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Taylor Kraayenbrink

Dr. Van Rys

English 221

6 December 2010

With Unseeing Eyes

Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh begins with a scene which bears heavily

on the rest of the novel. The hero of the novel, Niels Lindstedt, and his companion, Lars Nelson,

are depicted to be “fighting their way through the gathering dusk” (1). So ominously begins a

novel which is, at its heart, dark in nature. In her work entitled Survival: A Thematic Guide to

Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood notes the ubiquity of dark theme and content in

Canadian literature. After a comprehensive survey of the canon of Canadian literature, Atwood

takes this darkness to further articulation, postulating that there is a “central theme” in this

nation’s literary culture of survival (32). To this theme Settlers of the Marsh is no exception.

Indeed, it appears as though Grove’s 1925 novel is written to adhere to the later criticism of

Atwood.
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Going beyond the theme of survival, Atwood complicates her view of Canadian

Literature, bringing up her victim model of literary interpretation. Essentially, this theory

assumes that most literary works wrought in Canada are not only focused on survival, but the

ultimate survivor (or not) is at its core plagued as a victim (36). Of course, if there are victims,

one must inevitably ask who or what the victimizer is. However, this is where Atwood expands

her theory. What one is a victim of will place that victim in one of four categories (36-39).

Atwood denies that these four positions of victim status are impermeable: “You’re rarely in one

position in its pure form for very long—and you may have a foot, as it were, in more than one

position at once” (39). Not surprisingly, the hero of a 281-page novel cannot be pigeonholed into

one of these categories, but Atwood herself advocates further criticism seeking a “Dynamic

examination of a [victim] process in motion” (40). From here, this essay will explore the depth

and nuance of a survival/victim mentality in Settlers of the Marsh. Not surprisingly, such an

exploration yields conclusions which build on Atwood’s model, rather than submit to it.

However, it is clear that Settlers of the Marsh suffers from a philosophy of morbid hyper-

fatalism—a fatalism which fits “Position Two” in the list of victim stances; however, this victim

stance, at least as developed in the novel, is severely flawed, both by the attribution of the plot to

a vague, misanthropic, or at best apathetic, force, and by the sheer stupidity of the protagonist,

Niels Lindstedt.

When speaking of Canadian Literature, Atwood says “A lot of our literature, as you may

have suspected, is either an expression or an examination of Position Two: ‘I am a victim but

there is nothing I can do about it’” (42). How does Niels Lindstedt reflect, or represent, this

position? His language and thought must be examined throughout the entire course of the novel.
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Examining his philosophy before and during his crisis, or crises, will not affirm whether or not

he fits Atwood’s type two. How he thinks and views himself and those around him must be

considered before, during, and after crisis and catastrophe.

It is worthwhile to consider how Niels appraises and critiques his fellow settlers in their

views. Lindstedt’s first encounter with a settler of the marsh is Mr. Amundsen. He has an

extremely fatalistic (and hypocritical) outlook on life and its circumstances; circumstances both

adverse and positive to himself. Of his wife’s illness he says “It has pleased God to confine her

to her bed …It is a visitation, one must be resigned” (9). Niels disapproves strongly of this

mentality “He had not even called in what human skill and knowledge might give” (13). Niels is

critical of this man, who seems to be “laying down the law to his creator” implying that, to

Lindstedt at least, Amundsen has chosen his (or his wife’s) victim status, but is hypocritically

attributing it to God. Niels leaves the Amundsens feeling “resentment against something that

seemed wrong in the world” (14).

Of Mrs. Lund, there is a friendlier, but no less supercilious judgment. Niels is skeptical of

her dream of a better future, and he thinks “She seemed to live under a strain, as if she kept up

her spirits in an eternal fight against adverse circumstances” (21). Opposed to these two

characters stands Clara Vogel. And yet she is certainly not an escapee into Atwood’s fourth

victim stance “In which victor/victim games are obsolete” (39). When referred to as “the gay

widow of the settlement”, she repudiates this ironic title, saying, “Widow sounds so funereal”

(22). Clearly, she fits into Atwood’s victim Position One: “To deny the fact that you are a

victim” (36).
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Where does Niels stand? He certainly does a great deal of thinking on it, especially for a

farmer; however, he decides: “Success and failure! It seemed to depend on who you were, an

Amundsen or a Lund” (30). In this internal statement, Niels is embarking on the development of

his own version of Amundsen’s reductionist attributing of events to a vague “God”, with Niels

simply replacing God with another slothfully defined term, circumstance. Niels’ world is one

where, in the words of Gunnars, “Man is inherently ignorant, at the mercy of greater forces that

also appear mindless” (288).

