The Trimming of Their Lamps:
Norwegian-American Immigrant Women Writers in the Midwest
by Øyvind T. Gulliksen
During the early period of immigration from Norway, women often accompanied their husbands to America. Some left Norway with families, some left alone.
In some cases women in their teens were shipped to the United States to serve as maids. Maren Johnson, the sister of my own maternal grandmother, was sent by her father to Brooklyn as a housemaid. She married a Norwegian immigrant and moved to Lyle, Minnesota. There her husband worked as a blacksmith, a job that did not have much of a future in the 1920s, so the couple did not have much money to spend. My grandmother would receive letters postmarked “Lyle, Minnesota,” a place my grandmother would never visit and could not even pronounce correctly. The contents of those letters are no longer known.
But a body of texts by immigrant women has survived. In letters and diaries, stories and poems, these women tell about life in the country and in the city. They report from inside and outside parsonages and farmhouses. They write of the work they did, of harvest, cattle, kitchen work, children, church, and school. They bring news of births and deaths. Few of these women saw themselves as writers, yet they made important contributions to Midwestern Scandinavian-American literature. I have chosen four of them. Two were the wives of ministers, two were married to farmers, and all were mothers. They came from different social classes and organized their days differently, but they all struggled to shape some of their American immigrant experience in writing. And they are still read.
In the Doorway: Elisabeth Koren
For today’s readers, The Diary of Elisabeth Koren 1853–1855 has the attractive immediacy that her husband’s writing lacks.1 In spite of their Lutheran sincerity, Rev. Vilhelm Koren’s sermons have become somewhat dated documents, quaintly aloof from our present concerns. His texts were preached from Norwegian-American pulpits. They mattered at the time. He even had the honor of having his collected prose published in four volumes (posthumously in 1912). Yet very few readers, if any, will open his pages today with some sort of eager expectancy. His wife, Elisabeth Koren (1832–1918), had a different style. Her diary, private and home-based, is still read, not only as a historical report, but also as a personal document.
The last illustration of the writer in the published diary shows her sitting with her husband in the parsonage when she was 71. She wears an unbecoming white lace bonnet, too small for her. This could be misleading, for we might be tempted to forget that, at the time she was writing her diary, she was an immigrant woman of 20, a newlywed, proudly relating how women in her Iowa community thought she was no more than 16. “Well, you must be sixteen, I suppose,” one of them is reported to have said.2 Sixteen!
Downstairs, in the small log house that they shared with another family when they first came to Iowa, Elisabeth Koren had a little writing case, but every time Vilhelm came home and had sermons and church protocols to prepare, she put her pen and paper aside to make room for him. “Here I have my writing case and my work while Vilhelm is away; when he is home, on the other hand, I have to vacate the place and take my case away . . . .”3 Yet she kept writing, and slowly provided the pages of her now classic diary from the early 1850s. In her text, she appears to the reader as a young woman there in the doorway of a cabin, still vividly alive. Notice how often she tells us that she is standing or sitting in the doorway: “I sat knitting by the open door.”4 The wives of farmers around her were involved in the sort of housework she did not always do.
It’s strangely symbolic that, of the few square feet of the room, the doorway was her favorite place, reflecting her inner sense of freedom—the openness outside contrasting with the small, congested space inside, which was so unlike the house she was used to in the old country.
In a typical diary note (March 8, 1854), which must have been written almost at the very second she stood there, she wrote as if she were looking out on the road. More importantly, she composed her few sentences in a way that places the reader right next to her at the time, “I wish I knew what news Vilhelm is going to bring from Decorah. There he is now. I scarcely recognized him in that hat he has acquired.” 5 Pencil in hand, she must have had the sense of joy—shared by many writers—of being able to turn a second of that day to a piece of paper, even if her observation may appear insignificant to us.
“There he is now” and—we assume—in a somewhat stupid-looking hat. The present tense of that short sentence makes the reader think that she recorded it in the very second she perceived him, as if the intensity was in her body at the time of writing. It has a sense of poetic urgency.
