T
he Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset is less familiar to today’s
readers than she should be. She is best known for her multi-volume
historical epics set in the Middle Ages, especially the trilogy
Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22) about a woman’s life in fourteenth-century
Norway, which won Undset the 1928 Nobel Prize and remains the
basis of her literary reputation.1
Both her historical fiction and her
other work, which includes fiction, poetry, and essays, are known for
scrupulous historical accuracy, sensuous descriptions of
nature, penetrating psychology, and intellectual rigor.
Undset was a remarkable writer and a complicated woman. To her
contemporaries, her interest in the Middle Ages, her mid-life conversion
to Catholicism, and her skepticism of popular Darwinism and
social engineering gave her a reputation as an arch-conservative. But
she was also a fierce opponent of fascism, a wartime exile, and an acSigrid
Undset: Modern by Surprise
Sherrill Harbison
The Five Colleges, Amherst, MA
L&B 24:1,2 2004
1
Besides Kristin Lavransdatter Undset’s historical fiction includes the early novel
Gunnar’s Daughter (1909), set in Viking times, the tetralogy about Olav Audunssøn,
published in English as The Master of Hestviken (1924–27), set in the thirteenth
century, and Madame Dorthea (1939), set in the eight-eenth century.
tivist for the Norwegian Resistance, which mollified her critics and
made her a national hero. Today, more than half a century after her
death, her compatriots are alternately awed and aggravated by her
blunt, dogmatic opinions, her fearless and formidable intelligence,
her passion, and her generosity.2
Undset’s literary career spans the first four decades of the twentieth
century, which coincides with High Modernism in the United States
and much of Europe. For historical reasons, however, the movement
had very little impact in Norway until after the Second World War,3
and while Undset’s relation to Modernism is important, it fits a national
rather than a continental pattern. International Modernists
widely abandoned nineteenth-century realism for more formal experimentation,
but several factors contributed to the continued appeal of
realism in Norway, where the generation of writers active between 1900
and 1940 became known as Neo-Realists. First, Norway’s own national
tradition was grounded in the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas, the
2
In her 1937 history of the Norwegian feminist movement, Anna Caspari
Agerholt listed Undset’s many offenses against feminists and then sputtered,
“despite all this she is such a great writer that she sometimes shoots her theories
to hell” (267). In 1989 Gidske Anderson wrote a biography of Undset to
satisfy a lifelong fascination with the novelist, yet while describing Undset’s
views she also lashed out at them. “She offends me, she pains me, she infuriates
me,” Anderson complains, yet “her tender and often painful knowledge
of both the petty and splendid sides of men and women is so comprehensive
that it is worth reflecting on much of what she says” (237).
3
Two notable exceptions are the Symbolist/Expressionist painter Edvard
Munch and the novelist Knut Hamsun, who are the Norwegian artists from
this period best known abroad. The delay in Modernism’s impact on Norway
had two main causes. First, Norway was still preoccupied with gaining political
independence and shaping its own national identity. Not until 1907
(when Undset was 24) was the country emancipated from four hundred years
of foreign rule, only to lose its freedom again a generation later to the Nazi
occupation. Second, Norway did not participate in the Great War. It was undergoing
rapid economic growth and had no war destruction to repair, and
its artists and intellectuals—unlike continental war veterans eager to jettison
the burdens of the past—were busy recovering and celebrating a history they
most important body of work in Scandinavia’s literary heritage, which
are characterized by a stark, laconic realism very different from that of
the overfurnished Victorian novel. In addition, Nietzsche was very
early an important figure in Scandinavian thought due largely to his
Danish champion Georg Brandes, and Nietzsche’s own argument that
for the “superior man” realism was the only honest, objective approach
to the meaninglessness of existence had an impact on many Norwegian
writers (Oftestad 29). Women writers, however, often reacted against
Nietzschean elitism and subjective angst. For them, Neo-Realism was a
choice to focus not on the arcane issues favored by the aesthetes but on
the moral and psychological conflicts of ordinary people (Bliksrud
“Nyrealismen” 79–80).4
Con-tradictory as these positions were, both
took realism to be an ethical imperative.
Despite such national differences, the issues that led continental
artists to Modernism—the loss of a coherent metaphysics after Dar-win,
the fragmentation and alienation of the self in industrial society, disillusionment
with nationalism, war, materialism, and Positivism—were also
central to Norwegian artists’ thinking and writing. In the early twentieth
century both science and politics were heavily imbued with the
Darwinist view of an amoral universe in which humankind had no
privileged place. Victorians struggling with this revolutionary notion
sought to discover or reconstruct alternative “natural” hierarchies that
could restore their sense of dignity and control, the most popular of
which was the superiority of “virtue.”
The 1890s, when Undset came of age, was the heyday of two cultural
movements deeply engaged in a quite different approach—Symbolism
and its death throes known as Decadence. Nietzsche’s ex- aggeratedly individualistic,
anti-social ideal added important philosophical weight to
the Symbolist program, already outlined by Baudelaire in reaction to
the commercialism, conformity, and cloying moralism of Victorian
public sentiment. In order to transcend “bourgeois values,” Baudelaire
insisted that Symbolist art must have absolutely no moral usefulness.
