Sigrid Undset: Following the Thread of Belief
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Jonathan G. Reinhardt Sigrid Undset: Following the Thread of Belief here is a broad consensus on the work of Undset, daughter of an archaeologist, showed TNorwegian writer and Nobel Prize winner interest in the Norse myths from a young age, Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). “Mainstream” critics and her first attempt at novel writing was set in deride her for starting out with promise, then los- medieval Norway. She offered her maiden manu- ing all literary luster when she converted to script to the prestigious Gyldendal publishing Catholicism in 1924, and abandoning the feminist house in Copenhagen, where it was rejected. Ac- cause. Catholic critics praise her later work as cording to Undset, a reader told her she had no most mature, and rejoice in converting her biog- talent for historical fiction, but might try writing raphy into a passion of return. Norwegians love something modern. Undset because . she is Norwegian. Currently, She did, producing the diary Fru Marta Oulie however, James Crossely observed in the Review (not available in translation), published awash in of Contemporary Fiction, “though her Nobel scandal in 1907. Beginning with what Undset bi- Prize came to her in 1928, there’s a certain ographer Susan T. Vigilante calls one of the most mustiness about her reputation, as though she’d memorable first lines in European literature—“I lived in the era she most famously recorded.” have been unfaithful to my husband”—it portrays The third woman to receive the prestigious a petty bourgeois wife’s reeling life. The destruc- award for literary merit—and also the third and tive power of passions, especially from the point last Norwegian—she received the Nobel Prize of view of women, would become one of Und- “principally for her powerful descriptions of set’s major subject matters. Not considered a very Northern life during the Middle Ages.” At the strong work, Fru Marta Oulie nevertheless estab- banquet of honor, Professor Gösta Forssell re- lished her reputation as a writer and feminist. marked, “In her extensive work, an Iliad of the Undset’s other important early and contem- North, Sigrid Undset has resurrected in a new porarily set work is the somewhat autobiographi- and visionary light the ideals which once guided cal novella Jenny (1911, transl. of 1920 revision: our forefathers who built that community from Steerforth Press, 2002). In it, Undset tells of the which our Germanic culture derived. To an age Norwegian painter Jenny who decides to fall in in which it may be easier to acknowledge that love with the rather insipid Helge Gram while in the right to the greatest happiness is the duty of Rome, returns to Norway with him, begins an af- renunciation—to this age Sigrid Undset has fair with his father, then eddies from corruption shown the ideals of our forefathers: duty and to perceived corruption, suffers the loss of her faithfulness.” newborn child, and finally commits suicide. MARS HILL AUDIO Resource Essay The author’s own life parallels the protago- who succumbs to passion and deceit as a very nist’s at least insofar as that Undset herself visited young woman, then must live out the conse- Rome on a travel scholarship from the Norwe- quences of a difficult marriage to an unstable and gian government for a few months in 1910. often unfaithful husband who is not her strong- There, she met the talented, feckless but married willed equal, and struggles to atone for herself painter Arne Svarstad, who promptly divorced and with herself. She achieves endurance, if not and wed an already pregnant Undset two years redemption, by realizing, as J. C. Whitehouse later. The budding voice of the fjords in the main concluded in Vertical Man (Saint Austin Press, remained mute on her private life, but scholars 1999), “a refusal to turn away from the harshness assume that much in Undset’s writing that dwells of life, and a perception that it is not all harsh- on struggles with rampant passion, poisonous ness.” Kristin is an illustration of Undset’s remark suspicion, and strife and worries among hus- that early in her life the Norse Njál’s Saga (Pen- bands and wives stems from this her unhappy guin, 2002) gave her, in Vigilante’s words, “a and eventually rent wedlock. premonition of how women could easily allow Conservative reviewers were appalled by her their own destinies to become hopelessly entan- frankness, and Jenny also marked an abrupt end gled with those of gifted but neurotic men.” The for Undset’s ironically iconic status among Nor- novel is considered especially strong, too, for the wegian suffragettes (they were emphatically put human certainties Undset limns. Deal Hudson , in out about her protagonist’s weak, unliberated his MARS HILL AUDIO interview , comments, end). The controversies, however, established “The intertwining of . lives and the kind of ef- Undset as a shiningly direct, honest