Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel: Race, Truth, and Reconciliation
Author : Dr. Vivek Kumar Dwivedi and Dr. Pradeep Sharma
Abstract :
Margaret Laurence's four Manawaka series novels– The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers and The Diviners – are at the outset the stories of some obscure Canadian families trying to make the ends meet under difficult circumstances. However, the novels also carry traces of the concept of ‘reconciliation,’ that was to appear on Canadian socio-political scene much later. Laurence was the first Canadian novelist to raise the issue of marginalization of the indigenous communities in Canada. So, the novels can be interpreted from a postcolonial perspective as well. The present paper is an analysis of The Stone Angel, also touching upon the themes of other three novels as a connecting thread. The lives of all the major women characters in the four works are intertwined with the lives of characters who carry forward the history of colonization of their communities and who cherish the struggle for freedom their forefathers had undergone as well as who cherish their traditions and cultural values, but now live as marginal elements in the powerful and influential communities of the colonizers. The present paper theorizes that the portrayal of indigenous people in Margaret Laurence's selected novels bearing alienation, rootlessness, identity crisis, fight for survival, desire for freedom, and communication gap, constitutes a narrative metaphor employed by the writer to articulate the liminal existence of the whole communities representing a coherent expression of their simmering discontent with repression and erasure of their histories, even erasure of the stories of children who suffered untold miseries under Canadian residential school system.
Keywords :
Margaret Laurence, Manawaka Series of Novels, Marginalization, Indigenous communities, Reconciliation.
