4 Rolvaag's Beret Revisited: A Rejoinder by Harold P. Simonson The 1995 Ole E. Rolvaag International Seminar, held in Sandnessjoen , Norway - a short ferryboat ride from his birthplace on the island of Donna - demonstrated that interest in the novelists life and work continues unabated. Conference participants from both sides of the Atlantic reiterated Rolvaag s position today as a major writer whose relevance grows ever greater. Another indication of his importance is the lively, ongoing debate among scholars and critics who publish new insights about this Norwegian- American writer, sometimes to augment earlier ones and other times to propose radically different interpretations that trumpet an opposing viewpoint as out-and-out wrong. Of course professional courtesy requires assuasive caution as when Kristoffer E Paulson (in Norwegian-American Studies , 34), calls my own critical argument in Prairies Within: The Tragic Trilogy of Ole Rßlvaag (1987) "attractive and compelling . . . admirable, profound and penetrating" but "wrong."1 The controversy centers on the characters Per Hansa and his wife Beret in Rolvaag s deservedly most popular novel Giants in the Earth. In answering Paulson my intention is not to review the plethora of critical assessments published since the English version of the novel appeared in 1927. A useful summary of this nearly 70-year largess can be found in 0yvindT. Gulliksens Sandnessjoen paper, "Rolvaag-kritikken fra 1930-âra til idag" ("Rolvaag141 142 Harold P. Simonson critiques from 1930 to date).2 Suffice it to say that the common approaches to this novel and its major characters have focused on the themes of immigration and the concomitant social and psychological tensions arising when the old cultural ways clash with the new. Within this context my contribution to the debate highlights the religious issue. Thus I necessarily concentrate upon Beret who, in my judgment, projects the authors deepest insights as the protagonist who lives to the end of the trilogy, including Peder Victorious (1929) and Their Fathers' God (1931), whereas her husband meets his cold death in the final pages of volume one. Nevertheless , it is in Giants where the monumental issues arise, reaching tragic dimensions that reverberate throughout the subsequent novels. I argue that Beret is the person who bears the tragic sense of things. She feels deep in her bones that her husband's dream to do the impossible, to build his kingdom in America, is doomed to failure - moreover, that all such dreams carry retributive consequences . Pride costs a person's soul. Rolvaag showed no reluctance in suggesting it can cost a nation's as well. He knew the tradition well: the Faustian wager, the myth of hubris extending back to Greek tragedy, and the Biblical sin of exchanging God's will for one's own. Paulson finds a classical pattern shaping Giants , its "rising action " represented by Per Hansa 's land-taking and culminating in the birth of son PederVictorious on Christmas Day, and the "falling action" completed in the father's death.3 Within this rising/falling action Paulson also sees "circular" patterns of death/rebirth, the chief "death" being Beret's breakdown and her "rebirth" her restored mental and spiritual health, attributed to "the divine love of God and the human love of her husband" (P, 203). His allimportant point is this: the pattern of circularity stops when Beret's "authentic religious experience evolves into religious pride, a religious pride that finally precipitates Per Hansa's death" (P, 203). Her spiritual pride breaks the governing cycle and mitigates Per Hansa's responsibility for his own undoing, a conclusion undermining Paulson's claim that classical tragedy informs the novel. More important to this discussion is the onus he places upon Beret, whose religious experience, which brought peace and joy to Rolvaags Beret Revisited 143 her angst-darkened soul, supposedly changed into cranky pietism. He says she becomes a "fanatical believer in the forms of religion"; the testimony for such behavior he takes from the neighboring homesteader Syvert Tonseten, a man of shallow perception, who "cannot stand the new Beret" (P, 210). In concluding his analysis Paulson does two notable things. First , he cites Beret s "narrow dependence on religious forms and rituals" (P, 210) as the reason she sends...