Re-Mapping LagerlĂśf Performance, intermediality, and European transmissions
Edited by Helena ForsĂĽs-Scott, Lisbeth Stenberg & Bjarne Thorup Thomsen
nordic academic press
The publication of this volume has been made possible by kind support from The Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, London Magn. Bergvalls stiftelse, Stockholm The Embassy of Sweden, London Konung Gustaf VI Adolfs fond för svensk kultur, Stockholm Letterstedtska föreningen, Stockholm Åke Wibergs stiftelse, Stockholm
Copying or other kinds of reproduction of this work requires specific permission by the publisher.
Nordic Academic Press P.O. Box 1206 SE-221 05 Lund, Sweden www.nordicacademicpress.com
© Nordic Academic Press and the authors 2014 Typesetting: Stilbildarna i Mölle, sbmolle.com Jacket design: Design för livet Jacket photo: Photo of Selma Lagerlof by A. Blomberg, Stockholm, 1906. Map by Fugazi form. Print: ScandBook, Falun 2014 ISBN 978-91-87351-21-1
Contents Preface 9
i introduction 1. Re-Mapping Lagerlöf
13
The volume and its parameters
Bjarne Thorup Thomsen
2. Selma Lagerlöf in context Helena Forsås-Scott
18
3. A star in a constellation
24
The international women’s movement as a context for reading the works of Selma Lagerlöf
Lisbeth Stenberg
ii readers, performance, constructions 4. Sectional portal
41
5. The reader in history and letters to the author
44
The case of Selma Lagerlöf and her audience
Jenny Bergenmar & Maria Karlsson
6. Mårbacka: Larders, cow-houses, and other spiritual matters 60 Anna Bohlin 7. In the eyes of the beholder
74
Du coté de chez Selma Lagerlöf
Git Claesson Pipping & Tom Olsson
iii intermediality and film 8. Sectional portal
91
9. Selma Lagerlöf in the golden age of Swedish silent cinema Anna Nordlund
94
10. Jerusalem, Sons of Ingmar, and the transparent thickness of the cinematic view Christopher Oscarson
117
11. ‘Nothing about art is innocent’
131
Reading Edelfelt and Stiller
Helena Forsås-Scott
12. The Phantom Carriage and the concept of melodrama Tytti Soila
149
13. Nils Holgersson and a Japanese animated series Astrid Surmatz
163
iv (trans)national narratives and european transmissions 14. Sectional portal
183
1 5. Text and transnational terrain, 1888–1918 Bjarne Thorup Thomsen
187
16. The many facets of a diamond
207
Space, change and identity in Selma Lagerlöf ’s The Miracles of Antichrist
Elettra Carbone & Kristina Sjögren
17. Gender, war, and canon
222
Selma Lagerlöf and Sara Wacklin
Ebba Witt-Brattström
1 8. Violence and the uncanny in Selma Lagerlöf ’s ‘Gammal fäbodsägen’ Sofia Wijkmark
232
1 9. Selma Lagerlöf ’s story in Czech Dagmar Hartlová
245
20. Nils in the Netherlands
261
Selma Lagerlöf in Dutch and Frisian, 1911–1921
Roald van Elswijk
21. Journeys into English
273
An overview of the English-language versions of Nils Holgersson and anglophone academic discourse
Charlotte Berry
22. ‘Dear Selma’—‘Dear Velma’
289
Velma Swanston Howard’s letters to Selma Lagerlöf
Björn Sundmark
23. Selma Lagerlöf in Nazi Germany
302
Not banned, not forgotten: Lord Arne’s Silver as a Nazi Frontbuch
Jennifer Watson
Bibliography 315 Illustrations 337 Contributors 341 Index of works by Selma Lagerlöf
345
Index of names
347
Preface The conference ‘Selma Lagerlöf 2011: Text, Translation, Film’, arranged at University College London in June 2011 to mark the publication of the first three volumes of ‘Lagerlöf in English’, the series of new English translations of key texts, was the first international conference on Lagerlöf since 1997. Papers were given by twenty-seven speakers from seven countries. The structuring of the material in the present volume reflects the key areas of scholarship that emerged at the conference: Lagerlöf as a celebrity; films inspired by her texts; and her texts in relation to other cultures. In addition to selecting for this volume a representative range of material, the editors have commissioned further essays so as to present a more comprehensive coverage of current Lagerlöf scholarship. We are grateful to the contributors for their willingness to develop their research for this volume, for their co-operation throughout the process of editing the material, and for their patience. The three main sections of the book are introduced by sectional portals, the first two written by Helena Forsås-Scott and the third by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen. The editing has been done by Helena with some input from Bjarne. Lisbeth Stenberg has been responsible for the illustrations. The Embassy of Sweden, London, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond kindly supported the 2011 conference. For generous financial support towards the costs of publishing this volume we would like to thank the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, London; Magn. Bergvalls stiftelse, Stockholm; the Embassy of Sweden, London; Konung Gustaf VI Adolfs fond för svensk kultur, Stockholm; Letterstedtska föreningen, Stockholm; and Åke Wibergs stiftelse, Stockholm. Finally, the editors would like to thank Nordic Academic Press for their professionalism and efficiency. Annika Olsson of Nordic Academic Press and Charlotte Merton deserve a very special thank 9
preface
you: their expertise, support, and enthusiasm have been essential to the completion of this project. Helena Fors책s-Scott, Lisbeth Stenberg, Bjarne Thorup Thomsen Edinburgh and Gothenburg, spring 2014
10
i introduction
chapter 1
