Breaking Boundaries through the Body: Love, Monogamy, and Heteropessimism in Fredrik Backman’s Fiction

Introduction: The Body in Love

Fredrik Backman’s fiction has been lauded for its depictions of the human experience, particularly in relation to love and romance, and how it intersects with gender, sexuality, and ageing. As a contemporary Swedish author, his oeuvre offers critical depictions of the family and heterosexual monogamy, particularly when constructed under the terms of patriarchal ideologies. Backman’s debut novel, A Man Called Ove (2012), sold over 2.8 million copies in the English translation and is now one of the most popular Swedish literature exports since Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Alter 2016). However, Backman’s work also seems to move away from the darkness and violence of Sweden’s largest literary export, Nordic noir, and its popularity with both reading and viewing audiences. Indeed, in employing the sentimental, the whimsical, and the satirical, Backman’s fiction examines individuals in all their complexity—their strengths, longings, anxieties, and shortfalls. His narratives demonstrate the processes of globalisation, in which the backdrop of a quiet, self-contained Swedish life manifests a vast range of human experiences including grief, suicide, the difficulties and joys of marriage, and the enduring effects of sexual trauma, thus his work often shifts from the local to the universal. For this reason, I argue that the body and the self are central to Backman’s work, which represents the body as a middle way between the conceptual tensions of social, cultural, political, and spiritual lived experience. In doing so, Backman understands the body vitally as a subjective living organism, which moves through natural processes and embodies a self that is individualistic and inherent. Backman’s characters, however, are also complex and governed by how bodily ideals are constructed in a Western context that is driven by white supremacy, hierarchical class distinctions, youthfulness and productivity, heteronormativity, and male power. These definitions of the body are thus not mutually exclusive but rather coexist and inform conceptualisations of the body and the self in both intentional and unintentional ways.

Love—romantic or platonic—is, however, a deeply embodied experience that is most uniformly explored across all of Backman’s novels. Indeed, it is the body that feels love and consequently enacts practices of physical and emotional intimacy. Through highly individualised representations, Backman’s bodies contain the ambiguities and contradictions of human nature while also embracing how the body can be defined and understood in relation to patriarchal ideologies pertaining to selfhood, particularly when it comes to female domesticity, heterosexual monogamy, and the interrelation between sexuality and hegemonic masculinity. More specifically, Backman’s depictions of the psychological processes of love, betrayal, desire, and repulsion are explored through the body and its socio-cultural categorisations, which attempt to surveil and regulate its expression (Foucault 1975), as seen through the desexualisation of ageing women or fat bodies, for example. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the body is inextricable in nature, as “the biological induces the cultural rather than inhibits it, how biological complexity impels the complications and variability of culture itself” (4).

In Backman’s fiction, characters experience the cultural and social implications of their biological markers, particularly in relation to love and sex. The cultural appeal of love makes sense given its transcendental potential, however, it is also deeply politicised, used to reinforce ideologies of gender, race, and class, as seen through the heteronormative tendencies of the romance genre. As Heather Nunn argues, “the stable body, the discrete gender and a clearly defined sexuality have formed the reference points of identification in numerous narratives of love and loss” (16). The queer body, for instance, presents its own kind of destabilisation of embodiment, which has fed into the marginalisation of representations to do with queer love, as “same-sex sexuality was initially conceptualised in terms of a gendered misfit between body and soul” (Bauer 103). Love, when examined through the lens of the body, can act as a conceptual destabiliser of ideas around normativity, binarism, and identity; as Themal Ellawala argues, love often troubles the borderlines:

Love calls into question the hard, neat edges and impenetrable borders of cultural schematics—heterosexual/homosexual, woman/man, love/sex. While these are not fully upended nor destroyed, love creates cracks and fissures within these categories that trouble the diametrical opposition they are determined to exist in. Thus, a simultaneity of these states—the normative and queer, which destabilises both—is achieved. (56)

