Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s Place, Heritage, and Gender in the Immigrant Experience: Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious
By
Ipatia Apostolides, B.A., M.F.A.
December 7, 2020
Introduction
The life of Ole Edvart Rolvaag and his literary works Giants in the Earth (1927), and Peder Victorious (1929),will be examined in this paper in relation to place, heritage, and gender (sexual), in the immigrant’s experience. Ole Edvart Pedersen was born on April 22, 1876 in the small fishing community on the barren island of Donna in Norway (Rolvaag, 1971), and was the third child of eight children born to Peder Jakobsen and Ellerine Johanna (p. vii). He would walk to school, which was seven miles away, and during the winter, he and his siblings stayed at a farm near the school (p. ix). The fishermen worked in small boats, but in the winter, groups of four to six fishermen would travel in larger ships to the Lofoten islands to fish. He became a fisherman early in life (age 14) and during a winter storm in 1893, he was affected negatively when several fishermen on the ship they were traveling in did not survive the storm, and he decided that this life as a fisherman was not for him. In later years, he changed his surname from Pedersen to Rolvaag which was taken from a bay on his island.
O.E. Rolvaag wrote to an uncle who lived in Elk Point, South Dakota and asked to lend him the money to buy a ticket for America. In 1896, at the age of twenty, the money for the ticket finally arrived from his uncle, and that same year Rolvaag embarked on the journey to America (Rolvaag, 1971).
Rolvaag’s Immigration and Education
Rolvaag wrote about his immigration experience through letters to his brother and father, which were collected and published posthumously in a book titled The Third Life of Per Smevik (Rolvaag, 1971). These first impressions and experiences of his own life are also captured in his later novel Giants in the Earth.
During the first few years with his uncle, Rolvaag was a farm hand. He did not like the heavy work. He saved his money and attended Augustana Academy of Canton, South Dakota, where he met his future wife Jennie Marie Berdahl. He studied hard and then attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where he earned a B.A. and a M.A.
Once he graduated, Rolvaag became employed as a professor at St. Olaf College in the fall of 1906 and continued teaching there until his death in 1931. According to the St. Olaf College website (St. Olaf College), it was founded first as an academy in 1874 by a group of Norwegian immigrants, pastors, farmers, and businessmen. In 1889, it became a college. The name St. Olaf was derived from Olav II Haraldsson, king of Norway from 1016 to 1030; he became Norway’s patron saint after his martyrdom. St. Olaf College has also been affiliated with the Lutheran Church throughout its history. This higher education institution has maintained a focus on Scandinavian culture, and it was this environment that Rolvaag immersed himself as a professor.
At St. Olaf College, Rolvaag’s work routine was harsh, as he would arise at seven or eight o’clock each morning and continue working until two o’clock the following morning (Jorgenson, n.d.). This heavy workload affected his health. During 1905-1906, and in December, he was diagnosed with diphtheria.
In 1908, Rolvaag became a United States citizen and married Jennie Berdahl, whom he had met while attending Augustana Academy. The couple had three sons and one daughter; however, two of their sons died tragically. One of their surviving children, Karl, became a politician, and was elected governor of Minnesota from 1963-1967 and later became an ambassador to Iceland (1967-1969).
Rolvaag was often ill for the remainder of his life. He suffered “periodic nerve attacks which can have been nothing else than the beginning of the heart ailment that finally took his life,” and in 1911, Rolvaag suffered a mild attack of pleurisy (Jorgenson, n.d.). In 1918, he had an operation for Appendicitis, and in 1924, experienced heart attacks that grew increasingly severe (p.5). In 1931, he died from a massive heart attack at age fifty-five.
His Writing
While in college, Rolvaag’s sketches, poems, and short stories found their way into the school paper and the annual published by his class (Jorgenson, n.d.). His first novel, a love story, “Nils and Astri” was written while in college, but he could not publish it in America or in Norway (p.5).