We know that she is waiting for him, even though she does not say that openly here. Did she write that way to be true to her own experience, or did she include the sentence to make sure her husband would be pleased when he read it? He was, after all, her first reader. “Vilhelm was reading my diary, which is one of the first things he does when he gets home.” 6 It must have been good for a male reader to find such written evidence that his presence is in fact desired. But it may not have helped Elisabeth’s sense of freedom.
Her words “There he is now . . .” read like an aside to the audience in a theater performance. It is as if she is saying: “Dear audience, my husband is now coming up the road. My pencil and paper must be put aside.” She admits it too: “I never care as much about writing as when he is away.”7 That is, she enjoyed writing, but not so much when he was in the same room. Elisabeth often returned to similar episodes. In an entry from the day before she brings exactly the same news: “Per cried, ‘There comes the pastor!’ And sure enough, it was Vilhelm who stopped at the door.”8 Even the scene of his bringing home gifts is perceived from the doorway. On this particular spring day (March 7, 1854), Vilhelm brings home a gift given to him by a young girl in the congregation, a fan like “the tail of a bird, just as nature had formed it.”9 Eggs and cheese and milk were always welcomed gifts, but a fan given to him by a young girl is different. His wife reacts this way: “It [the fan] would have made a sensation at a ball back in Norway and would have given the gentlemen something to talk about.”10 How true! The proper place for a lady’s fan is a high-society ballroom, not the floor of an immigrant log house. And it would have caused rumors among gentlemen. Vilhelm did not think of that.
In a very Thoreau-like manner, and in the same year as Thoreau published his Walden (1854), Elisabeth Koren writes about her life, inside and out of a rural home in Iowa. Of course, she did not come anywhere near the solitude that he enjoyed. Nor did she want to. But she went out to investigate nature on her own and returned to the cabin (which was not even hers), noting that “it was wild and lovely in the woods and delightfully sheltered and warm.”11 Sometimes she was scared by thunder and lightning, and “the western settlements” did not always appear as beautiful to her.12 Yet on a fair day in Winneshiek County she must have felt, like Thoreau, that walking “comes only by the grace of God. It requires direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.”13 Walking out in January she writes, “. . .it was beautiful to be out in the lovely morning hour. It was like a spring day . . . the sky is so pure and clear and the atmosphere so extraordinarily transparent.”14 That is not so far from Thoreau’s observations near Walden Pond.
Often she felt alone: “here I was roaming about quite alone far inland in America on the far side of Mississippi. . . .”15 Nature to her was overwhelming. One time she saw her husband as a
tiny speck against the horizon “. . . something dark coming on foot from far away.”16 Only later does she discover that it is in fact her husband. He first appears as a man dwarfed by nature. Ulrik Vilhelm Koren, Master of Divinity from the Royal University of Christiania, Norway, here a particle of nature! It was unthinkable during Sunday service, but not out in the vast open spaces.
Thoreau could do without the post office. Elisabeth could not: “I rejoice over every letter that gets written. . . .”17 She spoke of her joy as a writer, not just as a receiver, of letters. Every line she was able to write and send off filled her with deep satisfaction.
Her walks brought about more meditations than did Scripture. She was a pastor’s wife, but there is hardly any reflection on the Bible in her diary, no pompous piety of the soul. Sometimes she even showed a sense of humor on religious subjects, as when she noticed that the walls of the cabin were papered for the most part with “Maanedstidene, of which some are upside down and others sideways.”18 Maanedstidende [Monthly Times], the theological journal issued by the serious men of the Norwegian Synod, which began publication in 1851 for the inspiration and doctrinal instruction of the people, here used as wallpaper, practical if not pretty, maybe to keep the wind out. And upside down! Her meditation on the Eucharist is not a preparation of her soul. She is concerned about “the order and dignity” with which it is performed.19 We know that she read a sermon or two, but don’t know what she may have gotten from it.20 The signs of grace to her were always visible, out there, saved for us in her observations of very colloquial scenes, like “two old women . . . their gray hair tucked up under their caps, sat on stools with their hymnbooks; on the bed lay an old man reading.”21 It was, she wrote, very “Sabbath-like.”22 Her prose may not be personal in a modern sense. We may read her diary as a realistic rendering of the idea of objective atonement salvation was not a question of continuous soul-searching; it was accomplished through Christ once and for all— and she presents the idea more vividly than most pastors at the time could do.
