Writing Grief

Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning

Christian Riegel

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780887559686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Margaret Laurence's much admired Manawaka fiction— The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners— has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning.

Riegel's analysis alludes to sociological and literary antecedents of the study of mourning, including the tradition of elegy, from Derrida and Lacan to Freud, van Gennep, and Milton. The "work" of mourning is necessary to move from a state of emotional paralysis to one of acceptance and active engagement. Laurence's characters "perform the work of mourning... returning over and over again to the key issues relating to loss, " and, as Riegel's close examination of the texts suggests, are changed thereafter fundamentally and significantly.

As an important study of one aspect of Laurence's oeuvre, Writing Grief not only illustrates how Laurence's own preoccupations with mourning are figured, but also how different ways of working through grief result in renewed potential for consolation and connection, and "a renewed definition of self."

CHAPTER ONE

SPEAKING THE HEART’S TRUTH: HAGAR’S WORK OF MOURNING IN THE STONE ANGEL

“When did I ever speak the heart’s truth?”

With The Stone Angel Margaret Laurence begins her exploration of the psychic changes of the mourning subject that continues through four more novels. In this novel she chooses the difficult task of depicting the final weeks, days, and, ultimately, moments of her protagonist’s long life, and the complex mental responses that occur when a person becomes increasingly aware of her incipient demise. Complicating Hagar’s reaction to her impending death is her slow move toward self-consciousness about her fate, and, thus, she only comes to a greater understanding of her life, and to fully mourn her death, in the final chapters of the novel. Laurence’s protagonist subconsciously resists the failure of her body at first, then gradually becomes more aware of her failing health, before finally coming to an uneasy acceptance of her death.

Laurence’s focus on this movement to self-consciousness prefigures her central concern with grieving in the four other Manawaka books, for Hagar’s work of mourning encompasses attributes of the other protagonists and their work. Hagar’s initial resistance toward mourning is akin to Rachel’s and Stacey’s attempts at denying their grief—and their need to work through it—and her slow move to acceptance of, and then working through, her grief is similar to their journeys of awareness. When she becomes fully self-conscious of her mourning at the end of the novel, however, Hagar is more like Vanessa and Morag as they consciously and actively work through, and repair, loss.

Hagar’s passage to the final moments of her life is figured as an increasingly self-consciously liminal one and as the final liminal stage of a lifetime. Her story begins with the prevalence of the symptoms of her physical decline, but it is only when she accepts the consequences of those signs that she is fully free to come to terms with the loss of her own life. Central to her liminal stage is the work of mourning that Hagar performs in preparation for death and that allows her to delve deep into the repressed emotions of loss so that she can “speak the heart’s truth” (292). The novel is divided into three movements that correspond to the development of her work of mourning, which is depicted as a three-level liminal stage. The first movement marks Hagar’s resistance to her declining health and signals her entry into liminality; the second presents her increasing awareness of her decline and represents her active and self-conscious mourning of the losses of her husband and son; and the final movement demonstrates her acceptance of, and final preparations for, her impending death, which also inevitably marks the end of her liminal stage.

A number of critics have noted Hagar’s attempts to understand her life retrospectively so that she can find meaning in the many events of her past that still affect her in the present. Jon Kertzer remarks in “The Stone Angel: Time and Responsibility,” “Through memory, Hagar relives her life in order to understand and come to terms with it. ... Now in retrospect, Hagar must sum herself up, tie her life together. She must reconcile the different periods in her life in order to find coherence and hence meaning in it.”¹ The role of the work of mourning in Hagar’s move towards her own death, however, has not yet been examined: mourning is integral to understanding Hagar’s need to revisit the past as her own present moves ever closer to its inevitable end.

The opening sections of The Stone Angel depict Hagar’s resistance to the degeneration of her body and her denial of that failure of the flesh. Throughout the four chapters Hagar is made aware of her body’s decline, and her memory sequences implicitly and subtly reinforce her physical strength: she is the survivor, while the main figures she remembers died prematurely as a consequence of their physical weaknesses. Hagar’s father is significant in her memories too, but he is figured as a symbol of strength. He is living proof of the power of physical and mental strength, and, thus, his certainty in all matters is implicitly signalled as a quality worth emulating. As James King remarks, “from an early age, Hagar’s identity is shaped by her father” (161). In all these sequences, memory becomes a reinforcing agent of Hagar’s strength.

