New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence: Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.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, "did I tell you - I've changed my name to Margaret?" Named Jean Margaret by her parents, Laurence was known in her early years as Peggy, and it is this name that she forsakes in her letter to Wiseman claiming that "it was Peggy I hated, so I have killed her off (I hope)" (Lennox and Panofsky 129). Margaret Laurence, of course, was the name under which her first novel, This Side Jordan, had appeared in 1960, and it is the name 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 be" (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 name 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, it 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 name 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 I 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. Much literary study of the past several decades has addressed important questions about the relations between a writer, the writer's life in the world, the world and the works written. All of these recent studies of Margaret Laurence consider, to varying degrees, these relations and questions. If an earlier critical orthodoxy argued that the literary work should be approached as autonomous and self-contained, as separate from the historical and biographical circumstances of its creation, the impelling force behind much recent literary analysis has been the urge to return the work to the context in which it was produced and received. This return, however, has not supported the reappearance of an understanding of history, of a period or a life, as simply background, or as the ground upon which an author's intentions and meanings can be fixed. Instead, the literary text increasingly has come to be understood as a form of discourse that interacts with and is shaped by other discourses and practices in specific historical moments. …