Technologies of Identity: The Language of the Incontinent Body in Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel"

The body in The [Stone Angel] not only signifies parallels between colonies and women, however: it also signifies that the colony can function just like the empire, and women just like patriarchs. [Hagar Currie Shipley] thoroughly articulates this paradox, again in the space of the structural contradictions of an invader-settler colony. Not surprisingly, then, Hagar's own incontinent body functions paradoxically in the novel, for it both registers and is a register of the repressive relations of settlement-invasion and social stratification represented in the novel. At the level of realistic detail, much of the narrative is taken up with Hagar's aged body, with its unwieldy size, its embarrassing and troublesome excesses of tears, urine, intestinal gas, and pain. She speaks of her "ankles and feet (thick as stumps)" (30), her "layered fat" (31), "heavy larded flesh" (54), "great swathed hips" (56), her "bulk" (55), "whole hulk" and "blubber" (76). Yet throughout her life, she has used this very excess of flesh in other women to condemn them: significantly, they are always women from a lower-class background than hers, even though neither she nor they may still occupy the particular class position of their birth. She thinks, for example, "What a disgrace to be seen crying by that fat Doris" (6), her daughter-in-law -- a disgrace not only because of Hagar's incontinent tears but because of Doris's lower-class origins (Hagar seems unaware that Doris's marriage to her son ought to have changed her social status upward; Hagar has managed to make class-distinctions even between her own sons). Similarly, Hagar's body's excess is a source of shame to her, but she rationalizes her excess through her husband's financial incontinence. Her body grew excessive because it was not contained by "a foundation garment." She remembers contemplating ordering a corset from the catalogue, but she did not want her values -- propriety, decency, continence, maintained by artificial means -- to be exposed by or to her husband's laughter. And so she deflects that exposure to his daughters, his values, and lower-class excess: " 'The girls don't go in for them things, do they, Hagar?' Of course his girls did not. Jess and Gladys were like heifers, like lumps of unrendered fat. We had precious little money -- better, he thought, to spend it on his schemes" (56). Again, the language confirms what was regarded as the natural inferiority of the lower classes. [Jason Currie] had, in simila