Identity in The Fire-Dwellers

Abstract

Statistics indicate that in real life the number of women who are enacting what was traditionally women’s role — that of home-centred wife and mother — is diminishing rapidly, and it is the same in fiction. In fiction, as in real life, the external characteristics of the role are changing radically, but the recurrent appearance of a maternal figure in the contemporary fiction of women writers such as Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence testifies to the continuing power of the archetype as distinct from its societal and time-conditioned image. In The Fire-Dwellers,¹ in Stacey MacAindra, the only protagonist in Laurence’s Manawaka novels enacting the traditional role, Laurence creates a remarkable portrait of the life of a middle-aged mother-of-four with all its horrors, its impossibilities — and its absolute centrality to feminine experience. A sensitive and challenging definition of the maternal emerges that renews the concept for modern times and yet links it with the biblical woman whose children rise up and call her blessed. Laurence’s focus encompasses not only an external, forceful and easily recognised social reality, but also a rich and sensitive internal perspective that often corresponds to and illuminates work done by Eric Neumann, Joseph Campbell and other followers of Carl Jung in the study of archetypes.