The only true “morality” lay in total withdrawal from commodity
4
In English- and German-speaking countries, New Humanism was a philo-
culture, a retreat to the “poet’s ivory tower” where pure aesthetics
could liberate the sensitive soul from a world contaminated by business
concerns. Since the bourgeoisie favored representational art, Symbolists
would shun “slavish imitation” for strangeness and
inaccessibility, further ensuring the incompatibility of an artistic vocation
with social obligation. The formulation of this attitude inaugurated
a widely resonant quarrel with mimesis and is often taken to be
a pivotal moment in the inception of Modern-ism (Nicholls 14–15).
Intellectual, temperamental, and biographical factors made the
convergence of these attitudes with the teenaged Undset’s developing
artistic sensibility a particularly potent one. While she shared some of
these precepts, she vehemently rejected others: she never abandoned
representational art for strangeness and inacessibility, and she disagreed
completely with the mandate that artists should disengage
themselves from the world.
Undset’s three major concerns, both in her life and her work, were
the troubled relation between science and politics in the early twentieth
century, her convictions about the individual’s responsibility to
others and to the social body, and her understanding of eroticism.
These interests developed early and simultaneously and for her were
inextricably intertwined. Together, they not only governed her fictional
characters’ views and choices, but they also shaped her own qualified
response to the Modernist movement, drew her to the Catholic
Church, and determined her reaction to fascism.
I. SCIENCE AND POLITICS
Born in 1882 when Ibsen was at the height of his career, Undset
was reared in the nationalistic, liberal, agnostic atmosphere of Norway’s
capital city. Her parents were intellectual, artistic, and unconventional.
From an early age she was closely attached to her
archeologist father, following his work both in the field and at the National
Museum. After a few years of homeschooling, she and her two
younger sisters were sent to a progressive coeducational school. She
hated it. She felt that everything she had learned at home—scrupulous
scientific method and skepticism of received truths—was betrayed by
teachers whose pedagogy included only textbook answers and liberal
dogma. She clung to the intellectual principles of her parents, and her
home life, rich with storytelling, art, botanical excursions, and uncensored
reading, was happy until her father’s health began a long, slow
decline.5
By her tenth year he was seriously incapacitated, and she
spent many hours reading to him, both from his professional journals
(in several languages) and her beloved nature magazines. She also read
from his favorite sagas in Old Norse. Though she did not fully understand
the language, her lifelong fascination with Norway’s medieval
history attests that she absorbed more than she knew.
When Undset was eleven, her life radically changed: her father died,
and the family was thrust into poverty. She became deeply depressed
and throughout her teens remained solitary, cynical, and hypercritical.
When the headmistress offered to fund her schooling through to university
matriculation, she declined: all she could imagine from a university
degree was a career as teacher, and she hated everything she had
seen of teachers (Kunitz and Haycraft 1432). She had wanted to be an
artist or a botanist. Instead, at sixteen she took a year at commercial
college and for the next ten years worked as a secretary at an electrical
firm, supporting her mother and sisters.
At this time she also answered an ad for a Swedish pen pal, and
her enthusiastic correspondence with Dea Hedberg, an aspiring
writer her own age, provides detailed information about her reading,
artistic tastes and ambitions, and writing projects over the next
decade. Here she reveals a mental state that very closely resembles the
Symbolist temperament: narcissistic, socially estranged, despondent,
even suicidal. She swooned over dreamy Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry
and wrote her own poems about nature, loneliness, and the hypnotic
effects of staring into the calyx of a rose (Kjaere 30).6
She also
gazed at herself in the mirror. Once while rowing a boat, she nearly
5
Ingvald Undset had contracted malaria in Italy before his marriage. He also
suffered from a degenerative disease affecting the nervous system, which has
followed Narcissus over the edge, but two ideals stopped her: an
epiphanic revelation of the beauty of nature,7
and her sense of personal
responsibility. As she explained to Dea, suicide would have been
a “sin against mama” (Kjaere 33).
It is striking how much the obsessive introspection, social snobbery,
and relentless idealism of the Symbolists resemble typical adolescent rebellion
and angst. Undset’s own youthful unhappiness, rooted in
trauma and loss, was extreme more in degree than in content. Her upbringing
and circumstances had led her, like the Symbolists, to disdain
conformity and bourgeois materialism, but she differed from them in an
essential respect: her social isolation made her excruciatingly lonely, and
she craved personal relationships and intimacy. The histrionic narcissism
of the art crowd repelled her chiefly because she saw those same
tendencies in herself and feared they made her unlovable.
Nonetheless, she realized she was an artist in spite of herself. In
1900 she confessed to Dea,
You see, the misfortune is that I have an artistic nature. . . . First
of all this is absolutely not an excuse, it is not a matter of vanity,
but it is a bitter, sorrowful truth, which I have just dared to admit
to myself. There’s nothing I detest more than artists . . . [and] the
artistic temperament’s “introspective” characteristics of egoism,
laziness—lack of pleasure, affection for, or interest in others—and
such a runaway fantasy that they dream their time away. And that,
exactly that, is my besetting sin, to which I give myself up more
and more. (Kjaere 29)8
If this were the sorry state of affairs, however, she pledged that as an
artist she would remain responsible to the outside world. In another letter
to Dea, written in 1902, she presented her new credo:
I will!
6
Undset’s single volume of poetry is Ungdom (Youth), published in 1910.
