Historikerns källmaterial befolkas ofta av standardiserade typer. Somliga typer har en mycket begränsad livslängd medan andra är mer beständiga. I boken lyfter ett antal forskare och skribenter fram varsin typ ur det nära eller fjärran förflutna.
The article discusses the female beauty ideal of the small foot in the Swedish press during the second half of the nineteenth century, as an object for the male gaze in fiction, as an actual fashion ideal, and as a prescribed beauty practice for women. It consists of three parts, analysing different subgenres within the press. First, I show how a male notion of the beauty and erotic attractiveness of the small foot was constructed in short stories and serial novels published in the daily and weekly press. Next, I show how this ideal was visually represented for its realization in every-day life in figures in fashion journals. Both genres presented an ideal unattainable for most women. Third, I discuss articles in dailies and weeklies giving advice on how to take care of feet, warning against ambitions to make the foot look small. Taken together, representations of female feet in the Swedish press involved a construction of the foot that also constructed women as perpetually failing in relation to the existing beauty ideal, making it part of a discursive misogynist practice, according to which women was supposed to invest in their appearance, and were derided and ridiculed when they did.
Summary: In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artistic practice of artists such as Canova, the performances raise interesting questions of how aesthetics worked when set in a commercial framework. The article discusses the problem of beauty faced by entertainers and spectators when art was reenacted for money. The experience of beauty was central to aesthetic theory and to living pictures. However, it remains unclear whether commercial living pictures was about beauty in art or about good-looking women. A possible conclusion is that it was about both, and that the aesthetic theory behind the tableaux was a theory created for a male visual culture, in which the male gaze’s consumption of female bodies was self-evident while dressed in arguments of truth and beauty, confirming a social order in which a certain right look was ascribed to men.
Under 1700-talet och tidigt 1800-tal förändrades inköpsvanorna drastiskt i Sverige: ett konsumtionssamhälle började ta form. En rad nya varor som kaffe, te, porslin, bomull och exotiska textilfärger gjorde succé. Ett urbant mode och sällskapsliv växte fram och krävde både tid och pengar. Gradvis fick nymodigheterna människorna, och därmed även samhället, att ändras.
I Att hasta mot undergången analyserar idéhistorikern Leif Runefelt debatten om konsumtion 1730–1830. Han belyser hur de nya varorna och beteendena uppfattades som hot mot samhällsordningen eftersom de ofta bröt mot ståndssamhällets regler. Ordningen var hierarkisk och skillnader skulle vara tydliga: man skulle klä och bete sig i enlighet med sin sociala position. Det rådde starka uppfattningar om vad som var lämpligt eller olämpligt för olika individer.
Genom nymodigheterna kunde människor iscensätta sig själva på sätt som inte svarade mot de förväntningar som fanns på dem. Därmed uppkom en moralisk fråga: vad var rätt, och vad var fel? Det fick också politisk dimension eftersom förfallet var ett potentiellt hot mot samhället. Den nya konsumtionshetsen innebar kanske att hela samhället gick mot sin undergång?
I boken får vi följa den intensiva debatt som fördes på flera olika arenor. Pressen och litteraturen befolkades plötsligt av härmapor, fjollor, sprätthökar, kaffedrickare, götiska bönder och andra typkaraktärer. Figurerna hade specifika retoriska funktioner i kritiken av konsumtionen, och i centrum stod människans förställning som det avgörande problemet.
Vid sekelskiftet 1900 lades grunden för ett självklart inslag i vårt moderna liv: reklambilden. Industrialismens otaliga produkter skulle säljas med en teckning eller ett foto - cyklar, blusar, tvålar, tidningar, underkläder och allt möjligt som skulle säljas i mängd. Boken undersöker idealbilder av kvinnan i annonserna i denna den svenska bildsatta annonsens genombrottstid. Den analyserar det första skedet av vår egen kapitalistiska konsumtionskultur, där valen mellan olika varor står i centrum för hur vi skapar oss själva som individer.
Konstruktionen av kvinnan som aktiv konsument, som flitigt arbetande i hem och kontor och som sexualiserat objekt kom redan vid denna tid att bli en väsentlig del av kapitalismens språk. Reklamens kvinna var ung och vacker, ibland självständig men oftare underordnad. Bilderna både förstärkte och utmanade rådande ideal. Reklamen var en magisk spegel i vilken konsumenten såg sin potential om hon valde rätt. Den speglade inte bara sin tid utan formade såväl sin samtid som framtiden - vår tid.
