Karina Garcia
The Stone Angel Analysis Assignment 5. Analyze and interpret the theme of pride as it reveals significant aspects of the central character’s personality. Pride is such an intriguing yet simple word. It is truly extraordinary how one word can lay the foundation for the reasoning behind of people’s daily decisions. Pride shapes many of their most beloved characters in many of their most beloved stories. Not only pride uses to rationalize the decisions that they make regarding themselves. Pride can also be derived from many of the decisions they make that impact their relationship with others. People often let pride mask their true feelings. Pride is defined as the quality or sate of being proud. This definition can't be more applicable than it is to Hagar's character in the short story “The Stone Angel”, by Margaret Laurence. Throughout “The Stone Angel”, it is clearly apparent that whether it being negative or positive, pride has a significant effect on many of Hagar's relationships with other characters. The main character is Hagar Shipley refused to compromise which shaped the outcome of her life as well as the lives of those around her. “Pride was my wilderness and the demon that led me there was fear… [I was] never free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched.” (Laurence, 292). Hagar’s pride and stubbornness were the causes of her failed relationships and lack of love in her life. Her excessive pride destroyed her relationships with her father, brother and husband. It also led to the death of her son John. Her stubbornness caused her marriage to dissolve, Marvin to be unhappy, her daughter-in-law’s frustration, and her own death. Hagar’s overwhelming pride was the reason she could not show love or affection to those around her. She inherited her pride from her father and from an early age she always refused to show emotion because she was too proud of let anyone see her weaknesses. Her father made aware that she had “backbone” and that “she took after him” (p.10). The first sigh of Hagar’s excessive pride was shown when her father scolded her for telling a customer that there were bugs in the barrel of raisins. She refused to cry before and after the punishment: “I wouldn’t let him see me cry, I was so enraged” (p.9). She continued to build a wall around herself to hide her emotions. Her pride interfered with many relationships in her life. Hagar’s pride and her lack of emotions ruined her relationships with her father, brother, husband and son. Hagar’s stubbornness was another cause of her and her family’s unhappiness. Due to her stubbornness Hagar didn’t find true love. In addition, Hagar’s stubbornness got in the way of her and her family’s happiness and destroyed her and the lives of those she cared about. In conclusion, Hagar’s Shipley’s refusal to compromise, due to her excessive pride and stubbornness shaped the outcome of her life and those around her. Her pride destroyed her relationships with her father, brother, husband and her son John. Her stubbornness denied happiness for her marriage, Marvin and Doris. It also led to the cause of her death. 2. To what extent is Hagar responsible for her isolation from society in The Stone Angel. In life, one sees that a person is often solely responsible for her/his own isolation from society. In The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, the author illustrates that various traits in Hagar’s personality ultimately cause her isolation in all her relationships. The pride she inherits from her father gives her a false sense of superiority. As a result, she keeps herself emotionally distant from the people she loves the most, and consequently, the choices she makes drive her deeper and deeper into solitude. These aspects of Hagar’s personality are what prevent her from making true human connections. Indeed, Hagar is controlled by her pride. Laurence uses Hagar’s attachment to her pride to demonstrate that the adversity that one faces is responsible for shaping character and identity. The resulting consequences of Hagar’s extreme pride define her character by causing her to judge others, have a lack of emotion, and suffer from self-imposed isolation. The challenges that Hagar faces throughout her life ultimately mould her character and define her to be a stone-cold woman who holds no joy in her life. Henceforth, Hagar Shipley endures many trials and eventually comes to the fruition of her redemption. The road to redemption, the changes that she experiences, is shown by the entire plot of the story. In essence, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, the story of Hagar tells of a very elderly woman and her struggle as she comes to terms with her past. The imagery associated with the motif of escape in The Stone Angel, found throughout Hagar’s journey, emphasizes her own self-centred personality. Hagar’s escape from the various men in her life has led to her strong independence, her destructive selfishness, and her undeniable pride.

4. Analyze and interpret Laurence’s use of flower imagery as it reveals significant aspects of the central character’s personality. Margaret Laurence uses image of prim peonies and wild cowslips along the Manawaka cemetery. Hagar is the protagonists in the novel of The Stone Angel, describes the “funeral-parlour perfume of the planted peonies, dark crimson and wallpaper pink, the pompous blossoms hanging leadenly bowed down with the weight of themselves and the weight of the rain”. This foreign flower is planted along the side of cemetery by men, not nature; they serve to “civilize” the land. This image is contrasted by Hagar’s description of the cowslips, who’s “scent would rise momentarily” through “the hot rush of disrespectful wind. They were tough-rooted, wild and gaudy flowers. Although they were torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking by could catch the faint, musky, dust tinged smell of things that grew untended and had grown always”. The image of these flowers evoke the contrast of civilized versus uncivilized, foreign and native, Jason Currie versus Brampton Shipley. Though Hagar understands that the planted peonies must be left to decorate the earth, she has a subtle inclination towards the wild and musky cowslips. But despite her inclinations, both are now a part of the cemetery’s surroundings. Consequently, though Jason Currie represents the kept and upright values that helped to civilize Manawaka, Bram is something more liberating and closer to the earth. Hagar signifies the connection of both natures within herself when she joins their names on her family plot in the cemetery, “so the stone said Currie on one side and Shipley on the other”, connected by the hyphen that is Hagar (184). This is the symbol of two pioneering families brought together for the purpose of growth, transformation, and reconciliation. Hagar is the medium between the two archetypical extremes, which represents the essence of the prairie pioneer. By the very fact that Hagar is a woman coming into her own, she reflects the notion of a young country coming of age. Struggling between English and French, native and foreign, Canadian and not British or American, Canada similarly establishes itself with its own identity. It has become a nation of pluralistic elements, integrating the histories of century-old settlers alongside newly received cultures to create an ever-changing “meta-culture” that continues to evolve even today.

