CHAPTER 5
Restoring the strident female voice
Selma Lagerlöf and the women’s anti-war movement
The Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) stands out in public as peaceable, never hysterical. She protected her reputation as an author, and played the role of the balanced and worthy queen of Swedish literature very well, starting with her 1891 début Gösta Berlings saga.1 When Lagerlöf, as the first woman and the first Swede, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, her role as ‘Sweden’s noble daughter’ was reaffirmed, and she was seen as the international intermediary of the new Swedish identity, based on the long period of peace in Sweden and the soundness and morality of the Swedish people, which this enduring peace was thought to stand for.2
With such international successes as Jerusalem (1901–1902) and Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils) (1906–1907), Lagerlöf was welcome to represent these new, chauvinistic ideas about a peaceful and progressive Swedish people, ideas that were in political agreement with the peaceful dissolution of the Union in 1905.3 Swedish self-esteem was rebuilt on a new story of an honourable country, where the people had turned their backs on the barbarities of war, and now looked ahead to Scandinavian reconciliation across the social divide and the establishment of good cross-border relations.4 In this story, Liberals and Social Democrats were united in the struggle for universal suffrage, introduced for men and men only in Sweden 1909, which merely increased Selma Lagerlöf’s commitment to the women’s liberation movement. Similarly, inimical to Sweden’s new self-esteem as a peaceful and neutral state, the 1906 Liberal government had legislated against anti-militarism, and Conservative politicians along with King Gustav V and his German wife Queen Victoria made no secret of their support for Germany, at the time closely linked to Sweden historically as well as economically and culturally.
At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the German invasion of Belgium had the full support of the majority of the Swedish upper classes. Swedish opinion was divided into the conservatives’ pro-German claims for ‘active neutrality’ (that is, ‘neutrality’ that held Germany to be the more innocent party in the war) and more liberal and labour-oriented, Entente-friendly claims for ‘real neutrality’ (that is, ‘neutrality’ that regarded Germany as the aggressor).5 The chauvinistic Swedish peace identity that had slowly formed during the nineteenth century was thus put to the test by the politics of neutrality. At the same time, Selma Lagerlöf’s role as an author was sorely tried, and during the first years of war she frantically searched for a new voice that would challenge chauvinistic ideals and recognize international pacifism and democratic ideals, associated with the worldwide women’s suffrage movement, which now also took the shape of a strong political opinion in favour of peace.
In this chapter I use Selma Lagerlöf’s authorship during the war years to illuminate the connection between women’s liberation and the peace movement. In particular, I consider the anti-war novel Bannlyst (The Outcast) from 1918 and Lagerlöf’s construction of an ignored and silenced female voice, which urgently speaks against all war. Just like the suffragettes, Lagerlöf argued through her authorship that the repressed female voice could offer a new and humane order of society, if only it was given credence. The repressed female voice in Bannlyst is juxtaposed here with Fredrika Bremer’s famous emancipation novel Hertha, published in 1856 and written during the Crimean War. Bremer (1801–1865) was the leading Swedish novelist at the time, recognized internationally as one of the greatest pioneers of women’s liberation. Her novel Hertha is a Bildungsroman in which the growth and maturity of society is ineluctably connected to the growth and maturity of women. Young Hertha has a theological mission: she wants to change the world, revive Christianity’s true commandments on the sanctity of human life, and give women the same rights as men. Hertha speaks from the position of the nineteenth-century bourgeois woman. The novel had also prompted a series of reforms that gave bourgeois women, including Lagerlöf herself, increased freedom, much like the daughters who are apostrophized by the dying Hertha in her orations at the end of the novel. In Lagerlöf’s novel, meanwhile, the female voice is projected through Lotta Hedman, a lonely working-class woman from the far north, at a time when working-class literature was just beginning to emerge in Sweden. Thus the female voice in Bannlyst speaks from a searching new position, far removed from the bourgeois women’s sphere in earlier feminist literature that had been so despised by Strindberg and others.
Lagerlöf’s creative crisis during the war was clearly connected to a politicization of authorship in the 1910s due to massive class conflict throughout Europe,6 compounded by a general doubt about the place of serious, non-realistic fiction as a vehicle of debate and opinion, prompted not least by the fact that war, in the rapidly changing media scene, for the great majority was now increasingly mediated as experienced reality—experienced through pictures and news reports in the press, and romanticized war stories in popular novels and short stories.7 The disastrous war thus had a paralysing effect on Lagerlöf, like other authors of the time.8 But more specifically, Lagerlöf’s creative crisis can also be connected to her ideological roots in the liberal women’s movements dating back to the nineteenth century and Fredrika Bremer, and the demands that leading figures placed on Lagerlöf to be part of the international women’s movements’ campaign for peace.
A ‘peace sheep’?