He successfully published Amerika-Breve, (Letters from America) his first book, in 1912, written in Norwegian and in 1914, another book titled Pa Glente Veie (Forgotten Paths) which showed the life of an immigrant in America.
In 1923, Rolvaag learned that Johan Bojer, a successful Norwegian author, would travel to America to gather information for his novel on Norwegian immigration in America (Filanti, 2019). Bojer was well known for his 1921 translated book The Last of the Vikings, whereas Rolvaag had not received such popular attention for his works, and this motivated him to work on his book. Rolvaag had been gathering material all this time, to beat Bojer’s deadline (p. 311). Rolvaag requested a sabbatical and retreated to a log cabin in Minnesota, where he worked up to sixteen hours a day. He finished the Norwegian version of Giants in the Earth by the deadline for the celebration of the centennial for Norwegian migration to America paid. (p. 311
Rolvaag successfully published I de Dage (In Those Days) in 1924, and Riket Grundlægges (Founding the Kingdom) in 1925, first in the Norwegian language by the Aschehoug publishers in Norway, and later in America, having translated both volumes into English with the help of Lincoln Colcord, and published as one volume titled Giants in the Earth (p. 4). His book received the acclaim that it deserved. Giants in the Earth focused on the “suffering and toil of Norwegian homesteaders in the Dakota territory” during the 1870s (Filanti, 2019). He used the experience from his own life on the farm, as well as his wife’s family, who had immigrated earlier to the plains area. Yet, his book’s storyline was very similar to Bojer’s book The Emigrants, and Rolvaag pleaded “not guilty” to plagiarism (p. 312). Both men corresponded frequently, before and after publication. Filanti (2019) believes that the likenesses seen in these two authors’ novels, as well as in other novels about immigration, “expressed very similar colonizing attitudes with regards to indigenous people, other animal species, and the land, as all of them knowingly compromised their own cultural values in the quest of a new home” (p. 313).
Rolvaag’s next two novels, Peder Victorious (Rolvaag, 1927) and Their Father’s God (Rolvaag, 1931) were part of the trilogy, focusing on the Holm family after Per Hansa died in Giants in the Earth. It’s interesting that Rolvaag would have three boys and one girl in this story, because that is the number of children he also had. According to Gudrun Hovde Gvale, who wrote the Introduction to Peder Victorious (Rolvaag, 1929), Rolvaag wrote most of Peder Victorious in his cabin at Big Island Lake during the summer of 1927. After it was published by Aschehousg in Oslo the following year, the English translation by Nora Solum was published by Harper & Brothers in New York in 1929 (p. ix). His last book of the trilogy, Their Father’s God, is translated from Norwegian into English by Trygve M. Ager, and was published in 1931 by Harper & Row, the year of Rolvaag’s death.
His last novel, which depicted the life of a young immigrant traveling from Norway to Minneapolis in 1912, and titled The Boat of Longing, was published posthumously in 1933.
By the end of his lifetime, Rolvaag had published six novels, two readers for class use, a couple of handbooks on Norwegian grammar and declamation, and one volume of essays (Rolvaag, 1927). Most of his writing focused on the immigrant experience.
Place
According to Patterson-Black (1976), The Homestead Act in 1862 by Senator William Borah announced, “The government bets 160 acres against the entry fee of $14 that the settler can’t live on the land for five years without starving to death” (p. 67). This was the impetus that brought many immigrants journeying to the west, hoping for a piece of land, and this included the Norwegians, Rolvaag’s uncle, and Rolvaag’s in-laws. Rolvaag’s characters Per Hansa and Beret Holm, in Giants in the Earth represent such Norwegian immigrants journeying to claim their land and become homesteaders. Owning a piece of land was a big deal to them because they came from a country where land was scarce and poverty prevailed. Their dream was to work the land and live off of it. However, in Giants in the Earth, they did not anticipate the harsh winter climate and locusts that would eat away at their dreams and leave them destitute.
