Between The Dancer and the Dance: Reading the Life and Work of Margaret Laurence

Abstract

THE CRAFTING OF CHAOS: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN MARGARET LAURENCE'S THE STONE ANGEL AND THE DIVINERS. Hildegard Kuester. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1994, A VERY LARGE SOUL: SELECTED LETTERS FROM MARGARET LAURENCE TO CANADIAN WRITERS. Ed. J.A. Wainwright. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant Books, 1995. CRITICAL SPACES: MARGARET LAURENCE AND JANET FRAME. Lorna M. Irvine. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MARGARET LAURENCE: POETIC NARRATIVE, MULTICULTURALISM, AND FEMINISM. Ed. Greta M.K. McCormick Coger. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. THE LIFE OF MARGARET LAURENCE. James King. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1997. THE SELECTED LETTERS OF MARGARET LAURENCE AND ADELE WISEMAN. Eds. John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. THE MARGIN SPEAKS: A STUDY OF MARGARET LAURENCE AND ROBERT KROETSCH FROM A POST-COLONIAL POINT OF VIEW. Gunilla Florby. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1997. CHALLENGING TERRITORY. THE WRITING OF MARGARET LAURENCE. Ed. Christian Riegel. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997. When Shakespeare's Juliet asked what's in a name? she entered a long and continuing conversation about the relationship between words and the world, about the self, identity and representation. In a postscript to a letter written in January 1961, Margaret Laurence asks her lifelong friend, Adele Wiseman, tell you - I've changed my to Margaret? Named Jean Margaret by her parents, Laurence was known in her early years as Peggy, and is this that she forsakes in her letter to Wiseman claiming that it was hated, so have killed her off (I hope) (Lennox and Panofsky 129). Margaret Laurence, of course, was the under which her first novel, This Side Jordan, had appeared in 1960, and is the under which all her subsequent work was published, work that justly earned Laurence respect and acknowledgement as one of Canada's foremost and accomplished writers. In The Life of Margaret Laurence, James King reflects on this postscript, first asking why did Margaret `kill off' Peggy? then answering that Peggy was the girl she had been, whereas Margaret was the woman she aspired to (151). While King sees this transition as sudden and violent, almost as if a change in personality would follow a change in name (Ibid.), the disjuncture between the two is subtly qualified by Laurence's parenthetical I hope. The Margaret Laurence may have been adopted, but the relinquishing of all that had gone before was clearly not possible. Reading through the list of the above titles, is this name, Margaret Laurence, that emerges as the constant element, and, in the language of the library catalogue, as the main subject of this review. But, as is always the case with any search for a subject, these eight works reveal that the ostensibly singular subject with which one begins cannot finally be apprehended or discerned in any single or uniform manner. Given the emphasis in literary theory and criticism over the past several decades on notions of plurality, multiplicity, heterogeneity and difference, to note that the writings of Margaret Laurence have been approached and interpreted in diverse ways may seem mundane, even unnecessary. However, the writings of Margaret Laurence are not all that is located under the main subject heading here. There is also the person who bore the Margaret Laurence, and the life that she led. In this collection of recent works on the subject of Margaret Laurence we accordingly find two collections of essays on Laurence's writing, two works offering comparative discussion of Laurence alongside another writer, a structuralist reading of two of Laurence's Manawaka novels, two letter collections and a biography. Names and identity, subjects and subjectivity have received much critical scrutiny of late, and introduce these issues at the outset of this review both to foreground the concerns this scrutiny has raised, and to suggest that they are of particular relevance in considering the life and work of Margaret Laurence. …