A Stone Angel
Characters
Hagar Currie Shipley
At the beginning of the novel, Hagar is ninety years old. She has
outlived her husband and one of her sons. When she discovers that her surviving
son and her daughter-in-law plan to put her into a nursing home, she runs away
into the woods.
Bram Shipley
Bram Shipley is the farmer
Hagar marries, at the expense of her relationship with her parents and family,
who disown her. He is rough and ill-mannered, and the two eventually separate
but do not divorce. Over time he develops a drinking problem which is
aggravated by Hagar's lack of respect for him.
Marvin Shipley
Marvin is the eldest of
Hagar's two sons. He is by far the more loyal and loving of the two, however
Hagar inexplicably favors his younger brother John. He is married to a woman
named Doris, and is Hagar's sole caregiver. However he is no longer able to
provide the care that Hagar needs. Accordingly, he makes the very difficult
decision to move his mother to a nursing home against her will.
John Shipley
John is the younger of
Hagar's sons. She preferred him over Marvin, taking him with her when she
separates from John. He ultimately rejects her and returns to his father, and
by the time Hagar runs away he is deceased. He fell in love with a young woman
named Arlene, but they both died in a drunken car accident involving a train.
Jason Currie
Jason was Hagar's father,
and was just as stubborn as she was. A wealthy, self-made man, he has high
standards for his children. Hagar's insistence on marrying Bram Shipley, an
unsuitable husband in James's opinion, is what leads to the end of their
relationship. He disowns his daughter when she insists on going through with
what he believes to be a bad marriage. Yet Hagar herself has the same
domineering, controlling attitude. It's clear she gets her self-destructive
pride from her father.
Lottie Dreiser
Lottie was a friend and
schoolmate of Hagar's; however, Hagar treated her the way she treated most
people: abusively. Lottie becomes aware that Hagar regards her with contempt.
Doris Shipley
Hagar's surviving
daughter-in-law, Doris, is married to Marvin. Hagar treats her very poorly and
contemptuously.
Murray Lees
Murray is a stranger who
comes to the cannery to sit alone and drink quietly. He and Hagar talk for a
while, and he comforts Hagar when she has a bad dream, but by morning he is
gone. He returns with Marvin and Doris to save Hagar.
About the Stone Angel
The author earned the reputation of being one of the most significant
Canadian novelists. The heroine of her novel "The Stone Angel" Hagar
Shipley, a woman of ninety years old, endowed with a sharp mind and a proud,
unyielding temper, decided on a desperate act: not wanting to get into a
nursing home, as it is perceived as a symbol of death, she runs out of home.
Left alone, Hagar immersed in memories and reflections, which reflected the
tumultuous events of the past years, and the aging of flour, and trying to come
to terms with the inevitability of the end. The last decisive step towards
independence enables her to overestimate the long lived life and take, finally,
her destiny the way it is.
“The Stone Angel” has been filmed in 2007, it has been directed by Kari
Skogland. The film was not a great success, but still received a lot of
positive critical notes.
The
Stone Angel Summary
The Stone Angel is written in a first-person
narrative that at times almost breaks into stream-of-consciousness writing as
Hagar, the main character, gradually loses lucidity due to old age and illness.
The narrative is divided into ten sections, each of which shifts back and forth
between the present time (the early 1960s) and an earlier point in Hagar's
life.
The novel
is set in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba: a part of rural Canada
where values tended to be conservative and where archaic notions of social
class were taken seriously long after the rest of the nation declared them
obsolete. The central character Hagar is a protagonist only by convention.
Given her antagonistic behavior toward everyone else around her, which is
rooted in her overweening pride, the reader can be excused for considering her
an anti-heroine.
There are
two narrative arcs. The present-day story shows Hagar as an elderly woman of at
least 90 and perhaps more. She discovers that her son Marvin and his wife Doris
are planning to put her into a nursing home, so she runs away. She stays
overnight in an abandoned cannery and is found the next day, but she suffers
from exposure and is extremely sick, so she is confined to a hospital where she
is literally belted to the bed at night so that she cannot wander. From time to
time she lapses into memory scenes that define the second narrative arc. These
scenes too are related in the present tense, as though they were actually
happening.
Hagar
spends most of her life being defined by the men to whom she is connected.
