Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking
What was new about thirty-year-old Astrid Lindgren’s stories in Landsbygdens jul and Mors hyllning in the years 1937–42 was not merely that she wrote about concrete, recognizable children in a concrete, recognizable world. It was the way she did it: not from on high, as in earlier children’s literature, but from the inside out. From a perspective that made it clear the adult narrator had emotionally and intellectually entered the imaginative world of childhood—on the child’s terms—to depict the needs, motivations, and intentions behind children’s thoughts and actions.
Behaviorism on the Bookshelf
We might ask ourselves how much inspiration Astrid Lindgren drew from the field of child psychology, which took a quantum leap during the interwar period, producing dozens of new theories and methodologies that were widely translated, presented, and discussed in 1930s Sweden. Researchers and prominent figures in the field, including A. S. Neill, Alfred Adler, and Bertrand Russell, visited Sweden and gave lectures and interviews that were widely discussed, especially in the culturally radical press. There is no doubt that Astrid kept abreast of such debates about child-rearing through the Dagens Nyheter, so it’s a little surprising to find almost none of the many child psychology and pedagogical works published in Swedish in the 1930s among the author’s four thousand–volume collection of books. According to the lists in the archive at the National Library, she owned no works from that period by Neill, Russell, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Charlotte Bühler, Hildegard Hetzer, John Dewey, Adler, Friedrich Fröbel, Sigmund Freud, or, for that matter, Alva Myrdal. The only two titles are D. A. Thom’s Normal Youth and Its Everyday Problems (1932) and John B. Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), which challenged its readers on the title page with the words: “Dedicated to the first mother who brings up a happy child.”
Both Thom and Watson belonged to the school of psychology called “behaviorism,” founded by John B. Watson in 1913. Behaviorism reached Europe in the twenties, when Watson’s books were translated into a number of European languages and published throughout Scandinavia. As a movement, behaviorism rejected the existence of all psychological phenomena that couldn’t be observed externally, and Watson—who was thus in opposition to the Freudian school—claimed that psychology should concern itself solely with the observable behavior of human beings: their physical reactions, movements, and actions.
Watson’s hands-on, down-to-earth psychology earned him many followers among interwar parents of young children, who were curious to know more about the mysterious nature behind their children’s patterns of behavior. His books proved especially sensational because Professor Watson was a talented salesman, familiar with public psychology and aware that provocative messages sell: “No one today knows enough to raise a child. The world would be considerably better off if we were to stop having children for twenty years (except those reared for experimental purposes) and were then to start again with enough facts to do the job with some degree of skill and accuracy. Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a science.”
The scientific facts alluded to were Watson’s famous and eventually infamous behaviorist studies of an infant’s instinctive reactions to fire, a rat, a rabbit, and a dog, as well as to the sound of heavy percussion behind its back. The experiments were intended to prove, for instance, that “fear” wasn’t inherited but was conditioned through environmental influences. This notion was far from self-evident in the 1920s, before child psychology had undergone its scientific breakthrough.
The Lindgren family going swimming at Nordkap (North Cape), which was the local name for the large, soft cliffs on Furusund’s northeastern point, overlooking the Baltic.
There is reason to believe that, as the mother of a small boy who had been pulled up by his fragile roots several times, the twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old Astrid Lindgren took an immediate interest in Watson’s studies of fear and its causes. What triggered panic in a child, and how could a parent teach him or her to control such emotions? Watson claimed this was possible, just as one could teach a child to read, write, and play with blocks.
Her encounter with Watson’s behaviorist theories in the early 1930s did not, however, make Astrid Lindgren approach raising Lasse and Karin any differently, or any more methodically. She seems to have skimmed Psychological Care of Infant and Child with interest, but also with a healthy dose of skepticism and critical distance. The young mother took what she could use, chiefly the idea that parents should carefully observe their child’s behavior from birth onward, and ignored Watson’s less helpful advice—particularly the professor’s warning against kissing and hugging one’s child too much, lest it encourage chronic mushiness: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight.”