Herbs from Our Garden: Susanne Grimstvedt
The writing of immigrant diaries and family letters was often a female activity. In the early 1850s, three sisters, named Anne, Herborg, and Susanne, from a small farm in the Grimstvedt community of Nissedal, Telemark, Norway, emigrated to Wisconsin with their husbands and children. From 1850 to 1875 they sent letters home. Their letters were collected, typed, and then—several years later—they were published.23 About half of the 29 letters in the collection are signed by Susanne (born 1825). The hand-written originals unfortunately have been lost. But even though the letters have been signed by both husband and wife, it is easy to detect when Susanne, and not her husband, is the writer. They arrived in New York in September of 1850. Susanne was then about 25 years old. She and her husband, Alf Nilsen, first bought land near Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, but soon moved to Winneshiek County, Iowa, then again to a farm community near Lake Mills, Iowa, where we last hear from her. Typically, many immigrants moved westward, from one NorwegianAmerican settlement to another.
To Susanne and her sisters, writing was an unfamiliar and solemn activity. Their position as immigrants made it a necessity for them to write if they wanted to keep in touch with their family in the old country. It was their only means of communication across the sea. Had they stayed in Norway, they in all likelihood would never have committed a single word to the page. Susanne was an untrained writer and must have had very little formal schooling, yet she wrote her letters, or dictated them to someone else in the community. In that way, she contributed to what eventually became a family chronicle, collected and saved by her family in Norway. She did not write often, maybe just once or twice a year, but in those short documents she constructed a life story. Her voice suddenly disappears, abruptly, in the last letter we have from her, which was written in 1875: “I will also on this occasion not neglect to include some lines to you . . . I am able, praise be to God, to inform you that by the Grace of God all is well with us. It is true though that I am always sickly, but I have learned to accept it. It is the rod that God uses to chastise
As with Susanne Grimstvedt, for many immigrant women flowers possessed a kind of emotional power and often symbolized connections with family members and other loved ones.
Album of cut-out pictures, stickers, and flowers, 1908, given to Karen Ingeborg Michelsen by her Norwegian friend Julie Berg as a present before Michelsen migrated to Chicago at age 18. Michelsen’s father was to become editor of Skandinaven, a Norwegian-language newspaper printed in Chicago from 1889 to 1930.
Vesterheim 1989.63.1—Gift of Marjorie Michelson Stedry.
me to become His dear child and who should then complain when we know that it truly serves us best?”24 As an American immigrant woman, she was clearly more concerned with the language of Job in the Old Testament than she was with the Declaration of Independence. As readers, we would like to hear more from her, but that is the end of her writing. It is as if she has left a piece of paper, saying “This is me,” and then she is gone.
Orm Øverland, professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Bergen, has reminded us that we need two strategies in our reading of such early immigrant letters. First, we should read them “so that we may even today catch some of the urgency with which they spoke to those they were written for,” and secondly they should be read “as texts that may yet have something to say to us in our own and present situations.”25 Susanne’s short notes are at once historical immigrant documents, reports from Midwestern farm life, and personal words of wisdom. They deal with the factual and the emotional at the same time.
