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Same-Sex Desire
and the Environment
in Norwegian Literature,
1908–1979
Per Esben Svelstad
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Same-Sex Desire and the Environment in Norwegian
Literature, 1908–1979
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Per Esben Svelstad
Same-Sex Desire
and the Environment
in Norwegian
Literature,
1908–1979
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Contents
1
Sexualities and Environments in the Norwegian
Twentieth Century
Queering Nature, Greening Sexuality
Narratives of Nation, Sexuality, and Environment
The Urban and the Pastoral
Environment as Cultural Building Block
Same-Sex Desire in the Norwegian Twentieth Century
Framework, Choice of Material, and Structure
Works Cited
1
1
6
10
16
23
32
43
Part I Love Between Women as Challenge to the
Othering of the Nonhuman
2
Elusive Sapphism
Undset’s Historical Approach to Sexual Relations
The Desire for Impossibility
Spectral Sapphism
Womanhood as Role
Reconsidering Øberg’s Sapphism
Masculine Mistreatment of Sapphic Nature
Narration as Counter-Discourse
An Ecofeminist Approach to Tarjei Vesaas’s Is-slottet
Female Desire as Epistemological Challenge
Desire for Knowledge
51
52
61
63
65
70
74
77
83
87
90
ix
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x
3
CONTENTS
Myths of Death and Regeneration
Works Cited
96
107
Urban Environments in the Lesbian Canon
Learning in the City: Borghild Krane
Intellectual Isolation: Ebba Haslund
Female Heroism and Disillusionment
The Environmental Lesbian
Lesbian Grammar: Gerd Brantenberg
The Relativity of Lesbian Nature
Conclusion to Part 1: Emancipation Through a Feminized
Pastoral
Works Cited
113
114
119
121
125
129
134
138
147
Part II The Gay Male Pastoral
The Political Ambiguity of Pastoral
States of the Gay Pastoral in Alf Martin Jæger and Axel
Krogh
Ambivalent Homosocial Pastorality: Krogh and Åsmund
Sveen
Succumbing to the Great Game: Tarjei Vesaas
Degenerate Doppelgängers and Reparative Ambivalence
The Diverse Effects of the Homoerotic Pastoral
Works Cited
153
Re-Claiming the Nonhuman
The Activist Autofiction of Gudmund Vindland
The Gay Pastoral as Celebration of Life
Enmeshed Oppression
A Bestial Counter-Discourse
Gay Male Poetics as Provocation to Readers
Conclusion to Part 2: Homographic Ambiguities
Works Cited
193
196
199
202
207
214
216
226
Queering the Environment: Concluding Discussion
231
Works Cited
239
Index
255
4
5
155
163
169
177
182
190
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About the Author
Per Esben Svelstad (born 1987) is Associate Professor of Norwegian
L1 Education with an emphasis on literature and literature education
at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from NTNU.
xi
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CHAPTER 1
Sexualities and Environments
in the Norwegian Twentieth Century
Queering Nature, Greening Sexuality
This book grows out of a curiosity regarding how and why conceptions
of the environment seem to play an important part in literary depictions
of same-sex desire. I hypothesize that the dichotomy between urban and
pastoral environments in Norwegian twentieth-century literature provides
a means of constructing, representing, and interpreting the experience of
same-sex love and its effects on a cultural as well as an individual level.
A guiding assumption is that while Norwegian narrative fiction on love
and desire between people of the same sex has points in common with
a Western “canon” on gay and lesbian themes, it also differs from it.
Many aspects of same-sex desire in Norwegian gay and lesbian literature
should be interpreted with reference to Norwegian environments—and
conceptions thereof. The works under scrutiny in the following chapters
thus provide unique case studies for an ecologically aware kind of queer
theoretical literary study.
One of the central goals of this book is bridging the gap between the
“de-naturalizing” project of gender and queer theory on the one hand,
and, on the other, the centering of the nonhuman environment in ecocriticism. While Greg Garrard (2012, 5) proposes a wide definition of the
subject of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship of the human
1
P. E. Svelstad, Same-Sex Desire and the Environment
in Norwegian Literature, 1908–1979,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56030-9_1
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and the nonhuman throughout human cultural history … entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself,” a problem with ecocriticism for
queer theory has been the former’s often uncritical assumption of the existence of an acultural “nature.” Conversely, as Robert Azzarello explains,
ecocritical scholars have lambasted the poststructuralist idea of nature as
socially constructed, finding social constructionism “indicative of a greater
human hubris that they identify as the cause of the environmental crisis
in the first place” (Azzarello 2012, 9). However, he goes on to identify
a potential for cooperation between these seemingly contradictory viewpoints by referring to Eve K. Sedgwick’s now famous distinction between
“paranoid” and “reparative” readings (cf. Sedgwick 2003). Since there is
no safe haven for lesbian and gay identities as either “natural” or “cultural,” a queer environmentality which cherishes “the overdetermination
of sexual desire” is necessary (Azzarello 2012, 18–9). Such an approach
does not mean that we have to do away with a critique of the heterosexist
ideologies we perceive in cultural texts. What it does mean, is acknowledging that literary artworks are filled with disparate ideological elements
so that what might look heterosexist can, if we ask the right questions of
the text, open for alternative ways to acknowledge nonheteronormative
sexualities.
In a similar vein, Nicole Seymour proposes to analyze the oppression of
human and nonhuman life as interconnected. Thus, echoing earlier efforts
in ecofeminism (cf. Chapter 2), she calls for historicizing the concept
of “nature.” Simply rejecting it as an oppressive term, Seymour notes,
begs the question of what it can mean and how it can be understood
otherwise (2013, 4). Instead of discarding concepts like “nature,” “the
nonhuman,” “the environment,” and “the future,” then, she encourages
environmentally conscious scholars of queer theory to highlight affirmative conceptions. For example, the prevalent dehumanization of queers in
homophobic discourse might not necessarily be considered “wrong in and
of itself—because the nonhuman is not worthless—but dehumanization
as a justification for violence would be. After all, environmental exploitation is often justified by the nonhuman status of ‘nature’” (ibid., 12). The
parallel oppression of nonhuman and non-heteronormative life forms can
allow for critical exploration of where the border between human and
nonhuman is conceived to go, and which values are assigned to either
side of the border.
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SEXUALITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS IN THE NORWEGIAN ...
3
Moreover, as Seymour underlines, much contemporary ecocriticism
essentializes nature by positing it as “pristine, primal, or at least selfevident” (2013, 14). For those of us who come into ecocriticism from
queer studies, this essentializing is quite glaring. Indeed, the relationship of many modern Westerners to the nonhuman environment strikes
me as similar to our relationship to sex, as Michel Foucault eloquently
described it. We talk about sexuality all the time while claiming to repress
it (Foucault 2009, 16), and we talk longingly about nonhuman nature all
the time while considering it something we have lost touch with or whose
existence we have forgotten.
Thus, as Timothy Morton asserts, the contemporary natureworshipper mourning the loss of a connection to nature “is like a
depressed closeted gay man who insists he is straight” (2010, 95). Riffing
on Judith Butler’s account of melancholia, he argues that we experience this depressive state since we cannot mourn for the environment
“because we are so deeply attached to it—we are it. Just as for Butler the
‘truest gay male melancholic is the ‘strictly straight man,’ so the truest
ecological human is a melancholy dualist” (Morton 2007, 186). Taking
this analysis in a slightly different direction, I would argue that just as
everyone can be considered “queer” in Butler’s sense of never performing
heterosexual gender perfectly, so the modern Western human might be
considered a “queer” animal seeking to attain an impossible state of
harmony with nature. Much like how the ideal of gender is constructed
as out of reach by definition, nature, too, is constructed as something
different from modern humans, something we by definition cannot attain.
Straight-identified people in modernity have a troubled relationship to
the category of “homosexual”: it is, as George L. Mosse (1998) has
shown, a necessary “counter-type” to normative conceptions of gender
but also a generator of especially male homosexual panic (cf. Sedgwick
1985). This is mirrored in the attitude of nature-worshippers who feel
the need to pledge allegiance to a nature paradoxically conceptualized
as simultaneously unattainable and inescapable. Here, those positioned as
non-heteronormative, and thus as unnatural, arguably have more freedom
in defining what their relationship to the nonhuman can be, as we will see
in several of the works to be studied.
While among the first to argue for a “a partnership between queer
theory and ecological criticism” (2007, 186), Morton, I would argue,
steps into the trap against which Seymour warns by arguing that
“[p]utting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from
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P. E. SVELSTAD
afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of
Woman” (ibid., 5). Calling for an “ecology without nature”—and, one
wonders, also a feminism without woman?—Morton thus seems to
assume that “nature” can only be politically oppressive and support
a dualism which in the last analysis blocks true ecological thinking.
However, just as feminists make efforts to conceptualize “Woman” in
antipatriarchal ways, so queer environmentalists can historicize, diversify, and redefine the concept of “Nature.” I propose that such a
process should start with a brief genealogy. In a thorough study, Frédéric
Ducarme and Denis Couvet map four current definitions of “nature” as
defined in dictionaries of Western languages. A simplified version of their
table looks like this:
1
2
3
4
Definition
Opposed concept
The whole of material reality, independent of
human activity and history
The whole universe, including humans
The specific force at the core of life and
change
The essence, inner quality and character, the
whole of specific physical properties of an
object, live or inert
Culture, artifice, rational intention
Supernatural, unreal
Inertia, fixedness, entropy
Transmutation, denaturation
(based on Ducarme and Couvet 2020, 4)
Several contradictions appear. “Nature” can mean everything except
humans (1), but also everything including humans (2). While the first
two definitions define categories (although (2), being all-encompassing,
does not work as a category in a strict sense), (3) and (4) are terms
for characteristics internal to organisms and/or objects. Several of the
authors whose works will be analyzed in the following play with what
comes across as a fundamental dual concept of nature. On the one hand,
nature is an external category with the power to exclude, and on the
other, it is the label for characteristics or forces internal to the subject. It
is also useful to note the contradiction between (3), a concept of nature
as a force of dynamic change, and (4), in which it is simply a synonym
for whatever is unchanging in an organism or in a dead object. While the
three first definitions have roots in philosophical traditions,1 (4) is more
of an everyday use of the term. Instead of doing away with such a flexible
concept, a queer ecocriticism should celebrate its potential for creating
literary overdetermination, as the works in this study are examples of. To
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SEXUALITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS IN THE NORWEGIAN ...
5
do so would be to “queer” the concept of nature in much the same way
as queer theorists have shown how “homosexual” is also a concept with
several contradictory definitions.
From this outset, I suggest distinguishing between three positions
within critical discourses on the relationship between “nature” and “sexuality.” The first may be identified in the long tradition of pastoral
depictions of same-sex love (cf. Shuttleton 2000; Donoghue 1995).
Often arguing implicitly against the idea of homosexuality as “unnatural,” authors—including several of those to be studied here—have taken
care to portray gay and lesbian characters as immersed in nature. This
approach takes the positive connotations of “nature,” as expressed in categories (2) and (3) above, at face value. Conversely, a second approach
consists in rejecting the relevance of “nature” altogether, as an oppressive,
cultural construction alongside normative ideas of gender and sexuality.
As mentioned, this is the fundament of the nature-skeptical viewpoint
common in the poststructuralist projects of queer theory and feminism.