In the article by Diane Quantic, she believes that the frontier in Giants in the Earth is a “liminal space: an acknowledged, inhabited landscape where people consciously can choose to remain between one culture and another…” (Quantic, 2003). Filanti (2019) also states, that in Giants in the Earth, “the frontier was, in the collective imaginary of the time, an uninhabited space that one could settle in and claim possession of while remaining indefinitely suspended between the old European culture and the new American one,” and it could only be described in terms of absence (p. 308).
In Peder Victorious, Beret victoriously faces the challenges on the prairie as a widow, mother, and landowner after Per Hansa’s death. However, the land is not as prominent in this sequel to Giants in the Earth as is heritage and gender.
Heritage
Rolvaag was a Norwegian immigrant who wrote primarily in the Norwegian language about the immigrant experience in America. He did not believe in cutting ties to Norway, his Old-World past, and his books were first published in Norway and later translated into English. According to Thorson (1976), Rolvaag “viewed the individual immigrant, shorn of his ties with his native culture and traditions, as doomed to failure” (p.6). Rolvaag believed that man’s creativity relied on continuity with his heritage, otherwise he would be plagued by misfortune and futility (p. 6).
Rolvaag’s heritage was influenced by his parents, religion, culture, and language. His father Peder, a fisherman, read the Bible and was engaged in a dogmatic religion (Jorgenson, n.d.); heavy handed with the children, he provided a strict and unbendingly Puritan environment in the home (p.3). Rolvaag’s mother, on the other hand, was a “simple woman, without learning and logic, but strong in the emotions of a warm heart; infinitely patient in her work, possessed of great charm, and completely devoted to her children” (p.1). Rolvaag was very close to his mother and writes in his diary, “If I had known how hard it would be to leave Mother, I probably should not have taken this step” (p.1.).
One other factor that influenced Rolvaag’s formative years, was oral tradition, which was particularly poignant during the cold winters while preparing for the annual fishing expeditions (Jordahl, 1975). These stories exposed him to a variety of Norwegian folklore, like supernatural holder, nisse, draug, and trolls (p.15). The trolls and archtrolls appear in Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, when Per Hansa discovers the Irish stakes on Hans Olsa’s southwest corner and thinks, “By God! The trolls must be after him!” (p. 132), and later, he thinks: “how would it turn out when the trolls came? Would he be able to hack off their heads and wrest the kingdom from their power?” (p. 142).
It has been written about that Rolvaag’s mother resembled the character of Beret. In Giants in the Earth, he promotes Norwegian ethnicity and a return to traditional Norwegian ways. This included religious faith, respect for one’s parents, love of home, and an appreciation of the collective ethnic past (Haugtvedt, 2008). However, the Norwegian immigrant community during Rolvaag’s time (1920s) was already beginning to assimilate into the American society (New World) and English was becoming the prominent language. He was concerned about this, and he wrote about this assimilation into American society; it is more pronounced in Peder Victorious, when Peder, Beret’s son refuses to speak the Norwegian language or become a minister, and in Rolvaag’s next sequel, Their Father’s God, instead of marrying a Norwegian Lutheran girl, Peder ends up marrying an Irish Catholic girl (Kongslien, 2012).
Gender
In Giants in the Earth, Per Hansa and his wife Beret play traditional roles, where he is the hunter, builder, and king, and she is the nurture, homemaker, and queen (Muthyala, 2005). Per Hansa focuses on building a house while Beret focuses on female domesticity (p. 232). According to Muthyala (2005), as long as these two separate spheres are maintained, a certain kind of predictability and stability exists, and only are undermined when the borders of these spheres are crossed (p. 232). On the surface, Beret obeys her husband and performs her duties, but internally, she experiences fear and depression, as she has a difficult time assimilating to the prairie’s challenges (sod house, harsh winter, locusts) and being far away from her family.
In Peder Victorious, Beret assumes both feminine and masculine duties. She is father and mother to her children, and also maintains the house and land. This is a surprising adjustment, coming from a person who has been fearful and limited in her assimilation to America in Giants in the Earth. Only after Per Hansa’s death, does she emerge in Peder Victorious as a successful “female pioneer woman” raising her children and overseeing the farm (Muthyala, 2005).