7
Compare her to the Symbolist poet Mallarmé, who wrote in 1866, “After I
had found Nothingness, I found Beauty” (qtd. in Nicholls 34).
8
All translations from the Norwegian are my own unless otherwise indicated.
I will stand tall, I will not buckle under. I will not kill myself—or
my abilities either. If I have them, I will find them and use them.
I will be what I can be. If I can’t become what I want, I will become
what I can. And if it goes wrong, the fault and punishment
are my own. And not God’s, the devil’s, life’s, death’s, my father’s,
my mother’s, grandparents’, great-grandparents’, or anyone
else’s, living or dead. And human beings ought to treat others as
they would like to be treated themselves. But we ought to be accountable
to ourselves for everything we do, both to ourselves and
to everyone who cares for us. Furthermore, two things are certain:
I live, and I shall die. And it is not good to live without happiness.
Amen. (Kjaere 77–78)
In the same letter she also introduced a concept that would become
central to her philosophy: “We should cultivate ourselves as works of art,”
she wrote, “pure and honorable as though created for eternity. . . . My
life is something I want someday to lay in death’s hands, perfect or imperfect.
. . . I love and honor both life and death so highly that I would
be bitterly sorry if I had nothing to offer death” (Kjaere 76 emphasis
added). Undset thus shared many fin-de-siècle attitudes but with this difference:
her morbid state of mind was not a product of an artistic philosophy.
Rather, her artistic philosophy was an effort to restore health,
to rescue herself from her morbid state of mind.
By insisting that an artist’s career should be compatible with social
obligation, Undset had much in common with the Romantics who had
invented the idea of the alienated artist, but who were often political reformers
at the same time. The Symbolists, in contrast, insisted on an inward
focus, a complete distrust of the kind of rhetorical appeals to a
shared human nature exemplified by, say, Géricault or Victor Hugo.
The Symbolists’ conviction that “individuality” must be won through
the assertion of a superior “difference” ultimately dehumanized their
art, even to the point of cruelty and violence—not least to the self. As
Peter Nicholls observes, when Decadents aligned truth and morality
with artifice, they replaced natural life with fictitious life, and in such
claustrophobic, aestheticized space the artist had little to do but present
a mirror to his own corrupt, “unnatural” self (53–54). Such self-ab-
sorption and cynicism—the kind of solipsistic nightmare perfected by
Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—also foreclosed love,
which the Romantics had glorified.
Undset tackled this particular problem in her first published novel,
Fru Marta Oulie (1907), set in contemporary times. Marta is a compulsively
unfaithful married woman who mistakes her narcissism for love:
“Love, Love!” she gushes to her diary, “I felt day after day how my love
made me beautiful and healthy and glowing . . . made me vivacious
and bold and infinitely superior” (20). Later, when her husband lies
ill in a sanatorium, Marta realizes that her self-absorption has
amounted to cruelty, that she has been incapable of loving: “I thought
of nothing else in the world but my own self,” she discovers; even her
secret lover “was of no more concern to me than the mirror on my
dressing table” (52).
It was this fin-de-siècle narcissism—this arrested stage of emotional development—that
most concerned Undset about artists, and she saw it
as a crucial factor in the unhealthy connection between erotics and
politics as well. In the mid-nineteenth century Europe had experienced
a huge surge in population growth, followed by an alarming
drop in the birth rate by century’s end. This crisis was widely blamed
on the failure of Decadence to police traditional gender roles. “Feminized”
aesthetes and dandies, the argument went, preferred to lounge
about in salons and boudoirs rather than to propagate, while the
emasculating “New Woman” joined the work force instead of remaining
at home tending a brood of children. Pessimistic Europeans, who
had presumed themselves at the top of the evolutionary ladder, now
found themselves fretting about “race suicide” and a world overrun by
“inferior” peoples.
Another suspect in the malaise was religion, which evolutionists
viewed as the “failed science” of genetically flawed races (Stocking
309). Charcot, Freud, and others studied religious ascetic practices
and mysticism as regressive pathological symptoms, a perversion of the
healthy erotic instincts needed to keep the population strong. Nietzsche
had declared that Europe’s degeneration was due to the irrational
ideas of Christ, who had taught that the weak and sickly should
be defended and protected (Genealogy 752). Both science and reason
showed, Nietzsche argued, that ailing specimens ought to perish, taking
their flawed genes with them, but the church had prevailed against
nature, attempting to subdue “everything autonomous, manly, conquering,
and imperious,” instincts he contended were “natural to the
highest and most successful type of ‘man’” (Beyond 449). His answer to
the crisis of confidence, of course, was the Übermensch—the fully “free,”
fully rational spirit who would prepare and command the coming master
race.
An outspoken Norwegian Nietzscheite was novelist Knut Hamsun, a
generation older than Undset and later her bête noir. In 1908 Hamsun
publicly advocated neglect of the elderly as state policy. Since old people
were reactionary and useless to society, he argued, public resources
should be directed instead toward energetic, enterprising youth.9
This
was not an unusual idea: some popularizers of science were already
suggesting that evolution should no longer be left to chance; careful
breeding could give humanity more control over the direction of the
species in the future. For prototypes of the revitalized race, theorists
looked to civilizations “uncorrupted” by Christianity, and to some,
the virile energy of Scandinavia’s rugged pagan past seemed especially
attractive, the Viking achievement a sign of the “true greatness” of the
Nordic race.
