Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 191-202.
Abstract
This passage introduces "Where the World Began," the concluding piece in Margaret Laurence's 1976 collection of travel essays, Heart of a Stranger, which functions as an autobiography, charting her life journey. Laurence wrote a preface to this collection that exists in manuscript at McMaster University, but which was never published-unfortunately, because it illuminates the autobiographical import of the essays-perhaps because the pattern of her life was clear to her by the time she wrote it in 1976: "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that they are all, in one way or another, travel articles. And by travel, I mean both those voyages which are outer and those voyages which are inner .... I have not arranged these essays in the order in which they were written. It seemed better to arrange them geographically, as travel articles, and this also includes a kind of thematic arrangement, for they end, as most outer and inner journeys end, in a home-coming." The small prairie town referred to in Heart of a Stranger is, of course, Neepawa, Manitoba.
Neepawa was the model for Margaret Laurence's Manawaka-the name an amalgam of Manitoba and Neepawa. In "A Place to Stand On," the opening essay of Heart of a Stranger, originally titled "Sources," Laurence clarifies connections and delineates differences between her factual, personal hometown and her fictional, universal "town of the mind": "Manawaka is not my hometown of Nee paw ait has elements of Nee paw a, especially in some of the descriptions of places, such as the cemetery on the hill or the Wachakwa valley .... In almost every way, however, Manawaka is not so much anyone prairie town as an amalgam of many prairie towns. Most of all, I like to think, it is simply itself, a town of the mind [italics mine], my own private world, ... which one hopes will ultimately relate to the outer world which we all share" (HS, 3-4). Margaret Laurence metamorphoses the actual town of Neepawa into the mythological microcosm of Manawaka, the setting of her Canadian novels- The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974)-as I will argue in this essay. Nothing can traverse national boundaries so easily as the human imagination, and the artist uses fiction to recreate a private kingdom for Everyman or Everywoman to inhabit.
Many great writers have created mythical microcosms based on their birthplaces: we recall Walter Scott's Waverley, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Canadian fiction is famous for its regional richness: "A 'Dictionary of Canadian Mythology' would contain a very large entry under 'Small Town,'" as Clara Thomas declares in The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. One thinks of Stephen Leacock's Mariposa, Sinclair Ross's Horizon, Robertson Davies's Deptford, and Alice Munro's Jubilee, to name but a few. Thomas insists that Manawaka is the most famous of these microcosms: "But no town in our literature has been so consistently and extensively developed as Margaret Laurence's Manawaka. Through five works of fiction, it has grown as a vividly realized, microcosmic world, acting as a setting for the dilemmas of its unique individuals and also exercising its own powerful dynamic on them.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln