“A Strong House We Build to Protect Us in Need…” : On Wel
Abstract The Danish novelists Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen and Vibeke
Grønfeldt had their breakthrough as storytellers in the 1970s and today they are
some of the most celebrated contemporary Danish authors. The article looks more
closely at how some of some of their works interact with the development of the
Danish welfare state that emerges in the writers’ youths. The welfare home and the
welfare family are core metaphors in their narratives and thereby show how their
novels interact with the political welfare rhetoric of the period.
Key words Danish literature; welfare narratives; novels on the welfare family
Authors Anne-Marie Mai is professor of Nordic Literature at the University of
Southern Denmark, she is the manager of research projects in welfare studies.
Her research areas include welfare narratives, contemporary Nordic literature,
the history of Nordic women’s literature and 18th Century literature. In 2014 she
was elected a Fellow of the Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her recent
publications include Hvor litteraturen finder sted, vol I-III (Where Literature takes
place) (Copenhagen 2010-2011), 100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period
to the Present Day, ed. Anne-Marie Mai and Thomas Bredsdorff (Copenhagen/
Washington: Museum Tusculanum 2011), “1966: A Literary-Historical
Experiment” in Scandinavica. An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies,
53. 2(2014: 53-81).
For generations, Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen and Vibeke Grønfeldt have been
yardsticks for Danish critics, writers and readers. They had their breakthrough as
storytellers in the 1970s: Jette Drewsen in 1972 with her debut book, Hvad tænkte
egentlig Arendse [What was Arendse really thinking of], which scored a bullseye in
the heated sex-role discussion of the time; Kirsten Thorup in 1977 with Lille Jonna
[Little Jonna], the first volume of the major series of novels about the gravitation of
a young girl from country to town; and Vibeke Grønfeldt in 1978, with Sommerens
døde [The summer’s dead], which is a searching, psychological portrait of two
young women in a rural environment that is on the decline.
The three writers have often been read separately and described on the basis
of their separate contributions to the renewal of a narrative prose, as for example in
the anthology Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede [Danish 20th century writers],
Vol. III, 2001, in which Kirsten Thorup and Vibeke Grønfeldt are portrayed by
analysis of how they have discovered new paths for prose. Here the emphasis is
on their experiments with the novel form in existential narratives about changes to
women’s lives and the gradual extinction of the peasant culture. Monographs and
PhD theses have been published as well as many university dissertations written in
which the three authors feature.1
It is typical for the various analysis to call attention to the social thematic
in the works. Seen from a literary criticism point of view, we are clearly dealing
with writers who in various ways make societal problems the subject of debate.
But the characteristic of how this takes place is extremely generalised. Accounts
often describe how the writers deal with the migration of the 1960s from country to
town, the disintegration of the old village community, the emancipation of women
and the psychological price paid for the liberation of the individual. But if one
wishes to concretise the social thematic and make it more than just a broad context
and look more closely at how some of the works interact with the development of
the welfare state that emerges in the writers’ youths, it can prove necessary to find a
more precise approach.
In this connection, it is an advantage partly to focus on individual works, and
partly to choose a system of concepts that can place the political language of the
welfare state and artistic language in relation to each other.
In the following, I take a closer look at three novels: Kirsten Thorup’s
Baby, 1973(translated into English 1979), Jette Drewsen’s Tid og sted [Time and
Place], 1978, and Vibeke Grønfeldt’s Det rigtige [The Right Thing], 1999. These
three works have been chosen because they make the home and the family core
metaphors in their narratives and thereby show themselves interacting critically
with the political welfare rhetoric of the period.
One gains a closer understanding of the actual welfare rhetoric by including
ideas from linguistic and sociological research about ‘framing’ and about
the metaphors and patterns of metaphors in everyday language as well as a
contemporary idea from political philosophy about politics and art as parts of a
constantly on-going creation of, and struggle for, the ways in which the sensual and
the sayable, words and things, are connected with each other.
The Framing of Welfare
In the establishment period of the welfare state a special welfare rhetoric emerges
in one of the largest Danish political parties, the Social Democrats — a rhetoric
that gradually spreads to other political parties, either as variations on the welfare
metaphors or a critique of the same. The welfare rhetoric acquires its own set
expressions, core metaphors and stylistic figures that one can still hear echoes
of in present-day political rhetoric. Certain critics of Social Democratic welfare
rhetoric actually believe that political language in Denmark is saturated with Social
Democratic welfare rhetoric.2
The concept of framing has been used in sociological and linguistic research,
among other things in investigations of how ideas and values crop up and are
formulated in the political debate. The American sociologist John L. Campbell
mentions how sociology studies the politicians’ framing of their policy in order
to maximise its impact. Frames function as normative and cognitive ideas and
language patterns that are placed in the foreground of political debates. For
example, the concept “economic globalisation” is used in the 1990s as framing for
the American shift to a neoliberal economic policy.
According to the American cognitive language philosopher George Lakoff,
framing is not mainly a question of politics or of creating political messages:
“Framing” is not primarily about politics or political messaging, or
communication. It is far more fundamental than that: Frames are the mental
structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to
create what we take to be reality. But the discovery and use of frame does
have an enormous bearing on politics. Given our media-obsessed, fast-paced,
talking-points political culture, it is critical that we understand the nature of
framing and how it can be used. (Lakoff 25)
The idea of deep “frames” is related to Lakoff’s and his partner Mark Johnson’s
concepts of the metaphors and conceptual patterns of everyday language, the socalled
“image schemata” that enable us to comprehend the world around us. In this
mode of thought, the metaphor is a basic human tool of understanding, one that is
both mentally and physically anchored. According to Lakoff, the metaphor is ‘the
main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform
abstract reasoning’ (Lakoff). When it comes to the study by cognitive semantics
of particular patterns of metaphors, a spatial pattern (the fact that we understand
reality via a spatial metaphoric) and a part-whole pattern can be used in the study
of the deep framing of the welfare state and its objectives.
The idea of the welfare state becomes spatial and concrete when it is visualised
as a home for the people and a societal family, or appears as a transferred epithet as
warm, helping hands and friendly voices that speak to the citizen. It is the thesis of
this article that Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen and Vibeke Grønfeldt have a special
outstanding account with the welfare state, since in their works and texts they react
to some of the political frames and metaphorical structures and in various ways
adopt a critical attitude to them via a honed linguistic awareness.
But in order to understand this exchange between literature and society it is
productive to include ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who in a
number of publications has dealt in depth with modern and postmodern literature
and art. He is interested in both poetry and prose, and in general one can assert that
Rancière utilises a concept of politics that means he regards politics and literature
as parts of a constantly on-going creation of and struggle concerning the ways in
which the sensual and the sayable, words and things, are connected with each other
— politics and literature take part in a struggle concerning the entire social picture.
Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere
of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable,
which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows
or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about
them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways
of speaking. The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is
involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of
being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world. (Rancière10)
Rancière conceives art and literature as possible contributions to the break with
consensus and with the regulation by those in power of the material world. It is
the combination of art’s possibility to appear detached from other social interests
and its use of language in a broad sense that makes it important in emancipatory
processes. Writers and artists have the possibility to change the frames through
which we perceive the material world. Writing fiction is reframing the real, building
up new relations between individual and collective, but, it should be noted, from a
non-dominant societal position, where art can free itself from links to other social
interests than itself as art. Thereby, modern literature has a special possibility to
create dissension.
So it is not the manufacturing of images of reality by literature that makes
it involved in politics; it is on the contrary the possibility it has via language to
introduce phenomena into a common social space that creates the relation between
politics and literature. Politics is a process of upsets, one in which interests and
phenomena are brought out into the light. Literature is part of this process, because
it has to do with anything at all that can be said and shown.
Political Welfare Rhetoric
The actual term welfare state emerges in Social Democratic language when the
prime minister, Hans Hedtoft, uses the concept “the governed-by-the-people
welfare state” in the debate book Mennesket i Centrum [The Human Being in
Focus] (Hedtoft 7).3 Here, inspired by the British political discussion of welfare
ideas, he combines the Old Norse word welfare with a concept of the state. The
word welfare has a long literary history in such writers as Holberg, Brorson,
Ewald, Hans Christian Andersen and Grundtvig, who, in accordance with common
language usage at the time, used the word in connection with the well-being,
happiness, progress and good conditions of the individual both while in earthly life
and beyond. Now the concept is linked to the state in a way already prepared for
by the philosopher Harald Høffding in his critical discussion in 1889 of Brandes’
Nietzsche-inspired thoughts concerning so-called aristocratic radicalism, in which
individualists seeking freedom and intellectuals were to ensure the future for the
many. Harald Høffding here formulates his ‘democratic radicalism’ as a diametrical
opposite to Brandes’ ideas. Democratic radicalism is to ensure the welfare and good
life of all. But Hedtoft goes all the way that lies just in front of Høffding. Hedhoft
links the welfare concept — or the welfare principle, as Høffding calls it — by
adding state organisation.4
The political framing of the concept welfare and welfare state that Hans
Hedtoft introduced means that the concept of welfare today most often refers
to something people have in common. If the politicians talk about “welfare,”
“more welfare” or “lasting welfare,” they do not mean the possibility of wellbeing
and security for the individual in his or her personal life but the share of
the individual in the common welfare — or common welfare pure and simple.
Thereby, the welfare concept comes to form what George Lakoff calls a deep frame
in the Danish political debate,5 even though the political ideas about the paths to
welfare often go in highly different directions and the actual concept of the welfare
state can also change meaning and character depending on its context (Petersen,
“Velfærdsstaten i dansk politisk retorik” 23).
In the mid 1950s, the concept of the welfare state was on the way to becoming
a negative framing in the political debate. The Conservative opponents of the
welfare policy used the concept “guardian state”(≈ nanny state), the term first being
used in 1956 by the Conservative Poul Møller as a criticism of the consequences of
Social Democratic policy regarding the welfare state.6
The guardian concept was thematised in literature by Villy Sørensen in his
Formynderfortællinger (Tutelary Tales, 1964). He deals with the guardian principle
from psychological, religious, existential, social and political angles. His tales deal,
among other things, with states and societies that assume the role of guardian of
their citizens, since the citizens are either deprived of or themselves renounce their
personal and social freedom and responsibility, after which a dreary conformity
and orthodoxy is victorious. Villy Sørensen himself claimed that he definitely had
not depicted present-day society (Clausen 30) but to a greater extent had shown
that social development acquires its own negative logic unless people personally
develop.
The point of the tales, in this optic, is that the dawning welfare state could
end up as being a guardian-like control system if people are unable to develop
psychologically. The negative political framing of the welfare state by the
Conservatives lost ground during the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s,
but it is still occasionally used, for example by several politicians from Venstre,
the right-wing liberal party in Denmark.7 In the mid 1960s, the deep framing of
the welfare state starts to work, with certain core metaphors becoming distinct and
influencing the political rhetoric of the other parties.
On the threshold of the 1970s, when the development of the welfare state
culminates, the welfare state in Social Democratic rhetoric starts to appear as an
architectural construction, a “folkhem”(home for the people) as the welfare state is
called in Sweden. This home is without “class barriers,” and where “reforms” and
“security” can be implemented.
So we are dealing here with a spatial pattern of metaphors, where the welfare
space is opposed to the “society of lack” that many Danes knew from the postwar
period.8 In its 1973 working plan, the Social Democrats thoroughly described
the “safety net” that was to be constructed under citizens in “the modern welfare
society.”9 The house metaphor is not substantial, but it forms a clear metonymic
basis in the imagery used, and it has a reference back to the biblical metaphoric
of the house and the temple building that was used in the labour movement songs
from the end of the 19th century, where for example Ulrich Peter Overbuy made
use of biblical expression when writing about the new society as “a strong house
we build to protect us in need” (Overby 1871).
The right-wing liberal party, Venstre, had also started to adopt the welfare
concept. In 1969, Venstre talked about replacing “the cold society” by a “human
society of well-being,” and it quickly transpired that the welfare idea was linked to
the idea of new building in the form of modern villages or single-family residential
areas that ought to be spread out around the country, cf. the party programme Frem
mod år 2000 [On towards the year 2000]. For Venstre, the core metaphor of the
welfare state is not a functionalistic rented dwelling but a single-family house by
the village pond.
In 1973, a crucial general election took place, with the old established parties
and their welfare ideas being challenged by various new parties. The so-called
“Single-Family Party,” Centrum Demokraterne, along with the Progress Party,
Fremskridtspartiet, got into the Danish parliament. The Centre Democrat Erhard
Jacobsen, left the Social Democrats in protest against the party’s policy towards the
growing middle stratum of car and single-family-house owners, and the Progress
Party rode on a wave of protest against the burden of taxation and the growing
public sector of the welfare state.
“The landslide election” quickly became the popular term for the dramatic
election which meant that the old parties lost many seats, while the Progress Party
at one swoop became the second-largest political party in Denmark.
The “landslide” metaphoric relates to a number of linguistic images that
the old parties had liked to used, with such expressions as basis, foundation,
reorganisation and expansion had implied the coming into existence of a societal
architecture, a building that was safe and secure.
With the “landslide election,” the very basis for the welfare architecture and its
cultural landscape seemed to be in danger. The chairman of the Social Democrats,
Anker Jørgensen, had to hand over the premiership to Venstre’s Poul Hartling, who
in his first New Year Speech in 1974 spoke of a need for a sanering(renovation)
of the welfare state, which as he interpreted as expressing the will of the people.
The Danish word used had definitely been chosen with care: something had to be
changed and modernised, but the welfare building was to endure.
The building and space pattern also unfolds in the rhetoric of many of the new
right-wing politicians. In the first programme of the Progress Party in 1973 the
concept of “sanering”(renovation) is very central. The Social Democratic society
is seen in terms of imagery as being a dilapidated house that needs renovating,
and Mogens Glistrup emphasises in a party-political letter to Poul Møller in 1973
that the Progress Party wishes to strengthen “Denmark as a business” and deliver
the welfare state and its social “safety net” from the “plethora of paperwork” and
“jungle of laws.”10We have Glistrup painting on the one hand a horror scenario of
an antediluvian despotism of paperwork, and on the other hand a dangerous Social
Democratic jungle, an untamed world of nature that threatens the welfare state — a
concept that Glistrup in this context completely appropriates to himself.
Even though Glistrup and his Progress Party did not have any major influence
on policy, he had captured a political platform in the Danish parliament, and he
made use of a political rhetoric that re-echoed in the whole of Danish society,
challenging the prevalent, somewhat cautious architectural welfare metaphor,
though with a clear reference to precisely core concepts in this metaphoric: the
house, path, plot, growth, health and security net.11Mogens Glistrup thus supplied
an almost performative linguistic turn in the political life of the time that had far
greater importance than his many political proposals (cf. Kuur Sørensen 104).
Welfare Metaphors at Work
An important feature of the establishment of the welfare state was a dramatic
change of the old patriarchal family. A new family structure with two breadwinners
out at work, consisting of father, mother and children, rapidly gained ground in
Denmark in the period from the 1960s and into the 1970s, and it was supported
by legislation and government resolutions concerning maternity leave, family
planning, the expansion of day-care centres and care of the elderly (cf. Borchorst
189 ff.). So already in its developmental phase the welfare state is on its way into
a societal situation where nothing is given in advance as regards father, mother,
grandparents or children. The family becomes a temporary community, loosely
connected by sex roles that are also rapidly being reformulated as the state assumes
the role of the framework around a security societal family that lives in a “home of
the people.”12
On the front pages of the Social Democratic programmes one can notice
the changes. The picture on an election programme from 1951 shows a mother
with two sons and a daughter standing outside their small non-detached, waving
goodbye to the father who is off to work. The caption beneath is the word “Security.”
The mother and children belong to the home, but the entire family is in fact on
its way out of the terrace house, and the younger girl would clearly like to be off
with her father. The picture looks like an omen that in the generation of the younger
girl women too will be part of the labour market, and that the state will come to
take over many of the tasks previously taken care of by the patriarchal family. The
members of the family are on their way away from each other in various directions:
work, school and institution, and the welfare state are to be the secure framework,
the pleasant non-detached house that encloses the life of the family.
Sixty years later, the Social Democrats choose a different metaphoric to
express their welfare ideals. In their programme of principles from 2011 we see
a little girl sitting on a jetty, her face turned away from us, out towards the open
sea. She is hugging a doll. She is alone, and the caption just says “hånden på
hjertet” (= hand on the heart = in all good conscience, honestly and truly). Here
the welfare state is presented as a kind of invisible lifeguard-parent that has taken
over responsibility for the individual’s life. The family relations have lost their
significance, but the child’s biological parents can rest assured — the welfare state
takes care of and watches over every single member of society, like a lifeguard over
the little girl on the great jetty of life. The welfare state is not there for families; it is
there for each and every citizen. It is no longer presented as a secure single-family
house and a cosy societal family but as a surrounding world with opportunities and
dangers and as an invisible being that is always there for individuals — the hand
that touches the heart.
The changes to family relations were supported by the fact that Denmark,
after a municipal reform in 1971, experiences a centralisation of the administrative
system of the public authorities and of such welfare institutions as hospitals and
schools. The economic crisis, which really accelerates after the major energy crisis
that starts in 1974, leaves long-lasting traces through the 1970s and has a profound
influence on the development of society up to the turn of the millennium. There
are geographical areas and occupations that never recover after the crisis and are
gradually phased out. The welfare developments thus also become geographically
out of synch with each other. Developments take place more quickly in the major
towns than in local areas in the country, but everywhere they are promoted by the
idea of growth and development.
The programmes of the political parties around the mid 1970s are full of
plus-words relating to well-being, growth and security. Venstre’s programme from
1975 has the title “We want to make society warmer” — which could, more or
less, also have been said by the Social Democrats, if there had not been certain old
core metaphors to cultivate, such as “solidarity.” The Social Liberal Party [Det
Radikale Venstre] stands united under the headline “A step on the way to a better
society.”The Social Democrats invite social debate with their motto “Solidarity,
equality and well-being”; The Socialist People’s Party expresses the wish for “A
new development — a new society” (1976), while The Conservative People’s
Party, also in the mid 1970s, repeats its headline from 1972 “Security in one’s own
home.”
Under the influence of the crisis, the Social Democrats state that they have
recognised “that there are boundaries for growth in quantity. For growth in quality
there are no boundaries.” It is here a question of creating “enhanced quality of
life.” “security for all” and “a feeling of belonging to society,” also via economic
democracy.13
The way to growth and well-being takes a different direction with
Venstre, where the emphasis is on “co-responsibility” and “co-influence” and
a strengthening of “the local community” if well-being and growth are to be
promoted. It is stressed that the rationalisation of schools, hospitals, transport and
police has jeopardised many values. “Did one think of the children’s well-being in
the school? Did one think of the increased distance between the patients and their
relations? What became of the individual in all this? What became of the joy in
working?”14
The idea of the local community and the values which women’s care of
children and the old once represented are eagerly advanced in several of the party
programmes. But the point is that the traditional tasks and skills of women as
regards the family are now best taken care of by society. Growth and well-being are
within all areas conditioned by the development of a close, warm society that may
well resemble the old nuclear family, but with the key point that the state has taken
the place of the reigning head of the family.
What gender, though, is the welfare state? Is it a father or a mother? As a
parent it resembles a bricolage of cultural values that relate to both the patriarchal
family’s male and female sex roles. It is a commanding and caring construction that
can manifest itself both as warm, helping hands, as the far-reaching arm of the law,
as the voices of teachers or as an electronic GPS, sewn into one’s clothes, that is to
prevent the senile from getting lost from the nursing home.
The relation between citizen and state often has a physical dimension in
the form of treatment, care and attention. The individual citizen meets changing
representatives of the state, but the welfare state finds it difficult to manifest
itself as a unified entity or figure — it is a space or a metonymic pattern: it is
hands, voices, text, aids, teaching, treatment and flow of money. The metaphor
of the house and the family therefore becomes important for politicians in their
concretisation of the idea of the welfare state. The welfare house and the family of
society gather together the metonymy and make the idea visible to citizens.
Kirsten Thorup, Vibeke Grønfeldt and Jette Drewsen work quite deliberately
with the special possibility modern literature offers to, on the one hand, imitate
all discourses (political, religious, scientific, personal) and, on the other hand,
to interpret them in different ways and inscribe them into a special, subjective
discourse (cf. Dines 100). In their literary publications there are involved in the
many changes to society and culture that take place in the period in which they
make their debuts, but the welfare thematic is often not obvious and programmed,
as it is in such an older prose writer as Martha Christensen (1926–95), whose debut
novel from 1962 Vær god ved Remond [Be nice to Remond], relates in a simple,
somewhat naive realism the story of a mentally retarded boy who is placed in a
children’s home.
The welfare themes in the three writers and their generation weave in and
out of linguistic and aesthetic challenges of contemporary ideas and values, also
including the political welfare rhetoric, both the deep framing of the welfare state
and the strong patterns of metaphors that emerge to do with house, home, family
and growth.
Family, House and Home
Shortly before the important general election of 4 December 1973, which turned
the political situation in Denmark upside-down, Kirsten Thorup’s debut novel
Baby was published, which can be read as a linguistic-aesthetic challenging
of the welfare metaphoric. The novel did not mark Kirsten Thorup’s popular
breakthrough, but it is one of the works that has subsequently been the subject of
both other writers’ interest and intense analysis. Kirsten Thorup says about Baby:
“The world that the language in Baby paints is very fluid and lacks cohesion. It is
quite deliberate that there is no difference between whether the book describes a
table or a thought, but links all the clauses and sentences with ‘and’” (Juhl 102).
Baby is based on the young writer’s and young mother’s own experience
of the Copenhagen precinct of Vesterbro, full of old-fashioned prostitutes and
pickpockets, but also typified by slums, crime and hard drugs. It is a social field
undergoing a transformation from an almost cosy old-fashioned criminal and
slum precinct to a tough urban district populated by the losers and outsiders of the
welfare state. The action centres on a circle of people living in this environment.
It is a gallery of big-city existences in a social and psychological conflict with
themselves and each other. Thorup’s novel deals with single parents, petty
criminals, unemployed, abortion-seekers and drug-addicts who are precisely the
types who ought to be included in the socialising safety net of welfare legislation,
but who apparently fall through the loose mesh, and where at last they are “caught
up with,” the help offered seems a parody and frightening.
Thorup emphasises that the description of the characters has almost been
stripped of stories about childhood or geographical past. The characters only exist
in their now and present habitats; they are without psychological depth and function
as mirror for each other.
The focusing of the novel on the present time results in the reader having
difficult in following a temporal progression: it seems as if the time-span of the
novel is about a year, around 1971–72. The narrative starts in February, and one
can follow a progression up to September and into the winter months, but the
sequence is interrupted by illogical jumps between seasons in several chapters,15and
one soon discovers that place and space are more important for the characters than
time. Time is stationary, while place and space bind and hold the characters in a
vacuum and interspace between life and death. Place and space are precisely not
secure places to stay, but are some sort of non-places the characters move around
between without either dwelling or existing there. While the contemporary political
rhetoric is overflowing with concepts of a welfare future that is being created and
shaped here and now via reforms, time does not make any impact on the universe
of the novel. While the political rhetoric implies that ‘in time’ advance and progress
comes, time flows without direction and amorphously in Thorup’s novel.
The novel centres on the middle chapter “I Am a Soft Ice, I Am a Tough
Guy,” which deals with the antique dealer and money lender Eddy, who the other
characters are dependent on. The car salesman Marc owes Eddy money; Marc’s
wife — with the car-name Cadett, sleeps with him for money; the gay couple Ivan
and Ric are his henchmen and gorillas; Leni, who earns money from translating
porno, is his former wife; the single mother Karla with the boyfriend, the upperclass
boy David, rent one of his slum properties; the transvestite Jolly Daisy appears
in the club milieu that Eddy frequents and meets a number of the other characters:
the young girl, Nova, who has run away from home; and the dishwasher, Susi, who
is in love with David and becomes a “gay-mother” for Ric and Ivan.
Eddy is a kind of criminal “spider” who holds the others caught in his web
of power, violence and money. He is the patriarch in a criminal parallel society
beyond the law and order of the welfare state. The paradox, however, is that the
welfare state makes use even so of Eddy’s power and his unscrupulous property
speculation.
The welfare institutions make their appearance in the universe of the novel
when Marc, hopelessly in debt after having lost his job, and his wife decide to
move into The Men’s Home (an institution where men with problems can spend the
night free of charge), an organisation to help drug addicts, and then Nova and Sonja
murder a random car-driver and end up at a rural borstal, the human climate of
which proves to be as cold as ice, despite the beautiful farming idyll with animals
and fields. The welfare institutions that ought to help to bring people back into
secure frameworks actually keep their clients on the periphery of society, and with
a view of an abyss.
The flat that the state eventually offers the single mother Karla is a parody of a
dwelling — it is unhealthy, dilapidated, a pure slum dwelling that ends up causing
the death of Karla’s daughter — it also happens to be owned by the villain Eddy.
The novel does not apportion guilt or responsibility — it blames neither
society nor individuals, but shows the welfare society to be an ambiguous structure
in which people try to survive by establishing, for better or for worse, human
relations and a “family.” The welfare institutions, however, undermine precisely
these relations, since they strive to take over the role of the family and place
themselves in its stead. So the institutions take measures against the makeshift
families that the characters attempt to form. The characters are admittedly included
in the country’s laws and welfare, but it is precisely these laws and welfare that
isolate them from each other and banish them to the periphery of society. The
welfare architecture is neither secure nor healthy as either a symbolical or physical
place to live.
The novel thus assimilates and processes political and socio-analytical
discourses in such a way that they are at the same time both used and rejected.
On the basis of Rancière’s ideas about literature and politics, one can claim
that the novel at the level of form and aesthetics underlines the importance of
artistic language as a discourse that can critically interpret the language and
concepts of politics and thematise how staple societal metaphors can artistically be
challenged.
When the romantic all-mother/all-father/all-baby, the transvestite Jolly Daisy,
finally invites the porno translator Leni in to a nativity-play-like scene with nightstars
and heavenly peace, Kirsten Thorup attempts in a way to reformulate a
biblical metaphoric of the holy family and the child that was born in a manger. One
can view this final scene as an allegorical comment on the secure societal family
of the political rhetoric, a comment that points out that one has to start right from
square one with the biblical metaphoric of the labour movement and also think in
new gender constructions if the societal house is to be built out of closeness and
humanity.
Time Creates New Wounds
While Thorup’s characters fight to establish alternatives to both the patriarchal
family and the new state welfare’s father-and-mother, Jette Drewsen’s novel Tid og
sted (Time and Place, 1978) tells of a characteristic tendency to drain the family
of its functions and tasks in the establishment phase of the welfare state. The novel
portrays a group of people — school friends, relations, acquaintances — dipping
into various points in time from March 1961 to October 1976.
The family appears as a social relation that is becoming increasingly unstable.
It is no longer a rock-solid ‘father house’ that the women fight to break free of. 16
Like Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen challenges a conception of time that
moves forwards and brings progress with it, as she breaks down the traditional
chronology of the novel: she starts with an account of the characters in April 1974
and then moves back to March 1961, followed by March 1966 and October 1968.
The final chapter can be dated to October 1976. In the course of the almost fifteen
years a number of the characters have become parents, but the family structure that
they themselves have experienced as children is rapidly becoming a thing of the
past. Their own parents have become old age pensioners who arrange their lives
and speak in a way that the family’s grandchildren simply cannot comprehend. The
social and cultural development creates a language gaps that kept people apart from
each other.
Jette Drewsen portrays various variations of the new family relations in the
novel: a middle-class married couple (the doctor Ejvind and the doctor’s secretary
Elise) with half-adult children, on their way towards infidelity and divorce; a
working-class family (the checkout assistant Ingrid and the taxi chauffeur Niels),
who stay together despite the man’s infidelity; a lesbian university teacher (Helle),
who lives on her own; a young unemployed academic woman (Birgitte), who
moves into a commune with her child and deselects her child’s father; a woman
journalist (Laila), who when very young had an abortion without her parents
knowing about it, but who as an adult decides to have her child when she becomes
pregnant after a one-night stand (with Ejvind) and to find a social father for the
child. This she finds in an elderly man who functions as both father, grandfather
and child in the family — for as long as it lasts. He is shunted out of the makeshift
family rather fortuitously after a somewhat scary “evening at home.”
When Helle and Ejvind’s mother dies, death is not felt to be a striking
or important event by those left behind — it is got over quickly, quietly and
anonymously. Helle uses the death as an excuse to visit a female friend she is
interested in as a sex partner, while Ejvind takes a sleeping powder. Later, the two
intellectual siblings start to ‘theorise’ about the mother’s death, since the actual
emotional relation seems to have disintegrated. The daughter-in-law, Elise, feels
herself hard-pressed and “deprived of the right to grieve for someone who had been
close to her” (Drewsen 173).
In the course of the 15 years covered by the novel, the single, divorced parent
becomes a characteristic figure, and those who do not get divorced during those 15
years weigh up their situation and think about a possible way out of the “decorative
family” (Drewsen 177).
Emotionally, however, the characters have come to a standstill: they are caught
in the childhood they never managed to round off, because the development of
welfare got rid of childhood’s form of the family “overnight,” so to speak, before
they were ready to take over control of their lives themselves, and they still miss
their parents as parents. Their hold a field of possibility open, rather than assume
the role of responsible participants in close human relationships.
Nothing is sure any longer except the need of the individual for a closeness
and intimacy that no longer has a social space. It is a difficult project to constantly
have to balance the family relationship and one’s own role.
The individual breaks free of the family ties that have limited people morally
and socially, but the emancipated life is full of emotional costs and restlessness.
And at such a time of upheaval, it is not really acceptable to be content with one’s
life, one’s husband and one’s children. The checkout assistant Ingrid is almost
ashamed about still being in love with her husband. She feels it is problematic that
she has no desire to liberate herself, and that she tolerates his relationship with
other women.
As a counter-image to the imploding family there is the depiction in the
middle of the novel of women’s lives in a high-rise block of flats where some of
the characters live for a while. The women meet in the wash house in the basement
where they exchange their experiences with and of children, marriage and work.
They are on maternity leave, are housewives or have half-day jobs, and in that way
are neither submerged in family life or work. There is a kind of “ritual intimacy”
(ibid 107) between the women of an almost mythical nature. “The women at the
well” is the archaic title of the chapter about the wash house.
One can draw a parallel between this scene and the image of the holy family at
the end of Kirsten Thorup’s novel Baby, although the conception of the alternative
to the imploded family in Drewsen has a form closer to reality and links up with
ideas in contemporary housing.
The high-rise block becomes a small welfare idyll where, even if one does
not “matter to each other,” one is at least able to behave humanely, considerately
and empathetically. The actual form of housing with flats makes it possible for
the women to pop into each other’s homes and share washing machines in the
basement. This social mixing promotes conversations, and on the day in 1966 that
the chapter describes there is a TV transmission of the wedding of the Dutch crown
princess to a German. Here the state even displays a human face, with the pictures
of a young successor and her husband to be!
The women use the TV broadcast as an occasion to talk about their own
weddings, their married lives and their children. The newly married Elise does
not join them in the TV room to begin with, but manages even so to ask the more
experienced women about “additions to the family” during their time together
in the basement wash house. “Yes, but when it’s suddenly there like that, a child
you’ve not known before at all, can you actually find time for it and afford it?
— Tell me, have you got into trouble or something, Ingrid said and laughed. —
Well, not trouble exactly, I’m married after all, but. — Are you quite sure? — Not
completely. And it wasn’t precisely the idea. — It’s very rarely precisely the idea,
Margit said” (Ibid 100). The description of the child as a stranger who disturbs the
relationship between man and woman displays the challenges brought about by the
new aspects of married life.
The intimacy between the women is greater than between spouses, even
bosom friends will not share everything. Margit declares that she stays with her
husband because she can’t be alone; Ingrid recalls her first boyfriend and would
like to meet him again, but enjoys her husband, Niels, also sexually, and thinks that
he resembles the bridegroom in the TV wedding. The chapter about the women at
“the well” sketches a small welfare idyll where the women are neither condemned
to loneliness, the twosomeness of marriage or the patriarchal family. But the idyll is
only a “breather” between the many changes taking place in society and the family.
When Laila becomes pregnant, she manages without her family’s knowledge
or help from her boyfriend to get an abortion based on her mental condition — the
novel takes place long before the introduction of free abortion. The meeting with
the hospital is as cold as ice — and the staff is full of hypocrisy. Everyone knows
why Laila has been admitted — because she wants an abortion — but officially it
is classified as pelvic infection. She is referred to a male psychiatrist, a consultant
doctor who interrogates her in an insulting way about her sexual habits while
putting on a smiling face and suggesting they use first names. He finally speeds
up the conversation; after interesting details about condoms and pubic hair all he
wants to do is get the “case” over and recommend an abortion:
The consultant doctor asked, more quickly now, the patient answered also
quickly, he asked what she felt when she saw a pram, she answered insecurity
and despair, he asked what she had thought in her darkest hours, she
answered abortionists and suicide, he asked what she thought when she saw a
handicapped child, she answered fright. (Ibid: 69)
Hospital communication demonstrates the incapacity of the professional helpers
and their curious looks into a situation in which the family of the young girl is
completely absent and is to be kept in the dark about a pregnancy that is regarded
as shameful. Later in the novel we see another hospital situation, where the doctor
shows a lack of consideration: Gert studies the X-rays of one of his patients,
somewhat absent-mindedly, while talking to his mistress.
He leant back slightly and read the name on the case record. Then he looked
up at the photos again and said it was a good thing it wasn’t someone one
knew and was fond of who looked like that inside. There couldn’t be long to
go now. (Ibid 169)
The welfare institutions, in the optic of the novel, simply lack human qualities
and become untrustworthy as replacements for the family in relation to children,
the elderly and the sick. In Drewsen, the welfare institutions are male, in the form
of doctors who believe they have the power of life and death, although also the
women who work in the institutions lack the capacity to care.
The characters do not mature and their welfare lives have to be told piece by
piece and divided into short situations and intermezzos. Neither a happy outcome
nor a complete tragedy are possible. Life, the changes and difficulties, simply
continue year in and year out — strangely endlessly.
The Cost of Growth
While Kirsten Thorup and Jette Drewsen show the schism between disintegrating
forms of the family and the emergence of new welfare-institutionised parents, we
find the growth metaphoric of the welfare state dealt with, among other things,
in Vibeke Grønfeldt’s novel Det rigtige (The Right Thing, 1999), which is a
contemporary novel, written on the threshold of the new millennium. The novel
looks both backwards and forwards in time, while telling the story of Ena Jakobsen,
who is delivery woman for a laundry in a small peripheral community that is
dominated by old people and odd-balls. Ena spends all her spare time maintaining
her family’s nursery, which was ruined when the convenience shops started to
import vegetables from all over the world on a large scale. Now Ena takes care of
the nursery, showing it to people as a kind of museum and cultivating magnificent
specimens of vegetables and flowers which she, like some self-appointed welfare
worker gives away to the local elderly, weak and various specially selected groups.
Ena has always striven to do things rightly and properly. She was brought up
to live up to an ideal of “a nice girl.” “The right thing” represents the good, useful
and well-carried-out piece of work; “the right thing” is the moral norms, virtues and
rules of rural society in relation to the family, the social community and the female
sex. “The right thing” is to contribute actively to the well-being of the family, the
maintenance of the community and mastering one’s sex role.”
As a child and teenager, Ena was a competent girl who also managed to keep
the nursery afloat economically when her father fell ill and her maternal grandfather
had to give up. Now most of Ena’s projects fail, except the nursery museum:
here she always keeps abreast of the slightest sign of any decline. Everything is
scrupulously ordered and maintained. Ena gets one step ahead of the inevitable
wear and tear of materials: “It became almost better than when it was in use. The
wear and tear was less. She could expand. [...] It was all ready for use. All that had
to be done was to press a button, her mother said proudly.” (Grønfeldt 23) Ena has
become a female inheritor of her ancestors’ dreams of a nursery, but the dreams
have been transformed into a museum extravaganza after the changes to social
and working life that modernisation and the development of the welfare state have
entailed.
The story of Ena ends badly, and it is her anger that takes her over the edge to
which she clings.
Ena is angry that the growth which is part of the development of the welfare
state has led to the very basis of the family’s existence withering away; she is
angry that her proficiency and industry, her loyalty to the “well-mannered school”
is not rewarded by the development of society, but instead is punished — even
mocked — and her loyalty leads socially to her becoming increasingly isolated.
She is angry at being angry, and her anger is hard to place. It is admittedly Ena who
shouts and scolds, but the replies and conduct that come from the representatives
of the welfare institutions and her work colleagues actually contain an aggression
and anger that hit Ena hard and are felt to be physical violence. Ena is the one who
expresses the anger, but she is not the sole cause of it.
Vibeke Grønfeldt develops the anger issue of the novel by introducing some
of the core metaphors of the welfare state that deal with growth, development wellbeing
into her universe and by showing them in a critical light.
In the optic of the novel, the welfare system works and yet does not work, for
example in relation to Ena’s younger brother, Oscar. He is a drug-addict, formerly
convicted and mentally ill, and as such has been installed in his own flat and has
got a light job at a library. But the welfare system and the male figures of authority
lack the human understanding, solicitude and patience that the women exercised
in the patriarchal family of the former society. The policeman who comes at the
request of the neighbours to make Ena see reason and calm her down does not
discover just how bad things are.
