MARGARET LAURENCE, CARL JUNG
AND THE MANAWAKA WOMEN

Nancy Bailey

"Canadian writing tends to be Jungian, whereas American writing tends to be Freudian" is the bold thesis of Robert Kroetsch.¹ The first half of it is certainly true of Canadian fiction. The influence of Jung on Robertson Davies in Fifth Business and The Manticore and on Margaret Atwood in Surfacing is obvious and well-known. What has not hitherto been recognized is that Margaret Laurence too may be called a Jungian, in the sense that some of Jung's most penetrating intuitions are exemplified and illuminated in her four Manawaka novels: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and The Diviners.² While the earlier women - Hagar, Rachel, and Stacey - represent only aspects of Jung's concept of personality, Morag Gunn, the protagonist of the last novel (which Laurence herself sees as ending the Manawaka saga³), goes through a process of development which corresponds closely to Jung's full pr! ocess of individuation. In the Laurence novels, the quest for identity can be seen to progress, almost systematically, from the problems of the persona and the unadapted shadow in The Stone Angel and A Jest of God, through increasing awareness and acceptance of the animus-figure in The Fire-Dwellers, to the completed individuation of Morag in The Diviners. The parallels between the phases of Jung's theory and of Laurence's fiction reveal the novelist as spiritually akin to the psychologist; her work has the scope and articulation of a complete cultural myth which lends itself appropriately toJungian analysis - while at the same time pointing beyond Jung's ideas on female-male relations, which were deeply conditioned by his own time. Although Laurence's techniques make her characters speak and live with the force of cinema verité, her women derive their universal and enduring power over our imaginations from the myth in which ! their creator places them. In the analysis of this myth, the conceptual tools forged by Jung can help us to place some of the characters and relationships, can throw increased light on the achievements that evade all the Laurence women except Morag Gunn, and can contribute to a better understanding of one of the central questions of our time, the nature of woman and her relation to the male. For the woman novelist ultimately diverges into a significantly different psychological and cultural mythos of woman, one in which the integrated but isolated self must learn to be its own support and create its own finality. In linking such a condition to love and joy, Laurence gives new meaning to Rilke's definition of love as two solitudes that "protect, and touch, and greet each other" and thereby places new demands on the techniques of fiction.

"The river flowed both ways." This first sentence of The Diviners, in the section entitled "The River of Now and Then," presents a symbol which draws immediate attention to Laurence's Jungian concept of the self as process, as always in a fluid state of becoming as opposed to a frozen state of being. The ongoing nature of the experience of identity, which involves the self in a simultaneous relationship to time present, past, and future, is apparent in all Laurence's novels and is basic to her most central and recurrent narrative relationship, that of mother and child. Except in the case of Hagar, who mothers two sons, this means the mother-daughter relationship, which for the female consciousness is the most elementary of all. Before the girl-child knows anything of the expectations of family and society, she knows she is a daughter of a mother. This relationship provides Laurence with a clear analogue to the ongoing nature of the self - namely, the daughter who i! n turn becomes mother; as mother, she still retains within herself her daughterhood and with it a strong sense of the past, while at the same time she sees the future in her daughter who is, as Morag says of Pique, "the harbinger of her death and the continuer of her life."⁴ Even the childless Rachel comes to the recognition that "she is the mother now." As she travels to Vancouver with her child-mother (Mrs. Cameron), Rachel is beginning to realize what Morag perceives as the pattern of existence at the end of The Diviners, as she looks once more at the river that flows both ways: we "look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence."

The struggle to define the self so as to be able to live freely in the present, while conscious of both past and future, is a distinguishing mark of the Laurence heroine. In all the novels, the preciousness of the living present is emphasized by the presence of emblems of "the silence." Death inhabits the novels: in the undertaker-father of the Carneron girls, in the cemetery with the Stone Angel which opens Hagar's novel and is in sight at the placewhere Rachel and Nick make love, in the Nuisance Grounds where Christie divines the garbage and the aborted child lies amidst the refuse, in the fire that destroys the Tonnerre daughter and her children (mentioned in Stacey's novel and central to The Diviners), and in the suicides that thread their way from one novel to the next. All these emblems affirm through contrast that the nature of the living and free being is movement, growth, and change. However, whereas the female characters, through their mother-daughter ide! ntity, demonstrate the quality of existence as continuous process, the male figures (usually father or lover) often seem to represent discontinuity in themselves and reorientation for the female. The female quest for selfhood cannot be fulfilled unless the challenge represented by the male can be met. In Laurence's fiction, there are some male characters who represent the ancestral, societal past and the functions of rational personality as conceived by Jung (Mr. Currie; Marvin Shipley; Morag's husband, Brooke; Grandfather Connor), but there are also those who represent the opposite of rationality - namely, nonrational sensation, intuition, instinct, freedom from fear of nonconformity. The latter group is the more numerous: Bram and John Shipley, Nick, Niall Cameron, Dr. .McLeod, Uncle Dan, Chris, Christie, Jules, McRaith, Royland. These men are realizations of the positive animus, but they become so only through their recognition by the integrated female psyche. The recogniti! on and acceptance of the animus is fraught with peril and demands great psychic energy and courage. The special, triumphant few who divine its presence are, for Laurence, the Diviners.

