Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal

by Sigrid Undset

  The translator thanks the National Endowment for the Arts for a 2004 NEA Translation Fellowship, which made this translation possible, and Nan Bentzen Skille, who read the translation in manuscript and offered helpful suggestions.

  Originally published as Fru Marta Oulie by H. Aschehoug & Co. in Kristiania (Oslo), Norway, in 1907

  Introduction copyright 2014 by Jane Smiley

  English translation copyright 2014 by Tiina Nunnally

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Undset, Sigrid, 1882–1949. [Fru Marta Oulie. English]

  Marta Oulie: a novel of betrayal / Sigrid Undset; Introduction by Jane Smiley; Translated by Tiina Nunnally.

  ISBN 978-0-8166-9252-1 (pb)

  1. Europe—History—Fiction. I. Nunnally, Tiina, 1952– translator. II. Title. PT8950.U5F713 2014

  839.823'72—dc232013046280

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Footnotes

  Part I

  March 26, 1902

  April 2, 1902

  April 3, 1902

  June 22, 1902

  June 25, 1902

  July 3, 1902

  July 20, 1902

  July 21, 1902

  July 22, 1902

  August 7, 1902

  August 10, 1902

  August 20, 1902

  Part II

  New Year’s Day, 1903

  January 3, 1903

  January 8, 1903

  February 3, 1903

  March 8, 1903

  March 12, 1903

  March 19, 1903

  April 8, 1903

  April 12, 1903

  Part III

  Lillerud, July 1904

  Introduction

  Jane Smiley

  When she began her debut novella, Fru Marta Oulie, in the summer of 1906, Sigrid Undset had just turned twenty-four. She had submitted a previous historical work to a prominent publisher in Denmark and been rejected, so she took up a subject that was very current: how women are to arrange their lives, how they should think of themselves, and how their inner lives, both intellectual and emotional, should fit into their existence. Marta Oulie is a married woman in her thirties with four children who has been unfaithful to her husband with her cousin. She narrates her story as a series of first-person diary entries. Sigrid Undset was an unmarried woman in her early twenties who had no children. Her first book cannot have been based on personal experience, but she embraced this subject and poured so much effort and feeling into it that twenty years later, when she was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the committee “focused on her debut novel . . . and on Kristin Lavransdatter, praising the author for her extraordinary power and originality, both in her examination of the human soul and as a storyteller.”1 Undset was not an autobiographical writer but a speculative, inquisitive one; her genius was empathy, the ability to enter into the mind of someone unlike herself (male or female, modern or medieval) and to body forth the feelings and the perceptions of that character, thereby reaffirming that human beings can and should understand each other across the barriers of time, geography, age, and gender.

  But Marta was not born in a vacuum. During the first years of the twentieth century, the proper role of women was under discussion in the city of Kristiania (later Oslo). Feminist ideas were popular, and they included issues of sexuality and reproduction. The debate could be acrimonious. Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, though twenty-one years old at the turn of the century, was well on its way to becoming the most frequently produced play of the twentieth century. Writers such as Gunnar Heiberg [“Balkonen” (“The Balcony,” 1894) and “Kjærlighedens tragedie” (“Love’s Tragedy,” 1904)] and Hulda Garborg [Kvinden skabt af manden (Woman Created by Man, 1904) and Fru Evas dagbog (Mrs. Eva’s Diary, 1905)] initiated the debate, but they were a generation older than Undset. Theater, newspapers, and literature were all afire, and Marta waded in with her bold first sentence: “I have been unfaithful to my husband.”

  Readers in the twenty-first century, inured to movies, plays, and fiction about infidelity, and for whom divorce is a routine social issue (even if a personal crisis), may be more shocked by Marta’s other experiences—the death of her husband, apparently the icon of strength and beauty, from tuberculosis within months (and no one even imagines a cure); her affair with her own first cousin; her isolation with no one to confide in and nowhere to turn when her story is finished. But Marta’s voice retains its power and intimacy, and we experience her uncertainty and despair step by step as events unfold and she reviews her life. Undset’s ability to evoke the immediacy of Marta’s emotions, and the settings in which they play themselves out, is one of her signal talents, one that would blossom in her mature works, the books she wrote after she encountered romantic passion, marital disappointment, and maternal difficulties.

  Sigrid Undset was born in Denmark in May 1882, the daughter of archaeologist Ingvald Undset and his Danish wife, Anna Maria Charlotte Gyth. Ingvald Undset was a successful and productive scholar who specialized in the study of Iron Age Europe. He worked at the Museum of National Antiquities in Kristiania and received a stipend for his work from the Norwegian government. After falling ill on a trip to Rome in 1882, he died at the age of forty when Sigrid was eleven, leaving a wife and three daughters. Undset took a secretarial course and went to work at the age of sixteen, but she was ambitious and curious; while holding her first job, she worked on a historical novel, set in the Middle Ages, undoubtedly inspired by her father’s studies and exploring classic themes of Norse literature, including rape, revenge, and pride.