The welfare state knows best, but it does not see things particularly clearly
when it comes to providing care and security, and refuses to recognise Ena’s
earnest struggle to retain the values and world of her family. She ought to abandon
the nursery, send her mother to a nursing home, get herself a job or apply for social
security benefit!
Ena manages to procure a financial help for her nursery by becoming a
chauffeur for a laundry that, among other things, serves social clients, and she feels
that she is now at last on her way towards what is ‘right’. The clean laundry helps
to get both the social clients, children, drug-addicts and formerly punished back
onto an even keel. “Ena Jakobsen believed in the result of common efforts. Those
of the local authorities, police, doctors, school. It is possible, what’s right” (Ibid
13). Ena uses her eyes and tells of mishandled children in the homes round about
that she gets to see, but the social workers and council workers say they know
everything in advance. Her observations are ignored, and she gets the impression
that social workers, educationalists and doctors consider her a naive person who is
a nuisance. She stops noticing what takes place around her. Only the bitter feelings
inside her growth at the same rate as the well-formed apples in her garden.
One can view the two “activities” in Ena’s life: the nursery of her childhood
and the laundry of her adult life as societal metaphors: the nursery represents the
old, patriarchal local community, where time and place, working life and family life
were in balance. The nursery is an enterprise with meaningful work assignments
and a solid basis of existence for the men, women and children of the family.
Furthermore, the nursery contributes to a local division of labour, since it provides
the local area with the vegetables, the fruit and the flowers that the more specialised
farms and workmen of the local area do not have time to cultivate themselves. The
family works at the nursery in harmony with the seasons and uses nature without
exploiting it, even though the use of toxic pesticides starts to increase in the course
of Ena’s childhood and adolescence. The father’s illness is also taken care of within
the framework of the family, since Ena — as if she was his son — simply takes
over his work. This shift in the traditional division of labour between the sexes
is marked symbolically by the fact that Ena steps outside the moral order of the
local community, becomes sexually active while unmarried — even pregnant. She
manages discreetly to get a half-illegal abortion carried out by the local doctor.
The change in the sex roles gives her a certain power over her own body, but
also increases the possibility of her inflicting pain and suffering on herself. The
increased use of toxic pesticides in the nursery, the protracted illness of the father
and Ena’s sexuality and abortion are thus signs that neither the old sex roles nor the
old order of society can be maintained.
The warm, close, responsible and solitary growth society, where the female
caring assignments are to be society’s responsibility and that politicians spoke of
in the early 1970s when Ena was young, wither with the increasing centralisation
and the economic interventions that comes with the expansion of the welfare state.
The productive ‘greenhouse’ is replaced by the servicing and universalistic welfare
laundry, whose rationalised services can be accessed by both the doctor’s family
and the social clients — their economic capacity being duly taken into account, it
should be noted. But the laundry only provides “surface treatment.”
When Ena’s anger finally overpowers her, she burns the nursery down to the
ground. She is given a suspended sentence, and the welfare state steps in, as Ena
and her mother are placed in sheltered housing. “Now she is safeguarded and only
needs to choose the right thing and do the right thing” (Ibid 307). But “the stillness
fills up with meaninglessness. Or the meaning is emptied and echoes in the late
afternoon when the postman has driven past” (Ibid 311).
In the concluding chapters of the novel, Ena takes to the bottle, is raped and
ends up being pumped out with a broken arm and in the course of her confused
downward spiral she passes a large boulder in the breakers. She embraces the stone
and suddenly feels understood, believed in and remembered.
The image does not imply any redemption or release, but if Ena has not got
solid ground under her feet, she has at least a very hard stone in her embrace.
The story of Ena has comprised the elements: earth (the nursery), water and air
(the laundry) and fire (the burning down of the nursery). The stone, as an old,
volcanic material, unites all the elements, and the concluding images give the
novel a symbolic touch that underlines the fact that it is not exclusively a realistic
analysis of society but a complex artistic image of the uncertain feelings that are
also connected to life and sex when placed under pressure by the development of a
modern society.
The novel does not idealise the old local society with the nursery as a lost
paradise, a societal Garden of Eden; it captures Ena in a number of strong glimpses
in which we perceive both the hard toil of the old world and the just as hard
emancipation of the individual in the new world.
In the novel, Vibe Grønfeldt rejects an idealisation of the past or a
mythologizing of an evil and ramshackle present, where it is a shame for the
peripheral areas, for women and the elderly; but she is interested in how anger
comes into being and is fuelled when Ena is unable to find her rightful place in
life, and when her self-observations cause her both to grow to giant size and to
shrink to absolutely nothing. Grønfeldt gives this imbalance and this anger a voice,
showing it to be a force that grows out of what, unstated, has disappeared during
the development of the welfare society and its adaptation to economic crises.
In Vibeke Grønfeldt, the explanations cannot be pushed on the back burner,
and the language of the novel becomes as restless and anxious as the characters
themselves: Ena’s life cannot be reduced to an effect, but not be summed up in
other ways either. The descriptions both conceal and reveal other meanings all the
time.
Two different types of art are mentioned in the novel: the recent arrival Edel
Borg’s complete failure of a performance of sections of West Side Story and La
Traviata and Schubert lieder, and the virtuoso performance by the singer Marianne
Berg of extracts of Verdi in the church. The two types of singing complement each
other as an image of the fact that art may stretch from bel canto to shrieking and
squalling if it is to approach the human and be open for interpretation. And it is
quite characteristic that the two types of art are executed by women — it is the
female sex that is placed under the severest pressure by the new welfare life, and
that therefore calls for artistic interpretation.
The women end up by carrying out a self-annihilating gesture in maintaining a
social order that, with far too little success, took over their responsibility and tasks
in the family, in the name of progress, emancipation and welfare.
The welfare state itself appears at the end of the novel as steps, voices,
friendly hospital orderlies and friendly helpers with nice, shiny trays with food
in the sheltered housing. The welfare state is anonymous metonymic remains of
something has gradually become rather indefinably human.
The helping hand, which is one of the welfare state’s strongest metonymies
and which has been used both in connection with health campaigns and protests
against reductions of social benefits, is here shown in its anonymity and its
difficulty in trying to be caring and considerate.17From her sheltered housing, Ena
has a view of a field where in time more social housing is going to be built: she is
quite literally becoming hemmed in by welfare.
But then she nevertheless finds the great fairytale stone at the end of the work,
and this is perhaps precisely what she is need of. To embrace something large and
incomprehensible, the cold stone from the beginning of time brings a peace to her
body that Ena has not known before. The semantic universe of the novel thus opens
out towards what is uninterested, untold and uncertain from a human and social
point of view. The art of novel writing continues.
The novels Baby, Tid og sted and Det rigtige are examples of how the
linguistic framing of the welfare state and its metaphorical patterns are investigated
and challenged in some of the most important oeuvres of the welfare period. As
an extension of the ideas of Jacques Rancière about literature and society, one can
claim that the three novels bring phenomena to do with the change of the family
and the cost of growth into a common social space and help to make a critique of
the core metaphors of political language sayable and audible.
Notes
1. Cf. Hjordt-Vetlesen (2002), Zeuthen (2008), Passages special issue on Kirsten Thorup, no. 56,
2006. Various dissertations were also written which dealt with the authorship of Jette Drewsen,
especially in the 1980s and 1990s, e.g. Munch-Hansen (1999)
2. The linguistic framing of the welfare state is discussed in the political debate book Velfærd
tur-retur. Efter socialdemokratismens sammenbrud (Welfare here and back. After the collapse of
Social Democracy, 2005), in which Niels Lillelund in the article “Social Democratic language’
proposes that the whole Danish language has been influenced by the Social Democratic framing
of the welfare state. Social Democratic language has removed the welfare state from reality and
made the word “social” an absolute password that all parties have adopted” (Lillelund 2005: 24).
3. For a more detailed account of the history of the welfare concept see Petersen 2002: 15 ff.
4. Cf. Anders Thyrring Andersen, who in the article “The dialogic-religious welfare principle
in Harald Høffding, Ole Sarvig, Martin A. Hansen, Peter Seeberg and Svend Åge Madsen,”
Andersen 2011, has provided a detailed analysis of the discussion between Brandes and Høffding
as well as of the importance of the welfare concept in Høffding.
5.“These (deep frames) are the most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political
philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without deep frames, there is
nothing for surface frames to hang on to. Slogans do not make sense without the appropriate deep
frames.”(Lakoff 2006: 29)
6. Cf. ibid. and cf. Madsen 2006: 107, who bases himself on Klaus Petersen’s studies.
7. The politicians Karsten Lauritzen and Kristian Pihl Lorentzen have both used the concept on
their websites.
8. Cf. The Social Democrats’ party programme. Det nye samfund – 70’ernes politik
vedtaget af den 30. kongres[The new society – policy for the 1970s, approved by the 30th
congress] 1969.
9. Cf. The Social Democrats: Work programme 1973.
10. The letter has been published at the website of The Royal Danish Library: http://www.kb.dk/
image_client_static/default/viewer/?viewerPagesUrl=online_master_arkiv_2/nonarchival/PLG/
Partiprogrammer/fremskridtspartiet/fre19731/&viewerPgNumber=0&viewerR2L=false#
11. In connection with the research project Velfærdsstatens sprog og begreber [The language and
concepts of the welfare state], led by Klaus Petersen, SDU (2010-2014), Lasse Horne Kjældgaard
has discussed the house and the path as basic welfare state metaphors; I have contributed to
the further analysis of these metaphors and would underline that they have roots in the Social
Democratic biblically coloured metaphors from the end of the 19th century. The political rhetoric
revolves round these metaphors, also when such concepts as basis, structure, common property,
expansion, health, well-being and care are included.
12. For a more detailed account of changes to the family structure during the development of the
welfare state, see: Christoffersen 2004. Here it states: “The censuses and the later occupational
statistics combined with the statistical umbrella surveys have made it possible to follow
developments within this area. By the nature of things, one will be inclined to underestimate the
extent of the housewife role in such surveys because a large number of women can have been
housewives for shorter or longer periods without that being the case on precisely the day they
were interviewed. From 1940 to 1965, almost half the women between 15 and 74 were full-time
housewives on the day of the survey. This share then dropped sharply. In 1990, housewives only
made up 5% of the same group of women on the day of the interview.
In 1960, one can observe a very clear tendency for large numbers of women to stop being
engaged in active employment at about 25, i.e. when they start to have children [...]. While two
thirds of the 20-year-olds were in active employment, only one third of the 30-years-olds were
back in 1960. This pattern has changed completely 25 years later. Firstly, the 25-30 year-olds
have a very high level of active employment, almost 90%. In the age groups where the women
have young children, they maintain a high level of active employment in 1985. 15 years late, the
picture has changed, since a considerably larger percentage of the young women under 30 are
still in education or training. So the figure for 2000 is considerably lower for the extremely young
women than was the case around 1985.” (Christoffersen 2004: 130).
13. Cf. The Social Democrats, Solidarity, equality and well-being, 1975: 9.
14. Cf. Venstre, We want to make society warmer, 1975: 2
15. Susanne Pedersen emphasises these chronological breaks in her analysis of Baby. (Pedersen
1997: 37 ff.).
16. The concept refers to the depiction by female writers of marriage and the family in the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th century; the expression comes from the Swedish writer
Fredrika Bremer and is the title og Vol. II of Nordisk kvinde litteratur historie, [The History of
Nordic Female Literature] 1993, http://nordicwomensliterature.net/, 2010.
17. See for example the use by Tønder Municipality of the hand as a metonym in its approach to
elderly citizens who are in need of personal help and care: http://www.toender.dk/Borger/Aeldre-/
Personlig-og-praktisk-hjaelp.aspx
In connection with protests against welfare cuts in 2007, social and health workers used
the hand as a poster with the text ‘L http://www.foa.dk/Global/News/Forbundsnyheder/
Forbundsnyheder/2012/Oktober/Sosu-ere-er-ikke-de-eneste%20varme
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medlemskab af EF 1950-1972, PhDthesis, Departure of History, Culture and Social Science,
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—. Hvor litteraturen finder sted, Vols. 1-3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2010-2011.
—. ed. Kættere, kællinger, kontorfolk og andre kunstnere. Odense: University Press of Southern
Denmark, 2013.
