CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF MARGARET LAURENCE Also edited by Colin Nicholson

TROPIC CRUCIBLE: Self and Theory in Language and Literature (co-editor) ALEXANDER POPE: Essays for the Tercentenary Margaret Laurence (1926-87)

(Courtesy of Trent University, Ontario) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence

Edited by COLIN NICHOLSON Senior Lecturer, Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh

M MACMILLAN Editorial matter and selection, chapter 12 ©Colin Nicholson 1990; Chapter 1 ©Clara Thomas 1990; Chapter 2 ©David Richards 1990; Chapter 3 ©Shirley Chew 1990; Chapter 4 ©Simone Vauthier 1990; Chapter 5 ©Michael A. Peterman 1990; Chapter 6 ©Elizabeth Waterston 1990; Chapter 7 ©Coral Ann Howells 1990; Chapter 8 ©Nancy Bailey 1990; Chapter 9 ©Peter Easingwood 1990; Chapter 10 © Lynette Hunter 1990; Chapter 11 ©John Thieme 1990; Chapter 13 ©Gayle Greene 1990; Chapter 14 ©Barbara Godard 1990; Chapter 15 ©Greta M. K. Coger 1990. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-46069-6

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First published 1990.

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British Ubrary Cataloguing in Publication Data Critical Approaches to the fiction of Margaret Laurence 1. Fiction in English. Canadian writers. Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987 I. Nicholson, C. E. (Colin Edward), 1944- 813'.54

ISBN 978-1-349-10094-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10092-7 ( eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7 Contents

Margaret Laurence frontispiece

Preface vii

Acknowledgements XV

Notes on the Contributors xvi

1 'Planted firmly in some soil': Margaret Laurence and the Canadian Tradition in Fiction Clara Thomas 1

2 'Leave the Dead some room to dance!': Margaret Laurence and Africa David Richards 16

3 'Some truer image': A Reading of The Stone Angel Shirley Chew 35

4 Images in Stones, Images in Words: Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel Simone Vauth.ier 46

5 'All that happens, one must try to understand': The Kindredness of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel Michael A. Peterman 71

6 Double is Trouble: Twins in A Jest of God Elizabeth Waterston 83

7 Weaving Fabrications: Women's Narratives in A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers Coral Ann Howells 93

v vi Contents

8 Identity in The Fire-Dwellers Nancy Bailey 107

9 The Realism of Laurence's Semi-Autobiographical Fiction Peter Easingwood 119

10 Consolation and Articulation in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Lynette Hunter 133

11 Acknowledging Myths: The Image of Europe in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners and Jack Hodgins's The Invention of the World John Thieme 152

12 'There and not there': Aspects of Scotland in Laurence's Writing Colin Nicholson 162

13 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners: The Uses of the Past Gayle Greene 177

14 Caliban's Revolt: The Discourse of the (M)Other Barbara Godard 208

15 Margaret Laurence's Manawaka: A Canadian Yoknapatawpha Greta M. K. Coger 228

Index 247 Preface

When I first began asking people whether they would like to contribute to a collection of essays exploring some of the issues raised in her fiction, Margaret Laurence was alive. On the one occasion that I was able to meet her, in 1983, it was through the good offices of Malcolm Ross, then Visiting Professor in Literature at Edinburgh University's Centre of Canadian Studies, and Adele Wiseman in Toronto. Canada Council footed the bill, while their counterparts in London, Canada House's Academic Relations department, came up with the label 'Faculty Enrichment Award Scheme'. At a large dinner-party in her house Adele Wiseman enabled me to put together an unusual three-week long seminar on current writing in Toronto talking to several of its producers. Adele also suggested that I should visit Laurence at Lakefield, and gave me telephone contact. I spent an afternoon and evening at Lakefield and for supper we were joined by the Scottish writers Andrew Greig and Kathleen Jamie. Andrew had brought his guitar, and I seem to remember that by the end of the evening we were all singing Scottish songs with more enthusiasm than ability. But earlier in the day Margaret Laurence had asked how could I most usefully spend my time with her. At that time I had read only one of her novels and told her so. Well then, after a moment's pause, would I like to see her collection of photographs. And so for more than an hour she talked me through a photographic record of moments in her life. It remains a vivid memory and something for which I have had considerable cause to be grateful when subsequently reading her work. A distinctive interweaving of her life and her life of writing is after all one of the attributes of Laurence's fiction. But it is impossible to read that fiction without being impressed by the scale of the achievement. By giving imaginative shape to contours and definitions of Canadian sensibility, Laurence has added to the ways in which we can understand ourselves and each other. So this collection was first conceived as a token in celebration of the many different kinds of recognition which her writing inspires. It would have been pleasant to give her a copy. Time was against us in that. But the impetus of compassionate human personality which informs her work makes it difficult for us not to think of

vii viii Preface her as still being present, and of these essays as a continuation of relationships in other ways. At any rate, it is in that spirit of constructive engagement that this collection is offered.