Not speaking out against the war meant letting emotions die and inspiration dissipate: this was the lament in several of Lagerlöf’s unpublished drafts and published sketches during the war.9 So, why let herself be called a ‘peace sheep’?10 At the beginning of her career, Lagerlöf had received a great deal of support from both the Swedish and the Danish women’s liberation movements, and she had contacts with leading representatives of the women’s movements.11 But not until she stood up for women’s right to vote did Lagerlöf speak publicly in favour of women’s liberation. She became a member of the suffrage committee in her hometown of Falun 1905, and wrote the committee’s petition for universal suffrage to the Riksdag, in which she referred to the national appeal for women’s suffrage, at the beginning of 1906.12 In 1911 she held her speech ‘Hem och stat’ (‘Home and State’) in Stockholm at the International Congress for Women’s Suffrage.13 It was quite an unassuming speech, with ideas that heralded those espoused by the Social Democrats—that the state would build a safe welfare state, in Lagerlöf’s vision by dint of woman’s hard-won experience and devotion to creating a safe and happy home. Because of her presence, the congress was treated more exhaustively and respectfully by the press than it probably would have otherwise.14
When the war broke out in 1914, women had the right to vote in Finland (since 1906)—the first country in Europe where women were enfranchised at the same time as universal male suffrage was introduced—and in Norway (since 1913). The women’s suffrage movement in Europe and Sweden had been well organized since the beginning of the 1900s, as a result of the fact that general suffrage organizations did not pursue the issue of women’s right to vote persistently enough. When the war started, the women’s suffrage movements swiftly mobilized into strong organizations for peace, and it was important to get the world-famous and widely respected Selma Lagerlöf to join these movements.15 She was under a lot of pressure.
Speak up against the war
Letters came by the sackful to her home in Falun and her childhood home, Mårbacka. Selma Lagerlöf was the country’s darling; yes, even the world’s. The letters were mainly from Swedes in need, asking for money. But could Dr Lagerlöf perhaps also make the war come to an end?16 Hers is a constant search for a narrative voice that could speak out against the war. In her 1916 short story ‘Dimman’ (‘The Fog’), Lagerlöf condemns the main character, ‘den fridsamme’ (‘the peaceable’), who, ironically echoing neutral Sweden, expresses a desire to continue his life unaffected by the Great War then raging:
Let me work in the way that is my own, do things that I can take care of! Let me be excused from running around the country as if deranged, trying to put things right that I am not man to master!17
But the price is high for such wilful self-isolation and self-deceit. Later in the same story, the character describes himself as being surrounded by ‘cold and darkness and silence and petrification and a haze which makes one apathetic’.18 It is not this creature, longing for a peaceful existence, who finds favour in the eyes of the Lord, but a mad woman constantly reminding him and others about the atrocities of the war. This short story has a very critical attitude towards neutral Sweden’s passivity. It was written in time for Christmas 1915 for the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation that was to be held in Stockholm in February 1916 on the initiative of the mayor of Stockholm, Social Democratic MP Carl Lindhagen and his sister Anna Lindhagen, one of the leading Swedish suffragists.
In the sketch ‘Ödekyrkan’ (‘The Church Ruin’) written the same year for the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, a ruined church becomes the symbol for Lagerlöf’s creative paralysis. The narrator, in misery over her lost creative powers, compares herself to the ruin: ‘I have been a minstrel and a jester, but out of my soul no more jesting or playing will emerge. My soul has become like you, mute, without bells, without song.’19
Throughout the war years, Lagerlöf was constantly aware that some voices of protest, particularly from the women’s suffrage and anti-war movements—scorned as peace sheep—were stifled or censured, while simultaneously regarded as often naïve and inconsequential. In the peace movement’s protests, she saw women taking politicized responsibility for human life, but personally she declined to actively take part in any other way than writing stories. To the great disappointment of many intellectuals—such as Ellen Key and Elin Wägner—Lagerlöf thus refused to get more personally involved in the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm and the international pacifist Henry Ford Peace Expedition, organized by famous London-based Hungarian suffragist and pacifist Rosika Schwimmer and named for its financial supporter, the American industrialist Henry Ford. Repeated calls from members of the expedition did not convince her to participate, and only succeeded in irritating her intensely. Selma Lagerlöf saw the expedition as vanity.20 Also, the participating women from neutral nations all over the world ended up splitting into antagonistic national factions, and the expedition was judged a failure.
Unlike her colleagues Key and Wägner, as well as the preceding generation of female authors, Lagerlöf kept her distance from official political rhetoric. As the war raged on, however, Lagerlöf began to doubt the effectiveness of her authorial image, although she still remained reluctant to embrace a more conventionally political discourse. In a poem that probably dates to February 1918, when she had started work on her anti-war novel Bannlyst, she laments the separation of body and soul during the years of war, and the loss of inspiration. The poem describes how soul and body fuse together again when the author to whom they belong has come to terms with her approach to the atrocities of war.21
A disturbing work
Over the course of a few months in the spring of 1918, Selma Lagerlöf completed the writing of her new novel. Bannlyst is arguably Lagerlöf’s most disturbing work. Emotional excess is laid out side by side with realistic, goal-oriented narrative to function as a manifesto of ideas against the war. The thought behind Bannlyst was to create a new taboo. If people could be made to feel the same feelings of disgust toward the killing of people in war as toward the eating of dead human flesh, then all wars might be avoided.22
The complex narrative chiefly spans the years 1909 to 1916 and is largely set in a rural fishing community on the rocky shores of the Swedish west coast, as well as rural parts inland. The hero of the novel, Sven Elversson, an English gentleman in his late twenties, has returned to his native Sweden after a British polar expedition. His English parents adopted him when he was nine years old. They have now rejected him, after rumours spread that Sven and his crewmates, shipwrecked and starving in the Arctic, ate the flesh of a dead comrade. Wishing to hide from the world, Sven returns to his biological parents, Joel and Thala, farmers on the island of Grimön on the west coast.