For Hagar and Rachel the acceptance of the self occasioned by the challenge of the male occurs as a shock of recognition only through the memory of time past, not in the present time of the relationship itself.⁵ In contrast, however, Laurence suggests that one of the main reasons why Stacey escapes from Manawaka so many years before her sister Rachel is that, having recognized and accepted her father for what he really was, Stacey is left free both to mourn him and yet to live her own life. Although she resembles her father in her fondness for the gin bottle and although she asks for his gun as her inheritance, she nevertheless throws it in the lake and remains untempted by the solution of suicide that her neighbour Tess adopts. The extent of Stacey's strength is revealed, moreover, through a figure of the past, Mac's father, whose confession she hears and to whom she can open both heart and home in a truly generous and life-enhancing way. Thus at the end of ! The Fire-Dwellers, Stacey is as triumphant as life allows any of Laurence's women to be, until Morag. The novel ends with the omniscient voice in the present tense:

Stacey heaves over onto her side. The house is quiet. The kids are asleep. Downstairs in the ex-study Matthew has been asleep for hours, or if not asleep, meditating. Beside her, she can already hear the steady breathing that means Mac is asleep. Temporarily they are all more or less okay.

The emphasis on quiet peace and intimate closeness in a continuum of past, present, and future suggests that Stacey is much closer than she realizes to fulfilling her quest for selfhood.

The patterns of growth toward selfhood which appear as Laurence moves from Hagar through Rachel to Morag run parallel to those found in Jungian psychology. Jung, like Freud, saw the psyche as having three basic parts or levels, but Jung differed from his predecessor in his analysis of these parts and in placing greater emphasis on memory and society and less on the controlling nature of sexual instinct. Jung uses the term "persona" to describe the mask which the ego consciously assumes to meet the world. Since the world as object includes all other people, as opposed to the self which is always subject, every self is a lonely island. How true this is of all Laurence's women!⁶ Jung warned that if the individual becomes totally identified with this persona, other valid parts of the personality which are thereby neglected will tend to act negatively and in unexpected ways. Mrs. Cameron, Mr. Currie, Grandmother McLeod, and Grandfather Connor are characters who seem t! o be totally identified with their personae and to have no life apart from them. Rachel, however, in her embarrassing outburst at the Tabernacle, shows the propensity of the inner self to assert itself against a persona with which it is not in accord. Hagar's misfortune seems to be that her conscious will is so strong that she can continue to assert her mask even with Bram - at the cost of denying her love for him and her joy in their sexual union. Too late she realizes:

I must always have wanted that - simply to rejoice. How long have I known? Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some cave too deeply buried, too concealed? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances - oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart's truth?⁷

Jung stressed that while one can achieve individuality through the persona alone, nevertheless, because this mask-like personality centres on the ego and the conscious part of the self, its area is perforce extremely limited, cut off as it is from the richer and more creative area of the self that is the unconscious.⁸ Hagar's speech is an agonized recognition of just such a situation. Only in death does she find access to this unconsciousness and its freedom which should and could have been hers in life.

The unconscious areas of the self have to be recognized and opened up before the goal which Jung termed "individuation" can be achieved. Individuation he regarded as an event spread over the whole of life: "[It] is never completed," he says; "it is always an unending approximation to which death provides the ultimate limitation."' Jung saw this process as creating a new level of being and as developing, not from a struggle between opposites, but from a dialogue between the equals of conscious and unconscious. Individuation is a goal because it involves the integration of inner and outer worlds. It is a blending ofcomplementary elements which allows the realization of the whole self, whose conscious sphere will be enriched and enhanced by its access to the unconscious. In Jung's view this process of individuation has to be preceded by adaptation to a necessary minimum of collective social and environmental standards. He thought that the self, after achieving individuation, w! ill expand naturally and necessarily to concern itself with collective or universal interests.¹⁰ This, it must be stressed, is Jung's view of normal, not abnormal, psychological development. The characteristic narrative voice of a Laurence novel is that of internal dialogue. At times this dialogue parallels the conflict through which the inner self and the mask achieve integration and growth. We can watch this process most clearly and most often in Morag. But it is clear too in Stacey:

How good to hear nothing, no voices. I thought you were the one who was screaming about nobody wanting to talk. Yeh. Well. How good it feels, no voices. Except yours, Stacey. Well, that's my shadow. It won't be switched off until I die. I'm stuck with it, and I get bloody sick of it, I can tell you. Who is this you? I don't know. Shut up. I'm trying to be quiet and you won't let me.¹¹

At times, momentarily, the note is struck with Hagar, too, as in this example from her night in the cannery:

They can dump me in a ten-acre field, for all I care, and not waste a single cent on a box of flowers, nor a single breath on prayers to ferry my soul, for I'll be dead as a mackerel. Hard to imagine a world and I not in it. Will everything stop when I do? Stupid old baggage, who do you think you are? Hagar. There's no one like me in this world.
(S.A., 250)

These examples show two selves which, knowing one another in different degrees and accepting, though grudgingly, their relation to each other, are able to argue as equals, as Stacey does so often with God.

