Mr. Troy has chosen a bad day to call. The rib pain is not so intrusive this afternoon, but my belly growls and snarls like a separate beast. My bowels are locked today. I am Job in reverse, and neither cascara nor syrup of figs nor milk of magnesia will prevail against my unspeakable affliction. I sit uncomfortably. I am bloated, full, weighted down, and I fear I may pass wind.I remember my mother telling me, with great delight, that my younger brother was reading The Stone Angel in high school and that he was disgusted by all of the references to the old woman's bowels. I suppose I joined in on the laugh at the time, since it was always good fun in our home to laugh at the things that made my humourless little brother uncomfortable. I know I didn't study this book in school, and although I thought I had read it before now, the only thing that stuck out in my memory as I devoured it this time is poor old Hagar's bowels. And this time, I am left feeling protective of the old woman, insisting that she not be an object of disgust or pity or ridicule.
This book is remarkable, not least of all because the main character is just so unlikeable. Ruled by pride passed down from her Scotsman father, Hagar (Currie) Shipley withholds the little kindnesses throughout her life that could have smoothed the way both for herself and for the family that she keeps at arm's length, leading to disasters of varying degrees. At the end of her life, she realises too late what this pride had wrought: Pride was my wilderness and the demon that lead me there was fear. After a visiting pastor sings the old hymn that Hagar has impulsively (perhaps mischievously) asked of him, she has a further insight. As he sings of rejoicing, Hagar is overwhelmed with tears and thinks: I would have wished it. This knowing comes upon me so forcefully, so shatteringly, and with such a bitterness as I have never felt before. I must always, always, have wanted that -- simply to rejoice. How is it I never could? I know, I know. How long have I known? Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some cave too deeply buried, too concealed? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even in the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some break of proper appearances -- oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak my heart’s truth? Even so, this is not a redemptive deathbed epiphany; Hagar is not remorseful about the kind words that she has withheld, but full of regrets that she had not allowed herself to feel joy.
This book is also remarkable for the gorgeous prose, and though it was written in 1964, it feels fresh and modern. A favourite passage, while Hagar is on the lam:
If I cry out, who will hear me? Unless there is another in this house, no one. Some gill-netter passing the point might catch an echo, perhaps, and wonder if he'd imagined it or if it could be the plaintive voices of the drowned, calling through brown kelp that's stopped their mouths, in the deep and barnacled places where their green hair ripples out and snags on the green deep rocks. Now I could fancy myself there among them, tiaraed with starfish thorny and purple, braceleted with shells linked on limp chains of weed, waiting until my encumbrance of flesh floated clean away and I was free and skeletal and could journey with tides and fishes.
It beckons a second only. Then I'm scared out of my wits, nearly. Stupid old woman, Hagar, baggage, bulk, chambered nautilus are you? Shut up.In Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood quotes the following as the moment that Hagar transcends the CanLit tradition of characters as victims:
I lie here and try to recall something truly free that I've done in ninety years. I can think of only two acts that might be so, both recent. One was a joke - yet a joke only as all victories are, the paraphernalia being unequal to the event's reach. The other was a lie - yet not a lie, for it was spoken at least and at last with what may perhaps be a kind of love.I found it interesting that what appear to be acts of freewill in the novel, marrying Bram and then leaving him or running away to Shadow Point, must in Hagar's evaluation have been forced upon her by her pride. At the end of her life, Hagar finally overcomes the victimhood that pride has forced onto her, and through the joke and the lie, finally acts in the best interest of others.
Speaking of Hagar for the last time, is her son Marvin:
"She's a holy terror," he says.
Listening, I feel like it is more than I could now reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness.When I think of Hagar, and her blocked bowels and her lack of joy and her failing memory and her nightly incontinence and her miserable treatment of the long-suffering daughter-in-law, Doris, it is entirely possible to think of her with a blend of anger and tenderness. Having read some negative reviews of this masterpiece, I need to wonder at the inclusion the The Stone Angel on high school reading lists; perhaps readers need to be a little more connected with the failings of the body and the mind before they can appreciate the honesty of this book; perhaps it takes some degree of life experience to appreciate that you can like a book without liking the people in it.
How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off me, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood.Of course my little brother was embarrassed to have read that in high school, and somehow, I am embarrassed on Hagar's behalf that those lines can be read unsympathetically by anyone.