Romance is only one embodiment of love, and yet Western (patriarchal) discourse tends to overlook other iterations, such as the platonic, familial, and spiritual (hooks). The framing of romantic love is heavily invested in sustaining conservative ideals of male domination, heteronormativity, and female desire. In examining the representation of women in romance, for instance, Barbara Creed argues that “regardless of her sexual preferences, woman in whatever form—whether heterosexual or lesbian—has been variously depicted as narcissist, sex-fiend, creature, tomboy, vampire, maneater, child, nun, virgin” (109). These archetypes are relational to how they satisfy the conditions of heteronormative eligibility and the male gaze in terms of love and sex, wherein the “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 11). That is, marginalised constructions of women, such as queer and transgender women, women of colour, fat and ageing women, are typically represented in alien ways, as their bodies fail to comply with models of desirability. Indeed, love and sex have historically been theorised through the male gaze, as seen by the birth of the rom-com and popular music. Even romance narratives ostensibly presented through the female gaze, such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (2005–2008), E. L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy (2011–2012), and the After series by Anna Todd (2014–2015), are ensnared in the problems of internalised misogyny and the gendered power of the male gaze. As John Berger argues in Ways of Seeing, the female gaze is at the behest of an internalised male gaze, as “to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men” (46). The female self is thus split in two, as the surveyor and the surveyed, wherein

she has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. (Berger 46)

In the context of popular fiction, the female gaze often manifests by maintaining Western ideals of beauty (that is, to be white, thin, and able-bodied), as seen by Meyer’s Bella Swan, James’ Anastasia Steele, and Todd’s Tessa Young, and how male masochism is implicitly employed in such romance dynamics. Indeed, female-led romance texts such as these still work within the frame of the male masochist, who seeks out the “perfect woman” to be moulded into an ideal partner and forced into alliance through contractual agreement (Deleuze). Through the deployment of such female gazes (or internalised male gazes), these texts suggest that “there is no specifically masochistic fantasy, but rather a masochistic art of fantasy” (Deleuze 72), where female heroines are subsumed by the fantasy of the male masochist.

As a cisgender and heterosexual male writer engaging in heteronormative mainstream writing, Backman’s novels lean heavily into binary and essentialist thinking around love and gender. Such binaries have historically informed and enforced the power dynamics between men and women that is perpetuated through dominant romance narratives. For instance, in the enemies-to-lovers trope, the epiphany of falling in love is almost always first realised by the female counterpart, who must then navigate her burgeoning feelings, as epitomised by much of the contemporary romance genre with texts such as Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game (2016); The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren (2019); and Book Lovers by Emily Henry (2022). In Backman’s Britt-Marie Was Here, Britt-Marie has a greater sense of vulnerability and higher stakes in her marriage with Kent, which ultimately leads to his infidelity, as she “needs” him more than he needs her. As Clementine Ford espouses in I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage, “while the reality patriarchy constructs for women has changed over the years, its purpose has remained the same—to keep women in subservience to men while pretending it’s for our own good” (3-4). Britt-Marie and Kent marry “because Kent’s accountant said it made sense from a ‘tax-planning perspective,’” while Britt-Marie describes how she never “had a plan” but “hoped it would be enough if you were faithful and in love. Until the day came when it wasn’t enough” (Britt-Marie Was Here 134). Britt-Marie craves intimacy and connection in ways she is denied: “Kent always pushes the shopping trolley, while Britt-Marie walks at his side and holds on to a corner of it. Not because she’s trying to steer, only that she likes holding on to things while he is also holding onto them. For the sake of feeling that they are going somewhere at the same time” (8). Britt-Marie must comply with the ideal embodiment of the “good wife”, not to be wholly accepted, but rather to maintain only a presence in the life of Kent, a compromise in which she is made both other and lesser. As a result, she is initially depicted as embodying a “heterosexual identity which is disempowered and marginalised by normative heterosexuality”, wherein she “reveals the tensions and contradictions at work within heterosexuality as an institution and an identity” (Carroll 18).