Morag's quest for selfhood begins early and abruptly as a result of the accident of her parents' death, which leaves her under the guardianship of Christie Logan, the Manawaka garbage collector, and his wife, Prin. The snapshots Morag keeps of her parents are raw materials for the legends she creates of them - legends which raise her above the sordid reality of her life in the shadows of the municipal dump (called, in Manawaka, "the Nuisance Grounds"). Surrounded by the detritus of the town, from bottles to aborted babies, Morag despairingly searches for order and meaning with the aid of legends - her own stories of her family and Christie's tales of an historical and racial past which he personalizes for her through the Celtic Piper Gunn and his woman Morag.¹² Yet, ironically, Morag's dream-life becomes a way of denying the living reality of Christie and his "garbage telling." He is the first of the novel's diviners and Morag's first (though unacknowledged) anim! us projection. The first time Morag goes to the Nuisance grounds, Jules is there too, and together they hear Christie "tell the garbage." Her sexual initiation comes with this same Jules Tonnerre. a Métis living with his father on the edge of the town. In her attempt to deny her Manawaka past. Morag chooses, however, to identify with the world of reason and order, for that, apparently, is what is represented by Brooke, one of her University professors of English. To marry Brooke, Morag gives up her university career and moves with her husband to Toronto, but, more than that, as her new surname indicates, she gives up a part of her inner self when she becomes Mrs. Skelton. Morag's denial of her inner self (in contrast to Hagar's), however, is a conscious choice. She vows to conceal everything about herself which he might not like (D, 159), although she knows that she is being untrue to herself in never letting Brooke see the "Black Celt" in her (D, 186)! .

In Jung's analysis, as in Laurence's world, the inner self and the mask will always be in some opposition, but in the secure personality, the persona will rest solidly on the unconscious; otherwise, extremes in the persona may be balanced by extremes in the unconscious. At this point, one of the aspects of the unconscious, the shadow, may give trouble by shooting up into the conscious without warning, causing moods, blunders, and so-called Freudian slips. "The Shadow" is Jung's term for the autonomous, weaker, unadapted side of the persona. Aside from the persona and its other self, the shadow, Jung argued that the personality expresses itself in four functions, linked in pairs - namely, the rational pair of thought and feeling or duty, and the nonrational pair of sense and intuition. What matters is not which pair is dominant but whether in fact the stronger pair is distinguished as the persona.¹³ That Morag is not meeting this condition is shown by the increasi! ng division between her persona and her inner self which grows until finally she comes to "hate the external self at variance with the inside" (D, 203). The external disguise of coiffeured hair. carefully tailored dresses, and matching accessories becomes more and more sterile: it represents intellect divorced from creativity, material security without inner peace. respectability which is really only conformity, a false pose which makes it finally impossible for her to bear Brooke's child. To be Brooke's anima, Morag must live totally in the present and deny completely the Black Celt in her that is associated strongly with sensation and intuition and with the past. What he loves and needs, Brooke tells her, is what he first found in her:

When you first came to me, you had no past. I liked that. It was as though everything was starting for you, right then, that moment. You used to make me laugh - I don't mean at you. I mean with you. Don't you remember? I don't, I suppose, laugh easily. You had a lightness of heart that I loved - I really loved.
(D, 210)

During this period of psychic stress Morag begins and completes her first novel, Spear of Innocence. The process of creative writing seems to enable her to stay alive and to keep strong enough and independent enough of her false persona to be able to respond to Jules when he reappears. Through him, she frees herself from Brooke to be re-born, even as her child is born.

