himself for Beret's condition, he still does not abandon the tenets of his dream of frontier conquest, nor does he embrace a religious faith of humility. For him, human vitality and ambition are not sins. To reject these elements in the human character would be to reject two of his most fundamental attributes. In fact, he plants these characteristics in his youngest son by naming him Peder Victorious. True to form, though, he does not consider the effect of such a name on his wife. She is deeply offended and terrified by it, because she maintains that no one can be victorious on the prairie and any belief otherwise proves one is in Satan's grip. He later realizes his mistake, but, even so, when the kindly minister criticizes him for his complaints by saying, "You are not willing to beat your cross with humility!" Per Hansa replies defiantly, "No, I am not ... We find other things to do out here than to carry crosses!" Despite his guilt and self-recriminations, he does not alter his way of viewing the world or his place in it in order to understand his wife better. He is a man who directly confronts physical challenges, but the subtleties of the emotional realm remain beyond his reach, much to the detriment of himself and his family.

Beret, too, suffers from an inability to alter her perception of the world, leading to her own debilitating unhappiness. Like her husband, Beret sees plains life as an opportunity. But for her it is an opportunity for people to sink to the level of animals, violating all that is sacred. She cannot see the prairie as beautiful or fecund; it is only terrible, the devil's instrument to lure people into baseness. She views the entire Western Movement as a destructive unleashing of human appetite: "Now she saw it clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old hunger of the poor after human happiness had been unloosed." While to Per Hansa and the other settlers such an event is cause for celebration, for Beret it is cause for distress. Throughout the book, Beret is the epitome of a traditionalist, believing completely in the religious tenets of her upbringing and the superiority of Norwegian life. Giving in to human passions and rejecting one's familial obligations in order to chase after elusive treasure, as she has done with Per Hansa, invite God's wrath. Indeed, she views their lives on the plains as a punishment for her own sins of sexual passion, filial betrayal, and excessive pride, and the intensity of her convictions prevents her from critically confronting her own responses and feelings of impending doom. As a result, she cannot truly see the good in others or in herself.

The plain, Per Hansa's reputation for amazing exploits, and his and Beret's irreconcilable perceptions all help lead to the final tragedy in the book: Per Hansa's death. He sees the proposed journey to find the minister as the height of folly because no man could survive in such a blizzard. In addition, he does not think Hans Olsa, a good man, needs a minister. Beret, on the other hand, believes that the dangers to Hans Olsa's soul far outweigh the dangers to her husband's life. In her mind, one cannot stand idly by and watch a man be condemned to damnation. To do so would be committing a grievous sin that could bring damnation upon oneself. Added to the pressures from his wife, Per Hansa must contend with Hans Olsa and Sorine's fearful pleadings and belief in his near invincibility. When Per Hansa acquiesces, he is not convinced about the lightness of his errand, unlike his other dangerous ventures. Instead, he is angry at Beret and resigned to do his best, though he seems to know he is walking to his death. His last thoughts, fittingly, are of his home and family as he bids himself to "Move on!—Move on!", driving himself forward, as he always does. In the end, Per Hansa is killed by a combination of his anger, pride, and sympathy; his wife's singular convictions; his friends' fears and unqualified belief in him; and the vicious might of the plain. Yet, despite his defeat, he dies still adhering to his visions, as the reader sees in his Westward death gaze.

While the novel contains a number of tones, it ultimately strikes more of a naturalistic than a romantic chord. If one sees the book as romantic, then the "Giants" in the title reflect the heroic stature of the Dakota settlers, thereby glorifying Western expansion. Yet the romantic tones in the book derive mainly from Per Hansa's praises and condemnations of the plains, as well as his sense of his own vibrant individuality. This sensibility comes through in Rolvaag's prose, but he counters it with darker, more enduring perceptions of frontier life. Individuals in the book are always at the mercy of their environment. Thus, Rolvaag implies, the "Giants" of the title refer to the natural forces (or trolls) working to prevent the success of the settlers' endeavors. Rolvaag's strongest message may be, though, that the characters suffer because of their own flawed characters. Per Hansa, for instance, is so caught by his visions that he allows his wife to suffer greatly. Even after recognizing his failings, he does not forsake his ambitions, showing the implacable grip of one's nature and dreams. Therefore, as critic Paul Reigstad asserts, the "Giants" could include the traits of the settlers themselves that, whether caused by inclination or upbringing, blind them to others' needs and to their own destructive shortcomings. Through this approach to his subject, Rolvaag identifies the settling of the plains as a widespread hunger for autonomy, adventure, and material prosperity whose silent costs often outweighed its loudly celebrated gains.

