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2005

Gendering the Frontier in O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth

John Muthyala University of Southern Maine

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Muthyala, John, "Gendering the Frontier in O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth" (2005). Great Plains Quarterly. 160. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/160

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. GENDERING THE FRONTIER IN O. E. ROLVAAG'S GIANTS IN THE EARTH

JOHN MUTHYALA

Not in all eternity can I sufficiently thank God, for the America journey was not for me what it was for many others. -Jannicke Saehle (in a letter to her brother, Johannes Saehle, in Norway, September 28, 1847)

The epic conquest of the continent must be read in the light of women's sufferings as well as in that of men's endurance. -Vernon Louis Parrington

Translated from the Norwegian into English, and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the conditioning factor" of American experience, saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization.! is a saga that has the sanction of official ideol­ Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dra­ ogy and the authority of a religious edict: to matizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American experiment. Even the marketing of this text in the United Key Words: Frontier literature, Norwegian immigrant, States aptly underscores this point. Riilvaag, women Consider, for instance, the Perennial Classics edition published by Harper Collins in 1999, John Muthyala is assistant professor of English at which has for its front cover a full-body image the University of Southern Maine. His articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Canadian Review of of a young man heaving a bundle of brush and American Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation thistle, ostensibly clearing the wilderness. At Theory, and Comparative American Studies: an the bottom, behind his feet, we can glimpse International Journal, among others. He is the author a clear horizon contouring a stretch of land, of the forthcoming Reworlding America: Myth, perhaps already cleared by this pioneer, thus History, and Narrative (Ohio, 2006). attesting to his stubborn resilience. The close­ [GPQ 25 (Fall 2005): 229-44] up picture of the entire body of the man, and

229 230 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005 the placing of the title at a level below his waist on remaining "poised in psychological uncer­ and under the bundle of thistle, give the image tainty between two worlds'''' as it negotiates the a mythic appeal: here is a human being who, fluctuations of immigrant desire, the contin­ by diligence, hard labor, and vision, finally gencies of history, and the ideological demands becomes a giant who can at last lay claim to the of multilingualism. frontier. As viewers, we get a sense that we are However, there is something more to canon­ looking from the bottom up, from the land to izing non-English texts than unearthing and the man who has taken it as only a giant can, studying them for their ostensibly transgres­ Our own visual perspective, or rather, the angle sive value. Multilingualism does not always that is afforded by the picture itself, is dwarfed guarantee occasions to contest the ideal of by the enormity of the task, which the man monolingualism and its attendant ideologies; executes with discernible purpose. Such a mar­ sometimes non-English texts may subscribe keting of the text, however, subverts the author's uncritically to dominant myths and histories own artistic vision, which seeks to contest such and undermine the subversive potential of mythified representations of pioneer experience the discourse of multilingualism. More impor­ by depicting nineteenth-century transatlantic tantly, Giants appropriates a dominant ideology Norwegian migration and settlement in the and insists on using Old World motifs, beliefs, Great Plains as a conflictual process of social cultures, and folktales to articulate Norwegian and cultural translation in the New World. American experience, thus making it difficult Interestingly enough, the novel was first to view it either as a paean to Turnerian myths published in Norway in two volumes titled or as an imaginative and historically informed I De Dage-Fortaelling om Norske Nykommere act of contesting the ideal of monolingualism. I Amerika (In Those Days: A Story about Having taught this text several times, I am Norwegian Immigrants in America, 1924) and hardly surprised when in class discussions the I De Dage-Riket Grundlaegges (Founding the one figure that emerges as most representa­ Kingdom, 1925). The difference between the tive of the frontier, as "an American Adam," Norwegian titles and the English title Giants or at least a pioneer that one can idealize, is in the Earth is telling: the one attests itself as a Per Hansa.5 When his frozen body is found narrative; the other subsumes its narrative into the spring after the winter in which he is sent a mythic discourse. This is not just an instance on an errand by his wife to get a minister to of a powerful American discourse appropriat­ administer last rites to a dying friend, the ing a non-English text, because the author impulse to view Beret as the naive subject­ himself uses the Norwegian bible in which the community-oriented exile who refuses the term "giants," or "Kjaemper," had the more to assimilate-becomes especially easy. Per emphatic connotation of "heroes" and not Hansa dies, bearing the elements, never yield­ mythic gods and goddesses.2 It is this process ing to the monstrous frontier, willing to lose his of translation that renders deeply problematic life in order to domesticate it, with his eyes still any easy reading of Giants as a celebratory "set toward the west" (531).6 But Beret Holm novel of the American frontier. As Norwegian is different. While her husband nourishes an clashes with English, as the immigrant author immigrant sensibility, she develops an exilic struggles to articulate New World experience consciousness, perpetually alienated from her in an Old World language, the contradictory environment. While Per is eager to sever the demands of location and memory are sutured ties that bind him to Norway and pursue his together by a powerful American discourse of dream, his Soria Moria, the "symbol for perfect westward expansion and an equally resilient happiness,"7 to Beret this eagerness bespeaks Norwegian folk discourse of trolls, gnomes, the monstrous impact of the frontier, specifi­ and castles.3 Multiply anchored in hegemonic cally the desire to cast off the old and take on culture and marginalized folklore, Giants insists the new-"so they had sold off everything that GENDERING THE FRONTIER 231 they had won with so much toil, had left it all this transformation are what I am concerned like a pair of worn-out shoes-parents, home, with here, as opposed to emphasizing an alter­ fatherland, and people .... And she had done nate female space of hyphenation as Simonson it gladly, even rejoicingly!" (258). does. Rather than viewing Beret's and Per's When Beret goes "mad"-has visions of differing attitudes toward the frontier as being her dead mother, crouches with terror inside shaped by personalized ideas about America the massive immigrant chest, prays unceas­ and choices about Americanization, shouldn't ingly for forgiveness, and eventually sends her we study the "female frontier" in juxtaposition valiant husband on a mission in the dead of to the male frontier, and perhaps even as an winter with little concern for his safety-it is alternative to the male frontier?9 But I want indeed hard not to view her as symbolizing all to push the matter further to consider what that which thwarts the development of pioneer happens when we study the female frontier and society. Beret reminds us of the difficulties we the male frontier as constitutive of each other, may often face in negotiating the demands of a perspective that necessarily complicates the America. But it is Per's vision, his tenacity in juxtapositional paradigm. believing in the endless possibilities of reinven­ In what follows, I make two moves: (1) I use tion, that we find so powerfully appealing. Or the "separate spheres metaphor" as a model to so the story goes. study the formation and sustaining of differ­ But what problems emerge when we frame ent "spheres" for Per and Beret, and (2) I use their different responses to the frontier as the Davidson and Hatcher's "post-separate spheres" tension between the immigrant and the exile, model to examine the fluctuating dynamics of between one who eagerly assimilates and one the separate spheres metaphor, that is, rather who actively resists Americanization? At times than viewing the spheres as relatively stable, even an astute critic like Harold P. Simonson, I want to underscore the problematic ways in who otherwise makes a compelling case for the which these spheres, specifically with respect centrality of religious discourse and immigrant to Per and Beret, are "intimately intertwined psychology in Rolvaag's fiction, tends to gloss and mutually constitutive." In refusing to view over the gender dynamics that shape Norwegian women as a "universal or stable category" and farming households in the Midwest. In arguing as those who were "virtuous simply because against other critics who dismiss Beret's immer­ they lacked the status, power, and position sion in Christian theology, peasant psychology, attained by middle-class white men," this frontier domesticity, and cultural rootedness, model avoids deploying gender as a category Simonson presents Beret as the apotheosis of of experience and an analytical tool to either Rolvaag's artistic vision that insists on nego­ underscore the limitations placed on women or tiating the "conundrum of the hyphen, feel­ to affirm the celebration of feminine ideals.1° ing its ambivalent pressures and enduring the I use this model because I wish to avoid view­ irreconcilable tension."s But while Simonson ing gender as a "metalanguage that orders feminizes this ambivalent space of the hyphen other relations." It then becomes possible to by contrasting it to Per's masculine space of the discover the "shifting dynamics of power and frontier, I want to suggest other possibilities­ privilege" that inform Beret's struggle with the ambivalence of the hyphen is less the result exilic memory and the pressures of conform­ of the existential anguish of a female migrant ing to her domestic sphere. Her struggle also and more the complex working out and clash­ marks her Americanization as she legitimates ing of a gamut of obligations and expectations her presence in the New World by subscribing of Old World culture undergoing a profound to a racialized discourse that positions Native transformation in the experience of transat­ Americans and Irish Americans at the margins lantic migration. The gendered modalities of of frontier existence.ll 232 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005