The structure of the novel, at this crucial point for Morag, throws considerable emphasis on the curious and seemingly unlikely figure of Prin. Although when Morag breaks free of Brooke she speaks Christie's words, it is the title of Prin's favourite song, "The Halls of Zion," which is used to name the section; and it is Prin's funeral that immediately precedes Morag's separation from her husband. Brooke attributes Morag's odd behaviour to her having had to return to Manawaka for Prin's death. What then is the importance of Prin, who does no more than rock and eat jelly donuts? The reader who stops to reflect on this question finds himself uncovering more and more connections through contrast between the two women. Prin is connected in Morag's mind with the scene in the bakery when Morag suffered what she fears most, public scorn. Prin retreated from the same menace into silence and dream, but Morag pushed herself on, developing, in school and college, the verbal protection! and escape of writing. Later in her life, however, her conversations with Catherine Parr Traill reveal Morag's awareness of a continuing temptation within herself to withdraw as Prin did from the front line battle of life. Prin, the Princess without a Prince or subjects, draws no nourishment from society; she becomes only a silent mountain of flesh. For her, there is no release or support for psychic energy, any more than there would be for Morag if she stayed in Manawaka, in her legend world, or in the false life she has created with Brooke. Prin's dreams have no connection to society; they are utopian, formed in exile as were those of the Jewish exiles who wept by the waters of Babylon when they dreamed of Zion. Prin, old yet young, with a simplicity that Morag recognizes as that of the pure in heart, is a strikingly close dramatization of Jung’s description of the shadow.

Jung's researches convinced him that the shadow, despite its repressed tendencies, is not evil. It is "merely what is inferior, primitive, unadapted and awkward, not wholly bad. It contains inherited, childish or primitive qualities that would in a way vitalize and even embellish human existence."¹⁴ For the shadow to be positive rather than negative, it must be consciously accepted. However, as Jung observed, commonly the shadow is projected onto another person instead. Hagar projects hers onto Lottie, but also, it seems, back onto her dead mother. Even as a child, she denies the part of her self that is represented by her mother, indeed, so completely does she repress it that she will not take the mother's place even in disguise to comfort her dying brother. Only in retrospect does Hagar see how much she resembles her father and what a price she has paid for denying the totality of her nature. Her refusal to join Lottie in killing the new chicks at the dump can ! be interpreted as the rebellion of her unconscious against the destruction of the fertility symbol. But even though she remembers the incident later in life¹⁵ and is convinced that her reaction was right. she has no awareness that in this solitary incident she has revealed her truest personality. The night scene in the hospital ward, in which Hagar is unaware of her own voice crying out Bram's name. indicates the extent of her denial of her inner self. Nor is she fully conscious when she begs forgiveness of John during her night in the cannery.

In contrast, Morag is aware of one similarity between herself and Prin when she muses at Prin's funeral:

Those halls of Sion. The Prince is ever in them. What had Morag expected, those years ago, marrying Brooke! Those selfsame halls? ... And now here, in this place, the woman who had brought Morag up is lying dead, and Morag's mind, her attention. has left Prin. Help me, God; I'm frightened of myself. (D, 207)

Right after this, Morag returns to Brooke, and Christie's words pour from her as she astounds her husband:

... Brooke, I am twenty-eight years old, and I am five feet eight inches tall, which has seemed too bloody christly tall to me but there it is, and by judas priest and all the sodden saints in fucking Beulah land, I am stuck with it and I do not mind like I did once, in fact the goddamn reverse if you really want to know. for I've gone against it long enough, and I'm no actress at heart, then, and that's the everlasting christly truth of it.
(D, 210)

Through the activation of the contents of her unconscious while she was writing, Morag's conscious mind seems to have come into contact with the shadow content of her personal unconscious in such a way as to assimilate it. In this way, she is prepared for Jules who represents a deeper level of being for her, a content of the collective unconscious and another projection of her soul-image or animus.

The animus/anima figures represent the opposite of the dominant sexual attitude in the conscious feniale/male personality. The dominating male attitudes of Western civilization have made the anima figure all too familiar to us, although she may appear in a variety of forms from Venus to the Virgin Mary, or even to Mary the bank's advertising helper. The animus figure, though less well known, is pertinent here since the Laurence protagonists are women. In addition to the sexual attitude, the animus figure will represent the opposite functions of personality to those chosen by the persona and will thus be associated with the shadow. The unconscious is not, however, like Freud's Id, dominated by sex; instead this is the level of the psyche which includes the spiritual element of the personality. It may appear in dreams as ugly and imperfect; but, if like the Ugly Fairy, it can be loved and accepted, it can be transformed into a powerful spiritual and creative force to balance ! or supplement the conscious life. If the personality is to be integrated in universal terms and elevated beyond the societal truths represented by the persona, an engagement with the animus must occur, out of which rebirth can ensue. Indeed, Jung felt that the appearance in dreams of the symbol of the child was the mark of the adult's momentous moment of rebirth. Before this can take place, however, it is essential that the shadow be dealt with, for it blocks the way to the deeper levels of the unconscious.¹⁶

