Madame Dorthea

WE hear a good deal nowadays of the decay in society, and its reflection in the work of our novelists. There is much truth in this, for the leading novelists of the last twenty years have not been primarily interested in the novel as a picture of society, and have preferred to use it to explore the new sensibilities of which modern psychology had made them aware. Instead of being absorbed by the functioning of life, they became absorbed in the nature of consciousness. They mirrored experience in fragments of living, in episodes, in tableaux, but made no effort to integrate or interpret it. The artist’s perceptions might be original, fresh, and sincere, but they led nowhere and pointed to nothing.

In comparison with the character of the leading American and English writers of today, the strength of a novelist like Sigrid Undset is the instinctive possession of a standard of values, which underpins all her writing, giving it a foundation and substance even when, as in this book, there is nothing really remarkable in either matter or manner. We are conscious always of a social and moral structure into which the characters are inescapably built. Each may realize that he is also inescapably an individual, as does young Vilhelm:

It was as though he had made the sudden discovery that all human beings were inclosed each in his own invisible shell — invisible, but no less impenetrable for all that. He himself stored up so many things which he had experienced, which he would always remember, and which his mother must never know about. And his mother, his grandmother, the Sheriff there, and everyone else, they had masses and masses of secrets which they hid away within their shells. It was really terrible to think of, for in this way one was always alone in a sense, no matter who might be present.

But around these human entities there is Society— binding them together, hedging them about with custom, with religion, with superstition, with ways of acting and feeling which force them into a mould.

Madame Dorthea is the work of an assured and accomplished storyteller who has here taken a small canvas and has worked on it in the Dutch manner. The scene is Norwegian country life of the late eighteenth century. Madame Dorthea is the wife of a manager of a glass factory, whose husband disappears one stormy night when he is out searching for his two sons and their tutor. The theme is her adjustment to the condition of widowhood. It plays itself out in her own home, among her seven children; in the house of her four-times-married mother; and on the farm of a neighbor, Captain Cold, a retired army officer who has made his housekeeper his mistress, but whose nostalgia for the life of the court and the city prevents him from achieving any happiness or harmony in his altered circumstances.

There are a succession of vivid ‘domestic interiors’ in these surroundings, but the interest of the novel centres in the power of the author to evoke the moment-to-moment life of the different characters. In one scene Madame Dorthea is faced with the sudden discovery that her mother has all her life been under the suspicion of murdering her first husband.

‘But how have you been able to bear it! To live — all these years, when you knew people were saying these — frightful things about you, behind your back! Mamma!’

‘ Dear me, child, what people say —’ she laughed quietly, but it was not a happy laugh. ‘One does not trouble so much about that, when all one’s time is taken up with living.’

The truth which emerges from the whole novel is that everyone’s time is taken up with living, and in this particular environment the basis of life is mainly animal. Madame Dorthea herself has a wider consciousness, and her young son Vilhelm has the emotions of sensitive adolescence, but in the main it is life with the minimum of mind and spirit — a life of the body and of social contract. Marriage, the cares of children, mating, abortion, are the subjects of the chief episodes; the impressions which haunt one are those of the ripening and the swift decay of physical beauty, the tyranny of lust, the smells of sweat, of drink, of food cooking, of corruption. It is not, indeed, either a comfortable or a comforting book, but it is rooted in ultimate realities; it is alive, and it creates and possesses the disturbing and unsatisfactory quality of life itself.

ELIZABETH DREW

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