Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [72]
Helga’s decisions were not unusual for the late Victorian era. “If we don’t talk about it, it will go away,” was one way in which pain and grief were handled. In the mid-1800s, there was a significant amount of sentimentality and religious literature surrounding grief and mourning over the death of children. These included consolation literature emphasizing the afterlife as joyous and available to all believers. This was aimed primarily at women, who were considered especially prone to grieving because of their focus on motherhood and expressiveness.14 Poems and stories about death (particularly a mother’s bereavement) had been standard fare in the middle-class women’s magazines, until they abruptly stopped in 1875 when Helga was fifteen. Victorian values may have caused this shift. As one woman of the era explained, “A woman’s highest duty is so often to suffer and be still.”15 For the next one hundred years, during the rest of Helga’s life, death and grieving became a taboo topic in the United States and no articles appeared in any of the six major women’s magazines.16 It was common behavior to keep painful experiences inside. Helga’s granddaughter Thelma mentioned that she never heard Helga talk about her husband after his death, nor does anyone in the family know much about her son’s death right before she left on the walk across America, or the death of Ole and Helga’s first-born son in Minnesota.
After Ole’s death, Helga did choose to write her memoirs in great detail. Hundreds and hundreds of pages came forth, but still she kept them secret from the sons and daughters, knowing they harbored anger. Yet the comment to her granddaughter Thelma to “take care of this story for me” suggests she held hopes that someday her story could be told. Her very act of creation indicates that she was validating the worth of her experiences, at least to herself. Her need to remember and share her life story remained.
AVOIDING THE ANGER
The children’s anger over Helga’s actions remained until their death. By staying silent, Helga avoided the continuous expressions of her children’s resentment. “She was never forgiven for leaving” was repeated often by family members, although they took very loving care of their mother in her elder years.17 The Victorian emotional culture gave little room for the expression of anger by women or children in the family. Anger was perceived as particularly menacing to family life. Prescriptive literature had firm advice on domestic discord and marital quarrels. Prohibitions existed against angry displays by children against parents. The overarching belief was that the family must be preserved against emotional storms.18
The fragility of the family after Helga returned was obvious to each member. They still were in dire economic circumstances and emotionally broken. It was likely they kept silent partly as a way to contain their anger. During Helga’s later years, when she enjoyed talking about politics, her family always “shut her up,” and her granddaughter said she seldom spoke back. This repression may be how she handled her own anger at being silenced for expressing her unpopular political views. Helga undoubtedly harbored some anger at the unknown wealthy New York woman and collaborating sponsors, if any, for their choices. She endured the humiliation of coming home empty-handed, susceptible to the charges that she had been a fool to trust a stranger’s wager. The family also spoke of Helga’s change to a more melancholy personality after