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Final Essay:
Dashed Dreams: An Exploration of Crushed Ideals in “Peter and Rosa,”
Betrayed and The Emigrants
A dream crushed or an ideal overturned is the ultimate fate of the protagonists of these three Scandinavian stories. In Isak Dineson’s “Peter and Rosa” and Amelie Skram’s Betrayed, death of the dream is realized as death of the body; in Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, however, the death of the protagonist’s ideal of the New World is articulated by his relentless guilty conscience.
In “Peter and Rosa,” two dreamers are brought together in an explosion of passionate emotional vulnerability. At the beginning of the story, Peter longs to fly away from his dusty life at the parson’s house, and is described while watching birds overhead: “such a tremendous stream of longing…that Peter, on the ground, felt his limbs ache. He flew a long way with the geese” (252). Rosa, who sits at a loom but does not weave, has a dreamworld of her own—though hers is internally directed, unlike Peter’s outwardly directed dream to fly and sail away, the two imagined worlds seem to be intimately connected. Peter would “give venture to his own fancies about the world, and many of them rang strangely in Rosa’s mind, like echos of hers” (256). He may encroach upon her own dreamworld and meet her there one day, which at first makes her quite uncomfortable. Rosa is afraid of this ultimate vulnerability, of having Peter totally understand her psyche. These two dreamworlds, fully in opposition to any surrounding material realities, are held separate from each other by both Peter and Rosa.
In contrast, in Book 1 of The Emigrants, the dreamworld that everyone shares is the fruitful New World; the passengers hope it will be something wonderful. In the following books of The Emigrants, however, these dreams are soon crushed. Once the remaining passengers arrive on land most everyone dies, and Karl Oskar is overtaken by guilt as he wishes they had never left their home. The world of their dreams did not come to fruition in America: their hopes were destroyed by cruel realities of emigration.
The imagining of the ideal world in America is extremely unrealistic, exemplified when, “Elin had no need of learning English, as the Holy Ghost was to visit her and all the Avians as soon as they landed in America; they would be able to speak the new language without difficulty at the moment of stepping ashore” (298). This blind faith in a fulfilled ideal echoes Peter and Rosa’s fruitless attempts to bring their internal dreamworlds to reality. In Peter’s case, he dreams to be at sea and at the same time to give himself completely to Rosa; for Rosa, she dreams to have Peter both fulfill his dream and be with her.
As Peter and Rosa come together, “the sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salty and universal as the sea” (267). Peter was ready to give himself up to Rosa and have their dreamworlds be shared; “it was something more absolute which he meant to yield up to her; it was himself, the essence of his nature, and at the same time it was eternity” (267). He was planning to embrace the sea completely—the physical sea and Rosa herself—before Rosa betrayed him. This betrayal created a rift between them; Peter could never really sail or give himself to her completely, as her betrayal forced her to not be able to honestly reciprocate his supreme gift. She built a wall between them, and she, like Judas Iscariot, had became the ultimate betrayer.
Rosa believed that Peter “was going away all the same, to far places, where she could not follow him…[he] left her here, forlorn” (269). She did not want him to leave her alone in her musings—her dream was for him to stay with her. Rosa was finally ready to share her inaccessible dreamworld, she felt she had been silly for “distrusting her old playfellow, and refusing him access to her own secret world” (268). But he was going to leave her. Peter “would not think of her; she would have gone from his mind. Gone, gone” (269); and so she betrays him.
Death of the cherished dream can be seen in The Emigrants, as well, although in a less personal affair. All the emigrants thought that they were going towards a much better place in America, when in fact they were (mostly) all headed towards death. They were also betrayed by what they had assumed ship travel would entail. Karl Oskar relayed that during the trip he felt as though sea travel was, “healthy to body but depressing to his mind” (312). The trek was painful and long, and no one seemed to be prepared.