In 1872 Susanne wrote from Lake Mills of health and crops. Her sentence about the possible coming to Iowa of a nephew is the standard formulation of so many American letters. He may come, but she cannot be responsible for somebody else’s choice:
We are, praise be to God, in reasonably good health, except I, your sister . . . I was bedridden last summer in a very hard sickness; I was in bed for 11 weeks, and must have been close to death many times, but with God’s benevolence I am now much better, so I am up and can do my usual work. We have had a reasonably good year; corn and potatoes, and all other crops stood excellently. The wheat was mediocre. You write, dear brother, that your son Knut wants to come to America, and you want to hear our opinion about that; that it will be good for him, we believe, but we will neither encourage nor discourage him. He will most certainly be very welcome if he should come to us, and we would also to the best in our ability help in one way or the other, if that should be needed for him. There is no free land hereabouts, but there could be work of some sort, since there will be work to be done on a railroad here next summer . . . .26
In August of the same year she wrote again to her brother in Norway. First comes her religious devotion and then, without warning or a new paragraph, she brings news of the harvest. The Holy Ghost and the potato harvest were always intimately connected in her mind. The family invested in a new Bible and new farm equipment at the same time. Her sentence about being “separated in this bodily life” is a religious term. It helped her and other immigrants come to terms with the experience of severance, often paired with the idea that Heaven is a place of a final union. Immigration had torn them apart “in the body,” so their joining “in the spirit” expressed a hope that was grounded in their certainty of never being able to see their families again.
Oh, let us meet in our prayers before His throne of Grace, so that we, although separated in this bodily life, may often unite in the Spirit for the Lord, and let us not resist his Holy Ghost, by whom he will give us power to grow in the awareness of God and to walk in our calling with dignity. May the Lord let this happen with all of us for the sake of Jesus! Amen . . . It is now fall in America, we have almost harvested all the wheat and oats. The wheat is very good, but the rust has almost destroyed the oats, yes, in some places it is completely lost, so people let it lay unharvested. Corn and potatoes look fine, although the potatoes could need some more rain, since it has been rather dry here for some time.27
In August of 1873 Susanne sent flower seeds back to her family in Norway, hoping that they might pass through inspection and be planted as American flowers in her old home yard. She uses the seeds of her favorite new flower as a genuine symbol, based on her knowledge of emigration, of motherhood, and her religious upbringing. First, the flower, when it sprouts in Norway, will remind the family of their daughter in Iowa, who once “blossomed” among them. Second, it will provide a picture of life, death, and resurrection. Susanne grew up on a small farm in Norway, where she learned the basics of reading and where she adopted a Lutheran literary symbolism that was very common among farmers. The short life of the flower made her think of her own
body. Yet, nature provided a parallel to the idea of resurrection. Susanne sent the seeds of an American flower to remind her family of the wisdom of the Catechism they all shared: Nature observed the same rhythm of life, death, and renewed life. The wisdom is old, but the American seeds she included were new. Her language is that of a sincere pietist; it reveals the practical theology of an immigrant farm woman:
I have . . . collected some flower seed and some herbs from our garden . . . if you could have the pleasure to share them among you and try if they could thrive with you. If that should succeed, you will then be reminded that your sister also ran and blossomed among you. Some of the flowers are very beautiful and demonstrate the growing, the folding out and the full flowering time of a person. Likewise [they symbolize] the decline and weak old age and especially the death, which I have especially observed in these flowers, although the whole nature shows us the same. We can also, praise be to God, learn from nature that there is a resurrection, for when everything seems to be quite dead in the fall, and before our eyes have to rot and become nothing, then—against all odds—it springs next year renewed from the earth and begins again a new, exciting life, so is it also with us.28
“So is it also with us.” She knew from her experience that life is a precarious business. She and other farmers in Norway for generations had sung themselves to comfort from the very popular seventeenth-century hymns of Thomas Kingo, among them On My Heart Imprint Your Image.29 But in her letter she also uses nature for a lesson in her own evangelical ethics before she goes on to the rest of her friendly and private sermon, reminding her folks at home of their reading of Matthew 25, the parable of the ten maidens. They would know what she meant by the advice to have their lamps trimmed. She does not need to give the reference. Again she applies the text to herself and kin before she starts on the wheat and the oats. Her next passage begins:
Dear siblings, when we have completed our measure, we are laid in the earth, and when our bones have crumbled and the time has come, determined by the Creator, our dear Savior arrives and calls us again out of the grave to a new and wonderful life, in case we have walked and died, believing in Him. Oh, my dear ones, let us then always, as far as it depends on us, attempt to have our lamps lit, so that when the Bridegroom arrives, that we then may be found ready to meet Him and go with Him into the eternal abodes where no sin, no sorrow, no death can touch us anymore, where God shall dry the tears from our eyes and where we for eternity shall be seated in the viewing of God and the Lamb. Yes, dear Jesus, let it be so for the sake of your name and honor. Amen. . . . We hope to get a good harvest, as everything looks fine, although the potatoes will be poor because we have had little rain; but that is not the foremost food in America. We have not heard from our sisters recently, so we cannot tell you anything about them…The first person who receives this letter is asked to send this letter to the others, as it is written for all of you.30
It is a feminine rhetoric of Heaven and of the barn. Simultaneously.
