The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

I finished “The Stone Angel” last night - 300 pages bristling with the grumblings of a woman steeped in the past. Whilst reading, onlookers observed the title of my book and scowled. “Hagar,” they declared, “I remember her from high school lit - what a whiner.”

Hagar Shipley. The much disparaged protagonist and narrator of “The Stone Angel.” She commences the narrative describing the stone angel that crumbles atop her families’ graves - and proceeds to scrounge about the decaying remnants of her memory. I thus I found myself buffeting my way through a murk of childhood traumas, a turbulent marriage, death, love, emotions secreted beneath pride - all presented interspersed amongst her current situation . At age ninety, Hagar functions under the care of her least favorite son, Marvin, and his wife, Doris. She is entombed in the upper story of her home, at the mercy of an ailing body she can no longer control. Threatened by a nursing home, she absconds to the seaside. There, she meets are stranger who, after belching out his life story, betrays her to Marvin. Hagar, captured, spends her last days in the noisy confines of a hospitable. Her world gets smaller and smaller until, finally, we are left with emptiness.

Readers dislike Hagar because she complains prolifically yet does little to assuage her misfortunes. This characteristic is found, too, in protagonists such as Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfeild, or the characters populating Wuthering Heights . Such heroines luxuriate in their tragedy - and relish, too,in accounting each wrong against them in abundant detail. The narratives are habitually meandering; lush with introspection, and domestic dramas, staged against intricately wrought scenery.

For me, it is not Hagar, but rather the suffocating fear the novel implanted in my mind. Hagar is the epitome of the horrors we (those still in their prime) ascribe to old age . She is crotchety; a burden upon her son and daughter in law, who tread gently around her, as if she may suddenly shatter. And, indeed, she is fragile. Weak. Her body is at the mercy of others - her mind frays, and hence, her input are no longer sought. She is insignificant. Hagar has been commended as a rounded, complex character - a “realistic” documentation of old age. Nevertheless, Margaret Laurence was thirty years when she wrote “the stone angel” and thus had yet to experience old age. I wonder, then, if Hagar is indeed an accurate portrait, or a deposit of tropes, defined solely by her advanced age rather than the fact that she is just a person, a character who happens to be old. Simone De Beauvoir declared (in her 60s) that “Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.”

In some ways, however, Hagar is not a stereotype. She is strong, indomitable - as her body decays, her will remains stone-hard. Her crankiness can also be defined as a means of clinging to her independence ...to her ideals. I was reminded of one of my favorite poems by Dyland Thomas: “Do not go gently into that good night/ rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Hagar’s infirmities - and impending demise - are inevitable, yet she does not submit, nor adapt the quiet introspection that seems to cling to the elderly, but rather “rages.”

Margaret Laurence grew up in the prairies - raised in a puritan town akin to Hagar’s Manakawa. This town was populated by careworn wives and mothers who are perhaps memorialized, as one, in Hagar.

Like these women, Hagar grew up to fit the rough hewn, and narrow edges of her environment. She was forged in the name of chastity, and backbone, and pride - as prescribed by both society and her father. At times, it appears she wants to break this mould. She marries against her father’s wishes, leaves her husband, and, years later, runs away from her son,Marvin. Yet, despite these attempts, she retains her shape. Her pride is untroubled through all circumstances and all environments. She carries her memories and lessons within her - for example, the image of the stone angel never seems to fade. She is magnetized to it - and always returns.

Aptly, Hagar equates herself to this monument. Upright, proud, and unfeeling all her life. Yet liable to crumble, and erode, and recede under various growths. This predicament parallels a poem by Percy Byron Shelley:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Hagar clings to the objects she amassed in her lifetime. As a wife, and housekeeper, she maintained cleanliness all her life, yet let her relationships, overlooked, ran dry. The “stone” part thus seems neat and tidy in my mind. But then I wondered about “the angel bit.”

Sure enough, some light research revealed biblical vein that runs throughout the novel. “Hagar” shares her name with a handmaiden forced to bear the son of Abraham. She flees in the face of Abraham’s wife’s (Sara’s) cruelty yet, at a creek, is urged to return by an angel who promises her son will be populate nations.Hagar Shipley, too, put much stock into her son, John. A son who seemed to deteriorate piece by piece before finally perishing in a car accident.

Hagar also ran away - to escape what she perceived to be the cruelty of Marvin and Doris. She finds herself without water - as what occurred to the original Hagar when exiled to the dessert - and meets a stranger (an angel?) who later witnesses her weep for the first time in decades. Tears that show Hagar is still a human - who needs water, and feels pain just like the rest of us.

As much as Hagar fancies herself made of stone, I think of her more as water. The narrative she relays, at least, is very water like; a deluge of emotions and memories that sting like the sea. Collected over her lifetime, welled up inside, and finally released upon her readers. In the final words of the book, Hagar is snatching a glass of water from Doris to prove she is still capable. Still alive.

And hence, I do not believe Hagar’s legacy lies in a stone angel. Nor that her pride has doomed her to decay. There is quote I stumbled on by Banksy that I believe applies to this situation. ‘They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time. “

Hagar is a ‘Holy Terror” - as termed by her son with equal parts anger and tenderness. She is the toiling, proud women, who remains, imprinted in our minds. Her name echoing indefinitely through english classes and hence, history - a name she was called only by her husband, her love, a name tying her to a long-dead handmaid. A name spewed vehemently from the mouth of each disgruntled reader, though remaining etched, stubbornly, in memory.

Hagar.