In my thesis project I study depictions of setting up home in a selection of swedish 20th century novels (by female authors, Selma Lagerlöf, Elin Wägner and Moa Martinson). The analysis is focused on how homes are depicted and discussed, what is necessary for the house to become a home, and what is asked of the inhabitants. This relates to contexts as swedish 20thcentury ideas and history, and questions of gender, class, sexuality and temporality.

A wide range of aspects of dwelling and the domestic sphere are considered – how the narrative space is organised, presented and lived in; how different homes and domestic tasks are valued within the fictive world; what is presented as the ideal home and how that relates to the historic context; and how that is negotiated by the characters in the novels. 

Research interests

domesticity, home, house, 20th century Sweden, spatial theory, architecture, literary geography, spatial reading, domestic sphere, everyday life

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• "En lugn och karlfri hamn"

  2020. Sara Pärsson. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 50 (2-3), 87-96

  Article

  This article explores how homes and ideas about a woman’s place are depicted in the Elin Wägner novel Pennskaftet (1910). In the novel social and spatial roles of women are depicted and discussed as full of political and existential meaning. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) provides concepts for the analysis. The concepts orientation, the straight line, and Ahmed´s thoughts on the process of inhabiting are used to explore how the New Women of the novel choose to live and what values they ascribe to the home. Throughout the novel there is a longing for a home of one’s own. By focusing on the wishes and needs of women the novel states that the home is a woman’s place: a place to rest, think, write, grief – maybe even be a place of marital bliss.

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• Ta sig hem: Skönlitterära skildringar av kvinnan och hemmet från tidigt 1900-tal

  2022. Sara Pärsson.

  Thesis (Doc)

  The aim of this dissertation is to examine how the concept of home is constructed in novels by Swedish female authors from the early 20th century. This includes analysing how the dwellings of the main characters are depicted and what ideas are expressed concerning practices of the home. The novels discussed in the study are Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet (1910), Selma Lagerlöf’s Charlotte Löwensköld (1925) and Anna Svärd (1928), and Moa Martinson’s Mor gifter sig (1936). All have female characters at the centre and depict these characters’ relationship to their homes.

  How are homes portrayed in the novels? What does it mean to inhabit and feel at home? In which ways are homes portrayed as class- and gender-coded places? These are the research questions of this study. Through exploring the literary texts, my intention is to give an in-depth picture of the renegotiation of home, and of women’s place and opportunities during the early 20th century. The dissertation contributes to the field of spatial literature studies and to the research tradition that studies homes in literature. Spatial theory, social and architectural history and queer and gender research is touched upon. Concepts by Sara Ahmed and Iris Marion Young are used as analytic tools.

  During the early 20th century, shifting gender relations, technological development, emigration, nationalism and an increased interest in questions of hygiene all contributed to making the home a central matter of discussion in Sweden. Housing was discussed on a national level and was, for the first time in Swedish history, considered a responsibility of the state. At the heart of this was the assumption that good homes would improve the lives of its inhabitants, consequently making them better citizens.

  The dual nature of the home, simultaneously ideal image and reality, is clearly thematised in all novels. The characters relate to the home as an ideal and contrast it to their actual homes. None of the central characters have an inherited, given place to call home. Instead, most of the characters explore the potential of the home, as they turn forward towards their ideals.

  The norm that prescribes that a marriage, or a nuclear family, are necessary for establishing a home is discussed and questioned in all the novels. Both Pennskaftet and Mor gifter sig discuss the question of what a home is, by questioning whether a particular dwelling counts as a home according to societal norms, but also whether it is perceived as such by the individual. Wägner and Martinson depict privacy and seclusion as a positive value of the home that the female characters express that they lack and desire. However, in Charlotte Löwensköld and Anna Svärd, where the spatial structure forms the basis for misunderstandings, boundaries get a more ambivalent role.

  In the dissertation, I show how the novels from the early 20th century connect descriptions and ideas of home to questions about care, responsibility, love and marriage. I also show how they emphasise a woman’s need for independence and seclusion, and how they express women’s longing to feel at home – in a house and in society.

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Show all publications by Sara Pärsson at Stockholm University