As far as demonstrative affection went, Astrid Lindgren couldn’t have been farther from Watson’s behaviorism. Plenty of family photographs from the 1930s and 1940s show a mother who couldn’t hide her love for her two children, poised at any moment to kiss and hug them. As Karin Nyman recalls: “Our mother cuddled us a lot. She often said she loved us, frequently in Smålandic. She had an expression, probably a quotation, I don’t know where she got it from: ‘Come here so I can squeeze the suet out of you,’ meaning very hard. And she said that a lot!”
My Chubby Little Daughter
For several years, in letters to Reinhold, Anne-Marie, Gunnar, and Sture, Astrid had been putting into practice Professor Watson’s basic advice—stay observant, and always keep notes on how your child’s life is being “conditioned”—and she maintained this focus on their development throughout the thirties and forties. Not simply in the accounts book, but also in her diary entries and in letters, now primarily addressed to Stina, Ingegerd, and her sister-in-law Gullan, who had married Gunnar in 1931. After the wedding she had sent Gullan a congratulatory note in the facetious, ironic tone the four siblings excelled at all their lives:
Dear little Gullan! My warmest congratulations! They say sisters-in-law are the absolute worst, but I hope we won’t come to feel that way. I still know so little about you, little sister-in-law, but I hope you’ll let us get to know one other better when I come home for Christmas. You end up with such a horrible number of “hope”s when you write a letter like this one, but in any case I hope that Gunnar doesn’t hit you until you bleed, doesn’t run off with anyone else or behave like a brutal ox in some other fashion. But he is my beloved little brother, after all, so for your part you mustn’t dare make him anything other than happy. But I’m sure you will be happy, even without my plea. My husband seconds my congratulations. Till we meet again, then! Your devoted Astrid.
Gullan and Astrid didn’t just get married within the same year; they gave birth almost simultaneously in the early summer of 1934, and both had girls—Karin and Gunvor—who eventually became just as close as their mothers. Astrid and Gullan remained good friends until the latter’s death in 1984, and in the obituary Astrid sent to the Vimmerby Tidning she emphasized that Gullan had always remained her own woman, even though she never drew attention to herself. She had been a pillar of strength for the whole family throughout half a century. The bond between the two had always been strong, says Karin Nyman: “In their later years, when they were both widows, they maintained a close relationship on the telephone, telling each other what they were going to make for dinner. Gullan confided unreservedly in her loved ones, and I can imagine that Astrid told her more about her private life than she did most people. They didn’t chat so much about their daily lives, I think, but about people. Astrid was strongly attached to Gullan, and missed her when she died.”
Around the time of her own and Gullan’s delivery in summer 1934, Astrid began to keep a kind of logbook of Karin’s development during the first year of her life, which her daughter could read when she was older. Astrid sent Gullan an extract in her New Year’s letters: “If you’re not already doing it, I think you should keep this sort of dail
y record of your child, because it’s really quite a fun thing to have.” Astrid’s began in May 1934:
Summer at Näs in the mid-1930s. In the middle of the picture, from top to bottom: Stina, Gunnar, Astrid (in the white hat), Karin crawling, Samuel August with Gunvor in his arms, and Ingegerd at the bottom.
May 20. Woke at two in the morning with symptoms. To the maternity ward at six. Severe contractions all day. Hellish agony from seven a.m.
May 21. Gave birth to my chubby little daughter at ten to one at night. 4,730 g.
May 22. Karin looks like Sture.
23. Producing milk. Karin is sweet and quiet. Lars has got his long-awaited front tooth.
24. Lars has a fever, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. If only I were home. Karin had colic and screamed like she was possessed, I cried a bit from exhaustion.
25. I had a slight fever. Karin sweet and quiet. Lars healthy again.
27. Karin screamed incessantly the whole of Mothers Day.
28. Karin quiet and sweet. Fever increased.
29. Rain fell, and I cried in the morning. Higher temperature. Worried about Karin.
30. Despair. Running out of milk, and Karin supplemented with cow’s milk. Screaming as if possessed.
31. The end of a difficult May. The last day was a bit better. Karin much calmer, my temp. lower.
June 2. Karin screamed.
