| Abstrakt: |
Hagar Shipley, née Currie, the protagonist, a ninety-year-old woman. She has become too much of a burden to her son and his wife, and even a hazard—bored at the age of eighty, she took up smoking. Daily matters make her aware of her aging body. Her mind is prompted by objects or sounds, such as those in her room or at the doctor's office, to recall episodes of her life filled with her enormous pride and inwardness. As a girl, her shopkeeper father drills her about her Scottish heritage and sends her to an Ontario girls' finishing school. She then works in her father's Manawaka store until she disdains his plan to have her marry well. At the age of twenty-four, she arranges her own wedding without his consent, for she responds to Bram Shipley's dancing and is attracted to his passion. Only once does she nearly express her deep feelings to Bram, whose speech and manners embarrass her. When she can no longer rear her two sons with dignity, she saves money from selling eggs in town and takes the boys to Vancouver. There she keeps house for retired Mr. Oakley, returning only when Bram is dying. Another year, she visits John in Manawaka until his accidental death. With Mr. Oakley's bequest, she buys a house in Vancouver, which she later signs over when Marvin and his wife care for her. Rather than be put in Silverthreads nursing home, she runs away, but she becomes disoriented after alighting from the bus at Shadow Point. As she rests in the abandoned cannery near the beach, she drinks wine with vagrant Murray Lees. After hearing his story, she shares her similar loss of a son. Her collapse comes the next morning. Dying in the hospital, she emerges somewhat from her lifelong inwardness enough to help the girl in the next bed; later, she can even lie to Marvin that he has always been her favorite. Aware that her pride has interfered with her doing more than two independent acts in her life, she expires. |
