Summary
The book opens with Hagar Shipley, the 90-year-old narrator, describing the Manawaka graveyard, especially the stone angel statue that sticks out for its large size and high quality. Hagar reveals that much like Regina, to whom the statue is dedicated, she has been forgotten. She recalls walking in the cemetery as a girl and the contrast of the more dainty flowers with the wildness of the prairie landscape. Hagar expresses that going back into her memories and smoking cigarettes are some of her only remaining pleasures in her old age.
Hagar recalls being a young girl. She was very much like her stern, store-owner father, while her brothers took after her mother more. She remembers her father whipping her brothers with birch leaves, and how they, in turn, beat her. She remembers a time that her father beat her for saying in front of a customer at the store that there were mice in the sultanas. She did not cry when he beat her, which surprised her father.
Hagar speaks about the other children in town that she grew up with and memories of doing schoolwork, which she always excelled at. Her father would emphasize to Hagar and her two brothers that they must work harder than others to get ahead in life. We learn about her father’s upbringing and how he made his own business from nothing after his own father lost his business after being cheated by his partner. We also learn that Hagar’s mother was not alive during her childhood: she was raised mostly by their housekeeper, called Auntie Doll.
Her father never remarried and she can only remember one time when she saw her father talking alone to a woman, which was when she accidentally saw him while she was reading at the cemetery: he was talking to the mother of a neighborhood girl, Lottie Dreiser. When Lottie’s mother died of consumption and Hagar informed her father, he behaved as if he had never had a relationship with this woman; his comments on her death remained with Hagar all her life.
Hagar describes her brothers, Matt and Dan. Matt was always somewhat of a miser, working and hoarding money until he finally spent it on a fighting cock that lost in a match. Dan, on the other hand, was less inclined to work and was a bit of a hypochondriac. When Dan was 18 years old, he fell into the ice-cold river and later developed pneumonia. As he became weaker, Matt asked Hagar to comfort him. We learn that their mother died in the birth of Hagar and that Dan, the oldest child, still remembers her. Hagar feels distance from her mother and cannot bring herself to soothe her brother like her mother would have.
Hagar’s inability to comfort Dan in his dying moments reminds her of when, as a girl, she visited the town trash dump and saw a bunch of dying, suffering chicks that she also felt unable to help.
Back in the present, Hagar is interrupted by Doris, her daughter-in-law, who knocks on her door. Hagar describes Doris as a dowdy woman who fakes timidness and enjoys being a martyr. Hagar gets out of her chair to come down for tea and falls due to the pain under her ribs. Marvin, her son, runs up and helps her get up again. He is annoyed with Doris, who tends to panic when Hagar falls.
The three of them go to have tea and Hagar is surprised by the assortment of cakes that Doris has prepared. She is suspicious of her extra effort and feels that something is amiss. Finally, Marvin and Doris announce that they wish to sell the house and move into an apartment where it will be easier for Hagar to get around. Hagar is angry and insists that it is her house, and they can’t sell it. Marvin reminds her that she actually transferred the title to him years before. Hagar thinks about all of her things in the house and how they would not be able to fit in an apartment. Marvin drops the subject and says they will discuss it another time.
Doris is going to church and asks Hagar to come, but she declines, thinking that the minister does not have much to offer her. She thinks about how her eyes, even now that she is past 90, are still the same eyes she had as a young girl.
Analysis
In the first chapter of The Stone Angel, the elderly Hagar Shipley brings us into her world, painting a vivid picture of the small-town Canadian prairie. The opening scene where Hagar describes the stone angel statue illustrates a deeper attitude she holds towards life: a distrust for the good amidst harsh realities. This snapshot we get of Manawaka is rife with details of both the beautiful and the ugly, beginning with Hagar’s own childhood, the memories of which constitute the main part of Chapter 1.
The descriptions of Manawaka in Hagar’s childhood make it out to be a place of little comfort, where children are made to work without pay and where babies often die while still in infancy. The cold Canadian climate also adds to this sense of harshness. Margaret Laurence’s intricate descriptions of the town's trash heap with the mutilated chicks evoke an image of this locale as a dreary place where death and sickness are present yet pushed out of sight.
There is much characterization of Hagar’s authoritarian father and his modes of parenting. The death of Hagar’s mother made it so she was mostly raised by her nanny, Aunt Doll, and this lack of a true motherly figure is evident in Hagar’s sharp edges and the way she resists showing care and compassion for others, such as her brother Dan as he is dying from pneumonia. From her narration, Hagar makes it clear that she mostly takes after her father, who is constantly emphasizing the virtues of hard work and self-discipline.
Yet Hagar also reveals the way in which her father, despite the image of upper-class dignity that he tries so hard to cultivate, had his own hidden struggles. This is best illustrated by his secret relationship with Lottie’s mother. Upon news of her death, the hiding of his emotions and his three distinct responses represent to Hagar the three different people he contains within himself. Hagar, even at age 90, still wonders which of these personalities was the "real" one.
As we are taken back to the present tense of the story, we are also acquainted with the characters that populate Hagar’s life as a 90-year-old. From her judgmental descriptions of her son and daughter-in-law, it can be inferred that Hagar is experiencing much pain in her old age, associated with the sense of being isolated and unable to participate in the activities that used to occupy her. We get the sense that she feels trapped by her arthritic body and thus lashes out at the annoying behaviors of those meant to take care of her. She has stopped going to church and lacks any faith in a higher power. In this way, going back in memory serves as a reprieve from her oppressive situation.
