Droppar i rashavet: En vithetskritisk läsning av Maria Sandels Droppar i folkhavet

Abstract

Although critical whiteness studies have yet to form a stable footing within the Swedish literary academia, its recognition within the field is increasing. The recent surge in research concerning early Swedish working-class literature, including that which regards Maria Sandel (1870-1927), who’s pioneering role within the genre defines her as one of the most important early working-class authors in Sweden, is linked to the fact that the Swedish hegemonic whiteness that was established during the nineteenth and twentieth century is of certain interest. By viewing Sandel’s novel Droppar i folkhavet (1924) through the lens of critical whiteness studies, this paper studies the thematic ways in which the novel portraits whiteness by mapping its raciality and approaching the phenomenon intersectionally, that is, by understanding class, genus, race, and sexuality as collaborate pillars of whiteness. A point of view based on intersectionality is necessary to locate said themes and motifs that are symbolically charged with whiteness as they are epistemically and ontologically unstable and multifaceted. The heavy influence of Christianity is palpable in the orientations of the characters in Droppar i folkhavet, as these orientations are intimately related to sexuality, motherhood, cleanliness, and the duality of man in terms of body and spirit. By navigating in and around the whiteness that surrounds them, the novel unfolds the characters oscillating condition between whiteness and blackness as a way of demonstrating the Christian belief of the bodily material as low standing and the spiritually immaterial as most desirable. The text invites an intersectional method of approaching whiteness, which underlines whiteness as a phenomenon best understood through the multiple and intwined relations that constitutes its construction. Because of the dogmatic habit of contrasting whiteness with blackness, the outcome is nevertheless emblematic; in order for the characters to become as white as possible, they must have some measure of blackness to empower their whiteness even further.