The considerable moral effort which Jung posits as necessary before one is conscious of the shadow can be seen in both Hagar and Rachel, both of whom also dramatize Jung's belief that the personal unconscious, which is associated largely with the shadow level, is essentially negative and constricted. Although the shadow exists for everyone, it is dangerous only if it remains hidden, because then it blocks the way to the deeper levels of the unconscious. For Jung the positive, creative force within the unconscious is the storehouse of the archetypes and the dwelling of the animus/anima. One of the commonest archetypes for the animus is that of the Father; others are Son, Hero, and Wise Man.¹⁷ The hindrance caused by the unknown or unacknowledged shadow can be seen in the difference between the Cameron sisters, between Rachel who rejects and Stacey who accepts her father as animus. Consequently, the rebirth symbols are strong in The Fire-Dwellers. Duncan, ! the child undesired by his father, is reborn from the sea into the arms of his father. In a novel where the dominant search is for ways of communication, the moment when Jen, the flower child, begins to speak may also be interpreted as a moment of rebirth. Throughout the novel Stacey's science-fiction fantasies suggest an opening of her unconscious life that leads her to Luke, who is to her a lover and an animus figure. Nevertheless, her identity is strong enough for her to recognize that her life cannot deny the past (as Luke would wish) but must affirm and include it,even to the extent of making a home for Mac's father and in effect including him as one of her children. Her growing perception of Mac's hidden needs and real strength offers fresh hope for their marriage. Mac, or even his father, may offer her an animus-projection, something to check that narcissism and over-preoccupation with inner processes that afflict those who lack a person on whom to project the animus.¹⁸ That danger, however, remains, though Stacey's narcissism seems much healthier than Rachel's, even as her arguments with God contrast to Rachel's acceptance of God's jest.

In "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship," Jung points out that while the male seems to have only one anima, the female may have several animus projections. The type of male who seems destined by nature to be an animus projection is described thus: "Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words - words seemingly full of meaning, which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the 'misunderstood' class, or be in some way at odds with his environment so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of 'average intelligence.'"¹⁹ Although this description fits, in varying degrees, Bram, Nick, Luke and Mac, it applies best to Jules Tonnerre. Jul! es, whose name Morag always mispronounces as jewels, appears time and time again in the novel as if in a dream, suddenly, without preparation or forewarning. A generation younger than Christie, he bears, nevertheless, a strong resemblance to him. Both are dominant in feeling and intuition; both share a sense of historical loss, of dispossession, and of alienation from society; although strongly individual and unrestricted by the claims of society, neither is happy, and both die with their speech failed or constricted. Both wrestle with their demons alone, and while Jules, in his music, seems to have greater opportunity than Christie for creative expression, he is no more able than Christie to resolve his inner turmoil. The war, the crucial demoralizing experience for Niall Cameron as well as for Christie, does not have the same potency for Jules.

Union with her true animus projection, Jules, releases Morag on her night journey to selfhood, described in the section "Rites of Passage." During this period she completes two novels, Prospero's Child and Jonah, the titles of which indicate the stages of her development. The first suggests the rebirth she undergoes as she frees herself, along with her protagonist, to "be her own person," and the second hints at the downward plunge she must take to engage the deepest levels of her psyche before she can return like Jonah from the whale's body. This is a period when there is an evident expansion of consciousness for Morag as she meets and responds to the witch Telfer and to the temptation to seek an antidote to loneliness in sexual relations with Eva, with the lonely males, and then finally with McRaith.

just before Morag returns to Manawaka for the last time to say farewell to Christie, McRaith paints her portrait. The description of her eyes as "angry and frightened, frighteningly strong" (310) suggests the final condition of her selfhood in which she has achieved a union of both partial systems, consciousness and unconsciousness, and has established a new centre of psychic totality uniting the divergent realities within. Her strength in this condition is undiminished by her lack of what she had earlier dreamed of as happiness. Her individuation is tested and proved by Christie's death. She blesses him in recognizing him as father and survives the paralyzing vacuum created by his death to find and establish her real home beside a river in Canada, at a spot close to, but not part of, a town like Manawaka. No longer is it of consequence that she is known to the town, as Jules tells her, as being "crazy as a bedbug." When Jules visits her here, their union is no longer sexua! l. According to Jung, the second half of life (which begins gradually between the ages of thirty-five and forty) has as its goal "above all the psychic 'conjunctio' a union with the contra-sexual (animus) both within one's own inner world and with its image bearer in the outer, in order that the 'spiritual child' may be born."²⁰ It is at this stage that Jung posits the possibility of rediscovering God within us as a unifying presence." The amusing passage in which Stacey argues that God should return to earth in the likeness of herself is reminiscent of Jung's God within. This inner dialogue occurs just before Stacey meets Luke. She argues:

Listen here, God, don't talk to me like that. You have no right. You try bringing up four kids. Don't tell me you've brought up countless millions because I don't buy that. We've brought our own selves up and precious little help we've had from you. If you're there. Which probably you aren't, although I'm never convinced totally, one way or another. So next time you send somebody down here, get it born as a her with seven young or a him with a large family and a rotten boss, eh? Then we'll see how the inspirational bit goes. God, pay no attention. I'm nuts. I'm not myself.
(F.D., 168)

Stacey's retreat at the last moment here is indicative of her stage of potential but incomplete individuation.

