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of babies is marginal in the text. There are references to Bobby’s babies, but this reference also includes mention of the degree to which such fertility has aged Bobby’s wife (203). The infant is an object of fear for Ellen, something she spends the entire novel avoiding. It is also a site of abject fear for Ellen’s mother and of severe inconvenience for the settler women who induce miscarriage, to the detriment of their health, so that they can keep up with the relentless farm work. Her mother’s suffering has shaped Ellen’s opinions about marriage. In confronting the issues of sexuality, pregnancy, and birth, Ellen finds that she is incapable of acting against what she knows, that all three result in weariness and death. Ellen baldly informs Niels, her suitor, of her reasons for refusing to marry. Paramount is her mother’s dying wish that she never marry: “Ellen, whatever you do, never let a man come near you. You are strong and big, thank God. Make your own life, Ellen, and let nobody make it for you” (112). Mrs. Amundsen’s life has been made for her. She makes no decisions for herself; she has no personal autonomy to set her course in the future or in the present. Her husband forces her to emigrate from Sweden, forces her to leave two of her children with her parents, and finally, forces himself on her, regardless of her pain and fatigue, regardless of yet another imminent pregnancy. Ellen vividly recalls overhearing her mother’s feeble protests at night against her father’s “vile, jesting, jocular urgency…the words he used to that skeleton and ghost of a woman” (112). Mrs. Amundsen copes with her pregnancies the way Mrs. Campbell suggested: by means of selfinduced abortion. Mrs. Campbell tells her, “When I’m just about as far gone as you are now, then I go and lift heavy things; or I take the plow and walk behind it for a day. In less than a week’s time the child comes; and it’s dead” (108). This, she suggests, is what “lots of women around here do” (108). Mrs. Amundsen follows her advice as it becomes necessary and prostrates herself with weakness. Mr. Amundsen then takes “a little box into the bush to bury” (111) and then rapes his wife, all the while saying of the babies, “God has been good to us…he took them” (112).10 His brutality is manifest. The babies are nothing to him. What matters is the appeasing of his sexual appetite. Ellen, having overheard her father’s repeated assaults and witnessed in her mother’s body the wreckage of too many babies, refuses to give up her power to a man who might do the same to her; she determines to make her own life. In order not to have babies, she chooses to live without a husband. Irene Gammel argues that “the 46 CHAPTER ONE mother’s legacy turns into a true discourse of power in her daughter’s life,” but it is a power that compels Ellen to reject “the role of wife-cumchild -bearer” (226). Ellen reverses her position only after Niels has married Mrs. Vogel, murdered her, and been released from prison after ten years. Grove’s description of the pathetic Mrs. Amundsen, continually inducing miscarriage and destroying her own life, is vividly realistic. Ellen’s vow to avoid her mother’s fate makes sense in light of the brutal exchanges that she witnesses between her mother and father. Her mother’s babies are unwanted, rejected in the most final manner. This is hard reality for Ellen and one that takes her years to overcome. She acknowledges to Niels at the novel’s end that her determination not to marry or have children remained firm “so long as [she] lived under the shadow of [her] mother’s life.” After all the tragedy of the novel—Ellen’s loss of her mother and Niels’s crime and punishment— there is a sudden, inexplicable change. Having lived with her choice and grown dissatisfied with it, Ellen says, “I knew then as I know now that it is my destiny and my greatest need to have children, children.… And I knew then as I know now that there is no man living on earth from whom I could accept them if not you” (217). What is to account for Ellen’s radical change of heart? She repeats the word...

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