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Their Minneapolis Their Minneapolis Novels of Norwegian-American Life in Minneapolis By Kine Dahlen Soleng A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages University of Oslo In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Fall Term 2007 Acknowledgments I would like to thank everyone who has helped and supported me with my thesis, especially Siri for reading and giving me invaluable advise and support. Helle, Ellinor, Helga Marie, Selja, and Rune – thank you for coffee breaks and for cheering me on, I could not have done this without you. I am thankful for all the help I have got from Ken Luebbering, Dina Tolfsby, everyone at the NAHA Archives, and Minnesota Historical Society. Thanks to Micheal, Rebecca, and Caroline for letting me stay with you in St. Paul. Finally I wish to thank my wonderful parents and grandparents for their support. 1 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 3 1.1. The Novels ...................................................................................................................... 5 1.2. Literature vs. History....................................................................................................... 8 1.3. Literary trends and periods............................................................................................ 13 1.4. Structure ........................................................................................................................ 14 2. Their Minneapolis ................................................................................................................ 15 2.1. Minneapolis................................................................................................................... 15 2.2. The authors’ backgrounds ............................................................................................. 21 2.2.1. Kristofer Janson and Drude Krog Janson............................................................... 21 2.2.2. Johannes B. Wist.................................................................................................... 24 2.2.3. Ole E. Rølvaag ....................................................................................................... 25 2.3. The Protagonists’ Minneapolis...................................................................................... 27 2.4. Summary ....................................................................................................................... 38 3. Linguistic and social aspects of immigrant life in Minneapolis........................................... 40 3.1. Language and Names .................................................................................................... 40 3.2. Language, Work, Education, and Social Class ............................................................. 45 3.3. Church ........................................................................................................................... 53 3.4. Temperance ................................................................................................................... 61 3.5. Summary ....................................................................................................................... 64 4. Norwegian Americans.......................................................................................................... 66 4.1. Ethnic Identity ............................................................................................................... 66 4.2. The role of literature in the formation of a Norwegian-American identity................... 72 4.3. Reception....................................................................................................................... 76 4.4. The authors’ views on literature.................................................................................... 81 4.5. Summary ....................................................................................................................... 85 5. Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 87 Bibliography............................................................................................................................. 92 Archives Consulted .................................................................................................................. 98 2 1. Introduction My motivation for writing about Norwegian-American immigrant literature stems from a life- long interest in Norwegian-American history. My great grandfather was one of the over 800,000 Norwegians who emigrated to the United States. In the spring term of 2004, I attended a course at the University of Bergen called “the Immigrant Experience in Fiction”, and one of the set texts was Giants in the Earth by the Norwegian-American Ole. E. Rølvaag. In this course I wrote an essay on the Norwegian immigrants’ experiences on the prairie, and in order to get a different perspective, I chose to focus on the urban experience of Norwegians in this thesis. Norwegian emigration to the United States began in 1825 with 53 people on the sloop Restauration. These Norwegians were soon followed by others and by 1925 more than 800,000 had emigrated, the majority with economic and material motives. Many of the later immigrants were also inspired by “America letters” from friends and family, describing their success and the American conditions in their area of settlement. This is of course a stereotype and a simplified account of the “America letters,” not all Norwegian immigrants were successful, and many also returned to Norway. However, several of the “America letters”, tempted Norwegians who struggled to make a living in Norway, and functioned as incentives for some of those who chose to emigrate. The majority of Norwegian immigrants in America settled in rural communities and on the prairie, but some moved to the bigger cities. “The Dillingham Commision reported that in 1890, only 20.8% of Norwegians were residents of cities of 2,500 or more.”1 The immigrant experience for these Norwegian urban dwellers differed greatly from that of those on the prairie, and the urban immigrant experience for Norwegians is the main focus of this thesis. Minneapolis in Minnesota was one of the larger cities where Norwegian immigrants settled, and these immigrants formed a larger portion of the city’s population from the 1880s to the early 1960s than that of any other American metropolis in the same period. They were present in large numbers, moreover, when Minneapolis was a young frontier city which exploded in size to become one of the nation’s largest commercial-industrial centers. Because of this, as well as other reasons, the city arguably became the most important center for 1 L. DeAne Lagerquist. In America the Men Milk the Cows: Factors of Gender, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Americanization of Norwegian-American Women (Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing Inc, 1991), 41. 3 Norwegian Americans in the country and a central place for the development of a self- conscious Norwegian-American identity.2 Immigration experience is a subject which is of interest today, in particular as Norway welcomes new immigrants each year. Research done over the last ten to twenty years has focused on the Norwegian Americans’ history, while the immigrant literature has played a smaller part. The prairie experience of the Norwegians in America has been the material for many researchers and also the setting for many of the novels written by the Norwegian Americans, perhaps to some degree overshadowing the fact that Norwegian-American authors also wrote about the urban communities. This thesis examines four novels in order to investigate what light they might shed on the urban Norwegian-American immigrant community in Minneapolis in the period between 1880 and the early 1900s. The main emphasis is on how these authors have chosen to portray the Norwegian urban immigrant experience. The thesis discusses to what extent these novels can be considered mimetic, that is “an imitation, or reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the ‘truth’ and ‘adequacy’ of its representation to the matter that it represents, or should represent.”3 The hypothesis that these novels depict useful reflections of history will also be examined, comparing the information in the novels to different historical sources and material, such as contemporary newspapers and books, in order to investigate whether the authors have portrayed the experience “realistically.” I will also be examining the scholarly literature concerning the formation of a Norwegian-American identity in order to evaluate whether the Norwegian-American novels were as important in this process as some of the authors hoped and believed. The immigrants had different experiences due to location, numbers of Norwegians in an area, climate, and exposure to other immigrant groups and to “native” Americans. In order to reduce the number of variables that would occur if two or more cities were the object of study, only novels set in Minneapolis have been chosen. The stories in the four novels do not take place at the same time, thereby adding a time aspect which makes it possible to investigate whether there are any significant changes in the portrayal of the Norwegian- American urban immigrant
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