Sven, the Swedish-born outsider who has been a member of an English expedition, brings some kind of horrible contagion back with him to the country of his birth. The local minister, Rhånge, accepts Sven’s existence in the county, living with his parents on a remote island. But he would never accept Sven as an active parishioner in the church where he holds sway. Rhånge’s condemnation of Sven in church sparks off the inhabitants’ mistreatment of Sven in the name of disgust. But Sven proves to be more gracious and righteous in his ways than any of the churchgoers. Rhånge’s spiritual charisma gradually leaves him after he condemns Sven. Lotta Hedman, a simple servant girl, who has the powerful gift of second sight, reveals the minister as a fake and shallow man. Rhånge falls deeper into rage and depression, before he realizes that he has to renegotiate his beliefs in spiritual powers and taboos. Two competing discourses of narrative consciousness thus clash within the novel: rationalist realism represented by the authoritarian Lutheran minister Rhånge, and untrammelled supernaturalism represented by a poor and simple woman born and raised in peripheral Lapland.
Bannlyst raises questions about the nature of reality and its apparent failure to represent the corporeal perceptions of war, and mirrors Lagerlöf’s own struggle to balance her wish to live in ignorance of the atrocities of the war with her urge to use her artistry to fight them and ultimately to break out of the box of genteel, National Romantic writing in which she had been long confined. When waves of swollen corpses of young men float ashore after the Battle of Jutland, people begin to re-evaluate Sven’s crime. His brother Joel, a seaman who has encountered thousands of corpses floating out at sea, now sick with despair asks Sven for forgiveness. Sven reminds him of the time Joel and his friends forced him to eat a snake. With eye-witness accuracy, Lagerlöf goes on to describe the sights Joel has seen:
They did not lie flat on the water, but were held upright by their lifebelts, with heads above water, so their features could be seen. And Ung-Joel told how the vessel had sailed for hours among the dead–thousands and thousands of dead. The sea was covered with them.
He described many terrible sights he had seen, but what seemed most terrible of all to him was that all those dead men had their eyes torn out by innumerable seagulls that hovered about their heads.23
Lagerlöf was on holiday in Strömstad on the west coast in June 1916 when corpses from the battle floated close to the shore. She then immediately started to work with the idea of connecting the disgust at dead human flesh with a taboo against war.24 The community’s disgust with Sven is redirected towards the corpses from the slaughter of battle. Bannlyst thus offers a new, more adequate perception of the ultimate repulsiveness of war than the conventional descriptions of the battles as a contest mainly between Germans and British offered in newspaper reports. The two major national newspapers in Sweden at the time, the liberal Dagens Nyheter and the conservative Svenska Dagbladet, routinely reported on the war by way of the propaganda headquarters in Berlin, London, Paris, and Amsterdam; the conservatives with a huge emphasis on Berlin and great sympathy for the Germans.25 The newspaper reports recast hand-to-hand slaughter, shooting, shelling, or bombing as the protection or defence of comrades, and always in national—never individual—terms.
Lotta Hedman’s supernatural sight appears as a cultural corrective. A prophetess from the rural north of Sweden, Lotta’s haunted visions, irrational compulsions, and dramatic public outbursts construct her as a kind of madwoman–outsider capable of seeing beyond dominating discourses. Her initial appearance on a train a third of the way through the novel signals a disorientingly abrupt change in the text’s tone and direction. Dressed in black, shy and inhibited, she nonetheless directs at her fellow passenger Sven a rapid-fire, half-mad, half-rhapsodic monologue that slowly attracts the other passengers as well. Finally, as she has finished her proclamations of the world coming to an end after the Great War, she starts talking about her love for her childhood friend and the minister’s wife Sigrun, and her notion, confirmed in a series of visions, that the minister Rhånge is a man capable of killing Sigrun’s soul.
Lotta’s presence, voice, and vision constantly threaten the novel’s realist conventions and narrative stability. She is the consistently uncontainable and destabilizing element in this fictional universe, one whose excessive inner visions and prophetic powers keep exploding outwards and keep creating unexpected dislocations at the levels of plot and formal coherence.
