Books: Bourgeois Wife & Mother

MADAME DORTHEA—Sigrid Undset—Knopf ($2.50).

Madame Dorthea is a study of a bourgeois wife & mother in the early months of widowhood. A really good novelist could have made something of the theme with no sales-trimmings. Madame Undset puts it in the 18th Century, replete with archeological detail, dopes it to the teeth with “colorful,” superfluous characters, whips up a spurious suspense, and still is too much of a bourgeois wife & mother to bring it off.

A clergyman’s daughter, young Dorthea married a clergyman—an old one—and suffered several frigid years. When he died, she married Businessman Jorgen Thestrup and settled down placidly to “the natural, modest contentment which a female may achieve in a marriage sensibly contracted.” This arrangement brought her, with the years, seven children and such morsels of natural, modest wisdom as the following:

“Ah no, she had come to see that love is a dangerous power. And if it has been vouchsafed to one to taste the joys of love while at the same time complying with the dictates of duty and virtue, one can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence for this rare mercy.”

At this point, with the wholehearted sympathy of at least some readers, Jorgen Thestrup mysteriously disappears, and Madame. Dorthea divides her time between her children, household duties, settling the estate, and flashbacks on her married life. All these domesticities are reported in an abundance which Tolstoy could have made wonderful and which Sigrid Undset’s high-grade Dorothy Dix tone of voice makes tedious.