Settlers of the Marsh by Frederick Philip Grove

First published: 1925

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: The early decades of the twentieth century

Locale: The Big Grassy Marsh District in northern Manitoba, near Lake Manitoba

Principal Characters:

• Niels Lindstedt, a shy young settler in pursuit of a dream
• Ellen Amundsen, the elusive centerpiece of Niels’s dream
• Clara Vogel, the lusty destroyer of Niels’s dream
• Lars Nelson, Niels’s friend and fellow settler
• Mrs. Lund, the feisty wife of a failed settler
• Bobby, the adopted son of the Lunds, Niels’s hired hand

The Novel

Settlers of the Marsh is the story of a young Swedish immigrant who becomes a successful farmer in the Canadian West, is rejected by the woman of his dreams, and unwittingly marries the nearby town’s prostitute. The novel’s pattern includes five main motifs: anticipation and preparation, rejection, degeneration, expiation, and regeneration.

Niels comes to the New World on a quest: He will work hard to build a farm that will personify his dream, namely a piece of land, a house of his own with a wife to love, and children all around. For some time, he does not know who that woman will be, until he comes to know Ellen Amundsen. His love for her and for his dream energizes him to work harder than anyone to cultivate his land and to build the biggest and worthiest house in the region, but Ellen fails to respond with a show of romantic interest. It seems that Niels has nourished an impossible dream. He throws himself into his labor with even more intensity, but now as an escape. His life is regulated only by the seasons.

Gradually, however, Ellen’s aloofness softens, and a friendship of sorts develops between them. Niels, of course, needs and hopes for more. One fateful day, she tells Niels the painful reason why the relationship can never go beyond friendship. Ellen has made a vow to her dying mother that “no man was ever to have power over me.” She did so in response to her mother’s confession that her husband had treated her like an animal. He had forced her to leave small children behind in Sweden, had forced himself on her even when she was sick, had blamed her when she became pregnant, and had manipulated her to find ways of miscarrying. The third miscarriage also ended the mother’s own wretched life. The abuse had embittered her mother, and her tale so repulsed Ellen that she promised she would never marry. She wants and needs Niels as a friend, even a brother, but he cannot be her husband.

Niels’s dream is now shattered. He leaves Ellen, not to return, because he cannot be merely her friend. He resolves that he will shun social relationships and marry himself to the land, but he discovers that it is difficult to ignore his sexual desires. One day, all too naïvely, he succumbs to the artful wiles of the town’s “merry widow,” Clara Vogel, who has had her eye on him for many years. His moral rectitude dictates that he marry her at once, but it soon becomes obvious to both that this marriage was not made in heaven. Clara’s masklike makeup, trivial knick-knacks, and showy finery represent her counterfeit values, which now invade Niels’s home and dreams. When Clara discovers that Niels does not love her but that his principles make him unable to divorce her, she sets out to destroy his life. Strife, discontent, and hate separate them. Niels moves out to live in a little shack with Bobby, his hired hand. When eventually he discovers what everyone else has always known, namely that he has in fact married the district whore and that Clara has turned his house of dreams into a brothel by entertaining midnight visitors, his moral universe disintegrates; in a fitful rage, he kills her. The noble quester has become a murderer.

It is a crime that cannot go unpunished, but public sympathy is on Niels’s side. He is sentenced to ten years in jail, but aided by the influence of a kindly warden, he is paroled after only six for his exemplary behavior. Now forty, he returns to his farm and, in one of the most effective scenes in the novel, discovers that Bobby, Mrs. Lund, and even Ellen have maintained the place well in his long absence. Niels burns all the reminders of Clara’s onetime presence and then sets out to make his peace with Ellen, asking her forgiveness for turning away from her. However, in his long absence, Ellen too has come to a new realization: She also needs more than friendship; she too wants a home and children. In a serene but moving final scene, Niels’s dream becomes a shared dream, the vision between them joining them for a future together.

The Characters

Because Grove is strongly theme-oriented, his characters tend to function more as types than as individuals. At its best, a type can rise to the level of individualization; at its worst, it descends to stereotype.

Niels Lindstedt comes close to engaging the reader’s sympathetic identification, mainly because Grove endeavors to present him as an archetype. Niels has the incorruptible dream of Everyman, from Homer’s Odysseus to Steinbeck’s Lennie and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby: The dream of a place called Home where one is anchored, secure, content, at peace, and loved.