—. “Det muliges kunst og det umuliges politik. Om Jacques Rancières diskussion af litteratur og
politik som bidrag til politisk historie, illustreret af et dansk eksempel.” Temp. Tidsskrift for
historie 8( 2014): 65-79.
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kvindelige forfattere i perioden 1970-1998, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics,
University of Copenhagen, 1999.
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Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2010. 217-236.
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1(2002): 16-28.
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Thorup, Kirsten. Baby. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973.
Zeuthen, Louise. De virkelige halvfjerdsere : krop, køn og performativitet hos Suzanne Brøgger
og Kirsten Thorup. PhD thesis, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of
Copenhagen, 2008.
Grønfeldt had their breakthrough as storytellers in the 1970s and today they are
some of the most celebrated contemporary Danish authors. The article looks more
closely at how some of some of their works interact with the development of the
Danish welfare state that emerges in the writers’ youths. The welfare home and the
welfare family are core metaphors in their narratives and thereby show how their
novels interact with the political welfare rhetoric of the period.
Key words Danish literature; welfare narratives; novels on the welfare family
Authors Anne-Marie Mai is professor of Nordic Literature at the University of
Southern Denmark, she is the manager of research projects in welfare studies.
Her research areas include welfare narratives, contemporary Nordic literature,
the history of Nordic women’s literature and 18th Century literature. In 2014 she
was elected a Fellow of the Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her recent
publications include Hvor litteraturen finder sted, vol I-III (Where Literature takes
place) (Copenhagen 2010-2011), 100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period
to the Present Day, ed. Anne-Marie Mai and Thomas Bredsdorff (Copenhagen/
Washington: Museum Tusculanum 2011), “1966: A Literary-Historical
Experiment” in Scandinavica. An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies,
53. 2(2014: 53-81).
For generations, Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen and Vibeke Grønfeldt have been
yardsticks for Danish critics, writers and readers. They had their breakthrough as
storytellers in the 1970s: Jette Drewsen in 1972 with her debut book, Hvad tænkte
egentlig Arendse [What was Arendse really thinking of], which scored a bullseye in
the heated sex-role discussion of the time; Kirsten Thorup in 1977 with Lille Jonna
[Little Jonna], the first volume of the major series of novels about the gravitation of
a young girl from country to town; and Vibeke Grønfeldt in 1978, with Sommerens
døde [The summer’s dead], which is a searching, psychological portrait of two
young women in a rural environment that is on the decline.
The three writers have often been read separately and described on the basis
of their separate contributions to the renewal of a narrative prose, as for example in
the anthology Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede [Danish 20th century writers],
Vol. III, 2001, in which Kirsten Thorup and Vibeke Grønfeldt are portrayed by
analysis of how they have discovered new paths for prose. Here the emphasis is
on their experiments with the novel form in existential narratives about changes to
women’s lives and the gradual extinction of the peasant culture. Monographs and
PhD theses have been published as well as many university dissertations written in
which the three authors feature.1
It is typical for the various analysis to call attention to the social thematic
in the works. Seen from a literary criticism point of view, we are clearly dealing
with writers who in various ways make societal problems the subject of debate.
But the characteristic of how this takes place is extremely generalised. Accounts
often describe how the writers deal with the migration of the 1960s from country to
town, the disintegration of the old village community, the emancipation of women
and the psychological price paid for the liberation of the individual. But if one
wishes to concretise the social thematic and make it more than just a broad context
and look more closely at how some of the works interact with the development of
the welfare state that emerges in the writers’ youths, it can prove necessary to find a
more precise approach.
In this connection, it is an advantage partly to focus on individual works, and
partly to choose a system of concepts that can place the political language of the
welfare state and artistic language in relation to each other.
In the following, I take a closer look at three novels: Kirsten Thorup’s
Baby, 1973(translated into English 1979), Jette Drewsen’s Tid og sted [Time and
Place], 1978, and Vibeke Grønfeldt’s Det rigtige [The Right Thing], 1999. These
three works have been chosen because they make the home and the family core
metaphors in their narratives and thereby show themselves interacting critically
with the political welfare rhetoric of the period.
One gains a closer understanding of the actual welfare rhetoric by including
ideas from linguistic and sociological research about ‘framing’ and about
the metaphors and patterns of metaphors in everyday language as well as a
contemporary idea from political philosophy about politics and art as parts of a
constantly on-going creation of, and struggle for, the ways in which the sensual and
the sayable, words and things, are connected with each other.
The Framing of Welfare
In the establishment period of the welfare state a special welfare rhetoric emerges
in one of the largest Danish political parties, the Social Democrats — a rhetoric
that gradually spreads to other political parties, either as variations on the welfare
metaphors or a critique of the same. The welfare rhetoric acquires its own set
expressions, core metaphors and stylistic figures that one can still hear echoes
of in present-day political rhetoric. Certain critics of Social Democratic welfare
rhetoric actually believe that political language in Denmark is saturated with Social
Democratic welfare rhetoric.2
The concept of framing has been used in sociological and linguistic research,
among other things in investigations of how ideas and values crop up and are
formulated in the political debate. The American sociologist John L. Campbell
mentions how sociology studies the politicians’ framing of their policy in order
to maximise its impact. Frames function as normative and cognitive ideas and
language patterns that are placed in the foreground of political debates. For
example, the concept “economic globalisation” is used in the 1990s as framing for
the American shift to a neoliberal economic policy.
According to the American cognitive language philosopher George Lakoff,
framing is not mainly a question of politics or of creating political messages:
“Framing” is not primarily about politics or political messaging, or
communication. It is far more fundamental than that: Frames are the mental
structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to
create what we take to be reality. But the discovery and use of frame does
have an enormous bearing on politics. Given our media-obsessed, fast-paced,
talking-points political culture, it is critical that we understand the nature of
framing and how it can be used. (Lakoff 25)
The idea of deep “frames” is related to Lakoff’s and his partner Mark Johnson’s
concepts of the metaphors and conceptual patterns of everyday language, the socalled
“image schemata” that enable us to comprehend the world around us. In this
mode of thought, the metaphor is a basic human tool of understanding, one that is
both mentally and physically anchored. According to Lakoff, the metaphor is ‘the
main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform
abstract reasoning’ (Lakoff). When it comes to the study by cognitive semantics
of particular patterns of metaphors, a spatial pattern (the fact that we understand
reality via a spatial metaphoric) and a part-whole pattern can be used in the study
of the deep framing of the welfare state and its objectives.
The idea of the welfare state becomes spatial and concrete when it is visualised
as a home for the people and a societal family, or appears as a transferred epithet as
warm, helping hands and friendly voices that speak to the citizen. It is the thesis of
this article that Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen and Vibeke Grønfeldt have a special
outstanding account with the welfare state, since in their works and texts they react
to some of the political frames and metaphorical structures and in various ways
adopt a critical attitude to them via a honed linguistic awareness.
But in order to understand this exchange between literature and society it is
productive to include ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who in a
number of publications has dealt in depth with modern and postmodern literature
and art. He is interested in both poetry and prose, and in general one can assert that
Rancière utilises a concept of politics that means he regards politics and literature
as parts of a constantly on-going creation of and struggle concerning the ways in
which the sensual and the sayable, words and things, are connected with each other
— politics and literature take part in a struggle concerning the entire social picture.
Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere
of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable,
which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows
or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about
them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways
of speaking. The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is
involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of
being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world. (Rancière10)
Rancière conceives art and literature as possible contributions to the break with
consensus and with the regulation by those in power of the material world. It is
the combination of art’s possibility to appear detached from other social interests
and its use of language in a broad sense that makes it important in emancipatory
processes. Writers and artists have the possibility to change the frames through
which we perceive the material world. Writing fiction is reframing the real, building
up new relations between individual and collective, but, it should be noted, from a
non-dominant societal position, where art can free itself from links to other social
interests than itself as art. Thereby, modern literature has a special possibility to
create dissension.
So it is not the manufacturing of images of reality by literature that makes
it involved in politics; it is on the contrary the possibility it has via language to
introduce phenomena into a common social space that creates the relation between
politics and literature. Politics is a process of upsets, one in which interests and
phenomena are brought out into the light. Literature is part of this process, because
it has to do with anything at all that can be said and shown.
Political Welfare Rhetoric
The actual term welfare state emerges in Social Democratic language when the
prime minister, Hans Hedtoft, uses the concept “the governed-by-the-people
welfare state” in the debate book Mennesket i Centrum [The Human Being in
Focus] (Hedtoft 7).3 Here, inspired by the British political discussion of welfare
ideas, he combines the Old Norse word welfare with a concept of the state. The
word welfare has a long literary history in such writers as Holberg, Brorson,
Ewald, Hans Christian Andersen and Grundtvig, who, in accordance with common
language usage at the time, used the word in connection with the well-being,
happiness, progress and good conditions of the individual both while in earthly life
and beyond. Now the concept is linked to the state in a way already prepared for
by the philosopher Harald Høffding in his critical discussion in 1889 of Brandes’
Nietzsche-inspired thoughts concerning so-called aristocratic radicalism, in which
individualists seeking freedom and intellectuals were to ensure the future for the
many. Harald Høffding here formulates his ‘democratic radicalism’ as a diametrical
opposite to Brandes’ ideas. Democratic radicalism is to ensure the welfare and good
life of all. But Hedtoft goes all the way that lies just in front of Høffding. Hedhoft
links the welfare concept — or the welfare principle, as Høffding calls it — by
adding state organisation.4
The political framing of the concept welfare and welfare state that Hans
Hedtoft introduced means that the concept of welfare today most often refers
to something people have in common. If the politicians talk about “welfare,”
“more welfare” or “lasting welfare,” they do not mean the possibility of wellbeing
and security for the individual in his or her personal life but the share of
the individual in the common welfare — or common welfare pure and simple.
Thereby, the welfare concept comes to form what George Lakoff calls a deep frame
in the Danish political debate,5 even though the political ideas about the paths to
welfare often go in highly different directions and the actual concept of the welfare
state can also change meaning and character depending on its context (Petersen,
“Velfærdsstaten i dansk politisk retorik” 23).
In the mid 1950s, the concept of the welfare state was on the way to becoming
a negative framing in the political debate. The Conservative opponents of the
welfare policy used the concept “guardian state”(≈ nanny state), the term first being
used in 1956 by the Conservative Poul Møller as a criticism of the consequences of
Social Democratic policy regarding the welfare state.6
The guardian concept was thematised in literature by Villy Sørensen in his
Formynderfortællinger (Tutelary Tales, 1964). He deals with the guardian principle
from psychological, religious, existential, social and political angles. His tales deal,
among other things, with states and societies that assume the role of guardian of
their citizens, since the citizens are either deprived of or themselves renounce their
personal and social freedom and responsibility, after which a dreary conformity
and orthodoxy is victorious. Villy Sørensen himself claimed that he definitely had
not depicted present-day society (Clausen 30) but to a greater extent had shown
that social development acquires its own negative logic unless people personally
develop.
The point of the tales, in this optic, is that the dawning welfare state could
end up as being a guardian-like control system if people are unable to develop
psychologically. The negative political framing of the welfare state by the
Conservatives lost ground during the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s,
but it is still occasionally used, for example by several politicians from Venstre,
the right-wing liberal party in Denmark.7 In the mid 1960s, the deep framing of
the welfare state starts to work, with certain core metaphors becoming distinct and
influencing the political rhetoric of the other parties.
On the threshold of the 1970s, when the development of the welfare state
culminates, the welfare state in Social Democratic rhetoric starts to appear as an
architectural construction, a “folkhem”(home for the people) as the welfare state is
called in Sweden. This home is without “class barriers,” and where “reforms” and
“security” can be implemented.
So we are dealing here with a spatial pattern of metaphors, where the welfare
space is opposed to the “society of lack” that many Danes knew from the postwar
period.8 In its 1973 working plan, the Social Democrats thoroughly described
the “safety net” that was to be constructed under citizens in “the modern welfare
society.”9 The house metaphor is not substantial, but it forms a clear metonymic
basis in the imagery used, and it has a reference back to the biblical metaphoric
of the house and the temple building that was used in the labour movement songs
from the end of the 19th century, where for example Ulrich Peter Overbuy made
use of biblical expression when writing about the new society as “a strong house
we build to protect us in need” (Overby 1871).
The right-wing liberal party, Venstre, had also started to adopt the welfare
concept. In 1969, Venstre talked about replacing “the cold society” by a “human
society of well-being,” and it quickly transpired that the welfare idea was linked to
the idea of new building in the form of modern villages or single-family residential
areas that ought to be spread out around the country, cf. the party programme Frem
mod år 2000 [On towards the year 2000]. For Venstre, the core metaphor of the
welfare state is not a functionalistic rented dwelling but a single-family house by
the village pond.