Source: Darren Felty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

It's nothing but a common, ordinary romantic lie that we are "captains of our own souls." Nothing but one of those damned poetic phrases. Just look back over your own life and see how much you have captained!

This statement by Ole Rolvaag, less about fate than the human error of false pride, points us in a rewarding direction for an interpretation of Giants in the Earth. Concerned with hamartia, irreconcilable values, and dramatically rising to state man's universal predicament, Rolvaag's masterpiece is fundamentally a tragedy. Henry Steele Commager [in "The Literature of the Pioneer West," Minnesota History, VIII (December, 1927)] and Vernon Louis Parrington [in Main Currents in American Thought, III (New York, 1930)] suggested this possibility in 1927, shortly after the book's publication. But neither Commager nor Parrington shed much light on Rolvaag's methods for establishing Giants as a tragedy. Since those early days, the considerable scholarship on this important writer has pretty much moved to do battle on other fronts. Yet, by understanding Giants as a tragedy, I believe we can resolve much critical debate over the novel, especially about Beret and Per Hansa, perceive the book's real form, motivations, and complex thematic unity; and finally, appreciate Rolvaag's intention and considerable accomplishments as an artist.

Rolvaag develops Giants in the Earth as a tragedy by several methods, to be noted now and developed throughout this paper. In terms of genre, tragedy becomes established with a process of definition by negation. Rolvaag includes many aspects and conventions of both saga and epic, but then undercuts both by parodying them, and by having the tragic aspects increasingly dominate as his novel progresses. In terms of form, Giants has ten chapters of five well-defined acts, adhering to the tragic rhythm of exposition, conflict, crisis, and catastrophe. Unities of time and place appear with the predictable seasons, tragic winter being dominant, and almost all action takes place within the Norwegian prairie settlements. Imitations of Ibsen's dramas and Shakespearian tragedy abound, hardly surprising since from early youth Ole Rolvaag had been an avid reader of great literature. (He went on, of course, to become a literature professor at St. Olaf College from 1906 to 1931.) Finally, for the key issue of tragic recognition, Rolvaag fashions out of his Norwegian milieu and literary consciousness, a particularly American awareness....

It seems widely agreed that tragedy emphasizes free will and individual responsibility, rather than inevitability and an external determinism, so happy in the saga or epic, but so dismal in naturalism. A tragic work typically presents a chain of events leading to catastrophe, often depicting a fall from high or successful station because of the hero's pride or hybris, an apt description of Per Hansa's life journey and fate. Some kind of chorus or community voice may function as spokesman for society's viewpoint and values. In Giants in the Earth the chorus not only advises but judges. As a community, they support Per; but later, as a congregation, they start to rally behind Beret.

Giants also has a tragic rhythm—nothing so episodic as scenes constructed and then struck, but a thematic movement of wax and wane. The exposition, the establishment of this Norwegian colony on the far edge of the prairie, is long, almost three and a half chapters. About midway in Chapter IV, "What the Waving Grass Revealed," Beret's disaffiliation and conflict with Per begins to become the book's dominant issue. Beret's withdrawal and conflict become deeper, even shocking, until a crisis is reached in Chapter VIII, "The Power of Evil in High Places." After a chapter of reprieve or counter-action, the catastrophe is consummated in the final chapter with its outrageous title. Before we can understand the recognition phase, the final tragic aspect in this book, we must see the terms of this tragedy.

