Manawaka

figure in their lives to give them the support of their father. Laurence received this fatherly figure from her grandfather and Piquette received it from Vanessa’s father which was told when Piquette told Vanessa “Your dad was the only person in Manawaka that had ever done any good to me” (Laurence, 9). With that statement Piquette showed how Laurence was influenced negatively by her father, but positively by her

The Loons Margaret Laurence’s “The Loons”, is a story about an Indian girl who tries to overcome obstacles in her life and discover a place of belonging, but in the end, dies at an early age. She grows up in an environment where she is not happy, and despite her efforts to leave, ends up back in her hometown, which leads to her death. The theme of this story is that everyone is a product of their environment, which is illustrated by Vanessa and Piquette’s lives and the loons on the lake. Vanessa

did? Did she? And to James, space venturer, first man on the moon? (59) There is interior monologue, consisting of the narrator’s self-questioning and her typically self-deprecating answer; Laurence then inserts imaginary future speakers, gossiping Manawaka townspeople, who

For instance, in “Horses of the Night,” the character of Chris has dissociative symptoms that can be linked to his depression. Margaret Laurence’s short story tells the story of Chris, a young teenager who moves to from a small farm to the town of Manawaka in order to go to high school. The story is told by his younger cousin, Vanessa. As she grows up, she learns that Chris is depressed. The author uses the theme of fantasy to show that he does not cope well with reality. The horses, Shallow Creek

story is told through the eyes of a young girl, Vanessa, and focuses on her relationship with an Indigenous girl in her class named Piquette Tonerre. The Tonerre family is not of any high social class and are often perceived to be “below” the rest of Manawaka, the fictional town the story is set in. In fact the narrator, Vanessa, confesses that she barely acknowledges Piquette’s existence until the young Tonerre spends a summer with Vanessa’s family at their cottage in Diamond Lake. Even then, Vanessa

by Margaret Laurence together with other stories in the sequence “A bird in the House” and was published in 1970. The story centers on the narrator and the main character Vanessa McLeod, a white girl and her youth days in a fictional town known as Manawaka,

An individual’s need to renounce a decision or a course of action can often lead to an individual forsaking themselves and choosing to live in their own fantasy, and not living in reality. In the short story “The Horses of the Night”, Chris has to deal with his below average life, in his below average house, and to do so he creates his own delusions by renouncing what his life is now. As the story progresses, the life of Chris progressively gets worse, with no job and no college education, Chris

Pride     In Margaret Laurence’s powerful novel “The Stone Angel”  the theme pride often displayed through the characters.  Each figure had their own way of showing this theme through both actions and words. The recurring theme is exhibited by the behaviors of Brampton Shipley, Hagar Shipley, and her father, Jason Currie.     Hagar Shipley lived her life blind, with pride as her cane for guidance. There was many situations throughout the novel where she made decisions solely based off of her pride

The Loons: A Girls Cry for Belonging Although some readers might think Margaret Laurence's short story “The Loons” is about the naivety of a young girl named Vanessa who spent her days fantasizing about native american culture, it is in fact about the adversity an individual faces when presented with a lack of belonging. Laurence employs this idea through the loss and mourning of her two main characters. Through Vanessa McLeod and Piquette Tonnerres she shows how one individual’s perpetual need of

In her novel The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence uses the stone angel monument to embody the qualities of Hagar . Over the course of the novel, Hagar reflects back on the memories that have made up her life. Hagar's loneliness and depression are self induced and brought on by her pride, lack of emotion, stubbornness and the ignorance which she has towards anyone's opinion but her own. The qualities of Hagar are identical with those possessed by the stone angel monument and paralleled by Laurence many