In 1973, a crucial general election took place, with the old established parties
and their welfare ideas being challenged by various new parties. The so-called
“Single-Family Party,” Centrum Demokraterne, along with the Progress Party,
Fremskridtspartiet, got into the Danish parliament. The Centre Democrat Erhard
Jacobsen, left the Social Democrats in protest against the party’s policy towards the
growing middle stratum of car and single-family-house owners, and the Progress
Party rode on a wave of protest against the burden of taxation and the growing
public sector of the welfare state.
“The landslide election” quickly became the popular term for the dramatic
election which meant that the old parties lost many seats, while the Progress Party
at one swoop became the second-largest political party in Denmark.
The “landslide” metaphoric relates to a number of linguistic images that
the old parties had liked to used, with such expressions as basis, foundation,
reorganisation and expansion had implied the coming into existence of a societal
architecture, a building that was safe and secure.
With the “landslide election,” the very basis for the welfare architecture and its
cultural landscape seemed to be in danger. The chairman of the Social Democrats,
Anker Jørgensen, had to hand over the premiership to Venstre’s Poul Hartling, who
in his first New Year Speech in 1974 spoke of a need for a sanering(renovation)
of the welfare state, which as he interpreted as expressing the will of the people.
The Danish word used had definitely been chosen with care: something had to be
changed and modernised, but the welfare building was to endure.
The building and space pattern also unfolds in the rhetoric of many of the new
right-wing politicians. In the first programme of the Progress Party in 1973 the
concept of “sanering”(renovation) is very central. The Social Democratic society
is seen in terms of imagery as being a dilapidated house that needs renovating,
and Mogens Glistrup emphasises in a party-political letter to Poul Møller in 1973
that the Progress Party wishes to strengthen “Denmark as a business” and deliver
the welfare state and its social “safety net” from the “plethora of paperwork” and
“jungle of laws.”10We have Glistrup painting on the one hand a horror scenario of
an antediluvian despotism of paperwork, and on the other hand a dangerous Social
Democratic jungle, an untamed world of nature that threatens the welfare state — a
concept that Glistrup in this context completely appropriates to himself.
Even though Glistrup and his Progress Party did not have any major influence
on policy, he had captured a political platform in the Danish parliament, and he
made use of a political rhetoric that re-echoed in the whole of Danish society,
challenging the prevalent, somewhat cautious architectural welfare metaphor,
though with a clear reference to precisely core concepts in this metaphoric: the
house, path, plot, growth, health and security net.11Mogens Glistrup thus supplied
an almost performative linguistic turn in the political life of the time that had far
greater importance than his many political proposals (cf. Kuur Sørensen 104).
Welfare Metaphors at Work
An important feature of the establishment of the welfare state was a dramatic
change of the old patriarchal family. A new family structure with two breadwinners
out at work, consisting of father, mother and children, rapidly gained ground in
Denmark in the period from the 1960s and into the 1970s, and it was supported
by legislation and government resolutions concerning maternity leave, family
planning, the expansion of day-care centres and care of the elderly (cf. Borchorst
189 ff.). So already in its developmental phase the welfare state is on its way into
a societal situation where nothing is given in advance as regards father, mother,
grandparents or children. The family becomes a temporary community, loosely
connected by sex roles that are also rapidly being reformulated as the state assumes
the role of the framework around a security societal family that lives in a “home of
the people.”12
On the front pages of the Social Democratic programmes one can notice
the changes. The picture on an election programme from 1951 shows a mother
with two sons and a daughter standing outside their small non-detached, waving
goodbye to the father who is off to work. The caption beneath is the word “Security.”
The mother and children belong to the home, but the entire family is in fact on
its way out of the terrace house, and the younger girl would clearly like to be off
with her father. The picture looks like an omen that in the generation of the younger
girl women too will be part of the labour market, and that the state will come to
take over many of the tasks previously taken care of by the patriarchal family. The
members of the family are on their way away from each other in various directions:
work, school and institution, and the welfare state are to be the secure framework,
the pleasant non-detached house that encloses the life of the family.
Sixty years later, the Social Democrats choose a different metaphoric to
express their welfare ideals. In their programme of principles from 2011 we see
a little girl sitting on a jetty, her face turned away from us, out towards the open
sea. She is hugging a doll. She is alone, and the caption just says “hånden på
hjertet” (= hand on the heart = in all good conscience, honestly and truly). Here
the welfare state is presented as a kind of invisible lifeguard-parent that has taken
over responsibility for the individual’s life. The family relations have lost their
significance, but the child’s biological parents can rest assured — the welfare state
takes care of and watches over every single member of society, like a lifeguard over
the little girl on the great jetty of life. The welfare state is not there for families; it is
there for each and every citizen. It is no longer presented as a secure single-family
house and a cosy societal family but as a surrounding world with opportunities and
dangers and as an invisible being that is always there for individuals — the hand
that touches the heart.
The changes to family relations were supported by the fact that Denmark,
after a municipal reform in 1971, experiences a centralisation of the administrative
system of the public authorities and of such welfare institutions as hospitals and
schools. The economic crisis, which really accelerates after the major energy crisis
that starts in 1974, leaves long-lasting traces through the 1970s and has a profound
influence on the development of society up to the turn of the millennium. There
are geographical areas and occupations that never recover after the crisis and are
gradually phased out. The welfare developments thus also become geographically
out of synch with each other. Developments take place more quickly in the major
towns than in local areas in the country, but everywhere they are promoted by the
idea of growth and development.
The programmes of the political parties around the mid 1970s are full of
plus-words relating to well-being, growth and security. Venstre’s programme from
1975 has the title “We want to make society warmer” — which could, more or
less, also have been said by the Social Democrats, if there had not been certain old
core metaphors to cultivate, such as “solidarity.” The Social Liberal Party [Det
Radikale Venstre] stands united under the headline “A step on the way to a better
society.”The Social Democrats invite social debate with their motto “Solidarity,
equality and well-being”; The Socialist People’s Party expresses the wish for “A
new development — a new society” (1976), while The Conservative People’s
Party, also in the mid 1970s, repeats its headline from 1972 “Security in one’s own
home.”
Under the influence of the crisis, the Social Democrats state that they have
recognised “that there are boundaries for growth in quantity. For growth in quality
there are no boundaries.” It is here a question of creating “enhanced quality of
life.” “security for all” and “a feeling of belonging to society,” also via economic
democracy.13
The way to growth and well-being takes a different direction with
Venstre, where the emphasis is on “co-responsibility” and “co-influence” and
a strengthening of “the local community” if well-being and growth are to be
promoted. It is stressed that the rationalisation of schools, hospitals, transport and
police has jeopardised many values. “Did one think of the children’s well-being in
the school? Did one think of the increased distance between the patients and their
relations? What became of the individual in all this? What became of the joy in
working?”14
The idea of the local community and the values which women’s care of
children and the old once represented are eagerly advanced in several of the party
programmes. But the point is that the traditional tasks and skills of women as
regards the family are now best taken care of by society. Growth and well-being are
within all areas conditioned by the development of a close, warm society that may
well resemble the old nuclear family, but with the key point that the state has taken
the place of the reigning head of the family.
What gender, though, is the welfare state? Is it a father or a mother? As a
parent it resembles a bricolage of cultural values that relate to both the patriarchal
family’s male and female sex roles. It is a commanding and caring construction that
can manifest itself both as warm, helping hands, as the far-reaching arm of the law,
as the voices of teachers or as an electronic GPS, sewn into one’s clothes, that is to
prevent the senile from getting lost from the nursing home.
The relation between citizen and state often has a physical dimension in
the form of treatment, care and attention. The individual citizen meets changing
representatives of the state, but the welfare state finds it difficult to manifest
itself as a unified entity or figure — it is a space or a metonymic pattern: it is
hands, voices, text, aids, teaching, treatment and flow of money. The metaphor
of the house and the family therefore becomes important for politicians in their
concretisation of the idea of the welfare state. The welfare house and the family of
society gather together the metonymy and make the idea visible to citizens.
Kirsten Thorup, Vibeke Grønfeldt and Jette Drewsen work quite deliberately
with the special possibility modern literature offers to, on the one hand, imitate
all discourses (political, religious, scientific, personal) and, on the other hand,
to interpret them in different ways and inscribe them into a special, subjective
discourse (cf. Dines 100). In their literary publications there are involved in the
many changes to society and culture that take place in the period in which they
make their debuts, but the welfare thematic is often not obvious and programmed,
as it is in such an older prose writer as Martha Christensen (1926–95), whose debut
novel from 1962 Vær god ved Remond [Be nice to Remond], relates in a simple,
somewhat naive realism the story of a mentally retarded boy who is placed in a
children’s home.
The welfare themes in the three writers and their generation weave in and
out of linguistic and aesthetic challenges of contemporary ideas and values, also
including the political welfare rhetoric, both the deep framing of the welfare state
and the strong patterns of metaphors that emerge to do with house, home, family
and growth.
Family, House and Home
Shortly before the important general election of 4 December 1973, which turned
the political situation in Denmark upside-down, Kirsten Thorup’s debut novel
Baby was published, which can be read as a linguistic-aesthetic challenging
of the welfare metaphoric. The novel did not mark Kirsten Thorup’s popular
breakthrough, but it is one of the works that has subsequently been the subject of
both other writers’ interest and intense analysis. Kirsten Thorup says about Baby:
“The world that the language in Baby paints is very fluid and lacks cohesion. It is
quite deliberate that there is no difference between whether the book describes a
table or a thought, but links all the clauses and sentences with ‘and’” (Juhl 102).
Baby is based on the young writer’s and young mother’s own experience
of the Copenhagen precinct of Vesterbro, full of old-fashioned prostitutes and
pickpockets, but also typified by slums, crime and hard drugs. It is a social field
undergoing a transformation from an almost cosy old-fashioned criminal and
slum precinct to a tough urban district populated by the losers and outsiders of the
welfare state. The action centres on a circle of people living in this environment.
It is a gallery of big-city existences in a social and psychological conflict with
themselves and each other. Thorup’s novel deals with single parents, petty
criminals, unemployed, abortion-seekers and drug-addicts who are precisely the
types who ought to be included in the socialising safety net of welfare legislation,
but who apparently fall through the loose mesh, and where at last they are “caught
up with,” the help offered seems a parody and frightening.
Thorup emphasises that the description of the characters has almost been
stripped of stories about childhood or geographical past. The characters only exist
in their now and present habitats; they are without psychological depth and function
as mirror for each other.
The focusing of the novel on the present time results in the reader having
difficult in following a temporal progression: it seems as if the time-span of the
novel is about a year, around 1971–72. The narrative starts in February, and one
can follow a progression up to September and into the winter months, but the
sequence is interrupted by illogical jumps between seasons in several chapters,15and
one soon discovers that place and space are more important for the characters than
time. Time is stationary, while place and space bind and hold the characters in a
vacuum and interspace between life and death. Place and space are precisely not
secure places to stay, but are some sort of non-places the characters move around
between without either dwelling or existing there. While the contemporary political
rhetoric is overflowing with concepts of a welfare future that is being created and
shaped here and now via reforms, time does not make any impact on the universe
of the novel. While the political rhetoric implies that ‘in time’ advance and progress
comes, time flows without direction and amorphously in Thorup’s novel.
The novel centres on the middle chapter “I Am a Soft Ice, I Am a Tough
Guy,” which deals with the antique dealer and money lender Eddy, who the other
characters are dependent on. The car salesman Marc owes Eddy money; Marc’s
wife — with the car-name Cadett, sleeps with him for money; the gay couple Ivan
and Ric are his henchmen and gorillas; Leni, who earns money from translating
porno, is his former wife; the single mother Karla with the boyfriend, the upperclass
boy David, rent one of his slum properties; the transvestite Jolly Daisy appears
in the club milieu that Eddy frequents and meets a number of the other characters:
the young girl, Nova, who has run away from home; and the dishwasher, Susi, who
is in love with David and becomes a “gay-mother” for Ric and Ivan.
Eddy is a kind of criminal “spider” who holds the others caught in his web
of power, violence and money. He is the patriarch in a criminal parallel society
beyond the law and order of the welfare state. The paradox, however, is that the
welfare state makes use even so of Eddy’s power and his unscrupulous property
speculation.