  Her next book (and the first published), Fru Marta Oulie, achieved the best kind of success for a young writer: upon publication, it made money and generated controversy. Undset was praised for her protagonist’s up-to-date, natural, and conversational voice and for her talent in exploring her characters’ idiosyncrasies. Some critics found Marta too modern and too self-involved; others thought her honesty made her sympathetic. The effect on Undset was inspirational: she wrote a friend that she was full of ideas for more books and pleased with her earnings (600 kroner). She published ten books in the next twelve years, including Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (Gunnar’s Daughter, 1909). Jenny (1911) and Vaaren (Spring, 1914) explored similar themes as Fru Marta Oulie. In 1920, at the age of thirty-eight, Undset published the first volume of what is considered her greatest work, Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway—the work that earned her the Nobel Prize in 1928.

  Literary and popular success enabled Sigrid Undset to shape her own life in a way that Marta cannot. In 1909, Undset went to Rome, where she met and fell in love with Norwegian artist Anders Castus Svarstad, who was thirteen years older than she was and already married, with three children. They married three years later, after his divorce, and lived for a while in Kristiania (though Anders spent time pursuing his artistic vocation in Rome and Paris). In 1919, the family was evicted from their apartment. Although they had contracted for another place to live, they could not, for practical reasons, move into it, and Undset, pregnant with her third child, took the train to Lillehammer, then something of an artist’s
colony. There she found her future home, an old-fashioned timbered house on a little more than an acre on the outskirts of town. She purchased the property one year later with profits from the first volume of Kristin Lavransdatter, Kransen (The Wreath). For the next twenty years, Undset devoted her life to rearing her children, writing her books (seventeen volumes, including the second and third parts of Kristin Lavransdatter and another set, Olav Audunssøn i Hestviken and Olav Audunssøn og hans børn, which are usually published in English as a tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken).

  Undset’s marriage to Anders Svarstad was beset with difficulties that somewhat resembled those suffered by Marta Oulie. Svarstad proved neither faithful nor reliable as a husband. He did not care to live in Lillehammer, and for the most part he left the care of the children to Undset, a responsibility that was especially challenging because their daughter, Maren, had severe learning disabilities from birth. Even before her marriage was annulled in 1924, Undset was living Marta Oulie’s life—supporting herself as a single mother with children. But in the two decades since writing Marta Oulie, Undset had answered the questions that she leaves unresolved at the end of her first novella.

  Perhaps the most powerful section of Marta Oulie is after Otto’s death. Marta has found marriage frustrating. Her husband, for whom she felt such early passion, has loved her faithfully but not understood her, or seemed to want to. Issues of taste, lifestyle, and intellect that compose Marta’s sense of who she is mean nothing to him, and so she has the affair with Henrik. After Otto dies (never knowing of the affair), Henrik tells Marta that perhaps he has a prior claim to her love, since he has loved her his entire life; he feels her marriage to Otto was her seminal betrayal. Henrik would like to marry her, support her, re-create the family life with her that she has lost. Marta, wracked with guilt, cannot allow such a thing, and it is clear at the end that she does not know how to proceed. The final image in Marta Oulie is an injured child staring obsessively at her injury. The ending is evocative but indicates the limits of Undset’s twenty-four-year-old imagination. In 1924, at the age of forty-two, Sigrid Undset did understand how to move forward. Not only did she keep writing and developing her property (especially her gardens), she also converted (scandalously for her time and place) to Catholicism. For the next twenty-five years, she was actively involved in the church, and she was sincere and industrious about constructing her life according to the precepts of faith and good works; when she received the Nobel Prize, for example, she donated the financial award to three charitable foundations. Her conversion (from agnosticism, although she was a Lutheran; we may read Marta’s lack of faith as resembling that of her creator) caused considerable scandal in Norway, since Lutheranism was the state religion. There was no Catholic church in Lillehammer, so Undset used a building she had brought to her property for services. Her conversion seemed animated by, and did further animate, her literary work.

  An author’s life and his or her writing are always in dialogue with one another, especially when the author is, like Sigrid Undset, inquisitive, speculative, ready to do research. An author writes a novel, but the novel may indeed convince the author of something that he or she was wondering about when the subject presented itself. After writing David Copperfield, for example, Charles Dickens decided that his marriage was over and constructed a wall between his room and his wife’s, then left her. The idea of Marta Oulie spoke to the young Sigrid Undset perhaps at first because of her father’s death and her own adolescence as the daughter of a single mother, for whom the issues of female identity were of primary importance. She could explore this topic, but she could not solve the problem, though she returned to it over and over. In the end, her definition of female identity—at least regarding her own—was based on hard work, faith, and charity. Marta Oulie is an unusually sophisticated and frank book for a young writer—shocking in its day, prophetic in hindsight, and well worth reading.

  Footnotes

  1 Inside the Gate: Sigrid Undset’s Life at Bjerkebæk, Marta Oulie

  Part I

  I have been unfaithful to my husband.

