and is not inclined to nurture. Yet, it is never too late for redemption. In moments of lucidity, Hagar sees herself.

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