Laurence also establishes in the opening pages of the novel that Hagar has not accorded herself, to employ Derrida’s phrase, the right to mourn the loss of her husband Bram and youngest son John. As Hagar states, “Oh my lost men. No, I will not think of that. What a disgrace to be seen crying by that fat Doris” (6). The linking of shame and grief is important as it reinforces the difficulty with which Hagar will engage in the work of mourning. Further, the disgrace of crying indicates the shame of externalizing emotions, which is paradigmatic of the experiences of Laurence’s four other protagonists in the remaining novels in the Manawaka series.

Signs of Hagar’s physical decline are shown early in the novel when she is troubled by her increasing dependency, caused by her aging, on her son Marvin and his wife Doris, but she shows no acknowledgement that their involvement in her daily life is a specific sign of her physical decline. She is upset that “The door of my room has no lock. They say it is because I might get taken ill in the night, and then how could they get in to tend me (tend—as though I were a crop, a cash crop). So they may enter my room at any time they choose. Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged” (6). Here, Hagar interprets the cause of this invasion of her life as age and not health, demonstrating her denial of her deteriorating body. It is common, she reasons, for the aged and “very young children” to have their humanity denied by “the middling ones” (6). Thus, she feels misunderstood as a stereotyped, frail, old woman by Marvin and Doris because of her age and elides the effects of her deteriorating health.

Nonetheless, her physical instability is impossible to ignore, despite her best efforts. In one scene with Doris, she falls, and “The pain under my ribs is the worst, the one that has been coming more frequently of late, although I have mentioned nothing of it to Marvin or Doris” (31). She realizes she is getting sicker, but it is, in fact, her incapacity that contributes most to her crisis and her recognition of it: “The pain burns through to my heart and I cannot breathe for a moment. I gasp and flounder like a fish on the slimed boards of a dock” (31). At the same time, she resists identifying herself as the weak one: “‘Leave me, leave me—’ Can this torn voice be mine? A series of yelps, like an injured dog” (31). The simile reinforces her psychic sense of distance from her failing body’s alien sounds, for she does not imagine herself as an old, dying woman, but as an animal. A short time later, Hagar feels further signs of the seriousness of her undiagnosed illness: “I cannot speak, for the pain under my ribs returns now, all of a stab. Lungs, is it? Heart? This pain is hot, hot as August rain or the tears of children” (35). The pain accompanies Marvin’s and Doris’s suggestion that Hagar’s house be sold because it is too large. In a sad irony, Hagar, who always finds it hard holding back her words, is silenced now by her body’s weakness.

The signs of Hagar’s physical frailty are countered by her memories of her mother—beginning with the opening scene of The Stone Angel—and brothers, who died prematurely. Hagar’s focus on, and then active remembering of, their deaths is a sign of her own fear of her body’s decline into illness and then, ultimately, into death. We see, in her remembrance of the death scenes,² no overt mourning on her part. She does not grieve the losses particularly. The deaths she still acutely feels (Bram’s and John’s), she pushes aside. Thus, the conscious return to the deaths functions as a more deeply originated statement of her fear of her own decline, and the memories become oppositional markers of her strength.

The novel opens with the scene of the stone angel that marks her mother’s gravesite, but that is also a marker of physical weakness, in Hagar’s view. James King states that “[Hagar] can only conceive of her mother as the antithesis of her self.”³ Critic Michel Fabré notes that “the Angel is dedicated to her mother, but she is weak, quasi-nonexistent in life as in death.”⁴ Another critic, Alice Bell, remarks that, “For Hagar, the stone angels in the Manawaka cemetery are symbols of passive weak-spirited women who acquiesced with death because they did not have the strength to deal with life.”⁵ While the angel ostensibly memorializes her mother, the literal purpose of the angel is primarily a function of Hagar’s father’s patriarchal tendencies, for it was “bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied, forever and a day” (3).⁶

