Unto A Good Land

Introduction to Unto a Good Land

Moberg finished the second volume of the Emigrant Novels in 1952 in Carmel, California. The Swedish original bears the title Invandrarna (The Immigrants). The English-language version, Unto a Good Land, followed in 1954. The English title is taken from the Old Testament, Exodus 3:8, a passage absent from the beginning of the Swedish edition.

A novel of passage, Unto a Good Land carries the immigrants to the margins of American settlement areas. Their first period in Minnesota consists of an elemental encounter with nature on the one hand and the difficulties of dealing with a new language on the other.

The distance the immigrants have traveled and the strangeness of their new environment make their sense of isolation more intense. At the same time, they are delivered, as in the Old Testament story, into virgin territory, a land of milk and honey, where the promise of freedom becomes a reality.

The narrative moves at a leisurely pace between New York and Minnesota. This pace gives Moberg an opportunity to depict the immigrants’ amazement at the bustle and perils of city life in America as well as the miracle of rail travel, Both of these aspects have historical validity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Sweden was still largely agricultural and lacked an urban culture. Stockholm, the capital, was an ethnically homogeneous town of barely one hundred thousand inhabitants. In addition, most Swedes of the 1840s and 1850s would never have seen a train before. Even though the steam engine was pioneered in Sweden, construction of the Swedish national rail lines lagged behind that of Britain and the continental European countries and was not completed until the 1880s.

Other aspects of Moberg’s narrative are also based on historical fact. Olof Hedström (1803–77) was an early Swedish immigrant who converted to Methodism and became a minister to seamen around midcentury in New York. As Moberg writes, he ran the Bethel ship in New York harbor. There he took in newly arrived Swedes and helped them with advice about America. Hedstrom’s brother Jönas (1813–59) was also a Methodist, a resident of Victoria, Illinois. He worked with the church and in real estate in western Illinois. The brothers were instrumental in guiding many Swedish immigrants to areas settled by their countrymen in downstate Illinois, where the newcomers often bought farmland.¹

Swedes traveling to Minnesota before 1870 typically came up the Mississippi River from Illinois or Iowa. They arrived by steamboat at St. Paul or in the Stillwater area, as does Moberg’s fictional group. In the nineteenth century Minnesota had several areas of strong Swedish rural settlement. Among those were Red Wing — Vasa in the southeast and New Sweden — Bernadotte in Nicollet County. Most typical of all, however, were Washington and Chisago counties. While Stillwater was the region’s English-speaking trade center, the countryside surrounding it was Swedish in culture and language. Karl Oskar’s land-taking near Chisago Lake is in line with actual settlement patterns.

The fact that Moberg’s characters have several of their most problematic encounters with Stillwater tradesmen and residents reflects historical differences between town and country in that part of Minnesota. In the nineteenth century, areas of Washington and Chisago counties were so totally Swedish speaking that contacts with English speakers occurred only when immigrants needed to carry out legal proceedings, make registrations at city hall, or trade in local stores.

Unto a Good Land introduces literary motifs common to the American segment of the novels. First is that of letter writing. Karl Oskar’s exchange of letters with Sweden foreshadows the correspondence that brings the final novel, The Last Letter Home, to its poignant close. Second, Kristinas homesickness becomes more pronounced in this novel, especially in the chapter “At home’ Here in America-.” Her sense of isolation eventually leads to the planting of the imported apple tree, a symbol of her lasting ties to Sweden and her difficulty in adapting to new ways.

This aspect of Kristina’s experience suggests an important theme in the literature of immigration. Dorothy Burton Skårdal has described this as the Divided Heart theme. Many immigrants found themselves in America more in body than in soul. While they may have succeeded materially and learned many American habits, they could never conquer their longing for home. In a sense, they found themselves half-American and half-European. For Kristina, finding a way to accept her fate in America but still remain Swedish becomes a prime spiritual concern.²

As in other things, Karl Oskar stands in contrast to his wife in this regard. He ignores his father’s earlier warning that seeking so much land in America is an example of overweening pride. Instead Karl Oskar looks with satisfaction at his ownership of land in the New World. Unconcerned in the beginning that the land was taken from Native Americans and unaware of changes eventually to take place in his own identity, he marks his place by carving his name in the Minnesota forest: K. O. Nilsson, Svensk.

The image of the immigrant husband looking expectantly to the future while his wife longs for the old ways is a common motif in American immigrant fiction, also employed by, among others, Ole Rølvaag in Giants in the Earth. It is a striking motif, one full of potential for mischance and ironic results.

R. McK.

NOTES

1. Svenska män och kvinnor (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1946), 3:374.

2. Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience through Literary Sources (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974).