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 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 . 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 , but might try writing raphy into a passion of return. 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 ), 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 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 (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 .

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 ’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. “There is Ward, 1954). Saga of Saints, Evelyn Birge Vitz of no flight from the world in her novels,” J. C. New York University explains, “was devoted Whitehouse, Reader in Comparative Literature at largely to a retelling, an reexamination, of the the University of Bradford, England, defends, “but epic and romantic legends—the great ‘sagas’—of a reflection on it in terms of a tough and pro- the great Norwegian saints, the fathers and found faith.” In his Scandinavian Studies 71.1 mothers of Norwegian Christianity” with whom article “The Unfashionable Kristin Lavransdatter,” Undset was so fascinated that they caused her Otto Reinert observed that Undset’s novels “are conversion to Catholicism in 1924: “I had ven- product and not process literature: the reader tured too near the abode of truth in my re- does not participate in the novel’s progressive searches about ‘God’s friends’, as the saints are discoveries or experiences them as being con- called in the texts. . . . So I had to scious of the difficulties of their own coming to submit.” being.” Undset exhibits antimodern biases as Undset did not wholly abandon fiction after clearly as Golding, Orwell, and Tolkien later her medievalist pieces, but critics have repre- would, and, in Reinert’s words, “her vaunted ‘his- hended her for increasingly abandoning the novel torical realism’ [is] a means of seducing the for allegory. Her post-Kristin novels are deter- reader into accepting [them].” Her work is mined by the experience of her religious conver- memorable because her characters’ struggles re- sion and are chiefly apologetic. J. C. Whitehouse main “immediate and believable in terms com- explicates, “It is clear that by The Wild Orchid prehensible to every modern reader.” (1929, Knopf 1931) and The Burning Bush Undset also lacks all shyness in asserting the (1930, Knopf 1932) there is a change in the na- sense—shared with T. S. Eliot, for example—that ture of the moral reflections which various char- a mother church could help heal the modern dis- acters engage in. There, what might be called the temper, and her alleged conviction that woman- natural decencies are seen through the eyes of a hood is most complete in wifery and mother- man for whom they are no longer completely sat- hood, which, Paul Bjorby notes the obvious in his isfactory and are indeed occasionally strange.” article “Recent Trends in Sigrid Undset Criticism” The Burning Bush especially is concerned with “that hidden part of each individual which is be-

Jonathan G. Reinhardt, “Sigrid Undset,” page 3 MARS HILL AUDIO Resource Essay yond the judgment of others, the self which is grace, among them the sacrament of more than the sum of the idiosyncrasies, qualities marriage. . . . Little by little the church’s or defects of each individual, and which is only view gained prevalence all over Europe . . fully meaningful in its relationship with God and . [that] it is criminal for other people, or other selves.” Ida Elisabet (Knopf 1933), which social conditions, to withhold [the right deals with spiritual transformation, and The of living in matrimony and founding a Faithful Wife (1936, Knopf 1937) fall into the family]. same category. Especially in her later years, Undset turned to Undset also voices her concern with the ab- writing essays and articles, often concerning her- sence of a Catholic response to the fascist self with the Catholic faith, such as in Katholsk movements—a stance that would force the vocal Propaganda (1927, not available in English). Norwegian nationalist to flee to the U. S. when Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Professor of Comparative German armies under Nazi leadership invaded Literature at the University of San Francisco, her country in 1940; a time she reflected in Re- notes in his article “Sigrid Undset: Holiness and turn to the Future (Knopf, 1942)—as an exam- Culture” that the autobiographical Stages on the ple for her opinion on the role of the Church: Road (1933, Books for Libraries 1969) contains two representative examples of the Nobel Prize The church militant on earth may be winner’s social concerns. Undset keenly observes reduced to a handful of adherents, not a reversal to pre-Christian oppressive social struc- many more than would fill an arena or tures as evident among the Vikings through mod- a local jail. The Christians of Europe ernism with its emphasis on the essential Viking may be reduced to a little band with value of freedom: no power to influence social devel- opment for a long period. . . . Until Industrial capitalism and free competition Catholic missionaries, from China or have resulted in the majority of members South America or Africa, return to of society having lost all security for their preach the faith of our fathers to the economic future . . . [Such] slave lost barbarian tribes who are living conditions are accompanied by a renewal amongst the ruins of ancient Europe. of the morality of slavery. This is precisely the point about ‘comrade-marriage’ According to Whitehouse, Undset makes the [‘living together’] . . . , the commonest point in her other autobiographical work The form of sexual intercourse among slaves. . Longest Years (1934, Knopf 1935) that “human . . Free love is for slaves, and marriage is beings are to be seen as an antidote to the over- for the free-born. . . . Of a slave-born dose of the superficial generalities concerning concubine a man can demand fidelity so l’homme moyen sensuel which the current long as he cares to keep her for himself; liberal view would provide.” of a wife her whole community can Men, Women and Places (1938, Books for demand fidelity . . . because she shares Libraries 1969) contains more essay-shaped re- her responsibility and the honor of the flections, and Undset also penned a contempla- family with her forefathers and with her tive memoir for children, Happy Times in Nor- husband . . . and with her children. . . . way (1947, Greenwood 1979). The Christian Church could not recognize Undset’s unbroken popularity in Norway and any due morality here either—could not an increasing interest for her works in English acknowledge class distinctions and racial translation prove that seventy-five years after she disparities to be other than trifling received her Nobel Prize, the strengths of her variations in a human material which was writing still hold. Gidske Anderson wrote for the fundamentally one. . . . The Church Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “None of insisted that Christian slave-owners at Undset’s books leaves the reader unconcerned. least refrain from hindering their slaves She is a great story-teller, with a profound and re- participation in the Church’s means of alistic knowledge of the labyrinths of the human

Jonathan G. Reinhardt, “Sigrid Undset,” page 4 MARS HILL AUDIO Resource Essay mind—at all times and in all places.” The New York Times’ Bawer remarks that the Scandina- vian author and her characters are “rather like Norway itself, its soul—half Viking, half Chris- tian—torn between bold adventure and stark self- denial.” Undset’s work mirrors the beauty and poetic clarity of Old Norse, the metaphorical consciousness of the Catholic liturgy, and is dominated by the fiercely, reservedly charitable conviction she sums up in the last sentences of her retelling of the Arthurian legends Fortællin- ger om Kong Arthur og Ridderne av det Runde Bord of 1915, “For mores and manners are al- ways changing as time passes, and people’s be- liefs change and the way they think about many things. But people’s hearts do not change; they remain the same through all the days, forever.”

Jonathan G. Reinhardt is a senior at Harding University and worked as an editorial intern for MARS HILL AUDIO in the summer of 2003, during which time he composed this essay.

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