Summary
In the present day of the story, Hagar is visited by the local minister, Mr. Troy. She is discussing how her father was a very wealthy man but never shared any of it with her. Internally, she feels that Mr. Troy is not able to actually understand her, even though he appears to try. Hagar recalls when she became an adult and her father sent her to the east for college, where she learned so-called feminine skills such as planning a menu and embroidery. Her brother Matt stayed behind and worked at her father’s store. When Hagar comes back from school, she upsets her father by telling him that she wants to work as a school teacher.
She does not end up being a teacher and instead works for her father, acting as a hostess and keeping his accounts. One night at a dance, she meets Brampton Shipley and feels an attraction to him. Brampton’s first wife had died suddenly and left him as a widowed father of two girls. Hagar’s father disapproves of him, calling him lazy. Lottie Dreiser also warns her that Brampton is “common as dirt.” When Hagar informs her father that she will marry Brampton, he is infuriated and does not participate in their wedding, feeling that it is a betrayal of him. Since that moment, she has been estranged from her father.
Hagar moves into the Shipley house, which is musty and dirty. Bram takes her virginity, which is very shocking to Hagar, who never imagined what it would be like. The next day, she scrubs the house clean.
Back in the present, Mr. Troy tells Hagar that it is important for her to have people her age to whom she can speak. He says a prayer and then leaves. Hagar wanders into the kitchen and sees an ad in the newspaper, circled in pen, for a nursing home. She momentarily loses her breath. Doris asks her about her time with Mr. Troy, and Hagar calls him “rather stupid,” which annoys Doris. Hagar again tells her that she does not want the house sold, nor does she want to go to a nursing home. Doris tells her to settle down so that she does not fall again.
Hagar thinks about how Marvin and Doris greedily consider all of her things their own. Through looking at her items, Hagar goes back to different memories. She thinks of her mother and how puzzling it is that she died during her birth rather than during the birth of her brothers. Her father never held it against Hagar, almost as if it was “a fair exchange, her life for [Hagar's].” We learn that Hagar’s brother Matt developed influenza and was cared for by his wife Mavis until his death. Mavis informed Hagar that Matt went quietly, without a struggle for life, which disturbed Hagar. Even after Matt’s death, Hagar still did not hear from her father, nor did she hear from him when Marvin was born.
Hagar starts telling Doris which items she wants left to which relatives, at the same time reminding Doris that she is not going to die anytime soon. Doris tells her not to talk like that in front of Marvin, as it upsets him and makes his stomach ulcer worse. At dinner, Doris and Marvin inform Hagar they are going out to a movie and that a young girl will stay with Hagar to make sure she is okay. This angers Hagar, who does not want to feel like she needs a babysitter. Marvin, frustrated with Hagar, changes his mind and says they won’t go out.
Doris retreats to her bedroom and sits in her much-adored armchair. She remembers going to Manawaka each week with Bram for their shopping. There was one instance when Bram spoke rudely to Hagar’s childhood friend Charlotte Tappen after she asked him a question. This furthered the poor image of Bram within the community. Hagar reconsiders the question of who was in the wrong in that incident. Hagar was frequently embarrassed by the unsophisticated way in which Bram spoke; eventually, she stopped going to town with him.
Marvin and Doris knock on her door and timidly try to tell her about how a nursing home would be best for her. Doris tells her she is no longer able to care for Hagar daily, especially because Hagar wets her sheets almost every night. They insist on how nice and comfortable a place it is; Marvin even repeats part of the advertisement that Hagar saw in the newspaper, which makes her laugh with scorn. Hagar is in disbelief. They tell her to go to sleep and that they will discuss it more the next day.
As Hagar tries to sleep, her feet cramp and she tries to turn on the lamp, but instead she knocks it over and breaks it. This causes Doris to wake and run over to Hagar, who insists she’s fine and brushes away her coddling. She goes to the bathroom and then sits awake, smoking a cigarette, thinking of Bram and how he was the only person who ever called her by her name instead of titles like 'Mother' or 'Daughter'. She gets into bed and imagines it as a field of snow, drifting to sleep while feeling as if she were “caught in a blizzard.”
Analysis
In Chapter 2, Margaret Laurence takes us deeper into the psyche and many memories of Hagar Shipley. Through Hagar’s recollections, we get a sense of her early life in Manawaka and the limitations placed on her as a woman growing up in still a very conservative time and place. Unlike her brother Matt, Hagar is barred from the world of commerce and other occupations, instead resigned to working for her father, who always expected her to be a proper lady. However, Hagar rebels through her marriage to Brampton Shipley, disobeying her father’s warnings. This choice ends up alienating Hagar from her father for the rest of her life: she has no relationship with him up until his death.
In this way, we are shown how both gender and class roles have played a large role in Hagar’s life. Although estranged from her father, she continues to hold onto upper-class sensibilities, frequently judging other characters for their poor taste, such as that of her daughter-in-law, Doris. In one sense, this ability to assess others gives Hagar a sense of power and superiority, especially in her old age, as she becomes more and more incapacitated. Yet at the same time, we see how Hagar has been limited to certain social roles throughout her life, especially as a woman. For example, although she sharply criticizes the poor manners of Bram, she is bound to her duty as his wife, enduring frequent rough sexual encounters with him. Although marrying Bram was Hagar’s major rebellion, their relationship brings a whole new set of restrictions.
Hagar’s isolation in her old age is a theme that echoes throughout these pages. Although she is still living with family and is even paid a visit by the local minister, she always has the sense that no one truly understands her. She seems to have difficulty expressing the complexity of her experiences, and she assumes that everyone to has a sinister agenda and wants to erase her existence entirely. This comes to a head when she is confronted by Marvin and Doris about going to the nursing home. In Hagar’s eyes, they are trying to shove her away and escape from the responsibility of caring for her. Yet from Marvin and Doris’s point of view, it would make sense to put the 90-year-old in a place where she can be cared for professionally.
We start to see how Hagar is not quite always a reliable narrator, relating her point of view in a way that is colored by her own subjective emotions and pain. Everyone is up to no good in her eyes—except for her son John, who is not in the picture. Yet we are also made to empathize with her condition: growing old in a world where the elderly are practically invisible. She detests being treated like a child, somewhat in denial of her own dwindling capacities. While her mind and hearing are sharp, her physical body is in decline, and Hagar has too much pride to fully acknowledge this reality.
Hagar is also unique in her old age, as most of her contemporaries have already passed away, some even at quite a young age. This contributes to her sense of isolation, and in this way, all she really has left are her memories. The way the text flows is not so much through a linear progression of events, but rather back and forth through different times and places, memories that are spurred through seeing different objects in her home. Now, in her old age, Hagar starts to see certain events from the past in a new light, ruminating on each instance with both nostalgia and detached analysis.
Margaret Laurence’s rich use of metaphor and simile not only brings the characters to life but also helps the reader to see the world through the perspective of Hagar. The descriptions of people, in particular, illustrate Hagar’s bluntly honest way of looking at others, such as her description of Bram’s first wife Clara being “moistly fat” or the image of herself in the mirror as a “puffed face purpled with veins.”
