Minna Canth

• Born: March 19, 1844
• Birthplace: Tampere, Finland
• Died: May 12, 1897
• Place of death: Kuopio, Finland

Other Literary Forms

Minna Canth started her career as a journalist. In 1874, when her husband, J. F. Canth, took over the editorship of a weekly paper, Keski-Suomi, it was Minna who did most of the actual writing. With her forceful articles, she angered the owners of the paper, and subsequently, in 1878, the Canths switched over to another publication, Päijänne. Even as an acknowledged author, Canth pursued her journalistic writing mainly in the liberal periodical Valvoja and, from 1889 to 1890, in her own journal, Vapaita aatteita. Canth’s first collection of short stories, Novelleja ja kertomuksia, was published in 1878 under the pseudonym Vilja. The stories are light, romantic tales written under the influence of the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. The themes that Canth explored in her drama are the same as those in her short stories: social commitment, anger at society’s neglect of its poor, and women’s issues. Canth’s dramatic talent and sharp ear for natural speech characterize her stories. Truly remarkable is the range of her female portraits; with equal veracity and sensitivity, she describes the gloomy existence of lowly maids, the strength of the women of the people, and the restricted lives of middle-class girls. Yet Canth’s stories are uneven in quality: Many bear the imprint of haste, written as they were during a spare moment and often lacking a final touch. Nevertheless, some of them, Köyhää kansaa (1886), Hanna (1886), Kauppa-Lopo (1889), and Agnes (1892), are among the most lasting artistic accomplishments of Canth’s career.

Achievements

Minna Canth has maintained her position as one of Finland’s foremost playwrights. Her works belong to the living cultural heritage of Finnish Finland. Both professional theaters and amateur groups continue to stage her plays on a regular basis. As a daughter of the working class, she entered the country’s cultural scene as an outsider and, propelled by her inner fire, introduced almost single-handedly the ideas of the “modern breakthrough” to Finland. Besides her literary accomplishments, her social significance cannot be overestimated. She championed the rights both of women and of the working class. Although active within the organized women’s movement, she never slavishly followed its dictates. Unlike the majority of the participants in the movement, who came from the educated classes and primarily strove for equality with the men of their own class, Canth stressed the necessity for women of all classes to unite in a common struggle. She also realized that the initiative had to come from bourgeois women, who must be prepared for certain sacrifices in the beginning. As long as working-class women saw their families starve, their primary allegiance would not be with their sex but rather with their class in a fight for survival. Canth criticized the institutionalized Church, which supported the status quo by teaching the poor to accept their lot in life with humility and the upper classes to regard their privileges as theirs by the grace of God. To Canth, such views represented a ticking time bomb that would one day explode. As much as the most radical of her works shocked contemporary audiences, in equal measure they have inspired later generations of the working class. Canth spurred their cultural interests by providing them with “plays of their own” and thereby strengthening their self-confidence.

Canth’s achievements were indeed remarkable, but they could have been even greater. She had the potential to become another August Strindberg or Henrik Ibsen had she the same opportunities. As it was, Canth never traveled outside Finland, and her exposure to theater was limited—a few visits to Helsinki and occasional guest performances in Kuopio by the Finnish theater. In addition to her writing, she managed a business and reared seven children.

Biography

The first nine years of her life, from 1844 to 1853, Minna Canth (born Ulrika Wilhelmina Johnsson) lived in Tampere, an industrial city in central Finland, where her father, Gustaf Wilhelm Johnsson, was employed in a textile mill. Although lacking in formal education, her father was highly regarded and advanced quickly in his job. In 1853, the family moved to Kuopio in eastern Finland, where Johnsson acquired a shop selling yarns manufactured by the Tampere factory. After graduating from a Swedish-language girls’ school in Kuopio, Canth continued her education in a newly established teachers’ college in Jyväskylä, which represented the highest level of education to which a young woman could aspire in Finland. In 1864, after only a year’s studies, she fell in love with and married J. F. Canth, a teacher of natural sciences at the college. During the following years, until her husband’s death in 1879, Canth devoted herself to their growing family. She did, however, find time to follow the major issues of the day, so that in 1874, when her husband took over the editorship of the paper Keski-Suomi, she was able to do most of the work. Canth translated foreign articles and wrote her own on topics familiar to audiences from her later artistic production: women’s education and alcoholism and other social ills. It was also during these years in Jyväskylä that she first came in contact with the theater, when the young Finnish Theater from Helsinki, started in 1872, gave guest performances there. Also influential was her acquaintance with the directors of the theater, Emilie and Kaarlo Bergbom. This sister and brother pair were to remain Canth’s mentors for years to come.

