Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1992, Page 37

Women and Men in Laxdæla saga
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One of the purposes of this paper will be to offer a feminist reading of
Laxdæla saga which avoids the pit into which feminist criticism sometimes
falls, as Carol Iannone (1988) has shown in relation to critics like Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar: of operating in the world of politics rather than in
the world of literature.
An example of the distinction I have in mind is at hand in Judith
Fetterley’s cogent analysis of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (1978:46-71).
She shows that although this work is a love story and thus overtly about a
world in which men and women share equally, it is in fact a novel which is
extremely hostile to women. Frederic Henry is irresponsible, passive, and
self-centered; Catherine Barkley’s character is merely “a reflection of male
psychology and male fantasy life and is understandable only when seen as a
series of responses to the needs of the male world that surrounds her” (66).
She must cater to his needs and fears and his essential hostility, and
ultimately she must do so by dying. “If we weep at the end of the book ... it
is not for Catherine but for Frederic Henry. All our tears are ultimately for
men, because in the world of A Farewell to Arms, male life is what counts”
(71).
If this novel, which is set firmly in the world of love and takes pains to
elevate that world above the masculine world of warfare, can be so sexually
biassed, then it is hypothetically possible that a saga whose fictional setting is
the man’s world of medieval Iceland may have an wwbiassed view of women,
as characters who are important in their own right and whose lives count as
much as the lives of men. In Hemingway’s novel both Frederic Henry and
the author are hostile toward women, but this is not the case in the Sagas of
Icelanders, as we can see in a number of ways. For one thing, women in the
sagas share actively in the so-called “male” world of feud (by shaping
events, by affirming solidarity with their husbands - as do Bergþóra in Njála
and Auður in Gísla saga), so much so that one (female) critic has suggested
that “feud in Iceland was very much a woman’s business” (Frank 1990:76).
The distinction between the man’s activities “utan stokks” and the woman’s
activities “innan stokks” is a matter of natural cooperation, not contention.
For another thing, the sagas - like the heroic poems of the Edda where
Brynhildur is so prominent and where, in the final poems, Guðrún is really
the subject - take a genuine interest in the inner lives of women; the ailing
Halla Lýtingsdóttir, to take only one example of many, is presented in such
a way that the reader both feels her pain and admires her dignity when
Brodd-Helgi shabbily abandons her and refuses to spend the night with her
(Vápnfirðinga saga, ch. 9).