Women, Violence, and Innocence Theme Analysis

Throughout the book, the novel portrays many of the challenges faced by women in 19th-century Iceland, from the gender roles that restrict them to the challenges of childrearing and childbirth. Clearly, life for Kent’s characters is difficult, between the bad weather, the isolation, and the poverty. These difficulties, however, are exacerbated for women, whose role as child bearers can be dangerous in such extreme conditions. Kent describes in gruesome detail Agnes’s foster mother Inga’s death in childbirth, which is due in part to a blizzard that prevents neighboring women from coming to the house to help her through labor.

Not only do women have to deal with the general hardships of life in Iceland and the way these exacerbate biological hardships like childbirth, but they also have to struggle against a general culture of misogyny and classism. For poor women who must act as servants, sexual violence and coercion seems to be nearly a given in Kent’s imagination of 1828 Iceland. Agnes describes her own experiences of sexual coercion throughout the book, discussing how many of the men she worked for forced her to have sex with them or else risk being thrown out into the cold. Again, the harsh realities of life in Kent’s novel clearly exacerbate this problem, since, for most of the year, Iceland is so inhospitable that sleeping outside would be a certain death sentence. Even Natan, who Agnes falls in love with and who initially seems to love Agnes back, uses his gender and class status to manipulate Agnes and use her for sex before hitting her and throwing her out of the house. Agnes’s continued love for Natan following this violence also shows how ideals of romantic love can trap women in violent and unhealthy relationships. Likewise, Agnes’s later conviction for Natan’s murder, despite her very small and merciful role in his death and Natan’s violence towards her, suggests how the justice system is not set up to favor or support women, even women who are victims of abuse.

Not only does Agnes herself experience this sexual manipulation and abuse because of her gender, but she also watched her mother Ingveldur undergo the same thing when she was a child. Agnes moved with her mother from place to place when she was a young girl as her mother was taken into different farms and then thrown out again after the man of the house grew tired of sleeping with her. Kent shows through this mother-daughter parallel how gendered violence and abuse gets repeated throughout generations.

At the same time that women experience gendered violence in Kent’s novel, they are also constrained by female gender roles. Women are valued differently based on how well they conform to these gendered expectations. For example, Lauga and Steina are constantly compared, and Lauga is regarded much more highly because she is beautiful, obedient, and much better at domestic tasks. Steina, meanwhile, is headstrong, loyal, and unafraid to challenge authority, so other characters consider her to be much less charming than Lauga. Similarly, Sigga and Agnes are compared in their criminal trial and Sigga comes out with a much better sentence than Agnes. Sigga gets her sentence reduced because she is “dumb and pretty and young,” as Agnes puts it, and it wins the sympathy of the judges and the public. Agnes, who is known to be highly intelligent, is accused of being the mastermind and thoroughly demonized, even in the community that she grew up in. Agnes attributes the lack of sympathy for her in comparison with Sigga to the fact that the judges “believe a thinking woman can’t be trusted” and that “there’s no room for innocence” in women who are intelligent. Agnes essentially describes how smart women are more likely to be punished, effectively showing how conceptions of innocence and guilt are inextricable from gendered norms. This also suggests how gender roles are not separable from violence against women, as Agnes’s failure to conform to gender roles is part of what provokes her condemnation to death.

Effectively, Hannah Kent shows how gender roles and gendered violence make up a vicious cycle, as gender roles are enforced with the threat of violence. This cycle, in addition to the general harsh realities of life in 19th-century Iceland, make womanhood difficult and dangerous.