When Canth’s husband died, leaving his wife with six children and expecting a seventh, she was forced to find some means of supporting her large family. Returning to Kuopio, she took over her parents’ bankrupt yarn shop, and with skill and hard work, she managed to develop the business into a successful enterprise, which gave her and her family a solid living and enabled her to devote time to her writing and other cultural endeavors.

Although a small town and far from the country’s capital, Kuopio had a bishop’s seat, and the provincial governor resided there. A lively cultural life developed around the small circle of the town’s intellectuals. Much of the credit goes, however, to Canth. Her house became the “salon” frequented by young intellectuals, the names of whom are today familiar to every Finnish schoolchild: the authors Juhani Aho and Heikki Kauppinen, the members of the gifted Järnefelt family, and the brothers Erkko, to mention a few. Books by European thinkers such as Georg Brandes, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Hippolyte Taine, Max Nordau, and the Scandinavian authors Ibsen and Strindberg were discussed. Canth translated some of their works and commented on them in her articles in Valvoja and in her own short-lived Vapaita aatteita. Under the guidance of the Bergboms, she also launched her dramatic career. Soon, however, it became apparent that the kinds of works desired by the theater did not always coincide with those that Canth felt compelled to write. Her first two plays, Murtovarkaus and Roinilan talossa, were public successes—harmless depictions of life in the Finnish countryside in the popular national Romantic style. By the third play, Työmiehen vaimo, the tone had changed. Brandes’s thesis of literature, which emphasized the inclusion of issues of current interest, found a loyal follower in Canth, who increasingly attacked the hypocrisy of society, double morality, the Church, women’s powerless position, and the economic plight of the working class.

In 1889, the performance of Canth’s fourth major play, Kovan onnen lapsia, marked a turning point in her career and private life. Its radicalism shocked the audience, and the play was canceled after its opening night. More significantly, Canth’s strongest supporters, the young intellectuals, thought that this time she had gone too far. The rift was further widened by their opposite stands in the so-called morality feud. Although both Canth and her young male supporters rejected the prevailing double standard of sexual morality, whereby men were allowed sexual freedom before and after marriage whereas women were expected to live by strict moral rules, they clashed over ways to remedy the situation. The men advocated free love for men and women but maintained that prostitution was a necessary evil in view of men’s naturally stronger sex drive. Canth, on the other hand, called for the abolition of prostitution and demanded the same virtuous behavior from men and women. She was less motivated by idealistic morality than by her pragmatic concern for the women who became pregnant as a result of “free love” and the girls, mostly from the working class, who fell victim to prostitution. Worst of all, the men’s attacks on Canth went beyond their differing points of view—they ridiculed her in public about her appearance, age, and lifestyle.

Before becoming an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia in 1809, Finland had been an integral part of Sweden for centuries. As a result, Swedish was the language of administration, culture, and education. Yet the majority of the people spoke Finnish as their mother tongue. With the nationalistic movement that reached Finland around the middle of the 1800’s, a strong, new interest was sparked in the Finnish language and culture. Both the Jyväskylä College and the Finnish Theater were products of the movement. Canth had always faithfully supported the Finnish cause and with her art contributed to its growth. Now in the 1890’s, however, she found herself alienated from both the young Aho circle and the politically conservative Finns behind the Bergboms and the Finnish Theater. In Canth’s view, a greater threat to Finland was posed by the nationalist groups in Russia than by the domestic language question. Furthermore, she encountered a more fertile soil for her ideas among such Swedish-language intellectuals as the author K. A. Tavaststjerna. That she wrote Sylvi in Swedish and offered it to the Swedish Theater did nothing to improve her relations with the Bergboms.