June 3. Cried in morn. Karin not putting on weight. Now she’s to be fed every three hours.
4. Allowed to get up for the first time.
5. Karin screams and throws up.
6. Gunnar and Gullan have had a girl. Karin screams, screams. And throws up.
After her delivery on May 21 at Södra BB, a maternity hospital in Stockholm, Astrid wrote a letter to her sister-in-law in Småland. Gullan was a first-time mother, and would have needed a bit of encouragement from someone who’d believed—for the second time in her life—that she might die: “Dear Gullan, don’t be scared. I’m sure you’ll be fine. If, like me, you think you’re going to die, I can reassure you that nearly everybody thinks that, but dying really isn’t that easy.”
Gullan gave birth on June 5, 1934, and survived. In the months that followed, the sisters-in-law continued their correspondence, which was mainly about the girls’ weight, their experiences breast-feeding, different kinds of vegetable purée, rubber pants, dietary supplements, and various cures for rickets. And in her little logbook, Astrid paid close attention to Karin’s day-to-day development. In February 1935, the girl turned eight months, and thankfully could do more than scream and spit up:
2. Karin said “mamma-pappa” this morning. Had her first egg.
3. Karin has tummy ache. Screamed and wouldn’t sleep.
4. Karin crawled a long way backward. (And the world’s still standing?)
Underneath the Grown-Ups’ Table
Her observations about children, whether her own or their playmates, cousins, or random children on the street or at the park, really started finding their way into Astrid Lindgren’s fiction only at the end of the 1930s, and they helped shape her narrative perspective. This development can be traced from “Christmas Eve in Lilltorpet” to “Maja Gets a Fiancé” in 1936–37, and is clearly apparent in “Also a Mothers Day Gift” and “Thing-Seeker,” both of which were printed in Mors hyllning in 1940–41. In these two short stories, Astrid Lindgren found her own space as a writer: underneath the grown-ups’ table, with the children who hadn’t started school yet.
“Also a Mothers Day Gift” is about two sisters who want to give their mother a newborn kitten on Mothers Day. First they have to wait for the cat to give birth, then they have to find its litter. Without any authorial interjections, the reader follows two ordinary children on a day like any other in a place that could be anywhere in 1930s Sweden. The story begins in a “place to be alone,” like the one Lasse asked his mother not to enter after their unsuccessful visit to kindergarten in spring 1931. One day in 1937, three-year-old Karin had also built a similar space under the kitchen table in Vulcanusgatan, with the help of some old clothing and assorted odds and ends. Eventually Astrid peered under the table and said: “No, I don’t like you when you do that!” And Karin replied after a little pause: “Mamma, I don’t like myself either! This is just silly! But maybe I had some silly blood in my tummy!”
Lasse and Karin at the photographer’s in the late 1930s.
In “Also a Mothers Day Gift,” Lillstumpan and her big sister Anna-Stina set up their den underneath a large folding table in the kitchen, screened from the grown-ups, who are busy in the outside world, beyond the borders of the tablecloth. Only Snurran, the cat, is allowed to stay with the sisters, who have their own sovereign perspective on the world outside: “There were Mother’s feet in black flat shoes—they were always so busy—and the servant Maja’s, which seemed to dance around; there were Father’s feet in big boots and sometimes old Grandfather’s feet, which tottered gingerly across the floor in thick felt slippers. The grown-ups’ conversation and laughter didn’t disturb the whispered small-talk underneath the table. They had the den all to themselves.”
