Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal

Introduction

vii 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 viii . . . Introduction 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 1. Nan Bentzen Skille, Inside the Gate: Sigrid Undset’s Life at Bjerkebæk, trans. Tiina Nunnally (Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co., 2009), 174. Introduction . . . ix 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. x . . . Introduction 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...