The times were changing, however, and new ideas were coming from abroad. The rational decade of the 1880’s was yielding to the new currents of neo-Romanticism and Symbolism of the 1890’s. Even Brandes, the father of realistic literature in Scandinavia, now espoused Friedrich Nietzsche-inspired radical aristocratism with stress on the exceptional individual. Instead of relying on the powers of reason, the new generation of writers and thinkers explored the secrets of the human mind, spiritism, and hypnotism. Canth did not remain unaffected by these ideas. Some personal tragedies, the death of three persons that had been close to her, a nineteen-year-old daughter among them, rendered her especially susceptible to the emotional appeal of the new “isms.” More than any other thinker, the Russian author Leo Tolstoyhad an impact on Canth. His ideas of pacifism, love, faith, and humility can be detected in Papin perhe and became the dominant force in her work by the time she wrote Anna Liisa. Canth was at the height of her creative powers and the mastery of her craft when in 1897, in her fifties, she died of heart failure.

Analysis

In 1882, when Minna Canth began writing plays, she had few Finnish predecessors to emulate. After Aleksis Kivi in the 1870’s, only some minor plays had appeared in Finnish. The lack of an established Finnish canon of drama was perhaps a blessing in disguise; it left the fledgling playwright with a greater sense of freedom.

Murtovarkaus

The plot of Canth’s first play, Murtovarkaus, is conventional. The play ends happily with the well-to-do farmer’s son, Niilo, marrying Helena, a poor but beautiful crofter’s daughter. Before that, however, many a hurdle must be overcome. Niilo’s father wants him to marry a wealthy neighbor’s daughter, Loviisa, and she, quite aware of Niilo’s financial strengths, eagerly accepts the offer. Therefore, Helena’s appearance on the scene is most unwelcome. So that her rival will not pose a threat, Loviisa contracts the services of a village witch, who dutifully proceeds to arrange a break-in in Niilo’s house and have Helena accused of it. Fearing her alcohol-prone father to be the real culprit, Helena compliantly accepts her imprisonment. Finally, Hoppulainen, a happy-go-lucky drunkard, Helena’s other suitor, by chance comes on the true offender, the witch, and the innocent Helena regains freedom and fiancé. In the manner of the well-made play, the plot intrigue is built on unexpected happenings, misunderstandings, and overheard conversations. The characters are static, either entirely good or entirely bad, the most interesting of whom is Hoppulainen. Although irresponsible and saddled with many vices, he possesses a tender heart and a quick tongue. In him, Canth portrays the typical inhabitant of Savo province, known for his humor, carefree nature, and quick wit.

In spite of the play’s many weaknesses, Canth’s achievement in Murtovarkaus was notable, and the play has remained popular with audiences. It provides the theatergoer with light entertainment, events set in the Finnish countryside, and characters with whom audiences can identify. The dialogue flows effortlessly, and the cleverest lines are reserved for Hoppulainen, who is a virtual treasure house of Finnish proverbs and sayings. The melodious language, rich in parallelisms and alliteration, harks back to Finnish folk poetry.

Työmiehen vaimo

After one more play, Roinilan talossa, in the national Romantic style, Canth turned her attention to more serious issues, the women’s question and the plight of the working class. In 1882, the Finnish diet had entertained a proposal that would have guaranteed married women the right to their own earnings. The defeat of the proposal provoked Canth’s anger, and the defenseless position of the married woman constitutes the ideological core of Canth’s next drama, Työmiehen vaimo. The play opens with Risto and Johanna’s wedding. The bride, an industrious young woman, enters the marriage with sizable savings that now, in accordance with the law, are the property of her husband. In a year’s time, all of her savings are gone, she has aged, and she is desperately struggling to support her ailing infant son. All her money, to the last penny, has gone to quench Risto’s insatiable thirst. Risto strikes the ultimate blow when he steals Johanna’s half-finished weaving from the loom, which causes Johanna to fall ill and die. Johanna’s has not been the only female life destroyed by Risto. With false promises, he has trapped and seduced the gypsy girl Homsantuu, a romantically wild and anarchistic child of nature. When Risto deserts Homsantuu, she shoots him. While being dragged away by the police, Homsantuu cries out the now famous lines: “Your law and justice. . . . These are what I ought to have shot.” These words crystallized all of Canth’s own resentment against the established social order.