In order to set an appropriate context of Canadian practice and precedent, Clara Thomas, one of Laurence's most widely read critics, considers ways in which the novelist developed and exten­ ded elements recognisable as a Canadian tradition in fiction. The illustrative topoi which Thomas selects include the climatic geography of the Canadian West, Scots-Canadian themes, the small town, the recognition of home, the registration of domestic speech, and the clear voice of women writing. And in this last respect, Thomas suggests for it a cross-gender representativeness. The historical coincidence of a maturing Canadian sense of purpose and place with a more widely articulate feminist awareness lends strength and credibility to Laurence's representative aspect. Then, much of the novelist's own status as paradigm stems, in Thomas's words, 'from our myth of the golden west and its demolition'. In similar vein, Thomas brings into focus the ethnic lineage in fiction to which Laurence is an adherent, and which she inventively restructures. Scotch myths and small-town ambience are here contextualised and connected with the ways in which Laurence exploited them for narrative purposes. But what then seems to be immediately called for is fuller consideration of the impact of expatriation upon her work. Laurence was uniquely placed to respond in distinctive ways to her experiences in Africa, and those experiences have in tum been seen as formative in the emergence of her own novelistic skills. Her encounter with colonialism was, itself, contextualised by her developing sense of Canada's historical situation and record. She could bring into play a different perspec­ tive. These are the areas of her work which David Richards explores, placing some of Laurence's sentimental attachments in other analytical frameworks, opening up some of their ambiguities and looking, too, at the positive interaction between Laurence and Africa. Chinua Achebe publicly acknowledges a sense of indebtedness, and Richards offers a comparative scheme which sets Achebe' s and Laurence's work in ways which suggest that for their literary relationships the river flowed both ways. Shirley Chew's essay on the first novel in the Manawaka cycle, The Stone Angel (1964), concerns itself with the archaeology of Preface ix memory. Hagar Shipley's backward glance over main-travelled roads is often cantankerous or troubled in other ways. Chew discerns an opposition between a search and a yearning for stasis on Hagar's part and narrative strategies which undermine coherence and deny serenity. Within these tensions, Laurence's character-studies group around the angel in various ways. Then, in a French reading of this novel as the play of signifier around signified, Simone Vauthier analyses ways in which the figure of the stone angel reads, and is read by, its contexts. As motif, the recurrent image enshrines considerable meaning. Laurence was to call her next novel A Jest of God (1966) and the novel which followed that features Stacey Cameron/MacAindra who can archly remonstrate with god-spoken words of her own imagining. Little surprise, then, that The Stone Angel should subject celestial represen­ tation to various human resonances and to prairie wind and weather. To read The Stone Angel is to encounter an icon of movement from sightlessness to fall, to partial restoration. The stone figure plies within and across an intriguing field of signifiers; a movement in which both petrified and angelic attributes are displayed. Hagar and the stone angel become, in precise ways, intertexts of each other. As elements in Hagar's story reveal, Laurence could show sympathy for those expatriated Scots often associated with Jacobite tendencies. But both here and in her subsequent depiction of self-made success in Canada, the reforming impetus behind much of what she wrote suggests deep affinities with those historical 'Improvers' who first encroached upon High­ land territory. Laurence gives fictive shape to possible futures. It is, then, hardly surprising that she spoke so eloquently in favour of nuclear disarmament. Also, a middle-class upbringing coloured her perceptions in any number of ways. Taking his cue from a remark Laurence herself made about an affinity and relationship, Michael Peterman com­ pares The Stone Angel and Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle' (1976). Peterman's concern is with narrative effects stemming from differ­ ent positions in a social structure and differing emphases upon the signs and meanings of social status. The politics of these writings are ventilated. To facilitate an examination of interactions between contemporary social pressures and the writing of fiction, Elizabeth Waterston takes the figure of the double helix as imaginative analogue, and sees A Jest of God as both a response to currents of thought and feeling associated with the 1960s and as a divining of X Preface more perennial problems in human relationships. The literal theme of twins opens up into a consideration of bondings, separations and symbiotic developments in Laurence's second Manawaka novel. Polarities and cross-pollinations inform the structure of a response which reads the novel as the most puzzling and powerful in Laurence's work. And forming a continuity with these concerns, though not necessarily sharing the same emphases, Coral Ann Howells looks at the narrative strategies by which Laurence presents her protagonists. The temporal registration of female subjectivity is one of Laurence's major achievements, and the female narrators of A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers (1969) both autobiographically order their experiences. Given the pronounced historical cast of Laurence's imagination, we are able to trace how interior sensibility and socio-historical development coalesce fictively. Howells discloses the divisions and self-divisions that legitimise fantasy. The techniques of realist narrative reach into other modes to express, and contain, the entrapments and repres­ sions routinely if differently experienced by Rachel and her sister. Continuity merges with changes. Whereas Howells builds upon the split between Rachel who stays at home in Manawaka and Stacey who moves west to Vancouver, Nancy Bailey returns to a different aspect of twinning in the elaboration of a