Juha by Juhani Aho (1911)

The temptation would be to call this a love-triangle, but I don't really think it is. It seems to me to represent a state which can be seen as prior to that of the civilised notion of love. It depicts nineteenth century pioneer Finland in the wilds, with scattered villages and trading posts and a smattering of clergy. The ground on which everything about life is based is elemental, as is the struggle to survive and prosper in an environment both full of possibilities and enormously lonely and limiting in a personal sense. It is particularly limiting for women; they appear in this book as appendages in the main, though the mothers of the two male protagonists are tough frontier matriarchs, having survived through their appendagehood to some form of independence; although they are still very much living through their sons, they are also despotic family rulers in the domestic sphere. Juha is an ageing individual, with his own home apart from the family stead, who, years ago, took on a young wife, an ethnic Karelian who had been orphaned into his family. He looked after her from young girlhood and it seemed 'natural' that she would become his wife in time. Marja is established in his home, which to some extent they have built up together, both working physically hard. She is pretty tired, and pretty tired of him. He seems old and very uninviting, and she's worn out in the way that must have been very common for pioneer women of that time. Into their lives erupts a wandering trader: the young, fit, lanky, ultra-masculine scion of the most famous Karelian trading family. Shemeikka sweeps Marja off her feet, and she's still young and pretty enough to grab his attention. When Juha's hellish mother arrives for a visit, criticizing everything Marja does in minute detail in her well-established manner, driving Marja mad for the millionth time, the attractions which Shemeikka holds out finally become too alluring. After some indecision, she hops into his boat as he's leaving and heads off with him. Juha is devastated. His mother says, in effect, 'I told you so'. Juha battles between thinking that perhaps Marja was forcibly removed by Shemeikka, and the distinct possibility that she went willingly. He slips into terrible depression. Meanwhile Marja, after a few largely happy weeks alone, discovers on their arrival at Shemeikka's family compound that he has a tribe of young women lodged there who have been procured in a similar manner to hers. She is simply this year's model. She also slips into a depression as her dreams of young love are murdered. Having been there for some time, and now with a child of the liaison, she decides that she hates Shemeikka more than Juha, and feels sorry for what she has done to him. She escapes, leaving the child behind, and heads home. Juha accepts her with open arms, having in the meantime conveniently convinced himself that she was taken against her will. She does not relieve him of this delusion, not being able to bear the results of what the knowledge of her willingness would do to him. But fate soon overshadows Marja's mind; she simply can't get past the fact that Juha is incredibly unappealing to her, even though she feels for him on some emotional levels. She needs her child also; they decide to go back to Karelia together to retrieve him. While they are trying to achieve a slipping in and out with minimal attention, Shemeikka walks in. In the ensuing confrontation, Juha fights Shemeikka, flooring him before he is ready to retaliate. But in the confrontation Shemeikka reveals that Marja came willingly, and that she once told him that she wished Juha dead. Having injured Shemeikka, Juha and Marja escape in their boat. Juha, realising at last the true qualities of Marja's lack of feeling for him, confronts her. This time, exhausted, she does not deny how it actually was. With a bewildered dead look in his eyes, he casts himself over a waterfall to his death. This has the classically 'depressing' Scandinavian engulfing fated realism, I guess, but I don't find that unenjoyable when it's written this well. It's not about love, except on Juha's part, it's more about the 'wife-taking' process; though I suppose both Juha and Marja were seeking it, and not finding it in each other. It seems to me well ahead of its time in terms of its tough discussion of the human nitty gritty. Its themes of ownership, violence and elemental retribution in affairs of 'love' have one other striking likeness: I think people living with family and relationship violence would find the situations and reasoning here chillingly familiar.