The Natives of Hemsö by August Strindberg

First published:Hemsöborna, 1887 (The People of Hemsö, 1959; better known as The Natives of Hemsö)

Type of work: Naturalism

Time of work: The late 1800’s

Locale: The island of Hemso and environs, on the Stockholm archipelago

Principal Characters:

• Johannes Edvard Carlsson, the newly hired manger of the farm
• Anna Eva Flod, the widow who owns the farm, who becomes his wife
• Gusten Flod, the son of Mrs. Flod
• Erik Nordstrom, the pastor of the community

The Novel

Johannes Edvard Carlsson arrives from the mainland to the island fishing village of Hemso to manage the farm of an old widow, Anna Eva Flod. His ignorance of things nautical and of the folkways of the small community provokes the disdain of Mrs. Flod’s son, Gusten.

Carlsson dreams big, however, and does know about managing a farm and about asserting his superiority. In no time, he works his way up, literally, from sharing a bed in the kitchen to enjoying the solitary attic room. He sees great promise in the terrain and livestock. He quickly becomes not only indispensable but also revered by everyone but Gusten. Carlsson gives fervent Bible readings on Sundays too inclement for the household to get to church, wins over the farmhands through trickery, spruces up the big summerhouse to accommodate a professor and his family as paying summer guests, and then flirts with their pretty cook, Ida. Although Norman, another farmhand, also woos Ida, Ida is Carlsson’s partner at the July haymaking and dancing festivities, and when they sneak away hand in hand, the widow looks longingly after them.

In the fall, the professor’s family moves back to the city, Ida goes with them, and Carlsson pines after her. One stormy night when Carlsson has gone to the city to get supplies (but, more important, to see Ida), the pastor, Erik Nordstrom appears, drunk and voicing the rumor that Carlsson will marry Mrs. Flod. Carlsson returns, spurned by Ida, and proposes to and is accepted by Mrs. Flod. At the news, the community feels hostile toward Carlsson, because he is an outsider coming into possession of “their” property through marriage. Gusten even persuades the pastor to postpone the wedding for six months, and the winter passes quietly. The professor’s family returns in the spring, but Ida is no longer with them. Once the banns are read and Carlsson is unshakably sure of himself, both he and the widow begin to fight bitterly.

The day before the wedding, Gusten rows to Norsten, a small, rocky islet that is a familiar fishing haunt of the Hemso folk. Pastor Nordstrom joins him, and as the men drink and smoke, Gusten reveals that he will not attend the wedding because he wishes to shame Carlsson. The two plot to get Carlsson so drunk that he will be unable to take his bride to bed. Meanwhile, Carlsson learns that the pair is at Norsten and concludes that they are plotting mischief, so he plans his own revenge.

At the wedding, the vows are interrupted by the crash of glass: The beer bottles have burst in the hot sun, and the bride is distressed at the bad omen. After the ceremony, the pastor toasts Carlsson again and again. Gusten finally arrives, and he and Carlsson make tentative peace during a round of toasts and good cheer. Ready to begin eating, the guests discover the pastor, very drunk, in the outhouse, carrying on a spirited debate with the professor. When the pastor returns to the festivities, he gives a speech in honor of Christmas before keeling over. At dawn, after the dance, steaming glogg is to be drunk, the first glass traditionally given to the pastor. Carlsson discovers that the pastor is occupying the bridal bed, so he flings him out the window into a patch of stinging nettles and then into fish-gut slime at the water’s edge. When the crowd arrives, Carlsson pretends that he has heroically rescued the pastor from drowning.

In the fall, the widow, now Mrs. Carlsson, gives birth to a stillborn child and Carlsson’s ship is hit by a gale. Undaunted by these misfortunes, Carlsson prepares for the future; he builds a new house, becomes a homebody, convinces his wife to prepare a will in his favor, and reads to her biblical passages about death.

Shortly before Christmas, Carlsson flirts with the household cook, Clara. One night as they sneak out for a tryst, Mrs. Carlsson follows them, falls through the ice, and becomes deathly ill. After instructing Gusten to burn her will and make funeral arrangements, she dies, and Carlsson and Gusten bitterly argue about who is in charge. Five days later, in a desperate effort to remove Mrs. Carlsson’s body to the church for burial, the men battle ice and slush with hooks and axes. Their boat, however, capsizes, and the coffin sinks into the sea. Gusten and Carlsson, separated on a remote island from the rest of the crew and the boat, are caught in a whirling snowstorm. Gusten successfully battles waves and ice to reach the pastor’s house, but Carlsson’s weight and lack of endurance defeat him. The marooned Hemso boat is rescued the next day, but the bodies of Carlsson and his wife are not found. The novel concludes with the pastor conducting an improvised burial service for two, and with Gusten, the new master of Hemso, rowing home on the fickle Sea of Life.