1. Analyze and interpret the following statement. Hagar’s inability to express her inner emotions inevitably leads to unhappiness and regret. Throughout her lifetime, Hagar faces a self-inflicted emotional isolation that can be likened to the harsh physical isolation of life in the prairies. Hagar values her independence over her relationships with others, and this sternness of character damages her relationship with her two brothers. When her brother Matt asks Hagar to act as their mother during the final moments of Dan’s life, she refuses to do so even though it would comfort Dan. “To play at being her –it was beyond. Hagar was crying, shaken by torments he never even suspected, wanting above all else to do the thing he asked, but unable to do it, unable to bend enough” (25). Hagar’s inability to bend causes her relationship with her brothers to deteriorate because she is not willing to make a sacrifice or compromise her own strength for their sake. She becomes as solid as stone. Her actions reflect the inevitability of solitude in the prairie lifestyle, because the strength of character. Particularly, Hagar takes after her father, who is harsh and unyielding, whereas her brothers Matt and Dan take after their mother and exhibit a weakness that Hagar detests. Though Hagar may be the source of her own isolation, just as her father had been for himself, who never remarried after his wife’s’ death, and never had a lasting relationship with any of his children–this isolation provides her with the ability to subsist in her environment. Consequently, Hagar uses isolation as a means of protection. Hence, it is easier for Hagar to repress her emotions rather than thoroughly experience them. She admits that her stone-like exterior is a means of self-protection. She has to be strong and self-sufficient in order to survive, for only she could secure her own well-being. In conclusion, Hagar is unreconciled to old age and approaching death, relentlessly critical, unable to reach out to others, always ready to think the worst of people. Hagar is a stone angel indeed and imprisoned in her own mind. She is unable to bring light to herself or to those around her. However, although the weight of the novel is on the negative aspects of Hagar's behavior, she eventually goes some way towards breaking down the walls she has built around her, and finding redemption. By the end of The Stone Angel it is a ruined reminder of how a life spent standing firm and upright has not led her anywhere and like her pride, it is wounded and harmed. Never for a moment does the novelist imply that transformation is easy, or that the long habits of the past can simply be discarded without a trace.

6. With reference to The stone Angel, show how Laurence develops a central character who is unable to charger her course of action. Margaret Laurence, in her novels, presents human life to predict the dilemma of man by planting humanity in all its nakedness bringing the real picture out of the social and environmental conditions. Laurence places human life in the situation where people respond with vitality. In The Stone Angel, the novelist presents the personal account of the last few years of the ninety years old protagonist, Hagar Shipley. With memory in form of chaotic energy, the old narrator responsively twisted episodes and events of her past life into the agonizing present one. The novel's structure follows the development process of Hagar's mind and character. In the beginning, Hagar is blind and lifeless like the statue of The Stone Angel in the graveyard of Manawaka. Throughout her life she conceals her emotions to protect her sense of pride and position, and lives in her own world of self-sufficient isolation. She encounters with her personal demons, struggles to provide meaning and purpose to her life through the process of self-examination. At the extremity of her life, though Hagar's recognition of need to rejoice and her restraining pride are very much personal, yet, at the same time, her situation can be generalized as a description of the situation of a whole generation. According to Patricia Morley, “Hagar Shipley is the first in a series of memorable women. Laurence presents universal concerns in terms of Canadian experience over four generations. She allows us to see into the hearts of her individual characters, their society and ourselves”. Hagar's life journey moves from spiritual blankness to redemption, from resistance and revolt to acceptance and adaptation. In the very beginning of the novel, Hagar looks odd due to fat and old age, and appears harsh, arrogant, ailing and frightened old woman with a sharp tongue to sting and satire others as well as herself, and her nature is battered by the self-willed surprise of her life. Presently, she is nearing her death with almost nothing to look back on with pride. It seems that her life has been governed by her concern of outward appearances and manners, but she is still exceptionally full of enthusiasm for life. Towards the end of the novel, she struggles to maintain her dignity, independence and finally her hesitant, unwilling, rebellious journey towards her self-knowledge. The way Hagar confronts the life situations and problems testifies to the fact that she has dismaying strength of both mind and body, and strong sense of independence that flow from both cultural background and personal fondness.