Jung considered that the symbol of God within, the mark of true individuation, might appear in dreams as a mandala, a wheeling magic circle with a centre. In the last Manawaka novel, the divining rod comes closest to this symbol. Its centre is the self holding the rod whose mysterious gift, Royland says, is inherited from others and passed on in turn to another. Morag, secure in her individuation, posesses the divining gift at least momentarily through her writing. Although the future for her is still mysterious, still requiring growth until the silence, in contrast to Hagar, Rachel, and Stacey (for whom God finally remains "out there"), the principle of unity which is divinity exists within Morag. Indeed, there may be a pun in the title of the novel. The special few are the divine ones.

Laurence, however, pursues the question of identity beyond the individual female consciousness to the consequence for creativity, which is the ultimate end of the Jungian conjunctio - the emergence from opposites of a new identity. When that new identity is the living, rather than the inner, reality, of a child, the consequences may indeed be threatening, for the temporal future belongs to Piquette Tonnerre-Gunn. Will she be a diviner? Will the process of individuation be any easier for her, born as she is without the constrictions of society which are the sources of fear for most of the Laurence heroines? The evidence of the last section of the novel suggests that the answer is No - that Pique's struggle will be even more difficult than Morag's. Here again one is reminded that a major difference between Jung and Freud is Jung's insistence on the societal nature of the self. This means that, in Jung's opinion, man cannot operate without culture, that no individuation is pos! sible without "society,"²¹ which he defines as implying continuity in time and as incorporating the communal or racial memory which is reached only at the deepest psychic level. This level, reached by Morag through legend and literature, may be tapped through song by Pique, as it was by her father. The Tonnerre songs, however, are songs of loss and deprivation. The strong sense of a society characterized by loss of meaning and purpose can be found also in The Bird in the House in the gulf between the past and present generations and in The Fire-Dwellers in the violent death of Buckle, the breakdown of Tess, and the vacuity of the whole "Richalife" operation. (In the first two novels, by contrast, the violence and emptiness is predominantly personal.) This is the world which Pique inherits, and she is highly conscious of its emptiness even in her teens. Perhaps the explanation for the lesser effect of war on Jules lies here too in the suggestion tha! t his generation, unlike that of Christie and Niall Cameron, finds in war only a slight variation on the peacetime condition of man. Perhaps that is why Jules cannot write his own song.

Jung cautioned that the individual who is not furnished by his society with a meaningful social role or set of symbols on which to build a strong psyche will be prey to neurosis - a condition which he defined as ultimately consisting of absence of meaning. In his view, the whole of Western society was in this neurotic phase, from which it could be freed only by an effort to find new symbols which would surface in archetypes from the past.²² The present time of The Diviners is concerned exactly with this search for meaning. Two talismen surface from the past, linking Christie and Morag with the Tonnerres and connecting them back to Hagar's family. One is the Scottish pin with its motto, "Gainsay Who Dare; My Hope is Constant in Thee"; the other is the knife with the hieroglyphic -I, an inverted T for Tonnerre and a visual divining rod. The pin seems to represent a cultural past in which the struggle for self-affirmation was constant, as it must be in the ! present, but which relied on another, unlike the present in which the hope rests on the self alone. The knife is associated much more closely with the untamed world of the West, where hope is balanced by despair, where the tradition of hunting involves the solitary self in a confrontation with death in nature, and the cultural tradition of the Indian enables him to live with the land and not in opposition to it. Catherine Parr Traill made a successful attempt as an individual to bridge the two cultures; now, in a time of greater collective crisis, the same task faces Pique, the half-breed. The pin and the knife are not, however, the archetypal symbols which Jung seems to have had in mind, and, significantly, in the Laurence novels the social archetypes that do appear are not expressive of unity. The twins of A Jest of God are separated by death, wives are without husbands, mothers are not wives, children are without fathers or mothers, the land is prairie without wate! r, there is fire and thunder (in the conspicuous Tonnerre name), but there is no water to save the original Piquette. In the Laurence novels, the only role which continues to generate real psychic power is that of the mother. Rachel, the one childless heroine, recognizes what is true of Hagar, Stacey, and Morag: the child is important for what it does for the mother (J of G, 50). Conventional sexual roles in such as those of husband and wife no longer identify because they are time-conditioned, and, as Laurence makes clear, the present time and society as organized at present have no meaning. Furthermore, as Jung pointed out, although the animus projection may satisfy and produce an effective tie for the moment, the object will scarcely be able to correspond consistently with the changing soul image. Nor is it likely that two people will find their projections in each other. Morag found hers in Jules, but he apparently never found his.