All the main characters are connected to that dream to a greater or lesser degree. To Niels, Ellen is the embodiment of his vision and thus functions as symbol of his ideal. Her very aloofness attracts him initially and intensifies his pursuit of the “impossible dream.” Yet Ellen, though remaining the ideal, explodes the dream as impossible. Grove uses Clara Vogel as Ellen’s opposite: not the embodiment but the destroyer of the dream. She too functions as symbol and remains mostly on the level of the stereotypical wanton who needs sex to fill an emotional void. In contrast to Ellen’s unadorned but genuine femininity and humanity, Clara’s lavish makeup and aggressive carnality serve death in Grove’s design, for underneath her mask is the face of a corpse. That is what she soon becomes, fit punishment for destroying the dream. Though she is a pathetic figure, her use as type is underscored by the fact that no one mourns her murder; she is simply cleared from the stage.

Figuring less prominently but still significantly in the dream motif is Lars Nelson, a fellow Swedish immigrant and settler and Niels’s friend. Lars pops in and out of the plot as an occasional comparison and contrast to Niels. Lars is not the visionary that Niels is. He is merely ambitious and thus lacks depth. He marries the first girl that happens to be available and pursues material success as an end in itself. There is a hint that he coarsens as he grows more affluent. In contrast, Niels by the end of the novel has become more refined and reflective even as his riches have multiplied.

Mrs. Lund contrasts to Ellen’s mother. Her feisty, assertive nature has survived an irresponsible husband, hardship, and financial failure. She has retained her humanity, and in the end she functions as Niels’s substitute mother who takes care of his place while he is incarcerated. Gratefully, Niels bestows on her an acre of his land and a fully furnished house.

Bobby, the hired hand, who has been almost like a son to Niels, the son he had always wanted but never had, is also rewarded. He and his growing family join the homestead, and they receive their own piece of land and a share of the profits. When Ellen finally reneges on her vow, Niels’s dream will be realized after all: He will be home, at peace and surrounded by love.

Critical Context

Grove lived and taught among recent immigrants in the Big Grassy Marsh country for a few years. The experience occasioned several books, including nature sketches and novels. Grove, however, was not really interested in documenting pioneer life. It was his passion, rather, to hold high in the new country the ideals at the heart of a Judeo-Christian and Roman/Greek tradition, ideals that would stave off the encroaching materialism of the United States. Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among others, Grove focuses on the basic question of life’s purpose and meaning in nearly all of his writing. In his fictionalized autobiographical novel In Search of Myself (1946), the young hero searches for the eternal values of truth, justice, and goodness. In The Yoke of Life (1930), the radical response to material limitations is to transcend them toward a spiritual reality. In Fruits of the Earth (1933), the protagonist is mocked at the height of his material success by its hollowness. The Master of the Mill (1944) warns that a dream fastened to material gain turns into a monster that diminishes and destroys the dreamer. Only the striving after the unattainable, Grove insists in In Search of Myself, is a worthy human quest.

Settlers of the Marsh was intended as part of a trilogy, but publishers persuaded Grove to condense the three parts into one. Though critically acclaimed, it ran into censorship problems over Ellen’s frank discussion of parental sex, which at the time precluded it from becoming a popular success. Yet it poignantly dramatizes the worthiness of the dream that expresses the longings of the human heart and spirit, and the heartbreak that so often accompanies the effort to possess the dream. At Grove’s death, Northrop Frye, the renowned Canadian literary critic, observed that he was the most serious of prose writers and may well be one of the most important.

Bibliography

Gammel, Irene. Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994. An analysis of the family as an imprisoning institution in Grove’s fiction, with an especially helpful commentary on Ellen as feminist.

Nause, John, ed. The Grove Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1974. Includes a useful essay on women in Grove’s novels.

Spettigue, D. O. FPG: The European Years. Ottawa: Oberon, 1973. Adds important information about Grove’s first thirty-some years in Germany.

Spettigue, D. O. Frederick Philip Grove. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1969. A comprehensive study of Grove’s life and works, with a particular emphasis on debunking Grove’s account of his early years.

Stobie, M. R. Frederick Philip Grove. New York: Twayne, 1973. An aptly critical assessment of Grove’s weaknesses and strengths as person and as writer.

Sutherland, Donald. Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977. Includes a provocative chapter on Grove’s humanism and naturalism.