Canadian matriarch, and in effect produces a chapter in the psychic biography of a writer's development. Stacey Cameron and Stacey MacAindra combine to form an archetypal figure of middle-aged, mother-of-four survival. In this process comedy comes into play, including a wit that is hysteric and laconic by turns and sometimes both simultaneously. Stacey's coming to self-knowledge is the subject here, where her lack of writerly skills is read as repressed potential. Laurence paints a portrait of woman in a small-town prairie environment who is unfulfilled in the roles imposed upon her by a community conservative in its expectations and desires and capable of religious rancour in pursuit of its preferred values. It was not, perhaps, the most auspicious of surroundings for the attempt, but Margaret Laurence took significant steps towards expressing the erotic in Canadian literature, and in ways, moreover, which fictively ruffled and which in actuality continue to ruffle the preconceptions of those who choose not to countenance either sameness concealed or difference revealed. If there had been, earlier, a sense of grand comedy in Hagar Preface xi inviting a patriarchal God of Scots-Irish descent to make up his own mind about whether or not to bestow his blessing upon her, there is also a fine and mischievous irony in the narrative fact that the male voice with which Stacey seems on most equitable, though not always comfortable, terms is the one she invents most completely for herself - the voice of God. But then, Laurence also created for us Grandfather Connors, who certainly registers as a genuine figure in a specifically Canadian patriarchy, though not unknown, mutatis mutandis, elsewhere. Perhaps it is because they present a woman thinking and speaking independently about such things as localised perceptions of a Christian God and about male and female sexuality that Laurence's novels are still subject to hostility from people fearful for the future of established icon­ ographies whose codes and prescriptions they profess to find congenial. As she describes their congruence with a range of archetypes, Nancy Bailey suggests other ways of encountering the figures in Laurence's fiction. Considering the codes and decorums of realist narrative, Peter Easingwood' s analysis grounds itself in a series of reactions to the ways in which A Bird in the House (1970) deviates from them, elaborating contingent responses to experience. Vanessa MacLeod's self-conscious narrations question novelistic procedures, explore narrative proprieties. Vanessa is revising as well as recording her own experience, and Laurence is reconstructing networks of relationship which foreground a differently perceived Canadian past. To claim the Metis as ancestors is to suggest a radical restructuring of the Canadian muthos. Easingwood' s trace of the displacement of autobiographical material into fiction enables a reading of the evocation of the lost world of the Metis as compensation for a contemporaneity experienced as both limiting and mediocre. Romance nudges realism aside, providing Laurence with the necessary space to inscribe with resonance and vitality quotidian small-town life in the depression era. One of the most difficult things Vanessa MacLeod has to acknowledge is that her own grandparents were, in fact, pioneers. The acknowledgement knocks a lot of gloss off hitherto prevalent (and continuing) North American notions of the pioneer figure. But having learned this much, Vanessa can then appreciate that in a country as young as hers, history is family and family memories. The span of her own life is more naturally perceived as part of that unfolding story. So history, more particularly in its xii Preface guise as legend or myth, varies according to the perceptions and preferences of the subjects who speak it. Like Vanessa, Morag produces herself, but not in circumstances of her own making. Yet in Laurence's large scale of endeavour, as Lynette Hunter shows, a novel like The Diviners (1974) is also characterised by a relentless refusal to be heroic or to search for determinist patterns. Hunter's structural identifications are placed at the service of character­ presentation. In the discovery and expression in a life of writing of Morag's own identity, her question 'what kind of character am I?' receives a response which tracks the writing of her own life into fictive credibility. The literary projects of author and character illuminate each other in interesting ways as we watch transform­ ations from prairie girlhood into Canadian writer. In this reading, The Diviners structures 'a documentary of memory pathways', in which provisionality seems key. And if, as Hunter remarks, the novel presents history initially as legend whereafter Morag learns of the changing of legendary contours in each different retelling, John Thieme's essay follows the line of enquiry, using comparative techniques to chart some of the complex patterns of mythic refurbishment and rejection in The Diviners and Jack Hodgins's The Invention ofthe World (1977). Whereas Laurence foregrounds Scottish ancestry, and reworks the relevance of its referential framework to her contemporary Canada, with Hodgins, Celtic origination myths trace back to Irish forebears. Hodgins's post-modem fiction constructs characters who are in part defined by their responses to a specific location in Vancouver Island. But both novels realise the acknowledgement that European origins are increasingly remote. Both focus alternately, as well as differently, upon lived Canadian experience: and both novels are effectively reconstructions and reintegrations of mythic histories whose irreducible difference and otherness is recognised even in the act of fictive assimilation. The essay which follows Thieme's emphasises Scottish traces in the patternings by which Laurence legitimises, for Highland memory, domestic space and native affiliations. For these complex processes of retrieval, selection and development, Laurence's image of the river flowing both ways makes the figure of the double-helix not only appropriate, but variously suggestive. The use of myth in the refiguring of history as personal experience is a concern of several of the essays here and it is perhaps to be expected that The Diviners should be the preferred terrain. Preface xiii

