The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel

Self-Inflicted Isolation and Loneliness

“I never realized until this moment how cut off I am.” (Laurence, 1988, 294) In the novel The Stone Angel, author Margaret Laurence portrays a lonely old woman by the name of Hagar. Over the course of the novel, Hagar reflects back on the memories that have created the story of her life. Hagar is a deeply lonely woman, and much of that loneliness is self-inflicted. This mental isolation is caused by her stubbornness, her pride, and the blindness that she has towards any opinion other than her own.

Hagar Currie-Shipley is a very stubborn woman at the age of ninety. She is very set in her ways, and does not appreciate being told what to do. The reader is introduced to this stubbornness when Hagar is brought to Silverthreads nursing home to view the location. Upon this discovery, Hagar attempts to run away, only to find herself lost in a forest. However, this stubbornness is not a new characteristic of Hagar’s, for she has been this way since early childhood.

I wouldn’t let him see me cry, I was so enraged. He used a foot ruler, and when I jerked my smarting palms back, he made me hold them out again. He looked at my dry eyes in fury, as though he’d failed unless he drew water from them. He struck and struck, and then all at once he threw the ruler down and put his arms around me… “You take after me,” he said, as though that made everything clear. “You’ve got backbone, I’ll give you that.” (Laurence, 1988, 9-10)

This passage shows Hagar’s ability to hide her true emotions, which is a tool that she uses a lot later on in life. She later talks of making love to her husband, Bram, stating that even when she did enjoy it, “He never knew. I never let him know. I never spoke aloud, and I made certain the trembling was all inner.” (Laurence, 1988, 81) Also, early on in life, when her brother Dan was dying of pneumonia, she could not bring herself to perform his final wish. He cried for his dead mother, and Matt had asked Hagar to wear an old shawl, to act as their mother, and hold Dan, but Hagar could not bear the thought of portraying someone as weak as her mother. Her heart seems to be made of stone, much like the stone angel that her father had imported from Italy for her mother’s grave. Hagar kept all of her emotions bottled up inside. After Bram died, she did not allow herself to cry. It w...

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...d to send Arlene to Toronto. When John tells Hagar about the move Hagar pretends to know nothing about it. John informs her that she “ ‘always bet on the wrong horse,’ John said gently. ‘Marv was your boy, but you never saw that, did you?’” (Laurence, 1988, 237) it really opens Hagar’s eyes. She realizes that she has been wrong in her favoritism, although she will not admit it until later on after John is dead. When she is lying in her hospital bed many years later, she lets this realization be known, telling Marvin “ ‘You’ve not been cranky, Marvin. You’ve been good to me, always. A better son than John.’” (Laurence, 1988, 305) Sometimes these realizations come too late.

The self-inflicted isolation that Hagar feels is a result of her stubbornness, pride, and blindness towards other views. Her past has shaped her to become the bitter, stolid, rigid old woman that she is in the novel, also greatly contributing to her mental isolation. This isolation is a result of the personal decisions and actions that she has made throughout the course of the novel. “Every last one of them has gone and left me. I never left them. It was the other way around, I swear it.” (Laurence, 1988, 164)