Addressing the limitations of this viewpoint, Kate Soper notes:
if there are, indeed, no ‘natural’ needs, desires, instincts, etc., then it is
difficult to see how these can be said to be subject to the ‘repressions’ or
‘distortions’ of existing norms, or to be more fully or truly realized within
any other order of sexuality. […] Equally, of course, such anti-naturalism
is at loggerheads with ecological realism and with any argument appealing
to the nature we share in common with the rest of the animal world, or
to our biological dependency upon the ecosystem. (1995, 130)
Hence the need for an affirmative approach to how “nature” and “sexuality” can be conceptualized otherwise, and how attention to the
oppression of the nonhuman can benefit nonnormative human lives. Such
a third type of approach, evidenced in the work of e.g., Azzarello and
Seymour, would also have to “affirm” the two other positions—in the
sense of seeking to understand how the pastoral and the nature-skeptical
projects are aesthetically, politically, and theoretically efficient.
Seeking not only to ecologize queer theory but also to queer ecocriticism, the following chapters rest on a dynamic view of literature which I
would label “ecological” in its own right. Not only do artistic representations change the state of what is politically visible, as Jacques Rancière
might say (2007, 12); they are also dependent on, and in turn affect,
the nonhuman world. I identify the project of this book with Catriona
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Mortimer-Sandiland’s and Bruce Erickson’s definition of queer ecology as
the critical analysis of how “ideas and practices of nature, including both
bodies and landscapes, are located in particular productions of sexuality,”
and how “sex is, both historically and in the present, located in particular
formations of nature” (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 4–5).
A queer version of ecocriticism can make us become aware of a variety
of ways of understanding and treating the world and its human and
nonhuman inhabitants.
Narratives of Nation, Sexuality, and Environment
The revolutionary contribution of ecocriticism, in the famous definition
by Cheryll Glotfelty, is taking “an earth-centered approach to literary
studies” by studying “the relationship between literature and the physical
environment” (Glotfelty 1996, XVIII). (One might add that contemporary ecocriticism has grown increasingly water-centered cf. Dobrin 2021.)
Rejecting the cultural ecologist view that “culture must in the final analysis have its origin in natural processes,”2 this book nevertheless insists on
the importance of the Norwegian context, including its geo- and topography, alongside cultural texts. Both queer theory and ecocriticism are
largely the work of scholars whose examples are drawn from British and
American fiction. This also applies to scholars within the field of queer
ecology. The centering of Anglophone culture in these fields means that
there is a risk of applying culture-specific notions to contexts where these
are less relevant—a kind of cultural appropriation by way of theory. If
one believes in the tenet of the social constructionist paradigm championed by Foucault, the basis of most queer theoretical study, one should
also be sensitive to how key terms and lines of argument are constructed
within a specific cultural context: that of late twentieth-century American
culture, which on many points differs vastly from Northern Europe.
Indeed, since a fundamental assumption of this study is that the
nonhuman environment and conceptions thereof are considered to be
carriers of meaning, I wish to highlight the need for attention to
local and national contexts. Not only is Norwegian geo- and topography and natural and urban history different from that of the USA
or the British Isles; conceptualizations of “Nature” are also culturally
contingent. Furthermore, there is much talk of a Nordic exceptionalism, which encompasses gender equality and sexual minority rights
as well as pioneering environmental policy (Hennig et al. 2018, 5–6).
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There is a strong case to be made that queer-friendliness and respect
for the nonhuman environment are strongly linked, if not in all aspects
of Realpolitik, at least in the identities and cultural imaginaries of the
Nordic countries. As Nina Witoszek succinctly (and sarcastically) describes
Norwegian national identity:
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an achieved utopia of the
European Left seems to have emerged in the North. It embodies equality,
freedom, welfare, and justice, and it combines these blessings with immense
affluence. Its wealth goes beyond the oil, gas, and hydro-power that give
it one of the highest GDPs in the world; it includes a rich tradition of
peaceful, reform-oriented development, emancipatory politics, a generous
welfare system, and an identity based on partnership with nature […] In
the eyes of the outside world, it has become the epitome of good governance, environmental concern, and enlightened altruism. It is symbolically
and politically linked to ‘positive development’, as evinced by Arne Næss’
Deep Ecology, the Brundtland Commission’s idea of ‘sustainable development’, and massive aid projects in developing countries. (Witoszek 2011,
7)
Indeed, it would seem that a respect for the surrounding nonhuman
world is fundamental to the altruism which ensures an equitable distribution of wealth, legal protection of women and minorities, and equal
opportunities for happiness—at home and abroad. (After all, the concept
of “sustainable development” was popularized by a UN commission led
by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the first female prime minister of the Scandinavian countries.) This national identity narrative has historical roots and
is clearly in need of nuance. Hence, the rest of this introduction critically
inquires the most salient aspects of conceptualizations of “sexuality” and
“nature” in Western and Norwegian twentieth-century culture.
The categories of “sexuality” and “nature” both grow in visibility and
importance due to the development of instrumental rationality from the
seventeenth century onwards. If “nature,” in the words of Andrea Wulf
(2015), was “invented” by scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt
at the turn of the eighteenth century, the homosexual, in Foucault’s oftquoted phrase, was “born” in 1869 (Foucault 2009, 59). As Sigrid Weigel
argues, Humboldt and other Enlightenment scientists built on a new
concept of nature, in which Woman was seen as a symbol of a janus-faced
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P. E. SVELSTAD
nature: both harmonious and demonic, and possible to objectify in scientific study and aesthetic contemplation (Weigel 1990, 127–8). Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant explains how the image of nature as female was
key in legitimizing the exploitation of natural resources starting with the
scientific revolution (Merchant 1990, 189, cf. chapter 2). Furthermore,
William Cronon has shown how a dualist conception of “wilderness” vs.
“civilization” came about in the nineteenth century through the merging
of Romantic ideas of the sublime together with the Rousseauian idea that
“the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern
world was a return to simpler, more primitive living” (Cronon 1996, 76).
Echoing Merchant, Cronon also notes how the individual who transcends
the frontier and draws strength from wilderness is most often thought of
as masculine (ibid., 78, cf. Chapter 3). The nature/culture divide, then,
is shot through with gender.
This dualism, along with the scientific impulse to categorize the world
in order to exploit its resources better, is at the heart of the bio-political
thinking that shapes the nascent category of the “homosexual” in late
nineteenth-century medicine. In Foucault’s view, modern states are characterized by shifting their emphasis of power from protecting the life of
the head of state to protecting and fostering the life of its citizens in order
for the nation to prosper. State power takes the form of an “anatomopolitics” of the human body and of a “bio-politics” of the population as
such (Foucault 2009, 183). Bio-politics entails mapping and exploring
the means of procreation, and thus sex is “put into discourse” (ibid., 33–
4). Coinciding with the development of the anthropocentric—as well as
androcentric and masculinist—modern natural sciences, this discursivation
of sex likely exacerbated the age-old association between same-sex desire
and the “unnatural.” In the law of king Christian V, in vigor in Norway
from 1687 until 1889, anal intercourse, involving different-sex as well as
same-sex couples, was termed “intercourse against nature” [Omgængelse,
som er imod Naturen] (Halsos 2007, 92). This echoes how, as Emma
Donoghue has shown in a study going back to the second half of the
seventeenth century, the “unnatural” is a common trope in all conceptualizations of same-sex desire (Donoghue 1995, 6). However, when “the
homosexual” emerges as a type of human, we are not just dealing with
“unnatural acts,” but with a whole class of people deemed “unnatural.”
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Thus emerges a set of binary, hierarchical opposites, exemplified in the
following table borrowed and adapted from Greta Gaard (2004, 23) and
Azzarello (2012, 20):
Man
Culture
Heterosexual
Reason
Rationality
Mind
Activity
Health
Strength
Spirit
Transcendence
Civilized
Subject
Self
Woman
Nature
Homosexual
Emotion
Animality
Body
Passivity
Illness
Weakness
Matter
Immanence
Primitive
Object
Other
As Azzarello remarks, such a system of dichotomies relies on stable
terms on each side (Azzarello 2012, 21). As we have seen, however,
“nature” is thought of as feminine and passive, but at the same time a
sublime, powerful wilderness for masculine exploration. Likewise, Gaard
has highlighted the paradoxical view of queer sexualities as simultaneously
against nature and against civilization, noting that this is precisely the
sort of paradoxes that queer theorists are interested in (Gaard 2004, 26).3
Predating Morton’s call for joining the forces of queer theory and ecocriticism, Gaard suggests that a queer ecofeminism would look for vertical
associations between terms in either column: “… we can examine the ways
queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture
that devalues women, animals, nature, and sexuality. … Finally, we can
explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, even queered” (Gaard 2004,
26). This approach entails acknowledging how the nonhuman physical
world and the concepts we use to make sense of it are changing, unstable,
and dynamic. All definitions of “nature” can be scientifically, intellectually, and politically useful, Ducarme and Couvet state, referring to Claude
Lévi-Strauss’ observation that even scientists work with a historically
contingent conception of human–nonhuman interplay (2020, 5). Awareness of the variety of such conceptions, they stress, is key in developing
culture-sensitive, philosophically sound, and rhetorically appealing conservation policies (ibid., 6). This claim supports a key point for many scholars
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P. E. SVELSTAD
in the environmental humanities, including Seymour, Gaard, Morton, and
Azzarello: the critical work we do can play a vital role in the transition to
an ecological society.
The Urban and the Pastoral
The ultimate queer environment seems to be the city. As David Shuttleton described the state of the historiography at the turn of the
millennium:
Historians of sexuality are largely in agreement that a modern Western
homosexual identity emerged as a metropolitan phenomenon enabled
by the particular conditions of social mobility generated by capitalist
industrialization and imperialism […]. By the close of the nineteenth
century, conservative and reformist sexologists alike equated neurotic
sexual perversion with the febrile life of the city. (Shuttleton 2000, 127)
The association between homosexuality and the urban environment thus
rests partly on pseudo-medical prejudice, partly on sociological facts.
Indeed, Henning Bech forcefully claims that the male homosexual form
of existence was an “answer” to the modern conditions of life:
[…] the city, the collapse of norms, the absence of safe and secure communities and identities, the struggle of the sexes, the images and the stagings,
the institutions of art, the theory and practice of liberal democracy, the
external surveillance of the police and the internal analysing of science
[…]. (Bech 1997, 154)
Taking this at face value, one might wonder how homosexual identities—at least among males—would be possible in a low-urbanized,
wilderness-worshipping country like Norway. Indeed, Dag Heede has
made the polemical claim that a Norwegian gay literary history is incomplete without the influence of Copenhagen (Heede 2015, 164). It is true
that the Danish capital, which also served as the capital of the DanoNorwegian union from 1537 until 1814, has had a special attraction for
Norwegian gays and lesbians. Larger than Oslo, Copenhagen is also a
bridge to the European continent and holds a place even in the contemporary Norwegian imaginary as a place of freedom and carefree leisure.4
However, there is no reason to disregard the actual metropolitan qualities
of Norway’s capital and arguably single big city. Named Christiania until
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1897, then Kristiania until being rebaptized with its medieval name in
1925, Oslo witnessed an enormous growth in the late nineteenth century,
when its annual population growth surpassed that of most European
cities. The growth rate reached a staggering 9% in 1898, encompassing
more than 32% of the total share of urban inhabitants in Norway (Helle
et al. 2006, 336). And although its net population number was unimpressive, passing just 250,000 in the inter-war years, the important fact is
its composition and variety. The growth of Christiania/Kristiania, from
less than 9,000 inhabitants in 1801 to more than 200,000 in 1900,
implies a remarkable demographic and thus sociocultural evolution over
the course of a century. The city turned into a “capital of movement,”
with thousands of people moving in and thousands out every year (Helle
et al. 2006, 349). This means that during the nineteenth century, the city
turned increasingly diverse: people from rural backgrounds moved in to
seek education and employment in a capital offering rich opportunities
for cross-cultural encounters and anonymity. This ambivalent attraction
of the capital is evident in several of the works to be studied.
