gel is made of hard, cold marble, making it strong and stiff. Like the angel, Hagar Shipley is cool and impermeable towards the world. She never reveals her true feelings to the people she knows because she sees this as a risk of being thought of as ‘soft'. This aspect of Hagar's personality is best shown when her son John dies. Hagar says, "The night my son died I was transformed to stone and never wept at all. When the ministering women handed me the cup of hot coffee, they murmured how well I was taking it, and I could only look at them dry-eyed from a great distance and not say a single word."(264) Hagar is so unable to show her emotions that even when her son dies she dare not cry. Like the stone angel she is unmoved. She fears that if she turns to the women around her for help she will be seen as some delicate, helpless creature. Hagar's coolness and hardness like that of the marble angel, is further shown when Bram's favourite horse dies; Hagar is upset for him, knowing how much the horse means to Bram. Yet, Hagar refuses to comfort him. Finally, the stone angel is symbolic of Hagar's blindness.The stone angel of the Currie family is doubly blind; this is because the artist neglected to add eyeballs to its chiseled face. This is symbolic of Hagar because she is blind to those around her. It is this blindness that causes Hagar to fail to recognize the fact that Marvin is the son that she seeks. From the birth of John, Hagar has always prized him as the son who will go on to make something of himself, who will do something with his life. In the end, however, John becomes more like Bram, as Marvin gains himself a job and position in life. Hagar's blindness keeps her from realizing this until one day she has a fight with John, and he says, "You always bet on the wrong horse...Marv was your boy, but you never saw that, did you?" (258) Hagar is never able to see Marvin as the successful son, even after John's dea...
