The Poetry of Agnes Mathilde Wergeland

Abstract

by LARRY EMIL SCOTT 9 The Poetry of Agnes Mathilde Wergeland THE of philosophy, CAREER of Agnes once Mathilde provided Wergeland, the source doctor for a of philosophy, once provided the source for a small flood of assorted commentary. To some, like Maren Michelet, Wergeland was a heroine of our philistine age, her years as professor of French, Spanish, and history at the University of Wyoming finally providing adequate recompense for many years of undeserved hardship.1 To the feminist critic Gina Krog, Agnes Wergeland was the undaunted champion of women's rights, struggling, ultimately with success, to earn her rightful place in the overwhelmingly masculine academic world.2 Still others, Katharine Merrill3 for instance, tend to find a strange combination of radical mind and conservative, introverted temperament in her, a combination which made it almost physically impossible for her to "sell" herself or even to present her accomplishments in the best possible light.4 It is not the purpose here to treat Wergeland's more public career as a champion of woman suffrage, first in her native Norway and then in America. Rather, the intent is to examine the inner life of the woman who was among the finest poets to write in Norwegian in 273 Larry Emil Scott America. Her verse has a depth of feeling, range of content , and technical virtuosity that few of her fellow countrymen matched. Her two substantial volumes Amerika og andre digte (America and Other Poems) in 19 125 and the posthumously published Efterladte digte (Posthumous Poems)6 - are among the gems of Scandinavian-American literature, ranking with the finest of Rplvaag's prose in skill and sophistication. Yet Wergeland the poet has attracted virtually no attention from either Norwegian scholars or American, since, as an immigrant writer who remained faithful to her native tongue for her verse, she belongs to neither literary tradition . Even more unfairly, some of Wergeland's most interesting poetry, for example "Pilgrimen" (The Pilgrim ), has been cited to demonstrate her Lutheran orthodoxy as a poet, a position which this study will attempt to modify. Furthermore, Wergeland's poetry provides valuable clues to the conflicting faces she presented to the world and goes a long way toward resolving some of the thornier problems in interpretation of what it was, exactly, that she hoped to accomplish in her public life and how well she ultimately succeeded in that quest. While she was obviously proud to be a Wergeland, the name haunted Agnes all her life, both in Norway and in America. Her father was a poor and unsuccessful cousin of the visionary poet Henrik Wergeland and his daughter, the pioneer feminist, Camilla Collett. Young Agnes knew that hers was hardly the illustrious branch of the family. Despite the great successes of her famous relatives, Agnes Wergeland felt that hers was a starcrossed family: "A Wergeland was never especially respected in Norway, and I am as 'contemptible' as all the others; ... [I too] follow the star that characterizes them! "7 The sense of exile weighed heavily on her; her sentimental yearnings for Norway thus take on darker 274 AGNES MATHILDE WERGELAND dimensions. Her native land had no room for her and rejected her with finality. Her enormous capacity for love at the ideal level of patriotism was thus thwarted or, rather, unrequited. So, just as her desire for intimacy and warm human intercourse was denied her on the social level, she seemed to feel that her family name made her a kind of political pariah. The way out thus had to be an interior one. What she did realize and practiced all her life may well have been inspired by her brilliant ancestors. First of all, from Camilla Collett she got her stubborn drive to overcome any barriers that her sex might cause to be raised against her. Secondarily, from Collett also derived the corollary, almost automatic membership in the active ranks of women fighting for their rights in the larger "kvindesaken" (women's movement). But Henrik Wergeland - mystic and poet, activist and politician, reformer and public speaker - perhaps influenced her toward the interior, the spiritual, away from the vigor and tumult of radicalism.8 She had a visionary sense of...