Backman’s novels are effective in critiquing cisgender heterosexual patriarchy, especially via the use of satire and hyperbole, as evidenced in the portrayals of “heteropessimism”—that is, “consist[ing] of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience” (Seresin). While Backman’s novels subscribe to the ideals of heteronormativity and gender roles in relation to his representations of romantic love, he does also challenge the rigid stereotypes of women within these narratives by suggesting their potential beyond the domestic. Britt-Marie, for example, is centred in her own narrative wherein she leaves her husband after discovering his affair with a younger woman. She is forced to navigate the challenges of earning an income, building relationships in a new community, and discovering how she wants to live outside of being a housewife. This paper thus examines the gendered dynamics of marriage and infidelity and how Backman both reinforces and challenges such representations largely through a female gaze that decries heterosexuality and monogamy as the only articulations of love and desire. Indeed, while Backman attempts to broaden the representative parameters of love beyond ideas of sex and romance via the body (especially female bodies), such representations remain centralised through ideas of cisgender heterosexuality.

“Faxin Lets You See the World”: Marriage, Monogamy, and Heteropessimism

Some scholars argue that marriage is an increasingly redundant institution in Sweden, where there has been a significant rise in childbearing amongst non-married couples (Kiernan 2001; Heuveline and Timberlake 2004). However, more recent research suggests that “marriage is still a salient institution in Swedish family formation, although there is evidence of increased diversity and divergence in the meaning of marriage across cohorts and subpopulations” (Holland 297). Certainly, it can be argued that marriage is merely the legal extension of monogamy, which remains deeply embedded in the Western cultural lexicon and imagination. The framework around monogamy is upheld by dogma pertaining to both creationism and evolution, wherein monogamy is used to reinforce corporeal and biological “truths” of gender essentialism. As Angela Willey argues, “the entrenched scientific naturalisation of dyadic family structures is deeply implicated in antifeminist sexual politics” (2), which is actively invested in the confinement of women to the domestic sphere of childrearing, housekeeping, and subservience to men. Backman’s representations of the female body through prisms of romance, marriage, and family work to highlight these patterns of domestic confinement and in/visibility of the female body. His portrayals reveal how patriarchy, the male gaze, and conservative gender roles contribute to the death of romance in postfeminist contexts wherein women are increasingly identifying with cynicism and nihilism when it comes to heterosexuality (Seresin). In her seminal essay on compulsory heterosexuality, Adrienne Rich argues that the “naturalness” of monogamy and heterosexuality is ensured by patriarchy’s rendering of alternatives as invisible. She states:

I doubt that enough feminist scholars and theorists have taken the pains to acknowledge the societal forces which wrench women’s emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and other women from woman-identified values. These forces […] range from literal physical enslavement to disguising and distorting of possible options. (637)

Indeed, Audre Lorde understood the body not only as a site of oppression and in service of power, but also how it becomes a crucial site of resistance, particularly in its erotic capacity. She argues that

the erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (56)

Britt-Marie and most of the women in Backman’s novels are led away from their embodied “emotional and erotic energies” and are instead coerced into patriarchal institutions such as enforced monogamy, domesticity, and motherhood. Contained within domestic spaces, Britt-Marie is prevented from performing the standard tasks of adulthood outside the home—she does not drive and has not worked a paid job in several decades, and as a result is deeply insecure about her abilities beyond a familiar roster of domestic duties: “Britt-Marie feels it would be unreasonable for her to be expected to know everything about cars. She has only driven on a very few occasions since she and Kent were married—she never goes anywhere in a car unless Kent is there, and Kent is an absolutely excellent driver” (22). Her obsession with Faxin, a cleaning product, reveals the irony of a life dictated by monogamy and marriage:

Britt-Marie has never used any other brand than Faxin. She saw an advert for it in her father’s morning newspaper when she was a child. A woman stood looking out of a clean window and underneath was written: “Faxin Lets You See the World.” Britt-Marie loved that picture. As soon as she was old enough to have her own windows she polished them with Faxin, continued doing so daily for the rest of her life, and never had any problems seeing the world. It was just that the world did not see her. (31–2)