It isn’t until two-thirds into the Peder Victorious novel, however, do we learn how Beret reacts to Per Hansa’s death. When they brought Per Hansa home, “things went black” for Beret. The minister visits her, and she confesses to him, “it was she who had driven Per Hansa to his death…There had been angry words, she had nagged him, he had left in a terrible temper!” (Rolvaag, 1929, p. 167). The minister believes that Beret’s “worst sin does not consist in what you did to your husband that day; rather it lies in your discontent with God’s special creatures, with your fellow men” (p. 169). Even though this is a surprising revelation to her, she doesn’t appear to do anything about it. Her actions and thoughts still separate her from others. The feminine, nurturing side of her remains glued to her family. Her thoughts are predominantly controlled by her religion and language, and both factors stem from her heritage.
Another gender issue that arises in Peder Victorious is young Peder’s Oedipal complex with his mother. Later as he grows into a handsome young man, his love affairs consume his time as he chases one girl after another.
Giants in the Earth
In the first book of the trilogy, Giants in the Earth (Rolvaag, 1927), Rolvaag uses place, heritage, and gender equally in the story. The Norwegian heritage that Rolvaag and his Norwegian characters came from was basically a poor fishing community where the inhabitants owned little property and relied on fishing to survive. However, it was an established society, complete with schools, churches, and communities. The South Dakota plains offered only land and sky, and nothing else. There were no established schools, churches, or roads, when the Holm family arrived in their wagon, and the small community consisted only of a handful of Norwegian immigrants. The closest town was almost eighty miles away. It was a bare canvas waiting to be worked on, and Rolvaag did an incredible job in this first novel of his trilogy.
With regards to place, the plains of South Dakota consumed much of the story, as the Holm family and the other Norwegians settled their wagons and families there. They had to first overcome the land, plowing and digging, building homes, fighting against the harshness of the climate, and deal with being away from their country, family and friends, and their culture. It was open land, with no place to hide, yet fertile enough to provide them food and a sod house. It was also fertile enough to feed cattle and provide for a living. They survived, but at a price. Those years, they worked very hard and struggled against the natural forces, but were still poor.
In the first two weeks on the prairie, Per Hans and the other characters of Giants in the Earth cannot “read” the landscape which has no real human-made markers (p. 249). However, Per Hansa’s imagination enables him to fill in the blank prairie space with buildings, animals, and crops. He journeys fifty-two miles to ensure that this land becomes officially his. His wife Beret, on the other hand, sees things differently. Her thoughts about the prairie when they first arrive are expressed here, “Had they travelled into some nameless, abandoned region? Could no living thing exist out here, in the empty, desolate, endless wastes of green and blue?...If life is to thrive and endure, it must at least have something to hide behind!” (p. 43). Her fear about this new place is quite clear throughout the novel. When Beret learns about the Indian grave with its bones, and the uprooted claim stakes by her husband; she does not approve but fears the “empty, haunted land” (p. 250). Yet she does not betray Per Hansa regarding the stakes.
With regards to heritage, Per Hansa appears to be eager in leaving behind his heritage and wholeheartedly embracing this alternative way of life on the prairie. He works hard on the farm, plowing and digging, and also in building the sod house. This all-consuming desire to work long hours is evident in this passage:
“As Per Hansa lay there dreaming of the future it seemed to him that hidden springs of energy, hitherto unsuspected even by himself, were welling up in his heart. He felt as if his strength were inexhaustible. And so he commenced his labours with a fourteen-hour day….he accordingly lengthened the day to sixteen hours” (p. 53).
Per Hansa’s working sixteen-hour days is very similar to Rolvaag’s own life, where he worked several hours a day with little sleep. This energy is all consuming and fills Per Hansa’s days, and he is driven to finish his projects. He is content.