While the city has traditionally been thought of as a male space and
a hotbed of gay male identity, female writers have played a central part
in constructing and transmitting the urban experience (Selboe 2003,
194–5). Mapping the feminized cityscapes of Norwegian realist authors,
Janke Klok highlights the tradition starting with Enlightenment philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, through the Norwegian
nineteenth-century feminist author Camilla Collett all the way to the
contemporary Dutch author Geert Mak, in which women’s opportunity to use the city as a public space is thought to indicate modernity,
progress, and civilization (Klok 2011, 28–9). This ideological strand,
of course, assumes that such elements are positive factors in the feminist emancipation project, conflating feminism and urbanism as modern
endeavors.
The urban landscape, so central to feminists and queer theorists, has
been largely absent from ecocriticism, with Michael Bennett and David
Teague’s The Nature of Cities (1999) constituting a rare exception.
However, their book is solely knowledgeable of North-American literature and urban life. Highlighting the city as environment, then, in itself
seems a way of queering ecocriticism. In contrast, one could make the case
that queer theorists have been more eager to integrate “green” perspectives in their field. Already in 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005) deftly coined
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the term “metronormativity” to describe how the trope of urban liberation paradoxically constitutes a set of limiting norms and expectations.
In other words, this trope ignores the potential for queer life in other
contexts, impoverishing our understanding of queer history and experience. Since the late 1990s, scholars in queer history and culture have
nuanced the image of the countryside as sexually repressive and urban
environments as liberating. This approach grows out of studies by sociologists and social geographers in the 1990s, such as Kath Weston (1998),
and Gordon B. Ingram, Anne-Marie Boutthillette, and Yolanda Retter
(eds., 1997), all uncovering opportunities for queer lives in rural environments. More literary oriented scholarship, too, such as the work by
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) and Lucas Crawford (2017),
or anthologies like De-Centring Sexualities (Phillips et al. 2000), Queer
Ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010), and Queering the
Countryside (Johnson et al. 2016) have explored counternarratives to the
dominant itinerary of breaking free from the village to seek erotic and
affective bonds in big cities.
In fact, alternative histories to the metronormative ones are not
isolated counterexamples but robust traditions in their own right. While
modern gay male identity has been associated with the city, Donoghue
argues that “[p]astoral poetry—set in idealised landscapes—provides some
of the most uninhibited poems of female passion” (1995, 116). In a Scandinavian context, Eva Borgström has highlighted how hiking, together
with sports and physical culture, was a part of the feminist emancipation project in the first half of the twentieth century (Borgström 2016,
106). Non-urban spaces have offered opportunities to participate in physical exertion traditionally reserved for men. One of Borgström’s examples
is Swedish author Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s classic five-volume lesbian
novel series Fröknerna von Pahlen [The Misses von Pahlen, 1930–35]
which relies heavily on primitivist tropes of reconnecting with nature
through sexuality (Borgström 2016, 179). Hence, misogynist and feminist discourses alike have drawn on the conceptualization of women as
more “natural,” whether understood as uncontrollable and chaotic, or as
harmonious and a life-giving antidote to urban decadence.
For women, it might seem, urban as well as pastoral space constitute a
potential flight from the oppression of the domestic sphere. As I discuss
in the following chapters, however, there is a relative paucity of pastoral
spaces in literature on desire among women in Norway compared to its
Scandinavian neighbors. This might be due to the relatively small grade
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of urbanization in Norway, which means that non-urban environments
are less available as locations of escape. (If pastoral landscapes constitute
your everyday, they are less likely to represent an alternative.) In literature
on male same-sex relations, however, there is a much stronger tendency
to seek pastoral spaces. I speculate that this is because as men have not
traditionally been confined to the domestic sphere, authors have been
able to distinguish more clearly between the symbolic import of spaces
conceived as different. This parallels how male homosexuality in itself has
been culturally produced as more visible and more clearly defined than
female homosexuality, a point to which I return in the next section.
The lesbian primitivism identified by Borgström forms part of a larger
tendency in the early 1900s to employ an imagery of nature that would
portray erotic desire between women as natural, instead of “against
nature.” I have argued (2017) that a similar trope is at play in the Danish
lesbian novel Et Vildskud [An Offshoot ], published by “Agnete Holk”5 in
1940. The title of this novel reappears in Gudmund Vindland’s Villskudd
(1979, cf. Chapter 5). Whether we are dealing with an instance of direct
influence, or an example of a rhetorical trope circulating in diverse texts
seeking to give an affirmative view of same-sex desire, is uncertain. Whatever the case, the metaphor forces the reader to question what is actually
natural: like an offshoot, the lesbian and the gay man are part of nature
and biological reality, although in important ways different from the
majority—characterized by a “wildness” at odds with civilizational norms.
Referring to Richard Terdiman’s 1985 study of symbolic resistance, I
choose to call the use of such tropes “counter-discursive.” Terdiman coins
this term to denote the “discursive systems by which writers and artists
sought to project an alternative, liberating newness ” in subversive opposition to established discourses (1985, 13). Yet as he further remarks, such
oppositional discourses run into “the problem of sustaining the crucial
claim of ‘difference’ against reinfection by the constituted sameness, the
apparent stability and inertia, of the dominant” (ibid., 13–4). In other
words, a protest against hegemonic ideology, e.g., in literary works of art,
always implies the discourse one opposes. Heteronormativity remains as a
specter in any antihomophobic counter-discourse.
This also applies to the strongest alternative current to metronormativity in gay male aesthetics, what Shuttleton dubs the tradition of the
“gay pastoral.” Quoting Rictor Norton’s assertion that “if any particular
genre can be called a homosexual genre, the evidence would point most
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convincingly to the pastoral tradition” (2000, 125), Shuttleton argues for
the need to historicize this genre:
The reduction of the queerness of pastoral to a timeless abstraction is to
succumb to the escapist pull of pastoral’s own dominant rhetoric, which
seeks to evade time, history and material political realities through a retreat
into a phantasmic ideal space which is pre-cultural, if not pre-social, and
often, by implication, superior and preferable. (Shuttleton 2000, 126)
In other words, the pastoral is not an unambiguous, universal idyll
removed from a repressive society. It is a historical trope bringing to light,
among other things, the complex entanglements between humans and
the nonhuman environment. Shuttleton notes how pastoral tropes have
been used in what we might call a counter-discursive way, by presenting
male same-sex desire as “natural.” However, this act of appropriating
the idea that “natural” equals “morally good” can serve politically problematic ends. For instance, André Gide’s Corydon, “overturns established
notions of ‘the Natural’ to support a highly elitist notion of homosexual
superiority and institutionalized pederastia; it is also grossly misogynist”
(Shuttleton 2000, 131). This illustrates how attention to the rhetoric
of environment makes different conceptualizations of same-sex sexuality
visible.
As these examples of different uses of urban and pastoral landscapes
show, we are not dealing with a stable connection between certain sexualities, gender categories, and spaces. Rather, these elements are produced
in dynamic and often contradictory interplay in Western modernity. In the
readings of the following chapters, I use the urban/pastoral dichotomy as
heuristic tool in order to explore this interplay. These categories denote
what are usually thought of as human-made and natural (nonhuman)
landscapes, while calling attention to how literary imaginings endow these
landscapes with meaning in dynamic interplay with material reality and
societal discourses. As Raymond Williams has shown in his seminal The
Country and the City, this dichotomy saturates Western culture: every
generation seems to long back to an unspoilt, authentic rural life as a
positively charged alternative to a decadent or unhospitable contemporary civilization. In a larger perspective, however, the question is: “what
kinds of experience do the [received] ideas [of country and city] appear to
interpret, and why do certain forms occur or recur at this period or that?”
(Williams 1985, 290). Identifying the figure of thought thus provides
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merely the first step of an inquiry into how the urban/pastoral dichotomy
interprets the experience of same-sex attraction.
In the view of Terry Gifford, one may speak of three kinds of pastoral:
the poetic form associated with Theocritus and his followers up until the
late Renaissance; celebratory descriptions of the country in opposition to
the city; a pejorative term for a simplified romanticization of country life
(Gifford 1999, 1–2). It is the second sense that will occupy us here, what
Lawrence Buell terms “pastoralism,” defining it as writing “that celebrates
the ethos of nature/rurality over against the ethos of the town or city”
(quoted ibid., 4). Gifford underlines how writers use the pastoral for
critique as well as escape. On the one hand, it can subvert value hierarchies, e.g., by turning on its head the superiority of townspeople versus
the inferiority of simple rural folk (ibid., 23). On the other hand, it can
represent “a retreat from politics into an apparently aesthetic landscape
that is devoid of conflict and tension” (ibid., 11). This retreat can be
both spatial and temporal.
Frederick Garber defines the pastoral with reference to Schiller’s
distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry, highlighting Schiller’s
placement of pastoral in the latter category (1988, 437). The pastoral,
then, is a genre characterized by “gaps of all sorts, lacunae that are
uncrossable under all present conditions. The [sentimental] state has
a topography of deep impediments and all sorts of attendant frustrations, spaces unfilled and unfulfilled” (ibid.). Garber’s choice of spatial
metaphors for describing the pastoral provides a suggestive way of
thinking about its potential for representing the state of identifying as
same-sex attracted in the twentieth century. Several of the texts under
scrutiny in the following chapters depict a longing for another state, a
place where same-sex love is possible.
Often, however, as in the work of Tarjei Vesaas (Chapter 4), this is also
linked to a conception of childhood. Here, the pastoral also describes a
temporal state of non-urban dwelling that feels irretrievably lost. Indeed,
as Williams argues, the pastoral is often an image of innocence, a paradisiac location before sin and ambition entered the world (Williams 1985,
23–4, 46–7). Or as Cronon similarly states:
In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from
history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from
which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history
could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn
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of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the
national historical epic. Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism,
it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints
of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home
of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains
untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow. (1996, 79)
As the pastoral implies a flight from some degree of civilization or cultural
agglomeration, it needs an idea of the urban as its counter-image. In his
thorough analysis of the construction of cities in modernism, Robert Alter
regards the urban as characterized by a fundamental ambivalence. Often,
it is marked by the “triple A” of “angst, alienation, and anomie,” due
to the general failure to make the exponentially growing cities attractive dwellings (Alter 2005, 103–4). However, there is also a parallel,
affirmative current, celebrating the possibilities and “the sheer teeming
variety of city life” (ibid., 104). Alter also discusses what he calls an
“urban pastoral,” exemplified in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Here,
the pastoral is not an alternative to the urban space, but the urban space
conceived of as providing harmony and joy as the cityscape is interwoven
with memories of rural life through Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique (Alter 2005, 105). I highlight this as an illustration of how the
pastoral as literary construction is not dependent on a real “unspoilt
nature,” but is rather a trope of sensibility: certain places generate or open
the way for certain feelings, to be described in a certain kind of language.
