The Unreliability of Memory
The Diviners is primarily a narrative of self-discovery; however, Laurence locates this pursuit in a middle-aged narrator whose journey to self-knowledge has consumed her entire life. As Morag delves into the depths of her memory to access the woman she once was, she encounters resistance. The entirety of her life yawns behind her, but she struggles to discern the authenticity of her recollections. Memory, she realizes, is a product of reality and desire, an ever-fluctuating entity with few ties to historical accuracy or precision. Morag’s attempt to detangle her clouded memories recalls the motif of divining, searching for the hidden waters of her mind in pursuit of the truth.
Morag’s critical gaze eventually extends beyond herself. She questions the truth of the thoughts and memories that feel fundamental to her being. Eventually, she extends this process beyond herself. Not merely accepting the veracity of outward appearance, she probes into the meaning of the past. Ultimately, by summoning up her personal memories and confronting those that shape her society, she sees how the past has influenced her current life and can move forward by rejecting the claims it made about her.
Through Morag’s questioning, Laurence explores the idea of collective truth in the writing and telling of history. Who is allowed to tell the story of a landscape? And what is their agenda? These questions, in tandem with Laurence's critiques of Manawaka's classist and racist values, indicate that it is not only individual memory that is flawed. Collective memory, too, is barbed with interpretations, assumptions, and desires that muddle the truth and disguise the past. Like Morag, the history of the land bears the burden of falsity; only a critical gaze can detangle the web of history as it happened and how it is remembered.
Female Independence
Primarily, The Diviners focuses on the life of Morag, a middle-aged author struggling to reconcile her craft, which she has allowed to fall to the wayside during a year-long battle with writer’s block. When her daughter runs away from home to find herself, Morag embarks on a similar journey, traversing through cobweb-covered memories to discover who she is as a writer, a mother, and a woman. Fundamentally, the story is autobiographical. Morag retells her history, detailing her life as she journeys from a childhood spent in poverty to a fulfilling adulthood as a mother and a writer. Hers is a journey back to herself, rediscovering the youthful truths that she had forgotten somewhere along the way.
As Morag details her life story, readers quickly realize that it is one of stubborn self-determinism. Staring down orphanhood, poverty, social ostracization, and isolation is no mean feat, yet Morag does it alone. She has had mentors throughout the years, but her development as a person and artist is often self-directed. Her quest for identity—concerning both her Scottish-Canadian heritage and creative direction—leads her across continents, traveling in search of herself. Although she has relationships with others—romantic and otherwise—her journey is solitary until the birth of her daughter, whom she raises alone. While motherhood invites new questions, Morag’s search for clarity and self-knowledge remains the same.
The Diviners is a stereotypical kunstlerroman . However, Morag’s womanhood is an integral factor in her evolution as an artist, an aspect that the often male-oriented genre lacks. Her development is unimpeded by her isolation, and throughout her life, she rejects romance and masculine influence. She marries and has a relationship with Jules, but her central focus is herself and, later, her daughter. Laurence’s protagonist is uniquely and unabashedly alone, content to discover herself by herself. She is a woman alone, and...
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Laurence finds no fault in that.
Canada’s Sociocultural Failures
While all five novels in the Manawaka take place in a fictionalized version of her hometown in Manitoba, her nostalgia only extends so far. Although she lingers in the land of her childhood, hers is not a romanticized retelling. She does not understand the implications of her foster family’s impoverishment until she begins to attend school. There, she witnesses the intense bullying children from families like hers face. She watches as her neighbor, a young girl her age, is verbally assaulted to the point of tears over her dress, which her mother sewed from old fabric and which does not suit the style of the time.
As she grows older, she understands the strain of poverty. Seeing it daily in her foster father, Christie. He does not dislike his job as the local Nuisance Collector; truthfully, he argues that he chose it. However, the way the townspeople treat him tempers his contentment. They treat him like a failure, correlating his job with a lack of intelligence. Christie tells Morag that their condescension is merely a fearful deflection: he knows all of their secrets, and for that, they resent him. His rage at the injustice of their classism stays with Morag, a painful lesson in the cruelty the working class face.
Racism intertwines with Laurence’s discussion of class-based discrimination. Through Jules, a young Métis boy three years older than Morag, Laurence unmasks the insidious anti-indigenous sentiment that lurks beneath the surface of Canadian culture. Her criticism is in no way unfounded; Canadian history is full to bursting with instances of discrimination and violence toward Aboriginal populations. Like Morag, Jules struggles with poverty and ostracization. Unlike her, his isolation is, at least partly, a response to his heritage. Laurence is careful to indicate that the townspeople's racist values are not idiosyncratic but rather an endemic problem that lurks beneath the surface of the nation.
