Det är minsann ingen lätt uppgift att vara barn. En komparativ motivstudie av barnet i den tidiga svenska arbetarlitteraturen

Abstract

This essay examines how the situation of the working-class child in early 20th century Sweden is depicted in short stories by Elf Norrbo, Maria Sandel, Karl Östman and Maj Hirdman. These authors wrote about heavy topics such as child labor, alcoholism, child abuse, foster children and mental illness. The stories were written at a time when Ellen Key – with her world famous work "The Century of the Child" (1900) – had started a discussion about improving children´s conditions. However, this new idea of childhood filled with play and without class-struggle and social problems was not the reality for a working-class child at this time, a fact that these authors certainly proved. The main purpose of this essay is to see how the child is themed as a motif and to see what role the thematization of the child has in the cultural construction of class in these stories. In a comparative motif study the essay uses Magnus Nilsson´s and Sandra Mischliwietz´s article ”Barnet, arbetaren, arbetarförfattaren. Om barnet och den kulturella produktionen av klass i 1930-talets svenska arbetarlitteratur” (2011) as inspiration and discusses the cultural construction of class through Nilsson´s article ”Arbetarlitteratur, teori, politik. Utkast till ett marxistiskt program för forskning och undervisning om svensk arbetarlitteratur” (2015). Furthermore, the study uses Beata Agrell´s discussion about early working-class literature as “Gebrauchsliteratur” – a literature for use in the class struggle of the time that demanded a meditative reading. The text also invites intersectionality into the discussion through class, gender and age. Although the four authors do not use internally focused narrative voices which was the case in the 1930s, but neutral narrative voices, the reading shows that the children in these early stories are used as vehicles and political symbols of the working class, just as much as was the case in the 1930s. With the didactic focus of the neutral narrator´s voice and through the meditative reading, the same effect can be created in these older texts where the child motif may arouse compassion in the adult reader.