Feminism and the Welfare State in a Cold Climate: Scandinavian Gothic
The Economist recently featured an article on Scandinavian crime fiction, and true to its penchant for punning, entitled it “Inspector Norse”. Yet Nordic writers have - with the exception of Ian Rankin - far surpassed their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in recent years - and Inspector Rebus is not even English. Murder, it seems, thrives in cold climates. Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and Henning Mankell’s laconic Wallander are its best known archetypes, yet northern writers have been toiling for years with a characteristic Lutheran work ethic to create a veritable smorgarsbord of sublime landscape, murder and decay. Gothic might have had a renaissance with Stephanie Meyer’s vapid and toothless Twilight series, yet Nordic writers show us that Gothic can still be a subversive force - that it, to follow the pun, still has a bite.
Now, most people will automatically associate the Gothic with vampires, abandoned castles and other legendary monsters. True, these are some of its most widely-recognised tropes, yet Gothic literature has always concerned itself with the the human condition and interior terrors, about the exploration of the monstrous self. Edgar Allan Poe, his macabre tales a staple of Halloween, more or less creates the detective story with his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (although others give the honour to E.T.A Hoffman’s exquisitely Gothic Das Fraülein von Scuderi, published 22 years earlier in 1819). The murder history is thus firmly cemented in the Gothic tradition and has never looked back, constantly reinventing itself, from Sherlock Holmes’ London to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And now Scandinavia. Sweden and Norway, with their epic yet desolate nature, their short days and long nights and their people “brought up to hide their feelings”, according the Norwegian Jo Nesbo, provide the perfect ingredients for a whodunnit.
Scandinavian crime fiction is no Cluedo - it contains a veritable fjord of social criticism and discontent. True once again to their Gothic roots, these boreal narratives are too drawn to decadence, to the destructive undercurrents lurking underneath civilisation. If fin-de-siècle Victorians were fretting about social unrest and the fissures showing in their vast empire, Nordic writers show us the misfits, the ones the Welfare State left out. Their stories are populated with ostracised characters, sometimes in self-imposed exile, living at the margins of these seemingly harmonious societies. They hold up a mirror and show the cracks in the social experiment. Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, protagonist of the Millenium trilogy, with her borderline autism and fiercely individual - and often questionable - ethics, sticks out like a sore thumb in a society that values integration above all. She is the Elephant Man of the Welfare Society. A ferociously intelligent sociopath, Larsson’s heroine is like an updated and twisted version of Sherlock Holmes, more faithful to modern times, and omnisexual rather asexual.
Lisbeth Salander is (technically) a woman, and she is not the only female protagonist in Nordic thrillers. In fact, women abound in these tales, and its seems that female writers are drawn to this genre too. Gothic, in its original inception, attracted both female and male authorship. One of its pioneers was the professional writer Ann Radcliffe, and the genre was known to have a strong female following as parodied in Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen’s satire shows that these tales of gloomth were not placed on the literary pedestal, particularly when produced by women. Often at the margins of the canon, many of these works have since been reevaluated, and I am also pleased that many of their female contemporaries have had their literary efforts recognized. Just as Gothic was in its time, crime fiction remains a second-rate genre to many members of the cultural intelligentsia, the Booker Prize mafia.
In the past, female writers used Gothic motives in their narratives to bypass patriarchal censure and thus express the unexpressable. Not content with with the limited representations offered to them as women, they attempt to go beyond the madonna/harlot dichotomy by subverting the femme-fatale stereotype, narrating events from a seemingly neutral male viewpoint, by reversing roles, making the male protagonist the hysterical figure, or by resorting to Gothic archetype of the Doppelganger to highlight their own fragmented subjectivity. Through vampires and other monsters, they attempted to explore their sexuality and other taboo subjects. In her short story, La mujer fría (The Cold Woman), the 19th century Spanish writer Carmen de Burgos gives us a covert critical response to the passive vestal blonde inevitably falling prey to a satanic lover, a common male trope that resurged in popularity during the Belle Époque. It attacks the seemingly morbid male fascination with beautiful anaemic, almost ghostly, women, when it is revealed that the pearly alluring blonde is actually a living corpse. Camilla Läckberg’s 2003 novel Isprinsessan (The Ice Princess) opens with a blonde woman dead and covered in ice, the narrator clearly fascinated with her arctic beauty and blue-tinged lips.
Although contemporary female writers suffer less censure than their predecessors, and thus have less need to conceal their message, they remind us that inequality and prejudice have not completely vanished - not even in seemingly enlightened Scandinavian societies. Not only must they solve a mystery, these female investigators must also confront chauvinistic colleagues and console partners unable to understand their career choice. Crime fiction is not only a perfect platform for social criticism, but also shows that feminism is very much alive and thriving despite the tiresome buzz surrounding so-called postfeminism. Anyone who declares themselves a postfeminist should be bitch-slapped. Long live Scandinavian crime fiction.
