Abstract
Margaret Laurence is usually regarded as a ‘regional’ writer concerned with Canadian history and myth. It is true that her writing gives voice to what she has called Canada’s ‘cultural being’, ‘roots’, and ‘myths’;1 and The Diviners, the last novel of the five-volume Manawaka series which occupied a decade (1964–74) of her career, associates personal quest with the search for Canadian past.2 But in The Diviners Laurence writes against wider and older traditions, reworking epic quest and Shakespearian romance in a re-vision of a central myth of our culture, that of the ‘fortunate fall’, and proposing an alternative conception of ‘paradise’ and ‘the artist’. Laurence also defines herself against Modernists James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, drawing on The Portait of the Artist as a Young Man for her portrait of the artist as a young woman, and on The Wasteland, which similarly draws on Shakespeare’s Tempest (and for the same reasons Laurence does) for its concern with the uses of the past.
This is the use of memory: For liberation …
T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets
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Notes
Clara Thomas describes Laurence as ‘predominantly engaged in writing out of the experience of Canadians and in their accustomed speech patterns’ in ‘The Chariot of Ossian: Myth and Manitoba in The Diviners’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978) pp. 55–63, esp. p. 62.
William New (ed.), Critical Views on Canadian Writers: Margaret Laurence (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1977) p. 27.)
The Manawaka series, so-called because it is set in the fictional town of Manawaka (a version of Laurence’s native Neepawa), is the work on which Laurence’s literary reputation rests. It includes The Stone Angel (1964); A Jest of God (1966), on which the film Rachel, Rachel was based; The Fire-Dwellers (1969); A Bird in the House (1972), a book of short stories; and The Diviners (1974). Clara Thomas describes The Diviners as concerned with ‘an entire culture, its myths and legends’ (The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975) p. 131). Margaret Atwood refers to this novel as ‘paradoxically … the most “international” of Laurence’s books and the most “national” (‘Face to Face’, in New (ed.), Critical Views on Canadian Writers, pp. 33–40; esp. p. 39). See also Sherrill Grace, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as Laurence Hero’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978) pp. 64–71.
Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1981).
Nancy K. Miller’s ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, vol. 96, no. 1 (Jan. 1981) pp. 36–48;
Lee Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984) esp. p. 27.
Martha Quest, overwhelmed by her sense of ‘the nightmare repetition’ is wearied that ‘It had all been done and said already’ (Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage, pp. 77, 95, 34) and thinks ‘it was time to move onto something new’ (Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, pp. 8–9). The term ‘something new’ recurs in Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam, 1973) pp. 61, 353, 472–3, 479 (referred to hereafter as GN), and in Martha Quest (pp. 53, 141, 216) and Landlocked (p. 117). (All references to Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence quintet are to the New American Library editions and are referred to as MQ, PM.)
Minis Pratt and L. S. Dembo (eds), Critical Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974) p. 102.
Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (Toronto, New York, London: Bantam, 1974) p. 4. Page references in the text are prefaced by D.
The Tempest is arguably the most sexist and racist of all Shakespeare’s plays. See Lorie Jerrell Leininger, ‘The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest’, in ‘The Woman’s Part’: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, (ed.) Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1980) pp. 285–94; and Gayle Greene, ‘Women on Trial in Shakespeare and Webster’, Topic: 36: The Elizabethan Woman (1982) pp. 10–11. Jane Leney discusses Laurence’s use of Prospero in her African fiction as an image of the European colonial in This Side Jordan: ‘Prospero and Caliban in Laurence’s African Fiction’, in John R. Sorfleet (ed.), ‘The Work of Margaret Laurence’, Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 27 (1980) pp. 63–80, esp. p. 68.
Mary Anne Ferguson, ‘The Female Novel of Development and the Myth of Psyche’, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England, 1983) p. 228.
Michel Fabre, ‘Words and the World: The Diviners as an Exploration of the Book of Life’, Canadian Literature, vol. 93 (Summer 1982) pp. 60–78.
Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975) p. 83.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979) cite Said (p. 4) in relation to their discussion of the woman writer’s challenge to male authority ‘in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are … both overtly and covertly patriarchal’ (pp. 45–6).
Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: Norton, 1979) p. 124. Surprisingly, however, Laurence’s novels have not received much attention from feminist critics. Harriet Blodgett praises Laurence for writing from a ‘feminine point of view … without being polemical’ and says it was ‘fortunate chance’ that she was born ‘too early to become a self-conscious participant in the recent women’s movement’ because this saved her ‘from the tendentiousness and shrillness of much radicalist [sic] feminine writing’ (‘The Real Lives of Margaret Laurence’s Women’, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1 (1981) pp. 5–17, esp. p. 5). More helpfully, Demetrakopoulos sees Laurence as ‘making a radical change in the whole literary tradition by re-telling from a woman’s point of view traditional and archetypal feminine life patterns that have been portrayed hitherto by male authors only’ (‘Laurence’s Fiction’, p. 42): Laurence ‘re-visions what it means to be a woman’ and her heroines are ‘changing the very structure of characterization in world literature’ (ibid., p. 55). But Demetrakopoulos stresses ‘feminine archetypes’ (ibid., p. 42) in a way that I do not find particularly relevant to Laurence’s fiction. Angelika Maeser, ‘Finding the Mother: the Individuation of Laurence’s Heroines’ (in Sorfleet (ed.) ‘The Work of Margaret Laurence’, pp. 151–66) similarly stresses archetypes; she offers a kind of feminist Jungian reading of Laurence’s female characters as wresting their identity from ‘the pre-patriarchal form of the Absolute, the Great Mother’ (ibid., p. 151).
Richard Howard, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).
Margaret Laurence, ‘A Place to Stand On’, in Laurence, Heart of a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Bantam, 1984) pp. 5, 2, 1.
M. Piercy, ‘Gritty Places and Strong Women’, review of The Diviners, New York Times (1974) rptd in New (ed.), Margaret Laurence, pp. 212–13.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (eds), The Representation of Women in Fiction: Selected Papers from the English Institute (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) pp. 19–59.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1960) pp. 8, 78, 143.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958) I.243.
David Blewett, ‘The Unity of the Manawaka Cycle’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978) pp. 31–9, discerns a movement in the Manawaka cycle ‘like that of Eliot’s Waste Land … from dryness to water, from spiritual barrenness to rebirth’ (p. 36). He notes the prominence of water in the novel — the centrality of the river, the reference to death by water on the first page, Jules Tonnerre’s ‘voice like distant thunder’. A deeper correspondence between The Diviners and The Waste Land is in Eliot’s and Laurence’s concern with the uses of the past, a concern which explains both writers’ allusions to The Tempest (see my ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest and Eliot’s Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said”’, Orbis Litterarum, vol. 34 (1979) pp. 289–300).
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (New York: Bantam, 1981) p. 190.
Jean E. Kennard describes the ‘two-suitor convention’ in Victims of Convention (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978) pp. 10–11, 14) and discusses its contemporary version in ‘Convention Coverage’, p. 79.
R. J. Dorius, Discussions of Shakespeare’s Histories (Boston, Mass.: Heath, 1964) p. 128.
Marian Engel, ‘Steps to the Mythic: The Diviners and A Bird in the House’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978), suggests that Morag is one of the few heroines who achieves ‘knowing what her life has been about, not through the agency of a man, but through her own experience’ (p. 74).
J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962) p. 235. See also Thomas, The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence, p. 168.
Barbara Hehner, ‘River of Now and Then: Margaret Laurence’s Narratives’, Canadian Literature, vol. 74 (Autumn 1977) pp. 40–57.
Leona M. Gom, ‘Laurence and the Use of Memory’, Canadian Literature, vol. 71 (Winter 1976) pp. 48–58; esp. p. 48.
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© 1990 Gayle Greene
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Greene, G. (1990). Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7_13
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