Nainen Linnaisten ullakolla: Gotiikan, ambivalenssin ja toiseuden kohtaamisia

Abstract

The Woman in the Attic of Linnais – The Meeting of Gothic, Ambivalence and Otherness “Does Finland have an aristocracy?” This is how the writer and historian Zacharias Topelius begins his serial story Gröna kammarn på Linnais gård (“The Green Room at Linnais Manor”, 1859), which was published in Helsingfors Tidningar (1859) and later on in the first part of Topelius’s collected works Vinterqvällar (“Winter Tales”, 1880), both in Swedish and in Finnish. The first sentence of the story reveals its central theme: the decaying power of the nobility and the rise of the middle class. The line between them is, however, anything but clear. Nobility is represented at the same time as a useless historical relic and as a tempting call from the past. The same ambivalence concerns the other central theme of the story: supernaturalness. Topelius offers a possibility of the supernatural, but gives a rational explanation to the apparently supernatural phenomena. However, this rationalizing does not remove the power which the “ghost” has over the reader. In this story, as well as in his literary production in general, Topelius uses the Gothic genre as a social, political means to represent the old world which should be replaced with a new and a better one. The Gothic conventions, such as the figure of the ancient tyrant, the ghost, and the imprisoned woman enable the author to deal with the issues of injustice and power. The female prisoner of the Green Room, who eventually commits suicide, is a character that brings forward the different ways in which gender and class intersect and produce social inequality