The Norwegian author Ebba Haslund’s primary interest was the social situation and conditions of life for the middle-class woman in post-war Norway. She defended housewives, but at the same time she could see how increased prosperity and modern technology reduced the scope of their undertaking. She therefore not only defended the woman’s right to be a normal housewife but also her right to deviate from traditional gender patterns.She shows the reader the daily lives of her women. But by means of this everyday picture, she also reflects the conflicts and contradictions of a societal apparatus – many readers have thus found her books relevant. She not only made her voice heard via her pen; for many years she was an active chair for Den Norske Forfatterforening (the Norwegian Authors’ Union), and her morning causeries on Norwegian radio were very popular with the listeners.
Tag: Causeries
Torborg Nedreaas made her publishing debut at a relatively late age – thirty-nine years old – with two collections of short stories. She was immediately recognised as a writer of note. The short story genre is as if made for her sure stylistic sense of sculpting a central event into a defined textual parameter. She is consistent in following her selected characters, always sticks to the chronology, and rarely plots parallel storylines. The reader should not be puzzled, reading should not be like solving a rebus, reasoned the author.She writes about outsiders and ordinary people under the yoke of war and capitalism, and she writes from various vantage points. She is concerned with the humbler members of the community, and these are often women and children – the weakest groups.She moves between the working class and the middle class, and major events such as the two World Wars and the inter-war period of the twentieth century form the foundation for her characters’ development and inter-personal relationships. The role of love in the individual’s prospects to act, to do something about personal circumstances and those of others, is always a central consideration.
Henrik Ibsen did not always go unchallenged. On the contrary, several of the women of the Modern Breakthrough felt provoked to correct or revise Ibsen’s original text, and time after time his portraits of women turn up in their plays and short stories, but rewritten on the basis of a different horizon of understanding. Two obvious examples from 1882 of such a female, partly subversive dialogue with Ibsen are Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler’s short story “Tvifvel” (Doubt), and Alfhild Agrell’s play Räddad (Saved).These texts clearly show how Ibsen’s portrayal of women served as a challenge, a set piece that had to be tested and partly destroyed in order for the two female authors to arrive at a more credible story.