Environment as Cultural Building Block
The urban pastoral in the Norwegian novels to be studied here is something quite different from that of Woolf. She depicts a true European
metropolis, whose streets and energetic life has some of the same effects
as the traditional pastoral. To illustrate the difference between Woolf’s
London and the steadily growing Kristiania/Oslo of the Norwegian twentieth century, one might look to Sigrid Undset’s novel Vaaren [The
Spring, 1914]. Here, the main character Torkild moves with his mother
and younger sister from the Norwegian countryside to the capital. For
the young boy, the city street with its apartment blocks is a place of both
wonder and fear:
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There were dairy stores with more chocolate and candy in the storefronts
than Torkild had imagined existed in all the world. […] He stood for an
unendingly long time peering at every window—all his sorrows forgotten
for a while.
But then he reached the end of the rows of houses. The street ended
by a field surrounded by a high fence of hay stakes. Beyond the field
there were hills with individual apartment blocks, but they were spread
and far from each other, it did not look like the country from where he
came, and not the city as he thought it was supposed to be—he felt a
sort of disappointment as he stood staring. […] There was a small creek
running straight through the field, going down a valley between large
alders. But as he reached the valley, he saw how ugly it was, filled with
broken bottles and yellowed newspaper and lots of dirt. The water in the
creek was grey and smelly. Over at the hill on the other side some men lay
without moving—he suddenly imagined that they were dead, murdered—
he had some unclear notions of how in the city, people murdered each
other. He turned around and ran until he was home in his street.6
Undset’s increasingly modern city is one of capitalist exchange of goods,
filled with amazing objects and opportunities pulling its inhabitants out
of the routines of the everyday. At the same time, this is not a space clearly
distinguished from places often conceived as pastoral. A street unexpectedly ends in a field with haystacks and, typical of a rapidly expanding
modern city, the field provides room for ever more urban apartment
blocks. The resulting environment is an eerie in-between space where the
pastoral seeps into the urban.
Torkild also discovers that the negative aspects of city life influence
what might seem a rural scenery. The broken bottles and malodorous
water serve as an unpleasant reminder of the other side of the fantastic
items in the storefront windows, such as waste and factory residues.
Furthermore, Torkild “reads” the city through the common trope of
moral and environmental degeneration: people laying about are most
likely victims of murder. On the one hand, this has a characterizing function: we understand that Torkild is a perceptive, but also naïve, boy. On
the other hand, Undset’s description of the city alludes to a discursive
context where the urban is linked to certain types of behavior, attitudes,
and lifestyles. Environment and identity interact in overdetermined ways.
This intermingling of the urban and the pastoral space is characteristic
of Norwegian history. Witoszek writes: “[f]rom the Edda – the medieval
collection of Norse mythology – to Arne Næss’ ecophilosophy, and on to
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the modern Norwegian manifestos against mem-bership7 in the European
Union – nature has been deployed as a locus of belonging and an emblem
of national identity” (Witoszek 2011, 18). In order to understand this
aspect of Norwegian culture, it is necessary to recognize why and how a
particular form of nationalist, Romanticist thought developed during the
nineteenth century.
Norway is a relatively young nation state. As a result of the economic
and demographic crisis in the aftermath of the bubonic plague in the
1300s, Norway entered the Kalmar union with Denmark and Sweden
from 1397. Norway remained in union with Denmark until 1814, when
the Danes, on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars, were forced to cede
their northern province to Sweden. While still not politically independent,
Norway saw the emergence of a distinctive form of Romanticism, creating
a powerful cultural imaginary of Norwegian rurality and wilderness as
national symbols.
All through nineteenth-century National Romanticism, Norway had
few and small towns and cities. As mentioned above, however, urban
centers witnessed an explosive increase, while the rural as an idea was
romanticized. In 1830, only around 14% of the total population of
around one million lived in cities; 90 years later, the numbers grew closer
to 43% of more than two and a half million (Helle et al. 2006, 249).8
In the nineteenth century, Norway was among the European countries
witnessing the fastest urbanization (Helle et al. 2006, 249). In Undset’s
novel, then, Torkild’s encounter with scattered apartment blocks on what
was recently a hay field is a highly realist element. Thus, the Norwegian nineteenth century is the history of two simultaneous and somewhat
contradictory processes. In nationalist ideology and the arts, we see an
idealization of nature, wilderness, and the non-urban, whereas political and economic developments generate a staggering growth of urban
culture and industry.
Due to the idea that Norway had been a medieval naval superpower
exploited by the colonial powers Denmark and Sweden, nostalgia towards
the centuries before 1400 was a touchstone of the project of national
reconstruction. Cultural historian Bjarne Hodne writes:
Those parts of peasant culture that could build bridges to the Middle Ages
and the independence of country and people were attractive from the point
of view of building a common cultural platform. In other words, those
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forms of life preserving antiquated practical habits were given attention
and were to be used in nation building.9
The mountainous regions of south-eastern Norway were privileged sites
for collecting folkloristic material. Drawing inspiration from the German
Grimm brothers, the fairy tale collectors Peter Chr. Asbjørnsen and
Jørgen Moe carried out extensive studies in these areas starting in the
1830s. Asbjørnsen and Moe believed that people here had been virtually
untouched by Danish colonial rule (Hodne 1995, 50). At the time, there
was no separate Norwegian written language. As Danish and urban varieties of spoken Norwegian are quite close on the level of vocabulary and
grammar, written Danish formed the basis for the initial development of
written Norwegian. However, a different strategy for developing a written
language was implemented by the autodidact linguist Ivar Aasen. Starting
in 1842, Aasen collected oral linguistic material in rural areas with the aim
of constructing a language that would democratically reflect the shared
elements in the rather varied dialects of the young nation.
Aasen, too, set out from the assumption that folk culture had preserved
authentic elements from before the period of Danish rule. His work
resulted in a written standard originally known as Landsmål [Country
language], but today named Nynorsk [New Norwegian].10 Since 1885,
Bokmål and Nynorsk have had equal status as official languages. Nynorsk
has had, and in the twenty-first century still has, a stronghold in
the coastal regions of western and south-western Norway. Historically,
however, it has been in extensive use in the mountainous south-eastern
inland regions.11
The written standards, too, have an overdetermined relationship to
geography and landscape. Even their names have spatial connotations:
while Bokmål , the language of the book, is associated with urban,
academic learning, Landsmål was from the beginning marketed as the
language of the idealized countryside. This means that one of the official written standards of Norwegian is in itself coded as more “national,”
more “natural,” and “pastoral.” This postromantic line of thought is
evident in, e.g., the influential national-vitalist poetry of Olav Aukrust
(1883–1929)—a Nynorsk poet:
Norwegian words!
You who still grow in secret
above all pyramidal saxifrages
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in my fatherland, catching
sheen and power from sun and earth,
bosom-blood carrying through the mountains,
fire out of the pith of the Norwegian people;
you need not fear the night any more, –
for you we wish the highest salvation –
to you the spirit will offer speech!
More and more!
[…].12
Such a clear-cut linguistic encoding of imaginaries of nature is evidently
quite evocative. Simply put: once an author has chosen either Nynorsk
or Bokmål, they have by the same token likely created environmental
connotations in their readers.
The ideological worship of nature, rural culture, and the pastoral as
alternative to the urban has fed into an ostentatious Norwegian self-image
as a country of preservation: nature is what makes Norway unique, and
thus love of the fatherland implies campaigning for ecological preservation (Hodne 1995, 135, 160). Likewise, skepticism of the urban, while
not unique to Norway, is arguably more pronounced as a part of Norwegian national identity than it is elsewhere (Helle et al. 2006, 338). A part
of the explanation for this is what are commonly referred to as countercultures [“motkulturar”], primarily lodged in rural, Western Norway
(Helle et al. 2006, 252). Abstinence, Low Church Christian worship,
antipathy towards the big cities and a preference for Nynorsk are key
elements, which thus form part of the same National Romantic imaginary.
To the urban bourgeoisie and middle class, the embrace of natureworship has been further cemented by the development of a strong
tradition of outdoor recreation. Here, too, the mountainous areas of
South-Eastern Norway were privileged (Hodne 1995, 83). The Norwegian term for outdoor recreation, friluftsliv, is a compound of the
adjective free and the nouns air and life. It thus literally means “life in
free (or open) air.” Granted, the etymology of a word only to a limited
extent reveals its meaning and connotative potential. But if the term and
its meaning seem overly lyrical, it is because it was likely coined by Henrik
Ibsen “as a poetic expression of the new aesthetic and adventurous view of
nature that was in the process of developing in Norway as elsewhere in
Europe around the middle of the nineteenth century” (Gurholt 2008,
60). This concept produces strong, positive associations to freedom,
the fresh air of the high mountains. More than just the isolated act of
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going camping, it denotes a lifestyle at the heart of Norwegian national
culture.13
Furthermore, as Kirsti Pedersen Gurholt argues, friluftsliv is gendered
in that it “links a mastery of challenging (Alpine) nature to not just adventurous experiences in nature, but the growth of (bourgeois) masculinity”
(2008, 57). In this paradigm, mastery of nature stands in for male
strength and control, its pristine state representing a virginal Woman. The
man, who masters both, is at a lucky remove from the menacing depravity
of cities. In one of the few fundamentally critical studies of conceptions
of “unexploited nature areas” in Norwegian politics, Stian Johannesen
(2017) documents the rhetorical constructions of wilderness. It is striking
how the metaphorical source area for much of this rhetoric is that of
gender relations—specifically female passivity. Words such as “untouched”
[urørt, uberørt ], “virginal” [ jomfruelig ], and “without human intervention” [inngrepsfri] all conjure up images of a sleeping beauty-like nature,
whose unravished aspect should have protection from the greedy, wanton
hands of men. In the same way that a bourgeois male should worship
“pristine” women all the while respecting their chastity, nature is a thing
to master but not to destroy.
Somewhat paradoxically, a central location in the Norwegian outdoors
is a place to stay indoors: the hytte. In a standard Norwegian-English
dictionary, “hytte” translates as “cabin” or “cottage.” But this powerful
element in the environmental imaginary needs unpacking. At the roots
of Norwegian cabin culture is the tradition of the seter, i.e., seasonal
mountain pasturing (Breivik 1978, 13). As Ellen Rees lucidly explains,
translating “seter” into “shieling”:
Shielings have traditionally been used as seasonal bases for transhumance
and food gathering; during summer months livestock were moved far afield
to graze in areas at or above the tree line. The shielings were typically
run by young, female dairymaids who milked and tended the animals
and processed dairy products; they might also be assisted by young boys
who tended the herds. A great deal of superstition was associated with
the shieling, making it a transgressive place both in terms of human and
nonhuman relations, and in terms of sexuality, given the relative freedom
accorded the young women who worked there during the summer months.
(Rees 2014, 13–4)
Originally a necessary and toilsome way of making the most out of natural
resources to avoid starvation, the seter, as so many other aspects of
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22
P. E. SVELSTAD
rural culture, was romanticized and idealized in the nineteenth century.
However, the seter is special because it forms the basis for the hytte.
As the city bourgeoisie sought to go back to nature by emulating rural
simplicity, the rustic mountain cabin increased in popularity. Today, it
is the most widespread form of holiday house and an important narrative and symbolic location. As Rees notes, the cabin is a setting for
masculinity—or a problematization thereof. However, she only to a
limited extent comments upon the homoerotic elements latent or explicit
in many texts taking place in pastoral locations such as the hytte, which
will be addressed particularly in Chapter 4.
This complex imaginary of national identity means that the urban
is delegated to the shadow of Norwegian environmental imaginaries.