This betrayal of the hopes of both Peter and Karl Oskar foreshadows sad realities ahead. For both Peter and Rosa, that reality was physical death. As Rosa realizes they are about to die, she declares, “‘now we are sailing straight to Elsinore…It is better than that we should go home first, do you not see?’” (282). Rosa is determined to create Peter’s dream for him before they die. She may have taken away his dream of really becoming a sailor, but in this imaginary moment he would be one. Peter, finally, can embrace the sea and Rosa in one. And this is all Peter had really ever hoped for. He declares that as “he remembered…that he was to have come to her room that night…a swift, keen pain ran through him. Yet this was more wonderful than anything else.” (283) Peter believes that their souls are passionately bound in this moment, that they have shared with each other their essence in this imaginary sail on the ice. In this way, his dream was, in his mind, realized. In another sense, however, it was not a real consummation of the unity of spirits with Rosa; she has betrayed him and carries the guilt. With this guilt weighing on her soul, and although he believed they were together as one, she could not completely give herself up to him in the end.
Dreams crushed in spirit and body end the story of “Peter and Rosa,” as “the current was strong; they were swept down, in each other’s arms, in a few seconds” (285). In The Emigrants, lofty dreams of America are similarly destroyed by physical death in numerous instances, including the death of Inga-Lena. She was convinced that because of her doubting God, she has been inflicted with the sickness of scurvy. She believes that this doubt is manifested when “worldly worries” (238), such as how her family will survive with close to nothing in America, take hold of her. Inga-Lena says that, “I am afraid in the end [my husband] will give away everything we own, and we will be left there, with our four children, in dire need, without food or clothing. When I think of this—that’s when the doubt assails me. Yet I know that doubt is the bloodiest of sins” (238). Her hopes for a new and holy life, where her husband’s religion is accepted and revered, die with her. This death of body parallels the death of the soul—Inga-Lena prayed for a better life in America, but this dream got weakened in her doubt and ultimately died with her body.
Similarly, Karl Oskar quickly realized that his idealized imagining of the journey on sea was grossly incorrect. He described that, “life at sea was destructive and unsound for a human being; this, indeed, he had learned…for the rest of his life he would live on land” (317). Karl Oskar’s intense guilt for bringing his family on this journey will remain with him throughout the rest of the saga. When he believes Kristina is dying his guilt intensifies as he thinks to himself, “I can only blame myself…I persuaded her. She came with me but I think she regretted it the whole time. I was the one who insisted, I and no one else decided” (345). This guilt marks the death of his dream of the New World. His dream does not die with his body, but with his spirit.
At the end of Book 1 of The Emigrants, Karl Oskar is finally on land, but “now that he stood on firm land dizziness overtook him and his legs were wobbly. He could not understand it.” (366). Although his idealized version of the ship travel was proved wrong, he believes that at least his dreams of bountiful life on land would come to fruition. However, Book 1 does not set up a successful realization of his dreamworld, as “precarious, insecure, and unstable were the first steps of the immigrants on American soil” (366). Furthermore, although we did not read the rest of The Emigrants, we know that Karl Oskar is constantly guilt-stricken by the realities of life in America.
As a dashed dream can manifest itself as a lifelong guilty conscience, crushed ideals can also manifest themselves in a prolonged deterioration of soul, character and, finally, body. In Amelie Skram’s novel Betrayed, both Ory and Riber were betrayed by their own expectations of what an ideal, romantic marriage would look like. When Ory eventually went with Riber she could not stop thinking about the words her mother had said: “‘submit’, ‘obedient as a lamb’, ‘bridal bed’, and ‘God’s commandments’ whirled around in her brain and made her head and neck ache” (16). They are both completely unprepared for the other’s preconceived notions about married life, and this beginning of the novella emphasizes the chasm between them. From the very beginning, a marriage between Ory and Riber was destined to fail.
