Like William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, and R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi, Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence has created a fictional town—Manawaka—which she populates with the characters of her novels and short stories. She has admitted to not knowing it would be such a central part of her oeuvre, but it has indeed amassed a good deal of reverence and scholarly attention for its universality.
Manawaka is located in the province of Manitoba and is based on Neepawa. Laurence has stated: “Manawaka is not my hometown of Neepawa— I agree. But it has elements of Neepawa, especially in some of the descriptions of places, such as the cemetery on the hill or the Wachakwa valley… In almost every way, however, Manawaka is not so much any one prairie town as an amalgam of many prairie towns. Most of all, I like to think, it is simply itself, a town of the mind, my own private world... which one hopes will ultimately relate to the outer world which we all share.” In another statement, Laurence admitted that “Manawaka often seems as real to me as my town of Neepawa,” and she has occasionally referred to her birthplace as Manawaka instead. She even placed a sign with the fictional town’s name on the shack near the Otonabee River where she wrote her novel The Diviners.
According to Denyse Forman, Manawaka is a “small WASP stronghold with an atmosphere of claustrophobic routine that is greatly in contrast to the boundless prairie landscape." The writer Clara Thomas praises Laurence's creation, stating that "no town in our literature has been so consistently and extensively developed as Margaret Laurence's Manawaka. Through five works of fiction, it has grown as a vividly realized, microcosmic world, acting as a setting for the dilemmas of its unique individuals and also exercising its own powerful dynamic on them. Manawaka is also specifically, historically, and geographically authentic, dense with objects and true to its place and its development through time.”
Critic Nora Foster Stovel deems it a “moralized landscape” like that of The Pilgrim’s Progress, where “features of topography symbolize social or moral values.” For example, the cemetery that opens The Stone Angel alludes to the primacy of death in the novel, and a sensuous river suggests the sexual relationship at the center of A Jest of God. There is also a railway that represents escape from small-town life as well as a boundary line between rich and poor; in The Diviners, the character Morag lives on the “wrong” side.
The characters of Laurence's novels are larger-than-life, “heroes and monsters, like the bogeys that children create out of pathetic derelicts.” They are mythic and legendary, and Laurence found it hard to say goodbye to them and their town. In a 1973 letter that Laurence wrote to a friend after completing the last book in the Manawaka series, she said: "[F]or me this is a bit worse than the usual withdrawal symptoms at the end of a book, because in fact this is the end of a 12-year involvement with Manawaka and its inhabitants, and as the wheel comes full circle in this novel, it will be the last of those...Little did I think, when writing The Stone Angel, that it would all work out like this. So I feel a bit odd, and empty, as though part of my inner dwelling place has now been removed from me."