Re-Mapping Lagerlöf The volume and its parameters Bjarne Thorup Thomsen The present volume aims to offer an international audience a variety of insights into a new interdisciplinary discourse on the Swedish world-literature writer Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1909. It is the first English-language volume to present a comprehensive conspectus of current Lagerlöf scholarship, conducted by researchers representing a range of national affiliations. Taken together, the innovative investi gations presented in the volume provide the reader with a new and multicoloured map of developments and connections in Lagerlöf ’s wide-ranging work, canonical as well as lesser known, of its ideological significances, contexts, and impact, of its multiple travels between media and transmissions across countries, and of the astonishing attraction and influence of Lagerlöf ’s public persona during her career and beyond. The history of the critical approaches taken to Lagerlöf ’s work and authorial figure since the beginning of her writing career projects, broadly speaking, a development from what could be described as more ‘confining’ perspectives in various forms to much more expansive and diverse ones, and Re-Mapping Lagerlöf may be seen as a further advancement along this route. While earlier criticism tended to tie Lagerlöf ’s literary activity to her home region of rural Värmland in western Sweden, and to remove artistic agency from the author by constructing her as the voice of a tradition of oral storytelling, as a mouthpiece for the Swedish soil itself, or as an embodiment of moral values,1 the subsequent critical ‘turns’—from the textual turn of the 1950s and 1960s to the application of a number of ‘beyond text’ approaches thereafter—have shaped a much more multifaceted understanding of the complexities, 13
introduction
Illus. 1. Selma Lagerlöf c.1881.
innovative force, and impact of Lagerlöf ’s work and persona. Re-Mapping Lagerlöf may thus be viewed as a unique window onto the current proliferation of perspectives on a writer, the appreciation of whom continues to grow. The perspectives on display in this book cover Lagerlöf in the context of the international feminist movement and as a writer whose work offers a richness of alternative discourses on gender. They position her as an international peace campaigner, but also as a celebrity and a literary ‘star’ whose status in her own time could rival that of royalty. They cover Lagerlöf ’s key contributions to nation-building and early welfare agendas in her own country and beyond, and to the national imagination as such, but also the transnational thought inherent in much of her output, of obvious relevance to present-day political and cultural concerns. The perspectives include illuminations of important strands of Lagerlöf ’s work with reference to intertextuality, canonicity, and generic hybridity. The perspectives provide, moreover, a range of insights into the vibrant, and continuing, re-mediation of Lagerlöf ’s output, including, significantly, the seminal role of her work in sup14
re-mapping l agerlöf
plying plot lines, spectacles, and thematic concerns to the emerging and expanding cultures of national and global cinema, which would markedly increase her already considerable audience. A further segment of perspectives in Re-Mapping Lagerlöf concerns the transmission of Lagerlöf ’s work into different, mainly European countries and cultural contexts, demonstrating how its reception speaks to very varied cultural constituencies and domestic interests. These transmission and translation histories illustrate a remarkable ability of the ‘cultural capital’ that Lagerlöf ’s work and persona increasingly represented to retain its currency through paradigmatic shifts in ideology and cultural politics beyond Sweden’s borders. This plethora of perspectives has been gathered into three main sections, while at the same time recognising that the essays, precisely due to their interdisciplinary impulses and desire to establish new connections, may straddle sectional boundaries. Each section is introduced by a ‘portal’ which sets out a common framework for the section and presents the essays. The first of these sections, ‘Readers, performance, constructions’, examines the author’s construction of her celebrity persona in texts, environments, and public performance, as well as investigating, complementarily, the understanding of Lagerlöf by members of the general public, as manifested, for example, in an extensive collection of letters to the author from very wide and varied segments of readers, both domestic and international. The second section, ‘Intermediality and film’, assesses the role of Lagerlöf ’s narratives in advancing early Swedish cinema in a cultural period that figured a productive dialogic relationship between canonical literature and the emerging art and entertainment form of film. The section contains, moreover, incisive new film studies of some of the most significant Lagerlöf adaptations or reworkings, which have achieved iconic status in international film history, along with gendered readings of illustrations and images in both print and film form. The third section, ‘(Trans)national narratives and European transmissions’, contains five case studies which explore the transmission and translation of Lagerlöf ’s work into a variety of languages, contrasting cultural and political climates, and different periods. The main focus is on Europe, but Lagerlöf ’s important role in the US is also covered in one contribution. The cases have been selected with the aim of representing diverse regimes and ideological environments, ranging from Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic before, during, and after communism, via Nazi Germany, to the Netherlands, the UK, and 15
introduction
Illus. 2. Selma Lagerlöf c.1891. She adopted a short hairstyle in the spring of 1889, at the same time as she experienced a stylistic breakthrough in the development of her debut work, Gösta Berling’s Saga (1891).