No More Parting: Gro Svendsen
Gro Svendsen (1841–1878) wrote her last letters from Iowa about the same time as Susanne. They remain the most wellknown letters written by a Norwegian-American immigrant woman. Her letters from Iowa were published in 1950, long after her death.31 It is indeed a unique collection.
When Pauline Farseth and Theodore Blegen published the letters of Gro Svendsen in 1950 as Frontier Mother, they hoped that the letter writer should appear as representative of a number of women who took part in mass emigration from Norway. To Blegen, her letters were rare documents of what he called “grass roots history.” Truly, her letters help constitute our knowledge of the thousands of Norwegian immigrant women who settled in the Midwest. But later readers of her letters, like David Gerber, have emphasized that they are not just sources of immigrant history. To him it does not really matter if Gro is representative of a larger number of women or not. What is significant is that she wrote several letters over a period of 16 years and that:
. . . she emerges vividly from her letters as a woman with a strong individuality, who created a rich, dynamic and complex life for herself… As a writer, she succeeded in
crafting a functional prose that allowed her to tell a great deal in the brief space of each letter and to achieve some sense of continuity between letters . . . It is certainly plausible to assume . . . that the act of writing each of them not only helped sustain her in the struggle to make a new life in America, and allowed her to preserve emotional links with family and friends in Norway, but gave her the opportunity for creative reflection on the person she was becoming as she endeavored to shape her new life in America.32
Gerber makes an important point. We should read her letters as an attempt to construct a female epistolary self. When I have referred to her collected letters in Frontier Mother as an immigrant chronicle, it is because we must consider the intricate nature and the process of compiling the book to a larger extent than Gerber does.33 Gro Svendsen had, of course, no chance to view the entire collection, and she had absolutely no knowledge of the fact that these letters would be read by postmodern strangers like you and me. Her letters make up a chronicle composed over a long period of time, with no chance of her editing. What she wrote and sent was final. Nothing could be deleted or added. By the time she sent her last letter, she had in all likelihood forgotten what she wrote five years earlier. She does not know when her last letter will be sent. Death is certain, but unplanned. Her death, of course, had to be told by others. Only to the receiver of her letters, who saved them over the years like a precious family keepsake, did they appear as a collected body of texts. Like a chronicle, Frontier Mother consists of a number of genres: weather reports, excerpts of diaries, travelogues, religious meditation, and accounts of farm life, haphazardly told and organized. Letters such as Gro’s constitute the core of Norwegian-American literature. It has all the intensity of a Victorian novel of life in the countryside, yet it is infinitely more real.
Her first letter, written in 1861, prior to departure, is addressed to her boyfriend, who has decided to immigrate to the Midwest. Consequently, Gro—now 20 years of age—is torn between loyalty to her parents and love for her friend. Her next letter is written from the boat. Between the first and the second letters,34 she must have made up her mind to brave the waters, after a struggle that we only have to assume. Nothing is given directly. As readers, we must fill in the blanks in her story, here and elsewhere. On the boat she is beyond herself with grief, “I must confess that the sorrow of parting overwhelmed me again, and I wept silently until we reached the halfway station.”35 Her idea of a promised land is connected more to the country she has just left than the country she is going to: “Today my last glimpse of Norway. I shall never again see my beloved homeland. O God of Mercy, my fatherland!”36
When Sydney E. Ahlstrom, in A Religious History of the American People, sets out to present a Protestant voice of what he calls “the inner history of immigration,” he picks just this letter by Gro Svendsen to underscore his point that “numbers cannot register the pain of severed human ties, nor the cumulative nostalgia . . . yet the tears and anguish are part of the American heritage, even though their full significance will never be known.”37 In fact he links the voice of Gro Svendsen, who of course had no status in the immigrant church, with the feelings of John Winthrop, the Puritan leader, when he saw “the English coastline sink from view in 1630.” To the church historian, Gro Svendsen is echoing an essentially American experience.