The memory of the angel is not presented as a wistful longing for the mother’s return, in Hagar’s mind, for the angel is depicted with weak attributes, reflecting the person it marks: “[S]he viewed the town with sightless eyes. She was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even a pretense of sight. Whoever carved her had left the eyeballs blank. ... Her wings in winter were pitted by the snow and in summer by the blown grit” (3). Significantly, while the description of the stone angel is detailed, an equally elaborate account is presented of another stone angel in the graveyard that commemorates Regina Weese,⁷ who, Hagar thinks, “had only herself to blame [for her death], for she was a flimsy, gutless creature” (4). A physically weak person, Hagar implies, deserves an early death. Hagar remembers her mother in similar terms to Regina, for, in her words, her mother “relinquished her feeble ghost” (3).⁸

The pattern of Hagar’s remembering in the next sequences is set in this opening scene, for Hagar’s returns to scenes from the past that depict weak family members are frequent, and all are figured with her mother’s attributes. When she thinks of her brothers, she considers that they “took after our mother, graceful unspirited boys” (7-8). She considers her brother Dan’s weakness in relation to the mother when he is on his deathbed—“all I could think of was that meek woman I’d never seen, the woman Dan was said to resemble so much and from whom he’d inherited a frailty I could not help detest” (25)—and she is unable to console him when Matt asks her to wear their mother’s shawl to comfort Dan: “To play at being her—it was beyond me” (25). In being “unable to bend enough” (25), Hagar reinforces the origin of her dislike for physical weakness, in her mother’s frail body, but a further explanation for her inability to accept her present decline is signalled: Hagar is conditioned from youth to an aversion to the physically weak that supercedes conscious rationality by her father’s favouring her because she “was sturdy like him” (8). Just as she was “unable to bend enough” to console Dan, she is now unable to recognize and accept her own weakness.

When Hagar learns of Matt’s death, she has a similar reaction of abhorrence to the seemingly facile manner with which he gave up his life. Aunt Dolly, the housekeeper, tells Hagar that “he went quietly.... he didn’t fight his death, as some do. They only make it harder for themselves. Matt seemed to

know there was no help for it He didn’t struggle to breathe,

or try to hang on. He let himself slip away” (60). Hagar’s response is indicative of her reaction to her own decline in the present of the narrative: “I found this harder to bear than his death, even. Why hadn’t he writhed, cursed, at least grappled with the thing?” (60). Matt’s passivity is, in fact, the antithesis of the way she approaches the signs of her demise, for Hagar fights and struggles as long as possible.

The origin of her siblings’ weakness, in Hagar’s eyes, as we have seen, is the mother, and Hagar is clear in her depiction of her—a figuring that borders on the contemptuous. In a long passage, Hagar considers a “daguerreotype of her” that her father gave her “when I was a child” (59). In this sequence, Hagar is clearly “reading” the photo, imbuing it with meaning, although she does not do so self-reflexively. She views her mother as “a spindly and anxious girl,” clearly figuring her as weak. Further, Hagar denounces her mother’s anxiety: “She looks so worried that she will not know what to do, although she came of good family and ought not have had a moment’s hesitation about the propriety of her ways” (59). Hagar is clearly troubled by this vision of her “perplexed” mother, especially as her mother died during the birth of her third child: “and even then it seemed so puzzling to me that she’d not died when either of the boys was born, but saved her death for me” (59). Hagar recognizes she is quite opposite to her mother’s characteristics: “I used to wonder what she’d been like, that docile woman, and wonder at her weakness and my awful strength” (59). That recognition adds another level of signification to the scene, building on the pattern of Hagar’s remembering. The weak mother has died in order to give life to the strong daughter, and the act of remembering the scene reinforces in Hagar the belief in her own physical strength. These reminiscences, then, remind Hagar of her strength. She was strong in the past, as her memories attest, and now, when she is showing to others clear signs of decline, these memories will help assure her of her continuing robustness and underscore her resistance to the work of mourning.