But for Gayle Greene, canonical textuality offers an appropriate point of entry. First framing her discussion with reference to Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1973), Greene ponders why The Diviners should turn to male-gender role models in literary prede­ cessors. She proposes that Laurence reworks some of the values implicit in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) and in The Tempest in ways that imply critiques. But similarities as well as differences are perceived. In both The Tempest and The Diviners, for example, art redeems the past, the sins of the elders are forgiven by the young, and the future is represented by a daughter. But against Miranda's passivity Laurence sets Pique, sexually and artistically active. So The Diviners reworks the myth of the fortunate fall into a reflection upon the nature of fictionality. Laurence reworks, too, epic quest towards a feminist perspective both in, and of, literature, and this entails a measure of liberation from the male-centred texts with which she creatively associates. Still working within similar parameters of reference, though with a different emphasis of feminist perception, Barbara Godard pro­ duces a more combative reading of The Diviners as the revenge of the female artist upon male-ordered literary precedent, in this case Milton and Shakespeare. In the epic scale of such a context, the sisterly assimilation and even, in a sense, dismissal of matriarchal ancestors in the figure of Catherine Parr Traill comes to seem :Umost routine. As Morag plays Prospero, Shakespearian echoes serve Laurence's purposes in several ways. In the spinning of her allusive web, as Godard quotes her, Laurence fulfils and demonstrates the values she inscribes in her fiction. 'Try to feel in your heart's core the reality of others.' Morag explores her own identity by opening herself to the Other, and the play of difference is preferred over other options. Rival senses of what constitutes the literary are promulgated. Yet for all this, Laurence remains a writer with both feet planted fmnly in Canadian soil. Local, topographical and domestic equivalences and correlations between Neepawa, the place she stood on, and Manawaka, the world she imagined, form the substance of Greta Coger's contribution, which includes material from interviews with people who remember Laurence growing up among them. It is, of course, difficult to determine how far these recorded responses are themselves conditioned by the Laurence myth - firmly established as it already is as an attraction in Neepawa. But interactions between memory and myth would xiv Preface anyway have appealed to the novelist; and Coger produces con­ tinuing evidence of shared experience from the community. In the face of Faulkner's wry claim to being sole proprietor of his fictive mundo, Laurence seems, rather, to privilege the development of imaginative senses of co-ownership for the country of the mind she has bequeathed to us. C.N. Acknowledgements

