The Potential of Travel As Nomadic Practice. the Situated and Embodied Female Subject in Ulla Bjerne’S Novel to Dare Being
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Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 15 (2020), z. 4, s. 263–274 doi:10.4467/20843933ST.20.022.12543 www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Litteraria HTTP://ORCID.ORG/ 0000-0001-6268-4290 BOEL HACKMAN Stockholm University e-mail: [email protected] The Potential of Travel as Nomadic Practice. The Situated and Embodied Female Subject in Ulla Bjerne’s Novel to dare being... Abstract This article focuses on the novel att våga vara… [to dare being…] (1948) based on the life of the explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), by the Swedish author Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969). Annotations in her diary as well as Eberhardt’s diary and biography, are in addition taken into account, read as examples of female situated embodiment and part of a feminist nomadic prac- tice, as elaborated by Rosi Bradidotti, in Bjerne’s aim to give representation to a new type of woman. It entails resistance to hegemonic, fixed and exclusionary views on feminine subjec- tivity, the affirmation of movement and the process of becoming, and the construction of new conceptions and images of women. The central hypothesis in the article is that travelling in att våga vara… has a potential to nomadize the female subject both literally and figuratively, in the quest to give representation to a situated, embodied female subjectivity, in both body and word. Keywords: female nomad, feminism, subjectivity, embodiment, travel The Female Vagabond and Nomad Bjerne published 27 books between 1916 and 1963, mostly novels, but also poetry and autobiographical works. Her first novel, Mitt andra jag [My Other Self ], in- troduced the female vagabond to Swedish literature.1 She describes using herself as “experimental object” in the aim to give literary representation to a new type of woman, “to expand the knowledge of the human. The woman”, in her diary. A considerable undertaking that Bjerne supposed that a more talented woman may have to continue, but has to be by someone like her – Bjerne concludes re- 1 K. Järvstad, Den kluvna kvinnligheten. “Öfvergångskvinnan” som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920, Eslöv 2008, p. 219. 264 BOEL HACKMAN gretfully that she is yet to encounter such a woman, with the exception for Sidi Mahmoud: “A sister soul”.2 The name Sidi Mahmoud is a version of the male alias used by the Russian- Swiss explorer and nomad Isabelle Eberhardt during her life and travels in North Africa between 1900 and 1904. The novel att våga vara… closely follows the biography of Eberhardt, consequently and only called Sidi Mahmoud throughout. With the novel, Bjerne wanted to ‟shove out that interesting female figure among the contemporary, banal types of women”.3 Ulla Bjerne described herself as a vagabond, displaced and rootless from an early age.4 She lived and travelled in Europe between 1911 and 1922, before mar- rying and settling in Finland, however continuing to travel all her life, in Europe as well as North Africa. In her twenties she had changed her name from Gully Ohlsson to Ulla Bjerne, cut her hair short and dressed in a pantskirt, vest and jack- et, fashioning herself as a New Woman. As such she stood model to, later to be esteemed Swedish artists such as Nils Dardel, Einar Jolin and Isaac Grünewald. Travel is constant in Bjerne’s authorship. During the time of writing att våga vara… she undertook an evaluation of her authorship so far, recorded in her diary under the heading “The important”. She notices a “prominent trace” through- out her work, beginning with Mitt andra jag and its conclusion: “to wander, at all times be seeing the road disappear behind oneself is the only possibility”.5 Bjerne’s autobiographical trilogy, similarly ends in the affirmation of constant movement. The last part, Botad oskuld [Innocence Remedied] (1961), unfolds in France 1914. Bjerne is leaving the country and her life as a writer is about to be- gin. The finishing sentences echoes the opening of Eberhardt’s diary from 1900, both depicting a young woman in a state of loss and solitude, but not desolation, looking out over the expanse of misty waters, towards an unknown future, liter- ally and figuratively on her way.6 I am not happy. But why should I be happy? Is it not enough that I aware of how crass and deceptive life is, still love it as highly as I do. Success or failure? What is that to the feeling of living fully and completely, and despite inner misery and inability still forge ahead? Constantly on the way.7 The woman vagabond is in this article analyzed as a feminist nomadic prac- tice as elaborated by Rosi Braidotti, focusing on to dare being… as the example alongside other work in Bjerne’s authorship, such as Don Juan in Tarbush [Don Juan in Tarbush] (1935) and her last book, the travelogue Sardiska stigar [Sardin- 2 U. Bjerne, “Diaries” (Vol. 41; 1944–1963), February 12, 1956. 