In Betrayed, the death of Riber’s body finalizes the death of his soul, similar to Inga-Lena, Peter and Rosa. His dream of having a healthy marriage died with him. Inga-Lena’s hopes for a grand future died with her, Peter’s dream of unifying with the sea died with him, and Rosa’s dream of being with Peter died with her. This bodily death represents the completion of a “soul’s death,” or a death of a dream.
In Betrayed, Ory and Riber’s ideals do not match. Ory dreams of a marriage with a chaste and religious man, while Riber dreams of a marriage with a version of Ory who understands the realities of a seaman’s life. These dreams are quickly dashed; Riber declares that he “‘never could…have imagined that a child could be such a heartless executioner’” (114) as Ory dissects his past, looking for a way to torment him. Riber loves her, and she hurts him brutally.
This cruelty echoes Rosa’s ultimate betrayal of Peter. Riber loved Ory intensely, Peter loved Rosa, and both were betrayed by those they loved the most. Rosa did what she did because she did not want Peter to leave her forever. On the contrary, Ory wanted to push Riber away—to deceive and hurt him as he had, in her own mind, deceived her by being an unprepared husband.
The dreamer’s world is inevitably crushed by the “real world”; an ideal is dashed by reality. In these three works, the dissipation of the characters’ dreamworlds by their realities prove that some fantasies will always remain fantasies. The death of the dream is finalized within the physical deaths of Riber, Peter, Rosa and Inga-Lena, and is realized as Karl Oskar’s lifelong guilty conscience. Peter and Rosa came close to fully realizing their souls’ reunion, their dream of being unified. But Rosa’s guilt creates a rift between them; they both cannot yield their essence, completely and with reciprocation, to the other. These joint disillusionments end with death. Consequently, Peter cannot realize his dream of sailing and Rosa cannot realize her dream of remaining with Peter. Riber’s dream of having a marriage with a woman of knowledge was dashed by Ory’s cruelty and ended completely with his bodily death. Inga-Lena’s dream of the New World was ended by her doubt and death. Karl Oskar is doomed to live with guilt and remorse that fully extinguish his own dreams.
Dashed Dreams: An Exploration of Crushed Ideals in “Peter and Rosa,”
Betrayed and The Emigrants
A dream crushed or an ideal overturned is the ultimate fate of the protagonists of these three Scandinavian stories. In Isak Dineson’s “Peter and Rosa” and Amelie Skram’s Betrayed, death of the dream is realized as death of the body; in Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, however, the death of the protagonist’s ideal of the New World is articulated by his relentless guilty conscience.
In “Peter and Rosa,” two dreamers are brought together in an explosion of passionate emotional vulnerability. At the beginning of the story, Peter longs to fly away from his dusty life at the parson’s house, and is described while watching birds overhead: “such a tremendous stream of longing…that Peter, on the ground, felt his limbs ache. He flew a long way with the geese” (252). Rosa, who sits at a loom but does not weave, has a dreamworld of her own—though hers is internally directed, unlike Peter’s outwardly directed dream to fly and sail away, the two imagined worlds seem to be intimately connected. Peter would “give venture to his own fancies about the world, and many of them rang strangely in Rosa’s mind, like echos of hers” (256). He may encroach upon her own dreamworld and meet her there one day, which at first makes her quite uncomfortable. Rosa is afraid of this ultimate vulnerability, of having Peter totally understand her psyche. These two dreamworlds, fully in opposition to any surrounding material realities, are held separate from each other by both Peter and Rosa.
In contrast, in Book 1 of The Emigrants, the dreamworld that everyone shares is the fruitful New World; the passengers hope it will be something wonderful. In the following books of The Emigrants, however, these dreams are soon crushed. Once the remaining passengers arrive on land most everyone dies, and Karl Oskar is overtaken by guilt as he wishes they had never left their home. The world of their dreams did not come to fruition in America: their hopes were destroyed by cruel realities of emigration.
