"Är inte att komma och kräva kärlek en smula mycket begärt?"

Om kärleksvägran och småkakor i Kristina Sandbergs Maj-triologi

Abstract

Kristina Sandberg’s novels about Maj Berglund and her life as a reluctant housewife in a Swedish small town during the 1930’s to the early 1960’s have received wide critical acclaim. Following a previously unacknowledged feminist literary trace of cookie crumbs, this article discovers a sisterhood of mad women in the kitchen, running throughout the 19th and 20th centuries up till the contemporary revival of the image of the happy housewife in popular culture and fiction. Sandberg’s unique contribution to the genre is the notion of love refusal as a subversive strategy, which in turn is deeply connected with a hidden legacy of housewives novels from the 1950’s. These were experimental in form and aggressively outspoken in their emotional modus. Due to their emotional intensity and domestic setting against the backdrop of the Swedish welfare state, these novels may tentatively be labelled “dollhouse desperado stories”, including Ibsen’s Nora in their ancestry. Taken together, these housewife/madwomen narratives play a crucial role in the forming of, with Sara Ahmed’s term, the “Unhappy Archives” of feminist theory.