“I Have Had Myself as Experimental Object”: Ulla Bjerne and the Politics of Female Embodied Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT The authorship of Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969) is almost forgotten in Sweden today. This essay has the overarching aim of recovering her work and restoring it to the gendered contributions of Swedish twentieth-century literature, and in turn to assert its general importance. The analysis revolves around the significance of the body to literary representation and reception. In order to claim the authority to speak as a woman and outsider, Bjerne performed a new type of woman and testified to her experience. She asserted the significance of the body which devalued her, challenging the false claims to the universalism and transcendence of male subjectivity, and hence the literary values based on them. Bjerne aimed to give literary representation to unrepresented female embodied experience and to render an alternative female subjectivity, making a new type of woman accessible to thought. The analysis of her autobiographical trilogy shows how a feminist critique leads to an affirmation of female embodied experience through the political power of testimony, given literary representation through narrative form and imagery. At the end of the third volume, Botad oskuld (Innocence Remedied), radical non-belonging and constant movement become the prerequisites for the female subject in genesis. This is the foundation of Bjerne’s authorship, devoted to the communication of the unspoken female experience through the experience of her embodied self, in order to write as a woman and make herself, and thus the voice of a new type of woman, heard.