Professor Harold Simonson [in "The Tenacity of History: Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth," paper presented at the Twelfth Annual Meeting, Western Literature Association, October 7, 1977, Sioux Falls, South Dakota] has suggested that Giants in the Earth presents two intersecting but irreconcilable dimensions, Time (Beret) and Space (Per). Simonson is concerned with the opposition between traditional Lutheran faith and the frontier ethic in Giants, but if expanded, this notion can also clarify the tragic character conflict in this novel. Forceful, physically powerful and handsome, skillful and even lucky, Per Hansa is a great natural leader. He loves the frontier because it is so expansive, a fitting, infinite surface on which to move his will, enact his own destiny and that of his people. Per attempts to change the prairie, or conquer time, by establishing a kind of immortality with his pioneer kingdom. Per's will and ego fill all space. Morally, he is a pragmatic teleologist who first ignores then hates the past. In the tradition of American Romanticism, he sees himself motivated by a dream of absolute good and right. Per fears rejection by those whom he leads far more than he fears impending failure because of the overwhelmingly hostile Dakota environment with its blizzards, floods, wind, clay soil, and grasshopper plagues. Per Hansa has confused his dream with reality.

As Per acts in terms of his vision, Beret acts in terms of consequences. Beret is the party of time; she wants to find her place in history, not escape it. Beret is defined and informed by what has already been created, and thus she is drawn to the old Norwegian culture, the Lutheran religion, and such other institutions as education, motherhood, and being a wife. Within an established community, institutions have been developed to deal with time, ritualizing the cycle of birth, growth, and death. But the prairie is infinity, as Rolvaag relentlessly reminds us throughout Giants, the zone where space cancels time, making the individual reach an absolutely Kierkegaardian state of being forever alone.

Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon ... Bright, clear sky, today, tomorrow, and for all time to come ... "Tish-ah!" said the grass ... "Tish-ah, tish-ah!" ... Never had it said anything else—never would it say anything else.

From this beginning, then, Beret is literally and figuratively "spaced-out."

Nevertheless, as critic Barbara Meldrum has established [in "Fate, Sex, and Naturalism in Rolvaag's Trilogy" in Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, Minn., 1975), 41-49] Beret can control her disorientation and depression until she comes to feel that Per Hansa has rejected her. Like Hester in The Scarlet Letter, Beret is no witch, but a passionate woman. She does feel guilt for her productive passion with Per, but her love for him continues to increase. Out on the prairie, she loses all sense of purpose with the realization that it is his dream, not Beret, which Per loves more than life. Beret comes to see Per as a person without fear, totally, blindly committed to his vision through his all-consuming pride. Per is thus daemonic, and the consequences for following this evil course shall most certainly be destruction. Beret must bear this burden alone. She has reached a Cassandra-like impasse—doomed to knowledge, but never to be believed because he who hears her cries heeds only his own voice.

In terms of Per's dream and the ideal goals of the community, Beret does indeed lose her sanity. But in Beret's terms, her bizarre behavior—having tea with her absent mother, sleeping in her hope chest, ceasing her household chores, and attacking Per for godless megalomania—ritualizes punishment for worshipping Per, the false god, her punishment for sins against time. Beret is not, as Lloyd Hustvedt [in discussion following this paper, "The Johnson Rolvaag Correspondence," at the above noted Western Literature Association meeting] once half-seriously proffered, "a party pooper out on the prairie." Nor is she a pietistic, guilt-ridden fanatic bent on precipitating Per Hansa's early death. Nor is she the opposing view, Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith" following God's divine imperative. However critically misunderstood, Beret remains a very human character, very hurt, and very much alone, pursuing a direction out of her moral and emotional wilderness by the only way she trusts....

That Giants in the Earth is a tragedy of two characters frozen in their irreconcilable dimensions may now seem evident, but where is that tragic recognition scene that changes and enlightens the protagonist? Since, as Maynard Mack [in "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies," in Stratford Upon Avon Studies, I (London, I960)] reminds us, "tragic drama is in one way or other, a record of man's affair with transcendence," where might this transcendence be found? Nowhere in the novel. Playing his trump card of dramatic irony, of making his characters realize less about themselves than the audience understands, Rolvaag throws not only the burden of interpretation but the responsibility of awareness squarely on his readers. Far from undercutting tragic conventions, by this strategy Rolvaag expands Giants into relevance, into our own dimension and consciousness.

