Nothing Grows by Moonlight: The Politics of Survival

Last year, Penguin Modern Classics published a new edition of Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas, translated by Bibbi Lee. This is the story of a young woman who falls in love with an older man and is left to deal with the aftermath (read: a young girl is groomed by her schoolteacher and then ostracised in her small town). The novel argues that survival itself is politicised; it is structured by class, gender, and economic systems that determine whose lives are viable.

It’s tragic but more than being a story of inappropriate and unrequited love, this is a study of class and gender, and how they operate together to determine who society protects. The novel’s structure makes that clear from the start. The woman who as a girl fell in love with her teacher confesses this story to a man she just met at a train station. He is the narrator, so most of the book is told in quotation marks, while his interjections about her body language and her smoking and drinking throughout the night are conveyed sporadically in italics. We are hearing her experience through male mediation. The dual perspective mirrors the social logic of the book: women are both subjects and objects of narrative, living their lives while simultaneously being observed, interpreted, and judged.

The setting of her story intensifies this. It’s a small rural town characterised by cold, routine, and surveillance. There aren’t any jobs, wages are too low, and gossip functions as social currency. For many women, gossip is one of the few available forms of influence or connection. It reminded me of an article I read a while ago that traces gossip back to its origins as a way to maintain cooperation and personal relationships but also as a mechanism to control where agency is limited. For women especially in immigrant communities where mobility can be constrained, gossip is a form of power and it can be either good or bad.

At one point, the woman reflects: ‘The men have their questions of pay and such in labour organizations. But their wives cannot get around to making life better for themselves… They become malicious because they think someone else’s accident elevates them a little from their own wretchedness.’

The woman reflects that the women of her small town were confined to the shop, the kitchen, and the well, and that their moral superiority became a form of power. If someone doesn’t conform or bend to the will of the town, they are punished socially and economically. And it isn’t only women who are punished. There is Morck, the town drunk, the “commie,” the artist, too politically and temperamentally misaligned with the town’s ethos. He is beaten down to a tragic end but his presence in the book makes clear that conformity is demanded from everyone, regardless of gender, though it is more punishing towards women.

Class critique is also embedded throughout this novel. The discussion of wealth distribution feels so current it’s almost exhausting, especially considering the book was first published in 1947. Wealth in the novel is not presented through luxury or brand names but through the comfort of not having to worry, the ability to be insulated from the troubles of the world, from inflation, wages, winter even. 

There is a striking passage about helplessness, how do you even fight the system if you can’t understand who the perpetrators are: 

‘Who is the factory? … It isn’t even a man, one particular man you can go to and tell this and that. It’s stocks and such, and you can’t talk to those. They’re supposed to make profits… a black kind of mathematics that they’d forgotten to teach us in school.’

Wealth does not belong to a person, it belongs to a system. Who is culpable? Who knows; it signifies that to be rich means you’re insulated even from responsibility, to some degree. 

The relationship between the young girl and her teacher must be read within this framework. Their relationship is a clear picture of an imbalance of power based on age, education, gender, and class. He risks little while she risks everything and when the relationship collapses, the fallout is all hers. 

The novel’s treatment of abortion sharpens this critique. There is no extended moral debate like we often see in contemporary discourse. Instead, pregnancy exposes hierarchy. At one point the text refers to a “pogrom of fetuses.” This deliberately harsh wording is meant to make us think of social viability: who is allowed to be born and under what conditions? 

The woman says: ‘We betray them before they're conceived and nail them to the cross before they’re born...When is a child allowed to have a good life, to be welcomed into this world, without forcing anyone into anything and without becoming a shame or a disaster to anyone?’ 

In a town where gossip reigns supreme, a child born to a poor and socially compromised woman would inherit that precarity. Reproduction is shaped by class as much as by biology. The protagonist’s decisions are less about individual empowerment and more about navigating a system that offers her limited viable paths. Important to note, abortion was illegal at the time and there are some really gory passages in this novel that are not for the faint of heart. 

The novel ends somewhat abruptly. We are returned to the opening scene: the man searching for the woman at the train station. After everything she has confessed, she slips away and we are left with his frenzied search. It almost feels like she passed on her tragedy to him.

It’s a tough read, but an important one. Nearly eighty years after its publication, the questions it raises about power, accountability, gender, and class feel very current. I appreciated how directly these concerns are woven into the narrative, not as grand declarations but as persistent, unsettling observations. There is a great deal to sit with here and if this is any indication of what Norwegian classics have to offer, I’m more than ready to read further.

‘Human beings have a weakness for moonlight. It doesn’t blind them. It doesn’t burn them…. Nothing grows by moonlight.’