Such moments situate irony and hyperbole within seemingly mundane commentary, satirising how the patriarchal institutions of marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality position women as peripheral, their enforced domesticity only allowing them to witness the world at a distance rather than being active participants in it. Most compellingly, Backman refuses to position Britt-Marie within this binary of (invisible) domestic servitude and (visible) female liberation, as it is important to note that she enjoys the domestic practices of homemaking, marriage, and creating family stability while also feeling oppressed by these roles and responsibilities. The only person who sees Britt-Marie’s true self and does not conflate it with a woman’s duty in domesticity is her sister Ingrid:

So while Ingrid would excel at everything out there in the world, Britt-Marie imagined herself being really good at things inside of it. Cleaning. Making things nice. Her sister noticed this. Noticed her. Britt-Marie did her hair every morning, and her sister never forgot to say, “Thanks, you did that really well, Britt!” while she turned her head in front of the mirror to a tune from one of her vinyl records. Britt-Marie never had records. You don’t need any when you have an older sister who truly sees you. (65)

Such relegation to the domestic sphere serves to make women invisible, by removing them from public spaces. One of the most integral components of Backman’s representations of women and monogamy is how they are caught in the liminal space between autonomy and subjugation within their marriages, their families, and their own selves. Indeed, Backman’s (gendered) bodies, when placed within the constructivist and institutional frames of marriage, monogamy, as well as capitalism and patriarchy more broadly, are liminal, wherein “the spatial dimension of thresholds, doors, gateways and other transit zones [are] fundamental for the cultural elaboration of ritual transitions and cultural transformation” (Thomassen 37). This is evidenced frequently through the Beartown novels—Beartown (2016), Us Against You (2017), and The Winners (2021)—which centre around a hockey-obsessed rural community and the events leading to the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl named Maya Andersson, perpetrated by the star hockey player, Kevin Erdahl. In a tight-knit working-class town that relies on sport as their source of hope and sense of success as a community, the trilogy reveals how power and toxic masculinity intersect in deeply traumatic ways for not just young women, but for the whole community. Maya’s mother, Kira, for instance, is described as “a mum with two university degrees who can quote the entire criminal code” (Beartown 15). As the wife of the hockey club’s manager, the community also expects her to fulfil the role of parenthood in ways they do not expect of her husband, as his “need” to work is most valued. Kira is constantly criticised for her choice to work competitive hours in a law firm, which enforces the stereotype of the cold and callous “career woman” who is a neglectful wife and mother. Despite this, Kira challenges the patriarchal ideology that tries to coerce her into a “correct” performance of feminine domesticity, most poignantly through humour:

When [the club president] heard she was thinking of carrying on her career in parallel with Peter’s, he exclaimed in surprise, “But who’s going to take care of the kids?” She really did try to keep quiet […] Eventually she turned to the president and pointed at his greasy, sausage-like fingers, which were clutching a prawn sandwich, then at his stomach, which was straining against the buttons of his shirt, and said, “I thought maybe you could take care of them. You have bigger breasts than me, after all.” (Beartown 34–5)

Kira reflects the feminist revolt against the naturalisation of female domestic servitude in expressing a kind of ambivalence for the institutions of marriage and heterosexuality more broadly. Like Britt-Marie, she represents a liminal femininity that is subordinated by patriarchal and heteronormative ideology as a married woman and tries to resist such oppression. Subversively, Kira is quick to acknowledge the value and importance of her work over her husband’s. When Peter complains about being late if he has to drop their children at school, she replies, “if I get to work late an innocent person might end up in prison. Sorry, I interrupted you. Tell me more about what happens if you’re late?” (Beartown 26) It is also worth noting how the above quote reveals a tradition of using derogatory insults that further reinforce gender stereotypes at the cost of femininity—as seen when she comments on the president’s breasts, reinforcing the idea of maternal nurturing as inherently feminine. Indeed, representations of feminist revolt can be problematised by such practices of internalised misogyny. Further, Backman exposes how patriarchy and gender roles contribute to the death of romance, wherein women are increasingly identifying with “heteropessimism”. As queer feminist Jane Ward argues, “erotically uninspired or coercive, given shape by the most predictable and punishing gender roles, emotionally scripted by decades of inane media and self-help projects, and outright illogical as a set of intimate relations anchored in a complaint-ridden swirl of desire and misogyny” (1), straight culture is increasingly challenged by those (typically women) engaged with heterosexual dynamics.

