Den erotiska frigörelsen i Karin Boyes roman Kris

Abstract

Feministic literary reception research has shown how political and philosophical issues in women's texts have been regarded literary as transformed personal and private problems. The more well-educated, intellectual and independent awoman writer is, the more urgent it has been for critics to move the focus of interest from ber thoughts and ideas to her body and character. Even in the case of Karin Boye, literary critics have one-sidedly focnsed on her gender identity. Even today's literary studies on Karin Boye see the quest for a solution to her own enigmatic personality as the prime driving force of her literary work. The reviews in the capital conservative press rejected all attempts at a modernistic way of writing when Karin Boye's novel Kris (Crisis) was first published in 1934. Anders Osterling reviewed it in Svenska Dagbladet, questioning the credihility of the protagonist, "a highly-strung woman". Margit Abenius, in her monography Drabbad av renhet (Stricken vvith purity), discusses the novel from a quite differenl angle. She dislikes the mixed styles of the composition. Since she maintains that only a harmoniously structured work of art can symbolize an ordered world, she deprecates the disorderly aesthetics of modernism. Kris is a novel about a young woman's rebellion against society. chttrch, school and family. At the same time it is a tale of her quest for her own identity, and for the identity of love. Her eyes are opened to a new Life when she recognizes and accepts her feelings for another young woman. Before, she tes seen nature only as filled with spiritual symbols. Now, she sees the image of her beloved in all that lives and grows, and she herself is part of the new creation. The story shows that the support by another woman is eruciål for the protagonists actions. By focusing on women's relations with other women and to their work, Karin Boye violated the sexual morality of her time, and advocated ways of living together based on the new knowledge of man.