Fredrika Bremer and the women’s international peace movement
The repulsive yet captivating Lotta Hedman appears in the novel as a personification both of a rejected position in society and a female literary tradition from which the Establishment had dissociated itself—especially at the time of Lagerlöf’s literary début in 1891— and which Lagerlöf herself considered harmful to be too strongly associated with: a tradition of politically radical, sentimental novels with reformist ambitions, where their message could be dismissed as sentimental and banal.26 All through the war, Lagerlöf’s drafts and short stories contained the insight that some voices were not to be heard, and if they were heard they were dismissed by the authorities of the world as silly and naïve. She lamented her fear that her great reputation as a humane and honourable author would collapse if she did not deliver an outburst against the war, while also fearing such an outburst would be associated with femininity and silliness. In the peace movements she saw women who took a certain responsibility for life, but she never took part in the worldwide manifestations arranged by women’s international peace movements. Lagerlöf protected her reputation as an author and her fear of public debate is well known.27 But at the same time she felt compelled throughout the war to reflect over the significance of her authorship in sketches and drafts, written at the request of various peace movements. She searched for a completely new format to be able to mediate a message of peace that would make an impact and all the while might restore the once-repressed female voice to literature and society.
‘Once, I sacrificed my good name as an author for them. I am happy that I knew what I sacrificed, and still did it.’ This is what Swedish author Fredrika Bremer says in a sketch by Lagerlöf from 1891. It is Christmas morning and she is in church, surrounded by the spirits of ageing spinsters. Lagerlöf’s short story ‘Mamsell Fredrika’ (‘Miss Fredrika’) was published in the women’s liberation periodical Dagny, and paid tribute to Bremer and her feminist novel Hertha.28 Thus, very much in line to her own début, Lagerlöf shows consciousness of a female author’s vulnerability in public, as well as an awareness of the political reforms in women’s right to self-determination and education that made her own career possible. Undoubtedly, Lagerlöf also knew that Bremer, after the Crimean War battle on the Åland Islands in the summer of 1854, had published an appeal in The Times on 28 August 1854, calling for the women of the world to unite in an alliance for peace: ‘May the earth thus become encircled by a chain of healing, loving energies, which neither ocean nor event, neither discord nor time, can interrupt.’29 The women’s organization’s main purpose would be to educate women to be responsible and competent citizens. Education would be a part of the emancipation of women from spiritual and physical oppression, and would change the world. Bremer’s conviction was that if women participated in public life it could fundamentally change world politics.
Lagerlöf was clearly formed in the spirit of Fredrika Bremer. Like many women in the Swedish suffrage movement and peace movement, she had a degree from the prestigious Kungliga Högre lärarinneseminariet (College for Women Teachers) in Stockholm, which was established by some far-seeing educationalists in 1859, after women’s lack of education opportunities had been debated in Hertha and by other intellectuals in Fredrika Bremer’s circle.30 The college had been run by the state under royal patronage since 1861 and was a unique, public higher educational institution for women in a country where women were not admitted to public grammar schools until 1927. That women’s limited opportunities for education and self-support troubled Lagerlöf in her youth is evident from her writings.31 Furthermore, it was older women in direct contact with Fredrika Bremer who had encouraged Lagerlöf to make use of her talent by going out into the world and getting an education.32 During the years Lagerlöf attended the college (1882–5) the peace issue was much discussed by the liberal women’s movement, which had connections to the college. Internationally as well, women’s commitment to peace and peace education was widely discussed. An international conference for peace had been held in 1878, where women were urged to engage in peace work. In a number of countries this led to women’s peace organizations being formed, with education and fosterage to peace on the programme, which also characterized the education on offer at the College for Women Teachers from the start.
When the war started in August 1914, suffragists all over Europe quickly organized peace rallies. The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance sent protests against the war to various countries’ legations in London, and in New York thousands of women dressed in black demonstrated in a silent procession to the sound of muffled drums.33 In Sweden, women of various political affiliations gathered in a help committee, and in the autumn of 1914, some of the Swedish suffragists secretly began to prepare an action they called Women’s Peace Sunday, planned for February 1915. The idea was that women in the neutral Scandinavian countries would gather in as many places as possible, pass a joint resolution against the war, and recommend neutral intervention between the belligerent states. When fully organized, the whole action suddenly had to be cancelled, as news of it reached the Swedish royal family and Queen Victoria considered it improper.34
However, plans for a pan-Scandinavian women’s manifestation for peace resurfaced after a legation of sixteen Swedish women participated in the International Women’s Congress for Peace and Freedom in The Hague in April 1915. In The Hague, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace was founded, with the influential American suffragist Jane Addams elected chairwoman (Addams, a forerunner in modern social politics, had useful contacts with President Wilson). The conference resulted in a resolution to send women’s delegations to governments involved in the war and thus work for a dialogue between the belligerent states. With the resolution, they also aspired to show that women were taking active responsibility for the development of society; that they could contribute to a better world, and thus should be enfranchised. The manifestation failed. But towards the end of June 1915, Women’s Peace Sunday gathered over 88,000 women in 343 different places in Sweden.35
Preparing for this Sunday, 27 June 1915, Selma Lagerlöf tried to write a speech for peace. A halting draft has been saved in her collection at the National Library in Stockholm: she wonders why the peace movement does not have more supporters, cannot sort it out, and suddenly her pencil starts writing a prayer of utter despair: ‘Jesus Christ, come and help me! Say what I should write. I am sitting here, listening for God’s voice.’ And she continues:
I have been wondering for quite some time whether the peace movement ought to change its name.