As Witoszek underlines in her delightfully iconoclastic analysis: “Urban
culture, associated with extraterritorial (i.e., Danish) clergy, bureaucracy
and townsfolk, was alien to the folk spirit. It was Nature, not Culture
that was national” (Witoszek 2011, 55–6). Furthermore, she argues that
nature has never functioned as a negative foil, as Other to civilization
in Norway, as it has in, for instance, Germany (ibid., 77). Perhaps one
might claim, however, nuancing Witoszek’s rather strict and essentialized
Nature/Culture dichotomy, that in Norway, the basis of national identity is a rural culture conceived as natural and thus as a pastoral escape
from the city. As she further claims, twenty-first-century Norway is an
extremely modernized country, which paradoxically denies the city any
place in its “moral universe” (2011, 25). This, of course, is a paradox to
the extent that modernity and urbanity are conceptually linked, on the
one hand, whereas the rural, the natural, and the authentic or antiquated
are conflated on the other. Nonetheless, one might say that while nature is
worshipped in principle, in practice Norwegians are drawn to, and adore,
city life.
As the legendary literary historian Francis Bull (1887–1974) once
remarked: when the capital is described in the nineteenth century,
the surrounding areas get about as much attention as the city proper
(Selboe 2003, 53). This tradition, however, continues into the twentieth century—in any case in works dealing with same-sex love, where
the pastoral appears as a critical counter-discourse and/or escape. One
reason for this is the history of urbanization in Norway. Another is the
presence of hiking areas surrounding big cities like Oslo, Bergen, and
Trondheim. The 1700 m2 forest Oslomarka makes up two-thirds of the
total area of the capital (Thorsnæs and Tvedt 2020). To this day, it is an
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immensely popular hiking area, and it is featured in several of the works
addressed in the following chapters. The fact that the border between
the urban and the pastoral is so fuzzy in the actual reality of the capital
city of Norway is one reason why I do not position this study in the
anti-metronormative strand initiated by Halberstam. Indeed, I am unsure
whether the US-centric division between metronormativity and its opposite is a useful prism to understand Norwegian LGBTQ culture. As I
will show, while fiction concerning male same-sex desire (part 2) is often
set in classically pastoral locations, novels that treat love between women
(part 1) are characterized more by an oscillation between the pastoral
and the urban. In this oscillation, I claim, lies an explorative critique
of how women have been excluded from free mobility represented by
urban space—always risking male violence, for instance—but simultaneously skepticism as to whether regarding women as “closer to nature” has
any liberatory potential. Interestingly, as Weigel has noted, the city too is
often conceptualized as a location to be conquered by men—often in an
erotic sense—and thus conceptualized as female (1990, 149–50). While
the female authors in my study problematize this patriarchal tendency, the
male authors arguably present an alternative view of the pastoral as not a
place of colonization, but as a welcoming space free from the many social
constraints of the urban.
Same-Sex Desire in the Norwegian
Twentieth Century
Drawing on Foucault’s criticism of the repressive hypothesis, Sedgwick
(2008 [1990]) develops an analytically potent discussion of what she calls
the epistemology of the closet in modern Western culture. One of her
central axioms is that we cannot identify a linear process of development
where different ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire supersede each
other (ibid., 47). It seems more useful, therefore, to explore the relations
between different sorts of models, as these coexist at the same time, and
often even in the same text. Sedgwick suggests mapping these models
onto two definitional axes: minoritizing/universalizing and gender inversion/gender separatism. The first describes how homosexuality is at times
considered a character trait of a particular, clearly delineated minority
group, but just as often considered a form of nonnormative sexual
behavior the boundaries of which anyone can overstep (ibid., 85). The
inversion/separatism axis describes a conflict between two tropes of
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gender. The idea of homosexual men being “women in a male body,”
and vice versa, is a standard trope in much nineteenth-century sexology.
But the idea of gender inversion lives alongside models of gender separatism, where it is considered only natural that people of the same gender
would wish to associate, to the exclusion of people of the other gender
(ibid., 87). In this line of thought, no man could be more masculine
than he who rejects everything female, including female sexual partners.
While such thinking played a central role in e.g., German Männerbund
ideology (cf. Bruns 2005), separatist models are perhaps most salient in
lesbian activism, with its tight bonds to feminist visions of a world free of
patriarchal tyranny.14
In the twentieth century, public debate on homosexuality in Norway
centered around Section 213 in the penal code, in force from 1905 until
1972:
If immoral intercourse takes place between persons of the male sex, those
who are found guilty, or those who contribute to it, will be sentenced to
prison for up to one year.
The same punishment will befall anyone who engages in immoral
intercourse with animals, or who contributes to it.
Prosecution will only take place when public interest so demands.15
(quoted in Halsos 2007, 93)
Historian Martin Skaug Halsos remarks how this was actually a radical
legal text for its time. The expression “when public interest so demands”
implied that prosecution should only occur if there was a risk of societal threat, e.g., if one of the parties was a young man thought to have
been seduced and thus misled from a socially sanctioned heterosexual life.
Thus, with Section 213, Norway became the first Scandinavian country
to lift the general ban on male same-sex relations, based on a modern,
medical understanding of the issue (Halsos 2007, 91, 94). However, one
could nuance this observation by pointing to how modern Western societies, as Sedgwick has shown, saw the need for a disproportionate leverage
on male same-sex relations, which required “that shows of power be
unpredictable and in an unstable relation to the ‘crime’ that is ostensibly
being regulated” (Sedgwick 1985, 88). No gay man—perhaps no man
at all—could ever be absolutely certain that the vague terms of “immoral
intercourse” and “public interest” would not apply to his relations with
other men. One should also note that the idea of seduction implies a
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universalizing concept of homosexuality. At the time, lawmakers did not
consider homosexuality as an identity category belonging to a specific
group.
Section 213 is also strikingly unmodern in its conflation of homosexuality and bestiality—a remnant of the earlier and far wider ban on
“sodomy”—and in its omission of female homosexuality. In 1896, during
the parliamentary debates on § 213 and whether the law should also
address same-sex female relations, the Minister of Justice Ole Anton
Qvam from the Liberal Party (Venstre) infamously remarked: “Corporeal
intercourse, sexual intercourse between two women, who has heard of
such a thing? It belongs to the realm of impossibility.”16 Historian Hanne
Marie Johansen argues that Qvam was likely aware that lesbian intercourse
was indeed possible, and that his comment most probably addressed the
problem of distinguishing between legal and illegal caresses (Johansen
2019, 75).17 In other words, male homosexuality was conceived as more
visible and easily punishable than female homosexuality, which was in any
case not perceived as a societal threat on the same scale as sexual relations
between men.18
In her groundbreaking autofictional novel Opp alle jordens homofile
[What Comes Naturally] from 1973, to be discussed in Chapter 3, Gerd
Brantenberg comments on the invisibilization of lesbian sexuality. She
wants to write about the meaning of the missing story, announcing “Here
it is,” before a double spread opens, only featuring the words “EVE,
where are you?”19 As Emma Donoghue remarks, female same-sex love has
been underexplored in feminist scholarship for exactly this reason (1995,
111). Thus, on a methodological level, we absolutely need a historical
awareness of how “homosexuality” is just one of myriad paradigms (albeit
internally contradictory) to understand love between people of the same
sex. This is not least so because “[l]esbian history has often been impoverished by rigid divisions between friendship and sex, social acceptability and
deviance, innocence and experience” (ibid., 1). After the general acceptance of a dividing line between homo- and heterosexuality, we lump
together in one category what might have been thought of as diverse
practices, identities, attachments, and cultural affiliations.
Furthermore, the material we study and the questions we ask of it
make certain facts salient, while others remain less perceptible. As anthropologist Hans W. Kristiansen observes, there was a tacit acceptance of
same-sex relations in many Norwegian villages in the first half of the twentieth century (2008, 24–5). Although it might seem counterintuitive that
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many “spinster couples” lived on the countryside, “indigenous” homosexual couples in fact enjoyed a respect and acceptance that homosexual
newcomers did not (ibid., 70). Moreover, as Mustola and Rydström
argue,
Women with lesbian desires have been vulnerable to the physical and structural violence suffered by women throughout history, but they have largely
been spared the state-induced judicial violence faced by homosexuallyinclined men. Indeed, in many circumstances, close companionship with
other women could be an opportunity for independence from men.
(Mustola and Rydström 2007, 41)
In a similar vein, Laure Murat has drawn attention to the way in
which early nineteenth-century manuals of psychiatry contrasted the flamboyance of homosexual men with the perceived “‘self-effacement’” of
homosexual women, “a stumbling-block to investigators which long saved
lesbians from being tabulated in statistics or probed by science” (2005,
64). On the one hand, then, women have been excluded from public
life and thus enjoyed fewer opportunities for exploring their erotic and
romantic attractions to other women. On the other hand, this silencing
has offered the benefit of privacy and relative freedom from legal persecution. Lesbians, then, have to some extent had access to rooms of their
own: “Women typically bonded in their homes or at work, in the intimacy
of rural female spheres or in the growing industries in the cities” (Mustola
and Rydström 2007, 55). A one-sided view of the criminal record and
its consequences for male city-dwellers risks barring from view the less
culturally prolific female and male same-sex relations.
Moreover, using the penal code as a fulcrum also has its caveats. In
the period 1905–1950, 119 men were condemned under §213, yielding
an annual average of 2–3. 57 of these verdicts concerned men in rural
areas, 62 in cities (Johansen 2019, 90). This would, on the one hand,
be expected, given that by 1920, around 43% of the population lived
in either cities or urban areas outside of the cities (Helle et al. 2006,
256), and one could well assume that village-dwellers would seek partners
in urban areas. In addition, the police would be more vigilant in places
where male prostitution was perceived as a menace to public morals. It
is important to remember, however, that §213 also addressed bestiality.
As Johansen underlines, while the Norwegian statistics do not distinguish
between the offenses of homosexuality and bestiality, comparable studies
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from Sweden suggest that several of the 57 rural cases likely concerned
sexual offenses against animals (2019, 91). Thus, while it is common in
gay and lesbian history to use criminal statistics as a way of mapping the
presence of same-sex relations, this might be a less than apt method to
approach what happens in non-urban areas.
For all its shortcomings as a vantage point to observe experience of
same-sex attraction, §213 functions as a discursive focal point in that it
indicates the importance of the medical paradigm. Research on the mainland Scandinavian countries Norway, Denmark, and Sweden has generally
found that psychiatry was the key agent in creating a social dividing
line between gay and straight (Johansen 2019, 87). Interestingly, the
term “homosexual” was well established in psychiatry from the late nineteenth century, but only used for the first time in a Norwegian legal
document—a police report—in 1921 (Johansen 2019, 94–5). By the
time, psychiatrists increasingly served as expert witnesses in court, and
the idea of homosexuality as a medical condition became a mitigating
circumstance (ibid.). Medical and legal discourses influenced each other,
dynamically changing the signification of same-sex desire.
In 1922, a committee was charged with the task of revising the penal
code. Three out of its nine members were physicians, a sign of how biopolitical questions of demography had increased in importance (Jordåen
2010, 201–2). Ideas of urban degeneration were central in the discussion:
indecency and seduction of the young and innocent spread in cities. In
keeping with a goal of counteracting this development in a more “scientific” way, the committee suggested changing §213. The ban on male
same-sex relations, they duly noted, was rooted in the biblical ban on
sodomy. But sodomy, they further held, was a far wider category encompassing masturbation, lesbianism, and other kinds of “abnormal” sexuality. As the law was based on outdated conceptions of sexual behavior
and lacked consistency, the committee proposed removing punishment on
same-sex relations altogether (Jordåen 2010, 203). Its members referred
to German gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and his assertion that
homosexuality was caused by abnormal gonads. The medical members
of the committee considered it unjust to punish an innate, biological
condition. Moreover, from the point of view of social hygiene it seemed
unfortunate to force homosexuals into choosing a heterosexual lifestyle.
