Amalie Skram

Background

Amalie Skram was born Bertha Amalie Alver on August 22, 1846 in Bergen, Norway. She grew up in a family of nine children; her mother had had all nine in the course of thirteen years. Only five of them, Amalie and four younger brothers, grew to adulthood, and her mother survived them all. Skram's father, Mons Alver, and mother, Ingeborg Lovise Sivertsen, were merchants and owners of a farm supply store.

Education

Because of her gender, Amalie was barred from entering Bergen's high school, but the girls' school from which she graduated furnished her with a reasonably good basic education, especially in languages. Skram had finished her schooling when her father Mons Monsen Alver went bankrupt due to unsuccessful speculations in shipping and herring. Having lost the grocery story with which he had supported his family, he subsequently emigrated to America, leaving his wife and children in near poverty.

Career

Skram's marriage to a sea captain elevated her family socially and enabled Skram to travel widely and to gain experiences later incorporated into her fiction. However, neither this marriage nor a second marriage were successful. These unhappy marriages profoundly affected her, and it has been suggested that her fiction reflects the emotional traumas of her own life. Works such as Forradt and Fru Ines, both published in 1891, portray the differences between men and women as virtually irreconcilable; thus marriage is seen to provide only nominal assurance of mutual concern, support, and faithfulness.

In 1878 Skram and her first husband were separated and two years later, divorced. The sorrow and disappointment she had suffered in the breakdown of her marriage were to some extent mitigated by the feeling of liberation that accompanied her divorce. But with that came a certain bitterness at the realization that the world will trample on a garden that has no surrounding fence. She was an easy target for criticism. To avoid it, she isolated herself to the extent to which she could bear the boredom of the small provincial town of Fredrikshald. She cooked and kept house for her brother and her sons and wrote newspaper articles and reviews promoting contemporary psychological and naturalistic works. She especially commended such authors as Henrik Ibsen and the Danish J. P. Jakobsen who refused to write of the world as a better place than it is and instead faced the indignities of humanity. In her opinion, they were the true agents of progress. She endorsed Ibsen's observations that women's inferior condition in society was caused by deficiencies in their upbringing, by husbands treating their wives as things or servants, and by women's toleration of those inequities.

Skram's outspokenness and general boldness added to her unconventional social position; it also put a severe strain on her relationship with her conservative and puritanical brother, who as an inhabitant of a small provincial town had an image to uphold. It was therefore a relief to both of them when Amalie and her two sons left Fredrikshald in the summer of 1881 to move in with her brother Wilhelm Alver who was a school principal in Kristiania (Oslo). Here, she breathed more freely, sharing the air with artists and scientists and exchanging ideas with writers, painters, and women who fought for emancipation. Here, too, however, her impulsive nature and beautiful eyes invited slander, gossip, and even a caricature in a story titled "Modern Ladies." Critics of the literary left were divided in their attack or support of the piece, and Amalie felt deeply betrayed by the latter. Pressing financial concerns were added to her troubles when her brother died in 1883 and left her without means for subsistence.

Amalie married Danish writer and journalist Erik Skram in 1884. He became an invaluable guide for his wife's literary career. He encouraged her to move from sketches and short stories to longer works, and as a journalist he protected her from attacks by Norwegian critics, especially after her first novel had been returned from the publisher upon acquaintance with its contents. Erik also supplied her with a home where she could shine among their friends with her sparkling intellect and domestic grace and abilities.

Even so, Amalie Skram found it difficult to sustain a balance between the roles of artist and wife. This became further complicated with the birth of a daughter in the middle of writing her major work, the tetralogy he People from Hellemyr. To get the solitude she needed, she would have to leave home periodically, which in turn would make her feel guilty and vulnerable to the disapproval of society. She was close to a nervous breakdown when her husband joined her doctor's entreaties that she seek help from the prominent psychiatrist Knud Pontoppidan. She agreed to spend a week or two at his hospital (Saint George in Copenhagen) but once there found herself declared insane and detained against her will. Erik obeyed Pontoppidan's injunctions against visitors and did not attempt to see his wife, even after she managed to smuggle out a note imploring him to come. She was eventually transferred to a hospital for the incurably insane but released because the doctor in charge found no evidence of insanity. On her return to the world, she was in a state of mental and bodily exhaustion from which she never fully recovered. She nonetheless found the strength to write two volumes about her stay in the psychiatric ward (Professor Hieronimus and At Saint George), so scathing in their criticism of hospital conditions that Pontoppidan found it necessary to resign from his post as head physician. Skram refused to see her husband ever again, and they were divorced in 1900. The remaining five years of her life she spent in Copenhagen with her daughter Johanne Skram.

