Kvinnor, natur och förmänskligade föremål – en ekofeministisk analys av Stina Aronsons Dockdans

Abstract

This essay concerns the play Dockdans (”Dolldance”) by Stina Aronson. Written in 1939 (but not published until 1949) it blends some of the most fascinating themes from two different stylistic and thematic periods in Aronson’s authorship. The emphasis on the woman in relation to the man in Aronson’s works from her modernist–feminist period (1928–31) ”blends” with a focus on the wasteland and the northen parts of Sweden, themes found more explicitly in her works of the 1940s. Recent research has also shown that Aronson’s ”wasteland novels” exhibit ecocritical aspects: something I argue is present in Dockdans as well. In order to analyze the connections to both the themes of feminism and the ecocrical aspects, I have used the theoretical framework of ecofeminism, which has proven to be rewarding insofar that it reveals connections between feminism and ecocriticism in Dockdans. Some examples include how women are portrayed as more in sync with nature, which is linked both to womanhood and to an ”intuitive approach”, which is contrasted by a rational, urban male approach, implicitly portrayed as environmentally bad in Dockdans. I have also focused on an animated / humanlike thing in Dockdans. A bed that makes the main character change his mind from a male rational approach to a more environmental friendly and feminists one. By comparing this bed with how political philosopher Jane Bennett uses Kafka’s living spool of thread Odradek as a thing that evokes a theoretical thought experiment which would make humans more environmentally aware, I argue that the bed in Dockdans can be interpreted as a literary dramatization of this idea. The bed is also very similar to Odradek in that it also destabilizes the position of both the human and the man. It can therefore be interpreted as an object challenging both an anthropocentric and patriarchal worldview.