the US. In addition to sketching this trajectory from east to west, the cases also capture the function of Lagerlöf ’s work and the fascination of her persona in linguistic environments that range from the Frisian ‘minor’-language culture to the world-language culture of English. These case studies are preceded by explorations of the role of transnational thought and international and public space in Lagerlöf ’s texts, along with examinations of the formation of canon, the construction of gender, and the role of the uncanny in Lagerlöf, the latter with a particular emphasis on the internationalised climate of the First World War period, appropriate in a volume published on the centenary of the outbreak of the war. Thus, overall, the present volume may be seen as a road-map to the multifarious ways in which Lagerlöf and her work have engaged with and impacted on culture and ideology, a new orientation in one of the most significant and influential world-literature writers to emerge from the Nordic countries. In keeping with the recurring emphasis in the volume on word–image relationships and on pictorial representation 16
re-mapping l agerlöf
as such, Re-Mapping Lagerlöf is richly illustrated, with many of the images rarely or never published before. They include reproductions of archival material and a range of illustrations relating to film adaptations of Lagerlöf ’s work and her important role in early cinematic culture. With its incisive perspectives, reader-friendly structure, detailed notes, extensive bibliographical section, and innovative range of illustrations, Re-Mapping Lagerlöf is designed to provide a tool for future Lagerlöf scholarship. Given the plurality of approaches and the variety of theoretical underpinnings used in the book, it is hoped, moreover, that the volume may serve as a source of inspiration for further interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities. The publication of Re-Mapping Lagerlöf coincides with an ongoing series of new translations into English of seminal works by Lagerlöf, launched by Norvik Press of London in 2011 under the umbrella heading of ‘Lagerlöf in English’ (see Carbone & Forsås-Scott, forthcoming), which is fuelling a new international interest in Lagerlöf ’s work. So far, four translations have been published—Lord Arne’s Silver (2011), translated by Sarah Death; The Phantom Carriage (2011), translated by Peter Graves; The Löwensköld Ring (2011), translated by Linda Schenck; and Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (2 vols, 2013), translated by Peter Graves—with further translations to come. Charlotte Löwensköld, translated by Linda Schenck, will appear in 2014, while Anna Svärd, likewise translated by Linda Schenck, is due to follow in 2015. The availability of new and more accurate translations will facilitate internationally further progress along the lines of enquiry presented in Re-Mapping Lagerlöf.
Notes 1 For a comprehensive study of the Swedish reception history of Lagerlöf ’s work, see Anna Nordlund’s monograph Selma Lagerlöfs underbara resa genom den svenska litteraturhistorien 1891–1996 (2005, ‘Selma Lagerlöf ’s Wonderful Journey through Swedish Literary History, 1891–1996’).
