Ljusets rike : Fredrika Bremer i Norrland

Nina and Midsommar-resan (The Midnight Sun) are Fredrika Bremer’s only novels set in the north of Sweden. They are usually considered fairly unsuccessful, but they give valuable information about both the author’s relation to the ideals of literary realism and her ambivalent attitudes to nature as well as culture. In these novels, the north of Sweden emerges as a predominantly spiritual landscape where a visitor from the south can get closer to her inner being and to God. Northern Sweden is pictured as a pristine, natural region, untainted by the excesses of civilisation in the south and on the continent. Bremer uses the north to express her critique of the polite world, but this requires her to downplay any examples of cultural life in the north. As a result, she orientalises the region by producing a symbolic rather than a realistic description where Northern Sweden has value only on the conceptual level, as a contrast to the south and as a landscape where communion with God is possible