MARIA-LIISA NEVALA

Women – challengers of Finnish theatre

As public participants in Finnish theatre, women took root slowly. For a long time, they remained consumers, not active producers. Women appeared as authors of literature in the 19th century, and soon afterward in the theatre. The first novels written by women were published in the 1840s, and the first collections of poetry in the 1850s. Individual poems and stories had, it is true, been published since the turn of the 17th century. Women writers remained rarities until the beginning of the 20th century.

The Enlightenment in the 18th century had marked a gradual liberation for women, a freedom to take a public role as artists and writers. There were a number of routes to independence. In Finland, one important path was via amateur dramatics. Acting was a popular pastime, particularly in country houses, from where it also spread to the bourgeoisie and on, in the early 20th century, to the working classes. The most important inspirers and supporters of amateur dramatics in Finland were women.

At the end of the 1880s, a group of women gradually came to publicity in literature. They combined in their work both literary and social causes, and were active in bringing realist ideals to Finland. They believed in the capacity of the word to change the world, and particularly the world of women. And an effective means of promoting change was the stage. Among the burning questions of realism were: the legal and economic dependence of the wife on the husband even when the woman earned her own wages, the exclusion of women from higher education, double standards in morality, which expressed themselves in the disparagement of education for women, the subjugation of women in wedlock, a generally negative attitude to sexuality, and prostitution.

Radical Minna Canth

The most prominent Finnish writer of the 1880s was Minna Canth (1844-1897), who was at the same time also the first women who achieved a prominent position as a dramatist. The fate of the writing woman crystallised in Minna Canth in the sense that she passed through all the phases typical of writing women of her time. As the wife of a seminary teacher, Minna Canth was delighted to work as her husband’s uncredited assistant in editing his newspaper. This formed her writerly education which, after her husband’s death, rapidly bore fruit. Within the space of a few years, the single mother of seven children became Finland’s most controversial playwright, the first performances of whose plays on the stage of the country’s major theatre always provoked passionate polemic.

In her plays Papin perhe (‘The vicar’s family’, 1891), Sylvi (1893) and Anna Liisa (1895), Canth, in the Ibsenesque spirit of the time, depicts the striving of young women for independence. Centre stage, however, is given over to the personal conflict of the main characters, which is the result of the moral doctrines of church and society, which restrict individual freedom. Papin perhe depicts a young woman who clashes with her father in his attempt to prevent her from adopting an artistic career. Trapped in an arranged marriage to an old man, Sylvi, on the other hand, is driven by her angst to poison her husband. The main character of Anna Liisa kills her illegitimate child. Although the society around us has changed, the basic problematics of Canth’s plays still crystallise the constricting power of taboos at any period, including our own.

Minna Canth’s radicalism was not immediately taken up by the generation that followed; no similarly courageous pushing back of the boundaries does occurs again until the 20th century. But in any case Minna Canth showed the uses to which the expertise gained in amateur dramatics could be put by women.

Maria Jotuni, sharp social critic

For the women who began to write in the early 20th century, consciousness of the meaning of their work was clear. The turning of interest from the political, the national and the social toward the inner life was characteristic of all the arts in the early 20th century. A new face was given to Finnish drama by Maria Jotuni (1880-1943). From the beginning, Jotuni showed a firm grasp of her subject and command of her theme. She is one of the most pure-blooded of Finnish playwrights. In keeping with the traditions of the best dramas, her writing reveals and conceals at the same time. Like Minna Canth’s, the themes of Maria Jotuni’s work centres on women’s lives, so that social meanings arise from the experience of women, not of men. Events entwine themselves again and again around love, marriage and money. A woman’s most certain means of earning a living is through marriage, and in such circumstances she must sell herself to the highest bidder. Jotuni is a sharp social critic, but unlike Canth she does not suggest improvements or preach; she merely shows. Her method is humour, sometimes ironic, sometimes grotesque.

Kultainen vasikka (‘The golden calf’), which received its première in 1918, shows Jotuni’s ability to write about her own time. The play shows an individual corrupted by the First World War, who is prepared to sell herself, her family, life, anything, for material gain. The character is grotesque and corrupt. Jotuni does not pity the characters in her plays, but on the other hand she does not moralise at their expense, either. Written at the time of the First World War, this satire is, in a cruel way, also a portrait of the people of our own time who seek security in money and things. And if we look closely, it is in the last analysis a question of the use of power in personal relationships, families, society.