Beret, Per Hansa’s wife, however, has a very difficult time adjusting to the plains. Her familial place, Norway, is difficult to let go and forget. Pregnant with her fourth child, Beret reminisces about her family in Norway, the churchyard where her ancestors are buried, and thinks that she will not survive this pregnancy. Unable to escape the prairie, however, she succumbs to depression.
Per Hansa approaches her one day about building a barn under the same roof as their house in order to keep the house warm. “Man and beast in one building? How could one live that way?...but then she thought of how desolate and lonesome everything was here and of what a comfortable companion Rosie might be on dark evenings and during long winter nights,” she thinks (p. 62). So she accepts.
An emphasis on gender differences is obvious in Giants in the Earth, as it shows the differences between Per Hansa and his wife Beret. According to Muthyala (2005), Per Hansa and Beret inhabit gendered spheres of work and activity and play traditional roles. The man is the hunter, builder, and king, and the woman is the nurturer, homemaker, and queen (p. 232).
Beret’s role as wife and mother are traditional and restricted, as she focuses on staying in the house and taking care of the family and the meals. Only when her husband is away, does she venture outside to do the work with her children.
By continuing these traditional roles, this brings predictability to their lives, and as long as they maintain these borders and do not cross them, Per Hansa and Beret have a stable relationship. However, Muthyala (2005) notes that Per Hansa disturbed this border by doing things that were normally associated with “the goddess of fertility: planting seeds, providing sexual pleasure, and procreating” (p. 233). Per Hansa is intent in transforming the frontier into a place of “habitation and eventually into a kingdom” (p. 233).
In Giants in the Earth, the land, a source of love and fertility, becomes Per Hansa’s metaphorical mistress, and he “exults that this vast stretch of beautiful land was to be his” (Moseley, 1978, p. 34). He “plowed and harrowed, delved and dug; he built away at the house, and he planted the potatoes; he had such a zest for everything and thought it all such fun that he could hardly bear to waste a moment in stupid sleep” (Rolvaag, 1927, p.56).
Another example of the land as metaphorical mistress, is when Per Hansa decides to grow wheat. “He ran his hand around in the bag, stroking the grain caressingly, taking great handfuls and giving them a gentle squeeze…And now the wheat rained down in yellow semicircles from Per Hansa’s hand” (p. 340).
According to Moseley (1978), Per Hansa is making love to the land, trying to satisfy both himself and his mistress through the following passages, “working slowly and carefully,” but “almost at once he grew very heated; his body was dripping sweat” (p. 35). Beret senses his infidelity as he spends less and less time with her, and yet she is loyal to him.
Per Hansa unwittingly encourages Beret to become more masculine. On one occasion, Per Hansa, enticed by Beret to make love to her (her traditional role in fertility), thinks about the work that still needs to be done, but at the same time, remembers the masculine work she had done, and likes it. By seeing role reversal in a positive light in his mind, he crosses the traditional border; for example, he likes that “she had let the children roam around and play in the grass while she herself had joined in their labor; she had pitched in beside them and taken her full term like any man” (Rolvaag, 1927, p. 57). This could also tie into their heritage, where women from the Old Country were involved in manual labor.
Meanwhile, Beret continues her traditional role, and sees life on the plains differently than Per Hansa does: “It seemed plain to her now that human life could not endure in this country. She had lived here for six weeks, and more without seeing another civilized face than those of their own company…To get what supplies they needed they must journey four whole days” (p.116).
These three forces of place, heritage, and gender tug and pull equally at the traditional life that the Holm family have left behind in Norway. As Beret becomes more fearful and introverted, she relies more and more on her religious ideals and sinks into madness, and Per Hansa seeks emotional satisfaction through the land (Moseley, 1978). It becomes apparent that Beret isn’t willing to assimilate along with her husband and children, because she is still attached to her Old-World thinking, to her language and religion, and she doesn’t adapt to the new place as does Per Hansa, who is busy building a home for her and the family; in the process, she becomes brittle and inflexible, and this fuels her mental maladies.