Undset believed that race-mythology was the most offensive and dangerous
element of this ancestor-worship. Glorifying the Vikings obscured
the fact that they had not sailed abroad as cultural ambassadors
but as destructive and murderous marauders. The arrival of Christian
culture in the North had not meant erasure of a “superior primitive
soul,” as some nationalists were claiming; instead, it had meliorated
Viking brutality and disregard for human life. She was therefore deeply
concerned to see in her own day a growing admiration for brute
strength, youth, and “life-force,” in all of which she saw worrisome parallels
to the Viking ethic of the right of the stronger.
9
Hamsun’s lecture, “Ærer de unge” (Honor the Young), was published in
Furthermore, in the parallel with Viking attitudes Undset found a
key to understanding the issues of her own era. From her childhood
reading of thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas she recognized that both
the Viking age and her own century were times of a seismic shift in life
philosophies between pagan and Christian world views—but in reverse
directions. When the old Norse world became Europe’s last pagan outpost
to join the Christian community, the mandate of personal honor
based on physical force gradually ceded to its opposite, that is, the
ideals of mildness, humility, and forgiveness. Be-cause the ensuing cultural
disruption was profound, the new ideas took centuries to fully
penetrate the old value system. In her own day Undset observed that
Europe was reverting to a “modern paganism”: since Darwin, the old
pagan idea of “survival of the fittest” had returned to favor, and once
again the cultural disruption was profound. She experienced a sort of
cultural déja vu. “I think . . . the reason I understand our own time so
well,” she wrote to her friend Nini Roll Anker in 1915, “is because
ever since I was a child I have had some kind of living memories from
an earlier age to compare with it” (qtd. in Winsnes 2).
In her earliest historical novel, Gunnar’s Daughter, Undset made her
first artistic statement about the disturbing link she saw between ancient
and modern paganisms. Set in Norway and Iceland in the early
eleventh century, the transition point between the Viking period and
the Christian Middle Ages, the novel reveals how superficial is the
early converts’ understanding of the new religion, and how the heroine’s
relentless determination to repay force with force destroys all
hope of love, harmony, and peace of mind. In making Vigdis Gunnarsdatter
strong, capable, and intelligent, Undset plainly reveals the waste
of human potential dedicated to such fruitless ends. This was not, she
wants readers to understand, a culture it would be wise to emulate,
and applying scientific knowledge to achieve such a goal was more than
folly—it was a threat to hard-won human rights and liberties.
II. INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
In her youthful credo to Dea Hedberg, Undset had pledged to remain
responsible to others, even if she “had” to be an artist, but how
did she come by this imperative? From age seventeen to twenty-seven,
she worked a full day at her office job, returning home to her mother
and sisters and staying up most of the night to read and write. She described
to Dea the stories she was working on, lamented her loneliness,
and dreamed about finding love. Certainly, gender issues mandating
female caring, nurturing, and obedience were a factor in her acceptance
of adult responsibility for her family at such an early age, thwarting
her own ambitions and dreams, and then regarding her cynicism
and resentment as a personal fault. But she also came to see taking responsibility
for others as an answer to the narcissism of Decadence, an
externalizing reaction to the suffocating inwardness of that movement.
Women and men alike needed to stop navel-gazing, she believed, and
instead reach out to care for one another as citizens, neighbors, parents,
lovers, because narcissism was not just her personal problem but
a widespread cultural one.
At the personal level, responsibility became an even more serious
issue when Undset discovered for herself how eroticism could be at perilous
odds with morality. Just after the publication of Gunnar’s Daughter,
Undset received an artist’s stipend from the government and was at last
able to quit her office job: “Finally my own master,” she wrote Dea
(Kjaere 157). She escaped to Rome and for the first time in her life enjoyed
her youth, living among bohemian artists. She also embarked on a
love affair with a Norwegian painter, Anders Castus Svarstad—a married
man and father of three, thirteen years her senior. They returned to
Christiania after a year and for two more years continued their “clandestine”
affair while he waited for a divorce.
During this interval she wrote Jenny (1911), the novel that made her
reputation, a sordid story about a young artist living in Rome who is
successful as a painter but longs only for love. While Jenny’s career is
essential to her, it does not solve the problem of loneliness. She idealizes
love as pure and sacred but eventually wearies of waiting for the
“true bridegroom” and has affairs with two men whom she does not
love—a feckless young man and his even more feckless father. The
novel scandalized readers on both sides of the political spectrum—conservatives
by its sexual immorality and feminists by its implication that
a woman needed a man to be fulfilled. Undset fully enjoyed the scandal,
acknowledging that she had expected nothing else (Winsnes 57).
In 1912 Svarstad’s divorce was finalized at last, and the couple again
went south to be married, returning to Rome to the same apartment
where they had first met and awaiting the birth of Anders junior. But
things did not go well: the child was ill, and doctors advised that he
could not survive the heat of a Roman summer. So after less than a
year of marriage Undset returned to Norway alone with her ailing infant.
She took a house some miles south of Christiania and nursed the
baby back to health. When her husband joined her months later, it became
clear that the couple had very different ideas about family life.