The welfare institutions make their appearance in the universe of the novel
when Marc, hopelessly in debt after having lost his job, and his wife decide to
move into The Men’s Home (an institution where men with problems can spend the
night free of charge), an organisation to help drug addicts, and then Nova and Sonja
murder a random car-driver and end up at a rural borstal, the human climate of
which proves to be as cold as ice, despite the beautiful farming idyll with animals
and fields. The welfare institutions that ought to help to bring people back into
secure frameworks actually keep their clients on the periphery of society, and with
a view of an abyss.
The flat that the state eventually offers the single mother Karla is a parody of a
dwelling — it is unhealthy, dilapidated, a pure slum dwelling that ends up causing
the death of Karla’s daughter — it also happens to be owned by the villain Eddy.
The novel does not apportion guilt or responsibility — it blames neither
society nor individuals, but shows the welfare society to be an ambiguous structure
in which people try to survive by establishing, for better or for worse, human
relations and a “family.” The welfare institutions, however, undermine precisely
these relations, since they strive to take over the role of the family and place
themselves in its stead. So the institutions take measures against the makeshift
families that the characters attempt to form. The characters are admittedly included
in the country’s laws and welfare, but it is precisely these laws and welfare that
isolate them from each other and banish them to the periphery of society. The
welfare architecture is neither secure nor healthy as either a symbolical or physical
place to live.
The novel thus assimilates and processes political and socio-analytical
discourses in such a way that they are at the same time both used and rejected.
On the basis of Rancière’s ideas about literature and politics, one can claim
that the novel at the level of form and aesthetics underlines the importance of
artistic language as a discourse that can critically interpret the language and
concepts of politics and thematise how staple societal metaphors can artistically be
challenged.
When the romantic all-mother/all-father/all-baby, the transvestite Jolly Daisy,
finally invites the porno translator Leni in to a nativity-play-like scene with nightstars
and heavenly peace, Kirsten Thorup attempts in a way to reformulate a
biblical metaphoric of the holy family and the child that was born in a manger. One
can view this final scene as an allegorical comment on the secure societal family
of the political rhetoric, a comment that points out that one has to start right from
square one with the biblical metaphoric of the labour movement and also think in
new gender constructions if the societal house is to be built out of closeness and
humanity.
Time Creates New Wounds
While Thorup’s characters fight to establish alternatives to both the patriarchal
family and the new state welfare’s father-and-mother, Jette Drewsen’s novel Tid og
sted (Time and Place, 1978) tells of a characteristic tendency to drain the family
of its functions and tasks in the establishment phase of the welfare state. The novel
portrays a group of people — school friends, relations, acquaintances — dipping
into various points in time from March 1961 to October 1976.
The family appears as a social relation that is becoming increasingly unstable.
It is no longer a rock-solid ‘father house’ that the women fight to break free of. 16
Like Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen challenges a conception of time that
moves forwards and brings progress with it, as she breaks down the traditional
chronology of the novel: she starts with an account of the characters in April 1974
and then moves back to March 1961, followed by March 1966 and October 1968.
The final chapter can be dated to October 1976. In the course of the almost fifteen
years a number of the characters have become parents, but the family structure that
they themselves have experienced as children is rapidly becoming a thing of the
past. Their own parents have become old age pensioners who arrange their lives
and speak in a way that the family’s grandchildren simply cannot comprehend. The
social and cultural development creates a language gaps that kept people apart from
each other.
Jette Drewsen portrays various variations of the new family relations in the
novel: a middle-class married couple (the doctor Ejvind and the doctor’s secretary
Elise) with half-adult children, on their way towards infidelity and divorce; a
working-class family (the checkout assistant Ingrid and the taxi chauffeur Niels),
who stay together despite the man’s infidelity; a lesbian university teacher (Helle),
who lives on her own; a young unemployed academic woman (Birgitte), who
moves into a commune with her child and deselects her child’s father; a woman
journalist (Laila), who when very young had an abortion without her parents
knowing about it, but who as an adult decides to have her child when she becomes
pregnant after a one-night stand (with Ejvind) and to find a social father for the
child. This she finds in an elderly man who functions as both father, grandfather
and child in the family — for as long as it lasts. He is shunted out of the makeshift
family rather fortuitously after a somewhat scary “evening at home.”
When Helle and Ejvind’s mother dies, death is not felt to be a striking
or important event by those left behind — it is got over quickly, quietly and
anonymously. Helle uses the death as an excuse to visit a female friend she is
interested in as a sex partner, while Ejvind takes a sleeping powder. Later, the two
intellectual siblings start to ‘theorise’ about the mother’s death, since the actual
emotional relation seems to have disintegrated. The daughter-in-law, Elise, feels
herself hard-pressed and “deprived of the right to grieve for someone who had been
close to her” (Drewsen 173).
In the course of the 15 years covered by the novel, the single, divorced parent
becomes a characteristic figure, and those who do not get divorced during those 15
years weigh up their situation and think about a possible way out of the “decorative
family” (Drewsen 177).
Emotionally, however, the characters have come to a standstill: they are caught
in the childhood they never managed to round off, because the development of
welfare got rid of childhood’s form of the family “overnight,” so to speak, before
they were ready to take over control of their lives themselves, and they still miss
their parents as parents. Their hold a field of possibility open, rather than assume
the role of responsible participants in close human relationships.
Nothing is sure any longer except the need of the individual for a closeness
and intimacy that no longer has a social space. It is a difficult project to constantly
have to balance the family relationship and one’s own role.
The individual breaks free of the family ties that have limited people morally
and socially, but the emancipated life is full of emotional costs and restlessness.
And at such a time of upheaval, it is not really acceptable to be content with one’s
life, one’s husband and one’s children. The checkout assistant Ingrid is almost
ashamed about still being in love with her husband. She feels it is problematic that
she has no desire to liberate herself, and that she tolerates his relationship with
other women.
As a counter-image to the imploding family there is the depiction in the
middle of the novel of women’s lives in a high-rise block of flats where some of
the characters live for a while. The women meet in the wash house in the basement
where they exchange their experiences with and of children, marriage and work.
They are on maternity leave, are housewives or have half-day jobs, and in that way
are neither submerged in family life or work. There is a kind of “ritual intimacy”
(ibid 107) between the women of an almost mythical nature. “The women at the
well” is the archaic title of the chapter about the wash house.
One can draw a parallel between this scene and the image of the holy family at
the end of Kirsten Thorup’s novel Baby, although the conception of the alternative
to the imploded family in Drewsen has a form closer to reality and links up with
ideas in contemporary housing.
The high-rise block becomes a small welfare idyll where, even if one does
not “matter to each other,” one is at least able to behave humanely, considerately
and empathetically. The actual form of housing with flats makes it possible for
the women to pop into each other’s homes and share washing machines in the
basement. This social mixing promotes conversations, and on the day in 1966 that
the chapter describes there is a TV transmission of the wedding of the Dutch crown
princess to a German. Here the state even displays a human face, with the pictures
of a young successor and her husband to be!
The women use the TV broadcast as an occasion to talk about their own
weddings, their married lives and their children. The newly married Elise does
not join them in the TV room to begin with, but manages even so to ask the more
experienced women about “additions to the family” during their time together
in the basement wash house. “Yes, but when it’s suddenly there like that, a child
you’ve not known before at all, can you actually find time for it and afford it?
— Tell me, have you got into trouble or something, Ingrid said and laughed. —
Well, not trouble exactly, I’m married after all, but. — Are you quite sure? — Not
completely. And it wasn’t precisely the idea. — It’s very rarely precisely the idea,
Margit said” (Ibid 100). The description of the child as a stranger who disturbs the
relationship between man and woman displays the challenges brought about by the
new aspects of married life.
The intimacy between the women is greater than between spouses, even
bosom friends will not share everything. Margit declares that she stays with her
husband because she can’t be alone; Ingrid recalls her first boyfriend and would
like to meet him again, but enjoys her husband, Niels, also sexually, and thinks that
he resembles the bridegroom in the TV wedding. The chapter about the women at
“the well” sketches a small welfare idyll where the women are neither condemned
to loneliness, the twosomeness of marriage or the patriarchal family. But the idyll is
only a “breather” between the many changes taking place in society and the family.
When Laila becomes pregnant, she manages without her family’s knowledge
or help from her boyfriend to get an abortion based on her mental condition — the
novel takes place long before the introduction of free abortion. The meeting with
the hospital is as cold as ice — and the staff is full of hypocrisy. Everyone knows
why Laila has been admitted — because she wants an abortion — but officially it
is classified as pelvic infection. She is referred to a male psychiatrist, a consultant
doctor who interrogates her in an insulting way about her sexual habits while
putting on a smiling face and suggesting they use first names. He finally speeds
up the conversation; after interesting details about condoms and pubic hair all he
wants to do is get the “case” over and recommend an abortion:
The consultant doctor asked, more quickly now, the patient answered also
quickly, he asked what she felt when she saw a pram, she answered insecurity
and despair, he asked what she had thought in her darkest hours, she
answered abortionists and suicide, he asked what she thought when she saw a
handicapped child, she answered fright. (Ibid: 69)
Hospital communication demonstrates the incapacity of the professional helpers
and their curious looks into a situation in which the family of the young girl is
completely absent and is to be kept in the dark about a pregnancy that is regarded
as shameful. Later in the novel we see another hospital situation, where the doctor
shows a lack of consideration: Gert studies the X-rays of one of his patients,
somewhat absent-mindedly, while talking to his mistress.
He leant back slightly and read the name on the case record. Then he looked
up at the photos again and said it was a good thing it wasn’t someone one
knew and was fond of who looked like that inside. There couldn’t be long to
go now. (Ibid 169)
The welfare institutions, in the optic of the novel, simply lack human qualities
and become untrustworthy as replacements for the family in relation to children,
the elderly and the sick. In Drewsen, the welfare institutions are male, in the form
of doctors who believe they have the power of life and death, although also the
women who work in the institutions lack the capacity to care.
The characters do not mature and their welfare lives have to be told piece by
piece and divided into short situations and intermezzos. Neither a happy outcome
nor a complete tragedy are possible. Life, the changes and difficulties, simply
continue year in and year out — strangely endlessly.
The Cost of Growth
While Kirsten Thorup and Jette Drewsen show the schism between disintegrating
forms of the family and the emergence of new welfare-institutionised parents, we
find the growth metaphoric of the welfare state dealt with, among other things,
in Vibeke Grønfeldt’s novel Det rigtige (The Right Thing, 1999), which is a
contemporary novel, written on the threshold of the new millennium. The novel
looks both backwards and forwards in time, while telling the story of Ena Jakobsen,
who is delivery woman for a laundry in a small peripheral community that is
dominated by old people and odd-balls. Ena spends all her spare time maintaining
her family’s nursery, which was ruined when the convenience shops started to
import vegetables from all over the world on a large scale. Now Ena takes care of
the nursery, showing it to people as a kind of museum and cultivating magnificent
specimens of vegetables and flowers which she, like some self-appointed welfare
worker gives away to the local elderly, weak and various specially selected groups.
Ena has always striven to do things rightly and properly. She was brought up
to live up to an ideal of “a nice girl.” “The right thing” represents the good, useful
and well-carried-out piece of work; “the right thing” is the moral norms, virtues and
rules of rural society in relation to the family, the social community and the female
sex. “The right thing” is to contribute actively to the well-being of the family, the
maintenance of the community and mastering one’s sex role.”
As a child and teenager, Ena was a competent girl who also managed to keep
the nursery afloat economically when her father fell ill and her maternal grandfather
had to give up. Now most of Ena’s projects fail, except the nursery museum:
here she always keeps abreast of the slightest sign of any decline. Everything is
scrupulously ordered and maintained. Ena gets one step ahead of the inevitable
wear and tear of materials: “It became almost better than when it was in use. The
wear and tear was less. She could expand. [...] It was all ready for use. All that had
to be done was to press a button, her mother said proudly.” (Grønfeldt 23) Ena has
become a female inheritor of her ancestors’ dreams of a nursery, but the dreams
have been transformed into a museum extravaganza after the changes to social
and working life that modernisation and the development of the welfare state have
entailed.
The story of Ena ends badly, and it is her anger that takes her over the edge to
which she clings.
Ena is angry that the growth which is part of the development of the welfare
state has led to the very basis of the family’s existence withering away; she is
angry that her proficiency and industry, her loyalty to the “well-mannered school”
is not rewarded by the development of society, but instead is punished — even
mocked — and her loyalty leads socially to her becoming increasingly isolated.
She is angry at being angry, and her anger is hard to place. It is admittedly Ena who
shouts and scolds, but the replies and conduct that come from the representatives
of the welfare institutions and her work colleagues actually contain an aggression
and anger that hit Ena hard and are felt to be physical violence. Ena is the one who
expresses the anger, but she is not the sole cause of it.