At one point, Per Hansa could not find her. As he searches for her, he finds her inside her trunk with her two children, and “Per Hansa flung the cover open with frantic haste. The sight that met his eyes made his blood run cold. Down in the depths of the great chest lay Beret, huddled up and holding the baby in her arms; And-Ongen was crouching at her feet – the whimpering sound had come from her” (Rolvaag, 1927, p. 397). This is one example of Beret’s fear and madness, and it adds one more break to their relationship, as he starts to treat her like a child after that.
Per Hansa is willing to overcome his differences and to step occasionally outside of his traditional gender role by being more feminine once in a while, but Beret’s fear possesses her and doesn’t leave her free to adapt to the new place and assimilate to it. Without her meeting Per Hansa halfway, their relationship continues to spark tension and conflict, and this is witnessed at the end of the story, which has reached a crisis when she urges Per Hansa to go out there in the bitter winter to fetch the minister for their ailing friend Hans Olsa. He resists at first and believes Beret’s insistence “that he leap right into the arms of death” is a sign that she is flinging all that he had done for her and the children in his face (Rolvaag, 1927, p. 520). He does end up going for the minister, but alone and in anger, and unfortunately dies in the bitter storm.
Peder Victorious
Rolvaag’s next novel in the trilogy is Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later (Rolvaag, 1929). The story is supposed to take place twenty years after Per Hansa’s death in Giants in the Earth. It focuses on Peder, the youngest son of the Holm family, from the time that he is young, and it depicts the passage of time as we see him grow up into a young man. In the story, schools have been formed, and churches are being built in the territory where the Holm family live. The Irish have arrived and built their homes there. During this passage of time, the community that has formed is a mixed community, and includes different cultures, religions, and languages.
In this sequel, Beret remains in their home, learns to work on the land, and raises her family successfully. Very few references are made to the land, as in the previous novel, where Per Hansa spends much time plowing and digging, and building their home. Everything has been done already. The children are older and do most of the outside chores. Beret has changed as a person from the time Per Hansa was alive. Her fear seems to have left her. She embraces the challenges of life on the prairie and even builds a barn. She is content being a homemaker and mother, where she reads her Norwegian bible and speaks Norwegian to her family.
It is through Peder and the mixed community that Beret’s heritage, language and religion are challenged every step of the way. Other immigrants in the story appear to have assimilated to America; their children are learning the English language, yet Beret continues to hold on to her beliefs and fight assimilation. She wants her children, particularly Peder, to continue speaking and reading the Norwegian language and religion. One day, Peder asks her, “Why can’t I learn my lessons in English?” and she resists, saying “How you talk, Permand!” and she calls him a “Norwegian boy” (p. 31). His thoughts contradict the idea that he is “a Norwegian boy…huh…The idea!” (p. 31).
Beret continues to retain strong ties to her Norwegian background, religion, and language. She does several things to show that. She moves Peder from one school, which had Irish students in it, to another school where Norwegians are attending it. He does not like this move, and thinks, “Here he was off to English school among the Norwegians because Mother was afraid…well, just what did she fear might happen to him among the Irish?” (p. 138).
The new minister, Pastor Gabrielsen is intent on speaking English and not Norwegian, and promoting Peder’s Americanization, for he believes that “in twenty years from now not one word of Norwegian would be heard in America” (Rolvaag, 1929, p. 201). This recurring theme about assimilation, and losing one’s language to English is particularly important as it ties into Rolvaag’s own philosophy about the Norwegian language being important. The fact that he wrote his novels in Norwegian even though he lived in America is a testimony that he never really forgot his heritage. Beret challenges the minister about his speaking English, and he replies, “Do you think I was committing a sin by speaking English here today?” and she replies, “Yes” (p. 206). In response to her reply, the minister thinks this is ridiculous and can’t help laughing.