Over the rest of the decade they became increasingly alienated from
each other, as Svarstad spent more and more time in his studio in the
city, and Undset took on full responsibility for the household. A further
complication occurred in 1915 when their daughter was born
both mentally disabled and epileptic. In addition, Undset took in
Svarstad’s three older children—including a seven-year-old, developmentally-delayed
son—after their mother had sent them to an orphanage
when she no longer could support them. Besides meeting the five
children’s usual and unusual needs, Undset did all the gardening, canning,
and sewing herself and stayed up all night to write.
If taking another woman’s husband had not made Undset feel
guilty enough, appropriating her predecessor’s children certainly compounded
her misgivings. Her fiction frequently includes ugly encounters
between rival lovers, which may have been drawn from her own
experience. Perhaps in compensation, she made demands of herself on
behalf of the family that seemed extreme and worrisome to her friends.
Nini Roll Anker notes in her memoir of Undset that her friend’s sheer
stamina and calm conviction were impressive—she
was still publishing a book a year—but twice in this period she was
obliged to spend time in a sanatorium to recover from exhaustion
(36–41). Finally her personal and familial demands became too much,
and in 1919, while pregnant with her third child, Undset left Svarstad
in Oslo and moved with her own children to Lillehammer, her home
for the rest of her life. Svarstad and his children made regular visits
there, but the couple never lived together again; they dissolved their
marriage in 1924.
Undset’s interest in Roman Catholicism, which developed during
this same decade, was also puzzling to her friends, as it has been to
many critics. Why, after all, would a liberated female artist from an agnostic
academic family begin to admire one of the most hierarchical
and patriarchal of institutions? Norway was a Lutheran country and
had for centuries been petrified of papism. Even after 1814, when
Catholics were again allowed to worship in Norway, they were subject
to discrimination; hence before Undset went to Rome in 1909, she
had had no personal contact with Catholicism.
Part of the answer lies in Undset’s growing dissatisfaction with Protestant
teachings about predestination and salvation by grace alone. She
discovered that her own view—that people are responsible for their own
fate—was more consistent with Catholic doctrine concerning penance
and good works. Her conversion was not a sudden epiphanic experience,
as some have supposed, but an intellectual and gradual acceptance,
as much a surprise to herself as to everyone else. Anker recalled
having a “first inkling” of the direction Undset’s spiritual life would take
in 1915, after hearing her friend’s comments on a spate of recent books
discussing Christianity. Undset wrote to Anker that before this time she
had had neither a particular interest in nor antipathy to Christianity
since she had hardly known what it was:
I perceived the church as a very picturesque ruin somewhere in
the back of the landscape. Recently I’ve been looking a little more
closely at it. . . . The Church of Rome at least has form—it doesn’t
offend the intelligence as the various Protestant sects do. Once
poured out of the form of the Catholic Church, the whole of
Christianity strikes me as a failed, burst omelet. (qtd. in Anker
33–34)
Possibly, Undset’s active quest for God began with the near loss of her
infant son in Rome in the winter of 1913, when she read an account of
Robert Scott’s ill-fated polar expedition and was inspired
to think deeply about life, death, and the values that one generation
passes on to the next. She incorporated those reflections in a lecture
called “The Fourth Commandment” at the university in Trondheim in
1914, designed as an open reply to Hamsun’s earlier lecture from the
same podium advocating a national youth-cult.10
Hamsun had denied
that youth bore any responsibility to reactionary old people, but Undset
turned this idea upside down: it was adults who needed to be responsible
to youth, not the other way around.
After conceding Hamsun’s Nietzschean point that the goal of humanity
was to become more godlike, Undset denied that this could be
accomplished by any single person, or that prospects would be improved
by the kind of policies Hamsun advocated. Human perfection,
she argued, was not a matter of physical strength, beauty, or even intelligence.
In explicit rebuttal of the goal of a “superman” who would be
“beyond good and evil,” she avowed that knowledge of good and evil
was the highest human faculty, and that to abandon it would be to return
to barbarism. There was no evolutionary “progress” inherent in nature’s
processes, she explained; on the contrary, progress often required
struggling against one’s most “natural” instincts and desires, instead
making moral choices for the collective good of the species. “All moral
ideas are a result of intellectual labor, of observation and experience,”
she observed: “Nature is amoral, and so are natural human drives;
morality awakens when a person consciously takes a position with regard
to natural urges” (Kvinnesynspunkt 33).
What youth most needed from adults, she argued further, was not
more indulgence but good role models, examples for living like Scott’s
altruism. Directly contradicting Nietzsche, she declared that youth
needed to relearn many other old virtues as well, such as justice, honesty,
compassion, chastity, temperance, and courage, virtues she admitted
had become “half-laughable” to her own generation but which
were everywhere needed in the struggle against destructive human
10
“The Fourth Commandment” was eventually included in Undset’s collec-
urges (34).11
Adults who lived by these virtues would win the respect of
young people, who instinctively hate cruelty and injustice and are always
alert to hypocrisy. The value of old people, therefore, was the wisdom
and beauty of a life well lived, and for adults to earn such respect
was their best possible gift to youth.