Again and again in her letters, Gro returned to her sense of guilt at having left her parents at home: “Now and then I reproach myself for leaving you alone at a time when you needed my help, but what is done is done. . . .”38 Her guilt may not have been with her always, but it was strengthened by the very act of writing. Her letters are a reservoir of the religious thoughts of a young immigrant woman: “My deepest hope is that we may meet up yonder where there will be no more parting. Farewell and may the Lord be with you. . .”
The most well-known group of letters by a Norwegian immigrant woman, Frontier Mother, published by the NorwegianAmerican Historical Association in 1950, is an immigrant chronicle and grass-roots history.
she wrote from Iowa in 1862.39 It makes perfect sense that immigrants would associate an ideal and perfect existence with the absence of farewell scenes. It is only after she has implemented heaven with the idea of “no parting” and thus comforted herself, that she is able to write the painful “farewell,” which here indicates that her very act of writing has united her momentarily with her family. The moment she puts aside her pen is indeed a time to write “farewell.”
Her letters informed readers in Norway about American politics, how the immigrants were affected by the Homestead Act of 1862,40 and how her husband left to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War. When he returned safely, “our joy was not of this earth. . . .” 41 She told about her work at home around Estherville, Iowa; how difficult it is to preserve butter through a hot summer; and how she is both a student of English and a teacher of Norwegian. “We are told that the women of America have much leisure time, but I haven’t yet met any woman who thought so!”42
She mentions her children and the death of her daughter, Sigrid, “a year and eight months old,” and continues, “My little girl was a very loveable child, mild-mannered, patient, and considerate. Therefore my bereavement is great; but God, who in his wisdom does all things well, relieved her of her pain and took her home. . . .”43 Rarely does she mention her pregnancies. In fact, when she includes as much as a whole paragraph about being pregnant, it is with her ninth child: “Next month, if God wills it, I shall have another child. This will be my ninth confinement. It is difficult these last days because I am always quite weak, but God, who has always been my help and comforter during my confinements, will surely help me this time, too. If I can only openly and sincerely put my trust in Him.”44
She survived the birth of this child, but did not survive her next. Gro Svendsen died at the age of 37, after having given birth to her tenth child. Her children’s short notes to her family in Norway after she died are also included in her chronicle. The five oldest of them assured readers in Norway that they “have learned up to the second article in the Longer Catechism.” They were, in spite of the tragedy and the distance, bound by the same texts, in the old and in the new country.
A New Sense of Faith: Drude Krog
JansonIn 1887, 40 years before Rølvaag’s novel Giants in the Earth was published in English, a Norwegian-American minister’s wife in Minneapolis published a novel in which her female immigrant heroine starts out as a saloonkeeper’s wench and ends up in a seminary to become a minister in Chicago. At the time, this was an unthinkable Lutheran life story, but in a sense it brought the religious
Drude Krog Janson (1846-1934) emigrated to Minneapolis in 1882 with her six children to be with her husband, Kristofer Janson, a Unitarian minister and prolific author. Active in the women’s suffrage movement, she wrote numerous articles for the Norwegian-American press. Returning to Europe in 1893, she published three more novels and divorced her husband. She died in Copenhagen. Courtesy of the Norwegian-American Historical Association, Northfield, Minnesota.
