Margaret Laurence: Short Stories Literary Elements

Short stories/literary fiction/World literature

Various locations in Africa and the fictional township of Manawaka in the Canadian province of Manitoba during the 20th century.

The most significant use of narrative perspective is in the short story cycle collection titled A Bird in the House. These interconnected stories are conveyed through the first-person point-of-view of Vanessa MacLeod, but the perspective becomes more complex as Vanessa is relating the events of the stories from a distant point in the future but incorporates observation and understanding of those events as if occurring in real-time.

While the narrative complexity of the stories in A Bird in the House create an unavoidably ironic mood, the tone of those stories as well as the ones in the collection The Tomorrow-Tamer are generally serious, politically and culturally aware, and philosophically contemplative. The stories also notable for presenting a rather darkly fatalistic view of fate as predetermined—or at least accepted as so—to a great extent.

Protagonists: typically the protagonist in a story by Laurence is representative of the alienated and marginalized part of society. Antagonist: naturally, the adoption of the marginalized segment of society in turns creates conflict in which the antagonist represents the power structure that works to maintain a status quo that engenders such social disruption.

The conflict at the heart of most of Laurence’s short stories is the struggle to assert authority and autonomy over self-identity. External identification with certain cultural or racial expectations or traditions create constant pressures which result in self-examination by the characters.

The most important climax in the short fiction of Laurence is, arguably, the death of Vanessa MacLeod’s father.

The death of Vanessa’s father is foreshadowed in the title and throughout the text with the symbolic allusion to a bird in the house being a foreboding of a death in the family.

N/A

A Biblical allusion is made a few times in A Bird in the House in reference to a very famous line from the Second Book of Samuel: “Oh, how the mighty are overthrown.” The characters make the usual slightly mistranslation into “How the mighty are fallen.”

Used brilliantly as a kind of literary equivalent of establishing shots in the opening lines of several stories, like this one that opens “The Merchant of Heaven”: “Across the tarmac the black-and-orange dragon lizards skitter, occasionally pausing to raise their wrinkled necks and stare with ancient saurian eyes on a world no longer theirs.

N/A

“The Rain Child” is possibly the most forthright example of the use of parallel construction in Laurence’s short fiction. It is a tale that parallels the young black student Ruth’s alienation from African culture with that of Miss Nedden’s alienation from white British culture as a result of having taught school in Africa for so long.

The stories set there use “Africa” as a synecdoche to cover all the cultural distinctions and variations within that vast continent as a macrocosmic concept giving it a simple identity of “otherness.”

A tortured pet dog’s desire to get at the object of his pain is made more palpable through personification: “He was growling now, a deep low sound. Not merely a warning – an open declaration of enmity. He did not try to get over the gate. He remained at a slight distance, his lips drawn back in the devil’s grin which I had only seen in pictures of other dogs of his blood, never on Nanuk.”