Certainly, Backman provides a warning about how the subordination of women as dictated by heteronormative patriarchy becomes a threat to the endurance of love and romance. Peter remarks on how “Kira never stopped making his pulse throb in his throat; he still loves her the way you do when you’re a teenager, when your heart swells in your chest and makes you feel like you can’t breathe” (Beartown 82). Comparatively, Kira expresses envy of a friend who is single and childless and frequently questions the nature of her relationship with Peter: “am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?” (103) Backman provokes questions about the luxury of male delusion in heteronormative relationships, thus challenging gendered ideas about male liberation and female subordination in the confines of marriage. While a term such as “heteropessimism” provides one understanding of how male power, domestic servitude, and enforced monogamy have allowed patriarchy and heterosexuality to thrive at the cost of women and other intersecting minorities, it does not offer any alternate visions of heterosexuality when it is decoupled from these components of patriarchal ideology. Rather, it would seem that women in real and fictional contexts believe they are decrying both heterosexuality and men, but they are actually critiquing the weaponised male incompetence nurtured by patriarchy, thus failing to understand heterosexuality as an agent of such power structures.

Indeed, feminist and lesbian feminist theorists, such as Judith Butler and Adrienne Rich, have long “offered an ideological critique of heterosexuality in relation to the gendered and sexual oppression of women; in this way, heterosexuality has been analysed as a patriarchal institution which perpetuates gendered power relations through sexuality” (Carroll 2). Rich, for instance, argues that “heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognised and studied as a political institution” which invests in constructing itself as being rooted in the natural and instinctual (i.e. reproductive sexuality), rather than the ideological (637). Considering this, Rich asks why “such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men” (637). Rather, heteropessimism has perversely “created a renewed investment in the consistency of heterosexuality, a reinscription of heterosexuality’s tired features, even as this investment takes the disguised form of negative feeling […] Heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken” (Seresin).

Indeed, Backman explores how women like Kira and Britt-Marie identify and express cynicism about monogamy and heterosexuality as a result of their subordination within such systems. However, he does not offer any alternate visions of heterosexuality in his representations, and these women fail to identify their oppression within monogamous love as a patriarchal issue as opposed to a heterosexual one. Certainly, LGBTQIA+ communities and other cultures outside of the West demonstrate alternative ways of living and loving, with things like “expanded kinship arrangements with friends or family, platonic or romantic polyamorous relationships, or even just good relationship therapy” (Hamilton et al.). A distinct feature of heteropessimistic culture and, by extension, Backman’s representations of marriage, is a wilful blindness to the potential for new visions of heterosexuality to dismantle male power. Ward considers such continued “blindness” may be because, “for straight people experiencing other violent and dehumanising forms of oppression—poverty, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, religious discrimination—straightness offers a degree of respectability and privilege” (2). This could be considered when looking at Britt-Marie’s commitment to heterosexuality despite the ways in which she is humiliated and rendered invisible and unvaluable beyond her domestic roles in the home, as she faces anxieties and oppression pertaining to her age and class status—both of which are heightened after leaving her husband. However, while Backman’s narratives attempt to use heteropessimistic representations to challenge and dismantle the ideologies around patriarchy, they nonetheless prescribe to heteronormative ideals.

The narrative of infidelity is also a persistently gendered one, in both literature and popular (Western) science. Initially it appears that Backman’s infidelity plot echoes the cultural stereotypes that have been insisted upon by the mythology of sexual evolution and popular science. For example, in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Matt Ridley divides the human species into two categories: “ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females” (17). He asserts that men “use wealth, power, and violence as means to sexual ends” (206), while the modern woman seeks to “monopolise a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him” (218). This sentiment has been defended by iterations of misogynist pseudo-science and has continued to be perpetuated into the mainstream self-help genre with phenomenalised texts such as Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (2018) and Neil Strauss’ The Game (2005). These “biological truths” perpetuate gendered ideas about women being the victims of such breaches of monogamy, while suggesting that men cannot (correctly) participate in monogamy. The married women in such narratives are almost always constructed as naïve and are thus the subject of humiliation. Indeed, Ward notes how “queer observers of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment” (8), as is the case for Britt-Marie. For instance, she discovers her husband’s affair only after he suffers a heart attack while he is with the “other woman” and must rush to the hospital. While waiting to hear about her husband’s state of health, Britt-Marie thinks about how she

