The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

 

The Diviners

                                                        -Margaret Laurence

Characters

Morag Gunn

This 48-year-old novelist is the protagonist of the story. The plot largely revolves around her relationships to her family, her husband, her illicit lover, her daughter, and most importantly, her isolation in a world who misunderstands her and doesn't value her identity as a woman, just like the colonials didn't respect the humanity of the natives.

Christie Logan

This anti-parent character is shown as a demonstration of the frustrating vulnerability that Gunn is left with after she is orphaned by the death of her parents. Logan is her step father, to an extent.

Brooke Skelton

Gunn's husband, Brooke Skelton, is a Canadian man who doesn't respect the individuality and independence of his wife, causing her to seek out an affair.

Jules Tonnerre

An ethnic native, Tonnerre comes to represent the similarity between the plight of the natives against the colonialists and Gunn's own mistreatment by her culture. Tonnerre and Gunn share an affair, and this leaves her with lots of native concepts and stories to help her work through her isolation.

Pique

Morag's relationship with Tonnerre is certainly not perfect. When the two have the child Pique, Morag takes her away from Tonnerre, so her daughter, Pique, and she have something of a difficult relationship.

 

Plot Summary

The Diviners is a 1974 kunstlerroman, or novel about the writing of a novel, by Canadian author Margaret Laurence. The semi-autobiographical narrative follows the life and memories of Morag Gunn, a writer and single mother who grew up in Manawaka, Manitoba, and her struggle to understand and accept her identity. Laurence is considered one of Canada’s greatest writers. The Diviners is the fifth book in her “Manawaka” series of books set in or around the fictional town, including The Stone Angel and A Jest of God. In 1972, Laurence was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. She died of lung cancer in 1987.

The novel opens with a section titled “River of Now and Then.” Morag, 47, wakes up in her Ontario log cabin to discover her 18-year-old daughter, Pique, is gone. She has left a note behind asking her mother not to worry or “get uptight.” Pique, who is Metis, of mixed First Nations ancestry, has headed West in search of her roots. The note unlocks Morag’s own memories of when she was Pique’s age and headed East from her Manitoba hometown, looking for her own identity. Morag searches her house for photographs from her childhood, ones she has treated carelessly over the years but has never been able to throw away.

In the next section, “The Nuisance Grounds,” the narrative flashes back to Morag’s early years. Both her parents died of polio when she was young, and she was taken from her comfortable upper-middle-class home to a poor foster family in Manawaka. Her foster parents, Christie and Prin Logan, loved and raised her, but she treated them with contempt, looking down on their lack of education and impoverished circumstances. Christie was the town “scavenger,” or trash collector, taking the town’s refuse to the dump, which the town referred to as The Nuisance Grounds.

Christie proves a natural storyteller, and furnishes Morag with made-up stories about her ancestors. He tells her tales of a Scottish hero named Piper Gunn, claiming that he is Morag’s ancestor several generations back. Piper’s exploits are actually based on the real history of Archie MacDonald, but Morag will not learn the truth until much later. Piper’s wife is also named Morag, and this ancestor helps give Christie’s untethered foster daughter a sense of identity and belonging. She believes her past and her people were rich and respectable—that they, not the Logans, represent who she is and where she comes from.

The next section, “Halls of Sion,” sees Morag escaping Manawaka as soon as she can for university in Winnipeg. She marries a professor 15 years her senior, Brooke Skelton, and moves to Toronto. The marriage is not a happy one. Brooke is pessimistic and controlling. Morag wants children, but Brooke tells her the world is too harsh to bring a child into. He ridicules

 her attempts to write. He confines and restricts her. One night, Morag encounters a childhood friend, Jules “Skinner” Tonnerre, who is Metis, on the street. She invites him in for dinner only for Brooke to insult him. In response, Morag leaves the house with Jules and has a three-week affair with him without protection, hoping she will become pregnant. She does, and it ends her marriage.

The final section, “Rites of Passage,” follows Morag as a writer and single mother. She moves first to Vancouver, where she writes her first novel, Spear of Innocence, and gives birth to her daughter, Pique. Jules is rarely present in their lives, though he stays with Morag for two months when Pique is five. Jules and Morag are drawn to each other through their shared sense of alienation from their hometown and their ongoing search for acceptance and belonging. As a “half-breed,” Jules has always been looked down upon, considered inferior for his racial heritage. He tells stories of his Metis ancestors that rewrite history, just as Christie did with his stories of Morag’s fictionalized ancestors. Jules leaves and Morag moves to England with Pique, hoping she will find a community of like-minded writers to thrive in. But reality does not match her imagination, and she is as lonely as ever in her new home.

Eventually she returns to Canada, to the log cabin home of the novel’s beginning. She goes on a journey to Scotland as well, in search of her ancestors, but does not actually travel to Sutherland, where her people came from. She realizes that Manawaka is her true home, and returns there to find that Christie is dying. She tells him he has been a father to her. More than that, her true heritage is not Scottish but Canadian.
Pique returns home after her own search for identity. Her relationship with Morag is sometimes uneasy, but they reconcile. Morag returns to her log cabin home and finishes her novel.

