Margaret Laurence, one of Canada's most brilliant, most prominent and most loved authors has managed to create a character Hagar Shipley who is equally brilliant but far from loved in her fictitious novel The Stone Angel. Throughout Hagar's life, she is faced with many trying and difficult ordeals that hold her back and stop her from reaching her full potential as a daughter, wife and mother. In order to cope with life and everything around her Hagar feels the need to escape and flee everything and everyone around her. Over the course of her life she makes several attempts to escape her life and start a new one on her own. Her first attempt at escape comes just after she finishes high school; to escape her father she runs off to finishing school. The second time she attempts to escape her life and family is when she runs away from her husband Bram with her young son John. Her third and finally attempt at escaping reality does not happen until many years down the road when Hagar is an old frail woman. Her final escape is away from Marvin, Doris and most of all the old folks' home which was her inevitable fate. Hagar is a woman who is destined for control in a world beyond her or anyone else's control and whenever she finds that she has lost control she flees all her worries and problems.
             Hagar makes her first attempt to escape life and reality as a very young lady. This first attempt comes soon after Hagar finishes high school. In order to get out of her father's home Hagar goes Down East to finishing school where she will be able let loose and escape the nightmares of Manawaka. The main reason behind Hagar leaving was to escape from her father and his discipline. All her life growing up Hagar had felt as though she was a prisoner, trapped in Manawaka by her father and his domineering ways. Every time she looked at her solid brick house, it brought back the memories of a prison and by the tim...