The enchanted novels of Sigrid Undset and Marly Youmans

About a year ago I read The Wreath (1920), the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s 14th century Norwegian domestic epic Kristin Lavransdatter.  Last month, I read The Wife (1921).  Maybe in a year I will read The Cross (1922) and finish up.

Our headstrong heroine Kristin married the man she loved at the end of the first novel.  For much of this novel, she manages her household, raises her children, and fights with her husband.  Maybe ten years pass.

I finally saw, in the first third of the novel, why Kristin Lavransdatter became, soon after its first English translation, a cult novel in the United States, a book that women passed from hand to hand.  Who in English in the 1920s, or for that matter much later, was writing so directly about difficult childbirths, or sexual conflicts between spouses, or simply the anxieties of moving to – taking over, managing – a new household for the first time?  These are ordinary problems, experienced by millions of young women who were not medieval Norwegians, and Undset writes about them clearly and without melodrama.

Maybe I also saw why the novel has receded, even with Tiina Nunnally fine recent translation.  Now there are lots of novels and films that tell these stories.

Undset’s best artistic move is to accumulate elements of more or less ordinary life into an extraordinary scene.  In The Wreath, the great scene was the long, complex wedding at the end of the novel.  This time, in The Wife, there were two, the death and funeral of Kristin’s father at the end of Part II, and Kristin’s pilgrimage, expiating her sins from the first novel, that ends Part I.  I was not surprised to learn that Undset readers still travel to St. Olav’s shrine in Trondheim to re-create Kristin’s pilgrimage – not the real pilgrimage, but the fictional one, which is kind of funny.  But it’s a beautiful, powerful sequence.  Undset’s prose is often quite plain, with occasional hints of bestsellerism, but the big, climatic scenes are artful.

Part III of The Wife turns into more of a Walter Scott novel, about Kristin’s husband’s political schemes, and did not seem that special.

Undset’s fictional, historical world is enchanted, in the sense that it is not disenchanted.  Religion, God, and darker things exist in this world, in the mentality and behavior of the characters.  By chance, I read a contemporary exercise in enchantment almost alongside Undset, Marly Youmans’s new novel Charis in the World of Wonders (2020), where the enchantment is visible in the title.

“For this is the world of wonders, an enchanted place of dreams, portents, and prodigies” – that’s the end of the first paragraph, when poor Charis, a young Puritan woman in New England, is awakened to spend the first long chapter fleeing catastrophe.  She spends the rest of the novel rebuilding a life, until she has to – chooses to – flee again.

The world’s “wonders” are its mysteries, whether beautiful or terrifying or in some other category, since the phrase is specifically evoked when Charis sees a moose, and I have trouble calling a moose beautiful; no trouble calling them wonders:

He lowered his head, crowned with new nubs of antlers, and began to lip at the foliage under the trees.  His breath ruttled as he blew outward and sent the plants to trembling. (216)

The voice, the action, and the ethos of the novel are all from the perspective of not just Charis’s faith, but her view of the world, a difficult thing to capture.  It is tricky. since no one at the time would write a first person account with so much dialogue, detail, or action.  The idea is to get close to the mentality of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the symbolic world, but not the form or the language.  Well, to some degree, the language.  Youmans borrows period language, wonderful archaic words, many of which we should return to use.  Nabbity, nattle, naughty-pack, nazzle, niffle-naffle, nightwalking, nittle.  The novel ends with a twelve-page glossary that I found readable and pleasurable on its own.  And I do not remember one time when I needed to turn to the glossary, since the vocabulary was always clear enough in context (e.g., ruttled up above).  The glossary is a bonus.

I should note that Youmans is a Friend of the Blog.  Marly, what a time to publish a novel!

A bit of Kristin Lavransdatter - What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices

Since I am going to Norway for a little vacation and am reading around in the 1920s, I read the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s beloved Kristin Lavransdatter, The Wreath (1920), the story of a young woman who is a Strong Female Character even for 14th century Norway, when the women generally seem pretty strong.

I read the 2005 Tiina Nunnally translation which is obviously superior to the old one, the beloved one.  Undset wrote in a plain style with lyrical interludes, much like so many novels written today, and was sexually frank in a way that is surprisingly not so far from another novel from 1920, Women in Love, and Lawrence had to publish that by private subscription to avoid the obscenity laws that squashed The Rainbow.  The older translation is full of pseudo-medieval “aughts” and “naughts” and “thees” and “thous”; Nunnally cleans out all of that and restores substantial passages that were too sexy for the Americans and English in the 1920s, so this is “the first unabridged English translation,” Nunnally says in her translator’s note.

But it is the older translation that was beloved by a large number of readers.  It is obviously inferior, but maybe I should have read the novel that people really read, the text of the phenomenon.  Do I want the phenomenon or the novel itself?  I guess the novel itself, and I guess the new one is closer.

In the novel itself, remembering that we are in a plausible and well-researched 14th century Norway, Kristin is first a child, then a teen who is promised to one man but falls in love with a bad boy, and finally through cussedness and suffering marries the one she wants.  Those are the three parts of the book.  The ethos is what I would call feminist, a challenge from the 14th century to the 20th, and very feminine.  Kristin makes butter, Kristin cooks, Kristin goes shoe shopping.  I can see why some readers love this book, and why others are bored to tears.

Characters in The Wreath, male and female, regularly burst into tears.  “Then Kristin burst into tears” (III.6).  Kristin Lavransdatter seems to be an exercise in mentalité, an attempt to novelize not just the clothes and customs of an earlier time, but also the psychology, the ways of thinking.  The characters are meant to be a little bit alien.  They are like us, but also definitely not.

But as Dion sang so long ago, "Well, if you want to make me cry, that won't be so hard to do," and The Wreath is about a "Teenager in Love." They are not like us, but then again are.

The long wedding scene that fills roughly the last sixth of the novel is formally the most interestingly scene.  Undset parallels a carefully reconstructed wedding of the time – clothes, language, ritual – with the increasingly chaotic thoughts of the heroine.  It is a bit Expressionist.  “Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd?” (III.8).  Many motifs of the novel, not necessarily so interesting by themselves, are pulled together in the wedding, at both the “material” and “psychological” levels.

I know, it is not a great recommendation – “the last thirty pages are really good!”  Well, that is one way novels work.

My favorite novelistic detail, easily: “The titmice clung to the timbered walls and hopped around on the sunny side; the pecking of their beaks resounded as they looked for flies asleep in the gaps between the wood” (III.4).  An observation, I suspect, from the 20th century, or the 19th, from Undset’s childhood, another way to link the past and present.