During the years of the Great War Undset read deeply and methodically
in medieval literature, philosophy, and theology. In 1919
she issued a collection of five essays written between 1912 and 1919, titled
A Woman’s Point of View (Et kvinnesynspunkt). By this time she had
become a highly respected literary figure, but her political views were
becoming increasingly provocative. Her growing interest in historical
Christianity underscored her stiff resistance to contemporary Positivist
and political ideas of human progress, and she was sharply criticized
for her conservatism. She accepted the charges with studied
irony, addressing her concluding essay, “Post-script,” to the “likeminded
reactionaries” who had suggested the collection (69).
The war had confirmed Undset’s doubts that human beings could
ever create a perfect society, because utopian schemes chose to ignore
human nature “as it really is” (qtd. in Kunitz and Haycraft 1433).
Good could never be enough because human instincts are always conflicted.
Time after time, the fully human instinct toward brotherhood
and solidarity with others had been followed by a reaction—the equally
human instinct to assert oneself at other people’s expense. Having
been fostered in history and prehistory, she later explained that she
did “not much believe in progress” (qtd. in Kunitz and Haycraft
1433).
For her, the most burning contemporary issue was whether the evolution
of the species had been masterminded by an all-powerful God
or could be controlled by human will (Kvinnesynspunkt 69), a question
she found critical not only for the fate of the species but also for the way
11
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche had written, “we believe that
severity, violence, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism,
tempter’s art and devilry of every kind, that everything wicked terrible, tyrannical,
predatory and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the
human species as its opposite” (429).
individuals lived their lives. Determinists held that environmental factors
robbed people of meaningful moral choices, which to Undset seemed
like either a reincarnation of the pagan idea of inescapable fate or a secular
version of Calvinist predestination. She was now prepared to argue
that the best ideological hope for preserving democracy, personal freedoms,
and human dignity came from “original” Christianity as espoused
by the Roman Church. The capacity for human depravity and evil was
bottomless, she acknowledged, but the Church believed that human beings
also possess a bottomless capacity for goodness and wisdom on
which they can act—if they choose. The Church’s own history, replete
with lasciviousness and corruption and also with the lives of the saints,
was proof of this. Thus, whether evolution were to direct people to
heaven or to hell, she wrote, the destination they aimed at made a crucial
difference (88).
Finally, Cassandra-like, Undset offered the first of many warnings
against totalitarianism. Human nature craved inspired leadership, she argued,
and failure to accept the objective existence of an all-perfect God
led to adulation of strong men posing as gods. The world would always
be faced with impostors, she concluded, but whether one believed that
God created man or man invented God, it was imperative to keep the
distinction between them clear, and “to remember these ancient words:
Soli Deo Gloria” (glory only to God) (107).
III. EROTICISM
Undset’s concerns about the fate of eroticism in the twentieth century
were drawn both from her experience and observations during her
own white-collar years and from the dramatic drop in Europe’s birth
rate at the end of the nineteenth century. She quickly took strong issue
with the popular misogynistic explanation for the declining birth rate:
she believed working women, far from causing the crisis, were its greatest
casualties. Industrialism and rural poverty had forced thousands of
girls and women to leave home and earn their living among strangers,
where their labor—and their innocence—were often exploited. Marriage
might well have been their original goal, but their chances were lim-
ited; in Christiania in 1900, for
example, women outnumbered men by seven to five (Johansen
21–26).
Furthermore, Undset felt that the inhuman severing of production
from consumption had left all society suffering from a pathological disconnectedness
that had catastrophic results for relations between the
sexes. “When people argue that erotica has too much place in today’s
literature,” she wrote in 1914, “it is a colossal misunderstanding. It has a
disquietingly small place” (Kvinnesynspunkt 35). Rather, the basic mood
was a profound anxiety about loneliness, a deep disappointment that
sexual relations had no power to heal it, and a growing doubt that anything
could.
The fact that lyric poetry was the weakest literary genre in her generation
was a telling sign. Rapture with the beloved, which she characterized
as a “primal and uninhibited bursting forth of joy,” found its
natural expression not only in procreation but also in lyric poetry and
song (36). By now people had become so estranged that they could not
connect emotionally with one another, or couples were so disoriented
and impoverished that they had lost confidence in their ability to raise
families. This erosion of erotic appetite was a tragedy of major proportions,
Undset believed, because eros was an expression not only of sexual
desire but also of one’s relatedness to others and the whole of
nature. The chief victims of this situation seemed to be women like
herself who had robust erotic appetites and high ideals about love.
Undset found a powerful example of the kind of rooted erotic feeling
that had been cast adrift in modern times in the intense, idealized
form of sexual passion of the Middle Ages known as courtly love. Troubadours
had elevated erotic passion to a divine mystery, a high spiritual
experience on a physical plane. Precisely because it was a mystery, Undset
maintained, human eroticism should be kept far away from scientific
dissection and government interference (58–59). Medieval poets
had always known what modern science could never teach: that taboos
and privacy enhanced passion, while public scrutiny killed it.
Many of Undset’s “reactionary” positions on marriage should be understood
in this medieval frame of reference. The prevailing opinion
among her contemporaries was that the best solution to Europe’s sagging
libido would be socio-political measures such as public health programs
and state-run childcare centers. In 1918 a Norwegian feminist,
Katti Anker Møller, published a tract called “Birth-Politics for
Women” (“Kvinnenes fødselspolitikk”), proposing that the state, in its
own interest, should pay mothers a fee per child (i.e., per future
worker) produced. For this Undset had nothing but contempt: children
were not “products,” she scorned in print, and motherhood was
not a “profession.” Motherhood was life; “birth” and “politics” did not
belong in the same sentence (Kvinnesynspunkt 60).