SEPARATE SPHERES ON THE FRONTIER integration of home and community."14 In this sense, "domesticity can be viewed as an anchor, It is not difficult to find evidence of the ways a feminine counterforce to the male activity of in which men and women in the novel, par­ territorial conquest."I5 ticularly Per and Beret, construct and inhabit Kolodny is far from affirming a benign, gendered spheres of work and activity. They female nurturance that stands in stark contrast both play traditional roles-the man as the to male ideas of plunder and conquest. She is hunter, builder, and king, and the woman as interested rather in how "women preserved to the nurturer, homemaker, and queen. The one themselves some part of the landscape oth­ protects; the other yearns for protection. As erwise physically appropriated by men for the Per dreams of building a "splendid palace" (127) marketplace and metaphorically appropriated and a "royal mansion for [Beret] and her little by men for erotic conquest."I6 Giants certainly princess!" (52), Beret wonders if "a home for does exemplify Kolodny's arguments, especially men and women and children could never be given the manner in which Beret's and Per's established in this wilderness" (44). Per's focus values and beliefs, specific to the gendered on building a house and Beret's concern with spheres they live in and the roles they sanc­ creating a home aptly emphasize the boundaries tion for each other, often collide and jostle for that separate the spheres they inhabit. Indeed, legitimacy. This is why it is especially impor­ Glenda Riley notes that female domesticity tant not to view Kolodny's argument as being may have been little influenced by the differ­ too traditional in its use of the separate spheres ent frontier environments-the farm, ranch, metaphor. This is because Kolodny is sensi­ mine, and so on-given the severe limitations tive to the play of power in the construction of of women's spheres that relegated them to the gendered spheres and the constant struggle for obligations of homemaking, childbearing, nur­ women to develop their own domestic spaces turing, educating, and preserving family tradi­ and gardens. I'd like to suggest that Kolodny's tions.I2 It is their insistence on playing their emphasis on power and struggle compels us traditional roles within their spheres-Beret's to reexamine two important implications of interest in spirituality, sin, morality, and the the separate spheres metaphor: (1) if men and afterlife, and Per's "masculine" pragmatism women subscribe to the ideology of separate regarding the harshness of winter, death, and spheres, so long as the separateness is main­ sickness-that eventually leads to the tragic tained, the pressure to conform is lessened and end, Per's death. The quotation by Parrington a certain kind of predictability and stability that prefaces this article also tends to view structure male-female relations; and (2) it is only the frontier in gendered terms by stressing the the crossing of the borders of these spheres that "endurance" of the man, implying physical­ engenders a confrontation with the powers and ity, and the "suffering" of the woman, imply­ forces actively seeking to contain their trans­ ing spiritual and psychological concerns. To gressive impact. But if we inquire into the dis­ extend Annette Kolodny's observations about cursive and material force and pressure needed American pioneers, Per and Beret "enacted to sustain the spheres as separate-as natural sanctioned cultural scripts."I3 Perhaps one and a given, so to speak-we will need to pay can go so far as to argue that Giants drama­ attention to the constant and often violent tizes one of Kolodny's central arguments that forms of power play that shape men's and wom­ unlike pioneer men who sought to tame and en's desire and ability to sustain that sense of conquer the frontier, pioneer women like Beret separateness between the spheres. This means provide alternatives to the masculine impulse that rather than viewing only the crossing of to possess land because they are interested borders as having the potential to undermine not in establishing kingdoms and cities but the stability of separate spheres, we need to in creating gardens embodying a "complex focus on the constant, repetitive negotiations GENDERING THE FRONTIER 233 of power, privilege, and expectations by which play their assigned roles of Frey and Freya, the a kind of gendering and separateness can be tragedy of death and madness would not be obtained. In drawing attention to these issues, necessary at the end of the novel. Because Per I want to emphasize an idea crucial to the argu­ crosses the borders of his sphere by ultimately ments I later develop: the entire gamut of ideas usurping Beret's functions and roles within her and beliefs that serve as the ideological arma­ sphere, the balance between the spheres, how­ ture for the separation and crossing of spheres ever deeply sexist and ideologically motivated, is created and sustained by an ongoing process could not be maintained. But there is another of struggle. In the specific context of Giants, I way of reading that disruption of the spheres: explore further the forms and modes that this Per's insistence on affirming the role of the struggle takes, how Per and Beret confront and male principle, Frey, by displacing his ideas deal with it, and with what effects. and obligations from his wife, the female prin­ As the novel progresses, as the pioneers begin ciple, to the frontier itself leads not so much to establish a settlement, and as Beret becomes to a crossing of spheres as to Beret's inability increasingly perceptive of the transformations or unwillingness to transgress the boundaries in her husband, which she views with disdain, of her own sphere. What seems to be a form of and which also create a psychological distance border crossing is itself a reaffirmation, albeit in between them, she begins to attribute all hard­ a different modality, of the legitimacy and need ship and ill health to trolls and monsters and for the separation of spheres. Per transgresses views herself as a sinner who would soon face the boundaries of his sphere not so much to God's anger for having agreed to accompany Per disrupt or dismantle the sexist and uneven on the journey to America. In her discussion of power play that informs the dialectic of spheres the use of Norse mythology in Giants, Catherine but to reestablish the privileges accorded to his D. Farmer argues that part of the reason for own gendered space. Border crossing becomes a Beret's growing disdain for the frontier involves repetitive act of appropriating and reaffirming the gradual undermining of the harmonious masculine power and status. What is striking relationship between the roles they both play in Per's transgression is that he continues to in the novel, that of the Norse goddess and god play the role of Frey except that he does it in Freya/Gerthr and Frey. Farmer notes that Per, relation not to Beret but to the frontier. In as Frey, eventually "takes from Beret (Freya/ expending his energy to transform the frontier Gerthr) her proper duties"l7 by doing things into a place of habitation and eventually into normally associated with the goddess of fertility: a "kingdom," Per develops an eroticized rela­ planting seeds, providing sexual pleasure, pro­ tionship with the frontier, precisely the kind creating. Per is successful in his venture, Farmer of relationship that existed between him and argues, because Per, having disturbed "his cre­ Beret. As Ann Moseley observes, "Per, in turn, ative balance with Beret" and "having fulfilled is increasingly absorbed by his attraction to his seasonal cycle, has become the embodiment the prairie and to the creative, almost sexual, of winter rather than of the 'creative force' of power he feels in planting and harvesting his springtime."IS Thus his death in the end can be fields."19 But like Farmer, Moseley also views viewed as a result of his having disrupted the this as creating disharmony between Frey and harmony of their earlier relationship in which Freya, Per and Beret, thus leaving unexamined each of them affirmed the roles assigned them the assumption that the relationship between in their separate spheres. the spheres was relatively harmonious and free However, Farmer subscribes to the idea of tension until their encounter with the allur­ that gendered spheres are relatively stable and ing but wild and monstrous American frontier. tensionless until the boundaries that separate In an important scene in the novel, we find them are crossed. The implication of her argu­ Beret initiating a moment of intimacy to which ment is that had Per and Beret continued to Per responds with a sense of guilt: 234 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005