It is the word. Peace movement sounds as if we were seeking something unreasonable, something that will never come about, something so unthinkable as peace on earth being possible. … Why lay yourself open to being called a peace sheep.36
There was an anonymous speech given on Women’s Peace Sunday, published and delivered to the rallies all over the country. Present in person in Strömstad, Lagerlöf read the speech and it is possible that it was she who had written it.37
Hertha and The Outcast as novels of ideas
The voice of Lotta Hedman in Bannlyst restores the female voice and the female literary tradition of the sentimental novel, for decades silenced as naïve and sentimental in political debates and intellectual discussions.38 Through the character of Lotta Hedman, Bremer’s fundamental message in Hertha is stressed: women have the same right as men to preach the word of God, and are perhaps even closer to God’s plan for mankind. As the novel unfolds, Lotta finally preaches outside the church, and the crowd turns its attention to her. It is stressed that Lotta has been called in her own right, and that she did not come to the church with Rhånge. The portrayal of Lotta throughout the novel alludes to Fredrika Bremer’s criticism of the strict Swedish Lutheran church, far from Bremer’s radical Christianity and the visions in Hertha of women possessed of divine wisdom that is renounced by men. Lotta’s concluding sermon is a clear parallel to the depiction of Hertha as a saviour and Hertha’s closing speech in Bremer’s novel. Here Bremer’s much-mocked, radical suggestion of a peaceful alliance between the peoples of the world, initiated by Christian women in a network of philanthropic women’s organizations, is also redressed. The fact that Bremer, by appealing for peace, had made a fool of herself was something the Swedish newspapers had diligently reported.39
With the characters’ reaction to the raft of corpses at sea and the novel’s two concluding sermons, where Rhånge’s and Lotta’s visions are joined, Bannlyst emphasizes the limitations of realism and documentary as a depiction of reality. In that sense, Lagerlöf also puts her authorship to the test, questioning its distance to a conventional realism and approaching Bremer’s ability to write a feminist novel of ideas with a pacifist message. In Hertha, her most radical work, Bremer depicts her feminist ideas, closely related to her radical, Christian view of society, through dreamlike apparitions and visions, cutting through the realistic accounts in the novel and pleading for women’s rights to an education and society’s need for female preaching. Hertha stands out as God’s human daughter called to turn fettered women into disciples. In a famous passage, Hertha has a challenging radical and satirical dream with mythical dimensions. In the dream she travels all over the world to seek help to solve the curse that lies upon women who have no rights. But among men of learning, all she meets is a lack of interest in her cause. They dispose of all their time and strength in the invention of bombs and disputes on theological and scientific trivialities; all while the world is on fire in the burning Crimean War, in Sweden’s immediate vicinity. In Hertha’s dream the men’s excitement prefigures the First World War propaganda:
we are now so occupied with the oriental war in the East, and are at this very moment doing our best to perfect a huge projectile, a gigantic projectile, which, when it explodes, will poison a whole city with its stench. It is a great matter, a very great matter. This is, my good girl, a great time for humanity, and if you and your sisters will come hither and help to cast bullets or to give lessons in the French language, then...40
Just like Hertha, Lotta has an inner calling, but external constraints obstruct her. She is still unlearned and is locked out from the ministry, but because of this, ‘My head’s not heavy with knowledge. Not all confused with doctrines of error. I am as an unwritten page; as the white scroll on which God Himself writes His own thoughts.’41
Like Hertha, Lotta delivers a sermon at the end of the novel, in which earthy schooling is severely criticized for its apparent failure to give mankind the proper means to listen to their inner voices and fulfil their true vocations. Her sermon concentrates on the essential elements of religion: the commandments concerning people’s inviolable worth and social rules. The sermon she delivers is a vision in which she sees how the bodies found in the ocean meet God in the hereafter, and God asks: ‘ “Ye souls that have passed through the school of earth,” says the man to them, “can you say my Ten Commandments as they are said on earth to-day.” ’42 The men haltingly rattle off the four commandments that speak to the formal side of the Church, but all the commandments concerning ethical rules for life are distorted in their mouths into warlike summons.
