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It is within easy reach to read “Is mother dead” by Norwegian Vigdis Hjorth as a continuation of the famous “Heritage and environment”. But now the emphasis is not on repressed abuse, but on a mother-daughter relationship. Ingrid Elam has read.
The novel “Heritage and Environment”, Vigdis Hjorth’s international breakthrough, was about a family that denies a crime, the father abusing his eldest daughter when the girl was five years old. The daughter remembers the long-repressed rape as an adult and then also understands why she left home early and has since been removed from family life. In Norway, the book was read, with some justification, as an autobiographical description, and Vigdis Hjorth’s sister, lawyer Helga Hjorth, wrote the opposite book “Free Will”.
When Hjorth now, after two more novels, returns to the family constellation father, mother and two sisters, it is within easy reach to read “Is mother dead” as a continuation of “Heritage and the Environment”. What happened after the older sister revealed the family secret? But here the emphasis is not on the crime of a father, but on the relationship between a mother and her daughter. When her daughter Johanna was in her early twenties, newly married and having started law school, she suddenly left the country and moved with a new husband to Utah, where she has worked as an artist ever since. He has almost no contact with the family and does not return home for his father’s funeral. She becomes famous, has a large and busy exhibition in her Norwegian hometown with photographs showing the family as a chamber of oppression. After that, all contact between Johanna and her mother and sister ceases.
When the novel begins, Johanna has returned to Norway to work on a new exhibition. Her husband has died, her son has left home, now she wants to get in touch with his mother. She calls, sneaks around her mother’s house, follows her to church, writes text messages, but never gets an answer. She becomes more and more obsessed and we are trapped in her consciousness, crawling through the bushes with her, throwing snowballs at her mother’s window, remembering bits of childhood.
Someone comes home after many years and creates anxiety in the family. If this is reminiscent of Ibsen’s dramas, it is not a coincidence. Vigdis Hjorth has previously released a remake of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in the effort of publisher Natur & Kultur to give Ibsen’s dramas a modern novel costume. At Ibsen’s, the past sooner or later catches up with the family and it is always sexuality that has made the boil of lies grow until it explodes. “Heredity and the Environment” was already a modern family drama in the Ibsen sequel and in the new novel Johanna reflects on Ibsen’s dramas: the mother is often absent, it is the father and his guns who worry about everything, in “Hedda Gabler” as well as in “The Wild Duck” “. “When the mother is central, she is often what we used to call a bad mother.”
One of the strongest things about this novel is that it is never completely clear to us what happened in childhood or why Johanna went to such lengths in search of her mother.
So what about Johanna’s own family? One of the strongest things about this novel is that it is never completely clear to us what happened in childhood or why Johanna went to such lengths in search of her mother. We don’t know because Johanna herself doesn’t really know. None of her memories indicate that her father sexually abused her, but he has despised her and has not liked her cartoons, childish but revealing family portraits. I imagine they look like the non-affective Alice Neel images of family members and friends looking unhappy.
The father does not matter much this time, instead it is the dislike of the mother that is in focus, her Slavic loyalty to the man that prevents her from recognizing and encouraging the daughter except on the rare occult occasions when he cannot see or hear . Now that she does not want to meet her daughter, we see her expression of terror when Johanna after many attempts manages to get a foot in the door. The sister has adjusted since childhood, attended business school, married and had four children. Johanna is also obsessed with her, because she protects her mother, keeps Johanna at a distance, and sends hateful text messages when she has still managed to catch a glimpse of her mother.
Almost nothing happens or is explained, but Vigdis Hjorth manages to maintain tension and empathy until the last page. Johanna knows that she is abusing herself, but she cannot do anything else, she has to reconcile with her mother, because “mother is murder without d”. Or is it your own image of the mother that needs to be confirmed? And what freedoms can an artist take without being displaced by his mother? The questions are never asked directly, but they still seek answers in this boldly monomaniac novel about a conflict that cannot be resolved, only recognized.