She begged him so gently and soothingly female spheres. It is for this reason that Beret's that he gave in at last and stayed in bed desperate attempts to retain a semblance of with her. But he was ill at ease over the loss continuity and stability on the forbidding of time. It wouldn't take long to lay a round prairie by seeking to reclaim the significance of sod, and every round helped.... Yes, she and power accorded to her as a woman, as one was an exceptional woman ... she had let occupying and living in a domestic sphere, can the child roam around and play in the grass be interpreted as her struggle to use a particular while she herself had joined in their labor; system of values and codes in order to affirm she had pitched in beside them and taken the ideals of her sanctioned domesticity itself. her full term like any man. (57, emphasis This underscores the danger of fetishizing the added) transgressing of gendered spheres as engender­ ing all forms of progressive, liberating practices. Farmer reads this as Per's glvmg "a sexual The creation of gendered spheres is a vexatious reward" to Beret "for her industry and fruit­ working out of various modalities of behavior, fulness."2o But it is worth noting that what memory, activity, and tradition whose social Farmer refers to as "fruitfulness" has little to codes and cultural values are determined in do with the nurturing aspect of Freya/Gerthr a conflictual process fraught with contradic­ and more to do with Frey's masculine impulse tory desires and perverse motivations. To to plow and work the land and, by extension, better understand why Beret considers herself the woman/goddess. It could be argued that Per the cause of the inexplicable challenges they indirectly encourages Beret to cross the border face in the frontier, we need to focus on the of her sphere by doing work normally associated events that happened in Norway prior to their with men. But it is clear in this instance that departure to America. As I will soon argue, it he is valuing her involvement in planting and is the domestic sphere in which Beret is made working the land because it secures and affirms to define her identity as a woman in Norway man's role as the cultivator of the land, which and its transplantation in America without has a lot to do with the public realm of male any significant transformation in its demands and activity. Thus reaffirmed in his masculinity, obligations that eventually drive her to a form of in his role as the provider and cultivator, Per madness.23 indulges in a moment of passion with Beret. Lincoln Colcord makes the point that In The Minds of the West, while drawing a R61vaag's "chief character, Beret, is a failure in distinction between the attitudes of European terms of pioneer life ... who could not take root migrant families and Yankee families toward in new soil.,,24 In a similar vein, Paul Reigstad nondomestic female labor, historian Jon Gjerde writes, "Beret's frail nature gives way before the notes that the commonplace involvement overwhelming crudity of life in the wilderness, of European women in farm work was often and she cries out for a godly life, which she perceived as a critique of American family believes is attainable only in the old country."25 arrangements where the gendered divisions of Indeed, by the time we come to the third novel labor marked domesticity as the appropriate of R61vaag's prairie trilogy, Their Father's God, vocation for women. But as Gjerde perceptively Raychel A. Haugrud states that Beret becomes notes, "The labor of European women in the a "whining, inconsiderate hag, and therefore fields, then, was perhaps a reflection of pov­ she can never find complete happiness."26 To erty, of the need to exploit all available labor Haugrud, this is because Beret realizes, right within the household."21 In this sense, what away in Giants, that "she can never be happy seems to be a "transgression against Beret's in living in America; her homeland is much gender,,22 ends up as a gesture of reaffirming too precious.,,27 Like Colcord, Reigstad, and the power and role of Frey, the male god, and Haugrud, Sara Eddy also views Beret's desire for the legitimacy of the separation of male and Norwegian culture and tradition as her belief GENDERING THE FRONTIER 235 in cultural organicity, the notion that culture When in America the cultivation of the possesses a core, an unchanging essence, that frontier becomes Per's sole concern, Beret feels should not be relinquished. As Eddy notes, diminished for having been supplanted as with reference to Beret's vexatious relationship Per's main object of interest. Although she is with her Irish daughter-in-law in the second cautioned in Norway about Per's probable dal­ novel, Peder Victorious, "To be Norwegian, to liances with other women, it is her ability to Beret, is as essential a quality as being a cow attract and remain the woman to whom Per is or a sparrow, and betraying the elements of most attracted that gives Beret a supreme sense that quality, like speaking another language or of confidence in herself-"She alone among 'mixing' with another race, might produce an women held his heart.... for him she was the abomination, something unnatural and inhu­ only princess" (256). Ensconced in the gendered man.,,28 To be sure, all of them view Beret's spheres in which she as a woman seeks her iden­ refusal to adapt to pioneering as providing tity and worth primarily in being the center of a another competing and realistic account of man's life and his only "princess," Beret faces on the impact of westward movement on settler the American frontier the challenge of warding communities, particularly on women, thus off other possible things and persons who could fore grounding the "shadow-side of the mythic displace her own position, a fear that is realized garden and frontier.,,29 However, to all four crit­ when land, the physical frontier itself, not Beret ics, Beret stands for things that hinder and slow the woman, becomes the site of fertility to Per. down Americanization. In America, the conflict between the spheres But such views do not address two central only intensifies but with a crucial difference. issues: first, the continued circumscribing of Whereas the sphere of male activity includes Beret within a domestic sphere even as Per as a man, Per, and land, the female complement, a man can transform himself and his beliefs by the sphere of female domesticity includes Beret, negotiating the