Minna Canth

Intrepid Finnish playwright and critic Minna Canth (1844-1897) is remembered as a forerunner of the Finnish realist writing movement as well as a symbol of Finland's modernist revolution.

Early Life

Minna Canth was born Ulrika Vilhelmina Johnson on March 19, 1844, in Tampere, Finland. Her working-class parents owned a shop in Kuopio, having moved there from Tampere when Canth was eight. Her father was Gustaf Wilhelm Johnson, and her mother was Ulrika Johnson. In an autobiographical sketch included in the book Sanoi Minna Canth: Pioneer Reformer, a 47-year-old Canth described her childhood relationship with her father: “From my infancy I was the apple of my father's eye; and I remember how he liked to brag a bit about my talents …. Though my father's circumstances at the time were humble, he nevertheless wanted to give me the best education a girl could hope for in our country.”

Education

In keeping with her father's wishes, Canth first attended a Swedish language school for girls, and when the first Finnish teachers' college was established in 1863 at Jyväskylä, she enrolled in the same year but left before the completion of her studies, having met and married her natural science instructor, Johan Ferdinand Canth (nine years her senior), in 1865.

Life Learning

The Canths had seven children, and Canth recalled in Sanoi Minna Canth, “I now had to forget all my idealistic aspirations and instead do needlework, prepare meals and keep house and take care of my husband, all tasks that went against my grain …. For some time I denied myself all reading, except for newspapers, and I tried my best to dull my sense of loss.” Canth had some opportunity to exercise her craft, writing the occasional article for a publication that was edited by her husband, but the majority of her time and energy went towards home and family. Canth's husband died unexpectedly of brain fever in 1877, while she was halfway through writing her first play and pregnant with their seventh child.

Writing for a Living

Undeterred by her misfortune, Canth struggled to support herself and her family. A shrewd businesswoman, she took over the Tampereen Lankakauppa, her father's draper's shop in Kuopio that sold Finlayson's fabrics. It had fallen on hard times since his passing a few years before, but she quickly revived the family business, all the while studying materials on the literature and social philosophies of the time. The business recovered so successfully that it allowed her the financial freedom to write more regularly. She published in minor journals and local newspapers like Keski-Suomi and Päijänne, addressing contentious issues like the temperance movement and women's rights. According to a biography of Canth on the Web site Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Biografiakeskus, Canth “became the first Finnish-speaking female journalist to work independently as an editor …. [Her] journalistic writing [was] characterized by lively rhetoric: exclamations, questions, direct appeals to the reader; alert humour and sharp-witted irony, but also pathos and aggressiveness.” The author might have continued her journalistic career, but was bitten severely by the drama bug after attending her first play.

From Businesswoman to Playwright

Canth began writing drama at the age of 40, after rigorous study that she conducted on her own. The folk play Murtovarkens (The Burglary, 1882) was her first foray into writing for the stage, and it was with this play that Canth began a decade of collaboration with Finnish Theatre founder Kaarlo Bergbom (1843-1906). She began to produce what The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature described as “naturalist propaganda literature … [like] the drama Työmiken vaimo (The Workman's Wife, 1885).” Canth recalled the play in an autobiographical essay contained in Sanoi Minna Canth, saying that it “is filled with the sharpest satire from start to finish, but it has no deeper psychology or artistic ripeness either. Even so, it made a tremendous impact when, in 1885, it was performed for the first time at the Finnish Theater …. Criticism and abuse rained on me like hail. I was not spared. I was branded an atheist and a free-thinker; parents forbade their children to visit my house; I lost a large number of my friends, and it required a certain amount of moral courage from the rest who still dared to acknowledge me.”

While Canth was critically and personally attacked on a regular basis for voicing her opinions, people were listening. As the book Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia explained, Canth's “combination of powerfully depicted characters and a strong sense of social indignation appealed to a generation of Finns ready to change society and help create a new world based on justice and freedom.” In 1872 a professional Finnish-language theater was established in Helsinki, deconstructing the nation's cultural stereotype as a society of “ignorant peasants and fishermen,” and Canth stepped forward in the 1880s as a principal member of the Young Finns, an organization devoted to cultural awareness and social reform.

Success and Censure

Critics tended to condemn her work based on the external content, without acknowledging what the playwright was saying. The Web site Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Biografiakeskus explained, “In the eyes of Finland's cultural elite, Canth was to be rejected and opposed not only because of the ideas that she championed … but perhaps even more so because of the ideas that she did not appear to champion. Nationality was the ideology of the era … and the further Canth went as a writer in the direction of psychological portrayal, the more clearly her art [showed] the ugly reality that [clipped] the wings of a national illusion.”

A versatile writer, Canth also authored novellas, short stories and poetry. The 1888 play Kovan onnen lapsia (usually translated as Children of Misfortune or The Hard Luck Kids) was described in Sanoi Minna Canth as “a heartrending description of the distress and misery of the proletariat, which ends up in desperation, crime and imprisonment.” It was quickly banned by conservative and religious authorities. The play was staged only once, in the autumn of 1888, the year that it also appeared in print. Her 1889 short story titled Kauppa-Lopo (Lopo the Peddler) was critically successful, but both productions were described in Women in World History as “shocking in their depiction of brutal exploitation and human degradation.” However, both “were recognized as significant works of art … [that allowed] the Finnish stage [to] claim equality with that of Sweden.”

