Victoria by Knut Hamsun

First published: 1898 (English translation, 1929)

Type of work: Romance

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Locale: A small Scandinavian village

Principal Characters:

• Victoria, the daughter of the Master of the Castle
• Johannes, a miller’s son and a poet
• Otto, a chamberlain’s son
• Camilla, who is, as a child, rescued from drowning by Johannes and later becomes his fiancee

The Novel

Once upon a time there lived a dreamy, solitary child, a miller’s son named Johannes. Sometimes he was invited to play with Victoria and Ditlef, the children who lived in a nearby mansion known as the Castle. So begins this fairy-tale romance that conveys a pervasive sense of long ago and far away. As the book opens, Johannes, fourteen, has been called upon to row the children of his betters and their friends to an island. Among them is the enchanting, ten-year-old Victoria. When Johannes attempts to help Victoria ashore and to join the group in their adventure, he is brutally reminded of his place by the churlish Otto, the son of a chamberlain. The always-amiable Johannes contents himself with his favorite escape: fantasy. He is Sultan, and Victoria is begging to be one of his slaves, or he is chief pirate, with Princess Victoria his chief treasure.

Years pass. Johannes is sent away to town for school, rarely returning home because of the expense, but never does he forget Victoria. She is his inspiration; all of his poems have been written to her. Yet when he sees her again, she seems aloof, their conversation banal. When Johannes saves a child from drowning and temporarily becomes a hero, he exults in the knowledge that Victoria has seen him do it but is soon deflated when he discovers that she has taken little notice. In subsequent years, he is tormented because Victoria’s social circles are closed to a miller’s son, which he will always be—even though he is also beginning to be known as a poet. When he next encounters Victoria in town, where he is a student, she is staying at the Chamberlain’s house, and she is wearing what appears to be an engagement ring. Shaken, Johannes pours out his heart: She is the only one whom he has ever loved, and everything he has ever written or tried to become is for her. She reveals that she has carried one of his poems next to her heart and that she loves him. Johannes’ ecstasy is extreme but short-lived. Searching for her the next day, he finds her at the theater, accompanied by Otto. She at first totally ignores Johannes, then she humiliates him by her condescension. Later, she tells him that everything is impossible for them; there is too much that separates them; her father would never consent.

Johannes feels that his soul has withered, but he immerses himself in his writing and poetic reveries, which continue to revolve around Victoria. He publishes a book which becomes a success and goes abroad without telling anyone where. Two years pass. Johannes returns home and encounters Victoria gathering flowers in the woods that they once roamed as children. She invites him to a party at the Castle and, seeing his reluctance to accept, adds that she will have a surprise for him there. He notes that she wears no ring. When Victoria later sends a special invitation to him by messenger, he joyfully accepts and prepares to enter the Castle for the first time. In the drawing room, he finds many important guests, including the Chamberlain and his Lady and their son, Otto, now a lieutenant. When Victoria finally enters, she gives Johannes his surprise: She presents Camilla, whom Johannes, years before, saved from drowning, now an attractive young woman of eighteen. The party is a celebration of Victoria and Otto’s engagement. Camilla is a consolation prize for Johannes. Bitterly noting that Victoria is again wearing a ring, he tells her not to take it off again. She replies that she is certain that she never will. Johannes and Victoria thus continue to wound each other throughout the remainder of the day. The truculent Otto, taking note of the strange tension between the two, blackens Johannes’ eye and loudly announces that he is going to join the Laird’s shooting party.

Within hours, news comes that Otto has been killed in a hunting accident. Victoria, hysterical, cries out to Johannes, “He was a hundred thousand times better than you.” Later, Victoria goes to Johannes and explains that her father, a fiercely proud man, had compelled her to accept Otto because they needed Otto’s money to avoid financial ruin. She had stalled, saying that in three years she would marry Otto, but as the day drew nearer, she begged her parents to insure her life instead and allow her to drown herself. She has always and only loved Johannes. To this passionate declaration, he has only one response; “I’m engaged.” He and Camilla have entered into a secret understanding that one day she will marry him. Meanwhile, Victoria’s father, attempting through insurance to save something for his heirs and unable to face ruin, takes advantage of everyone’s absence during Otto’s funeral to torch the Castle and himself.

When Johannes returns to town, he becomes so absorbed in his writing that he has little time to escort his secret fiancee to the balls and parties that she wishes to attend. By mutual agreement, Richmond, an Englishman, becomes her escort. Soon the two fall in love. Johannes is oddly unaffected by this revelation. He extends his blessing and returns to his writing, too preoccupied to attend a party at Camilla’s home that he knows Victoria will attend. One night, Johannes arrives home to find an old acquaintance waiting in his doorway, the former tutor and aspiring poet from the Castle. He had not seen the tutor since the disastrous engagement party. At that time, the tutor confessed that he had not married because his first love had rejected him, but now he has married a widow and has thus instantly acquired a family, clothes, shoes, house, and home. Johannes congratulates him and patiently listens to him babble. Suddenly, the tutor asks Johannes whether he has heard about Victoria. In confusion, Johannes replies yes, and then no. The tutor tells him that she is gravely ill with tuberculosis, that she attended a party at Camilla’s family home, where she danced like a mad person, and that she collapsed in a pool of blood and had to be carried home. In fact, he tells Johannes, Victoria is dead. He hands Johannes a letter which she asked him to deliver after her death and leaves, his mission ended.