It was not in the best interest of society, the committee argued, “because
they often produce bad offspring.”20 Indeed, homosexuality was seen
as nature’s way of stopping degeneration from spreading. Lastly, the
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committee enclosed a Freudian account of how homosexuality could also
be caused by abnormal psychosexual development (Jordåen 2010, 204–
5). For reasons unknown, the proposal of deleting § 213 was not put into
effect.
Nevertheless, it is worth dwelling on this debate as it highlights key
aspects on conceptions of homosexuality in the early Norwegian twentieth century. First, the field of medicine held a strong rhetorical ethos, to
the detriment of religious understandings of sodomy. Even homosexual
rights activism, such as Hirschfeld’s theories, were acknowledged, and the
medical community considered them scientifically sound. Second, minoritizing and universalizing definitions coexisted: the physicians on the 1922
committee simultaneously considered homosexuality an inborn “natural” trait of certain people, while leaving the door open for a Freudian
understanding of perverted psychosexual development and a polymorphous infantile sexuality implying a need for the protection of all young
people from harmful influence. Third, conceptions of the environment
played a large part in the discussion: homosexual acts were associated with
urbanity, but were also understood as “natural” in Ducarme and Couvet’s
definition (1), i.e., independent of human intervention.
It is relevant to compare §213 and the primarily juridical debates
surrounding the law to another important text, documenting views on
same-sex relations from the interwar years. In 1932, the socialist physicians Karl Evang and Torgeir Kasa initiated the Populært tidsskrift for
seksuell opplysning [Popular Journal of Sexual Education]. Each issue
focused on one specific topic, prioritized according to how many letters
of interest they had received from readers. Once more attesting to the
increased visibility and curiosity concerning homosexuality, this was the
topic of their fourth issue. Evang and Kasa, too, start from a Freudian
understanding, arguing that homosexuality is caused by abnormal psychosexual development and not degeneration
In addition, homosexuality seems always to have thrived most potently
under conditions when women were hard to come by, especially during
military campaigns. Great skill in warfare and robustness by no means
excluded homosexuality […]. It does not seem to have been associated
with any racial degeneration or deterioration.21
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Evidently, male homosexuality constitutes the point of reference also
for Kasa and Evang. Their understanding is predominantly gender separatist—although they leave the door open for the existence of “psychic
hermaphrodites,” i.e., third gender “inverts.” At the same time, they
promote a fundamentally universalizing theory of homosexuality:
There is a homosexual component in the sex life of all people, a sexually charged attraction to one’s own sex. […] In reality, it is so with
normal people that their love life, their capability of taking responsibility
for others, their capability of compassion, tenderness, and sympathy—all
having a sexual root—are not only directed towards the other sex, but
also in great extent towards children, the elderly, and fellow citizens of the
same age, regardless of sex. This, after all, is also the condition for a social
community in general.22
Given the male homosexual panic informing §213, still very much in vigor
when Kasa and Evang wrote this, the radicality of their assertion is astonishing. Perhaps one can also see remnants of a “pre-homosexual” idea
that there is no clear-cut line between intimacy, romantic friendships, and
sexual desire. Indeed, this more inclusive and fluid understanding of the
function of same-sex desire runs like an undercurrent in modern Western
thought. Even Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis
postulated that sexual desire was the basis for social activity, building a
home and property, and nurturing feelings of care for humankind (Oosterhuis 2000, 68), and an extreme version of this was foundational for the
separatist Männerbund ideology, cf. above. It seems plausible that such
ideas had trickled down to Norwegian medical professionals. Where legal
and medical discourses generally worked hard to separate immoral homosexuality from inoffensive caresses, Kasa and Evang seem to be completely
at ease with arguing that, indeed, “homosexuality” is but a crude and
imprecise category that largely fails to capture the variety of human sexual
and romantic experience and its various social roles.
This is not to argue that the two physicians were queer theorists avant
la lettre, but to highlight the fact that more inclusive and universalist
understandings of homosexuality coexisted with degeneration theories
and minoritizing viewpoints. There seems to be no clear dividing line
in mainstream culture between ideas of amical intimacy, homosexuality, and “queer” identities either. Therefore, all of these concepts must
understood as “unrationally coexisting” models (cf. Sedgwick 2008, 47).
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An affirmative approach means exploring exactly how this coexistence
enables literary semiosis and positive identification for same-sex attracted
individuals.
This discursive intensification continued in the postwar years. As is
well-known, the 1950s saw an increase in homophobia in Western societies, connected to the rise of the nuclear family ideal and the need
for stability after World War II. Not only was homosexuality associated
with communism in McCarthy-era USA; Norway’s neighboring country
Sweden was also scandalized by the so-called Haijby affair. In 1950, the
waiter Kurt Haijby claimed to have had a relationship to the Swedish king
Gustav V (Söderström 1999, 477). The affair contributed to widespread
anxiety that homosexuals helped each other avoid punishment in court
thanks to a secret cooperative network (ibid., 422). In 1954, when §213
was again up for debate, the Norwegian Council of bishops issued a
joint statement—the first of its kind—warning against the societal danger
of legalizing homosexuality (Moxnes 2001, 60; Grodal 1957, 341–2).
Indeed, the bishops argued that § 213 should be expanded to include
both sexes, possibly demonstrating an increased awareness of lesbianism
in the postwar years.
However, this decade also witnessed the first Norwegian nonfiction book written in the first person about (male) homosexual experiences. Indeed, the book Vi som føler annerledes [We Who Feel Differently], published by the musician and activist Øivind Eckhoff under
the pseudonym “Finn Grodal” (1957) is also among the first texts to
intentionally use the term “homofil.” The term was probably introduced
by activists in 1951, aiming to place more emphasis on homosexuality as a form of love (Greek: philia) instead of sex (Johansen 2019,
123). In modern Norwegian usage, “homofil” has largely superseded
“homoseksuell” [homosexual ].
There is a larger discussion to be had concerning whether this rhetorical and strategic insistence on “love” instead of “sex” ultimately entails
ceding to a moralist view on sex as a primitive drive compared to love
as a sentiment worthy of respect and protection. However, the important
point in this context is how even Eckhoff’s radical contribution to the gay
rights debate in his time reproduces much of the Freudian understandings from earlier decades. Freud, Eckhoff writes, was the first to break
with the paradigm of innate homosexual orientation, drawing attention
to environmental factors (Grodal 1957, 70). His understanding, which
likely expresses a consensus among homosexual rights activists at the
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time, is marked by the exact crisis Sedgwick perceives in modern homo/
heterosexual definition: it is universalist in the sense that he holds certain
environmental factors to be decisive in the development of homosexuality,
but also minoritizing in that he believes inherited traits form a breeding
ground (“grobunn,” literally: fertile soil ) for such development (ibid.,
1957, 98). This metaphor—catachrestic in Norwegian—also serves as a
discreet way of “naturalizing” same-sex desire.
Eckhoff’s understanding draws not only on Freudian concepts of
“developed” homosexuality, but also on what was state-of-the-art research
at the time. By referring to Alfred Kinsey’s survey studies, Eckhoff makes
the radical claim that 100,000 Norwegians—i.e., almost three percent of
the total population of 3.5 million—are erotically attracted to their own
sex (Grodal 1957, 47). His point is to underline the developmental nature
of homosexual attraction. However, this universalist line of reasoning
is fundamentally based in an ideal drawn straight from early twentiethcentury social hygiene: preventing the development of homosexuality,
Eckhoff argues, would entail a maximum of happiness for every individual (Grodal 1957, 298). In other words, establishing a developmental
definition of homosexuality is not primarily a call for acknowledgment
or social rights. Instead, it scaffolds a eugenic project of minimizing the
number of homosexuals. This strikingly demonstrates one of the fundamental problems of conceiving of sexuality as “natural”: once something
can be understood in biological terms, it can also be prevented in ways
construed as “scientific” and presumptively value-free.23
In Norwegian gay and lesbian history, however, Vi som føler annerledes
is perhaps most important as a sign of the increased postwar activism that
would lead to the final abolishment of §213 in 1972, as well as greater
visibility and acceptance of homosexual identities. The first political organization for homosexual men and women, DNF-48 [The Norwegian
Society of 1948] was founded in 1950, as the Norwegian chapter of a
Danish organization established two years earlier (Johansen 2019, 121).
Its main goal was to decriminalize homosexual relations, and its strategy
was that of public education. Pamphlets, op-eds, media appearances by
activists, and the creation of journals were intended to increase public
awareness of the weak scientific and sociological reasoning behind §213.
At the same time, DNF-48 famously followed a line of discretion, where,
due to fear of police reprisals, becoming a member was extraordinarily
difficult.24 Thus, public debate on homosexuality became increasingly
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tangible and diverse, although non-heteronormative sexualities remained
an underground phenomenon.
Interestingly, the omission of lesbianism from the penal code proved an
asset for Kim Friele, arguably the most prominent Norwegian homosexual
rights activist from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021. Elected leader
of DNF-48 from 1966 until 1970, Friele remained general secretary until
1989. As a woman, she was by definition not a criminal under §213.
Thus, she became the spearhead in a turn towards more open activism,
appearing often in both print and audiovisual media (Johansen 2019,
135). After reading the Friele-initiated pamphlet Paragraf 213—Onde
eller nødvendighet? [Section 213—An Evil or a Necessity?], Labor party
MP Arne Kielland submitted an interpellation to parliament, resulting in
the removal of §213 in April 1972 (Johansen 2019, 137). In the aftermath, many more homosexuals, male and female, came out publicly. The
flipside of this achievement was an increased visibility that also entailed
more homophobic violence, as well as vitriolic attacks in the media. Friele
and DNF-48 continued to campaign determinedly for the inclusion of
sexual orientation in Norwegian anti-discrimination legislation. In 1981,
this came to pass (Johansen 2019, 140–1). Thus, homosexual rights
activism, public homophobia, and homosexual visibility are tightly linked
to the discussion on legislation. In this way, the period between 1905 and
ca. 1980 forms a relatively consistent time-window on cultural constructions of homosexuality in Norway, motivating the historical period of
focus for this book.
Framework, Choice of Material, and Structure
My approach to the texts to be explored in the subsequent chapters is
strongly influenced by the so-called postcritical turn. Taking Rita Felski’s
thought-provoking The Limits of Critique (2015) as a starting point, I
consider the postcritical turn as a continuation more than a rejection of
critique. Critical and postcritical readers alike are interested in exploring
how literary texts deal with social issues, and in deconstructing their
ideological content. However, where critique stops at the “exposure” of
oppressive ideologies, postcritical scholars ask how the text might mean
otherwise, and how it expresses other meanings that might offer the
reader space for positive affects and identifications. As Felski asks: “Why
not think of a text as gradually yielding up its interpretative riches rather
than being probed for its unconscious contradictions?” (ibid., 66). Like
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Azzarello’s queer environmentality, Felski’s postcritique draws heavily
on Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative readings. As
mentioned, Sedgwick builds on Kleinian psychoanalysis where the patient
is considered able to “reconstruct” the threatening world, using “one’s
own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into
something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like
any preexisting whole” (Sedgwick 2003, 128). Thus, while the critical
attitude is traditionally one of detachment and distance—reading with
one’s “guard up” (Felski 2015, 83)—the postcritical is one of investment
and identification. Postcritique envisions a kind of reader simultaneously
joyfully committed to the text, while capable of reconstructing it in order
to “repair” one’s own sense of self and/or the world.