What does Niels make of his life? He rarely, for someone so successful, seems to be

happy with himself or his circumstances (14; 24; 38; 104). Upon his rejection by Ellen, Niels

speaks to Mr. Amundsen’s aforementioned deity: “Oh God, I can’t understand it” (118). And,

like Amundsen, after the rejection scene, Niels decides that it is best not to over-think this

rejection: “He did not enquire into it. It was final” (119). After this point, Lindstedt stops

inquiring into why his life is turning out adversely. Indeed, he does not penetrate the world of

causality any more than the analogous “mysterious second room” he gives to his wife, Clara

Vogel (169). At the culmination of his mental distress in the novel, Niels becomes almost the

express image of the man he was so critical of, Mr. Amundsen. They both find sufficient

explanation for the bad (and good) in their lives in a reductionist attribution of life’s

circumstances to the Judeo-Christian God. Asking himself if he is a “mere product of

circumstance” (210), Niels turns to the English Bible, where he finds answers enough for his

query in Ecclesiastes, ever the company of the miserable disenfranchised (218). Nevertheless, it

appears that, for the most part, Niels is ambiguous at best in defining what he blames for the
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cause of his misfortunes, although he seems to lean toward a vague version of Atwood’s

“Position Two” mentality.

The most interesting character in this novel in terms of the victim blame game may in

fact be F. P. Grove himself. What are his comments on the plight of his hero, and other

characters in the story? The first comment outright which deserves examination is when Mr.

Lund is divining, trying to decide where to dig for the well. As Niels looks on, Grove states of

Lund “Life had him in its grip and played with him” (28). One important thing to note here is

that this quotation could also be attributed to Niels’ thoughts, rather than Grove’s narration. This

is the case in many passages of deeper thought in the novel, and is deliberate, Grove binding up

the thoughts of his protagonist with his own. However, it seems more appropriate to attribute the

words less doubtfully to Grove. Later on at the Lund’s, Niels has one of his (unrealistic) dreams

of the future, what Grove calls “The eternal vision that has moved the world and that was to

direct his fate” (31). Commenting on Niels pioneer dream, Grove claims it is implanted in him

“By some trick of his ancestry” (34). When rescued from the clutches of Clara Vogel the first

time, the narrator claims “Chance came to his aid” (54). As Niels tries to sort life out in one of

his hazy lines of thought, Grove is ever willing to step in and help the reader discern why Niels’

life is so brutal. This time, Grove waxes poetic: “he was a leaf borne along in the wind, a prey to

things beyond his control, a fragment swept away by torrents” (57). Second-guessing his

decision to move from Sweden, Niels is at a dead end, but Grove is not, commenting wistfully

“How chance played into his life!” (64) Upon running into Mrs. Vogel in town Grove states it

was “A chance happening” which “disturbed Niels still more profoundly” (99). Ruminating

deeply, as he always seems to be doing, Niels considers his success over the land, which Grove
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again says was wrought “by the aid of a fickle ally; circumstance” (105). Perhaps Grove gets a

bit more reasonable in his commentary after Mrs. Vogel reveals her real character to the ignorant

Niels; but still, he is shackled by forces beyond his power to overcome: “he could not act or

speak except according to laws inherent in him. What must happen would happen” (202-203).

Even when Clara tries, in her own backhanded way, to reconcile with Niels, Grove trumps it up

as “A chance meeting” (205). Alas, but Grove yearningly laments that if Niels had understood

the meaning behind Clara’s “chance” meetings with him “fate might have been stayed” (208).

Then the narrator asks a rhetorical question “Are we mere products of circumstance?” (210) Not

wanting the reader to go astray, Grove is sure to answer the question himself with the comforting

passage from Ecclesiastes “That which is crooked cannot be made straight” (218).

Grove does not change his mindset even in the closing pages: “What must come will

come…why hasten it?” (279) Clearly, if the philosophy of this novel is to be determined by the

narrator’s interjections to the plot, it is a philosophy of the most resigned fatalism, as Gunnars

states in the afterword “Niels is at the mercy of circumstance, origin, and time” (286). Or in the

words of Buitenhuis, “the characters are in large part creatures of fate.”