has always liked the theatre, because she enjoys the way the actors get applauded at the end for their pretence. Kent’s heart attack and the voice of the young, beautiful thing meant there’d be no applause for her. You can’t keep pretending someone doesn’t exist when she speaks to you on the telephone. So Britt-Marie left the hospital room with a shirt smelling of perfume and a broken heart. (27)

Contemporary fiction has aptly challenged these narrative stereotypes of female monogamy versus male polyamory to dismantle the ideologies pertaining to romance and gender roles. As Venla Oikkonen asserts, “the evolutionary infidelity narrative has moved romantic love from the pedestal on which it has historically been placed and challenged its cultural status as a unique, near-transcendent experience” (593). Feminist authors often use the theme of infidelity, when enacted by a female protagonist, to suggest discontent for the neoliberalist and patriarchal institutions of marriage, monogamy, and domesticity. For example, writers of what has been labelled the “sad girl lit” genre, including texts such as Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017), Luster by Raven Leilani (2020) and Green Dot by Madeleine Gray (2023), frequently employ a young female protagonist who embarks on an affair with an older married man, who is typically considered successful and secure in their work, finances, and family. Such female protagonists express a particular dissatisfaction for their status as a younger woman in larger male-dominated spaces (i.e., the corporate workplace), wherein their sexual desire becomes conflated with their desire for power. The affair is thus utilised as a means to consume and obtain the same kind of power these men hold, or, in other words, to metaphorically become these men (or attain a form of their influence). Indeed, this recent trope along with other post-feminist literary contributions around love, sex, and the body speak compellingly to affect theory, namely Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”:

Speaking of cruel optimism, it may be that, for many now, living in an impasse would be an aspiration, as the traditional infrastructures for reproducing life—at work, in intimacy, politically—are crumbling at a threatening pace. The holding pattern implied in “impasse” suggests a temporary housing. This leads us to the other sense of “impasse” that moves throughout the book: impassivity. Cruel Optimism pays a lot of attention to diverse class, racial, sexual, and gendered styles of composure. What Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible” appears here not only in the class-based positioning of sensibility, but also in gestural economies that register norms of self-management that differ according to what kinds of confidence people have enjoyed about the entitlements of their social location. The way the body slows down what’s going down helps to clarify the relation of living on to ongoing crisis and loss. (4–5)

As noted, literary representations of the affair in contemporary fiction are thus increasingly framed around feminist ideas about male power, entitlement, and sexual liberty, and are largely explored through the lens of female autonomy, which Backman also reflects through representations of infidelity. As a contemporary author, Backman reframes the reader’s expectations of the affair as it functions as the impetus for Britt-Marie to embark on her own coming-of-age narrative where she transitions from invisibility to visibility within her community and family. Recalling the idea of the erotic potential of the body, Lorde notes how

another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (56–7)

Britt-Marie is able to embrace embodied (and feminist) acts of joy, offering another account of the vibrancy of female embodiment while also dismantling visions of biological and gender essentialism (i.e., women as child-rearers, homemakers, loyal wives to their husbands’ transgressions) determined by patriarchy. For instance, after she is forced to address the affair and leaves her husband, Britt-Marie moves to a remote town where she connects with the community, works and earns her own money for the first time since early adolescence, and becomes the manager for the local children’s football team. The ways in which she is humiliated by the marriage and infidelity leaves her feeling like she is invisible and has lost all social currency because of her age and lack of life experience outside the domestic space, as “it’s difficult knowing who you are, once you are alone, when you have always been there for the sake of someone else” (61). Britt-Marie is satirically constructed as the old crone, wherein her ageing female body is almost entirely invisible or informed by ageist constructions of senility, menopause (i.e., infertile and sexless), or as the wrinkled and disorderly crone/witch (132). Indeed, she is childless, without a husband, and fails to meet the stereotype of the warm and nurturing older woman. However, such ageist rhetoric is constantly challenged throughout the novel through the infidelity plot; that is, through Britt-Marie’s creation of a new life outside what is familiar and outside the limits of what she expects an “older” woman to do. As Lorde further argues, “in order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives” (53). Certainly, Britt-Marie’s oppression, first via monogamy and then as a result of infidelity, allows a space for an embodied and energetic shift, or, in Lorde’s words, a turn towards the agential potential of the erotic.