Canth's early influences included Norwegian playwrights Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) and Björnstjerne Björnson (1832-1910), as well as French naturalist Émile Zola (1840-1902), and in the 1890s she began to incorporate psychological and religious themes in her work after reading Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Canth's home became a haven for the young writers of her day. She even hired Heikki Kauppinen—later known as Kauppis-Heikki (1862-1920)—as an assistant in the shop and was able to guide his writing career.

Canth composed Papin perhe (The Vicar's Family) in 1891, Sylvi in 1893 and Anna Liisa (Anna-Liisa) in 1895. Women in World History stated that these plays mark the period where she became “the voice of the long-oppressed Finnish people, particularly its women, who had for centuries suffered not only from foreign oppression but also from the injustices at the hands of a patriarchal regime.” Canth used her depictions and discussions of the family unit as a mirror held to bigger social issues. As Dennis and Elsa Carroll explained in an essay on Finnish Theatre in The Drama Review, the Finns as a people had a tendency to “nurture isolation and self-sufficiency” that leads to difficulty expressing feelings—a conflict that is well addressed through the rituals and ceremonies inherent in stage drama.

Canth's health started to spiral downwards in the 1890s, and she died on May 12, 1897, in Kuopio. Attempts to apply avant-garde translations to Canth's work have been met with interest as well as concern. According to The Drama Review, celebrated Finnish director Jouko Turkka's (born 1942) 1981 production of Canth's Murtovarkaus (The Burglary) “threw out all Canth's dialogue except seven sentences, and transformed the events, gestures and props of Finnish rural life into timeless and indelible icons.”

Beloved

Canth was commemorated in 1944 on the centenary of her birth with a postage stamp bearing her portrait. There are statues of her in Kuopio, Tampere, and Jyväskylä, and productions of some of her more popular plays even appear in current internet movie databases. The Old Kuopio Museum has showcased historical interiors that include the room where Canth used to write, and tourist tours often begin in her room in the museum and end at a statue of her that stands in a nearby park, also named after her. Kuopio hosts a festival to celebrate Canth's “Name Day.” In 2007 the festival included a morning picnic in the park, where trees were planted in her honor and the Kuopio University's Student Theater presented “What Would Minna Say Today?.” The Kuopio Museum presented a drama titled “Mrs. C at the Old Kuopio Museum,” after which the students of Minna Canth High School put on a play depicting local life at the end of the 1800s. Adult and child dance troupes performed folk dances included in Canth's stage works.

Despite her obvious and lingering popularity, Ritva Heikkil, editor of Sanoi Minna Canth, wrote, “Incredibly, it is hard to find copies of her works anywhere. They have long been out of print. And published translations from the original Finnish into other languages are almost nonexistent.” According to Sanoi Minna Canth, Canth once acknowledged, “To tell the truth, I am not satisfied with a single thing I have written so far, but I hope in the future to turn out better works, for I still have thirteen years left before I reach the age of sixty, the age, that is, at which every writer, I understand, ought to be clubbed.”

Canth's sharp, incisive and often fearlessly critical portraits of the lives and loves of her culture have become an integral part of Finnish and feminist literary history. According to Sanoi Minna Canth, the author had the last word, in a letter written to fellow Finnish writer Teuvo Pakkala in March of 1892, where she stated, “That exactly is the important function of literature: to teach us to know and love one another.”

Books

Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia: Fourth Edition, edited by Bruce Murphy, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1996.

Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, edited by Claire Buck, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1992.

Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia: Second Edition, edited by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Cassell's Encyclopaedia of World Literature: Volume Two, edited by J. Buchanan, Brown, Cassell and Company Ltd., 1973.

Chambers Biographical Dictionary, edited by Melanie Parry, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 1997.

Penguin Companion to European Literature, edited by Anthony Thorlby, Penguin Books Ltd., 1969.

Sanoi Minna Canth: Pioneer Reformer, edited by Ritva Heikkilä, Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1987.

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, edited by Anne Commire, Yorkin Publications, 1999.

Women's Firsts, edited by Caroline Zilboorg, Gale Research, 1997.

Periodicals

The Drama Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn 1982.

Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3, October 1978.

Online

“Canth, Minna (1844–1897),” Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Biografiakeskus, http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi/english/?id=2816 (December 8, 2007).

“Minna Canth,” Britannica Online Encyclopedia, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9020060/Minna-Canth (November 27, 2007).

“Minna Canth (1844–1897),” Famous Women on Stamps, http://home.online.no/∼jdigrane/amd/finwomen/canth.htm (November 13, 2007).

“Minna Canth,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0134562/bio (December 8, 2007).

“Minna Canth,” The Minna Project, http://www.minnaproject.net/java/Index?oid=58 (December 13, 2007).

“Minna Canth (1844–1897),” Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mcanth.htm (November 27, 2007).

“Minna Canth Event,” Kuopion Setlementti Puijola ry, http://www.puijola.net/monikulttuurikeskus_kompassi/multicultural_center_kompassi/minna_canth_event (November 13, 2007).

“Welcome to the Kuopio Region,” Kuopio Info, http://www.kuopioinfo.fi/english/perussivut/vierailukohteet/museot.php?we_objectID=1041 (December 8, 2007).