One of the conclusions to which this last novel clearly points is that the relation of the sexes remains an unresolved problem. At this point Jung offers little help. His researches take as a postulate the complementary function of opposites. Although he apparently came to his belief without benefit of biological research, Jung approximates a biological concept of the origins of sexual difference when he says: "The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to women from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc."²³ Jung cannot of course be called sexist, since he clearly believes that only through the balancing of these equal but different parts can either male or female be complete. However, he refers constantly to the male as dominant in Logos - that is, in thought, rational feeling, mind, order, initiative, judgement, and discernme! nt. Woman, on the other hand, is dominant in sensation and intuition, and representative of Eros as relationship and connection. Psychologists must be left to determine whether Jung was scientifically correct or whether he was drawing questionable conclusions from data which were already socially determined. The fact remains, however, that the novel The Diviners presents an increasingly common social phenomenon: the woman who chooses not to be constrained by the tradition that expects a woman to enact a home-centered role of wife and mother. Instead, Morag has found within herself the strength to unite the diverse aspects of the feminine which society has so long kept apart.

In the feminine typology described by the Jungian psychologist Toni Wolff, the feminine appears in four forms, which she terms the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon, and the Medium.²⁴ In Morag, Mother and Amazon, which are collective forms of relatedness to persons and to nonpersonal values respectively, are expressed in the nurturing support she gives to figures as different as Prin, Jules, O.K. Smith and the young Dan, and in her own career as novelist. The Medium, expressed in the archetype of the Wise Woman, is described by Wolff as "immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her period, but above all in the collective (impersonal) unconscious. . . ."²⁵ Morag's role as "diviner" expresses the medial woman's ability to "inspire others to become conscious of their own psychic contents and those of others,"²⁶ an ability dependent upon her own firm sense of self as well as upon her aesthetic talent as a novelist. T! he Hetaira is the female as companion rather than mother. This attitude is expressed in a "personal identity which centers around the values of individual relationship and the fulfillment of personality" and "finds love an end in itself rather than something subordinated to family and social forms."²⁷

Morag's relationship with McRaith demonstrates the vitality of the Hetaira in her, and the deception of Pique, which it necessitates suggests that this is the orientation most difficult for her to unite with her other aspects. McRaith seems ideally suited to Morag, since like her he is creative, dominant in sense and intuition and connected to the Celtic cultural tradition with which she identifies. But once more, as with Jules, it appears that the male is unable to integrate his inner and outer selves. McRaith cannot paint anywhere except beside the great archetype of creativity, the sea, but he cannot stay there for long because of the presence of his wife and large family. His unconscious is not freed through his wife, yet his psyche is too fragmented to live without her protection. June Singer points out that ". . . unless we are partners with that contrasexual side of our natures, the soul that leads us to our own depths, we cannot become full and independent partners ! with a beloved person in the outside world."²⁸ This unhappy state characterizes Christie, Jules, and McRaith, while Morag, thanks to the inner marriage, is able to remain strong, despite the absence of a beloved mate. Stacey, the only other Laurence heroine who approaches the completeness of individuation achieved by Morag, and like her unites all the feminine aspects, is alone among the Manawaka women in having a real chance to find that joy and that enlarged potential for enriched experience which a happy marriage offers.

Although Morag is ready for love as the translation into personal terms of the outward reaching impulse of the individuated self, nevertheless, at the end of The Diviners, as she returns to her empty house to record the title of her latest novel, Morag walks alone. Thus in the Laurence fictional world the woman again appears as a lonely island, forced through the inadequacies of her chosen mates into an isolated independence which is the price of developing her consciousness to the full and achieving individuation. That Morag is not diminished by this deprivation of her feminine function of relatedness points to the way Laurence seems, if not to reject, then at least seriously to question Jung's views on sexual complementing. The significant and positive male figures in the Laurence world represent the Jungian female traits and qualities, linked to strongly masculine physical sexuality. None represents a traditional hero; with the possible exception of Bram, the on! e closest to pioneer society, none finds self-integration. The women consistently respond to animus figures of sense and intuition, and are themselves complex mixes of Jungian male and female with a slight dominance in the logos qualities of thought and duty. Such women thus have little temptation to try to realize themselves spiritually in a man, but little hope, either, of being able to find fulfillment through a man. The salvation for the Manawaka woman lies inside the self and outside traditional and recognized societal patterns for the female. The problem this represents is described by one male Jungian psychologist as follows:

One might speculate upon the possibility that there may be no archetypal pattern available in western Christian culture - that is to say, no archetypal pattern that has been accepted by this culture - that would enable certain types of women to find their true individuality in terms of their femininity. The basic rejection and denigration of feminine values as compared to masculine values is the heritage of our historically patriarchal culture. This has resulted in a situation in which the feminine individuation problem has become a pioneering task that is perhaps meant to usher in a new period of culture.²⁹

In this respect, The Diviners may be a pioneering novel, for it may suggest that truer animus figures will be found in primitive or pioneer societies than in the rich cultural but male-dominated European ones where Jung carried out his research. The problems seem immense, and one wonders what Pandora's box the feminist movement has opened. Can we give up or re-orient deeply rooted societal givens? Will the new possibility of real feminine consciousness free the male as well as the female from a one-sided, either/or definition into an awareness that is more truly expressed by the androgynous figures than by the contrasting, though complementary, male-female ones?