challenges of the frontier and the woman, but lacks the male complement, as become more Americanized; and second, the Beret is replaced by land. The gendering of the burden on the woman to create a new home in a frontier in this sense perpetuates the conflicts new environment while severing all ties to other between the spheres evident in Norway prior to homes in other places, a burden that obfuscates the family's departure to America. non-American experiences of the gendering of work and daily activity, and profoundly affects OLD WORLD/NEW WORLD the different responses to the challenges of the frontier. While I have already addressed the When we situate these acts and gestures of first issue, I restate it here so it can be placed in repetition in the context of Norwegian immi­ context with the second one. The powerfully grant experience, Beret's "breakdown" has a appealing discourse of self-reliance and change, disturbing logic-her inability to cognitively which are pivotal transformative moments in map the spheres of a domesticity in which she the process of Americanization, also authorize is no longer the goddess of fertility, the woman the repetition of particular practices of gendered of sexual health and promise, the complement behavior which, ironically, run counter to the to the male principle, occasions a violent reas­ very ideals of adaptability and flexibility that sertion of religious beliefs that can provide a ostensibly give meaning to new forms of social­ semblance of continuity and therefore mean­ ization in America. In other words, for Per to ing on the American prairies. Beret's turn to emerge as an American pioneer requires that a kind of extreme religiosity grounded in Old the gendering of their spheres be intact. It is Testament theology seems to affirm the argu­ the predictability of the gendered spheres, their ment that she is indeed unsuited for the rigors of repeatability and sustainability, that shape the transcontinental migration and that her desire Americanization of the male pioneer. for and belief in tradition, memory, culture, and 236 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005 roots are naive, simplistic, and unproductive Indeed, what do we make of what happens ways of dealing with the exigencies and anxiet­ in Norway prior to this Norwegian family's ies of travel and settlement. The problem with departure to America? In what way can these such a reading is the idealization of America, of events inform our understanding of the gen­ America as offering life-transforming challenges dering of the American frontier experience? and opportunities to settlers and immigrants. In Why does the separate spheres model in this addition, America is often viewed as offering particular instance compel us to move toward a space for reinvention, for radical transforma­ the post-separate spheres model? Far from tion, because it is a "new kind of space where being a virtuous woman who relished her role the boundaries of home are dissolved or at least as woman, daughter, and wife, in Norway Beret extended."'o The discourse of the "new" and the and Per have a "love" child much to the con­ "beyond," the belief that America affords differ­ sternation of her family and the community. It ent kinds of border crossings where one is often is this sin of sexual transgression in which she compelled to move from the old to the new, from gave "herself freely, in a spirit of abandoned roots to fluidity, from a tradition-bound exis­ joy" that weighs on her mind (256). In addi­ tence to a new way of living where individual tion, in choosing to leave Norway with Per choice is valued-this discourse is what gives against her parents' wishes, Beret commits, to America its drama of pain and tragedy, but as she reflects on this in America, the "sin of also its magic and wonder. In this view, Beret's filial disobedience" by breaking the command­ apprehensions can be regarded as her continued ment to honor her father and mother.3! But subscription to a tradition-defined gendering of the act of leaving itself, coupled with the fact spheres, which gives her a space in which she of having a love child and not yielding to her can fulfill and realize her dreams of becoming parents, is what troubles Beret: to leave the a woman, a mother, a nurturer. Her misgivings past, her home, her family, her traditions, her about the prairie and the difficulties it poses, church-this is their unpardonable sin. It is which drive her to religious extremism, can be intriguing that the Beret in Norway is almost seen to be incontrovertible evidence that Beret a different character from the Beret on the is almost unfit for America, that she lacks what American frontier. The woman who seems to it takes to become truly American. relish tradition, harmony, balance, community, But such a reading is flawed because it culture, and God in America is, or rather was, conceives of migration, particularly immigra­ in Norway a woman who often pushed the tion, as a movement primarily from tradition boundaries of her domestic sphere by crossing to modernity, with America symbolizing all them-she disobeys her parents, indulges in that is modern and the Old World all that is, premarital sex, and transgresses accepted codes simply put, "old." I want to stress here how per­ of female behavior. versely one would have to misinterpret Beret's We need to be careful, however, not to view non-American experiences so as to affirm such this as evidence that a woman who eagerly an American idea. Giants undermines this subverted feminine codes in Norway eventually teleology of transformation. What we find becomes "domesticated" in America. Such a view in Giants is the opposite-in America, Beret simply reverses the hegemonic myth of America is confronted with even greater pressure to as the modern site for female liberation by conform to her sphere of domesticity. Rather replacing America with an idealized Norway and than moving across a spatial and psychosocial romanticized Norwegian culture. Interestingly continuum where the end point is the gradual enough, in Sexual Customs in Rural Norway, breaking down of Old World prejudices and the sociologist Eilert Sundt notes that between 1831 formation of a new American consciousness, and 1850 the "relationship between marriages Giants dramatizes the disorderliness of transat­ and illegitimate births (excluding stillbirths)" lantic migration. in Norway was 100 to 30.8. In the district of GENDERING THE FRONTIER 237

