Hon klädde av sig framför spegeln

Abstract

She undressed herself in front of the mirror: Sigfrid Siwertz’s Portrayal of Women in the Short Story Collections, Margot and Cirkeln.
 This text examines how Sigfrid Siwertz describes women in his first two short story collections, Margot (1906) and Cirkeln (1907). Siwertz wrote the collections in a time of great social and economic upheaval, affecting society and culture in general, but also the particular situation of women. Step by step, female subjects conquered social, aesthetic and narrative rooms, challenging the clichés of late nineteenth-century art. One characteristic of the nineteenth century’s fin-de-siècle decadent aesthetics was the division of women into groups of whores and madonnas; the depiction of woman as either femme fatale, or femme fragile. This reduction of women to common stereotypes also pervaded the conventional society that decadent artists had attempted to defy. In his short stories, Siwertz both confirms and challenges bourgeois and decadent stereotyped gender roles. In the reformation of some of his female characters, Siwertz deviates from the femme fatale/fragile stereotypes of decadent aesthetics, moving towards more complex representations of women. This development may be regarded as a premonition of the ideological and literary change that Siwertz was about to undergo. After publishing Cirkeln, Siwertz changed his style and abandoned the decadent theme. The portraits of energetic, independent actresses or mothers he produced during this time heralded not only the more progressive (and less nihilistic) spirit of Siwertz’s later production, but also the new situation of women in society. This article aims to shed new light on the early writings of Sigfrid Siwertz.