17
chapter 2
Selma Lagerlöf in context Helena Forsås-Scott ‘Mårbacka was the centre of Selma Lagerlöf’s world’, writes Vivi Edström, her most recent biographer (2002, 24),1 but as the remainder of the relevant section of Edström’s introductory chapter indicates, Lagerlöf ’s lifetime was a period of such comprehensive change—economic, political, social, technological—that we may be justified in thinking in terms of a succession of Mårbackas, plural. There is certainly a world of difference between the red wooden building, a single storey with an attic, at the farmstead where Selma Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858, and the impressive white building in neo-classical style with its manorial roof, two storeys with a large attic, and the façade enhanced by a balcony and five pairs of elegant columns, which she left behind when she died on 16 March 1940, along with a sizeable, productive farm with scores of employees. The Mårbackas can be read as part of ‘a process of personal myth-making’ (Forsås-Scott 1997, 55); but most importantly, they need to be understood in terms of the contexts that helped transform Sweden during Lagerlöf ’s lifetime, contexts that were themselves part of the prerequisites of her success, and that were, to some degree, also changed by her work. The Sweden in which Lagerlöf was born was a poor and marginal country, with agriculture the mainstay of the population of 3.7 million. The riksdag (Parliament) consisted of four Estates, the king wielded extensive power, and since 1814 the country had been in an uneasy union with Norway—a union ultimately dissolved in 1905. The social differences were extensive; and although single women above the age of 25 were granted legal independence in the year in which Lagerlöf was born, women lacked access to publicly funded education and training, and there were extremely few opportunities for employment open to them. To Selma Lagerlöf ’s father, a military man who had inherited a 18
selma l agerlöf in context
Mårbacka requiring a considerable amount of investment and modernisation, and to her mother, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, it was obvious that their two sons should be allowed to draw on the limited family assets for their education, and so the risk for Selma Lagerlöf and her two sisters of remaining stuck in the remote corner that Värmland was at the time, given the inadequate communications, was very real. Major changes, however, were beginning to affect Sweden. Industrialisation was late but swift, yet emigration to the US remained the preferred option for many tens of thousands up to the First World War. One of these emigrants was Lagerlöf ’s brother Johan, who ended his days in Seattle. Johan had assisted Selma with money for a course in preparation for her training at the Women Teachers’ College of Higher Education in Stockholm in 1882–5. She subsequently obtained a post at an elementary school for girls in Landskrona, in the south of Sweden. With her mother having been widowed in 1885 and Mårbacka sold at auction in 1888, the fact that Selma Lagerlöf was able to support herself—and to some extent her mother and an aunt too—was crucially important; and although her ground-breaking first novel appeared in 1891, the early phase of her career as a writer was slow, leaving her dependent on her teaching post until 1895. In 1866, the Swedish Parliament had been restructured into two chambers, and modern political parties were beginning to take shape in the decades before 1900. Universal suffrage for men was introduced in 1909, following a general strike, but the campaign for women’s right to vote was drawn out and had to contend with many setbacks. Selma Lagerlöf was actively involved in this campaign, and Elin Wägner, herself a writer and suffragist and author of the first comprehensive biography of Lagerlöf, has described, with reference to the 6th Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm in 1911, how wonderful it was ‘to have on the rostrum a world-famous woman author and landowner who lacked the civic right that any male author and farmer possessed by virtue of his gender’ (Wägner 1943, 85).2 Lagerlöf ’s international fame in combination with her commitment to the cause made her the obvious icon of the Congress. While Lagerlöf ’s extensive international travels had been fundamental to some of her work, notably Antikrists mirakler (The Miracles of Antichrist), set in Sicily, and Jerusalem, her texts had also been widely translated; and she had received, as the first woman ever, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. But as Wägner indicates, Lagerlöf at the time of the Congress 19
introduction
Illus. 1. Mårbacka before Selma Lagerlöf ’s renovations in 1908. Mårbacka had several different owners between the auction in 1888 and Lagerlöf ’s purchase of the property in 1907.
was also a landowner: having purchased Mårbacka with its garden in 1907, she had bought the land and the livestock in 1910, a move that not only made her responsible for the running of a sizeable farm but also for the farmworkers, numbering no fewer than fourteen families at the time (Wägner 1943, 77). Lagerlöf ’s speech at the Congress in 1911, ‘Hem och stat’ (‘Home and State’), analysed here by Lisbeth Stenberg, presents Lagerlöf ’s vision of a welfare state that is democratic and inclusive, with the extensive contributions by women as a transformative influence. However, full democracy in Sweden was still some way away, with parliamentarism introduced in 1917 and women granted suffrage only in 1919, later than in any other Nordic country. In the meantime the impact of some of Lagerlöf ’s works was becoming conspicuous, with the short story entitled ‘Tösen från Stormyrtorpet’ (‘The Girl from the Marsh Croft’), 1908, made into an acclaimed film by Victor Sjöström in 1917, contributing to new and more humane welfare legislation introduced in Sweden not long afterwards. The novella Körkarlen (1912, The Phantom Carriage) originated as a short piece commissioned by the National Tuberculosis Society; again thanks to Sjöström, Lagerlöf ’s text subsequently inspired one of the most famous works of the Swedish silent film era. Arguably, 20