Johannes, struggling to take in the fact that Victoria is dead, opens the envelope and reads: “Dear Johannes, When you read this letter I shall be dead.” She is able at last to be perfectly honest. She clings to life but knows that there is no hope for her. She bitterly regrets that she has been unable to show how much she has loved him. She begs forgiveness for the many unkindnesses and injuries she has inflicted on him. She asks him not to see her in her coffin. She thanks him “for every single day and hour,” and the letter and the book end.

The Characters

Despite the novel’s obvious fairy-tale and romantic qualities, Knut Hamsun has given his major characters some roundness and depth. Johannes is much more the poet than the peasant. He is sensitive, introspective, imaginative, and emotionally intense. He is at times brooding and solitary, frequently seeking solace in nature. At another time, he is capable of staying up all night, singing loudly to himself for excess of joy. Unhappily for him, he is also a romantic in his belief that first love is the only true love, that love can conquer all obstacles, and that love means perfecting oneself in order to be worthy of the beloved.

In the beginning, Victoria and Johannes enjoy the easy equality of children, but the world of money and class difference inevitably intrudes more and more. Yet even when it seems that Victoria has entirely rejected him, he still draws his inspiration from her, still struggles to become worthy of her. She is obviously something more than Victoria. She becomes an object of his idealized love, all the more necessary and desirable because she is unavailable.

In one surrealistically repellent dream, he is at the bottom of the sea “in front of a huge doorway.” There he “meets a great barking fish. It has a mane on its back and it barks at him like a dog. Behind the fish stands Victoria. He stretches out his hands to her, she has no clothes on, she laughs to him and a storm blows through her hair.” When he wakes from this forbidding dream, he leaves town and the country, as if in flight from the real, sexual woman. The suggestion is that Victoria, as an unattainable ideal, is in some way necessary to his psyche and to his writing. If attaining Victoria were truly his greatest wish, why does he not seek her out after he is released from his promise to Camilla? He stays away from Camilla’s party although he knows Victoria will be there, and thus misses his last chance to see her.

Victoria is the Princess. She is her father’s daughter in her pride, her class consciousness, and her occasional snobbery (for example, when she tells Johannes that Otto may be less handsome than he, but at least “he is a well-bred man. And that means something”). She is the cold aristocrat when she shows disdain for Johannes’ father after he calls at the Castle. (He came only because she asked for news of Johannes.) She can be cruel—inviting Johannes to her engagement party and then mistreating him there. She can also be passionate and sincere; her letter has a terrifying honesty. Besides pity and fear of mortality, it reveals considerable self-knowledge. She writes, “O God, if you knew how I have loved you, Johannes. I have not been able to show it to you, so many things have come in my way, and above all my own nature.” She adds, “Papa was hard on himself in the same way and I am his daughter.” The father’s nature is a fierce pride of position and place, which justifies the sacrifice of an only daughter to a loveless marriage and, when that fails, requires self-immolation.

Victoria’s nature is somewhat more difficult to understand. She is obviously drawn to Johannes; she would rather be with him than with anyone else, and she would rather drown than marry a man she does not love. Yet she does nothing but acquiesce to her fate, at times seeming almost to revel in it. Perhaps she is the kind of woman who finds the dreadfully involuntary subjugation of love difficult to forgive. Perhaps love wounds her pride, because it destroys her proud illusions of self-sufficiency. It is possible to speculate about Victoria and about Johannes, but Otto and Camilla are one-dimensional characters who have little to do in the novel but be true to their respective types: Otto, a privileged and aggressive boor, and Camilla, a jejune debutante.

Critical Context

Hamsun once said, “Victoria is nothing more than a little poetry. A writer may have some poetry he wishes to get rid of, particularly if for ten years he has written books that strike you like a fist.” Clearly, Victoria is very unlike Hamsun’s novels of psychological realism of the 1890’s—Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899), Mysterier (1892; Mysteries, 1927), and Pan (1894; English translation, 1920)—and there is much that is poetic in the novel. Hamsun’s setting, with its Castle and its allegorical characters known only as the Master and the Lady of the Castle, the Chamberlain and his Lady, the Tutor, and the Miller, helps create the feeling of a romance, the antithesis of realism. Yet the novel does not, for all its poetry, successfully wall out reality. The preoccupation with death and tragedy in Johannes’ writings is a grim undercurrent to the romance elements of the novel. Victoria’s letter to Johannes is unlike the sentimental letter written by a dying heroine in a romance. Its extreme honesty may not strike like a fist, but it sears and burns. Finally, it seems that a difference in class is not the only or even the real thing which separates the Peasant-Poet from his Princess. Their tragedy seems more a product of their somewhat neurotic selves than of implacable fate and cruel society.

Victoria became a great commercial success for Hamsun. In Norway, it is his best-known and best-loved book, and for a long period it was considered an appropriate confirmation present. It has become one of the most famous love stories in world literature.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, 1987.

Gustafson, Alrik. “Man in the Soil,” in Six Scandinavian Novelists, 1940.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun, 1922.

McFarlane, J.W. “The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun’s Early Novels,” in PMLA. LXXI (1956), pp. 563-594.

Naess, Harald. Knut Hamsun, 1984.

Naess, Harald. “Who Was Hamsun’s Hero?” in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature, 1975. Edited by John M. Weinstock and Robert T. Rovinsky.