Undset also felt that efforts to relax restrictions around sexual life—
forgoing marriage altogether or making divorce easier, for example—not
only threatened families and destabilized society but were also counterproductive
for eroticism. On this subject Protestant churches provided
no help; they had reverted to the old pagan idea of marriage as a
merely human contract, binding partners only to each other and dissoluble
at will. This invited partners to challenge one another for default
based solely on their sense of personal satisfaction; it implied no
higher obligation either to God or society. The chief victims of such
lack of commitment, Undset repeatedly pointed out, were innocent
children, upon whose stability and good will the future of society
rested.
Finally—and startlingly, to secular ears—Undset concluded that the
best feature of Christian morality was the concept of sin. Using a parallel
with taste, she commented that anyone who could not taste the
difference between absinthe and fresh milk profited little from drinking
either one. When the concept of sin was diluted, she wrote, people
could no longer distinguish between “the intense sweetness of
forbidden love and the healthy, thirst-quenching goodness of sanctioned
love” (82).
Interestingly, her position on sin did not make Undset more puritanical
than the Protestants against whose rigidity on sexual mores many of
her generation were rebelling. She acknowledged that most people at
some time face situations in which they will choose to break society’s
rules, and erotic passion could be one such circumstance. But this did
not mean, as some of her contemporaries argued, that such rules should
be abolished in favor of “free love.” Rules were established to protect innocent
people and as such were evidence of advanced civilization. It did
mean, however, that people must be prepared to pay a price for their
transgressions—and that price may be high.
After issuing A Woman’s Point of View, Undset labored for three
years in her ancient timber house in Lillehammer, bodying forth the
world of fourteenth-century Norway in her trilogy Kristin Lavrans-datter
in which she portrayed the medieval society that had adopted and accommodated
itself—though not without vigorous struggle—to the preReformation
model of Christianity that Undset admired. It is the
story of a woman’s life from childhood to death, and especially it is
the story of a marriage, one that illustrated the continuing strains between
old Norse pagan beliefs, which survived in folklore and custom,
and the competing teachings of the Church.
Every feature of Kristin’s marriage—its beginning in reckless passion,
its reliance on canon law to justify defiance of parental wishes, its fecundity
and preoccupation with maternity, its joys, its sorrows, and its
bitter strife—embodies the view of the institution which Undset had
discovered in medieval theology and which she was convinced was the
best antidote to the low erotic temperature of her own time (Kvinnesynspunkt
81–82). Indeed, Kristin Lavransdatter resonates more than any of
Undset’s other novels with the heightened physical and emotional experiences
of women in love. Kristin, her mother Ragnhild, the “witch”
Lady Aashild, and Kristin’s rival Eline all sacrifice their moral integrity
for carnal joys, and nowhere does Undset suggest that passion was not
worth claiming, even at such a high price. As Lady Aashild, who had
lost her position at the royal court for her illicit escapade with Herr
Bjørn, explains to the young Kristin, “the grandest days are costly indeed,”
but she cannot be so naive as to complain that she is left only
with “sour, watered-down milk” after she has “drunk up all [her] ale
and wine” (I. 49).
It is possible to see all of Undset’s important concerns and convictions
about her era—the misuse of science in politics, the role of personal
responsibility, the revolt against morality—merging for her in the
sexual crisis. One Modernist writer she admired was D. H. Lawrence,
who she felt recognized the real dimensions of the contemporary
problem. In a 1935 essay she described him as a writer who “symbolize[d]
his civilization at the moment when it has reached a crisis” (“D.
H.” 48). “The widespread fear of the results of the mechanization of
existence—a slow death from loss of heat—finds voice with Lawrence,”
she wrote, although his “perpetual harping on the sexual act, which to
his sensitive soul meant communion, holy matrimony, was quite naturally
misunderstood by his fellow countrymen.” Unfortunately, she
observed, the
new phallus-cult he sought to found no more brings peace and
warmth in reality than it does to the eternally restless persons in
his novels. But the idea that human blood is such a mystical
source of power and warmth, the saving fluid, occurs naturally to
men who are fighting against the fear of an ice age. (51–52)
Like many Modernists, Lawrence deeply admired Freud. Undset
was suspicious of the Viennese doctor, who first dismissed religion as
“unscientific” and then reclaimed the centerpiece of primitive religions,
phallus worship, for science. To her the shift made no sense: a
sophisticated religious sensibility was replaced by a primitive one, masquerading
as modern “liberation.” Asked once whether she thought
religion was simply a substitute for sex, she replied, “No, I believe the
opposite is true.”12
Undset’s own view of eroticism had less in common with Freudian
analytic ideas than with French philosophical tradition from medieval
troubadours to her contemporaries Denis de Rougement and Georges
Bataille.13
Over forty years after Undset’s A Woman’s Point
12
The story is anecdotal, but entirely typical. She puts the same idea into the
thoughts of her character Paul Selmer in her 1930 novel The Burning Bush
(166).
