Figures of Emancipation: Organicist Imagery between Romanticism and Darwinism

Abstract

Feminist theory in the early twentieth century built on a tradition of feminist thought in literature. I use linguistic theories of the metaphor to argue that the imagery in the Nordic emancipation novels of the 1850s may be studied as a theorization of women’s emanci- pation, and that the shift of theoretical underpinning during the second half of the nineteenth century may be traced in the transformation of a romantic, organicist imagery. The first part of the analysis shows how the organicist metaphors in Collett’s Amtmandens Døttre (1854– 1855), Fibiger’s Clara Raphael (1851), Bremer’s Hertha (1856), and Runeberg’s Fru Ca- tharina Boije och hennes döttrar (1858) conceive of women’s rights within a romantic understanding of Bildung in connection to a Christian notion of evolution. The second part of the analysis highlights the displacement of the organicist metaphors towards an imagery associated with evolutionary biology in Collett’s collections of essays of the 1870s.