Essay

About the Author:

Margaret Laurence  (July 18, 1926 – January 5, 1987) was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and is one of the major figures in Canadian literature. She was also a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. One of Canada's most esteemed and beloved authors by the end of her literary career, Laurence began writing short stories in her teenage years while in Neepawa. Her first published piece "The Land of Our Father" was submitted to a competition held by the Winnipeg Free Press. Her early novels were influenced by her experience as a minority in Africa. They show a strong sense of Christian Symbolism and ethical concern for being a white person in a colonial state. Laurence won two Governor General’s Award for her novels A Jest of God (1966) and The Diviners (1974). In 1972 she was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Introduction:
The Diviners was a controversial book when it was first published. It continues to be challenged and banned from school districts for perceived coarse language and blasphemy. Despite this, it is widely considered a classic of Canadian literature. In 1993, it was adapted into a popular made-for-TV movie starring Sonja Smits and Tom Jackson.

Discussion: Themes

Lots of people are disenfranchised, and it matters.

Laurence chooses to liken her frustration to the plight of the native peoples in light of the past colonialism of Canada. This draws attention to the fact that the dominant class, primarily white men, has historically mistreated many people. This makes the story less about the particular person and more about injustice itself.

 

 

Writing is a spiritual and psychic process, as well as an act of the mind.

By describing Morag Gunn’s  relationship to writing, Laurence also explains the premise of the novel in a way. Basically, it's Laurence indicating to the reader that a life of artistic creation is a difficult, lonely, emotional path, and it causes her to face the emotions that she might otherwise avoid. It's out of love for the novel that this novel is born.

Men and women have a precarious relationship.

Conceptually, the reader might have expected Gunn and Torrerre to last as a couple, since their identities share common elements, but actually, Laurence chooses for Gunn to leave Torrerre, citing the difficulties of the relationship, even though he was a muse to her. Basically, the picture is that even a good relationship is made worse by the unfortunate social systems that limit their involvement.

Even women are not allowed to be part of each others' teams.

Poor Morag Gunn doesn't even get to take solace in her relationship with her daughter, because the daughter has a difficult time understanding Gunn and her decisions. Part of the reason certainly seems like Gunn trying to rationalize her opinions so she can maybe feel some community after all, but because of the systems she cites, even her relationship to her own daughter, or to femininity by proxy, is strained.

Literary Devices:

The father quest

Morag knows instantly that her daughter's pilgrimage to encounter the spirit of her father and her ancestry is archetypal. She knows from experience what a rite of passage such a journey can be. Her daughter is venturing into the unknown to learn who she herself is, and her desire to understand her ancestry is a symbol for that journey toward self because she is literally a product of their existence. This journey also symbolizes whatever heritage and culture she might be able to salvage.

The dual parent motif

Morag is familiar with hero motifs. In fact, she is a famous author because her own life was archetypal. For instance, she writes about her foster parents. This fostering led her to a life of existential confusion. Who is she really? Where is she from? Is here identity already complete and whole given that she doesn't know her true parents? This is a common motif in heroic literature. One might think for instance of Superman's foster parents, or of Moses's Egyptian and Hebrew parent pairs.

The controlling husband

There is a man whose name is almost "Skeleton." He is Brooke Skelton, a person who looks inviting on the surface, but who is eventually controlling and domineering. His personality brings a kind of personal death into Morag's life. She strives to please herself or him, but his domineering nature makes her pick either slavery to his angry ways or freedom entirely. The dilemma leads to infidelity. Perhaps one way of interpreting this symbolism is that Skelton represents patriarchy and control.

The pilgrimage

When her daughter leaves, Morag is in the process of writing a novel, and she finishes the novel at the end of this book, a sort of book within a book motif. She needs her daughter's wild behavior to remind her of her own youthful passions, and then she can finish the novel. This brings to mind her own deeply human experience of youth and becoming one's self. Like her daughter, this happened in the form of a pilgrimage, but for her it was pilgrimage to her home country, Scotland.

The reunion of mother and child

When the mother and daughter are finally united, Morag and Pique talk through the disagreements. They finally seem to work through it. The resolution that they accomplish is the twin symbol for the missing father and the journey. Pique has two parents, and one is not there, and that is her journey with him, learning what abandonment looks like and how she ought to feel about it. This experience makes her more sympathetic to her mother because their personality conflicts were evidence that her mother sacrificed and provided for her.

Conclusion:

The Diviners, thus establishes the fact that how a woman establishes her individuality after making lot of struggle and compromises. The novel can also be viewed as postcolonial one, because the family members like the colonizers do not understand the inner mind of the protagonist but every time they try to snub her effort and emotions in the name of love and the societal norms.