  I write that down and sit and stare at the words, which fill my thoughts. The same way I once wrote Otto’s name and stared at it: Otto Oulie, Otto Oulie, Otto Oulie.

  March 26, 1902

  Otto’s letters arrive as precisely as Thursday and Saturday arrive. He’s in good spirits and writes that things are progressing well. After I read them, I’m always left with the same feeling of disappointment. They’re so impersonal, even though he almost always writes about the children and our home, and then a little about life up there in the sanitarium. But he might as well be talking about some other home and other children.

  I’m ashamed of myself for thinking about things like that—I focus my attention on his businesslike penmanship and businesslike tone. Yet from every single letter I can sense that he is longing for all of us, my poor boy, and that he loves us.

  Incidentally, I can’t seem to put together a single natural-sounding or unrestrained letter. I write only about the children, but I can see how badly my letters are written. Otto probably doesn’t notice.

  April 2, 1902

  Otto’s letter today was more melancholy than any of the previous ones. He is longing terribly for home. He says that he spent all afternoon reading through the old letters from me and the boys, looking at our photographs. “I kiss the pictures of all of you every single evening. The little photo that Henrik took of you and Einar at the cabin hangs over my bed, but I take it down and kiss it every evening just before I turn off the light.”

  He says that I must come to visit him at Easter. Yes, my dear, I will certainly come. Oh, I do long for you, too, Otto. But what I long for is the impossible. It’s something that I would give my life and my soul to have undone. Oh, to have a free, healthy, clear conscience! Then nothing could steal my courage away from me—no, you would gain strength and hope and vitality with every word I wrote or spoke to you. I would be both father and mother to the children while you were away.

  Then I wouldn’t have a single thought for myself, only for my dear ones and for you, Otto, wishing that you would regain your health. I feel so wretched about the fact that I’m always going around brooding and thinking about my own problems. But I can’t let them go even for an instant. And the situation is as bad today as when it was fresh, or perhaps even worse, because I have to bear it all alone, lock it inside so it lies like a cancerous wound on my spirit. And I’m reminded of it twenty times a day. I find it unbearable when Otto writes to ask whether I’ve seen anything of Henrik recently, whether he often comes to see us, and the like. He talks about him in almost every single letter. And then all those greetings to Åse: “my little Sweetheart that Father has hardly seen.” He always wants to hear everything about her.

  God knows what would happen if one day I told Otto: “Åse is not your child. Henrik and I, the two of us, about whom you have believed the best in the world and loved the most, we have betrayed you. Henrik is Åse’s father.”

  I don’t know what he would do. I can’t even imagine. I know only that his life would be destroyed so thoroughly that nothing would be left of it. Where would he turn with such a boundless, appalling grievance? The fact that we betrayed him, while he himself was so faithful, painfully faithful in every way. Ever since we were married, I’ve seen how he lives for his home, for me and the children—as if we were his creditors, and it was our right to take every hour that he could spare and every øre he earned.

  I don’t think he even really believes that anything of that sort—infidelity and adultery—could happen to him. On the periphery of his life a man might occasionally “seduce a woman” or betray his wife, or marry a “slut,” but Otto’s view of things is terribly uncomplicated. About such cases he would always say that he or she ought to be shot or stuffed into a sack and tossed into the Aker River.

  Poor Otto. And poor me.

  April 3, 1902

  I’ve begun keeping a diary
again. I also kept a diary when I fell in love with Otto, but back then I didn’t manage to write much. At the time I didn’t feel like sitting down and thinking about myself.

  In the past I was always shocked when I read books that claimed a woman could be happy only if she devoted herself completely to another person. Now I say yes and amen to that, as I do to all the other hackneyed and worn-down truths that I rebelled against in my youth.

  Now I understand why a criminal confesses, and why Catholic women become addicted to confession.

  I once said that I would be capable of committing a murder and continuing to live with my own conscience as confidante and judge to punish or pardon me. Good Lord, now I go around thinking about confessing to someone. I lie awake and ponder such matters all through the night. For instance, what if one of the children, as an adult, should someday end up in great mental anguish and confess to his mother—would I then tell the young person everything, to frighten and warn and strengthen and help and save him? How awful.

  It would be so refreshing to sit in a confessional and spill out everything to a priest behind a grating and then go home, relieved and cleansed, with a clear conscience. Or to be able to serve my sentence in jail.

  Instead, I’m sitting here now, writing page after page. And good Lord, what a miserable wretch I’ve become! I had imagined that I would think less about it in the daytime and lie awake less often at night. To some extent, that’s true, but it’s more likely because I’ve had the Easter cleaning to tend to.

  Tomorrow I leave for Lillehammer.

  June 22, 1902

  I’m trying to write again because I can no longer tolerate my own thoughts. It feels as if some superhuman imagination had thought everything out and made the situation as unbearable and painful and upsetting as possible. I’m almost at the point of being converted to believe in Providence again.