Hannah Kent's Burial Rites

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Throughout the novel Burial Rites, the book portrays many of the obstacles encountered by Hannah Kent’s characters due to the Icelandic landscape and severe weather conditions. The setting of the novel based in Iceland, becomes a crucial part of the unfolding story of Agnes Magnusdottir’s execution, where the striking Icelandic landscape manipulates the characters behaviours and shapes how the characters in Burial Rites narrate their own stories.

Challenges for women such as childbearing and childbirth are exacerbated for women whose role as child bearers can be dangerous in such extreme conditions. Chapter 6 is where Agnes voices the story of one of the most traumatic events in the novel. Agnes describes in gruesome detail her foster mother …show more content…

For poor women who must act as servant, social violence and coercion seems to be nearly a given in Kent’s imagination of 1828 Iceland. Agnes describes her own experiences of sexual coercion throughout the novel, discussing how many of the men she worked for forced her to have sex with them or else risk being thrown out into the cold. Again with the harsh realities of life in Kent’s novel clearly intensify this problem, since for most of the year, sleeping outside would be a certain death …show more content…

As Agnes’ begins to confide in Toti and learn to rely on him the weather gradually becomes increasingly miserable making it difficult for the two to meet. At the climax of the novel, ‘travelling to Kornsa in this unfit weather’ has resulted in Toti’s fever, leaving Agnes ‘scared’ and deprived of her spiritual advisor. These Icelandic weather conditions limit social interaction between characters and create a sense of isolation between Kent’s characters.

Agnes often describes her surroundings using metaphors from nature. At one point she describes Natan’s lingering in the air like “a cloud of ash over a volcano”. Furthermore in another instance, as Agnes is being transported from prison, she describes the crowd’s anger bursting forth like a “geyser”. These descriptions reflect that Agnes’s vocabulary and sources for comparison come from the nature present in Iceland in that period of time, portraying just how much of an affect these conditions have on the individuals in Burial

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