Escape, Search, and Return

The term ‘place’ in Laurence’s work has complex connotations, and allusions to ‘place’ in her work in general are frequent (as for example in the title of her essay ‘A Place to Stand on’).^®^ The meaning of ‘place’ for Laurence encompasses not only physieal space, but also position or situation (in time or history). Place is one of the determinants of Laurenee’s identity; of the Canadian prairies she says;

This is where my world began [...] a world which fornied me, and continues to do so, even while I fought it [...] a world which gave me my own life work to do, because it was here that I learned the sight o f my own particular eyes?"^

Margaret Laurence, ‘A Place to Stand on’, in A Place to Stand on, ed. by George Woodcock (Edmonton: NeW est Press, 1983), pp.15-19.

Laurence’s concept of ‘place’ is not static; it involves evolution and change, a search in motion, a cycle. Certainly, Laurence made numerous actual trips or journeys, and she frequently refers to geographical changes in her autobiography. Nora Foster Stovel says Laurence had the ‘heart of a traveller’.^^^ Her memoir is full of references to vehicles (bicycles, trains) and journeys, real or imaginary - the young Margaret used to paint bread boards with imaginary scenes of journeys to exotic countries and write fictional travel journals (Dance 61-62). Laurence’s numerous journeys covered three continents and took place over most of her lifetime (Canada, Somaliland, Ghana, England, Egypt, Suez, Greece, Scotland, and finally Canada again); flying and sailing were intrinsic parts of her existence (as shown by her collection of essays Heart o f a Stranger). Laurence, however, refers to travel not only as physical displacement, but also as psychological pilgrimage. In an unpublished preface to Heart o f a Stranger she explains: ‘By travel I mean both those voyages which are outer and those voyages which are imier’.^^* As well as actual journeys, Laurence undertakes a spiritual quest, a psychological journey towards ‘inner freedom and existential maturity’.^^^ She sees her psychological journey, back to her roots and forward to change, evolution, and growth, as at the core of all human experience and hence at the heart of her

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writing.

The first stage of Laurence’s journey is an escape. Young Margaret is more than eager to flee her early environment: ‘When I was eighteen I couldn’t

Nora Foster Stovel, ‘Heart o f a Traveller: Margaret Laurence’s Life ^o\xxwey\English Studies

in Canada, 28(2002), 169~94(p.l69).

Nora Foster Stovel, “‘A Town o f the Mind”: Margaret Laurence’s Mythical Microcosm of

y im2LyNdksL , Great Plain Quarterly, 19.3(1999), 191-202(p.l71).

Patricia Morley, M argaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), p.7.

wait to get out of that town [Neepawa], away from the prairies’.^^"^ She wants to escape from the house she shares with her Mum and her little brother; her home is felt as a refuge, a secure realm, the location of maternal warmth, but it is also a place where arbitrary demands are made (for example, by her aging grandfather). It is a woman’s kingdom, a world inhabited by strong, independent-minded, talented, intelligent and fostering women - Marg and her spinster sisters, Ruby and Vem - but nevertheless, a male-oriented, limiting world {Dance 7).^’^ Her Mum ‘had no choice’; she had to remain there, trapped by poverty and duty

{Dance 63). The young Margaret Laurence also plans to escape from her town,

which represents the power of spatial-social strictures. She describes her hometown as a microcosm where ‘all seeds of man’s freedom and captivity’ are found.^^^ The ‘positions’ of its inhabitants are determined by social-economic and ethical attributes, and by physical referents - people belong to the right or wrong side of the railway/town.^’^ Thus, after she fails in her attempt to join the naval service during the Second World War, she finally departs for college: the ‘doors to the world were opening’ {Dance 89-90). Wes McAmmond, Laurence’s teacher at high school, recalls young Peggy Wemyss’s feelings at that time: ‘She was tied down. She was at home in a community. Everybody knew who she was. [...] She couldn’t take liberties. She could not have fun! I think she was quite glad when she got going to Wiimipeg’.^’® In order to get out of Neepawa, Laurence must travel across southern Manitoba; she recognizes she has ‘ambiguous feelings about the prairies’ :

Margaret Laurence, Heart o f a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p.217. Powers, Alien Heart, p.25.

Laurence, Heart, p.243. ^ Laurence, Heart, p .216.

Greta M. Coger’s interview o f 25 July 1984 with McAmmond, confirmed by Lyall Powers’ interview, summer 1989 in Winnipeg. Quoted in Lyall Powers, vt/mM Heart: The Life and

Work o f M argaret Laurence (Winnipeg: University o f Manitota Press, 2003), p.49.

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I wanted then to get out of the small town and go far away, and yet I felt the protectiveness o f that atmosphere too. I felt the loneliness and the isolation o f the land itself, and yet I always considered southern Manitoba to be very beautiful, and I still

do.'^'

Later in college where she adopts the stereotype of the inspired poet:

Laurence, ‘A Place’, p. 17. Laurence, Heart, p.218.

