Stone Angel Character Analysis

The Stone Angel :Character Analysis of Hagar Shipley The story centers around ninety year old Hagar Shipley, an aging woman living with her eldest and least love son and his wife. Margaret Laurence skilfully reveals Hagar’s past through a series of flashbacks and the reader is taken on a tour of this woman’s life as she struggles with her present failing condition and her anger and resentments about the past. We learn that …

…on being independent and self-sufficient, and in these last days of her life, she realizes what a price she has paid over the years. The main burden of the novel is the change which comes to Hagar as a person. At the end her hardness melts and her egocentrism softens, in this way establishing a redemptive pattern for the novel. In the final analysis there is a sense of pathos in our attitudes towards her.