Bannlyst re-established Lagerlöf in the twofold female literary tradition that was founded on Bremer’s ideas of emancipation: realist allusions to substantial changes and political debate and visionary, mythical allusions to spiritual liberation and theological debate. In Bannlyst, Lagerlöf’s solution in the face of the realist tradition, which at the time of her début had never been greater nor more influential, and because of this began to be despised as simple, everyday realism—tendentious, inartistic—is to bring it almost to the level of expressionistic realism in its accounts of the community’s abhorrence at Sven’s cannibalistic crime; Lotta Hedman’s appearance on the train; Sigrun’s escape from her raging husband; rafts of swollen corpses drifting on the North Sea. Moreover, in Bannlyst Lagerlöf renews Bremer’s provocative, visionary, mythical allusions and her liberation theology. In both novels, the oppressed female voice has a messianic edge to it, and the message is worded with the hope that the world will change for the better when all people are given the freedom to determine their own circumstances, and can no longer be tamed and forced into submission by the formal regulations of power. Bremer and Lagerlöf show how, as long as women are excluded from formal power structures, the formal dictates of power result in a direct contradiction of the Christian tenet of the sanctity of human life.
However, the intention behind Bannlyst, that of creating a new taboo, admittedly ended up being modified and de-fanged in the final version. Lagerlöf’s influential friends Valborg Olander and Sophie Elkan were so upset by the shunned hero Sven Elversson’s cannibalistic crime that Lagerlöf finally surrendered to their advice. At the last moment she modified the idea of the novel by deleting the word äckel (disgust) where she could, and by adding to the plot a letter in which a dead comrade of Sven’s confirms that Sven was innocent of the cannibalism committed by the others on the polar expedition.43 The author desperately wanted to get the book published. Bannlyst finally reached Swedish bookshops in the middle of December in 1918, only a little more than a month after the armistice was signed on 11 November. The reception disappointed her. Not one critic drew a parallel with the women’s peace and suffrage movements.44
In the aftermath
Europe changed after the armistice and with time the women in Germany, Great Britain, the US, and Sweden received the vote. The League of Nations was founded in 1919 on President Wilson’s initiative, with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) as an example and in consultation with Jane Addams.
For many women, however, the franchise was a disappointment. It did not change society to the extent the suffragists had argued it would. Already in 1919, Selma Lagerlöf spelled out the risks for decreased political commitment, in her speech on a suffrage festive just a couple of days after the full introduction of general suffrage in Sweden on 24 May, last of all the Scandinavian countries.45 She also foresaw the severity of the Entente Powers’ peace terms, and immediately after the armistice she appealed to the women of the Entente Powers to work for reconciliation. The article ‘Till mödrarna i ententeländerna’ (‘To the mothers of the Entente Countries’) was published in a number of major Swedish newspapers on 29 November 1918 and had an impact on the WILPF.
Although the women’s peace movement had no effect on the peace negotiations, the WILPF is still active and has consultative status with a number of UN organs. Three of its members have received the Nobel Peace Prize: its first chairwoman, Jane Addams, in 1941; its first secretary-general, Emily Greene Balch, in 1946; and the Swedish politician Alva Myrdal in 1982.
Notes
1 For more on Lagerlöf’s reputation in Swedish literary criticism and history, see Anna Nordlund, Selma Lagerlöfs underbara resa genom den svenska litteraturhistorien 1891–1996 (diss.; Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2005).
2 ‘Sveriges ädla dotter’ is an epithet in the Nobel prize speech given in honour of Lagerlöf, which drew a clear connection between Sweden’s role as peacekeeper and Swedish literature in general, and with Lagerlöf in particular. The speech was published in Les Prix Nobel en 1909 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1910), 31–33.
3 For the cultural development of a new nationalism around 1905, see Rikard Bengtsson, Trust, Threat, and Stable Peace. Swedish Great Power Perceptions 1905–1939 (diss.; Lund Political Studies, 114; Lund: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, Lunds universitet, 2000); Magnus Ericson, A Realist Stable Peace. Power, Threat and the Development of a Shared Norwegian–Swedish Democratic Security Identity 1905–1940 (diss.; Lund Political Science, 113; Lund: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, Lunds universitet, 2000); Inger Hammar, För Freden och rösträtten. Kvinnorna och den svensk-norska unionens sista dagar (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2004), 145–78.
4 Much has lately been written on Sweden’s peaceful self-image slowly formed during the 1800s. See Mats Hellstenius, Krigen som inte blev av. Sveriges fredliga officerskår vid 1800–talets mitt (diss.; Lund: Lunds universitet, 2000); Lars I. Andersson, Fred i vår tid. Sverige, krigen och Freden, 1870–1945 (diss.; Lund: Sisyfos, 2003); Magnus Jerneck, ‘Modernitet och småstadsidentitet – mönsterlandet Sverige som fredlighetens land’, in id. (ed.), Fred i realpolitikens skugga, (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009), 77–93; Kim Salomon, ‘Synen på krig och fred. En begreppshistoria’, in Jerneck 2009, 66–76.
5 Nils-Olof Franzén, Undan stormen. Sverige under första världskriget (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1986); see also Lina Sturfelt, Eldens återsken. Första världskriget i svensk föreställningsvärld (diss.; Lund: Sekel, 2008), 185–218.