But juxtaposed with this overblown and overindulged sense of fatalism is the real cause

of adversity in the novel. That Grove intends for the reader to see the true cause as such is

debatable. Nonetheless, the tragic flaw inherent in Niels is an acute case of ignorance. In the

words of a scathing 1925 review of this novel, Niels’ “simplicity passes all reasonable

understanding” (La Boissiere 149). It is worthwhile to explore some of the more stark examples

of Niels’ simplicity. When considering the women in his life, Niels is dumbfounded, as they

seem to be “bent on replacing the vague, schematic figures he had in his mind” (36). Poor Niels
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needs a soul mate who would “understand the turmoil in his heart without an explanation in so

many words”, and certainly he does need someone who can do that, for he lacks any powers of

articulation whatsoever, both in his thought and in his speech (51; 55). Of Vogel, she was

“Incomprehensible to him” (56). In what may be a description of the epitome of boorish non-

romance, after the death of Ellen’s father, Niels is anything but penetrating (or comforting), as he

“looked at her dully, uncomprehendingly” (69). Niels is without doubt a man who wishes to

avoid definition, articulation, and comprehension. He tries to avoid the culminating moment of

asking Ellen’s courtship, as he comes to “dread the decisive moment” (98). In one of the more

vivid passages in the novel, just before Ellen rejects Niels, the description of their emotions is

noticeably inarticulate, in keeping with Niels’ character: ”Imponderable things,

incomprehensible waves of feeling passed to and fro between them” (110). This passage repeats

itself almost verbatim in the end, when Ellen and Niels are united (277). These are some

examples of how Niels has an innate flaw of what can only be described as dullness, simplicity,

or some other negatively connoted word implying stupidity. Dull understanding, dull

comprehension, dull emotion, etc, is the rule of Niels’ life. The only times he seems to have real

emotion is when he experiences “passionate intensity” (48, 268).

With a protagonist so dull, the force he is oppressed by is also necessarily “vast,

nebulous, and unchangeable” (Atwood 37). This begins with the vague “something” which Niels

feels to be wrong in the world (14). Later, he fails to obey a “hardly articulate impulse”, arguably

an impulse that if better articulated, and thus heeded, would have saved him from his “terrible

destiny” (51). Then comes a very dull relation of what “life” is, “A dumb shifting of forces, grass

grew and was trodden down; and it knew not why” (121). An unflattering comparison of Niels to
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grass is an unconventional way to treat the protagonist of a novel, but it is true to this character’s

ignorance. Again Grove says “Things which all about him knew: he alone was ignorant of them”

(159). When he begins to suspect Clara of infidelity, he has fears “unimaginable, horrors

unspeakable—the most horrible as they were vague, vague” (187). Even after Clara explains her

adultery and true character to him, the reader is old “he did not understand” (197). Niels is the

supreme Atwoodian Position Two victim protagonist: one who, in an unwillingness or inability

to understand reality, chalks up life’s adversity to a “dumb shifting of forces”, thereby, as

Atwood says, he is “permanently excused from changing” any circumstance—even those he

could change (37). Going back to the beginning of the novel, Niels and the other characters in

the plot are “mere sand that blows with the wind”, and everyone is a victim of a “merciless

force” (3).

Margaret Atwood raises an important question about Canadian Literature in her essay.

Are all Canadian authors seeking to write on a serious level “neurotic or morbid?” (35)

Certainly, in Settlers of the Marsh, there is a predominantly dark current of philosophy, even in

the end, when, as Henry Baron notes, Niels returns from prison ready “to accept a compromised

dream.” Although Niels is skeptical of the fatalistic resignation of the severe Mr. Amundsen, he

ends up succumbing to that same worldview, perhaps even a less sharply defined and articulated

version of it. Perhaps it is a stretch to put too much stock in claiming that the dim-wit Niels

accepts an unadulterated version of this fatalism; but it is definitely the philosophy presented in

the novel by Grove and imposed upon his characters. Certainly one would agree with La

Bossiere that “There is tuition to be learned in the story of ignorance and silence the novel tells,

in the negative, limitative semantics of the author” (159). Even after a dynamic examination of
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this novel, it is more than arguable that the main stance of this novel is one of Margaret

Atwood’s “Position Two”. Unfortunately, although Niels ends up surviving, in the words of

Atwood, he “has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival” (33). Gunnars calls it a “grim

comedy” (291). Unfortunately although this novel could serve as a heuristic lesson of the

consequences of gross ignorance, it has an inherent self defeating design flaw, as Niels never

overcomes or even understands his own ignorance.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. English 221

Coursepack: 27-43. 2010. Print.

Baron, Henry J. “Settlers of the Marsh.” Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised

Edition (2000): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 27 Nov. 2010.

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Buitenhuis, Peter. “Settlers of the Marsh.” Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction

Series (1987): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 27 Nov. 2010.

Gunnars, Kristjana. “Afterword” to Settlers of the Marsh. Toronto: M&S, 1989. Print.

Grove, Frederick P. Settlers of the Marsh. Toronto: M&S, 2008. Print

La Boissiere, Camile R. “Of Words and Understanding in Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh.”

University of Toronto Quarterly 54.2 (1985): 148. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO.

Web. 28 Nov. 2010.