Furthermore, my analyses are inspired by Toril Moi’s discussion of
how ordinary language philosophy can contribute to literary studies.25
Starting from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Stanley Cavell’s work, Moi calls
for understanding interpretation as acknowledgment: “in talking about
forms of life Wittgenstein, as always, is concerned with understanding—
acknowledging —the practices of others, not with censoring or criticizing
them from a pre-established normative position” (Moi 2017, 58). Note
how this concept of acknowledgment takes the pole of the text more into
account than Sedgwick’s and Felski’s more reader-oriented approaches.
To Moi, “acknowledgment” means recognizing that the text wants something from me, demanding a response, an attempt at getting clear on what
the texts wants.
The following chapters, then, constitute an attempt at creating a “clear
view” of why same-sex love and desire are so often couched in a symbolically charged, urban, and/or pastoral Norwegian environment in the first
three-quarters of the twentieth century. In asking this question, I claim
that no reader “approaches” the text from the “outside” (cf. Moi 2017,
209–10). Rather, the reading subject is part of the text, striving to get
a clear view of whatever the text calls for. It bears repeating that such
a practice of reading in no way abolishes critical commitment. As Moi
writes:
If I am trying to understand why you say what you say and do what you
do, I can’t just will away your form of life. On the contrary, I must accept
it as the conditions of possibility for your words and acts. […] (I am still
free to judge your form of life to be racist or sexist, exploitative or plain
evil. Or to admire it as the perfect realization of Utopia. The point is that
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I can’t even make such judgments unless I acknowledge it as the condition
of possibility for your use of language.) (2017, 59–60)
A text and its reception are both expressions of forms of life, which
encompasses “both our cultural practices and their connectedness to
the natural conditions of our lives” (Moi 2017, 55). The concept of
“form of life” is relevant, then, because it acknowledges how the interplay
between human culture and nonhuman nature makes up the fundamental
condition for our use of language.
There are several terms for the reading practice that characterizes postcritical scholarship: affirmative, acknowledging (cf. Moi above), restorative, and reparative. While Sedgwick comes across as the most central
reference, postcritical reading has many roots: in critical theory, in
ordinary language philosophy (again, cf. Moi), and not least in SpinozistDeleuzian affect theory. This latter field is a key source of inspiration for
Yves Citton (2017), whose defense of “affective hermeneutics” Felski cites
(2015, 177–8). While my chosen theoretical framework is not Deleuzian,
other scholars of queer literature in Scandinavia have demonstrated its
potential. For example, Tove Solander usefully suggests distinguishing
queer theoretical readings into three strands: one “pessimist-critical”
(building on Lacanian psychoanalysis), one “optimist-critical” (represented by Judith Butler and her idea of the fractures in the heterosexual
matrix), and the last one “affirmative” (Solander 2012, 46). From this
fertile soil of concepts, I harvest two key terms. While Sedgwick talks of
reparative reading, suggesting the power of literature to mend psychological trauma in the reader, Moi’s discussion of acknowledgment rather
implies an affirmative attitude to the text and its expressivity. In the
following chapters, I will switch back and forth between “reparative”
and “affirmative” when describing my approach to the literary texts,
depending on whether I primarily have in mind the reader or the text.
(This is a question of emphasis, not exclusion.) I turn the affirmative
gaze towards a selection of narrative texts—a few in part 2 in lyrical
form—from the period 1908–1979. In limiting the period of inquiry,
I have used Section 213 as a point of departure. However, the choice
of material is also motivated by my own expertise in the proliferation
of public discussion of homosexuality in the interwar years. Thus, while
the works to be studied span the period between 1908 and 1979, there
is an emphasis on the years up to 1940. Other historical tendencies
than the existence of §213 also contribute to bookending this period.
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1905 is the year of the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian-union. In
the ensuing decades, Norway attempts to establish a national identity,
leading to a vitalist revival of National Romantic tropes. World War II
and the restoration of the 1950s and 60s entails attempts to find positive,
non-chauvinist views of the Norwegian nation. The project of national
re-building contributes to the cementation of gender roles and thus the
need for antihomophobic counter-discourse. Finally, the 1970s marks a
turning point for homosexual-identified Norwegians, with decriminalization and legal acknowledgment in the form of anti-discrimination laws
that came into force in 1981.26
However, limiting the scope of this study to 1908–1979 is not an
attempt at creating a narrative of liberation from the oppressive initial
decades of the twentieth century until the sexual liberalism of the 1970s.
On the contrary, close analysis of the works in question demonstrates the
many different forms same-sex attraction can take and the various ways in
which the nonhuman environment can function as both oppressive and
liberating.
The book is divided into two main parts, the first on relations between
women, the second on relations between men. This, admittedly quite
traditional, division grew out of working with the respective works. It
reflects how female and male same-sex attraction has been conceptualized differently due to gender but also due to how nature and the
city have been associated with womanhood and manhood in different
ways. In my choice of material, I have benefitted greatly from the
pioneering works of Gerd Brantenberg, Bodil Espedal, Relsen Larsen,
Lisbeth Nilsen, Astrid Torud (1986), and Jan Olav Gatland (1990).
Their books are literary-historical overviews of, respectively, love between
women in Western literature (with an emphasis on Scandinavia) and
homosexuality in Norwegian literature.
Having mentioned the idea of “Nordic exceptionalism” above, I
also need to explain why the material chosen is Norwegian—and why
I do not deal with Scandinavian literature at large. The Scandinavian
countries share much common history, and our languages are mutually intelligible. It is only a slight exaggeration to think of Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway as one literary region. Moreover, liberal attitudes
to gender and sexuality and acknowledgment of anthropogenic climate
change form part of the politically correct consensus in all three countries.
However, as demonstrated above, Norway also has its own history with
respect to urbanization, attitudes to nonhuman nature, and legislation
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P. E. SVELSTAD
and activism concerning sexuality. The project of National Romanticism
and its renewal as a vitalist tendency celebrating the natural energy of
“wild” landscapes have postcolonial aspects that lack clear equivalents
in Denmark and Sweden, both of which played the dominant role in
their successive unions with Norway. While the common literary culture,
evidenced for example in the “offshoot” metaphor mentioned above,
might speak for a transnational study of gay and lesbian literature, I view
it as necessary to establish parts of the Norwegian queer literary history
as a first step.
Part 1 starts with a chapter on Nobel Prize laureate Sigrid Undset
(1882–1949) and Edith Øberg (1895–1958), a less-read experimental
novelist. I first discuss Undset’s tale of housewife and former actress Uni
Hjelde, covered in two short novels: the titular story of her prose collection Den lykkelige alder (1908) [The Happy Age] and one of the texts in
her Splinten av troldspeilet (1917) [The Fragment of the Troll’s Mirror],
which features two stories of disillusioned housewives. This is a stock
character in Undset’s contemporary fiction. Uni lacks spiritual and erotic
fulfillment in her marriage, and particularly the second part of her story
contrasts Uni’s sense of dissatisfaction with her pastoral fantasies of her
deceased friend Charlotte. My approach here could be labeled intratextual, as I am interested in how Undset’s representation of female same-sex
attraction corresponds to her stated, and often controversial, views of
gender roles. At the end of the chapter on Undset, I briefly discuss one of
her more canonized novels, Jenny (1911). My analyses show that while
Undset’s view of women is politically conservative, there are reparative
possibilities in her work when it comes to thinking about same-sex desire
as valuable because natural.
I compare Undset’s use of pastoral tropes to the more unstable urban/
pastoral dichotomy found in two of Øberg’s 1920s novels which also
tell the story of one same-sex attracted female character. In Boblen [The
Bubble] (1921) and Skum [Foam] (1922), the reader follows the hopeless fascination of Gudrun Haavaldsen for her schoolmate Berit Sørlie.
Øberg’s novels explore the difficult relation between imagination and
reality, and criticize patriarchal oppression of nonhuman nature in ways
that can be considered ecofeminist. Undset and Øberg both show how
the romantic friendship as a social form grows increasingly vexed with the
establishment of intimate same-sex relations as perverse.
Furthermore, Øberg’s work demonstrates a latent queer ecofeminism
which I regard as visible also in the classical novel Is-slottet (1963) [The
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SEXUALITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS IN THE NORWEGIAN ...
37
Ice Palace, 1966] by the foremost Nynorsk novelist Tarjei Vesaas (1897–
1970). A story of a budding erotic friendship between two young girls,
the novel focuses on our mysterious inability to understand an other. As
in Øberg, this suggests a possible critique of heteropatriarchal Western
thought.
In Chapter 3, I explore the “lesbian canon” in Norwegian literature, consisting of three novels by Borghild Krane (1906–1997) (1937),
Ebba Haslund (1917–2009) (1948), and Gerd Brantenberg (1941–)
(1973). While Undset and Øberg could be said to rely on conceptions of the “romantic friendship,” Krane, Haslund, and Brantenberg
show the consequences of “the lesbian” appearing as a new identity
category. In their novels, urbanity comes across as the primary environment for living as a lesbian, although all three authors problematize
ideas of the pastoral. Thus, in particular Haslund and Brantenberg follow
the tendency established by Øberg to counter-discursively engage with
traditional conceptions of femaleness and the nonhuman.
I distinguish between the novels of Chapters 2 and 3 by using the
concepts of “the sapphic” and “the lesbian.” The intention is to highlight
the difference between novels that depict female same-sex desire without
categorizing it as lesbianism, from novels where the crucial problem
consists in how the new dichotomy between homo- and heterosexuality
leads to a crisis in women’s relationships. The “sapphic,” then, a term I
borrow from Susan Lanser (2014), is a broader category, applicable to all
the novels studied in the first part of the book. I argue that the rise of the
concept of “the lesbian constitutes a paradigm shift, necessitating other
ways of representing and discussing female same-sex attraction.
Part 2 also starts by focusing on the interwar years. Chapter 4 maps
the use of pastoral tropes in gay male literature. I discuss the aesthetic
and political aspects of the pastoral in the work of Alf Martin Jæger
(1895–1967), Åsmund Sveen (1910–1963), and Axel Krogh (1892–
1982), before devoting the bulk of the chapter to Det store spelet (1934)
[The Great Game], the breakthrough work of Tarjei Vesaas. Det store spelet
pushes all the buttons of pastoral homoeroticism in its depiction of its
main character Per Bufast. Like Undset, however, Vesaas depicts a world
where same-sex relations remain a ghostly, and even scary, impossibility.
In the final analytical chapter, I briefly discuss the use of pastoral and
urban tropes in some postwar lyrics by poet, songwriter, and novelist Alf
Prøysen (1914–1970). The revelation of Prøysen’s bisexuality in 2004
initiated a public controversy which demonstrated the importance of his
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38
P. E. SVELSTAD
texts for gay male readers. The writer Gudmund Vindland (1949–) was
among those who severely criticized the homophobia surfacing during the
controversy, and my analysis of his gay literary milestone Villskudd (1979)
[Offshoot ] constitutes the main part of Chapter 5. A coming-of-age story
of the young man Yngve Vilde, this novel is a radical defense of male
homosexuality, its poetic armory aimed at both the church and psychiatry as oppressive institutions. Villskudd is an exhilarating and melancholic
whirlwind of eroticism, psychological trauma, and literary quotations.
