Äventyraren, passionen och kvinnan

Abstract

This artiele deals with adventure-ideology and its role in the formation of male identity. Adventureideology is therefore crucial in determining relations beteween men and women. According to Michael Nerlich, who has studied the emergence of adventure-ideology, this ideology is a corner-stone of modernity in Western Europé. For the first time in western civilization, change is regarded as a positive value, and adventure entails the active search for change and the unknown. What Nerlich doesn't consider, however, is the role of woman in this transformational process. By relating the theory of adventure-ideology with the theory of the ideology of love, as it was developed by Denis de Rougemont, it is possible to find a connecting link between man and woman. One aspect of the ideology of love as it emerged in the middle ages, was that it obviously prepared the male for adventure. I.ove as passion is synonomous with suffering and disorder, and everything that is opposite to the routine of everyday life. 1 then examine two nineteenth-century novels from the viewpoint of adventure-ideology, and the ideology of love. In the first novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometeheus, I lind a high awareness of the importance of adventure-ideology in forming the relations between the everyday and the extraordinary, between common knowledge and new knowledge, and between man and woman. Mary Shelley definitely criticizes adventure- ideology from a woman's perspective, but she is also ambivalent. The second novel I examine was written in 1888 by the swedish author Bernhard Meijer, and is fairly unknown today. In this novel I find the basic characteristics of the male identity in the twentieth century, an identity which I call the frustrated adventurer.