To Escape the Body. A study in Transcending Boarders.

Sara Stridsberg’s novels Happy Sally, Drömfakulteten and Darling River are all brimming with literary images of movement and becoming. The physical aspects of being a female subject in becoming highlights the enfleshed body as important. Themes such as sexuality, power and violence can be traced in the beautiful but most disturbing narratives of Stridsberg. The purpose of this study is to show the reader how the literary female characters are transcending the physical borders of their bodies in order to become something more than what the human form allows them to be. Heteronormative sexuality, sickness, closeness to water and animaling are bound together by the way they enact the female characters to stretch beyond the surfaces of their skins. It is within these four themes the feminine body is seen to break, push or dissolve the boundary between the human body and it’s surrounding. Even though many of the crossings must be read as destructive there are still potentials of subversiveness. By applying Rosi Braidottis feminist figuration The Nomadic Subject and Astrida Neimanis hydrofeminist theory to the reading of the novels, I will be able to detect these various forms of transcendings and transformations. By suggesting these crossings as ways of trying to escape violence or patriarchal boundary, the study takes on a feminist approach towards the understanding of the female literary subject as multiple and transformative. Not only are they complex within them self, but together they can be understood as an literary image of one female subject, shifting and stretching forms. Here the image of the kaleidoscope is giving the idea of the multiple literary subject more body and it is introduced as a way of understanding the process of the shifting elements within and between the female characters in Stridsbergs novels