The imagining of the ideal world in America is extremely unrealistic, exemplified when, “Elin had no need of learning English, as the Holy Ghost was to visit her and all the Avians as soon as they landed in America; they would be able to speak the new language without difficulty at the moment of stepping ashore” (298). This blind faith in a fulfilled ideal echoes Peter and Rosa’s fruitless attempts to bring their internal dreamworlds to reality. In Peter’s case, he dreams to be at sea and at the same time to give himself completely to Rosa; for Rosa, she dreams to have Peter both fulfill his dream and be with her.
As Peter and Rosa come together, “the sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salty and universal as the sea” (267). Peter was ready to give himself up to Rosa and have their dreamworlds be shared; “it was something more absolute which he meant to yield up to her; it was himself, the essence of his nature, and at the same time it was eternity” (267). He was planning to embrace the sea completely—the physical sea and Rosa herself—before Rosa betrayed him. This betrayal created a rift between them; Peter could never really sail or give himself to her completely, as her betrayal forced her to not be able to honestly reciprocate his supreme gift. She built a wall between them, and she, like Judas Iscariot, had became the ultimate betrayer.
Rosa believed that Peter “was going away all the same, to far places, where she could not follow him…[he] left her here, forlorn” (269). She did not want him to leave her alone in her musings—her dream was for him to stay with her. Rosa was finally ready to share her inaccessible dreamworld, she felt she had been silly for “distrusting her old playfellow, and refusing him access to her own secret world” (268). But he was going to leave her. Peter “would not think of her; she would have gone from his mind. Gone, gone” (269); and so she betrays him.
Death of the cherished dream can be seen in The Emigrants, as well, although in a less personal affair. All the emigrants thought that they were going towards a much better place in America, when in fact they were (mostly) all headed towards death. They were also betrayed by what they had assumed ship travel would entail. Karl Oskar relayed that during the trip he felt as though sea travel was, “healthy to body but depressing to his mind” (312). The trek was painful and long, and no one seemed to be prepared.
This betrayal of the hopes of both Peter and Karl Oskar foreshadows sad realities ahead. For both Peter and Rosa, that reality was physical death. As Rosa realizes they are about to die, she declares, “‘now we are sailing straight to Elsinore…It is better than that we should go home first, do you not see?’” (282). Rosa is determined to create Peter’s dream for him before they die. She may have taken away his dream of really becoming a sailor, but in this imaginary moment he would be one. Peter, finally, can embrace the sea and Rosa in one. And this is all Peter had really ever hoped for. He declares that as “he remembered…that he was to have come to her room that night…a swift, keen pain ran through him. Yet this was more wonderful than anything else.” (283) Peter believes that their souls are passionately bound in this moment, that they have shared with each other their essence in this imaginary sail on the ice. In this way, his dream was, in his mind, realized. In another sense, however, it was not a real consummation of the unity of spirits with Rosa; she has betrayed him and carries the guilt. With this guilt weighing on her soul, and although he believed they were together as one, she could not completely give herself up to him in the end.
Dreams crushed in spirit and body end the story of “Peter and Rosa,” as “the current was strong; they were swept down, in each other’s arms, in a few seconds” (285). In The Emigrants, lofty dreams of America are similarly destroyed by physical death in numerous instances, including the death of Inga-Lena. She was convinced that because of her doubting God, she has been inflicted with the sickness of scurvy. She believes that this doubt is manifested when “worldly worries” (238), such as how her family will survive with close to nothing in America, take hold of her. Inga-Lena says that, “I am afraid in the end [my husband] will give away everything we own, and we will be left there, with our four children, in dire need, without food or clothing. When I think of this—that’s when the doubt assails me. Yet I know that doubt is the bloodiest of sins” (238). Her hopes for a new and holy life, where her husband’s religion is accepted and revered, die with her. This death of body parallels the death of the soul—Inga-Lena prayed for a better life in America, but this dream got weakened in her doubt and ultimately died with her body.