Four key scenes in Giants, all revealing to the audience rather than to the characters, establish our participatory role in this tragic novel. The first is that opening scene of the prairie as mystical infinity, a landscape more formidable and incomprehensible than any of the characters. The second scene is the visitation of the grief-stricken and insane Kari, her husband Jakob, and their children. This episode forms a kind of play-within-a-play, a dumbshow or mirroring device for the relationship between Per and Beret. Kari's hysteria is Beret's largely self-contained depression put into action, and Jakob surely must be enacting a Per Hansa fantasy by roping Kari down in the wagon and saying: "Physically she seems as well as ever ... She certainly hasn't overworked since we've been travelling." The third scene is the christening of Peder Victorius, where the Per-Beret schism becomes public, but here too, actions are taken and positions are stated without any understanding by the characters. This pattern continues into the last scene. Per departs for his death with an almost spitefully disconnected calm, while Beret broods, paralyzed by guilt and doubt, wondering how history and the community will judge her.

Dramatically, then, Rolvaag opposes his audience's recognition against his characters' actions. But beyond dramaturgy, Rolvaag limits his characters' awareness by significantly limiting their language. Typically a tragic hero defines himself by overstatement, using hyperbole and metaphor to establish a momentum towards change and understanding. But Beret moves in circles inside the soddie, while Per Hansa moves in circles outside the house. Never soliloquizing, Beret conducts a long series of spinning monologues, usually in the form of unanswered questions in the conditional voice. Per Hansa, as suspicious of words as he is of emotions, wanders a path around the community, seeking tasks and deeds that will establish his goodness. Per and Beret are not fools blindly driven by some all-powerful malignant force. Perhaps the novel's greatest tragedy is that it centers on two very human characters who cannot understand their own tragedy. We can.

In the establishment of Giants in the Earth as a tragedy, Rolvaag owes a particular debt to two sources, Ibsen and Shakespeare. From Ibsen, whom Rolvaag intensely studied and taught for many years, he adopts a tone of pervasive overcast along with the thematic emphasis of self-deception as a psychological prison. Thus, Per Hansa is a synthesis of Brand and Peer Gynt, Brand predominating. Surely Beret's character has been filtered through the apprehension of Nora and Hedda Gabler. Ibsen's celebrated and tragically overwhelming momentum of cause and effect gives the pattern for the plot of Giants. As Rolvaag once concluded in a potent lecture on Ibsen: "... the free exercise of will in the dramas results in disaster ... Life is tragic."

Shakespeare's Macbeth provides an analogue if not a source for the characterization and context in Giants. Both Lady Macbeth and Beret act with a sane and visionary madness, reflecting on all that has happened before and its consequences. Like Macbeth, Per Hansa just gives up. Certainly the eerie atmosphere of Macbeth exists out on the prairie, but, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, Giants also has its moments of saving humor. Maynard Mack notes an aspect of Shakespeare's later tragedies particularly appropriate to the tragic movement of Giants in the Earth:

Whatever the themes of individual plays ... the one pervasive Jacobean theme tends to be the undertaking and working out of acts of will, and especially (in that strongly Calvinistic age) of acts of self-will.

Tragedy provides neither eternal answers nor temporal game plans, but heightens our awareness, our realization of the human condition. This is Rolvaag's mission with Giants in the Earth.

Giants in the Earth, then, is not a saga or epic about Norwegian settlements and triumphs in the Land of Goshen. This tragic novel is an amalgamation of Norwegian culture and concerns turned to a pioneer experience, set on the most extreme American frontier. As John R. Milton [in "The Dakota Image," The South Dakota Review, 8 (Autumn, 1970)] has noted, Giants is the premier account of "how people remember the Dakotas or learn about them." As such, especially with Rolvaag forcing the tragic realization upon his audience, Giants is squarely in the tradition of American tragic realism, in the company of such works as The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, and even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In the manner of Ibsen and Shakespeare, Rolvaag's masterpiece transcends time and space to make a dramatic and universal statement about the meaning of life.

Source: Patrick D. Morrow, "Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth as Tragedy," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 83-90.

Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth is a vision of human life rich in its implications. Here the pioneer struggle with the untamed universe may serve as a symbol for the condition of man himself against inhuman Destiny. The hero, Per Hansa, is a typical man of the West, both in the regional sense that he represents our pioneer background and in the universal human sense that he embodies the independent spirit, the rationalism, and what has often been condemned as the utilitarianism of Western civilization—European mankind's determination to cherish human values against the brute force of Fate. Under the influence of German philosophy and Romantic pantheism, many modern writers have bent the knee to the gods of nature and worshiped a fatal Destiny. On the other side, we turn to French literature and its greatest thinker, Pascal, for the classic statement of the Western attitude: "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in Nature; but he is a thinking reed ... If the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies."

