Margaret Laurence's Women: Isolation and Survival in the Manawaka Sequence

• Thesis title in Czech: Ženské postavy Margaret Laurencové: izolace a prežití v cyklu Manawaka
• Thesis title in English: Margaret Laurence's Women: Isolation and Survival in the Manawaka Sequence
• Key words: Margaret Laurencová|Manawaka|přežití|izolace|kanadská literatura|prérijní literatura
• English key words: Margaret Laurence|Manawaka|survival|isolation|Canadian literature|prairie literature
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 01.02.2021
• Date of assignment: 01.02.2021
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 16.02.2021
• Date and time of defence: 24.06.2021 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 31.05.2021
• Date of proceeded defence: 24.06.2021
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.

Guidelines

Margaret Laurence's Manawaka is a meticulously developed fictional reflection of her own hometown. Located on the Manitoba prairie, the town appears in her famous sequence of four novels and one short story collection: The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974). It is home to female protagonists in various stages of life, living in the predominantly Scottish and Ukrainian community, collectively enthralled by the sound of the train on the prairie reminding them of a world outside of Manawaka.
Margaret Atwood was at the beginning of her career when Survival, her thematic survey of Canadian literature, was first published in 1972. Intended for academic and layman audience alike, the book discusses the development of national identity in Canadian literature around the notion of survival: "The central symbol for Canada is undoubtedly Survival." Atwood herself describes the idea of survival as multi-faceted and adaptable: "In earlier writers these obstacles are external - the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what one may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being." In French-Canadian contexts, it took on the meaning of cultural, linguistic, and religious survival under English dominance.
A sense of dissatisfaction runs through the Manawaka sequence; as Laurence's protagonists face their personal realities they go through processes of alienation and self-discovery, often including an encounter with death. With images of empty dusty landscape, the prairie setting itself feels isolating, and the small town's social hierarchy is firmly in place.
The aim of this thesis is to explore isolation in the Manawaka cycle in relation to spiritual survival as a central Canadian theme. The focus is on female experience shaped by the prairie environment, considering Atwood's four proposed Victim Positions: 1) to deny the fact that you are a victim, 2) to acknowledge that you are a victim but to explain this as an act of fate, 3) to acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the role as inevitable, and 4) to be a creative non-victim.
Laurence's women oscillate between the positions as they struggle with the socio-cultural conditions of their time, location and the events of their lives. In The Stone Angel 90-year-old Hagar recounts her life story marked by losses that result in a state of emotional detachment. At the end of her life, she strives for Position Four but she cannot think of a time she acted as a free being. The protagonist of The Fire-Dwellers, Stacey, is a Manawaka expat living in Vancouver, while her sister Rachel remains in the small town, her own frustrations captured in A Jest of God. Although one is a married mother of three kids and the other one single, both can be examined as examples of the Rapunzel Syndrome. At the age of 40, Vanessa from A Bird in the House revisits the events of her childhood, both the family's economic survival during the Depression and her own desire to escape the house. Morag of the cumulative work The Diviners even moves overseas, only to come back to Canada years later to write fiction much like Laurence herself did. As a writer, she is the only one to achieve the position of a creative non-victim through her exploration of history, fiction and myth.

References

Primary Texts:
Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1994.
Laurence, Margaret. A Jest of God. Toronto: Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1974.
Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1985.
Laurence, Margaret. The Fire-Dwellers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. London: Head of Zeus, 2016.

Secondary sources:
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.
Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Ricou, Laurence. "Empty as Nightmare: Man and Landscape in Recent Canadian Prairie Fiction." Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1973). University of Manitoba.
Staines, David, ed. Margaret Laurence: Critical Reflections. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001.
Stovel, Nora. Divining Margaret Laurence. Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, 2008.
Styles, Christina. "The Ambiguous Nature of Female Identity in Margaret Laurence." MA thesis, McMaster University, 1999
Thomas, Clara. The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975.
Warwick, Susan J. River of Now and Then: Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993.