13
It is worth noting that French academic study of courtly love and medieval
romance first took root in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, when
French scholarship was trying to emancipate itself from German influences
(Hult 195–98). Undset’s own aversion to things German was rooted in her
family history and manifested itself early in her life.
of View Bataille published Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957), a
study that echoes her views to a startling degree. At first glance Undset
and Bataille seem unlikely companions—he a Nietzsche disciple, a
libertine, a Surrealist, whom she never mentioned and with whom
her path never crossed—yet like her, Bataille understood and emphasized
the religious dimension of eroticism and its essential component
of risk. (His well-known influence on Foucault and Baudrillard is
thought-provoking: could Undset be seen as a proto-postmodernist?)
Bataille maintained that eroticism is different from simple sexual
activity in being “a psychological quest” independent of the natural
goal of reproduction (11). Its purpose, he wrote, is essentially a spiritual
one, to taste “continuousness” with the universe, to be released
from a “discontinuous” existence as solitary individuals. Thus, he argued,
eroticism is “primarily a religious matter” rather than a biological
one (31). Furthermore, to understand either eroticism or religion
one “must have an equal and contradictory experience of both prohibitions
and transgressions.” As Undset had in 1914, he explained that
prohibitions or taboos exist precisely because of the irrational elements
in human nature, and the fact that they are regularly transgressed
does not mean that they are valueless; indeed, quite the opposite: only
in their transgression do they acquire meaning. A meaningful or “successful”
transgression includes both disobedience and respect; it “suspends
a taboo without suppressing it,” because “unless a taboo is
observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its
deepest significance” (37).
To use Bataille’s terminology in the medieval context from which
Undset drew, the “successful” transgression of the famous lovers Tristan
and Yseult is due to a magical device, a love potion, which renders them
innocent while guilty—allowing passion to triumph over loyalty without
denying the virtue of loyalty. Tristan and Yseult are remembered not because
their passion “won” over loyalty, but since passion and loyalty
were equally valued, their transgression brought about intensely conflicting
feelings. “The inner experience of eroticism,” Bataille explained,
“demands from the subject sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of
the taboo no less great than the desire which leads him to infringe it.
This is the religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror,
intense pleasure and anguish” (38–39). These certainly are the feel-
ings that afflict Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, both in her battle of
wills with her father over her choice of Erlend Nikulausson as suitor
and husband and in her pilgrimage to St. Olaf’s shrine at Nidaros,
where she hopes to purge her terror of God’s punishment for the child
she has conceived in sin.
Undset was acutely conscious of the difference between Kristin’s sin
with Erlend and the kind of casual adultery being committed by her
contemporaries. In 1917 her modern heroine Harriet Waage, comparing
her own sad destiny to that of Tristan and Yseult, laments that
“they sinned from ecstasy; we sin from misery and boredom” (Splinten
213). Bataille, too, argued that secular attempts to “liberate” eroticism
from its religious context threatened its survival altogether. Without
taboos “eroticism was no longer a sin, and since [people] could no
longer be certain of doing wrong, eroticism was fast disappearing. In
an entirely profane world nothing would be left but the animal mechanism”
(128).
Animal mechanism and, Undset would add, a despairing auto-eroticism,
the spiritual void of narcissistic fixation. Such moral ambivalence
and cultural narcissism was her era’s Zeitgeist, and from it she warned
against the dangers of demagoguery—false gods with bogus scripts for
socially or genetically engineered human perfection that promised mirror-gazing
as the ultimate fulfillment. In her own view, humanity
would always need the corrective of the divine: “I have seen how a
hunger and thirst of authority have made large nations accept any
ghoulish caricature of authority,” she wrote in 1940, a few weeks before
the German invasion of her country, “[b]ut I have learned why there
can never be any valid authority of men over men. The only Authority
to which mankind can submit without debauching itself is His whom
St. Paul calls Auctor Vitae—the Creator’s toward Creation” (qtd. in Kunitz
and Haycraft 1433–34).
IV. CONCLUSION
The cultural crisis that propelled Undset’s religious quest made her
vast corpus of writing on Christianity—her Catholic Propaganda (Katholsk
Propaganda), as she wryly titled one of her apologetics—the linchpin of
her political activism, and her activism was the mature flowering of her
lifelong concerns about the misuse of science in politics, the individual’s
responsibility to others, and the fate of eroticism in the modern world.
She lived to see her worst nightmares about the future of European civilization
come true. Her outspokenness against Hitler’s regime led to the
banning of her books and the confiscation of her royalties in Germany.
Warned to flee during the early hours of the invasion of Norway, she
spent the war years in exile in America. Her elder son was killed in the
Resistance; nieces, nephews, and friends suffered in concentration
camps; and her Lillehammer home was used as a brothel by vindictive
German officers. Meanwhile, she did her own “soldiering” on the lecture
circuit, where she repeatedly warned Americans to prepare for the
dangers facing them and the world.
Undset returned to Norway in 1945 exhausted, ill, and aged by
grief. She never wrote fiction again. For the next four years until she
died, she did all she could to help family, friends, and neighbors recover
their lives and fortunes, and for her wartime work she received
her country’s highest civilian honor, the St. Olaf’s Cross.
Forty-five years earlier, when she was twenty, Undset had written to
Dea, “We should cultivate ourselves as works of art. . . . I love and
honor both life and death so highly that I would be bitterly sorry if I
had nothing to offer death.” Death must have been moved by her of-
fering.
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