This conception is developed most fully in the great tragic dramas of European literatures, but we find a similar respect for man at the very dawn of our civilization in the first Western author, Homer. His men are "like gods"; indeed, sometimes they are better and wiser than the supernatural forces and divine giants they come in contact with. Before the Heroic Age, mankind was sunk in an Age of Terror, given over to the superstition that the world is ruled by forces which can be dealt with only by magical rites—a view that still survives in Per Hansa's wife Beret. But with Homer, man emerges into the epic stage of human consciousness, with its great admiration for men of ability. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth is a modern epic of Western man.

In this novel, as in Homer, or, for that matter, in Beowulf, there is the heartiest gusto and admiration for human achievement—sophisticates would say a naive delight in the simplest things: "Wonder of wonders!" What had Per Hansa brought back with him? "It was a bird cage, made of thin slats; and inside lay a rooster and two hens!" Nobody but Homer and Rolvaag can get us so excited over merely economic prosperity, man's achievement in acquiring fine things for his own use. One of the high dramatic points in the novel is the discovery that, after all, the wheat has come up! This sort of thing means life or death; and the preservation of human life, or the evaluation of things according to the pleasure they can give to individual men, is the very opposite of submission to material forces.

Hans Olsa was cutting hay; his new machine hummed lustily over the prairie, shearing the grass so evenly and so close to the ground that his heart leaped with joy to behold the sight. What a difference, this, from pounding away with an old scythe, on steep, stony hillsides! All the men had gathered round to see him start.

That sounds like a passage from the Odyssey. And the central figure in the novel is an epic hero. Like Odysseus, Per Hansa is "never at a loss." Hans Olsa says to him, "No matter how hard you're put to it, you always give a good account of yourself!" This might be used to translate one of Athena's remarks to Odysseus. Or one may think of Virgil. Here are some of the phrases that make the novel seem epic: "[They talked] of land and crops, and of the new kingdom which they were about to found ... Now they had gone back to the very beginning of things." This comes in the earliest pages of the book; while the last chapter states their attitude thus: "There was no such thing as the Impossible any more. The human race has not known such faith and such self-confidence since history began"—one ought to say, since the Homeric Greeks. But in the translation of this novel from Norwegian into English, made by a New Englander, there has been added, out of respect for our Atlantic seaboard, "so had been the Spirit since the day the first settlers landed on the eastern shores." Thus the novel, especially in the English translation, brings out what America meant to mankind. "He felt profoundly that the greatest moment of his life had come. Now he was about to sow wheat on his own ground!" This is exactly what Jefferson wanted America to be. And as the Middle West became the most complete type of democratic civilization that the world has ever known, our leaders have fought many battles, in politics and war, to enable the ordinary hard-working farmer to sow his wheat on his own ground.

America at its most American, this is embodied in Per Hansa, who "never liked to follow an old path while there was still unexplored land left around him." That is the spirit of the West against the East, of America against Europe, of Europe against Asia. It is not that the amenities of life are undervalued; even Per Hansa is working to achieve a civilized life. But the amenities are less exciting than the achieving. Much of the dramatic tension between the characters turns upon this choice. It is the pioneer faith that "a good barn may perhaps pay for a decent house, but no one has ever heard of a fine dwelling that paid for a decent barn." But the opposite view is expressed by one of the men: "One doesn't need to live in a gopher hole, in order to get ahead." There speaks the conservative culture of a more Eastern or more European mind. The conquest of material nature has been superciliously criticized by comfortable New Englanders from Emerson to Irving Babbitt (both guilty of an undue respect for oriental passivity) as a case of forgetting the distinction between the "law for man and law for thing," meaning by the "law for thing" not material force but human mastery. It "builds town and fleet," says Emerson; by it the forest is felled, the orchard planted, the prairie tilled, the steamer built. But it seems to me that human triumph over matter is a genuine practical humanism, and that this is the true spirit of the West; that in Bacon's phrase, knowledge may well be used for "the relief of man's estate." Emerson was closer to the spirit of the pioneers when he said, in "The Young American":

Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk ... or ... manufactory, values it less ... We in the Atlantic states, by position, have been commercial, and have ... imbibed easily an European culture. Luckily for us ... the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.

