BRITT ANDERSEN: HAMSUN AND THE NEW GENDER RELATIONSHIP

Just before and after the year 1900, fiction became a central arena for exploring identity, gender, and relationships.

Hamsun is called our foremost love poet. In Pan , Mysteries , Victoria , Rosa and Benoni , the man's love is the theme. In Norway, no one had previously depicted the feelings of the man in love in such a sensual way. Here, love exists on the outskirts of society, often on a collision course with authority and class barriers. In Pan and Mysteries , the forest is the place for erotic encounters. Desire permeates everything, spring and light intoxicate nature, animals and people.

Reading Pan creates joy, but also leads to boredom. The epilogue in Pan evokes discomfort. In the shift from Glahn as narrator to a hunting companion as narrator, the novel changes. The journey into the Indian jungle leads into a darkness of (self)destruction and death.

The background is the breakup with Edvarda. Edvarda rejects Glahn, and rejection is something Hamsun's male characters are vulnerable to: "[...] as soon as she feels exposed to you, she will say to herself: Look, there stands this man looking at me and thinks he has won the game! And she will, with a look or a cold word, take you ten miles away."

The theme here is the battle of the sexes. Male power changes to impotence. Not getting the support that the beloved's overestimation provides is disastrous for Glahn's self-image. In his unconscious, the woman is threatening.

There is a psychosexual aggressiveness in the texts of male modernists around the turn of the last century. The women of reality threatened the privileges of men, their right to define and control. In Pan, Glahn has the point of view; Edvarda never has the point of view. “When you came I had already chastised her for a year,” the doctor says to Glahn, “it began to work, she cried with pain and annoyance, she had become a more reasonable person.” Edvarda’s father, Mr. Mack, imposes his will on his daughter, who is to be married off.

In the epilogue , which takes place in the jungles of India, Glahn has a comrade kill himself. In this way, he punishes both his hated self and Edvarda, who has revealed that she longs for Glahn.

Both Pan and Mysteries end in suicide. The suicide in Pan is foreshadowed after a dance at Sirilund, where Edvarda rejects Glahn, whereupon he inflicts a gunshot wound on himself. This image of a wounded self is reinforced when Glahn shoots the dog Æsop. Edvarda had asked for Æsop. At parting, Glahn gives her a dog's corpse. The grotesque act can be understood as a reaction to male wounding and vulnerability.

The latter half of Hamsun's writing is characterized by wounded men and a moralizing narrative attitude towards the new woman. The Last Joy (1912), The Women at the Water Fountain (1920) and The Last Chapter (1923) are examples of works that deal with the new gender relationship. Male characters who are impotent and castrated indicate that something is wrong with masculinity.

In the Last Chapter, the main character is simply called the suicide. He lives in a sanatorium (a picture of a “sick time”), and associates with the skin-sick and gradually “snow-blind” Mr. Anton Moss. The two young (!) men, one physically and the other mentally damaged, are in short Hamsun’s picture of a wounded masculinity. In the shadow of women’s emancipation, men appear who are victims of “the new woman,” a term that emerged around the turn of the last century, and was associated with women who demanded the right to education, a profession, the right to vote, and eroticism on their own terms.

At a time when the middle class was having fewer children, Hamsun also wrote about the great importance of “breeding”. The women in his universe are often persuaded away from the freedom of the city to a life as wives and mothers in the countryside. The decline in the birth rate from 1880 to 1930 was a theme throughout Europe. Policeman Geissler in Markens grøde from 1917 claims that we are “all for breeding”. In Konene ved vannposten from 1923 the male protagonist is castrated, but since his wife is unfaithful to men from the upper class, he still becomes a father. At the same time, the men who were considered to have the greatest biological value become fathers of “illegitimate children” with brown eyes. The castrate, who believes he is the father, is “blue-eyed”. He lives in a kind of matriarchy, where his wife and his own old mother rule. As a social satire, it says that men are deprived of all power in modern times.

Finally, the castrato is praised for being "of the enduring human substance". As the "father" of many children, he has ensured the survival of the nation. Hamsun's satires on population policy enter into dialogue with contemporary texts, including the women's rights activist Katti Anker Møller, who argued that women should control reproduction. She was also behind the "Castberg Children's Laws" from 1915, a very radical law that gave naming and inheritance rights to so-called illegitimate children. Hamsun ironizes this when the doctor in The Women at the Water Tap tracks down and accuses upper-class men of being biological fathers in public, and the castrato collects money from the biological fathers. The doctor, who discusses topics such as breeding and good ancestors, is married to a women's rights activist. Neither of them wants children. If she gets pregnant, she will have an abortion. Katti Anker Møller wrote against the criminalization of abortion, and for women's freedom.

But in Hamsun's culturally critical novels, the new woman is persuaded back to motherhood, a theme until Hamsun's last novel, The Ring is Broken from 1936. There, the new woman is described in the next generation, and then as a flapper feminist. She was known from American films; with short hair, cigarettes, cars and champagne parties, she became a modern icon. But as the woman became part of the modern, she was paradoxically forced back to the traditional. Hamsun's wandering novels describe that his wanderers can only live in exile when the woman is taken back to the countryside and has children. Her traditional role becomes a guarantee of the wanderer's freedom and belonging.

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Britt Andersen is a professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Literature, NTNU, Trondheim.