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.
Sorry, but I am stranger here myself
“Nationalism is an infantile disease… It is the measles of mankind.” Albert Einstein
“Germany has been called the first postmodern nation and the first postnational society. Those labels refer to the tendency of German intellectuals to reject any unselfconscious German identity and to insist on questioning its nature and Genesis” Brian Ladd in Ghosts of Berlin
Perusing the archives of The Economist on a lazy Sunday, I was quite amused to learn that being foreign is no longer considered exotic, like not dying of scurvy, or being in possession of all your teeth after 30 - all wonders of the post-industrial age. For the first time in history, it is no longer a rarity to be a Korean in New York, a South African in Rome, an Estonian in Paris or in my case, a Scandiberian Londoner in Berlin. It is a state of perfect normalcy. It is true that many of members of this ever-growing diaspora have left their countries reluctantly, forced by poverty, war or persecution. But there is also a significant number who have left on their own will, caught by the traveling bug, attracted to its gastronomy or culture, seduced by the climate, or in my case, by a particularly alluring native. This penchant - given a half chance - for upping sticks displayed by a growing number of people clashes with long-established discourses that claim the human animal is best off at home. This is one of the founding tenets of Nationalism and other unnecessarily constraining ideologies.
Hermits apart, there is no doubt that the Homo Sapiens is a social creature. The fundamental fallacy of Nationalism is to assume that we should belong to one society only. There is no logical connection between these statements, but then again its proponents are not known for deconstructing false syllogisms, and spend their time instead defining themselves against the perceived otherness of, well, others.
It was not always this way, of course. Nationalism, or the identification of an ethnic identity with a state, has its roots in the American and French Revolution, which saw the emergency of the modern nation-state. Prior to these events, people would pledge their loyalties to a city or to a particular leader, rather than to a kingdom. Not that I endorse this either, but it is at least more feasible to identify oneself with a town than an entire nation. If I consider myself Danish, I would have to have something in common with 5 million people. That figure goes up to 46 million should I plump instead for my Spanish heritage. I am glad I am not Chinese, or Indian for that matter - you try to connect with a whole subcontinent.
The idea of a homogenous national culture is just that, an idea, but one that gets brought up repeatedly, regardless of the inability to reach a consensus of what constitutes a nation’s character. It is often localized in some pre-industrialized utopian past, before it was polluted by the arrival of outsiders, with a sentimentalised peasantry as the keepers of this elusive national ethos. This image of a pre-lapsian Arcadia has been popular since Classical times, think Virgil’s Eclogues, but it was only in the 19th century when it became permanently entrenched with nascent nationalistic discourses. Rediscovering one’s roots became all the rage, and aristocrats who had eschewed the local language in favour of the more cosmopolitan French would go hiking in the “national” costume, trying to emulate the peasants they had scorned a generation earlier. Hunger and poverty had in the meantime forced these peasants to migrate to the less bucolic cities, where they would co-exist, and often mingle with the sways of immigrants who were arriving, attracted too by what the metropolis had to offer.
So paradoxically, or perhaps coincidentally, this era of increased mobility also saw the rise of nationalism and its recurring bedfellow, militarism. The 20th century would witness the excesses of this poisonous mix of ethnical superiority and Jingoism that had fueled and legitimized the empires of the previous century. Commercial interests had always been at the heart of European expansion, of course, but now Nationalism was replacing Christianity as the religion preached by missionaries. Instead of the Pater Noster, colonised people would find themselves memorizing God Save the Queen. Fascism would pick up the baton of nationalism and take it to tragic extremes in western Europe, whilst Communism brewed its own lethal concoction in the East. The rest, as they say, is history. A history that now includes the Eastern Front, Auschwitz and the Great Leap Forward.
This brief digression shows not only the damaging effects of nationalism but also its recent origins. Nationalism might have been one of the driving political and social forces of the last two centuries, but it should never be regarded as our default state. Not only is it logically flawed but it is just one more ideology, a construct amongst other ideas competing for cultural dominance. I think people often forget this. In a way, it is not their fault, they have been inculcated with nationalism, until it becomes an organic concept, a state of normalcy.
But as we now know, being foreign is a state of normalcy these days. This growing number of expats, together with the lowest number of deaths in armed conflict since records began, fills me with a sense of optimism. True, xenophobia might be on the rise in a hungover world that got bloated with non-existent credit, and woke up to growing unemployment once the bubble burst. Spain, for example, was once the poor man of Europe, with Spaniards forced to migrate to other countries in search of job prospects. The property boom changed all that and made the Mediterranean country a desirable destination for members of less fortunate countries. The recent recession however led to growing racism with some Spaniards fretting over a shrinking pool of jobs they felt were entitled to as “natives” and other dubious nationalistic arguments.
I remain upbeat though and believe this to be a temporary setback. It has nothing on the Great Depression which, remember, was sandwiched between two world wars. The rise of xenophobia has been met with concern in most quarters, whereas fascism was actually fashionable in many parts of Europe during the Great Depression, i.e. the idea that one nation, race, or group is naturally superior to all others, and has a right to conquer or exterminate inferior nations, races, or groups. Ok, apart from Fox News.
Perhaps we could embrace the more rational civic nationalism which defines the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights, and allegiance to similar political procedures. But please leave that pesky “common ethnic ancestry” out the debate - it is political quicksand. Plus we are all mutts anyway. What’s this obsession with roots? I am not a tree. It would be a shame to put humans, such wonderfully eclectic and varied beings into a single box. As George Santayana once said “ To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography”