And he calls it a "false state of things" that "our people have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another." But happily "America is beginning to assert herself to the senses and to the imagination of her children." If this be true—and I must confess that it seems rather extreme doctrine even to a middle western regionalist like myself—then Rolvaag, born in Europe, is more American than some of our authors of old New England stock. All Emerson's "Representative Men" were Europeans. It was not until the Middle West came into literature that we get an epic and broadly democratic spirit in works never to be mistaken for the products of modern Europe. Emerson recognized this in Lincoln; at last he admired a representative man who came from the West. And middle western leadership in American literature, begun with Lincoln's prose, established beyond a doubt by Mark Twain, was confirmed in our day by Rolvaag ...

In "The Method of Nature" Emerson says, "When man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. We may therefore safely study the mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in mind"; and he proposes that "we should piously celebrate this hour: [August 11, 1841] by exploring the method of nature." We may take this to represent the attitude toward Nature that we find in the Romantic period of American literature: that is to say, the New England masters and their followers continuing up through Whitman. But romanticism came late to America. Already in England Tennyson was recognizing that the method of nature is red with blood in tooth and claw. It was this later view that came to prevail in literature toward the end of the nineteenth century, even in America, doubtless because of the increased knowledge, of nature. I refer not only to the progress of science, but to the fact that later authors had struggled with Nature, more than the Romantics, whose Nature had been tamed by centuries of conquest. Thoreau said. "I love the wild not less than the good," but his Walden was within suburban distance of the cultural center and the financial center of the New World. Rolvaag had known Nature as the sea from which, as a Norwegian fisherman, he must wring his living. In 1893 a storm at sea drowned many of his companions; and this, he says, caused him "to question the romantic notion of nature's purposeful benevolence." So in this novel there are giants in the earth. On the prairie, "Man's strength availed but little out here."

That night the Great Prairie stretched herself voluptuously, giantlike and full of cunning, she laughed softly into the reddish moon. "Now we will see what human might may avail against us! Now we'll see!" And now had begun a seemingly endless struggle between man's fortitude in adversity, on the one hand, and power of evil in high places.

"The Power of Evil in High Places" is the title of the chapter, which includes a plague of locusts and also the terrible insanity of Per Hansa's wife. That is what we really find to be the method of Nature. For by this term Rolvaag, of course, does not merely mean scenery. He means the whole created universe that man is up against and the blind inhuman force or might that moves it. Sometimes he calls it Destiny, as in speaking of the murderous storm of 1893: "That storm changed my nature. As the seas broke over us and I believed that death was inescapable, I felt a resentment against Destiny." Twenty-seven years later another even more bitter tragedy occurred to impress Rolvaag with the murderousness of Nature: His five-year-old son Gunnar was drowned, under terrible circumstances. He writes that this tragedy changed his view of life. Previously he "had looked upon God as a logical mind in Whom the least happening" was planned and willed. Now he saw that much is "due to chance and to lawbound nature." In this novel, written later, it should be noticed that Per Hansa's wife Beret, especially when she is insane, continues Rolvaag's older view, blaming God for all miseries as if he had planned all. She broods that "beyond a doubt, it was Destiny that had brought her thither. Destiny, the inexorable law of life, which the Lord God from eternity had laid down for every human being, according to the path He knew would be taken ... Destiny had so arranged everything." Another poor miserable woman in this novel, her husband receiving his death blow from a cruel Nature, has this same dark pagan view: "Now the worst had happened and there was nothing to do about it, for Fate is inexorable." This is a continuation of the deadliest oriental fatalism, always current in misconceptions of Christianity, though actually it is just this which it has been the function of Christian philosophy and Western humanism to cast out, to exorcise in rationalizing man's relation to the universe. Emerson put his finger on the difference between West and East when he wrote in his Journals in 1847:

The Americans are free-willers, fussy, self-asserting, buzzing all round creation. But the Asiatics believe it is writ on the iron leaf, and will not turn on their heel to save them from famine, plague, or the sword. That is great, gives a great air to the people ... Orientalism is Fatalism, resignation, Occidentalism is Freedom and Will.

