In the Vicinity of Marriage: Heteronormative Affect and Alternative Intimacies in Three Fin-de-Siècle Short Stories

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ABSTRACT In the decades around the fin de siècle, literature offered women authors a space in which to experiment with new ways of living together. Previous research has prioritized alternatives that combine erotic desire and emotional intimacy as opposed to the marriage of convenience. In examining three Swedish short stories, this article takes the concept of intimacy as a starting point to include alternatives that have been overshadowed by the focus on eroticism. Anne Charlotte Leffler’s “Kvinnlighet och erotik” (1883), Elin Améen’s “En rabulist” (1898), and Frida Stéenhoff’s “Ett sällsamt öde” (1911) all feature female protagonists who have developed strong attachments leading to alternative intimacies, but who remain in close proximity to heteronormative marriage. The aim here is to elucidate the heteronormative script as an affective regulatory and productive force in constructing alternative intimacies, visible in both thematic and formal aspects of the stories’ composition, especially in spatial relations. The analysis is underpinned by Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s ideas of “national heterosexuality” and of intimacy as the “elsewhere of political public discourse”, which are combined with new censorship theory (553).