In addition, as Peder grows into manhood, it is increasingly apparent that he is spiritually dead when it comes to the Norwegian religion and this bothers Beret to no end. Several things occurred to push him away; one is his father’s death, and the pregnant girl’s (Oline) death, and his questioning God about these; another incident is the minister trying to force him to become a minister. When the minister visits Beret to tell her that he’d like Peder to go away to school to become a minister, Peder has other thoughts about this, “And now Gabrielsen was wanting to get him off to school and make a preacher of him – just let him try it!” (Rolvaag, 1929, p. 260). Peder was more interested in chasing girls at this stage in life. He also did not want to leave his mother alone and go off to school. The other siblings had already moved out of the house.
This story also focuses on gender and sexual relations, particularly as seen through Beret’s Oedipal relationship with her youngest son Peder and later, through Peder’s eyes in his relationships with girls. Beret’s nurturing, female side is revealed as she raises her children and feeds the cattle. This is seen in the following passage, “More than anything else she enjoyed taking care of the cattle; every creature on the farm responded to her voice” (p. 172).
Using Peder as his conduit, Rolvaag is able to place an emphasis on gender and sexual occurrences. When Peder was young, he became a substitute for his father Per Hansa, in that his mother seems to have spent more time with him than any of the other children. He is a sensual, handsome boy and later, an amorous young man. There are also some Oedipus complex issues with his mother; the Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytic theory written about by Sigmund Freud in 1899. Similarities between the sensual way young Peder relates to his mother Beret, are seen with Paul, the son in Lawrence’s 1913 novel Sons and Lovers; where Paul has an Oedipal complex with his mother.
In one defining incident, Peder learns about a pregnant girl’s (Oline’s) death, and he becomes terrified when he thinks he sees her ghost outside their home, and rushes to his mother’s bedroom. There, he throws himself into her bed; he tells her he sees the girl “standing over in the grove and wants us to help her” (p. 41). His mother tries to talk him out of having seen the ghost and then admonishes him when he believes God allowed this terrible thing to happen to the girl. Beret pleads he must pray unceasingly and ends up crying. He cries with her, and in the end, “she petted him and stroked him; and he snuggled closer to her, sank down into something wonderfully soft and pleasant” (p. 44). This sensual moment defies the pure mother-son relationship and becomes a pseudo-male-female relationship with an Oedipal overtone where Peder subconsciously replaces Per Hansa.
Yet Peder outgrows this phase and increasingly spends less time with his mother. As he grows older, he becomes even more sensual, noticing his body and its reaction to the local girls like Else, Miriam, and Susie. Another similarity between Paul in Sons & Lovers is Peder’s relationship to Miriam Nelsen, which goes nowhere, as in Paul’s relationship to Miriam Lievers, who is deeply religious. In both stories, Peder and Paul move on to other relationships. Also, both girls have the same first names.
The strong male role is evident in Peder’s burgeoning love affairs. He pursues different girls and courts them, staying out until late hours. One such girl is his best friend’s sister, Susie, who is Irish Catholic. He chases her in the new barn and jumps on her as she hides in the hay. “he had never felt anything so silken and soft. His chin sank down into the warm hollow of her throat, his cheek pressing close” (p.89). This critical physical moment in their relationship, aptly described by Rolvaag, is remembered and as time passes, Peder marries Susie later in Their Father’s God the third book of the trilogy.
According to Martin (1989), he posits that in the last chapter of Rolvaag’s Peder Victorious, Rolvaag expresses “sexual humor.” This is evident when Beret discovers in Peder’s Bible some verses titled “To My Beloved” and fails to connect it to the Old Testament’s “The Song of Songs.” She believes these verses about love were actually written by Peder, and she burns them. She had conceived her first child out of wedlock, and “decides to prevent Peder from behaving like his parents” (p. 256).
Conclusion
Much of O.E. Rolvaag’s own life as an immigrant from Norway, and the lives of his parents, siblings, his wife, his family, his wife’s family, all seem to have found their way somehow into his immigration novels. He is Per Hansa in Giants in the Earth, working hard on the farm as he did in his uncle’s farm in Elk Point, South Dakota. His mother and mother-in-law can be seen in Beret who had a difficult time acclimatizing to the American way of life, her Norwegian language and religion being so important to her identity. His own siblings can be seen in Per Hansa’s sons in Giants in the Earth and later, his own sons in Peder, in Peder Victorious, a young American-born boy growing up in America, and assimilating into the American way of life through the school system. Even his wife can be witnessed in Peder’s relationship with Susie in Peder Victorious.