So, Beret does not believe they should try to conquer the prairie; she feels that it is sinful to undergo the conditions of pioneer life; she is "ashamed" that they have to put up with poor food. "Couldn't he understand that if the Lord God had intended these infinities to be peopled, He would not have left them desolate down through the ages?"

But her husband, Per Hansa, is a man of the West; he glories in the fact that he is an American free-willer, self-asserting. He rebels against Destiny and tries to master Nature. Carlyle says that the struggle between human free will and material necessity "is the sole Poetry possible," and certainly this makes the poetic content of Rolvaag's masterpiece. During the plague of locusts one of the other characters gives vent to an expression of Asiatic abnegation:

"Now the Lord is taking back what he has given ... I might have guessed that I would never be permitted to harvest such wheat" ... "Stop your silly gabble!" snarled Per Hansa. "Do you really suppose He needs to take the bread out of your mouth?" There was a certain consolation in Per Hansa's outbursts of angry rationalism. [But when Per tries to scare the locusts away, Hans Olsa says, "Don't do that, Per Hansa! If the Lord has sent this affliction on us ..."]

It should be noticed that Per Hansa, though a rationalist, is also a Christian; so the author designates him in the title of the last chapter, "The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men." Per is defending a higher conception of God. When Hans Olsa, dying, quotes, "It is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God," Per says, "Hush, now, man! Don't talk blasphemy!" Rolvaag is aware of the divine gentleness of Christianity; the words of the minister "flowed on ... softly and sweetly, like the warm rain of a summer evening" in a tender scene which suggests "Suffer little children to come unto me." This is in a chapter entitled "The Glory of the Lord"—for it is a clergyman who ministers to the "mind disease" of Beret and brings her out of her "utter darkness" in a passage that may be considered the greatest yet written in American fiction. What is implied in this novel becomes explicit in the sequel, Peder Victorious, where the first chapter is concerned with the religious musing of Per's fatherless son Peder. At one point he feels a difference between a Western as opposed to an Eastern or Old World conception of God and concludes that "no one could make him believe that a really American God would go about killing people with snowstorms and the like." But more significant is the account, in this sequel, of what the minister said to Beret after she had driven her husband out into the fatal snowstorm to satisfy her superstitious reverence for rites:

You have permitted a great sin to blind your sight; you have forgotten that it is God who muses all life to flower and who has put both good and evil into the hearts of men. I don't think I have known two better men than your husband and the friend he gave his life for ... your worst sin ... lies in your discontent with ... your fellow men.

Surely, whatever Rolvaag's religious affiliations may have been, this is the expression of a Christian humanism. From this point of view it is far from true to say that American literature has sunk down in two or three generations from the high wisdom of Emerson to the degradation of the "naturalistic" novel. Giants in the Earth is a step in the right direction, abandoning the romantic idolatry that worshiped a Destiny in Nature and believed "the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy." "Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity"—as Emerson puts it in his "Fate"—"Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than 'philosophy and theology embodied?'" This sentiment can be found repeated in many forms throughout the rhapsodies of the "prophets" of our "Golden Day." I, for one, am rather tired of the glorification of these false prophets, and I am glad that American literature has outgrown their enthusiasms, so lacking in a sense for the genuine dignity of man. Wisdom was not monopolized by the stretch of earth's surface from a little north of Boston to a little south of Brooklyn Ferry. Another passage from "The Young American" could bring home to us the repulsive inhumanity of Emerson's conception of God. Enumerating the suffering and miseries of man's lot, how individuals are crushed and "find it so hard to live," Emerson blandly tells us this is the

sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided... the individual[s] never spared ... Genius or Destiny ... is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design ... That Genius has infused itself into nature ... For Nature is the noblest engineer.

In opposition to this deadly submission to cruel natural force, I contend that Western civilization was built by innumerable details of calculated and voluntary activity, that the Christian God is a God concerned not with race but with individuals according to their moral worth, and that in the tragic event which befalls Per Hansa in this novel, without his design, we do not witness a God infused into Nature.

Source: Joseph E. Baker, "Western Man Against Nature: Giants in the Earth," in College English, Vol. 4, October, 1942, May, 1943, pp. 19-26.