Rereading The Stone Angel
Eileen Manion
With Hagar Shipley, protagonist and narrator of The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence created one of the most memorable voices in Canadian literature.
At ninety years old, she’s both rebel and conformist, courageous and fearful, reflective and deluded. Judgmental. Bitter. Resentful. A nasty old woman, both disappointed with her life and proud of her achievements.
She mourns the loss of her men: brothers Dan and Matthew, father Jason Currie, husband, Bram Shipley, son, John.
Where is her grief for her mother? To Hagar, her mother represents weakness — so she can’t bear to don her mother’s shawl to comfort Dan as he lies dying. She’s afraid of becoming her mother — a woman she never knew but needs to reject.
Nor is Hagar close to other women — no sisters, no daughter, no close women friends. She despises Doris, her daughter-in-law although she feels affection for her granddaughter, Christina.
Hagar seems more attached to things than to people: her house, her chairs, her vases; in their familiarity, they establish her identity: “If I am not somehow contained in them, …then I don’t know where I am to be found at all.”
From her father, Hagar learned independence, obstinacy, the value of hard work, but these traits proved useless in the role he assigned her: the appearance of a genteel lady of leisure while she kept his store’s accounts at home. A galling bit of hypocrisy? His ideal seems based on the 19th century notion that a tradesman improves his class status by keeping his daughter from working at anything more strenuous than needle point, despite the fact that he wants or needs her unpaid labor in his business.
Like her father, Hagar tries to control her children, especially her favored son, John, for she never learned that such intervention can result in the worst kind of loss.
Although Hagar asserts that she does not live in the past: “Each day…has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it…” She is “rampant with memory,” obsessed with the past and her effort to gain insight into the events of her life.
What does she learn from her reflections? That, so driven by fear, pride, and invidious comparisons, she failed to “rejoice” in what life gave her. On her deathbed, she is “choked with…the incommunicable years,”
Who can blame Marvin and Doris for wanting to put Hagar into a nursing home? She’s been a “holy terror” for the 17 years they have lived with her, looking down on them all the while they have been caring for her, putting up with her, trying to please her while she appreciated none of their efforts.
But we share her desperation when they take her to visit Silver Threads — an upscale residence for the time. Obviously no one chooses to live there.
My grandmothers, women as sure of their opinions and prejudices as Hagar, would have been her contemporaries. Although in that era, it was taken for granted that women would do the unpaid labor of caring for aged relatives, they both spent the last months of their lives in nursing homes.
Hagar’s desperate flight after her son tells her he intends to place her in a nursing home, takes on new resonance when we think about the way nursing home residents were afflicted during the first wave of covid-19.
As feminists have pointed out since the 1970s, care-giving, assumed to be unskilled work done by women, is paid at the bare minimum. Men who service things, like cars, computers, appliances, or weapons, are paid much more than women who take care of human beings.
How much longer can we maintain this fiction that care-giving is unskilled labor just because women are usually the ones doing it? You may have to learn on the job, but there certainly are skills necessary to do it properly.
Providing needed care for the frail elderly has now fallen to either the state or private enterprise. In both instances the tendency is to skimp — because of austerity or desire for profit.
At the start of the pandemic, we were reminded how deplorable are conditions in these places as the vulnerable old people sickened and died in disproportionate numbers. For months after the initial scandal, all visits were forbidden — to keep residents “safe.” Until we heard reports of elderly people dying of loneliness and despair.
What to do with frail old people who can no longer live independently, and are warehoused where we don’t see them?
This question has not lost its urgency since Margaret Laurence published her novel in 1964.
Who cares about old people? Not our politicians who openly suggested they should die off for the greater good.
During the first months of the pandemic, we learned about the conditions that led to so many nursing home deaths, but I fear we will forget these facts as we try to return to whatever we consider normal, especially if “normal” means looking away from the treatment of the dependent elderly, as we did in the pre-covid-19 past.