sensibility that we have seen in Norwegian-American women’s diaries and letters to a logical conclusion. The daughter of a Lutheran minister in Norway, Drude Krog Janson (1846–1934) was inspired by the Protestant liberalism of Emerson and Channing and, as such, she must have been an anathema in circles of the Norwegian Synod. She and her husband had left the Lutheran fold, and with all the intensity of recent converts, they ran a Norwegian-American Unitarian congregation in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Drude had the main responsibility of six children, while her husband was running the church, yet she found the time to write. The irony is that the works of her husband, who was a well-known writer at the time and among the first to secure a yearly stipend from the Norwegian government for his writing, are now close to oblivion, whereas her novel of 1887 has just been translated to English and published by the John
One of the regular departments in Saamanden (The Sower) was Kvindesagen (The Status of Women), which drew much of its material from the Women’s Journal, the organ of the American Women’s Suffrage Association. Drude Janson was involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Here Drude was writing about the aftermath of the hanging of anarchists in November 1887. Note her initials at the end of the article, inset. Saamanden, Year I, No. 7, March 1888. Vesterheim Library.
Hopkins University Press, accompanied by a whole book of critical essays about the novel.45 That is, if nothing else, sweet, posthumous revenge.
Drude’s novel, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, must be listed as a Norwegian-American immigrant novel, even if the writer was later to return to Europe. She is a rare urban bird among immigrant women writers. She was a friend of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the famous Norwegian poet who wrote to her from Rome, admitting he could not forget her white shirt sleeves! She was also a friend of the much younger writer Knut Hamsun, who spent time in their Minneapolis home. Her life was certainly different from the farm life of Gro Svendsen, yet they were both born in the 1840s.
Drude Krog Janson’s novel is a reflection of religious ideas at the time. Unlike the female writers of diaries and letters we have discussed, Drude thought of herself as a writer. Her heroine, Astrid, a young immigrant from Norway, wanders the streets of Minneapolis, where her father runs a dubious saloon business in the Norwegian-American community. She adores her deceased mother, who was once an actress, and Astrid gets involved in a theater production in Minneapolis, only to be shocked by the uncouth behavior and excessive drinking of Norwegian immigrants. When she meets Bjørnson on his public tour of the Midwest, he assists in her conversion. Astrid confesses to him that she has “this pressing demand to be a complete person, but then I’ve always been made to feel that I was only a weak woman,”46 whereupon Bjørnson to Astrid’s surprise suggests that she become a minister, “a minister like those found here in America.”47 Astrid then applies and enters a Unitarian seminary out east, with a new sense of faith.
If You Want to Write. .
.
All four female writers mentioned here shared the experience of being Norwegian-American immigrants in the Midwest during the second half of the nineteenth century. They all shared a bilateral consciousness. They had spent their girlhood and young womanhood in Norway. They wrote their American texts in the Norwegian language. At times they felt out of place in their new setting. They all raised children and worked in and around their homes in the new country. All of them found time to write. They compared their new surroundings to those they had known. All of them had been schooled in a Lutheran tradition, whether on a farm or in larger towns. All of them had to reflect on the transfer of religious traditions from one country to the other, a topic they approached differently, but with a feminine sensibility for the joy and the grief, for the realities and frailties of life.
Brenda Ueland (1891–1983) was not an immigrant, but in her writing she is wonderfully comforting to readers and writers when bouts of grief set in. Born in Minneapolis, the daughter of a Norwegian immigrant and granddaughter of a
Brenda Ueland’s crisply observed commentaries on social, political, and literary life are as timely today as when they were first written, and luckily much of her best work is still in print, thanks to Jim Perlman’s distinguished Holy Cow! Press, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. To order Ueland’s books and other titles, visit Holy Cow! Press online at <www.holycowpress.org>.
famous Norwegian farmer-politician, she had more confidence in her own writing than all the immigrant women mentioned here. She lived and worked among Americans who wrote in English, yet she shared some of the heritage with earlier Norwegian-American women writers. I met her briefly in Minneapolis in 1976, then a lady in her middle eighties. In her book If You Want to Write (1938), she argued in a very Whitmanesque way: “I have proved [!] that you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.”48 In the same book she included a section explaining why women “who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing” and urged them to keep an “honest diary.” Well said.