In this article on the critique of face painting during the 18th and early 19th century, I argue that face painting was a part of the visualization of gendered social order. I conceive the critique and the growing emphasis on women’s natural ability to please men as a consequence of the growth of sociability. A main point is that the explicit critique of face painting was based on its implicit acceptance, as long as it was contained within younger women of the middling sorts, as well as within the dominant ideal of beauty, the petrarcan tradition of red and white.
I also claim that the ideal of the natural within the critique wasn’t very natural at all, which came from a reluctance to accept real naturalness, represented socially by the peasant classes and esthetically by disease and early aging. Face painting stood in a complex relation with a double physiognomy which explained two different truths: the widespread conception that the face was the window of the soul, and the likewise widespread idea that the hierarchic order of society was legible in the faces and appearances of its different members. Within the ideal of natural beauty face painting thus became a tool for disciplining young women. The new, more heterogenic social life created possibilities for women to take on public roles, which lead to an increased will to discipline them and emphasize their subordinate and complementary position through a strengthened rhetoric of natural beauty.
A basic assumption in the thesis is that every economic as well as political and ethical doctrine contains a conception of man, and, thus, that this conception needs to be scrutinised in order to achieve deeper understanding of the doctrine. The purposes of the thesis is (1) to account for conceptions of man within the rarely studied Swedish seventeenth-century economic thought, (2) to examine how conceptions of man and of society influence and shape this thought, and (3) to do this from a synchronous approach, by which emphasis is laid on economic thought as an integral part of the intellectual culture of the epoch. In chapter 2 is explored the conception of man as expressed in economic thought. Man is conceived as selfish and irrational. In chapter 3, this conception is explained as it is placed within a wider context, the most common psychological theory of the epoch, the theory of the passions, which is thoroughly examined. Chapter 4 consists of an analysis of the theory of householding, as it was expressed in the literature of the epoch. It is shown that this theory, not focused on by earlier research, to a large extent is a part of ethics and a prolongation of the theory of passions. The householder or “house-father” is obliged to control his own as well as the other household-member’s passions, and to maintain the hierarchical order within the household. Chapters 5 to 8 deal with the central areas within economic thought. These areas are domestic production and trade (ch. 5), the sumptuary laws and attitudes towards luxury (ch. 6), the use of the concept of free trade (ch. 7) and the issues of idleness and employment (ch. 8). It is shown that the king or government is viewed as the “house-father” of the realm, and that the core of the theory of the passions, the taming of the passions through reason and virtue, is vital also within economic thought, in which four virtues were central: justice, diligence, temperance and frugality; the same virtues as in the theory of householding.
I artikeln behandlas den manliga agrara ståndspersonen unde tidigt 1800-tal, uppfattad som hjälte av sig själv. Det sker genom fokus på ett särskilt område, som är ödesmättat och av avgörande betydelse för landets framtid: den svenska skogens tillstånd, förstörelse, återväxt och skötsel. Källmaterialet begränsas till ortsbeskrivningar, ett material producerat av agrara, manliga ståndspersoner.
The article analyses the male body-biased gaze in serial fiction in the Swedish press 1850–1890, by using the concept of the body flâneur as an analogy to the well-known city flâneur. The normative construct of the body flâneur was a discursive practice, normalising the male gaze in media representations in period still poor on visual representations. It gave authors an opportunity to describe, in detail and in an educated manner, female bodies as aesthetic objects. It had a twofold educational function. First, the body flâneur taught readers, both female and male, what the ideal female body looked like and how it could be detailed in words, but also that the woman was a natural object of scrutiny, and a field of expertise. Second, it presented to readers to various conceivable female reactions to being stared at.
The article discusses two elusive components in the construction of bourgeois and middle class femininity in Sweden, 1870–1914: the corset and the mirror. Two popular genres of images are contrasted: images of corsets in Swedish fashion advertisements, and images of corsets and undergarments in Swedish fashion magazines. While fashion advertisements in general copied fashion magazine images, they chose a different path in regard of the corset and the mirror. The two objects, albeit important parts of the period’s fashion, are made invisible in fashion magazines while clearly visualized in the advertisements. The purpose of Swedish fashion magazines was not only to present the latest fashion, but also to construct a conception of timeless womanhood well integrated into the predominant ideology of domesticity. Vanity, gossip, and erotic desires were staple goods of traditional misogyny and were hardly possible to express in fashion magazines. Advertising on the other hand communicated with the female consumer as an individual and presented her as a vain, sexual and emotional creature – without condemning her at the same time. Fashion advertisements emancipated, clearly not woman, but fashion itself, from the morals of domesticity.