There is also a distinct irony in the domestication and subordination of Backman’s women within marriage and monogamy, as Backman reveals how men are the ones in need of these structures to feel secure and supported. Certainly, not long after Britt-Marie settles into Borg, her husband begs her to come home. She observes how “his tears are the first tears she’s ever seen in his eyes” (177) when he declares, “I need you at home, darling. I need you there. Don’t throw away a whole life we’ve lived together just because I made one stupid mistake!” (178) This is not a stand-alone representation of male dependence but is consistently depicted across Backman’s other novels. It is also witnessed in Ove’s suicidal ideation after losing his wife, for example, and in Peter’s reliance on Kira in navigating their daughter’s rape and PTSD. In this sense, Backman aims to dispel the pseudo-science that insists monogamy is a female compulsion rather than a male one. Instead, we see many of his female characters—such as Britt-Marie, Elsa’s grandmother in My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises, and even Beartown’s Kira—thrive outside the confines of marriage or monogamy, often by decrying enforced monogamy and heterosexuality. Contrastingly, there is little evidence of his male characters existing comfortably beyond such paradigms. Considering this, Backman’s representations of marriage and monogamy reveal how women are subjugated within these institutions while men mostly benefit from them. Moreover, these representations also reject the notion that love and romance is an exclusively female experience, while also dismantling the biological and socio-cultural mythology around the interconnection of women and monogamy.

Conclusion: Love Does Not Conquer Patriarchy and Compulsory Heterosexuality

In the portrayal of romantic love, Backman exposes the degradation of women who are bound by traditional gender roles under the institutions of marriage and monogamy. More crucially, he interrogates the notion that monogamy is an inherent instinct for women. While most of his female characters are married and impacted by the gendered expectations placed upon them in terms of work, family, and domesticity, they also often provocatively question these expectations and express dis-ease at such domestic confinement, as seen by Kira’s heteropessimism. Moreover, these characters are given narrative opportunities to transcend the role of “wife.” For instance, Britt-Marie makes drastic life changes at the age of sixty-three, while in the Beartown novels, Kira refuses to be defeated by the pressures of balancing roles as wife, mother, community member, and lawyer. (In the final instalment of the trilogy, she starts her own law firm with the domestic and emotional support of her husband, which is something she always felt was unattainable as a wife and mother.) While Backman endeavours to broaden the scope of representations of love and highlight how love can be weaponised through patriarchal and heteronormative ideology (particularly for women), he incidentally reinforces certain gendered expectations and essentialist thinking when it comes to love, heterosexuality, and patriarchy. In this sense, it seems that Backman fails to disrupt the canon of Swedish fiction, but also contemporary fiction more broadly, as his representations of love still assume the centralisation of cisgender heterosexuality.

Reference List

Alter, Alexandra. “The Man Behind “A Man Called Ove,” Sweden’s Latest Hit Novel.” The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/books/a-man-called-ove-fredrik-backman-sweden-success.html.

Backman, Fredrik. Things My Son Needs to Know About the World. Translated by Alice Menzies, Michael Joseph, 2012.

—. A Man Called Ove. Translated by Henning Koch, Sceptre, 2012.

—. My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises. Translated by Henning Koch, Sceptre, 2013.

—. Britt-Marie Was Here. Translated by Henning Koch, Sceptre, 2015.

—. Beartown. Translated by Neil Smith, Atria Books, 2016.

—. Us Against You. Translated by Neil Smith, Michael Joseph, 2017.

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