Vibeke Grønfeldt develops the anger issue of the novel by introducing some
of the core metaphors of the welfare state that deal with growth, development wellbeing
into her universe and by showing them in a critical light.
In the optic of the novel, the welfare system works and yet does not work, for
example in relation to Ena’s younger brother, Oscar. He is a drug-addict, formerly
convicted and mentally ill, and as such has been installed in his own flat and has
got a light job at a library. But the welfare system and the male figures of authority
lack the human understanding, solicitude and patience that the women exercised
in the patriarchal family of the former society. The policeman who comes at the
request of the neighbours to make Ena see reason and calm her down does not
discover just how bad things are.
The welfare state knows best, but it does not see things particularly clearly
when it comes to providing care and security, and refuses to recognise Ena’s
earnest struggle to retain the values and world of her family. She ought to abandon
the nursery, send her mother to a nursing home, get herself a job or apply for social
security benefit!
Ena manages to procure a financial help for her nursery by becoming a
chauffeur for a laundry that, among other things, serves social clients, and she feels
that she is now at last on her way towards what is ‘right’. The clean laundry helps
to get both the social clients, children, drug-addicts and formerly punished back
onto an even keel. “Ena Jakobsen believed in the result of common efforts. Those
of the local authorities, police, doctors, school. It is possible, what’s right” (Ibid
13). Ena uses her eyes and tells of mishandled children in the homes round about
that she gets to see, but the social workers and council workers say they know
everything in advance. Her observations are ignored, and she gets the impression
that social workers, educationalists and doctors consider her a naive person who is
a nuisance. She stops noticing what takes place around her. Only the bitter feelings
inside her growth at the same rate as the well-formed apples in her garden.
One can view the two “activities” in Ena’s life: the nursery of her childhood
and the laundry of her adult life as societal metaphors: the nursery represents the
old, patriarchal local community, where time and place, working life and family life
were in balance. The nursery is an enterprise with meaningful work assignments
and a solid basis of existence for the men, women and children of the family.
Furthermore, the nursery contributes to a local division of labour, since it provides
the local area with the vegetables, the fruit and the flowers that the more specialised
farms and workmen of the local area do not have time to cultivate themselves. The
family works at the nursery in harmony with the seasons and uses nature without
exploiting it, even though the use of toxic pesticides starts to increase in the course
of Ena’s childhood and adolescence. The father’s illness is also taken care of within
the framework of the family, since Ena — as if she was his son — simply takes
over his work. This shift in the traditional division of labour between the sexes
is marked symbolically by the fact that Ena steps outside the moral order of the
local community, becomes sexually active while unmarried — even pregnant. She
manages discreetly to get a half-illegal abortion carried out by the local doctor.
The change in the sex roles gives her a certain power over her own body, but
also increases the possibility of her inflicting pain and suffering on herself. The
increased use of toxic pesticides in the nursery, the protracted illness of the father
and Ena’s sexuality and abortion are thus signs that neither the old sex roles nor the
old order of society can be maintained.
The warm, close, responsible and solitary growth society, where the female
caring assignments are to be society’s responsibility and that politicians spoke of
in the early 1970s when Ena was young, wither with the increasing centralisation
and the economic interventions that comes with the expansion of the welfare state.
The productive ‘greenhouse’ is replaced by the servicing and universalistic welfare
laundry, whose rationalised services can be accessed by both the doctor’s family
and the social clients — their economic capacity being duly taken into account, it
should be noted. But the laundry only provides “surface treatment.”
When Ena’s anger finally overpowers her, she burns the nursery down to the
ground. She is given a suspended sentence, and the welfare state steps in, as Ena
and her mother are placed in sheltered housing. “Now she is safeguarded and only
needs to choose the right thing and do the right thing” (Ibid 307). But “the stillness
fills up with meaninglessness. Or the meaning is emptied and echoes in the late
afternoon when the postman has driven past” (Ibid 311).
In the concluding chapters of the novel, Ena takes to the bottle, is raped and
ends up being pumped out with a broken arm and in the course of her confused
downward spiral she passes a large boulder in the breakers. She embraces the stone
and suddenly feels understood, believed in and remembered.
The image does not imply any redemption or release, but if Ena has not got
solid ground under her feet, she has at least a very hard stone in her embrace.
The story of Ena has comprised the elements: earth (the nursery), water and air
(the laundry) and fire (the burning down of the nursery). The stone, as an old,
volcanic material, unites all the elements, and the concluding images give the
novel a symbolic touch that underlines the fact that it is not exclusively a realistic
analysis of society but a complex artistic image of the uncertain feelings that are
also connected to life and sex when placed under pressure by the development of a
modern society.
The novel does not idealise the old local society with the nursery as a lost
paradise, a societal Garden of Eden; it captures Ena in a number of strong glimpses
in which we perceive both the hard toil of the old world and the just as hard
emancipation of the individual in the new world.
In the novel, Vibe Grønfeldt rejects an idealisation of the past or a
mythologizing of an evil and ramshackle present, where it is a shame for the
peripheral areas, for women and the elderly; but she is interested in how anger
comes into being and is fuelled when Ena is unable to find her rightful place in
life, and when her self-observations cause her both to grow to giant size and to
shrink to absolutely nothing. Grønfeldt gives this imbalance and this anger a voice,
showing it to be a force that grows out of what, unstated, has disappeared during
the development of the welfare society and its adaptation to economic crises.
In Vibeke Grønfeldt, the explanations cannot be pushed on the back burner,
and the language of the novel becomes as restless and anxious as the characters
themselves: Ena’s life cannot be reduced to an effect, but not be summed up in
other ways either. The descriptions both conceal and reveal other meanings all the
time.
Two different types of art are mentioned in the novel: the recent arrival Edel
Borg’s complete failure of a performance of sections of West Side Story and La
Traviata and Schubert lieder, and the virtuoso performance by the singer Marianne
Berg of extracts of Verdi in the church. The two types of singing complement each
other as an image of the fact that art may stretch from bel canto to shrieking and
squalling if it is to approach the human and be open for interpretation. And it is
quite characteristic that the two types of art are executed by women — it is the
female sex that is placed under the severest pressure by the new welfare life, and
that therefore calls for artistic interpretation.
The women end up by carrying out a self-annihilating gesture in maintaining a
social order that, with far too little success, took over their responsibility and tasks
in the family, in the name of progress, emancipation and welfare.
The welfare state itself appears at the end of the novel as steps, voices,
friendly hospital orderlies and friendly helpers with nice, shiny trays with food
in the sheltered housing. The welfare state is anonymous metonymic remains of
something has gradually become rather indefinably human.
The helping hand, which is one of the welfare state’s strongest metonymies
and which has been used both in connection with health campaigns and protests
against reductions of social benefits, is here shown in its anonymity and its
difficulty in trying to be caring and considerate.17From her sheltered housing, Ena
has a view of a field where in time more social housing is going to be built: she is
quite literally becoming hemmed in by welfare.
But then she nevertheless finds the great fairytale stone at the end of the work,
and this is perhaps precisely what she is need of. To embrace something large and
incomprehensible, the cold stone from the beginning of time brings a peace to her
body that Ena has not known before. The semantic universe of the novel thus opens
out towards what is uninterested, untold and uncertain from a human and social
point of view. The art of novel writing continues.
The novels Baby, Tid og sted and Det rigtige are examples of how the
linguistic framing of the welfare state and its metaphorical patterns are investigated
and challenged in some of the most important oeuvres of the welfare period. As
an extension of the ideas of Jacques Rancière about literature and society, one can
claim that the three novels bring phenomena to do with the change of the family
and the cost of growth into a common social space and help to make a critique of
the core metaphors of political language sayable and audible.
Notes
1. Cf. Hjordt-Vetlesen (2002), Zeuthen (2008), Passages special issue on Kirsten Thorup, no. 56,
2006. Various dissertations were also written which dealt with the authorship of Jette Drewsen,
especially in the 1980s and 1990s, e.g. Munch-Hansen (1999)
2. The linguistic framing of the welfare state is discussed in the political debate book Velfærd
tur-retur. Efter socialdemokratismens sammenbrud (Welfare here and back. After the collapse of
Social Democracy, 2005), in which Niels Lillelund in the article “Social Democratic language’
proposes that the whole Danish language has been influenced by the Social Democratic framing
of the welfare state. Social Democratic language has removed the welfare state from reality and
made the word “social” an absolute password that all parties have adopted” (Lillelund 2005: 24).
3. For a more detailed account of the history of the welfare concept see Petersen 2002: 15 ff.
4. Cf. Anders Thyrring Andersen, who in the article “The dialogic-religious welfare principle
in Harald Høffding, Ole Sarvig, Martin A. Hansen, Peter Seeberg and Svend Åge Madsen,”
Andersen 2011, has provided a detailed analysis of the discussion between Brandes and Høffding
as well as of the importance of the welfare concept in Høffding.
5.“These (deep frames) are the most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political
philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without deep frames, there is
nothing for surface frames to hang on to. Slogans do not make sense without the appropriate deep
frames.”(Lakoff 2006: 29)
6. Cf. ibid. and cf. Madsen 2006: 107, who bases himself on Klaus Petersen’s studies.
7. The politicians Karsten Lauritzen and Kristian Pihl Lorentzen have both used the concept on
their websites.
8. Cf. The Social Democrats’ party programme. Det nye samfund – 70’ernes politik
vedtaget af den 30. kongres[The new society – policy for the 1970s, approved by the 30th
congress] 1969.
9. Cf. The Social Democrats: Work programme 1973.
10. The letter has been published at the website of The Royal Danish Library: http://www.kb.dk/
image_client_static/default/viewer/?viewerPagesUrl=online_master_arkiv_2/nonarchival/PLG/
Partiprogrammer/fremskridtspartiet/fre19731/&viewerPgNumber=0&viewerR2L=false#
11. In connection with the research project Velfærdsstatens sprog og begreber [The language and
concepts of the welfare state], led by Klaus Petersen, SDU (2010-2014), Lasse Horne Kjældgaard
has discussed the house and the path as basic welfare state metaphors; I have contributed to
the further analysis of these metaphors and would underline that they have roots in the Social
Democratic biblically coloured metaphors from the end of the 19th century. The political rhetoric
revolves round these metaphors, also when such concepts as basis, structure, common property,
expansion, health, well-being and care are included.
12. For a more detailed account of changes to the family structure during the development of the
welfare state, see: Christoffersen 2004. Here it states: “The censuses and the later occupational
statistics combined with the statistical umbrella surveys have made it possible to follow
developments within this area. By the nature of things, one will be inclined to underestimate the
extent of the housewife role in such surveys because a large number of women can have been
housewives for shorter or longer periods without that being the case on precisely the day they
were interviewed. From 1940 to 1965, almost half the women between 15 and 74 were full-time
housewives on the day of the survey. This share then dropped sharply. In 1990, housewives only
made up 5% of the same group of women on the day of the interview.
In 1960, one can observe a very clear tendency for large numbers of women to stop being
engaged in active employment at about 25, i.e. when they start to have children [...]. While two
thirds of the 20-year-olds were in active employment, only one third of the 30-years-olds were
back in 1960. This pattern has changed completely 25 years later. Firstly, the 25-30 year-olds
have a very high level of active employment, almost 90%. In the age groups where the women
have young children, they maintain a high level of active employment in 1985. 15 years late, the
picture has changed, since a considerably larger percentage of the young women under 30 are
still in education or training. So the figure for 2000 is considerably lower for the extremely young
women than was the case around 1985.” (Christoffersen 2004: 130).
13. Cf. The Social Democrats, Solidarity, equality and well-being, 1975: 9.
14. Cf. Venstre, We want to make society warmer, 1975: 2
15. Susanne Pedersen emphasises these chronological breaks in her analysis of Baby. (Pedersen
1997: 37 ff.).
16. The concept refers to the depiction by female writers of marriage and the family in the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th century; the expression comes from the Swedish writer
Fredrika Bremer and is the title og Vol. II of Nordisk kvinde litteratur historie, [The History of
Nordic Female Literature] 1993, http://nordicwomensliterature.net/, 2010.
17. See for example the use by Tønder Municipality of the hand as a metonym in its approach to
elderly citizens who are in need of personal help and care: http://www.toender.dk/Borger/Aeldre-/
Personlig-og-praktisk-hjaelp.aspx
In connection with protests against welfare cuts in 2007, social and health workers used
the hand as a poster with the text ‘L http://www.foa.dk/Global/News/Forbundsnyheder/
Forbundsnyheder/2012/Oktober/Sosu-ere-er-ikke-de-eneste%20varme
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