As the first movement of the novel progresses, however, it becomes more difficult for memory to overcome the obvious physical signs of Hagar’s decline. While she does not completely acknowledge the marks of her impending end, she does begin to distinguish them more clearly. Hagar recognizes a harbinger of her decline, despite being horrified, when she accidentally sees the ad from the newspaper lying open on the kitchen table: “It is then that I see the newspaper and the dreadful words” (53):

Only the Best Will Do for Mother

Do you find it impossible to give Mother the specialized care she needs in her declining years? SILVER THREADS Nursing Home provides skilled care for Senior Citizens. Here in the pleasant cozy atmosphere of our Lodge, Mother will find the companionship of Qualified medical staff. Reasonable terms. Why wait until it is too late? (53-4)

Hagar responds by paying attention to the particularities of her body, which she now defines as a body in decline. Indeed, she figures her body in corpse-like terms and echoes the phrases of the most common funeral rites:

[M]y hands are dry and quiet. ... My throat, too, is dry, and my mouth. As I brush my fingers over my own wrist, the skin seems too white after the sunburned years, and too dry, powdery as blown dust when the rains failed, flaking with dryness as an old bone will flake and chalk, left out in the sun that grinds bone and flesh and earth to dust as though in a mortar of fire with a pestle of crushing light. (54)

Hagar echoes the familiar funeral rites: “Dust to dust / Ashes to ashes.” Her reaction to the ad is physical, opposing the previous mental responses: “Up flames the pain now, and I am speared once more, the blade driving under my ribs.... Breath goes” (54). And again, she fears death: “Can a body hold to this life more than an instant with empty lungs?” (54).

A second look at her image a short time later reinforces her recognition of her declining body, despite her protestations to the contrary: “I’m only preparing against the day. But it won’t be for a while yet, I can promise you that” (65). She sees herself as a grotesque, inhuman creature with a face beyond hope of reparation:

I ... see a puffed face purpled with veins as though someone had scribbled over the skin with an indelible pencil. The skin itself is the silverish white of the creatures one fancies must live under the sea where the sun never reaches. Below the eyes the shadows bloom as though two soft black petals had been stuck there. The hair which should by rights be black is yellowed white, like damask stored too long in a damp basement. (79)

This is the face of a person of considerable age, the marks of a lifetime making themselves evident. Her physical self is clearly prepared for the final movement to death, but Hagar’s mental self still resists what is told in the image reflected back to her.

The unexpected trip to Silver Threads, after Doris and Marvin trick her into going, is for Hagar another harbinger of her end, for she feels that if she acquiesces to their request that she stay there, she will be acknowledging her decline openly and, thus, making it real. Here again, Hagar is unable to resist physically, reinforcing the belief that she is becoming unsound: she is “overcome with fear, the feeling one has when the ether mask goes on, when the mind cries out to the limbs, ‘flail against the thing,’ but the limbs are already touched with lethargy, bound and lost” (95), similar to her brother Matt. The mind is still willing to resist, but the body is failing miserably, and no mental gymnastics will allow Hagar to escape from the reality of her situation.

The increasing knowledge of her own impending death causes old losses, over which she is still conflicted, to resurface for Hagar. She lies about John’s death in her conversation with one of the old ladies at the home: “‘Two sons.’ Then I realize what I’ve said. ‘I mean, I had two. One was killed—in the last war’. ... I wonder why I’ve said that, especially as it doesn’t happen to be true” (104). This uncontrolled speech is a sign of the kind of psychic space that the visit to Silver Threads occasions, for further troubled memories come forth soon thereafter. Hagar is troubled and confused by her physical failing, and in that state her mind is less guarded about the losses of the past. This is attested when she mistakes a man in the garden for Bram, for in this scene she loses touch with reality and no longer knows if she is dead or alive:

Although his face is hidden, I can see his beard. Oh—

So familiar he is that I cannot move nor speak nor breathe. How has he come here, by what mystery? Or have I come to the place he went before? This is a strange place, surely, shadowed and luminous, the trees enfolding us like arms in the sheltering dark. If I speak to him, slowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Mourning, Work, and Liminality in the Manawaka Fiction
• Chapter One Speaking the Heart’s Truth: Hagar’s Work of Mourning
• Chapter Two Transgressing the Taboos: Rachel’s Work of Mourning
• Chapter Three The Crisis of Word and Meaning: The Work of Mourning and the Loss of Consolation
• Chapter Four “Rest Beyond the River”: Mourning in A Bird in the House
• Chapter Five The Diviners and the Work of Mourning
• Afterword Laurence and the Elegiac Tradition
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index