Hagar Shipley Analysis

Hagar Shipley, tells the story of her life and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintain pride in the face of senility, white recalling the life she led as a grieving mother. Lawrence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant. It is Lawrence’s admirable achievement to strike, with an equally sure touch, the peculiar note and the universal: she gives us a portrait of a remarkable character and at the same time the picture of old age itself, with the pain, the weariness, the terror, the impotent angers and physical mishaps, the realization that other are wait and wishing for an
The Shipley place had vanished replaced with a new house and a barn. At the cemetery, the angel was still standing. A young care taken not knowing who they were was enthusiastic about the cemetery. He pointed to the stone bearing the names Currie and Shipley they were the earliest pioneering families in the district.According to Hagar, her mother was a flimsy, gutless creature, bland as egg custard, caring with martyred devotion for an ungrateful fox- voiced mother year in and year out”. Though Regina Weese died at a very early age the mother lived on for a longer period of time.Hagar feels that Regina must be smiling in Heaven now while her mother might be laughing in hell. In such a way Hagar says about her mother when she seeing the statue on the
But the technSique by the life of the protagonist is not presented chronologically, but shown through an alternation between past and present. Hagar is an old women who has never last her spirit and free will Hagar is still being faced with obstacles which she must fight to overcome. Since Hagar is a character who is not perfect, the audience is capable of relating to her. The tragic heroine through her struggle and the recognition of her own short comings reveal man’s essentialor potential nobility, and we are ennobled, uplifted by the spectacle.
Later in the train, I cried, thinking of him, but of course, he never Know that and I’d been the last to Tell him (42). Influenced by her father’s lack of communication Hagar’s solution to a difficult situation is to ignore it or hide from her problems instead of dealing with them in a nature and open fashion. In an attempt to ignore her failing health, she runs away from Marvin and Doris,
So I merely sit on the bed and Look out window until the dark comes And the trees have gone and the Sea itself has been swallowed By the night