The beauty of the prairies, however, cannot conceal from her their risks, the vicissitudes of the natural world that render existence there perilous, and that affect her soul deeply: ‘The land still draws me more than other lands [which] do not have the power to move me in the same way as [...] that part of southern

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Ontario’. For Laurenee, leaving behind the vastness of such landscapes means physical and temporal as well as emotional distance from her former life, rooted as it was in the prairies. She makes an escape, or better a series of escapes, from the dominion of a fixed environment in pursuit of a rootless existenee.

The second stage of Laurence’s journey is a search. She feels the need for fulfilment but she has not yet discovered where to look for it. Her journey of discovery is closely eonnected with creativity, as can be observed in some of her first literary attempts, her imaginary travel journals, ‘a highly uninformed but jubilantly imaginative journal of Captain John Ball and his voyages to exotic lands, complete with maps made by me of strange, mythieal plaees’ {Dance 61).

It was the fashion for aspiring poets to nip over to The Manitoban office, sit down at a typewriter, and dash off a poem on the spur o f the moment, which was then offered and frequently accepted in that week’s issue o f paper. I worked every spare moment in my room for a couple o f weeks, composing, rewriting, and shaping a poem, fortunately now lost to histoiy. I then tripped meiaiiy over to The Manitoban and proceeded to type out this poem from memory. One o f the staff read it, gave me a slightly suiprised glance, and said, ‘Gee, that’s not bad.’ It was sent to be typeset at once (Dance 96-97).

Finding this pose unsatisfying, she looks for emancipation and fulfilment in marriage. Laurence’s friend Lyall Powers affirms that for Peggy, the young college student, ‘Jack Laurence seemed to embody most, if not all, of the features of the ideal escape that Peggy was seeking and, in fact, to push the horizons of her

young life even fuither than she had dreamed possible’. L a u r e n c e pursues then the conventional career of a devoted bride, housewife and mother. She then feels the need to escape from the risk of being identified only with those positions, and this time her means of escape is definitely her writing. She feels the need to write, even if it is inconvenient, unvalued, tiring, and difficult. She does not really have time to write: she must wait until her children are asleep, she has to conceal her work from the community in which they live, her husband has a patronizing attitude towards her wiiting, and she feels herself that she has no claim to be a professional writer {Dance 152; 157). But she perseveres. When she finally leaves her husband, she does so in the hope of finding a literary community to belong to, a fellowship, which could support her creativity: T had to [...] go to London, England, where I imagined, wrongly as it turned out, there would be a literary community that would receive me with open aims and I would at last have the company of other writers, members of my tribe’ {Dance 157-58). Further multiple trips to exotic, far-off lands, to imaginary and actual realms, replenish her life. At each stop on her way, she absorbs experiences, she learns about other human beings, and remarkably, also about herself. Discovering the place where she belongs is, Laurence finds, paradoxically, easier in foreign lands than in the place where she was born. In her experiences abroad, she perceives and appreciates the significance of being a stranger and, as she puts it, ‘one can never be a stranger in one’s own land - it is precisely this fact which makes it so difficult to live

Powells, Alien Heart, p.76.

It was not the first time Laurence sought to escape through marriage. In the Summer holidays o f 1945, just before the end o f World War II, when her RAF ex-boyfriend Derek had gone back home, Laurence wrote to her university roommate, Helen Warkentin: T wish now that I’d manned Derek before he left. I would be in England now, & it would somehow be better’ (Letter to Helen Warkentin [Summer 1945]. York University, Toronto, Clara Thomas Archives, Margaret Laurence, Call Number 2004-040/001).

there’. Wlien in unfamiliar lands, the traveller experiences the same phenomenon of existential isolation writ large; her feeling of being ‘out-of-the- way’ is exaggerated by the strangeness of the unknown nature (landscape, weather) and culture (customs and traditions, language). Without recognizable context, Laurenee’s own existential process beeomes the only point of reference and is, therefore, more deeply analyzed. Any attempt at defining the environment, which excludes the observer, becomes also an attempt to define Laurence’s own identity; ‘The strangest glimpses you may have of any ereature in distant lands will be

those you catch of yourself. Geographical and temporal distance from

Laurence’s origins enable her to observe her self from a fresh viewpoint: ‘my experience of other eountries probably taught me more about myself and even my own land [...] living away from home gives a new perspeetive on home’.^^'’

Afriea certainly taught Laurence to look at herself. Clara Thomas confirms that Laurence’s experience in Africa was a crucial ‘catalyst’ :

The whole experience in Africa did that very thing [making her aware o f differences] for her [...] Every time she spoke to anybody or did everything, it wakened up the distance between the cultures and the importance of the culture she was in, and it gave her a great feeling o f not only its importance but its stature and the worth o f other people. It destroyed for ever any theory she might have grown up with about white people in the Western world being on top.^^^

In Africa, Laurence is constantly reminded of her strangeness and, like her character, Miranda Kestoe, in This Side Jordan, she tries to understand and befriend the native Africans, but soon recognizes her naïveté. Laurence gives Miranda a different background but makes her share her own determining and potentially debilitating relationship to it. Miranda, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, thinks she has ‘broken away from her class’ but, like her creator, she

Margaret Laurence, The Prophet’s Camel Bell (London: Macmillan, 1963), p/237. Laurence, P ro f e t’s, pp. 1-2.

