Fire Dwellers and Motherhood Margaret

Fire Dwellers and Motherhood

Margaret Laurence's The Fire Dwellers provides a clear lens through which the reader can view various manifestations of both positive and negative images of motherhood. This is primarily accomplished through Stacey, whose characterization as an individual woman is inseparable from the twin roles of wife and mother. Stacey's sense of self is continually at war with how she believes she should act and how she actually acts. When viewing herself through the eyes of a stranger on a bus, Stacey describes herself as a "housewife [and] mother of four" (Laurence 9) wearing clothes that are slightly out-of-date, a physical description which jars against her more fantastical self-description as "a mermaid, a whore, a tigress" (9).

Stacey's internal fantasies, memories, and self-dialogues provide the reader with multidimensional insight into her character illustrating that despite her connections with family and friends she essentially sees herself as isolated, alone, and adrift. She suffers from guilt and depression when faced with her own insufficient mothering skills, and although she recognizes that she is not the only "crumby mother" (150) in her world, it is cold comfort. Stacey is caught in a terrible cycle: she feels that she is a failure as a mother and seeks comfort in alcohol, which only intensifies her insecurities regarding motherhood. When pondering her relationship with her children, Stacey recalls the story of a mother who smothered her newborn and finds herself justifying the other woman's behavior and finding commonalities between their two situations. Caught deep in the throes of her alcohol dependence, she questions her capacity for violence, asking, "What if I hit one of them too hard sometime, without meaning to? Am I a monster? They nourish me and yet they devour me, too" (14). This view of her children as creatures which simultaneously give her strength while weakening her at the core speaks to Stacey's inability to reconcile her sense of duty with her own personal desires.

Stacey's inner-monologues, which make up a majority of the narrative, illustrate how cut off she has become from intimate and meaningful relationships with those around her. Unable to speak in more than superficial terms with her husband, Mac, and facing a distant relationship with her sons and eldest daughter, Stacey only truly reveals herself through conversations with two-year-old Jen, who is non-verbal and thus unlikely to either interrupt or challenge her mother's rantings. Left with no one to talk to, Stacey has no choice but to retreat into memory and fantasy and her conversations with the God she is no longer certain that she believes in.