Images in Stones, Images in Words

Abstract

‘Titles’, says Margaret Laurence, ‘are important, as they should in some way express the theme of the book in a rather poetic way.’¹ The title which she chose for her first Canadian novel certainly fits her definition. Solid and ethereal, opaque and spiritual, The Stone Angel confronts the reader with a challenge that is felt all the more clearly because of the oxymoronic quality of the phrase. Announcing the new — the text to come — it also resonates with the old: Thomas Wolfe’s lyrical novel, Look Homeward Angel and Milton’s line. Hardly have we had time to puzzle about it, however, when the narration blocks our flight of imagination by presenting us with a fictional referent for the title. ‘Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. …’² As the opening paragraphs describe the monument and the cemetery where, blind and superlative, it used to rise, the reader is taken on a tour of Manawaka’s burial ground — and of the novel’s major semantic polarities. We are in a sense reassured: so that is what the title refers to — this marble statue ‘brought from Italy at great expense’, erected in memory of the narrator—protagonist’s mother.