author whose fect that the failure or success of one life has on sentimental gifts were confined to picturesque another is so powerfully depicted that you’re re- land- and cityscapes. A short story Images in a minded that you don’t act your life in isolation Mirror, and a play In the Gray Light of Dawn from others.” (both included in Sigrid Undset on Saints and Kristin Lavransdatter has never been out of Sinners, Deal W. Hudson, ed., Ignatius 1993) are print in English since it became available in trans- among Undset’s minor accomplishments of this lation in the 1920s. However, current Undset earlier stage. translator Tiina Nunnally points out in her Spiting everyone, Undset soon returned to a dialogue with Ken Myers, the older translation medieval setting for her novella Gunnar’s was in need of revision. Bruce Bawer of the New Daughter (Penguin, 1998), published in 1909. York Times concurs: “In English-speaking coun- The plot of this tale of passion and violence told tries, the book failed to survive its best-sellerdom, into the dawn of pagan Scandinavia’s Christian owing mainly, one suspects, to the execrable conversion initially seems to be that of a romance translation, which is crammed with hoary medie- novel: maid meets noble warrior. Claiming she valisms (“come a-wooing”, “methinks”) that have wanted to reflect the old sagas and ballads with- no basis in the original.” Nunally’s new transla- out romanticizing their violent episodes—instead tion (Penguin, 1997-2000) won the PEN Book-of- making them seem realistic—Undset weaves a the-Month Club translation prize in 2001. The narrative writhing in rape, revenge, unrest, do- older translations (Vintage, 1987-1995) are also mestic abuse, murders committed over honor, still available. and victimized children. Nunnally, a Finnish-American Scandinavian Soon after, the Nobel laureate marked her languages specialist, has also translated Jenny and whole-hearted return to historical fiction with the letters by Sigrid Undset for The Unknown Sigrid publication of the first volume of Kristin Undset: Jenny and Other Works (Steerforth Lavransdatter, a trilogy set in medieval Norway. Press, 2001), and the best-seller Smilla’s Sense of The Wreath (Penguin, 1997) was quickly fol- Snow by Danish novelist Peter Høeg (Delta, lowed by The Wife (Penguin, 1999), and when 1995). The Unknown Sigrid Undset additionally the final part, The Cross (Penguin, 2000), ap- includes two hitherto unavailable short stories peared in 1924, Undset had offered to the world translated by Naomi Wolford, “Simonsen” and her magnum opus. Kristin Lavransdatter re- “Thjodolf,” concerned with the life of common counts the life of the young noblewoman Kristin, people in early twentieth century Oslo. Jonathan G. Reinhardt, “Sigrid Undset,” page 2 MARS HILL AUDIO Resource Essay Immediately following up on the success of for Scandinavian Studies 58.3, alienates recent her Kristin trilogy, Undset produced The Master feminist critics. of Hestviken, for which she seized upon the ma- Ideological preferences aside, Undset’s novels terial of her very first, rejected manuscript. The have fallen out of favor partly because their mod- first of four parts, The Axe (Vintage 1994) be- ernism reflects the nineteenth century narrative came available in 1924, and, by 1927, the epic style of Austen and Dostoevsky more closely than piece was concluded with The Snake Pit (Vin- her feminist contemporary Virginia Woolf, or the tage, 1994), In the Wilderness (Vintage, 1995), word-play of James Joyce. “If modern writing and The Son Avenger (Vintage, 1995). The series matches modern philosophy in its preoccupation is considered second only to Kristin Lavransdat- with doubt, Undset and Dostoevsky struggle with ter. Paul Evans, in Sigrid Undset: On Saints and belief,” Paul Evans remarks in Sigrid Undset: On Sinners (Ignatius, 1993), compares Hestivken Saints and Sinners. “They understand that hu- with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers in man failing is less a matter of disease or history or its wide-scope life-and-death struggle, claiming accident than of revolt against Pascal’s ‘God of that “so individual in its manifestations is the sin Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of phi- [Undset] depicts that its complex ‘personality’ is losophers and scholars’.” what lingers in our minds.” Beginning in 1925, the deeply religious Und- Historical novels remained Undset’s forte, set turned to hagiography. The first result was a and she would later conclude her fiction writing work on the life of the Norwegian St. Halvard, to with the less spectacular historical novels Sigurd be followed by one on the holy king Olav in and His Brave Companions (1931, Knopf 1943) 1930, a collection titled Saga of Saints (Books for and Madame Dorothea (1939, Knopf 1940). Libraries, 1977) in 1934, and, posthumously, a Like many writers of historical fiction, Undset biography of Catherine of Siena (Sheed and was sometimes criticized for escapism.