Helgeland, from which came the Norwegian narratives and discourses about Americanization settlers in Giants, the number of illegitimate and immigrant experience, which often make it children per 100 marriages was 45.5, which is a easy to view and even appreciate Per as epito­ highly significant ratio.33 Sundt's figures compli­ mizing the American frontier spirit embodied in cate the argument that by having a child out of the westward movement of the nineteenth cen­ wedlock, Beret bends social customs and, in the tury. More specifically, the primacy of America novel's context, emerges as a figure of transgres­ as the privileged site where a Norwegian sion. At the same time, to view the important peasant family's encounter with the pressures historical context provided by Sundt as having of modernity is marked by the transgression an unproblematic correspondence to Beret's of separate spheres is undermined. The ques­ experience would be to needlessly conflate his­ tion then becomes not why a tradition-bound tory with literature and view literature as simply woman continues to refuse Americanization reflecting a social reality. The high rate of ille­ while her husband embraces it. It is not about gitimate births does not mean that bastardy was a man who embraces America while his wife free of social strictures and that bastard children clings to a sentimental past. It is not about how and their parents were treated the same as the separate spheres created in the Old World children born in wedlock and married couples. are compelled to redraw their boundaries in Some of the people whom Sundt interviews, the New World. It is, rather, about how in the and Sundt himself, demonstrate the hegemonic very gendering of frontier experience, diverse cultural and social orientation toward the social acts and behaviors, which are legitimated by phenomenon of bastardy. That the sociologist the ideology of separate spheres, are constantly often uses phrases like "deplorable experiences being rearticulated and reinvested with dif­ with regard to moral conditions in the coun­ ferent values, albeit by reaffirming and main­ tryside" and "pernicious influence stemming taining particular "norms" of domesticity that from the rural areas" in his research point to effectively relegate women to "the unrelenting the cultural and ideological matrix within attrition of chores and duties, the carrying on of which bastardy becomes an object of societal innumerable bleak activities amid childbearing, concern.34 In Giants, we learn that Beret was loneliness, anxiety, and primitive conditions of no exception to such pressures. Beret's "parents, medical care and treatments" while the men, in in fact, had set themselves against the marriage stark contrast to the women, "would be stimu­ with all their might, even after the child, Ole, lated by the American democracy in which they had come" (255). They refer to Per as a "shiftless soon found themselves playing an active part."36 fellow" who "was wild and reckless" because he The promise of the West was culturally, socially, "got himself tangled up in all sorts of brawls." To religiously, and politically available primarily these parents "no honourable woman could be to men, not women, which introduces an ele­ happy with such a man" (156). These memories ment of incommensurability vis-a-vis the vexed form the "cultural baggage she brings with her" question of Americanization. Given the lack of to the American frontiers, and with every major recognition of women's work, their relegation challenge this settler family faces, Beret's belief to playing secondary roles in frontier families, that it was a "retribution for their very personal and their highly restricted participation in civic sin" of having a child out of wedlock is further and social life,37 the more interesting question strengthened?' That it is not the man but the becomes, who benefits from cultural and social woman who is burdened with guilt aptly under­ transplantation? Within these spheres of domes­ scores the gendered division of spheres that ticity, however, there are other movements of makes cultural upbringing and family heritage displacement and realignment of values and the sole responsibility of the woman. codes, but with a significant difference in their Paying attention to Beret's non-American translational modality. These values are often experiences fundamentally challenges hegemonic reascribed to those deemed to be on the margins 238 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005 of civilized life and, by extension, modernity and the desolate landscape of an Indian burial itself, namely Native Indians and Irish immi­ ground make the frontier a place that marks grants. Thus, the American frontier, as it is the end of human possibility, of creating and experienced by this Norwegian family, positions sustaining human life, society, and culture. To the woman within the confines of domesticity. a woman who desires to fulfill her role within It also highlights not so much Beret's incapacity her sphere of domesticity by creating a home for pioneering but, as Dick Harrison perceptively that can facilitate the growth of human civili­ comments, Per's "ironic and ominous" desire to zation, the frontier is an uninhabitable place, establish frontier settlements "with distinctly not amenable to domestication. To Beret, regal and feudal casts," a desire that renders him "a home for men and women and children "incapable of dealing with domestic affairs, and could never be established in this wilderness" therefore of creating the homes that should have (44) especially because, as she remarks to her been the purpose of those visionary mansions" pastor in Peder Victorious, she "cannot under­ (emphasis added).38 stand why the acquiring of a new language However, in fulfilling her role as a woman, [English] must crowd out our own!"39 In this and in creating a new home, there occurs instance, Beret construes Americanization as in Beret a kind of slippage of meanings and a form of linguistic imperialism. But even as values in a process of othering. It enables her, language differentiates between the Old and as a marginalized subject, to reassign herself New Worlds, and further positions Beret on another "higher" subject position in a racial­ the margins of American pioneer experience, ized social hierarchy by assigning to the Native her willingness to subscribe to prevailing Indians and the Irish settlers the "new" position codes of race offsets the threat of marginal­ hitherto occupied by the woman-the space ity posed by linguistic difference. To be sure, of the marginal. This mode of realignment is a primary reason why Beret assumes that not predictable and neither is it orderly and civilization is not possible on the American consistent throughout the novel. It is, rather, prairies is because of the Indians, the "red a constant shifting of subject positions in rela­ children" of the frontier who "would not learn tion to the separate spheres, the landscape, the the ways of man" (115). Like the Indians, the native inhabitants of the prairies, and other Irish migrants also signal the impossibility of European migrant groups, which dramatizes establishing a settler colony, because although the psychosocial imbrication of race, gender, European, they are "different," as different as environment, and immigration. the Indians from the Europeans.4o Since the Irish "don't live according to the Scriptures" RACE AND FRONTIER DOMESTICITY and are unable to produce their certificates of claim on the land, they are "nothing but a From the very beginning of their arrival in pack of scoundrels" (156). To Eddy, this dis­ America, Beret constantly ponders the possi­ placement of antipathy from the Indians to bility of creating a home, a space of nurturance the Irish foregrounds the constructed nature of and support for the entire family, in a "name­ race, particularly whiteness, and its ideological less, abandoned region ... beyond the outposts motivations. Because the Indians no longer of civilizations" (43). When the settlers realize posed a significant threat, the need to seize that they had indeed settled on an Indian burial control of the land was less important than the site, Beret's response is one of stoic endurance: need to manage the labor of European settlers. "Strangely enough, it did not frighten her; it In this sense, whiteness acquires a racialized only showed her more plainly, in a stronger, identity that has little to do with phenotype harsher light, how unspeakably lonesome this and more to do with the competition among place was" (47). The vast, unending stretches diverse European immigrant groups vying for of land and prairie, the harshness of winter, access to land and labor.41 Eddy's comments GENDERING