The Unity of the Manawaka Cycle

The Unity ofthe Manawaka Cycle DAVID BLEWETT With the publication in 1974 of The Diviners it became clear that Margaret Laurence's series of Manawaka novels were intended to possess a· cohesion that went beyond the mere coincidence of place or the occasional reappearance of a character from an earlier novel. The Diviners, a work deeply concerned with the transmission of the values of the past through the generations, reaches back to complete a story begun in The Stone Angel. And if there were links of this kind, was it not possible that each of the separate works might be seem, from this perspective, as parts of a whole? I In this essay I argue that the Manawaka cycle is unified not only by the centripetal pull of the home town itself, but by the development over the four novels of a vision of the human condition which is not fully ·rendered until the cycle is completed.2 This development imparts to the cycle a rhythm of reconciliation in which the fragmentariness of ordinary life, explored in the separate works, is seen against, and so continually absorbed into, a sense of design and purpose in the universe. My intention here is not to examine all the means by which that vision is worked out (that is beyond the scope of a single essay), but to consider three ways which seem to me to be important: the meaning of Manawaka; the continuity of a major device, that of contrasted pairs of individuals and images; and an elaborate parallel with Eliot's symbolism of the four elements in The Wasteland. I The primary unifying feature is Manawaka itself, the home town of all the narrators and many other characters, and the imaginative centre of the cycle. We derive our knowledge of the town from the accounts of the troubled women who Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 3(Automne1978 Fall) are the protagonists, each of whom offers us a highly personal, retrospective, and frequently bitter perspective, such that at first the recurrence of Manawaka in their backgrounds appears fortuitous . Later, as we put together their separate narratives, we build up a picture of the social structures and physical features of the town. As we do so, we come to a deeper understanding of the meaning of Manawaka, which is not only a fictional town in southern Manitoba, but is also the embodiment of Margaret Laurence's vision of the human lot. What chiefly strikes us about Manawaka is its social and physical divisions. The social structure of Manawaka is a rigid - if somewhat rickety - hierarchy, based on money and race. There are three main groups. First, the original settlers and their descendants, largely Scottish Presbyterians, proud, tough, hard-working, and, by and large, prosperous. There are subtle gradations of social degree within this group, but it is united against the rest of the town by its respectability . Outside respectable society there are various kinds of people who do not count socially the Ukrainians (such as Nestor Kazlik and his family), unsuccessful farmers (such as Bram Shipley ), and ne'er-do-wells (such as Christie Logan). Finally, outside the town and its social order altogether there are the Metis, the descendants of the original inhabitants of the land, but now dispossessed . The geography of Manawaka and the country around it reflects and reinforces the social structure. Its main areas are the quiet, residential streets lined with brick houses inhabited by the well-to-do; a commercial centre of office buildings and stores owned by the wealthy businessmen and merchants; and an area of poorer houses near the CPR tracks, which cut across and further divide the town. Outside the town lie the farms, isolated, particularly in winter, and increasingly cut off as the Depression makes transportation expensive. And beyond the farms in the valley are the shacks of the Metis. Manawaka is an emblem of human divisiveness . Its inhabitants are cut off from one another by pride, timidity, and the awareness of social differences, and as a result are largely unable to 31 communicate their feelings, or even to recognize their emotional isolation and imprisonment. Like the speakers in the first section of...