6 For more on Lagerlöf’s creative crisis in the 1910s, see Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Körkarlen och Bannlyst. Motiv- och idéstudier i Selma Lagerlöfs 10-talsdiktning (diss.; Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1963), 3–35.
7 For more on narratives and images of the war in the Swedish popular press, see Sturfelt 2008.
8 However, recent research has shown how in particular explicitly politically active authors in Sweden responded to the war in prose and poetry in various ways. See Claes Ahlund, Diktare i krig. K. G. Ossiannilsson, Bertil Malmberg och Ture Nerman från debuten till 1920 (Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 2007); Sofi Qvarnström, Motståndets berättelser. Elin Wägner, Anna Lenah Elgström, Marika Stiernstedt och första världskriget (diss.; Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 2009); and Qvarnström in this volume.
9 The drafts are in the Mårbacka Foundation’s collection of manuscripts, held at Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm, under the heading ‘Stämningar från krigsåren’ (‘Moods of the War Years’).
10 Peace was commonly associated with sheep, and ‘Fredsfår’ (lit. peace sheep) was used across Scandinavia to disparage peace activists. It is also found in Lagerlöf’s lamentations over her reluctance to support the peace movement, discussed below.
11 See, for example, her correspondence with her Danish translators Elisabeth Grundtvig and Ida Falbe-Hansen, and with the Norwegian dentist and pacifist Kaja Hansen, in Selma Lagerlöf, Brev 2. Utgivna av Selma Lagerlöf-sällskapet, ed. Ying Toijer-Nilsson (Lund 1969).
12 For Lagerlöf’s commitment to the suffrage movement, see Bertil Björkenlid, Kvinnokrav i manssamhälle. Rösträttskvinnorna och deras metoder som opinionsbildare och påtryckargrupp i Sverige 1902–1921 (diss.; Skrifter utgivna vid avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala, 29; Uppsala, 1982), 197–2004. For the dissolution of the union and its influence on the Swedish suffrage movement and Lagerlöf in particular, see Hammar 2004, 188. From Lagerlöf’s correspondence with her close friend Sophie Elkan it is evident that the dissolution of the union was a political reawakening for Lagerlöf, which resulted in her commitment to women’s right to vote, hoping that women would be able to contribute to a fresh start for Sweden (see Selma Lagerlöf, Du lär mig att bli fri. Selma Lagerlöf skriver till Sophie Elkan, ed. Ying Toijer-Nilsson (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1992), 262, 266–7.
13 Published in Selma Lagerlöf, Troll och människor 1 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1915).
14 Elin Wägner, Selma Lagerlöf, ii: Från Jerusalem till Mårbacka (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1943), 86.
15 See further Sif Bokholm, I otakt med tiden, om rösträttsmotstånd, antipacifism och nazism bland svenska kvinnor (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2008), who also shows the strong political engagement among women against the right to vote and, during the First World War, the suffrage movement’s division into a militarist grouping with less interest in the right to vote and a dominant pacifist grouping for whom the commitment to the franchise remained or increased during the war: See also Irene Andersson, Kvinnor mot krig. Aktioner och nätverk för fred 1914–1940 (diss.; Studia Historica Lundensia; Lund, 2001), 73–84.
16 The more than 40,000 letters Lagerlöf received from the general public are held at Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm, in the Mårbacka Foundation collection. Jenny Bergenmar and Maria Karlsson are currently studying the letters for the research project ‘Reading Lagerlöf. Letters from the public to Selma Lagerlöf’.
17 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Lagerlöf, Troll och människor 2 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1921), 180, ‘Låt mig verka på det sätt, som är mitt eget, syssla med ting, som jag kan sköta! Låt mig slippa att som en sinnesrubbad löpa kring landet för att söka ställa till rätta det, som jag inte är man till att behärska!’
18 Ibid., ‘köld och mörker och tystnad och förstening och förslöande töcken’.
19 Lagerlöf 1921, 169, ‘Jag har varit en lekare och en gycklare, men ur min själ framgår inte mer varken gyckel eller lek. Min själ har blivit som du, stum, utan klockor, utan sång.’
20 Lagerlöf 1992, 438–9; for further evidence in her unpublished letters to Elkan and her companion Valborg Olander from December 1915 until August 1916, see Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm (hereafter KB), Ep L 45.
21 The poem was published after Lagerlöf’s death in Selma Lagerlöf, Från skilda tider 2, ed. Nils Afzelius (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1946), 17–20.
22 KB, Ep L 45, Lagerlöf to Olander, 14 & 19 October 1918; Lagerlöf 1992, 474, Lagerlöf to Elkan.
23 The Outcast, trans. W. Worster (London: Gyldendahl, 1920, 257); Selma Lagerlöf, Bannlyst (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1918), 315, ‘De hade inte legat utsträckta i vattnet, utan de hade hållits i upprätt ställning av sina korkvästar. Deras huvuden hade varit upplyfta ovan vattnet, så att man hade kunnat urskilja anletsdrag och uttryck. Och ung-Joel berättade, att ångaren hade gått fram i timtal genom tusenden och åter tusenden av döda. Hela havet hade varit betäckt av dem. Han skildrade för brodern många fasans syner, som han hade sett, men det, som tycktes värst ha gripit honom, var, att alla de döda hade fått sina ögon uthackade av de otaliga skaror av måsar, som kretsade över dem.’