THE FRONTIER 239 are insightful, especially as she makes clear not just as a pioneer, but as a pioneer woman. the link between land, labor, immigration, This distinction is crucial to my argument ethnicity, and racial discourse. But what about because I am attempting to trace the "vexed Beret's initial misgivings about the frontier? and contradictory relations between race and What explains the eventual construction of domesticity."44 Norwegian settlements on Indian lands, spe­ But the brief encounter early on in the novel cifically the success of Beret's husbandry after between the Norwegian travelers and a group Per's death, as evidenced in Peder Victorious? of Indians may seem to undercut my argument Are the modalities of Per and Beret's racializa­ about the gendering of the frontier, especially tion similar or different? Does a "shared white­ given the intimate and nonviolent nature of the ness"42 elide the gender differences within a encounter-tobacco sharing by the Indians, the racial group? How can we account for gender use of the "horse cure" and the "white rags" by Per even as its forms of socialization are imbricated to care for a sick Indian, Per and Beret sleeping with race? together among the Indians and keeping watch Since the frontier is coded with gendered over the sick man, and the gift of a pony by this meanings, the ascription of racial identity Indian to Per as a gesture of appreciation (87, and the appropriation of a hegemonic racial 91). To Eddy, however, these benign encounters discourse may also take different forms and set the terms for later confrontations with the acquire contradictory meanings. While both Irish and the creation of a "shared whiteness" Per and Beret view Indians with skepticism, among the Irish and Norwegians that offsets their understanding of Indian presence dif­ their anxieties and fears of the Plains Indians.45 fers in significant ways. When faced with the The emphasis on "white rags" to clean the realization that they have indeed set up their "brown" skin of the Indian (Giants 87, 89), a col­ habitation on the grave of an Indian, Per and oration that itself renders uncertain the attempt Beret respond in clearly different ways that to determine the effectiveness of the cleaning are fundamentally shaped by the ideology process, argues Eddy, "reinforce or undermine of separate spheres. Indian presence, to Per, the construction of whiteness."46 My argument affords him the possibility of demonstrating his about gendering the frontier complicates Eddy's courage, a crucial component of his manliness. argument, in that Per's reaffirmation of white He muses: "This vast stretch of beautiful land masculinity vis-a-vis his bravery in interacting was to be his-yes, his-and no ghost of a dead with the Indians and even "curing" one of their Indian would drive him away" (41, emphasis in sick with "white rags" is heavily dependent on original). Indian presence signals to Per that Beret's physical presence at the Indian campsite, land in America is not for the taking but can and more importantly, on Beret's willingness to only be acquired by dispossessing the Indians. give her apparel-"her very best apron" and "her Thus, the Indians pose a challenge to this home-braided garters" (92, 95)-to bandage Norwegian immigrant who is eager to claim the wounds of the ailing Indian. The man's the land, found a new kingdom, and establish insistence on having rags that are white to treat his princely power, all of which give meaning the wound have to yield to the woman's exigent and significance to his activities not just as desire to allow her own apparel to be used for a pioneer, but as a pioneer man. In a sense, treating the Indian; that is, the gendering of Indian presence, to Per, keeps "alive the power whiteness realigns the boundaries of separate of resistance to aggression, and [develops] the spheres by underscoring the ways in which stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiers­ Beret's experience of the Plains as a woman man.'>43 Beret's concern, however, is the lack of shapes and informs Per's construction not just culture, sophistication, education, and nurtur­ of masculinity but of white masculinity. ance that the Indians ostensibly signify, ideas While the overlapping of land and labor and values that she is primarily concerned with are concerns for the male pioneers, to Beret, 240 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005 the female pioneer, the possibility of creating a she eschews all contact with the Indians and "female garden" hinges on her active denial of views them as an uncivilized people who, by the social, cultural, and historical significance implication, cannot even comprehend the of burial grounds for the Indians, But this is not cognitive mapping that a church graveyard simply a matter of personal or collective preju­ can offer to a "civilized" woman in the New dice. What is of interest is the economy that World, an irony that is lost on Beret since she links the experience of migration and reloca­ belongs to a family of peasants and fishermen tion to the repetitive, gendered practices that in Norway. Still, the strange Indian "other" structure separate spheres in the New World: exerts a powerful hold on their imaginations. the conflict for this Norwegian pioneer woman To Per, in their presence "there was something is one between affirming herself as a "fertile" that made it almost impossible for him to tear woman within her sphere of domesticity by cre­ himself away" (85), and to their children, the ating a home for her family on an Indian burial graves "exerted a strange and irresistible fasci­ site and recognizing the power of memory and nation" (73). Even given her powerful sense of tradition to shape Indian attitudes toward the memory and tradition, Beret is finally unable to Norwegian settlers. Thus, it is only by position­ fully appreciate the significance of death and ing the Indians in an inferior racial position in burial grounds to the Indians because she is relation to the Norwegians that Beret is able to able to reposition herself as a racially superior realize her potential as a woman. A particular subject in relation to them. By positioning the form of racial coding authorizes a particular Indians as inferior racial subjects, Beret and her form of domesticity. But this nexus of race fellow Norwegian immigrants, despite all their and gender has a religious dimension that misgivings about the frontier, eventually set up makes it difficult to view Beret's devotion to a settler colony on a sacred Indian grave. All Old Testament Christianity as a sign of female this is not just to point out that a white pioneer madness resulting primarily from patriarchal woman exhibits racist ideas and views. What oppression. This is nowhere more evident than is important here is that in negotiating the in her musing about her village church in the immense psychological, social, and material Old World. pressures of the frontier, this migrant woman In Norway, the churchyard was a familiar subscribes to a hegemonic racial discourse that place to Beret, so familiar indeed that she enables her to affirm the legitimacy of a domes­ knows where each one of her relatives, count­ tic space and the ideology of separate spheres. ing back to generations, is buried in the church Still, this leaves unaddressed Beret's embrace graveyard. Her familiarity with her church and of a rigid religious morality in the New World. the churchyard points to her attachment to the Robert Eric Livingston's arguments about village community, her past, and by implica­ migration and the undermining of place as a tion, her tradition and culture: "In the midst reliable and transparent mode of identification of the churchyard lay the church, securely pro­ may be useful here. He observes that as people tecting everything round about. No fear had migrate and resettle in new locations, place ever dwelt in that place .... She knew where seems to offer a semblance of continuity, a all these graves lay" (262). The churchyard certain kind of resilience that resists the uncer­ facilitates a mode of material and discursive tainties and anxieties of travel. But in that mapping that enables her to construct a sense movement of travel, it is the very undermining of home and belonging within a defined and of place as "place," of place as a "contingenc[y] familiar territory. In America, the Norwegian of location" that engenders a form of anxious settlers establish their homes not in uninhab­ living. He notes: ited wilderness but on an Indian burial site. But the significance of the churchyard is not easily Since sense of place is commonly the bearer translatable across cultures largely because of moral order, erosion of place subverts GENDERING THE FRONTIER 241