As I read the opening line of a prose poem Brenda Ueland published in 1945, “Under the high moon, Lake Harriet is as smooth as glass,”49 I think of Elisabeth Koren, at Washington Prairie, almost 100 years earlier, observing that “it was wild and lovely in the woods and delightfully sheltered and warm.”
Endnotes
1 The Diary of Elisabeth Koren 1853–1855, trans. and ed. David T. Nelson (Northfield, Minnesota: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1955 / Vesterheim reprint 1978). Now available in a new printing from Vesterheim.
2 Koren, 116.
3 Koren, 186.
4 Koren, 193.
5 Koren, 188.
6 Koren, 185.
7 Koren, 207.
8 Koren, 184.
9 Koren, 184.
10 Koren, 185.
11 Koren, 203.
12 Koren, 223.
13 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” [1862] in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 598.
14 Koren, 125.
15 Koren, 121.
16 Koren, 208.
17 Koren, 206.
18 Koren, 187.
19 Koren, 119.
20 Koren, 122.
21 Koren, 200.
22 Koren, 201.
23 Susanne’s letters are included in a collection of American letters from the three sisters and their husbands, entitled “Saa nær hverandre.” Ei samling Amerikabrev fra Midtvesten til Nissedal, 1850–1875, ed. Øyvind T. Gulliksen (Bø in Telemark: NAHANorge, 1999). Page references in the text will be to this volume. A preliminary and near complete English translation, “So Close to Each Other”: A Collection of America-Letters from the Midwest to Nissedal, 1850–1875 is in the archives of the Norwegian-American Historical Association, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. The letters were originally typed by a son of Susanne’s brother in Norway and given to the archives at Luther College, where they remained until they were published in Norwegian in 1999. Susanne signed her letters “Susanne Kristiansdatter.”
24 Saa nær, 90.
25 Orm Øverland, “Learning to Read Immigrant Letters: Reflections towards a Textual Theory,” Norwegian-American Essays 1996, ed. Øyvind T. Gulliksen et. al. (Oslo: NAHA-Norge), 209.
26 Saa nær, 83.
27 Saa nær, 85.
28 Saa nær, 86.
29 Lutheran Book of Worship, 1982, hymn 102.
30 Saa nær, 87.
31 Pauline Farseth and Theodore Blegen, Frontier Mother: The Letters of Gro Svendsen (Northfield, Minnesota: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1950).
32 See David A. Gerber, “The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: The Uses of Immigrant Personal Correspondence in 20th Century American Scholarship,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 16:4, 1997, 3–34.
33 See my essay “Amerikabrev som familiekrønike,” Amerikabrev (Sogndalseminaret, 2000).
34 Frontier Mother, 3-4.
35 Frontier Mother, 4.
36 Frontier Mother, 14.
37 Sidney A. Ahlstrom, in Section 45, entitled “Protestantism and the Later Immigration,” A Religious History of the American People Vol. II, (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1975), 209–211.
38 Frontier Mother, 27.
39 Frontier Mother, 11.
40 Frontier Mother, 65.
41 Frontier Mother, 69.
42 Frontier Mother, 28.
43 Frontier Mother, 130.
44 Frontier Mother, 134.
45 Drude Krog Janson, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter (Minneapolis, 1887), trans. Gerald Thorson, ed. Orm Øverland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Asbjørn Grønstad and Lene Johannesen, eds., To Become the Self One Is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson’s A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter (Oslo: Novus Press, 2005).
46 Daughter, 119.
47 Daughter, 120.
48 Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit [1938] (St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1987), 10.
49 From the Valleys to the Mountains: Midwest Poetry (Minneapolis: MFCP Book Project, 1945), 182.
About the Author
Øyvind T. Gulliksen is professor of American literature and culture at Telemark University College, Bø i Telemark, Norway. He was a visiting instructor at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 1983-1984 and 2001-2003, and he will return to teach there in the fall, 2007. In 1992 he cofounded the Society for the Study of Religion and Literature in Norway and has since served on the board of that organization. His Twofold Identities: Norwegian-American Contributions to Midwestern Literature was published in 2004. He is now editing a collection of articles by several scholars, entitled Norwegian-American Essays 2008.