Not only men but also bourgeois women and their lack of solidarity are chastised by Canth in Työmiehen vaimo. Two women, members of the local women’s club, break into a tirade of accusations against Johanna without ever investigating the circumstances surrounding the theft. Because of Johanna’s poverty and lack of social graces, the women regard her as a morally inferior being, unfit to be a mother and to receive their work consignments. Vappu, an independent and strong-willed person, is the only woman who supports Johanna, and after Johanna’s death it is Vappu who adopts her son. Vappu realizes that marriage can be an ensnaring trap for a woman, and she steadfastly guards her freedom. In that, Vappu contrasts sharply with another female character in the play, a representative of the traditional woman, who regards marriage, set by God, as indissoluble, is always quoting from the Bible, and urges Johanna to surrender herself in humility to her husband’s tyranny.

Kovan onnen lapsia

The tone of Canth’s next drama, Kovan onnen lapsia, is sharper. The scene opens with a young boy about to die of hunger and lack of medical care. His mother, herself worn out prematurely by worry and deprivation, is a deeply religious woman who suffers in silence and accepts without protest her lot in life, regarding it as God’s will. In contrast, a group of young workers, her husband among them, who have lost their jobs after openly challenging their employer, are determined to fight for a better future for their people. Their leader, Topra-Heikki, is a modern-day Robin Hood, generous but hot-blooded. With the intention of getting medicine for the sick child, Topra-Heikki sets the barn of a wealthy but miserly farmer on fire and then steals his money. When one of Topra-Heikki’s men, driven mad by a bad conscience, threatens to inform the authorities, Topra-Heikki feels forced to kill him. The police, however, catch up with Topra-Heikki and his friends. In the play’s final scene, the police arrive at the cottage of the ailing boy. The father, who has had no part in the robbery, is arrested when he, at his pious wife’s urging, admits to knowing about the stolen money. Topra-Heikki’s good intentions have come to nothing; his help arrives too late, for the little boy has died. Now, only the mother and her two young daughters are left behind as the men are taken away to the accompaniment of the little girl’s bitter cry. With their father, the family’s breadwinner, gone, the child knows that only starvation and death await them.

Kovan onnen lapsia was performed only once at the Finnish theater in Helsinki. Strong public outcry was unleashed against Canth’s alleged advocacy of violence on the part of the working class. From a modern-day vantage point, her message rings more like a warning to the establishment than a call to arms for the workers. Unfortunately, Canth’s warnings went unnoticed. In 1918, a civil war broke out in Finland between the Socialist “Reds” and the bourgeois “Whites.” The bourgeois won, Finland retained its newly gained independence, and democracy was given a chance to develop, but a lot of bloodshed and deep social divisions could have been avoided had soothsayers such as Canth been heeded. In Kovan onnen lapsia, Canth champions social reforms rather than revolution. Indeed, she does not sanction Topra-Heikki’s behavior but clearly demonstrates how one criminal act leads to another. She understood, however, how bitterness can arise among poverty-stricken workers and lead to unintended violence.

Although the play contains genuinely touching scenes, it suffers from excessive didactic pathos and Robin Hood romanticism. Also, the extreme humbleness of the pious wife-mother dates the play. Such blind obedience and acceptance of life’s hardships strike modern Scandinavian audiences as strangely unrealistic and antiquated.

Papin perhe

The harsh public reaction to Kovan onnen lapsia, criticism from her supporters, and deaths in her inner circle of friends all contributed to the changed mood and mellower tone in Canth’s next play, Papin perhe, one of her strongest. Although still addressing serious issues, such as women’s subordination in family, Canth approaches her subject with more humor and less didacticism. Also evident is Canth’s growth in terms of dramatic technique.

The plot intrigue evolves around the generational conflict between the repressive rule of a father, a pastor, and his progressive children. The battle lines are drawn when the son refuses to work for his father’s conservative newspaper and is subsequently disowned by the father. In response, the son leaves for Helsinki and there joins the enemy camp, the competing liberal paper. The family’s two other children, two daughters, follow their brother to Helsinki. Somewhat unexpectedly, the play ends in reconciliation. On the evening of the younger daughter’s successful theater debut, the father arrives unannounced at his children’s apartment. At the sight of her father, who was always vehemently opposed to his daughter’s theater ambitions, the daughter becomes so frightened that she falls violently ill. This in turn shakes the father out of his self-satisfied complacency, making him realize not only that he drove his children away from home but also that he was about to kill one of them. Subsequently, father and children vow to respect one another’s opinions, and the play ends as the older daughter recites Tolstoyan words of love: “Freedom is the most important thing. No it isn’t. Love is.”

