To enter into the world of Margaret Laurence’s fiction—whether long or short—is to enter into a world defined by bifurcation, isolation and alienation. Though she was born and raised in Canada, her stories are almost equally divided between North America and Africa. The African stories came about as a result of experiences gained while her accompanying her husband to his job building dams in the famine-stricken deserts of Somaliland. The result of that sojourn was a series of stories which naturally placed the perspective of her characters within the role of outsider looking in. With the stories set in Canada, however, Laurence revealed that the perspectives of alienation and isolation were only partially steeped in geographical-based cultural differences.
One of the most interesting aspects of her Canadian-based collection A Bird in the House is the way that its very structure reflects how primally centered this fragmented point of view is within her literary DNA. Given an appropriately limited amount of time to conduct the necessary editing, rewriting, and transitions, Laurence could quite easily have reformulated this collection of individual tales into a fully coherent novel. Even as it exists in its intended state, the reading experience is very much like that of a novel.
A Bird in the House is categorized as a short story sequence because of the presence of a shared narrator and recurring characters. That Laurence specifically chose to present the stories in this fashion is telling as it quite likely offers insight into the fundamental dynamics of her psyche. That assertion can be justified on the persistent presence of a perspective toward the world which enjoys a systemic coherence, but is nevertheless defined by the gaps in that coherence. Things are slightly out of joint in the world of Laurence’s short stories; they connect, but not without a great deal of pain and effort. For instance, A Bird in the House are stories filtered through the consciousness of a single narrator, Vanessa MacLeod, and cover various different periods in her life. The result is that Vanessa is presented both as the younger version in the stories and at the time as the more experienced, middle-aged woman recollecting that youth. The two wholes do not always necessarily sync together to produce a fully realized version of the character. A reader may often find themselves musing over whether travail which the young Vanessa goes through really had any lasting impact on the woman remembering them. It is an extraordinary accomplishment for the writer in that she even manages to bring her prevalent themes of isolation and alienation into the being a character: Vanessa at times seems alienated from Vanessa!
It thus makes complete sense that there is almost a decade-long gap between the publication of the author’s stories set in Africa, The Tomorrow-Tamer, and this collection set in Canada. The ability to create a sense of fragmentation within a single person very likely required the extensive writing experience of capturing the sense of the marginalized outsider that is rampant throughout those African stories which are informed by biographical realities. It is certainly no mere accident that among the most memorable and well-constructed of her African stories are those that very specifically focus on how non-Africans relate to the natives. “The Rain Child” especially seems like a trial run for the stories Vanessa relates in A Bird in the Hand as it presents a particularly complex view of alienation and isolation. It is the story of conflicting perspectives itself: Violet Nedden is a British woman who has been teaching at school in Africa for twenty years. Ruth is an African girl whose father has arranged to send her to England to receive her education and experiences culture shock upon returning to her homeland. The disconnect at work in these two figures—the British woman who is now more African and the African girl who has learned to become British—most assuredly prefigure the stunning complexity embodied by the disconnect between the younger version of herself that Vanessa MacLeod writes about.
Taken together, the stories of a fragmented perspective defined by the issues of being an outsider even to themselves, both the African-based stories and the Canada-based stories of Margaret Laurence become evidence of her controlling themes. They form a coherent vision of the writer while also being just slightly out of sync.