Although often considered the fundamental coming-out novel in Norwegian literature, Villskudd has so far not been the object of a sustained
analysis. As I argue, space and place are key to understanding the main
character’s troubles with identity and coming to peace with the world.
The book closes with a brief discussion where I consider what these
readings might tell us about how we conceptualize environment, gender,
and sexuality in tandem. I also highlight how such readings make new
genealogies, and alternative traditions, appear.
Finally, a note on translations is in place. Out of the ten works
analyzed in depth, published English translations exist for five of them:
Splinten av troldspeilet (Images in a Mirror [1938]); Is-slottet (The Ice
Palace [1966]); Det hendte ingenting (Nothing Happened [1987]); Opp
alle jordens homofile (What Comes Naturally, [1986]); and Det store
spelet (The Great Cycle [1967]). The other works have never, to my
knowledge, been translated into English.27 While I could have cited
the translations that are available, translators have often made choices
that, however idiomatically valid, hide important connotations in the
Norwegian original. As will be clear from my readings, much of the
interpretative potential rests in allusions, wordplay, and symbolism that
require a direct translation of the Norwegian. To avoid confusing the
reader by quoting several versions, I have therefore chosen to use my
own translations from Norwegian for most of them, with Vesaas’s Isslottet constituting an exception. Throughout the book, I provide the
original text in the endnotes. This also applies to Brantenberg’s novel,
which, although translated by herself, in cooperation with native English
speaker Gillian Hanscombe, comes across as a revision of the Norwegian,
with several chapters fundamentally altered. I therefore regard them as
versions of one and the same “fluid text” (cf. Bryant 2013), and quote
the published translation without comment only when it corresponds to
the Norwegian. However, I make a point out of comparing them when
the translation contributes to a different literary and/or political effect.
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Notes
1. Notably, (3) is connected to vitalism, which will be addressed in
Chapter 4.
2. “… Kultur letztlich ihren Ursprung in natürlichen Prozesse
besitzen muss” (Finke 2006, 186). All translations are mine unless
otherwise stated.
3. Although one might note that in the Aristotelian tradition,
“nature” is opposed to “chaos,” and “hence, civilized men are
more ‘natural’ in this point of view, […] than ‘barbarian’ peoples,
submitted to disorder and then oblivious of their human nature
[…]” (Ducarme and Couvet 2020, 2).
4. In 1989, the Danish office of tourism introduced the slogan “Det
er dejlig å være norsk – i Danmark” [“It is wonderful to be
Norwegian—in Denmark”]. As it alludes to liberal Danish policies on alcohol and tobacco, the slogan has become a catchphrase
in contemporary Norwegian (Fonbæk 2014).
5. The name is a pseudonym; the true identity of the author remains
unknown. The book was translated as The Straggler and published
in the USA in 1955. A second translation, Strange Friends,
appeared in 1963 (Lindeqvist 2009, 12).
6. “Der var melkebutikker med mere chokolade og sukkertøi i
vinduerne, end Torkild hadde tænkt sig der fandtes i hele verden.
[…] Han stod uendelig længe og glodde ved hver rute – alle sorger
var glemt for en stund. Men saa kom han til enden av husrækkerne.
Gaten endte ved et jorde med høit gjærde av staurer omkring.
Bortom jordet var der bakker med enklete bygaarder paa, men de
laa spredt med langt imellem, det lignet ikke landet han kom fra
og ikke byen, slik han syntes han visste den var – han følte sig
likesom skuffet, der han stod og stirret. Han krøp gjennem et hul i
gjærdet og ruslet ind paa jordet. Græsset var kort og tyndslitt, med
brede optraakkede stier bortover. Der løp en bæk tversigjennem
jordet, den gik nede i en liten dal mellem store oretrær. Men da
han kom nedi dalen, saa han at der var saa stygt, fuldt av flaskeskaar
og gulnet avispapir og en masse lort. Vandet i bækken var graat og
lugtet vondt. Borti bakken paa den andre siden laa nogen mænd
urørlig – han bildte sig pludselig ind at de var døde, myrdede –
han hadde nogen utydelige forestillinger om at de myrdet folk i
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40
P. E. SVELSTAD
byen. Han snudde og sprang, til han var hjemme i gaten” (Undset
1914, 32–3).
7. A pun on Richard Dawkins’ (1976) theory of memes.
8. The urbanization of the nineteenth century is at the heart of a
tremendous increase in the population; in the period 1735–2014,
the Norwegian population increased from 666,109 to 5,109,056
(Dybdahl 2016, 161). The demographic turning point in the
1800s is also related to environmental factors; Norway was only
minimally affected by the Tambora volcano eruption of 1815 and
thus avoided the crop failures and famines that ravaged the British
Isles and Central Europe (ibid., 165).
9. “De deler av bondekulturen som kunne bygge bro til middelalderen og selvstendighet for land og folk, var attraktive ut fra
målsettingen om å skape en felleskulturell plattform. Det var med
andre ord de deler av livsformen som bar oppe et alderdommelig
handlingsmønster som var gjenstand for oppmerksomhet, og som
skulle brukes i nasjonsbyggingen” (Hodne 1995, 41).
10. The term “New Norwegian” is intended to highlight how this
written language is the direct descendant of the Norwegian variety
of Old Norse spoken during the Middle Ages, commonly known
as “Gamalnorsk” [Old Norwegian].
11. In most private and official contexts, everyone is free to use whatever written standard they wish. Since anyone can in principle
switch between Bokmål and Nynorsk from one text to the other,
there are no official statistics of how many users each language
has. However, estimates indicate that around 550,000 primarily
use Nynorsk (Språkrådet 2021, 10), in other words around 10%
of a population at around 5,5 million people.
12. “Norske ord!/De som enno løynleg gror/over alle vidanvangar/
i mitt fedreland og fangar/glans og kraft av sol og jord,/blod i
barm som bèr i berg,/eld or Norigs folkemerg;/de tarv ingor natt
meir fæle,–/dykk me vil den høgste sæle –/dykk skal ånd gje munn
og mæle!/Meir og meir! […]” (Aukrust 1931, 34–35). The plant
pyramidal saxifrage, for which Aukrust uses the dialectical vidanvang, is common in Norwegian mountain areas, and was named
the national flower of Norway in 1935.
13. “Still friluftsliv is viewed as an abstract concept in everyday
language, as what people are actually doing is described far more
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SEXUALITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS IN THE NORWEGIAN ...
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concretely; they go for a walk, to fish, to pick berries, to climb,
etc.” (Gurholt 2008, 59).
14. A well-known example is Adrienne Rich’s (1983) idea of the
lesbian continuum.
15. “Finder utugtig Omgjængelse Sted mellem Personer af Mandkjøn,
straffes de, der heri gjør sig skyldige, eller som medvirker dertil,
med Fængsel indtil 1 Aar. Med samme Straf ansees den, som har
utugtig Omgjængelse med Dyr eller som medvirker dertil. Paatale
finder alene Sted, naar det paakræves av almene Hensyn” (quoted
in Grodal 1957, 145).
16. “Legemlig omgjængelse, kjønnslig omgjængelse mellom to
kvinder, har man hørt noget saadant? Det hører til de umulige
ting” (quoted in Johansen 2019, 75).
17. A similar line of reasoning lay behind the omission of lesbianism
from Section 175 of the German penal code in the Third Reich,
as it was revised in 1935: “… since women’s ways of expressing
friendship were generally more intimate than those of men, a criminalization of lesbian sexuality would lead to difficulties in verifying
criminal activity, as well as to too many denunciations of innocent
relationships” (Mustola and Rydström 2007, 49).
18. As Emma Donoghue notes, female same-sex desire is traditionally
called “the silent sin” (1995, 8). Furthermore, in a heteronormative society where sex is generally conceived as involving penetration by a penis, affectionate embraces between women might not
have been thought of as sexual by either the participants or by
greater society. “[…] many women [of the eighteenth century]
would probably not have thought of their friendships as sexual in
the same way as their marriages were supposed to be” (ibid., 130).
19. “EVA, hvor er du?” (Brantenberg 1973, 69–71).
20. “… da avkommet ofte er dårlig” (quoted in Jordåen 2010, 204).
21. “Ellers synes homoseksualitet til alle tider å ha blomstret sterkest
under slike forhold da kvinner var sjeldne, særlig under felttog. Stor
krigerdyktighet og hårdførhet utelukket slett ikke homoseksualitet
[…]. Det synes ikke å ha vært forbundet med noen utartning og
svekkelse av rasen” (Kasa and Evang 1947, 179). Quoted from a
collected volume of all the essays from Populært tidsskrift for seksuell
opplysning.
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P. E. SVELSTAD
22. “[I] alle menneskers kjønnsliv finnes en homoseksuell del, en
seksuelt betont tiltrekning til ens eget kjønn. […] Det er i virkeligheten hos normale mennesker så at deres kjærlighetsliv, deres
evne til ansvar overfor andre, til medfølelse, ømhet og samfølelse
– alt sammen ting som har en seksuell rot – ikke bare er rettet mot
det annet kjønn, men også i høy grad mot barn, mot gamle og
mot jevnaldrende samfunnsmedlemmer uansett kjønn. Dette er jo
også betingelsen for et samfunnsliv i det hele tatt” (Kasa and Evang
1947, 171).
23. I refer here to Sedgwick’s thought-provoking discussion of her
axiom that “[t]he immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on
nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background
of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature”
(Sedgwick 2008, 40). Azzarello also builds on this insight to argue
for a queer environmentality: “If ‘it,’ homosexuality, is cultural, an
effect of nurture, it can be undone through the selfsame logic, a
kind of de-homosexualization therapy. If ‘it’ is biological, an effect
of nature, it can be undone again through the selfsame logic, here
a kind of genetic surveillance and reengineering” (Azzarello 2012,
18).
24. In order to join, prospective members needed two existing
members of at least six months’ membership to vouch for
the discretion and respectability of the newcomer. The use
of pseudonyms and the omission of family names constituted
common practice in DNF-48 meetings (Johansen 2019, 122).
25. I feel the need to underline that Moi has stated that her Revolution of the Ordinary, which makes the case for the relevance of
ordinary language philosophy as a part of literary studies, is not
a postcritical book. Underlining this in a recent comment to a
debate on her book in the literary journal Edda, she voices skepticism to the term itself, as it suggests that literary scholars have now
turned their backs on critical readings altogether (Moi 2022, 52).
As explained above, I regard the postcritical turn not as a rejection,
but as a continuation, of critique. Moi’s idea of “acknowledgement,” however, does not presuppose a primary critical reading
that is then to be reassembled (although this is certainly possible).
While the term “postcritique” in itself does not appear in Revolution of the Ordinary, one of its chapters, “‘Nothing Is Hidden’,”
was first published in the anthology Critique and Postcritique
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(Anker and Felski 2017). Here, Moi frames her argument by referring to Sedgwick as well as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’
influential “Surface Reading.” In practice, then, I would argue that
Moi has contributed in shaping the field of postcritique, while not
necessarily identifying with it.
26. The 1970s are also a decade of increasing economic and technological progress for Norway, having discovered petrol resources in
the North Sea in the late 1960s. Norway’s oil-fueled economy, of
course, creates a paradox in a country where ecological preservation
and worship of the wilderness are fundamental national-ideological
tropes.
27. Villskudd, however, has been translated into German as Der
Irrläufer (Vindland 1983).
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PART I
Love Between Women as Challenge
to the Othering of the Nonhuman
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