Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2020-11-06T10:16:45+00:00

Conclusion

In contrast to legal texts, literature allows for meta-reflection and the twisting and turning of several possible outcomes of legal change. Maria Jotuni and Elin Wägner problematise the institution of marriage in relation to reason and the erotic in their works, which were simultaneously strongly feminist, to use a modern term, and widely read.31 The challenge of the legal discourse, as we have analysed it here, was probably more visible and important to some readers than others. In quite a similar manner, but in different contexts, they probe into the failure of legal change as a means of creating equality and thus uncovering remaining injustices. The fact that class differences between women play an important role further highlights the near impossibility of attaining women’s true emancipation through law as long as traditional social conventions prevail. Reactions from society and family to Anna’s, Lea’s and Siiri’s life-choices, which are all within the limits of the new law, in fact reveal the dominant ideology of the law, in Critical Legal Studies terminology, which on a surface level propagates equality while ideologically supporting patriarchy. Through their personal struggles against a social order that restricts their capacity for acting independently, they emphasise issues that were occupying many fictional New Nordic Women, although they are far from the wilder figures of the flapper or young hard-working city women.

The women in Jotuni’s and Wägner’s texts hold ambivalent and liminal positions in society because of their gender, age, and position. On the one hand, an extremely rational and cool attitude is a prerequisite for attaining decency, respectability and individual freedom in a society that would rather define women as emotional and self-sacrificing. Sexuality, on the other hand, is exclusively imputed to women of lower social standing, and in the case of the middle-classes, to younger women as wives and future mothers. Thus, it seems nearly impossible to embody respectability and sexuality simultaneously, and erotic reason becomes something of an oxymoron in a society built on double moral standards.

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