Similarly, Karl Oskar quickly realized that his idealized imagining of the journey on sea was grossly incorrect. He described that, “life at sea was destructive and unsound for a human being; this, indeed, he had learned…for the rest of his life he would live on land” (317). Karl Oskar’s intense guilt for bringing his family on this journey will remain with him throughout the rest of the saga. When he believes Kristina is dying his guilt intensifies as he thinks to himself, “I can only blame myself…I persuaded her. She came with me but I think she regretted it the whole time. I was the one who insisted, I and no one else decided” (345). This guilt marks the death of his dream of the New World. His dream does not die with his body, but with his spirit.
At the end of Book 1 of The Emigrants, Karl Oskar is finally on land, but “now that he stood on firm land dizziness overtook him and his legs were wobbly. He could not understand it.” (366). Although his idealized version of the ship travel was proved wrong, he believes that at least his dreams of bountiful life on land would come to fruition. However, Book 1 does not set up a successful realization of his dreamworld, as “precarious, insecure, and unstable were the first steps of the immigrants on American soil” (366). Furthermore, although we did not read the rest of The Emigrants, we know that Karl Oskar is constantly guilt-stricken by the realities of life in America.
As a dashed dream can manifest itself as a lifelong guilty conscience, crushed ideals can also manifest themselves in a prolonged deterioration of soul, character and, finally, body. In Amelie Skram’s novel Betrayed, both Ory and Riber were betrayed by their own expectations of what an ideal, romantic marriage would look like. When Ory eventually went with Riber she could not stop thinking about the words her mother had said: “‘submit’, ‘obedient as a lamb’, ‘bridal bed’, and ‘God’s commandments’ whirled around in her brain and made her head and neck ache” (16). They are both completely unprepared for the other’s preconceived notions about married life, and this beginning of the novella emphasizes the chasm between them. From the very beginning, a marriage between Ory and Riber was destined to fail.
In Betrayed, the death of Riber’s body finalizes the death of his soul, similar to Inga-Lena, Peter and Rosa. His dream of having a healthy marriage died with him. Inga-Lena’s hopes for a grand future died with her, Peter’s dream of unifying with the sea died with him, and Rosa’s dream of being with Peter died with her. This bodily death represents the completion of a “soul’s death,” or a death of a dream.
In Betrayed, Ory and Riber’s ideals do not match. Ory dreams of a marriage with a chaste and religious man, while Riber dreams of a marriage with a version of Ory who understands the realities of a seaman’s life. These dreams are quickly dashed; Riber declares that he “‘never could…have imagined that a child could be such a heartless executioner’” (114) as Ory dissects his past, looking for a way to torment him. Riber loves her, and she hurts him brutally.
This cruelty echoes Rosa’s ultimate betrayal of Peter. Riber loved Ory intensely, Peter loved Rosa, and both were betrayed by those they loved the most. Rosa did what she did because she did not want Peter to leave her forever. On the contrary, Ory wanted to push Riber away—to deceive and hurt him as he had, in her own mind, deceived her by being an unprepared husband.
The dreamer’s world is inevitably crushed by the “real world”; an ideal is dashed by reality. In these three works, the dissipation of the characters’ dreamworlds by their realities prove that some fantasies will always remain fantasies. The death of the dream is finalized within the physical deaths of Riber, Peter, Rosa and Inga-Lena, and is realized as Karl Oskar’s lifelong guilty conscience. Peter and Rosa came close to fully realizing their souls’ reunion, their dream of being unified. But Rosa’s guilt creates a rift between them; they both cannot yield their essence, completely and with reciprocation, to the other. These joint disillusionments end with death. Consequently, Peter cannot realize his dream of sailing and Rosa cannot realize her dream of remaining with Peter. Riber’s dream of having a marriage with a woman of knowledge was dashed by Ory’s cruelty and ended completely with his bodily death. Inga-Lena’s dream of the New World was ended by her doubt and death. Karl Oskar is doomed to live with guilt and remorse that fully extinguish his own dreams.