ethical understandings as well: hence the ceptualized outside the ideological boundaries resurgence of any number of Manichaean and power dynamics of the gendering of fron­ moralities, in which the terror of unpredictabil­ tier life. The separate spheres not only reflect ity is met and mastered by a violent reassertion the ideological power of gender and its material of morallegibility.47 effects but the ways in which the negotiation of these effects and the border crossings they A form of moral coherence is obtained by a engender produce and authorize particular reassertion of binary codes to assuage the ter­ racial codings of otherness. rifying possibility of negotiating the "limits" of But by the time we come to the end of place itself. To avoid this confrontation with the novel, Beret Holm ceases to exist-as a the liminality of place, it is necessary to impose woman. The pioneer woman disappears so that a certain form of order. Given Beret's inability the pioneer man, Per Hansa, can emerge as the and sometimes refusal to come to terms with sole proprietor of the frontier estate. This is the the translational demands of her transnational more disturbing tragedy at the end, not Per's journey, it is almost inevitable that the Old untimely demise in a billowing snowstorm, Testament orthodoxy of a vengeful God and which Reigstad views as a "humiliating end for pitiful sinners afraid of the "terror of conse­ the jaunty Ash Ladd."49 Just before the final quences" should begin to offer at least an iota events unfold, Per, in a moment of reflection, of order and meaning to her experience of dis­ muses about the profound transformations orientation as an "exile in an unknown desert" in the household economy that has so far (180). Beret's immersion in Old Testament sustained his frontier kingdom. The process Christianity is already compromised by her of caring for his wife during her physical and understanding, or rather, "mapping" of Indian mental sickness and her pregnancy has resulted burial land as a desolate place because she is in a severing of conjugal ties. This severing has unable to appreciate their history of habitation less to do with the waning of sexual desire and and tradition and positions them on a hierar­ more to do with the repositioning of the wife as chical social scale that makes Norwegian settler a child in a domestic frontier economy: occupation of Indian burial sites less a matter of desecration and more a matter of inconve­ During the years that her mind had been nience. Thus, her racialization of the Indians beclouded he had treated her as a father is intimately linked to her negotiation of the would a delicate, frail child.... So solicitous obligations of her domestic sphere. In other had been his watchful care over her through words, the mark of Beret's Americanization all these years, that this paternal attitude had is not an embrace of an individualist ethos, a become fixed with him. . . . To him she was nascent capitalism, or a severing of traditional still the delicate child that needed a father's languages, cultures, and beliefs. Rather, it is watchful eye. To desire her physically would her growing implication in a racialized process be as far from his mind as the crime of incest. of socialization that enables her to sustain and (515-16, emphasis added) legitimize the ideology of domesticity. The dynamic that structures this process is not one The tragedy that unfolds in the Hansa family that demands self-effacement or radical breaks is that, though Per becomes the apotheosis from tradition and memory. Those moments, of the mythic American pioneer, a paternal­ as we have seen, where there is a constant slip­ ist and patriarchal economy leaves no place page of subject positions, where there is a rep­ for Beret to exist-as wife, mother, helpmate, etition of sanctioned gendered behavior, are, to equal. It requires her disappearance as a woman use Janet Floyd's words, "imbricated within the and her reappearance as a child. True, Beret's disposition of power.'>48 Beret's experience of story continues in Peder Victorious and Their the frontier as a white woman cannot be con- Father's God, where she gains a reputation as 242 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005