24 Lagerroth 1963, 375.
25 I have looked through Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet with an eye to the battlefields of Champagne, Neuve-Chapelle, and Ypres in February and March 1915, the sinking of Lusitania on 7 May 1915, the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, and the battlefields of Cambrai– St Quentin and Amiens for 21 March and April 1918.
26 For more on the sentimental novel in connection with Lagerlöf’s debut, see Lisbeth Stenberg, En genialisk lek. Kritik och överskridande i Selma Lagerlöfs tidiga författarskap (diss.; Skrifter utgivna av Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen vid Göteborgs universitet, 40; Gothenburg, 2001), 169–82; Nordlund 2005, 33–8, 48.
27 Wägner 1943, 395.
28 Also published in Selma Lagerlöf, Osynliga länkar (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1894), 156–68, ‘Jag offrade en gång mitt författaranseende för dem. Jag är glad, att jag visste vad jag offrade och ändå gjorde det.’ This taken almost word for word from a letter Bremer wrote a fortnight before her death. See further Carina Burman, Bremer. En biografi (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2001), 393.
29 Quoted in Burman, 362.
30 Nothing has yet been written on the College for Women Teachers as a hotbed of intellectual women.
31 See, for example, Ett barns memoarer (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1930); Dagbok för Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1932).
32 Namely Eva Fryxell and Sophie Adlersparre.
33 Andersson 2001, 67–8.
34 Ibid. 84–90.
35 Ibid. 90–101.
36 KB, Mårbacka Foundation collection of manuscripts, ‘Stämningar från krigsåren’: ‘Kristus Jesus kom och hjälp mig! Säg vad jag ska skriva. Jag sitter och lyssnar efter Guds röst.’ ‘Jag har gått och undrat sedan någon tid om inte fredsrörelsen borde byta om namn. Det är ordet. Fredsrörelsen låter ju som om vi eftersträvade något orimligt något som aldrig ska komma, något så otänkbart, som att det skulle kunna skapas fred på jorden. … Varför utsätta sig för att bli kallade fredsfår.’
37 A letter to Valborg Olander indicated she did (KB, Ep L 45, 30 June 1915); see also Lagerroth 1963, 427–8.
38 Through Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theory of abjection Birgitta Holm suggests that Lagerlöf’s aesthetics in Bannlyst represent discoveries of cultural powers surrounding ‘the female’ as a collective unconscious. See Birgitta Holm, Selma Lagerlöf och ursprungets roman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1984), 248–73. For the female literary tradition and the sentimental novel in Sweden between 1830 and 1880, see Elisabeth Mansén, Konsten att förgylla vardagen. Thekla Knös och romantikens Uppsala (diss.; Lund: Nya Doxa, 1993); in connection with Lagerlöf, see Stenberg 2001, 169–215, 264–5; and for Lagerlöf and the melodramatic imagination, see Maria Karlsson, Känslans röst. Det melodramatiska i Selma Lagerlöfs romankonst (diss.; Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2002).
39 Inger Ekbom, Den kvinnliga fredstanken. Fredrika Bremer och andra i kamp för fred (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1991), 21.
40 Hertha, trans. Mary Howitt (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1856); Fredrika Bremer, Hertha eller En själs historia. Teckning ur det verkliga livet, ed. Victor Svanberg (Aktuella klassiker; Stockholm: Askild & Kärnekull, 1974), 113, ‘Vi ha så mycket att göra med orientaliska kriget; vi hålla som bäst på att tillverka en stor bomb, en jättebomb, miss, som, när den exploderar, skall kunna förgifta en hel stad genom sin stank. Det blir en stor sak, en mycket stor sak! Detta är en stor tid, miss, för mänskligheten, och om ni och era systrar vilja komma hit och stöpa kulor eller ge lektioner i franska språket, så …’
41 The Outcast 1920 (above, n. 23), 111; Lagerlöf 1918, 133–4, ‘Mitt huvud är inte tungt av vetande. Det är inte förvirrat av irrläror. Jag är som det oskrivna papperet. Jag är som det vita bladet, där Gud själv skriver ner sina tankar.’
42 The Outcast 1920, 292; Lagerlöf 1918, 347, ‘I själar, som haver genomgått livets skola, kunnen i läsa upp för mig mina tio bud, sådana som de i dessa dagar lyda på jorden?’
43 KB, Ep L 45, letters to Valborg Olander, 14, 24 & 28 October 1918; Lagerlöf 1992, 476, letter to Sophie Elkan, 28 October 1918; Lagerlöf 1969, 343, 391–395, letters to Kaja Hansen, 5 April 1919.
44 Nordlund 2005, 158–63.
45 Published in Från skilda tider 1, ed. Nils Afzelius (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1945), 156–9.