This article will take a close look at the female protagonist’s mental illness, such as hysteria, madness, etc. illustrated - overtly or covertly - in two Swedish literary fairy tales written by the female authors Julia Nyberg and Anna Wahlenberg respectively. I will try to show that when the female protagonist shows signs of hysteria or some other mental illness, this is often deeply related to a protest against her predetermined path to motherhood, which made a life outside the home impossible.
The material I have chosen is from two periods that are decisive for Swedish female writing, namely the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In 1831, Julia Nyberg fought for her and all women’s right to write at all, while Anna Wahlenberg’s fight in 1914 was aimed at equality between the works of female and male writers. Both women were strongly opposed by the patriarchate.
As in the nineteenth century, the literary field was still dominated by male writers in the early twentieth century. For the female writers, the conditions changed a lot during this time, however. During the nineteenth century, the women who wanted to write struggled with how they could combine the woman’s primary calling, the role of mother, with authorship. This they eventually managed to do by embracing the fairy tale genre. In the twentieth century, a large number of women had already been accepted as authors, and the struggle during this time concerned how to give children’s literature a status equal to other literature.
The perspective and method of the narrative analysis of the chosen fairy tale texts are based on the theory of feminism presented by Elaine Showalter, and on the medical and historical theory presented by Karin Johannisson and Tomas Laquer.