Although many broken friendships were mended by Papin perhe, the harmonious relationship between Canth and the Finnish theater remained permanently damaged. Canth became increasingly alienated from the Bergboms’ conservative Finnish nationalism, finding a more open-minded atmosphere in Swedish cultural circles. Her next play, Sylvi, which was originally written in Swedish, was first performed in the Swedish Theater.

Sylvi

Sylviis the story of a childlike young woman married to a man many years her senior and her passionate love for Victor, a childhood friend. Considering her marriage an unfortunate mistake, Sylvi asks her husband for a divorce. When he categorically rejects all talk about it, Sylvi, in desperation, kills him with rat poison. Immediately afterward, in witnessing her husband’s death agony, she bitterly regrets her act, but she never regrets or denies her love for Victor. Indeed, it is this love that sustains her in prison when she is tormented by remorse and a guilty conscience. In the end, when Victor announces that his feelings have changed and that he is engaged to another woman, Sylvi’s emotional defenses collapse, and she loses her foothold on reality.

Sylvi resembles Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880) in many respects. Like Nora, Sylvi is her husband’s cute plaything, his “kitty cat.” Canth, like Ibsen, attacks the sanctity of marriage. For reasons of economy, lack of educational opportunities, and social prestige, young girls were often compelled to marry older men, thus passing from their fathers’ patronage to that of their husbands. A clear conflict prevailed between the laws of nature and those of society. In the eyes of society, Sylvi is a woman of loose morals or even a hardened criminal. To Canth, she represents a victim of a hypocritical society. In fact, Canth’s exaggerated emphasis of Sylvi’s natural purity and childlike innocence detracts from her believability as a character.

Anna Liisa

Anna Liisa, Canth’s masterpiece and last major play, shows the progress she made during her relatively short writing career, and it also reveals her changing outlook on life. Instead of social concerns, the focus lies on individual psychology. Anna Liisa and Johannes are in the midst of wedding preparations when their marriage plans are abruptly shattered by the arrival of Mikko, a former farmhand of Anna Liisa’s father. In an effort to reclaim Anna Liisa, Mikko tells the family about the child Anna Liisa had borne four years earlier, when only fifteen, and her strangulation of the newborn. After the initial shock, the parents urge Anna Liisa to marry Mikko, father of the child, to keep the secret within the family. Not only does Anna Liisa refuse, but she also decides to confess everything in public. Only by accepting her rightful punishment, she believes, will she gain peace of mind. By surrendering herself voluntarily to the authorities, she rises in stature.

A clear indication of Canth’s changed outlook is the fact that this time it is the village pastor, the villain of earlier Canth dramas, who comes to Anna Liisa’s support and defense. Although led away in handcuffs, Anna Liisa appears at the end restored to her former greatness. She is, as Johannes puts it, at heart the same old Anna Liisa, a paragon of virtue and goodness, that he had planned to marry. Yet, the modern reader is likely to rebel against Canth’s Tolstoyan doctrine of humility here. Has Anna Liisa not, as her mother wonders, suffered enough during the long years of lonely struggle with shame and guilt? Did she not deserve a chance for a new life with Johannes? Why is Mikko allowed to leave the stage unscathed? Admittedly he failed to win Anna Liisa back, but that hardly seems a sufficient punishment for his actions. The author of Anna Liisa is far removed from the indignant writer of Kovan onnen lapsia or even of Sylvi, written only two years earlier.

Bibliography

Marjormaa, Ulpu, ed. One Hundred Faces from Finland: A Biographical Kaleidoscope. Helsinki: FLS, 2000. An essay on Canth is included among the famous Finns covered in this volume.

Sinkkonen, Sirkka, and Aneneli Milén, eds. Toward Equality: Proceedings of the American and Finnish Workshop on Minna Canth, June 19-20, 1985. Kuopio: University of Kuopio, 1986. A collection of papers presented at the workshop on Canth held in Finland at the University of Kuopio in 1985. It examines her works as well as women’s issues and feminism in Finland. Includes bibliography.

Wilmer, S. E., ed. Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finnish Women. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997. Examines the work of Canth and other Finnish women playwrights.