My thanks are due in the first instance to all the contributors represented here. A collective effort is precisely that, and without their all-round support we would not be in a position to offer this collection of essays in its present form. I would, though, like to express my gratitude to Peter Easingwood, convenor of the litera­ ture group in the British Association of Canadian Studies. His early and continuing encouragement has been a great help. To him my particular thanks, and to Coral Howells, too, for productive suggestions at an early stage. From Canada, Clara Thomas's prompt reply and enthusiasm for the project were invaluable. And both Elizabeth Waterston at Guelph University and Michael Peterman at Trent University have been unstinting in the provision of material information and advice. They gave time and energy beyond the call of duty: so to them, a special word of thanks.

Michael A. Peterman's essay, "'All that happens, one must try to understand": The Kindredness of Tillie Olsen's "Tell me a Riddle" and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel', is reprinted by kind permission of Chryst! Verduyn, editor of Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation (Vancouver: Broadview Press, 1988).

John Thieme's essay,'Acknowledging Myths: The Image of Europe in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners and Jack Hodgins's The Inven­ tion of the World', is reprinted by kind permission of the editors of Commonwealth.

Greta M. K. Coger's essay 'Margaret Laurence's Manawaka: A Canadian Yoknapatawpha' is reprinted by kind permission of the editors of Crosscurrent.

XV Notes on the Contributors

Nancy Bailey teaches English literature at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She has published articles incorporating Jungian approaches on all the Laurence novels, as well as on other American, Canadian and Commonwealth novelists.

Shirley Chew teaches English literature at the University of Leeds. She is the editor of Arthur Hugh Clough: Selected Poems and of Re-visions of Canadian Literature. She has published on English and on Commonwealth literature in various journals.

Greta M. K. Coger teaches English literature at Northwest Missis­ sippi College. She is the compiler of Index of Subjects, Proverbs, and Themes in the Writings ofWole Soyinka, and has published articles in various journals.

Peter Easingwood teaches English literature at the University of Dundee and is Convenor of the Literature Group in the British Association of Canadian Studies. He is co-editor of Canadian Story and History: 1885-1985.

Barbara Godard teaches English literature at the University of York (Canada) and is a founding co-editor of Tessera. She has published widely on Canadian and Quebec writers and has translated Quebec women writers. She is editor of Gynocritics!Gynocritiques, and her book The Listening Eye: Audrey Thomas, Her Life and Work will appear soon.

Gayle Greene teaches English literature at Scripps College (Clare­ mont, California) and is co-editor of The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare and of Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism.

Coral Ann Howells teaches English literature at the University of Reading and is Secretary of the British Association of Canadian Studies. Her essays have appeared in Canadian and Com­ monwealth literary journals, and she is the author of Private and Fictional Worlds: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s.

xvi Notes on the Contributors xvii

Lynette Hunter teaches English literature at the Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at the University of Leeds. She is the author of several books including Rhetorical Stance in Modern Literature and Modern Allegory and Fantasy.

Colin Nicholson teaches English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is co-editor of Tropic Crucible: Self and Theory in lAnguage and Literature and editor of Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary. He has published articles on Scottish, American and Canadian literature.

Michael A. Peterman teaches English literature at Trent University, Canada, and is current editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies. He co-edited Suzanna Moodie: Letters of a Lifetime and is the author of Robertson Davies. David Richards teaches English literature at the University of Leeds. He has published articles in various journals on English and Commonwealth literature. He is currently writing a book on literature and anthropology, and is co-authoring a book on recent Commonwealth literature. John Thieme teaches English literature at the Polytechnic of North London. He is an Associate Editor of The Year's Work in English Studies and the author of The Web ofTradition: Uses ofAllusion in V. S. Naipaul' s Fiction. He has published extensively on Commonwealth writers.

Oara Thomas is Professor Emeritus at York University (Canada) and is York University Libraries' Canadian Studies Research Fellow. In a widely productive life she has written biographies, many articles, and introductions to volumes in the New Canadian Library series. Her guidebook to English-Canadian literature, Our Nature, Our Voices: Vol. I appeared in 1973. She is perhaps best known for The Manawaka World of Margaret lAurence. In 1989 she was awarded the Northern Telecom Prize.

Simone Vauthier teaches mainly American and Canadian literature at the Universite de Strasbourg IT, France. She has been editor and co-editor of Recherches Anglaises et Americaines (RANAM) for several years. She is currently working on Canadian short fiction, and has published articles in various journals. xviii Notes on the Contributors

Elizabeth Waterston teaches English literature at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and is the author of Survey: A Short History of Canadian Literature. She is co-editor of The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery and has published extensively on Canadian, Scottish, and children's literature.