What will be the consequences for fiction itself of such a revolution of expectation as that involved in the changing female consciousness? Will there be a marked alteration in the characterization of the male in his animus roles as Father, Son, Hero, or Wise Man? Uke many other women writers, Laurence has often been criticized for the unsatisfying nature of her male characters who are known only through memory (Bram), waking dream (Nick or Luke), or, as in The Diviners, as reflections of Morag's inner being, not as individuals in their own fight. Will readers come to understand and accept such males as products of the woman writer's fidelity to the female process of self-discovery? One of Laurence's great achievements is to have been able to give voice and vitality to a woman's inner being without destroying her necessary Eros response of relationship to an external world which has its own, though separate, validity. Novelists of both sexes face the problem of how! to use the techniques of fiction so as to be true both to social reality and to a twentieth-century understanding of self-fulfillment.

The river of time carrying us back into pre-history may bring us forward into a future we have no way of gauging. If Morag's tragedy lies in her isolation, across the river from the Smiths, and a continent away from Pique who is travelling West once more to live with her father's brother, her greatness lies in her ability to continue to do what is demanded of all of us in Laurence's world. We must continue, not as boats against the current carrying us back into the past, as in Fitzgerald's American mythic world, but, as in The Diviners, looking ahead into the past and back into the figure - through our children, our inheritors in the river of time in whose waters flow our mysterious links to the past and to our as yet unknown heritage. Hagar's pin must be linked by Pique to the knife of Lazarus, but it remains for the time being with Morag, as perhaps "the hope that is constant with thee" remains with the timeless mother found in and through the father but separate! from him.

University of Guelph

NOTES

¹Robert Kroetsch, "The Canadian Writer and the American Literary Tradition," The English Quarterly, 4 No. 2 (Summer 1971), p. 47.

²Although A Bird in the House is set in Manawaka and provides a strong link between The Fire-Dwellers and The Diviners, it will not be considered here since its short story form differs from the novels and its protagonist is not seen as a mother.

³Margaret Atwood, "Face to Face with Margaret Laurence," Maclean's, May 1974, p. 46. Like most readers, I am familiar with Jung's work but lack extensive knowledge of it, nor do I understand its application as would a psychologist. There is no indication that Laurence has any more than a lay knowledge or interest in Jung, although in her discussion of her writing methods she emphasizes issues and attitudes that are central to Jung's psychology. See Donald Cameron, Conversations with Canadian Novelists, Part One (Toronto: Mcmillan, 1974), pp. 96-114.

⁴Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974). p. 239. All further references will be contained within parentheses in the text.

⁵See Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), p. 124, for the scene in which Rachel enters the darkened funeral parlor for the first time and hears Hector speak the words that liberate her into self-responsibility.

⁶See C. M. McLay, "Every Man Is An Island: Isolation In A Jest Of God," Canadian Literature, No. 50 (Autumn 197 1), pp. 57-58.

⁷Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart), p. 292. All further references will be enclosed within parentheses in the text.

⁸I. Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 224.

⁹Jolande Jacobi, "The Process of Individuation," Journal of Analytical Psychology, 3 (1958), 105.

¹⁰Carl Jung, Psychological Types (London: Pantheon Books: 1923), p. 56 1, ff.

¹¹Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), p. 171. All further references will be contained in parentheses within the text.

¹²Progoff points out that "the typical Celtic tale portrays the struggle of the psyche forindividuation" (p. 241).

¹³Jung, Psychological Types. The complexity of Jung's "futictional compass" is beyond the scope of this paper and is not reflected in the novels.

¹⁴J. Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 1951), p. 130.

¹⁵Laurence, The Stone Angel, pp. 28, 213.

¹⁶Jung, Psychological Types, p. 588 ff.

¹⁷ E. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest (New York: Putnam, 1969), p. 207.

¹⁸Ibid, p. 598.

¹⁹Jung, The Development of Personality, p. 199.

²⁰ Jacobi, Psychology, p. 141.

²¹Progoff, p. 230.

²²Ibid, pp. 231, 232.

²³June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 204.

²⁴Ann Ulanov, The Feminine, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 194.

²⁵Ibid, p. 208.

²⁶Ibid, p. 208.

²⁷Ibid, p. 203.

²⁸Singer, p. 237.

²⁹Whitmont, p. 214