3 U. Bjerne, “Diaries” (Vol. 41), March 2, 1947. 4 U. Bjerne, “Diaries” (Vol. 40; 1907, 1913, 1915–1944), March 15, 1937. 5 U. Bjerne, “Diaries” (Vol. 41), March 2, 1947. 6 I. Eberhardt, Writings from the Sand. Vol. I, Collected Works of Isabelle Eberhardt, Lincoln– London 2012, p. 355–358. 7 U. Bjerne, Botad oskuld, Stockholm 1961, p. 301. ‟Lycklig är jag inte. Men varför ska jag vara lycklig? Är det inte nog att jag medveten om livets krasshet och svek fortfarande älskar det så högt som jag gör. Lyckas eller misslyckas? Vad betyder det inför känslan att leva fullt och helt, och trots inre misär och otillräcklighet ändå sträva framåt. Ständigt vara på väg”. The Potential of Travel as Nomadic Practice. The Situated and Embodied Female Subject... 265 ian Pathways] (1963), not otherwise mentioned in the analysis, but that similarly trace a woman’s negotiations to be able to “be” and the potentiality of the per- ceived radically different “other” place. The analysis investigates strategies used by Bjerne in the aim to give representation to an alternative female subjectivity, founded in real life experience of women such as her own and Isabelle Eber- hardt’s, where travel holds a potential for liberation from confinement, nomadiz- ing the subject into a state of transit and transition. In extension, Bjerne could be placed in line with, and as a possible forerunner to, a succession of Swedish female writers during the 20th century, that similarly use their situated embodiment and the potential of travel, in order to represent an alternative female subjectivity, for example in the work of Kerstin Thorvall (1925–2010) and Birgitta Stenberg (1932–2014). According to Rosi Braidotti, nomadic consciousness is not defined by travel- ling in the literal sense, but by a critical consciousness and resistance to socially encoded ways of thinking and being.8 The point of this article however, is the significance of place and travel, freeing the female subject from a fixed status quo and the potential of movement and process of becoming.9 Founded in a critique of the false universalism of subjectivity the aim is the construction of new concep- tions and images of woman.10 With reference to Luce Irigaray, Braidotti points to the importance of finding a transmissible form for the female voice. It denotes a redefinition of subjectivity taking its physical roots into account and to speak like a woman in order to empower women and activate changes in their socio- symbolic conditions.11 Bjerne’s literary project can thus be described as the at- tempt to give literary representation to a new type of woman, to empower women and to bring about change, and is in this sense political. While holding on to the empirical foundation of female subjectivity and the practice of sexual difference feminism, Bjerne nomadizes the subject and redifines femininity as a receipt for transformation, movement and becoming.12 Biographical elements supplies the foundation and travelling both literally and figuratively sets the female in motion. Divisions and Transgressions The critique of the false universalism of subjectivism depart from notions of dif- ference that constructed the modern subject, alongside patriarchy, colonialism and heteronormativity.13 The norm is ascribed to the white male and differences are distributed negatively across a series of marginalized others.14 Woman becomes 8 R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York 2011, p. 26. 9 Ibid., p. 114–115. 10 Ibid., p. 150. 11 Ibid., p. 24–25. 12 Ibid., p. 114–115. 13 S.J. Kim, Empathy and 1970s Novels by Third World Women [in:] New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, eds. Julia Kuehn, P. Smethurst, London 2015, p. 163. 14 R. Braidotti, Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York 2011, p. 28. 266 BOEL HACKMAN the downgraded other, mirror to the dominating subject, forming its masculinity in a universalistic attitude. Travel arguably holds in att våga vara… a potential for liberation from dif- ferences organizing women and men on different levels, as indicated below, no- madizing the subject into a state of transit and transition. Subjectivity as Women as universal notion of the subject the specific other than the subject coinciding with consciousness coinciding with devalorized difference (different from) self-regulating uncontrolled rational agency irrational entitled to rationality in excess of rationality capable of transcendence confined to immanence denying corporeal origins or objectify- = a corporeality that is both exploited ing objectifying the body and reduced to silence Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of the universalism of the subject, positions woman as the cultural other and “unrepresented”. To poststructuralist Luce Iriga- ray however, woman is “unrepresentable within this scheme of representation”, as Braidotti points out.15 Bjerne’s aim can in this sense be regarded as the struggle to give representation to the hitherto unrepresentable.16 It is an ongoing, indefinite process, made possible in pieces, through gaps, suggestion and imagery.