Rolvaag was successful in addressing place, heritage (vs assimilation), and gender in his writing on immigration. Yet, once he chose the topic of immigration for his writing, he was limited artistically. Filanti (2019) believes that the likenesses seen in Rolvaag’s and Bojer’s novels, as well as in other novels about immigration, “expressed very similar colonizing attitudes with regards to indigenous people, other animal species, and the land, as all of them knowingly compromised their own cultural values in the quest of a new home” (p. 313).
Although he was successful as a writer in Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag was not able to go beyond the immigration experience or the Norwegian background in any of his other novels. In Peder Victorious, the focus was on Beret’s difficulty letting go of her language and religion, and her conflict with her American-born son Peder who embraces the American culture and language quite easily. Even Rolvaag’s last novel, The Boat of Longing, posthumously published in 1933, focuses on immigration from Norway. Yet, he contributed significantly to the pioneer experience by writing about it and about the hardships faced by immigrants.
One wonders, though, if his life hadn’t been cut short, if Rolvaag would have written on other topics besides immigration.
References
Filanti, R. (2019). “Facing the great desolation: Migration and translations in Giants in the Earth. In S. Guslandi, P. Loreto, A. Cardone, & A. Tiengo (Eds.), The US and the World We Inhabit (pp. 300-319). https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ahHCDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA302&dq=gender+in+o.e.+rolvaag&ots=SxGS1rndpi&sig=KAro0f3knjReqNDez1mLkoK5yT8#v=onepage&q=p.%20319&f=false
Haugtvedt, E. (2008). Abandoned in America: Identity, dissonance and ethnic preservationism in “Giants in the Earth.” MELUS, 33(3), 147-168. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20343495
Jordahl, O. (1975). Folkloristic influences upon Rolvaag’s youth. (34)1, 1-15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1498749?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
Jorgenson, T. (n.d.) The main factors in Rolvaag’s authorship. (X), 135-142. https://naha.stolaf.edu/pubs/nas/volume10/vol10_6.htm
Kongslien, I. (2012). Culture, difference, and diversity in O.E. Rolvaag’s immigrant epic. Scandinavian Studies, 84(2), 177-190. https://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=96d202b5-21b5-49b2-af1f-04e512257926%40sessionmgr4006
Martin, D. (1989). Rolvaag’s “roguish smile” in Peder Victorious. Western American Literature, (24)3, 253-256. https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1989.0033
Moseley, A. (1978). The land as metaphor in two Scandinavian novels. Melus, (5)2, 33-38. http://www.jstor.com/stable/467458
Muthyala, J. (2005). Gendering the frontier in O.E. Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth.” Great Plains Quarterly, 25(4), 229-244. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23533679
Patterson-Black, S. (1976). Women homesteaders on the Great Plains frontier. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, (1)2, 67-88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346070
Quantic, D.D. (2003). Fairy castle or steamer trunk? Creating place in O.E. Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth.” Great Plains Quarterly, 23(4), 245-259. https://jstor.org/stable/23533283
Rolvaag, O.E. (1927). Giants in the Earth. HarperPerennial Modern Classics.
Rolvaag, O.E. (1929). Peder Victorious. Bison Books.
Rolvaag, O.E. (1971). The Third Life of Per Smevik. Dillon Press. https://archive.org/details/thirdlifeofpersm0000rlva/page/n3/mode/2up
Rolvaag, O.E. (1931). Their Father’s God. University of Nebraska press.
St. Olaf College. The history and heritage of St. Olaf College. https://wp.stolaf.edu/about/history/history/
Thorson, G. (1976). Ole Edvart Rolvaag: 1876-1931. MELUS, 3(3), 6-7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/763502