In the 1920s, Maria Jotuni daringly included expressionist elements in her plays. The public did not find it easy to digest the radical form of her pays. On its first performance in 1924, her play Tohvelisankarin rouva (‘Wife of the henpecked husband’) raised such a storm that it proved necessary to close it after four performances. In her play, human rapacity, materialism and heartless exploitation of others are grotesquely open and effective. For the theatregoers of the time, their combination with a playful death – complete with a stylised funeral game – was evidently too much.

Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), who wrote in Swedish, was an author and one of the most influential critics of her time. As well as writing plays, she also pondered the essence and significance of theatre from a theoretical standpoint. Like Maria Jotuni – and in fact in an even purer form – Olsson developed expressionist drama. In her plays, she took a stand on everything from the incapacity of the League of Nations to maintain balance in Europe to the threat of the extremist political movements of fascism and communism and the moral responsibility of scientists and scholars (SOS, 1928).

Hella Wuolijoki – chronicler of the strong women of the countryside

The Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki (1886-1954) moved to Finland in 1909. Her life and career were diverse and colourful: a writer and businesswoman, she was accused of treason and condemned as a communist, but was later appointed director in chief of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation. Of Wuolijoki’s extensive oeuvre, the most often performed and most successful part are the plays of the Niskavuori series (1938-1953). The series is set in the Finnish countryside and depicts life in a large farmhouse, family relationships and relationships with tenants. The central parts are played by strong women who keep the farm going while the weak men fritter away their strength on other things, politics or infidelities.

The name of Hella Wuolijoki has become known internationally through her friendship with Bertolt Brecht. Brecht spent a winter in Wuolijoki’s country house on his refugee journey from Germany to America. Brecht and Wuolijoki collaborated on a play which they developed from a sketch by Wuolijoki, Iso-Heikkilän isäntä ja hänen renkinsä Kalle (‘The master of Iso-Heikkilä and his man Matti’, 1946), which Brecht then developed further into his own play Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1950).

 

The Second World War marked a radical change in the lives of Finnish women. The decade of participation and politicisation, the 1960s, did not bring many Finnish women dramatists to prominence. Instead, women merged with the general leftist movement. They participated actively in the song movement, political cabaret and, in the theatre, as actresses and directors.

In the 1980s, on the other hand, women took on a central role in the theatre in many ways. Important playwrights did not appear, but women directors were all the more interested in dramatising the work of women writers. One of the most conspicuous was a dramatisation by Eija-Elina Bergholm of Maria Jotuni’s novel Huojuva talo (‘The swaying house’); Bergholm also directed the play. Huojuva talo has made a reappearance in various theatres around Finland during the 1999-2000 season. Dramatisations of novels have also continued in the 1990s (e.g. Orvokki Autio, Leena Lander, Anja Snellman).

During the 1980s and 1990s, the actress and playwright Pirkko Saisio (born 1949) followed the line of social criticism practised by Finnish dramatists, but she broadens her exploration to marginal groups and, in particular, sexual minorities. Her tv-play Elämänmeno , which tells the story of a family living in a working-class areas of Helsinki from the 1950s to the 1990s, achieved great success.

Laura Ruohonen and Anne Koski, writers of the young generation

Laura Ruohonen (born 1960) and Anne Koski (born 1969) belong to the youngest generation. Ruohonen worked for years as a dramaturge with the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation and also achieved international succcess as a writer of radio plays. Ruohonen’s plays are always linked with great ethical, moral and global problems. Her study of biology is visible in the fact that concern for the environment is always prominent. Her plays Lintu vai kala (‘Fish or Fowl’, 1992), Olga (1998) and Suurin on rakkaus (‘Love is Paramount’, 1998), reflect her development as a playwright from a sermonising environmental activist to a writer who ponders the responsibility and morals of the individual. The last of the plays also has literary ambitions. Through three influential Finnish cultural figures of the late 19th century, it addresses open questions that still, one hundred years later, trouble Europeans.

Anne Koski attracted attention with her first première in a professional theatre, Suuri Toivelaulukirja (‘The great book of song requests’) in 1998 at the Finnish National Theatre. Anne Koski represents a very different way of approaching her subject from Laura Ruohonen. She moves from the inner world of the individual toward social reality, and does not hold her characters responsible for anything but their own personal lives. Of her plays, Suuri Toivelaulukirja deals excellently with the very fragile relationship between a father and daughter in a situation in which the father returns from prison, having suffered a long sentence for the murder of his wife. Koski is a skilful and sensitive portrayer of minds. With a rare maturity, she shows the complex network of human relationships.

In Finnish dramatic literature, the challenge posed by women has, since the late 19th century, provided an interesting tension in the development of drama. Finnish drama exists, however, behind an awkward language barrier. A journey into Finnish drama is well worth while; it is simply waiting for its international discoverer.