There are female characters in the novel, specifically the servant Auntie Doll
and her daughter-in-law Doris, however most of Hagar's key relationships are
with the male members of her family. She is the third child of Jason Currie, a successful self-made businessman
who has built a thriving shop up from nothing. As a small child, this means
only that she is well dressed and somewhat spoiled. Yet as she grows into young
adulthood it becomes evident that she is not at all like her weak, ineffective
mother and in fact takes after her father in terms of intelligence, fortitude,
and work ethic. Her two older brothers show less aptitude for business than she
does, although her father takes pains to teach each of them the basics of the
trade, beginning with weights and measures. Hagar regards him as a primary
antagonist throughout her early life because she truly cannot see his love for
her or his attempts to give her the tools to succeed later in life.
Hagar is
not particularly maternal or nurturing. When one of her brothers is injured by
falling into a frozen pond, she refuses to nurse him through his subsequent
illness. He dies. Later, Hagar is distant toward her elder son, preferring the
younger one John whom she perceives as being the most like herself.
An astute
reader will notice that Jason Currie is grooming Hagar to run and possibly
inherit his family business. She, and not her surviving elder brother, is sent
to a finishing school in the East. Upon her return, her father wants her to
keep the account books in the store. This is an extremely important job and
vital to the success of the company; it is also a necessary first step in
turning the store over to her. But instead of interpreting the gesture as an
expression of trust and respect, Hagar regards it as a control attempt by her
father. Hagar wants to be a schoolteacher instead. In a fit of rebellion, Hagar
chooses to marry the highly unsuitable Brampton "Bram" Shipley. Jason
retaliates by cutting Hagar out of his life. She, who was perfectly positioned
to run the store and perhaps even own a share of it in her own right, receives
no inheritance from him whatsoever.
Hagar's
marriage with Bram is very unhappy. His family is regarded as making up part of
Manawaka's lower class. He speaks poorly, blows his nose with his fingers, and
has crude mannerisms. He is not particularly hardworking, and chooses to do
only enough work to get himself by, preferring to spend time with his horses or
else drinking. Whether Hagar or their two sons are well provided for is not a
factor in his decision making. However Hagar is physically attracted to Bram,
at least at first, because of his handsome appearance, his skill as a dancer,
and the fact he seems somewhat forbidden at least from Jason Currie's
perspective. Bram also has a warm and tender heart. He is not cruel, just
self-absorbed. This contrasts with Hagar's character: she inherited her
father's work ethic and pride, and she has had the benefit of higher education
(roughly on par with a liberal arts university degree) at an Eastern finishing
school. Bram's lower-class speech and lack of vocabulary embarrass her. She
also notices that her social class has dropped: she is no longer regarded as
"Jason Currie's daughter", the aristocratic young lady who believes
herself superior to everyone. Instead she is Bram Shipley's wife. As an extension of one of the
lowest-ranked men in town, Hagar is keenly and bitterly aware of her loss in
status. Frustrated and angry, her pride wounded, she takes it out on Bram and
becomes verbally abusive and controlling especially as his alcoholism
progresses. The two eventually separate, and Hagar leaves town, taking her
younger son John with her.
As
John grows to adulthood, Hagar starts to turn into her father. She resents that
she cannot control her son, who eventually abandons her and returns to
Manawaka, where he marries a woman named Arlene, quite possibly the same Arlene
who was the daughter of the "illegitimate" Lottie Dreiser, and who referred to Hagar as
"the egg-woman". John and Arlene are killed in a car accident when
the vehicle is hit by a train, and Hagar refuses to weep in front of other
people. Later, when she is alone, she cannot weep at all. She believes she has
turned to stone metaphorically, like the large, blind stone angel in the
churchyard.
In the
present day, Hagar runs away when she overhears Marvin discussing the
possibility of placing her in a nursing home. She associates the nursing home
not only with death but also with being controlled. Having spent a lifetime
controlling others and getting her own way, Hagar does not wish to become a
patient. But Marvin and Doris are no longer capable of caring for her
themselves in their home. The home, which was initially Hagar's home, is one of
many things Hagar signed over to them, although she continues to live there.
Although power and control has passed to the younger generation, the
65-year-old Marvin is reluctant to use his authority and force Hagar to do
anything in particular, until it becomes necessary for her health.
Hagar
wanders around for a while, reminiscing, and meets a stranger who also spends
the night in the abandoned cannery. They speak for a while, and Hagar shares
some of her experiences. Later in the morning, the stranger sneaks away to
bring help. After a night outdoors, Hagar is sick and suffering from the cold
and damp.
Marvin,
Hagar's surviving son, visits her in the hospital. Aware that she is dying, she
finally apologizes to him and starts to express her feelings: the tears finally
come, and she is finally able to say what she means instead of keeping up false
appearances in the name of pride.
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 own death.
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