University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Summer 1999 A Town Of The Mind" Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Ofmanawaka Nora Foster Stovel University of Alberta Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Foster Stovel, Nora, "A Town Of The Mind" Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Ofmanawaka" (1999). Great Plains Quarterly. 1592. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1592 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. '~ TOWN OF THE MIND" MARGARET LAURENCE'S MYTHICAL MICROCOSM OFMANAWAKA NORA FOSTER STOVEL A strange place it was, that place where the world began. A place of incredible happen­ ings, splendours and revelations, despairs like multitudinous pits of isolated hells. A place of shadow-spookiness, inhabited by the unknowable dead. A place of jubilation and of mourn­ ing, horrible and beautiful. It was, in fact, a small prairie town.! This passage introduces "Where the World it illuminates the autobiographical import of Began," the concluding piece in Margaret the essays-perhaps because the pattern of her Laurence's 1976 collection of travel essays, life was clear to her by the time she wrote it in Heart of a Stranger, which functions as an auto­ 1976: "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that biography, charting her life journey. Laurence they are all, in one way or another, travel ar­ wrote a preface to this collection that exists in ticles. And by travel, I mean both those voy­ manuscript at McMaster University, but which ages which are outer and those voyages which was never published-unfortunately, because are inner.... I have not arranged these essays in the order in which they were written. It seemed better to arrange them geographically, as travel articles, and this also includes a kind Nora Foster Stove! is Associate Professor of English at of thematic arrangement, for they end, as most the University of Alberta. She is author of Margaret outer and inner journeys end, in a home-com­ Drabble: Symbolic Moralist (1989), Rachel's ing."2 The small prairie town referred to in Children: Margaret Laurence's AlestofGod (1992), and Stacey' Choice: Margaret Laurence's The Fire Heart of a Stranger is, of course, Neepawa, Dwellers ( 1993). She is currently writing a biography Manitoba. of Margaret Laurence. Neepawa was the model for Margaret Laurence's Manawaka-the name an amalgam of Manitoba and Neepawa. In "A Place to [GPQ 19 (Summer 1999): 191-202] Stand On," the opening essay of Heart of a 191 192 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1999 Stranger, originally titled "Sources," Laurence Manawaka is also specifically, historically, and clarifies connections and delineates differences geographically authentic, dense with objects between her factual, personal hometown and and true to its place and its development her fictional, universal "town of the mind": through time."3 "Manawaka is not my hometown of Neepaw a­ I agree. But when I first visited Neepawa in it has elements of Neepaw a, especially in some 1988, after the Margaret Laurence memorial of the descriptions of places, such as the cem­ conference at Brandon University following etery on the hill or the Wachakwa valley .... her death on 5 January 1987, I was shocked. In almost every way, however, Manawaka is Neepawa was just like Manawaka in particu­ not so much anyone prairie town as an amal­ lars-from the Brick House to the Little House, gam of many prairie towns. Most of all, I like from the Regal Cafe to the Roxy Theatre, from to think, it is simply itself, a town of the mind River Street to Mountain Avenue, from the [italics mine], my own private world, ... which cemetery on the hill to the river in the val­ one hopes will ultimately relate to the outer ley-it was all there, exactly as in the novels. world which we all share" (HS, 3-4). Margaret But it had none of their power. It was just a Laurence metamorphoses the actual town of boring little burg-no different from any other Neepawa into the mythological microcosm of prairie town or any small town anywhere­ Manawaka, the setting of her Canadian nov­ utterly lacking the mythic power of Laurence's els-The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God Manawaka. Then I saw the trestle bridge where (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), A Bird in the John Shipley is killed in The Stone Angel, ex­ House (1970), and The Diviners (1974)-as I cept that the train tracks were gone, leaving will argue in this essay. Nothing can traverse only the two earthen supports with a gap in national boundaries so easily as the human the middle-Canada's answer to Tintern Ab­ imagination, and the artist uses fiction to rec­ bey perhaps. Then I realized that Neepawa/ reate a private kingdom for Everyman or Manawaka was both a boring little burg and a Everywoman to inhabit. town of mythic power-just as our birthplace Many great writers have created mythical appears small to our adult eyes, yet still retains microcosms based on their birthplaces: we re­ the magical power it had for us as children. call Walter Scott's Waverley, Thomas Hardy's That is the miracle that Margaret Laurence Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha recreates in Manawaka. County, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, In this paper I will argue that Laurence is a Ohio. Canadian fiction is famous for its re­ mythmaker who mythologizes not only her gional richness: "A 'Dictionary of Canadian home town of Neepawa as Manawaka in her Mythology' would contain a very large entry fiction but also the actual Neepawa in her under 'Small Town,'" as Clara Thomas declares nonfiction. To support this claim, I draw on in The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. her collection of travel essays, Heart of a One thinks of Stephen Leacock's Mariposa, Stranger, a text that is virtually ignored by Sinclair Ross's Horizon, Robertson Davies's critics, even though it was the last adult book Deptford, and Alice Munro's Jubilee, to name Laurence published. but a few. Thomas insists that Manawaka is The child may indeed be mother of the art­ the most famous of these microcosms: "But no ist, for both view the world through magical town in our literature has been so consistently lenses. Laurence's mythologizing of Neepawa and extensively developed as Margaret as Manawaka is essentially a child's view of Laurence's Manawaka. Through five works of reality. She uses this quotation from Graham fiction, it has grown as a vividly realized, mi­ Greene's Collected Essays to introduce "A Place crocosmic world, acting as a setting for the to Stand On": "'The creative writer perceives dilemmas of its unique individuals and also his own world once and for all in childhood exercising its own powerful dynamic on them. and adolescence, and his whole career is an "A TOWN OF THE MIND" 193 effort to illustrate his private world in terms of nary occurrences in his life. Gradually during the great public world we all share'" (HS, O. these first years the child acquires knowledge Laurence responds, "If Graham Greene is of an objective world and is able to free his right-as I think he is-in his belief that a observations and his conclusions from the dis­ writer's career is 'an effort to illustrate his pri­ tortions of primitive thought."4 Fraiburg's de­ vate world in terms of the great public world scription of the child as magician sounds like we all share,' then I think it is understandable a definition of the creative artist, and her dis­ that so much of my writing relates to the kind tinction between the imaginative and ratio­ of prairie town in which I was born and in nal methods reads like a distinction between which I first began to be aware of myself" (HS, the artistic and scientific modes of thought, as 6). She begins "Where the World Began" by delineated by C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede explaining how her childhood home created Lecture on The Two Cultures and the Scientific her adult vision: "Because that settlement and Revolution. Karl Popper argued, "Science must that land were my first and for many years my begin with myths"-a view Claude Levi­ only real knowledge of this planet, in some Strauss developed, for myths explain or nar­ profound way they remain my world, my way rate scientific truths. of viewing. My eyes were formed there" (HS, We can also extend Fraiberg's argument 237). And she concludes her personal essay from early childhood to ancient or primitive with this manifesto: "This is where my world cultures, if we consider myth as defined by began. A world which includes the ancestors­ Myer H. Abrams in the following passage: both my own and other people's ancestors who became mine. A world which formed me, and In classical Greek, "mythos" signified any continues to do so, even while I fought it in story or plot, whether true or false. In its some of its aspects, and continue to do so. A central modern significance, a myth is one world which gave me my own lifework to do, story in a my tho logy-a system of heredi­ because it was here that I learned the sight of tary stories which were once believed to be my own particular eyes" (HS, 244).