The Tensions between Domestic Life and Maritime Life in Sea Novels
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From Defoe and Smollett to Melville and Conrad, sea novels are traditionally thought of as one-dimensional, anti-bourgeois, and male universes in, which female characters are eliminated and feminine traits are problematic. In this essay, I argue that the sea novels by the Norwegian author Jonas Lie - partly in contrast to the maritime literary tradition, partly in contrast to the tradition of domestic fiction - operate with a simultaneous domestication of the maritime and oceanication of the domestic. This structure of compromise introduced by Lie is not only a new feature in maritime fiction, it is also an alternative and more positive, perhaps even modern, way of dealing with the domestic sphere than we encounter in Lie's fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, who saw the home as a scene of female oppression. In Lie, the maritime infuses the domestic with openness and fresh air, just as the domestic infuses life on the sea with a certain restrain and rationality.