Remembering her father’s words about the consequences of indiscretion-his example of the drunkard who orders drinks without thinking but then must pay for them in his sobriety (“what one has signed in one’s cups one must abide by when sober”)-Ida accepts the consequences of her moral choices by honoring her marital vows, sacrificing for her children, and submitting to a life of toil both inside and outside the home as a cross she must bear.
Spoiled by his doting parents who never instilled in their son a sense of industriousness, Frithjof-though a husband and a father-remains a child dependent on his wife for the family income to provide for him and their three children. Unmotivated and slothful, Frithjof-constantly promising to find work but hardly making a total effort-never learned the meaning of duty, the value of work, or the discipline of will power in his family upbringing. Surprised by the proposal of her lover, Ida rationalizes that the respectability of marriage will remove the stigma and restore her respectable character: “It did look as if she were doing a sensible thing in marrying Frithjof, but that was only an excuse she made to herself for yielding to her ardent longing for rehabilitation.” Their expedient marriage (“a marriage contracted as the result of a juvenile faux pas”) for the sake of human respect rather than true love soon brings enormous tribulations and anguish to Ida who quickly learns that she must not only accept the full responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood but also carry the economic burden of providing for the family as a dressmaker-an exhausting, demoralizing situation in which her lethargic husband Frithjof fails in his role of husband and father: “But when a mother has to take the place of the father while the father hangs about seeming to assume the part of the mother-why, that is simply iniquitous, utterly against the order of nature.” Several years after the embarrassing episode in the barn where the town doctor accidentally finds them in the midst of their lovemaking, Ida, to reclaim her honor, agrees to marry the young man who tempted her. A novel about a self-sacrificing woman whose life of heroic suffering for the sake of her marriage and children exemplifies moral courage, Ida Elisabeth traces the heroine’s life from the folly of an adolescent scandal in which she loses her virginity to the period of adult womanhood as a mother of three children.
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