In "Wanderers" the disintegrating influence in the marriage of the Falkenbergs is habit that breeds indifference, and Fru Falkenberg, one of Hamsun's most poignantly beautiful and most unhappy heroines, is of too fine a caliber to survive the bruise to her self-respect. In "Shallow Soil" Hanka Tidemand is drawn by the false glamour of genius which surrounds the poet Irgens, and regards her husband as nothing but a commonplace business man. Here, however, the strength and depth of the man's love saves the situation. In its happy ending their story is unique among the author's earlier works.
Among his many wayward heroines Hamsun has painted one woman of calm and benignant steadfastness, Rosa, the heroine of the two Nordland novels, "Benoni" and "Rosa." She is so deeply and innately faithful that she not only clings for many years to her worthless fiancé and finally marries him, but even after she has been forced to divorce him and has been told he is dead, she feels that she can "never be unmarried from" the man whose wife she has once been. It is only after he is really dead and after her child is born that she can be content in her marriage with her devoted old suitor, Benoni. Then the mother instinct, which is her strongest characteristic, awakens and enfolds not only her child but her child's father. Quite alone in the sisterhood of Hamsun heroines stands Martha Gude, a spinster of forty with white hair and young eyes and a child heart. Her goodness and her purity, which has the dewy freshness of morning, draw Nagel to her, although she is twelve years older than he.
Side by side and often intermingled with the ethereal delicacy of his love passages, Hamsun has many pages of such crassness that often, at the first reading of his books, they seem to overshadow and blot out the fineness. He treats the subject of sex sometimes with brutal Old Testament directness, sometimes with a rough, caustic humor akin to that of "Tom Jones" or "Tristam Shandy," but never with sultry eroticism or with innuendo under the guise of morality. There is in his very earthiness something that brings its own cleansing, as water is cleansed by passing through the ground. Probably most of us would willingly have spared from his pages many passages in "Benoni" and "Rosa," "The Last Joy," and more especially in his last book "Women at the Pump," and even in "Growth of the Soil," but they all belong to the author's conception of a true picture of life.