A year later, in 1941, Astrid Lindgren ventured even further into the magical world of childhood in the short story “Thing-Seeker,” which is about the treasure trove of experiences a four-year-old can gather on a single afternoon of free, uninterrupted play. In the opening scene, Kajsa is sitting on a little red stool in the kitchen while her mother stands next to her, kneading dough at the table. The narrator zooms in on the interaction between mother and child. Kajsa’s flights of fancy are neither halted nor guided by an adult hand, and the scene at the kitchen table is a study in the close, respectful relationship between children and grown-ups that so much of Astrid Lindgren’s work builds on—and seeks. Kajsa tells her mother that she’s soon going to set off on a journey to look for treasure. Her mother listens, asking careful and sympathetic questions about the four-year-old’s big plans, and Kajsa is so grateful for her mother’s interest and confidence that she dedicates one of her important future finds to her on the spur of the moment. Nothing less than a gemstone will do: “‘Just a little gold nugget is all I want for myself,’ said Kajsa. ‘Or maybe a diamond.’ ‘Yes, maybe,’ said her mother, putting the final tray of buns in the oven. Kajsa smoothed her little red apron over her stomach and walked over to the door on her chubby little legs. ‘Farewell, I’m going now, diddley-dum and diddley-dai!’ ‘Farewell, my love,’ said her mother, ‘but don’t go too far.’ ‘No,’ said Kajsa, turning around at the door. ‘Only a thousand kilometers.’”
After the four-year-old says goodbye to her mother, her powers of imagination drive the narrative on her thing-finding journey. The essence of play is revealed as its extravagance: play is never rational or measured but is based on sheer enthusiasm. The child acts of her own accord, sovereign, without intervention from the adult world. First Kajsa feeds the hens, and next she finds a dead bird with a yellow beak and lovely dark-blue wings, then a snail’s shell full of beautiful sounds, and then an old coffee dripper she can use to find gold dust. Every object in this imaginative tour de force gives rise to a new phase in the game, sketching out a new direction. From the porch steps to the henhouse, then to the old spruce tree, the heap of stones, and the pond, over the fence and into the woods, down to the junkyard with all the trash from town and out onto the large dirt road, where there are some pretty flowers to be picked . . . but then tiredness sets in, and Kajsa is convinced she’s lost. Before long, however, Andersson from Lövhult comes clattering along in his milk cart and asks one of the grown-up questions children find so strange: “‘Well I never! Is that Kajsa?’ ‘Who else would it be?’ said Kajsa, stretching up her arms toward him. ‘Help me up, I want to go home to Mamma.’”
Park Aunties
The basic pedagogical approach in Astrid Lindgren’s short stories for Landsbygdens jul and Mors hyllning around 1940—and in “Måns Starts School” from 1942, which explored the theme of bullying roughly thir
ty years before the term entered the Scandinavian classroom—had been cobbled together from various different sources: partly from the author’s own childhood experiences, and from everything she had read and heard as a young mother, and partly from what she learned in the 1930s from her daily interactions with children and parents.
Vasa Park and its “park aunties” came to play an important role in this regard. That was Astrid’s term for the mothers around her age, especially Alli Viridén and Elsa Gullander, whom she got to know in 1934–35, when they would go for walks with their strollers and sit on the benches around the playground in Vasa Park. Her first meeting with Alli Viridén, Astrid Lindgren later recalled, gave little indication that they would become friends. Alli’s little girl, named Margareta but never called anything but Matte, seemed unusually precocious, and Astrid asked one day how old she was. Her mother’s answer was so guarded that Astrid promised herself she would never approach her again. But a few days afterward they began talking and took a stroll around the park with their strollers, chatting about children, family, and society.
Gradually these walks around the park became a tradition, continuing—eventually without the strollers—for nearly sixty years. By that point their daughters had long since grown up, of course, and had children of their own, but Alli and Astrid, who both lived near the rolling park with its rock formations and dense, ancient trees, kept arranging to meet there, among new generations of parents and children. Such trips had their own predetermined choreography, recalls Karin Nyman. Astrid, coming from Dalagatan, approached the park from the east, while Alli approached from the west, through St. Eriksplan and Atlas; they always met in the middle, where the wide gravel paths crossed, between the old candelabra-shaped linden trees and the playground.