Religious Imagery
Religious Imagery
Religion was a very vital part of life during the time of Hagar Shipley in the novel, The Stone Angel. It comes as no surprise that there is a strong presence of religious imagery throughout the novel. Through the positive and negative views on the church and religion portrayed by the characters and the comparison between the story of Hagar Shipley and the biblical Hagar of Genesis, Margaret Laurence makes the religious imagery very clear. There are many similarities between the stories of the two Hagars.
The story of the biblical Hagar is very similar to that of Hagar Shipley in the novel. The two are not only similar in the events, but also in the characters of both Hagars. The parallels between the Hagar of Genesis in the bible, and Hagar Shipley are clear. Both women work as maids at one point in their lives, Hagar Shipley for Mr. Oatley and Hagar of Genesis for Sarai and Abram. Another similarity between the two characters is that they both creatures of the wilderness. In the bible, Hagar ran away from her home because "Sarai treated Hagar so cruelly" (The Good News Bible, Gen. 16.6). Hagar also left her father's home for the wilderness of the Shipley farm. Hagar Shipley shows us what the Shipley place was like when she says, "The Shipley house was square and frame, two-storied, the furniture was shoddy and second-hand, the kitchen reeking and stale, for no one had scoured there properly since Clara died" (Laurence 50). This shows the reader that the life at the Shipley house was nothing like the life that Hagar was used to. One of the major similarities in both stories that is not very well known is that the two characters of Hagar both encounter a theophany. For Hagar of Genesis, her theophany came when she was confronted by an angel of the Lord at a spring on the road to Shur. The Angel said to Hagar, "Go back to [Sarai] and be her slave…I will give you so many descendants that no one will be able to count them" (The Good News Bible, Gen. 16.9-11). Hagar of Genesis realizes the reasons for her getting pregnant and goes back to be Sarai's handmaid and bares Abram's son. In the case of Hagar Shipley her theophany is not quite as straight forward. Earlier in the novel, when Hagar and John are...