Those were difficult years. Her health was precarious and her finances no less so. Monetary worries made concentrated writing arduous even after she was granted a writer's stipend from the Danish government. Skram died on March 15, 1905.

Achievements

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  Amalie is recognized as an early and strong proponent of the women's movement, setting the early European trend. Since 1994, the Amalie Skram prize, a travel stipend, has been awarded annually to Norwegian authors who show exceptional skill in addressing women's issues. In 1949 at Convent Garden in Bergen, a statue of Skram was unveiled. Amalie was also honored with a Norwegian postage stamp in 1996.

Works

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  • Professor Hieronimus 1895
  • Sjur Gabriel 1887
  • Forraadt 1892
  • Afkom 1898
  • S.G. Myre 1890
  • To Venner 1888
  • Lucie 1888
  • På Sct. Jørgen 1895
  • Fru Inés 1891
  • Karens Jul 1885
  • Constance Ring 1885
  • Sommer 1899

Views

Adopting the Emile Zola belief that all life is controlled by natural laws, Skram perceived human existence to be actuated by a "race impulse" that determines behavior through biological urges, making men and women slaves to a natural instinct of propagation.

Amalie Skram dealt with topics she knew well. Her work can be divided into three categories: novels concerning marriage, which explored taboo topics such as female sexuality and the subservient status of women in that period; multi-generation novels, which dealt with the fate of a family over several generations; and mental hospital works, which dealt with the primitive and brutal conditions of such institutions of the period.

Connections

Skram's engagement to a ship's captain, Bernt Ulrik August Müller, ten years her senior, was engineered by Amalie's mother as a means of getting her daughter financially settled. It is a fact that the new bride was entirely ignorant of the matrimonial duties owed her spouse, and she faulted her mother for having neither offered advice nor invited questions in the matter of wifely responsibilities. As the skipper's mate, Amalie was expected to accompany her husband on his voyages to Mexico, the West Indies, South America, and Australia, and somewhat to her surprise, she found life on a sailing ship much to her liking. It suited her high spirits and energetic pursuit of knowledge, and soon her husband would brag that she was as good a seafarer as any. As a wife in the captain's cabin, she experienced greater difficulties of adaptation. She had grown up in a divisive home and bore the imprint of her mother's pietistic teachings of sin and guilt. On their wedding night, she had found Müller's sexual advances disgusting, and she appears to have refused them on other occasions to the extent to which it was possible, given their confined space and the walls of listening ears.

After 12 years spent either in the captain's quarters or separated due to Amalie's pregnancies and the births of their two sons, Müller turned his back on the sea and bought a mill outside Bergen. For about a year, the couple, along with eight-year-old Jakob and ten-year-old Ludvig, lived a life of great diversity albeit little genuine happiness. The beautiful wife filled her life with parties and amateur theatricals, and wrote articles and literary reviews for Norwegian newspapers. Eventually, however, the increasingly strained relationship was brought to a crisis. Amalie suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed at the Gaustad asylum. Though she recovered after a couple of months, she refused to return to her husband. Instead, she demanded a separation and spent the next three years living with first one then another of her brothers. Her divorce was granted in 1882.

In 1882 Amalie met the Danish writer and journalist Erik Skram at an anniversary celebration for the great Norwegian poet Björnstjerne Björnson, Amalie's friend and mentor. Erik fell in love with the bright and lovely Norwegian writer and during the following year kept up an avid correspondence not only attesting to his love but initiating and encouraging discussions of literary, political, and moral issues. His courting won her heart, and they were married on April 3, 1884. As a writer for left-wing publications, Erik made little money, but he was a first-rate journalist and, according to his memoirs, content to give up his own novel writing to function as inspiration and mentor to his wife's greater talents.

Amalie Skram found it difficult to sustain a balance between the roles of artist and wife. This became further complicated with the birth of a daughter. Amalie and Erik were divorced in 1900.

Father:

Mons Monsen Alver

(1819 - 1898)

Mother:

Ingeborg Lovise Sivertsen

(1821 - 1907)

child:

Jacob Müller

(May 15, 1866 - May 7, 1911)

child:

Ida Johanne Skram

(October 9, 1889 - September 6, 1971)

child:

Ludvig Müller

(February 29, 1868 - October 1, 1922)

Ludvig Müller was a Norwegian actor and theatre director.

ex-spouse:

Bernt Ulrik August Müller

(April 11, 1837 - November 19, 1898)

Bernt Ulrik August Müller was a Norwegian ship captain.

ex-spouse:

Asbjørn Oluf Erik Skram

(March 10, 1847 - November 21, 1923)

Asbjørn Oluf Erik Skram was a Danish journalist and author.

References

• Amalie Skram om seg selv A book by Irene Engelstad.
  1981