351. The Stone Angel

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The Stone Angel

by Margaret Laurence

The University of Chicago Press 1964

P5 “Now I am rampant with memory... To carp like this -- it’s my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom. Marvin thinks it disgraceful of me to smoke, at my age, ninety. To him there is something distressing in the sight of Hagar Shipley, who by some mischance happens to be his mother, with a little white burning tube held saucily between arthritic fingers...” Kind of see Marvin’s side here. Though of course this was written in the ‘60s, today it would be even worse or at least mean something else.

P104 Hagar: “Do you--” I hesitate. “Do you ever get used to such a place?” [while visiting the old folk’s home.]

Mrs. Steiner: She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once.
“Do you get used to life?” she says. “Can you answer me that? It all comes as a surprise. You get your first period, and you’re amazed -- I can have babies now -- such a thing! When the children come, you think -- Is it mine? Did it come out of me? Who could believe it? When you can’t have them any more, what a shock -- It’s finished -- so soon?”

I peer at her, thinking how peculiar that she knows so much.

“You’re right. I never got used to a blessed thing.”

P111 line 2 “when let I’m out” I’m let out. There were also a number of instances of missing close quotation marks.

What an amazing narrator, and we never leave her point of view. The most revealing passages are when she’s drinking with the insurance man in the fish place and when the preacher sings for her. Otherwise she seems entirely shut off even to herself. And she so reminds me of Gladys Trede even down to her use of “black as the ace of spades.” Again, we don’t see any kind of a perennial philosophy shift as she nears death. It does seem that she finally realizes, at least to some extent, how she has always misjudged Marvin. Though if she suddenly recovered, I doubt she would change a lick.

As awful as she is, she does usually adjust to the curves thrown at her to some extent. From her marriage to the women she shares space with in the hospital. Everyone except Doris. And it’s really hard to tell how unfair she’s being to Doris since we only have her perception of her.

I like what Robertson Davies writes, “...The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader toward the self-recognition that Hagar misses.”