Self-Reliance and Modern Illusion: O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth

O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth is usually read as a novel about immigrant homesteading and Norwegian ethnicity, but the novel also situates problems of religious faith against the prairie frontier in its conflict between the pioneer Per Hansa and his wife, Beret. Seeking to reconcile these diverse themes, this article suggests that Giants is about the modern self. Drawing upon Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, it analyzes Beret and Per Hansa as types of premodern and modern selves, their conflict an interrogation of modern secular self-reliance. It then applies Søren Kierkegaard's argument for the need for God to Per Hansa and Beret to evaluate the authenticity of both selves. Kierkegaard suggests that Per Hansa is inauthentic because he worships unacknowledged gods outside himself but that Beret's spiritual paralysis is equally compromised. This conclusion implies that Giants is best understood as a sustained irresolution about the authenticity of both premodernity and modernity, which broadens its scope and enriches other approaches to the novel.