Laurence, Heart, p .II.

hasn’t really; she ‘is influenced by her background much more than she realizesSimilarly, when Laurence travels to Scotland, the land she used to identify as the place of her ancestors, she anticipates a feeling of deep emotional closeness to the old country. She encounters disappointment instead: ‘I felt absolutely no connection with the actual Scotland, and yet I half expected and even hoped to discover some feeling of ancestry there, something that would convey to me a special personal m ea ni ng L a ur en ce realizes that, in spite of having been raised in a mist of Scottish traditions, the Scotland she had envisaged during her childhood had been a fantasy. To her old fiiend Jack Borland, she wi'ote:

I love it ... Scotland has a fascination for me, because it is the ancestial roots, but I am coming to the conclusion that what really matters for like m yself is not the real Scotland but the fact that we were brought up with myths o f a countiy which wasn’t real, the fantasy Scotland, the paradise .. and we in dreams behold the Hebrides ..in dreams is

right.'^'"

Complicating furthermore Laurence’s recognition of ancestral identity and roots, is the fact that when she was born, there were no Canadians, as the British Statute of Westminster gave autonomy to the Dominion of Canada only when she was five years old. Thus, Canada was not the traditional place of her people, but her relationship to Scotland goes back to ‘a more distant past which one has not personally e x p e r i e n c e d I n Scotland, Laurence recognized names of places and people, landscapes, and even faces, but they seemed unreal there, because for Laurence they were Canadian names or sceneiy:

Letter to Adele Wiseman, 31 July 1956. In Laurence and Wiseman,*S'e/ec/‘et/Letters, p.97. Margaret Laurence, ‘Road from the Isles’, mH eart o f a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), pp.l45-57(p.I47).

Letter to Jack Borland, 11 Februaiy 1969. In P o w e r s , Heart, p.347-48. Laurence quotes from ‘Canadian Boat Song’ by John Galt (1779-1839), Blackwood’s Magazine, 1829: ‘From the shelling on the misty island /Mountains divide us, and the waste o f seas, /Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is highland, /And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’

Margaret Laurence, ‘A Place to Stand on’, in Heart o f a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), pp. 13-18(p. 13).

Scottishness - real or invented - had to be present, in order to be superseded, for

All these names meant something to me. Glengany - this is Glengairy, Ontario; it is The

Man from Glengarry by Ralph Connor. Sutherland, Banneiman, Ross, Selkirk, Kildonan

- to me, these names are the names o f the places 1 grew up among, the names o f Manitoba towns and the names o f Winnipeg’s streets. [,..] The Highlands of Scotland struck a chord in me because they reminded me o f Clear Lake in Manitoba?^ °

Ï

.S Laurence to become Canadian. During her life pilgrimage, Laurence becomes

aware of her difference and learns to identify herself with the place that gives meaning to her life, where she feels she belongs, her first home:

There is another kind o f histoiy, the kind that has the most power over us in unsuspected ways, the names or tunes or trees that ean recall a thousand images, and this almost- family history can be related only to one’s first homeF'

Finally, she recognizes that her roots are after all entangled with the hearts and souls of Canadian people, and that these roots are not to be found by journeying to places different from Canada. She feels the need of ‘a foothold in Canada’ because her ‘true roots were in Canada’ {Dance 196).^^^ She uses her newly achieved knowledge to build her lively fiction and a strong sense of identity for herself. Hers is a life-long struggle for an existential locus.

After years of searching for a place, a position for her real self, Laurence acknowledges that the only truthful place for her to stand is on her ‘heartland’

{Dance 215)?^^ Thus, a third stage of her life-long pilgrimage is a return to the

one place where her being is physically and psychologically rooted. Her life’s journey literally ends where it started: an ex-funeral parlour in a small Canadian prairie town {Dance 210). In fact, Laurence describes her whole life as ‘a long journey back home’.^^"^ The question here is whether this return to her point of departure is really possible. At the point of her return she is different from the former self who left the prairies many years before; she has new roles in her

% Laurence, ‘Road’, p. 155-56. Laurence, ‘Road’, p .156-57. Laurence Heart, p.219. Laurence, Heart, p.161. Laurence, Heart, p. 12.

community as a recognized wiiter, and she has now a mature self with diverse thoughts - and emotions - and different strategies for processing them. The place of her childhood is different as well: it has changed independently from her memories. New kinds of interactions between Laurence and her community necessarily arise, as, for example, in some fundamentalist attacks on her work

{Dance 214-16). However, in a mental and emotional sense as well as a physical

one, for Laurence return is possible:

The most loved place, for me [...] has changed throughout the years, as 1 and my circumstances have changed. 1 haven’t really lost any o f the best places from the past, though. I may no longer inhabit them, but they inhabit me, positions o f memory, presences in the mind.^^^

Because of the dynamic relationships between the positions she has occupied, they remain vital and open to be revisited. Having destroyed significant misconceptions, as for example her former ideas about her Scottish roots and her illusion of a better literary community somewhere else, she knows now the place she must return to, the place where she belongs, the place where the journey started, the land where she was born.^^^