The Characters

For several summers in his early twenties, August Strindberg spent what was perhaps the happiest time of his life vacationing on Kymmendo, on the Stockholm archipelago. The novel, written quickly to make money, is in part a peaceful memory of island flora and fauna but more important an unsentimental chronicle of the bawdy, colorful, comic, and proud island inhabitants. It is naturalistic in its depiction of an individual’s unsuccessful struggle against life, and Strindberg seems uncharacteristically to side against the individual and with society. There are no large ideas here, only small, specific vignettes of real people leading uncomplicated and not very admirable lives.

Carlsson is an ambitious and clever entrepreneur, but he is also a rogue and an interloper. Unlike most of Strindberg’s main characters, he is free of inner conflict and psychological turmoil. He is so self-assured that he has an easy time convincing others to trust him. He is not maliciously manipulative but merely savvy enough to live by his wits. If he profits from the fruits of his economical ruses, so do the people of Hemso. While they never forget that he is an interloper, and at times hate him for it, they cannot deny that he has managed money and position well.

A drifter and jack-of-all-trades from the mainland, Carlsson may lack roots and nautical knowledge, but his good humor and survival skills allow him to adapt well to various situations and people. He is spirited, confident, and lucky, and Strindberg admires those traits in him. His downfall is merely an unhappy twist of fate. Because Strindberg uses primarily the third-person, limited-omniscient point of view, his readers largely gain entrance only to Carlsson’s mind. While Strindberg’s characters are all of a piece, no other stands out in so many dimensions or communicates so much personality and information as Carlsson does.

The widow is seen, by turns, to be trusting and warm, even coquettish in the early stages of courtship, but gullible in listening to her heart rather than her mind and capable of bitter anger. After two years of widowhood, she relishes the prospect of marriage. Yet, both before and after the wedding, Carlsson’s philandering is her undoing. She is justifiably suspicious of her younger husband, though proving his infidelity leads to her death.

Gusten, Strindberg makes clear early, is easygoing and lazy. His aimless drifting at Norsten is typical of his lack of direction and immaturity for most of the novel. Yet he is loyal to societal and familial ties. He is the first character to be suspicious of Carlsson. His knowledge of the sea is the critical advantage that he holds over Carlsson; Carlsson defers to him in this throughout the novel, and he dies because he does not possess it. At Carlsson’s death, when Gusten is ready to assume the position of command and his rival can no longer threaten him, Gusten calls himself by his last name and even voices some charitable thoughts about Carlsson. The novel is a tale of Gusten’s coming of age.

Strindberg’s other characters are a sociable, very human lot who are prone to drunkenness and bawdiness, holding grudges and kicking up their heels. They are ribald and uncomplicated, taking the world as it is and making the best of it.

Critical Context

Strindberg is universally recognized as one of the progenitors of modern drama, but outside Scandinavia, his reputation as a writer of fiction is scarcely known. He did write a dozen novels and many volumes of short stories and tales. This novel is one of his earliest, written during a stage in his career when he was concerned with realism, predating the other important stages marked by symbolism, myth, and experimental form. Strindberg called this novel an “intermezzo scherzando in between major engagements,” and in tone and subject matter, it is a literary respite between two more darkly profound works: Fadren (1887; The Father, 1899), a play that Strindberg labeled his tragedy, and Le laidoyer d’un fou (1893; The Confession of a Fool, 1912), an autobiographical novel about a bitter marital relationship which illustrates Strindberg’s concept of “psychic murder.” This work was therapy for its author and remains an anomaly among his other major works, which tend to be tense, introspective, and tortuous, depicting evil and a suffering humanity.

Strindberg’s interest in psychology led him to explore the self in depth in his drama, but here an unambiguous, one-dimensional hero is exploring instead how to have a good time and make some money. Here, the character is defeated not by subjective mental anguish but by a very objective physical storm. Although Strindberg used the setting of the outer Skerries in other works—notably the later novel I havsbandet (1890; By the Open Sea, 1913) and several tales—nowhere else is the treatment so picaresque and undidactic, the characters so realistic, and the philosophy so obviously un-Rousseauistic. This novel of local color is worlds removed from the “inferno” period of hallucinations, religious mysticism, and pseudoscientific experiments that darkened his life soon after.

Strindberg has called the novel his sanest book. It was written in typical Strindberg fashion—quickly, with little attention to revision. He characterized the book as art for art’s sake and, when he saw it in print, thought it was insignificant. It is his most objective novel and his most conventional work of fiction. It is also his most popular, hailed as a success when it was first published and seen today as a masterpiece of naturalistic fiction. The novel is uncluttered, unself-conscious, and joyful, showing off Strindberg’s knack for storytelling, his ear for dialogue, and his painter’s eye.

Bibliography

Gustafson, Alrick. “Strindberg and the Realistic Breakthrough,” in A History of Swedish Literature, 1961.

Johannesson, Eric O The Novels of August Strindberg: A Study in Theme and Structure, 1968..

Johannesson, Eric O. “The Problem of Identity in Strindberg’s Novels,” in Scandinavian Studies. XXXIV (February, 1962), pp. 1-35.

Paulson, Arvid. Foreword to The Natives of Hemso, 1965.

Tennant, P.F.D. Introduction to The People of Hemso, 1959.