a successful pioneer woman for expanding the 3. See Orm Overland's The Western Home: A farm, raising her children, and presiding over Literary History of Norwegian America (Northfield, one of the biggest family estates in the county, Minn.: Norwegian American Historical Association and University of Illinois Press, 1996) for a compre­ However, this is not simply a case of a resilient hensive treatment of Norwegian American literary widow who by dint of hard work and courage history. is able to provide for her family by becom­ 4. Neil T. Eckstein, "0. E. Rolvaag: The Mar­ ing "the best farmer in the settlement,"SO As ginality of the Bi-Cultural Writer" in Ole Rolvaag: Orm Overland observes, "Beret has lived in Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, MN: St. Olaf College Press, 1975),68. the shadow of her charismatic husband and 5. Overland, Western Home, 359. only after his death can the author explore her 6. O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth, trans. potential as a character" (emphasis added).51 It Lincoln Colcord (New York: First Perennial is the death of her husband, the absence of the Classics, Harper Collins, 1999). Further citations man, that enables her to emerge as the female to Giants in the Earth are given in parenthesis in the text. pioneer but only within a farming economy 7. Raychel A. Haugrud, "Rolvaag's Search that affords her the psychosocial and mate­ for Soria Moria," Norwegian American Studies 26 rial spaces in which her value and identity as (1974): 103, http://www.naha.stolaf.edu/pubs/nas/ a woman could be renegotiated on terms over volume26/voI26_5.htm. which she has at least a modicum of control 8. Harold P. Simonson, Prairies Within: The Tragic Trilogy of Ole Rolvaag (Seattle: University of and influence. In this context, then, while Washington Press, 1987), 8. the post-separate spheres model affords a more 9. Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Com­ complex approach to theorizing gender rela­ parative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains tions and studying frontier household econo­ (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1988),2. mies, we still need to acknowledge how the 10. Cathy N. Davidson, and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., Introduction to No More Separate Spheres! Manichean allegories of the separate spheres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 7, 11-12, continue to exert their violent force in ways 11. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontier of that sometimes require the erasure of female Women's Writing: Women's Narratives and the presence, and tragically sometimes, necessitate Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (Tucson: University the death of the man. of Arizona Press, 1996), 5; Davidson and Hatcher, No More Separate Spheres! 8, 12. 12. Riley, Female Frontier, 2. NOTES 13. Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, It was at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, that 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North I first taught Giants in the Earth in spring 2001. Carolina Press, 1984), 12. In writing this article I benefited immensely from 14. Ibid., 12. stimulating discussions led by students in class and 15. Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity" in No intense conversations with colleagues in Paideia More Separate Spheres! ed. Cathy N. Davidson and discussion meetings. Students at the University of Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham: Duke University Press, Southern Maine, where I am presently teaching, 2002), 185. have provided, over the last four years, valuable 16. Kolodny, Land Before Her, 12. insights into the novel. By offering criticisms and 17. Catherine D. Farmer, "Beret as the Norse suggestions, the three anonymous reviewers of this Mythological Freya/Gerthr" in Women and Western article helped me develop my arguments more rigor­ American Literature, ed. Helen Winter Stauffer and ously than I could have done had I not been fortu­ Susan J. Rosowski (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1982), 181. nate to have their input. A special word of thanks Also see Philip R. Coleman-Hull's "Breaking the to them all. Silence: Hymns and Folk Songs in O. E. Rolvaag's Immigrant Trilogy," Great Plains Quarterly 15, no. 1. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness 2 (1995): 105-15. In discussing the use of music in (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University the novels, Coleman-Hull underscores the deep Press, 1956), 1. psychological divides between Beret and Per that 2. Einar Haugen, Ole Edvart Ri:ilvaag (New York: are also registered in the music they listen to, sing, Twayne Publishers, 1983), 76, 86. or remember. Whereas Beret likes sacred songs and GENDERING THE FRONTIER 243 hymns, Per finds Norwegian folk melodies more the margins of society-derelicts, alcoholics, labor­ appealing. This difference in musical orientation, to ers, jail inmates, etc.,-Sundt earned the nickname Coleman-Hull, foregrounds the differences in their "Fante-Sundt," derived from the term "fanter," existential worldviews on the prairies, which also which means "vagabond." Although he used terms profoundly shape their understanding and response such as "depravity" in examining sexual customs to the challenges of settler life. in Norway, rather than subscribing to traditional 18. Ibid., 188-89. religion's focuses on the vileness and sin of human 19. Ann Moseley, Ole Edvart Rolvaag (Boise, ID: nature to explain sexual behavior, Sundt sought to Boise State University, 1987), 31. prOVide a cultural materialist analysis as exemplified 20. Farmer, "Beret as Freya/Gerthr," 181. by his detailed examinations of barns and lofts as 21. Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethno­ sleeping quarters and the practice of "nattefrieri" cultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830- or "night courting" in Norway ("Eilert Sundt" in 1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Sexual Customs in Rural Norway: A Nineteenth­ Press, 1997), 173. Century Study, ed. and trans. Odin W. Anderson 22. Farmer, "Beret as Freya/Gerthr," 181. [Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993], 275, 23. There was a high incidence of madness 278). As Stephen G. Wieting observes, Sundt "casts among immigrant groups in the late 1800s. Nearly his lot with a modern social science that resists reli­ 33.2 percent of the insane were foreign born, gious conclusions and personal biases" (Afterword while immigrants constituted only 14.77 percent in Sexual Customs in Rural Norway, 186). I am point­ of the national population. The proportion of ing out these things to caution against dismissing Scandinavians among the insane jumped from 28.3 Sundt's remarks as shot through, without complica­ percent to 30.7 percent between 1886 and 1890 in tion, with elitism and disdain. the state of Minnesota, where Scandinavians com­ 35. Diane D. Quantic, "Fairy Castle or Steamer prised only 16.5 percent of the population (Harold Trunk? Creating Place in O. E. Riilvaag's Giants in P. Simonson, "Angst on the Prairie: Reflections on the Earth," Great Plains Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2003): Immigrants, Rolvaag, and Beret" in Norwegian 254. American Studies 29 (1983): 89, http://www.naha. 36. Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to stolaf.edu/pubs /nas /volume29 /vo129 _03 .htm. America (Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American 24. Lincoln Colcord, Introduction to Giants in Historical Association, 1940), 65. the Earth, xv-vi. 37. Glenda Riley, "Women's Responses to the 25. Paul Reigstad, Rolvaag: His Life and Art Challenges of Plains Living," Great Plains Quarterly (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 117. 9, no. 3 (1989): 178. 26. Haugrud, "Rolvaag's Search for Soria Moria," 7. 38. Dick Harrison, "Rolvaag, Grove, and Pioneer­ 27. Ibid., 7. ing on the American and Canadian Plains," Great 28. Sara Eddy, "'Wheat and Potatoes': Recon­ Plains Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1981): 253. structing Whiteness in O. E. Rolvaag's Immigrant 39. O. E. Rolvaag, Peder Victorious, trans. Nora Trilogy." MELUS 26, no. 1 (2001): 142. O. Solum and O. E. Rolvaag (New York: Harper 29. Simonson, "Angst on the Prairie." Brothers Publishers, 1929), 226. 30. Janet Floyd, Writing the Pioneer Woman 40. The conflict between the Irish and the (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 2. Norwegian settlers becomes even more compli­ 31. Barbara Meldrum, "Fate, Sex, and Naturalism cated when Peder eventually marries Susie, an in Riilvaag's Trilogy" in Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Irish woman. While Peder Victorious charts their Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, period of romance and marriage, Their Father's God MN: St. Olaf College Press, 1975),46. (trans. Trygve M. Ager [New York: Harper Brothers 33. Eilert Sundt, Sexual Customs in Rural Nor­ Publishers, 1929]) explores the conflicts between way: A Nineteenth-Century Study, ed. and trans. Susie's Catholic beliefs and practices and Peder's Odin W. Anderson (Ames: Iowa State University Protestantism. Peder's destruction of the crucifix Press, 1993),9-11. and the rosary, which he refers to as "hocus pocus" 34. Ibid., 7, 19. This work was first published in (23), culminates in Susie's departure, thus under­ Norway in 1857, 1864, and 1866, and Anderson's scoring religion as yet another vector along which English translation is based on the 1857 publication. the codes of racial discourse and gender ideology It is important to historically contextualize Sundt's intertwine in mutually constitutive ways. comments. Arvid Brodersen notes that because 41. Eddy, "'Wheat and Potatoes,'" 5. Sundt worked for years as a church minister and as 42. Ibid., 1. a scientist, his work embodies a sustained tension 43. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in between his Christian faith and Enlightenment American History (New York: Henry Holt and principles. Given his emphasis on those living on Company, 1920), 15. 244 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2005

44. Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," 185. 49. Paul Reigstad, "Rolvaag as Myth-maker," in 45. Eddy, "'Wheat and Potatoes,'" l. Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald 46. Ibid., 3. Thorson (Northfield, MN: St. Olaf College Press, 47. Robert Eric Livingston, "Global Knowledges: 1975), 55. Agency and Place in Literary Studies" PMLA 116, 50. Kristoffer Paulson, "Rolvaag as Prophet: The no. 1 (2001): 148. Tragedy of Americanization" in Thorson, ed., Ole 48. Floyd, Writing the Pioneer Woman, 2. Rolvaag, 58. 51. Overland, The Western Home, 363.