A RARITY SHOW OF MODERNITY

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 74–92, 2010 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain

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doi:10.1016/j.annals.2009.07.005

A RARITY SHOW OF MODERNITY Sweden in the 1920s Sofia Eriksson Macquarie University, Australia Abstract: This paper redresses a gap in the study of travel literature. It explores a geographical area—Sweden—that has received little scholarly attention, particularly during the period that the paper focuses on; the interwar years. The paper uses ideas of dirt and cleanliness to examine tourist constructions of difference between themselves and other people, as well as to conceptualize modernity. Cleanliness and dirt are themes that have been much discussed in contexts of colonial discourse, but their meanings and functions in a non-colonial setting have not been adequately explored. This paper argues that tourist perceptions of cleanliness and dirt can be used to mediate modernity, race, and the authenticity of cultural experiences. Keywords: Sweden, modernity, anti-modernity, cleanliness, race. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION In 1936 Sweden, a sparsely populated country off the beaten track in the far north of Europe began to attract a more widespread notice. The interest coincided with the publication of a number of foreign accounts of the country, the most popular and influential of which was arguably Sweden—The Middle Way (1936) by the American journalist Marquis Childs. Childs traveled to Sweden in 1930 to visit an exhibition that showcased Swedish housing design and remained in the country to write a series on its social and political advances for the St Louis Post Dispatch (Saxon, 1990). The analysis offered by Childs emphasized what he perceived as the unique Swedish economic model, located between capitalism and communism. His account is often considered to be a breakthrough in the Anglo-American image of Sweden as a political ideal (Kastrup, 1985), and the previously largely ignored country now increasingly figured as a topic of conversation within American and British politics. In Britain both the moderate left and the Fabian Society imagined ‘‘the Swedish way’’ as the way forward (Hale, 2006, p. 168), and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed interest in Swedish politics and social reform during the Depression (Leuchtenburg, 1997, p. 301). Sofia Eriksson (Email: ) has previously studied at Lund University in Sweden and received her MA in Modern History from UCL in London. She is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University. Her current research project studies constructions of Australia and Australians in British travel writing, 1870–1939, focusing on the questions of identity and empire. 74

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Marquis Childs as well as the Fabian socialists, and the aides dispatched by Roosevelt to explore the Swedish cooperative movement (Swenson, 2004, p. 1) were all touring Sweden with the purpose to investigate the country as a potential example for emulation. They were, to use a phrase coined by Hollander, political pilgrims (1981). They were similar to the western intellectuals who went to communist countries, or those Europeans who traveled to the United States in search for alternative political and economic models from the interwar period and onwards. For tourists such as these, Sweden represented a space of modernity and progress even prior to their experience of it; a visit to the country was in one sense a visit to the future. Ottoson (2002) has shown how the notion of Sweden as a paragon of modernity was not only central to how intellectuals perceived the country, but integral also to how Swedish intellectuals constructed their own national self-image during domestic travel. But no studies have investigated representations by tourists visiting the country for purposes unrelated to its potential as a political role model. This article will discuss how tourists who traveled around Sweden in the years prior to Childs visit and the recognition of the 1930s represented the country. It will demonstrate that they too constructed Sweden as a space of modernity and example for emulation. The tourists of this study did, however, not construct its modernity through a focus on progressive politics. Instead they emphasized another aspect of cultural modernity; that of cleanliness and racial whiteness. The last decades have seen an explosion in the use of travel narratives as entry points into the discursive frameworks that shape the experiences of tourists. Both contemporary and older texts have been the subject of such studies. The emphasis, however, has to a great extent been on western tourists traveling to colonized or third world countries, and the impact of images reproduced in travel narratives on more material structures have been well explored (Said, 1978; Spurr, 1993; Pratt, 1992). These writers contend that the reiteration of certain perceived ‘truths’ in travel books shape the image of foreign countries and cultures and construct them discursively for the audience at home. Central to this way of understanding travel writing is the notion that the themes that recur in representations tell us as much, if not more, about the visiting tourist as they do about the destination. This study draws on the theoretical framework generated by this body of work. It will, however, further develop the central premises of the discursive approach by employing them in qualitative case study that examines not the construction of superiority or a hierarchy based on degrading representations of the ‘other’. Rather the discussion will shed light on the less well-explored context of how British and American tourists, as opposed to the political pilgrims of Hollanders’ study, negotiate confrontations with the foreign that challenge the superiority of their home society and provoke or reinforce a desire for change. One of the important conclusions that are generated by the analysis is that the construction of the traveled space as a role model does not eliminate the need to establish cultural hierarchies, demonstrated in the travel accounts of this study in their emphasis on Sweden as

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diminutive, and therefore not charged with the greater challenges of more sizeable nations. The discussion will focus on three analytical concepts that have proved pivotal to examinations of travel writing: modernity, dirt and race. These three concepts play a key role in the travel accounts of Sweden as well, though the different context inflects their meaning in significant ways. This paper will map these meanings and situate them in relation to developments in American and British as well as Swedish society during the early interwar period. The paper will begin with a section that situates foreign tourist representations of Sweden from the eighteenth century and onwards in relation to domestic Swedish politics and culture. The discussion will then move on to introduce the source material in section two, where the analytical concepts are discussed in relation to representations of Sweden. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the results of the study. The published American and British travel accounts from the 1920s that remain available, some fifteen texts in all, form the empirical base for the study, while four texts have been chosen for detailed discussion in this paper. The selection is based on the way these four texts illustrate recurring surface similarities in a particularly pertinent way. By examining these travel accounts this paper seeks to shed light on how tourists respond to the encounter with spaces of perceived modernity and examples for emulation, as well as to further expand our understanding of how concepts of modernity and race are mediated through representations that focus on cleanliness. TOURING SWEDEN—PRIOR TO THE INTERWAR PERIOD When gentlemen and ladies traversed continental Europe for their Grand Tours in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sweden was rarely listed on the itinerary. Apart from a period of European influence 1600s starting with the ascension of Gustav II Adolph to the throne, Sweden had played a minor role in the politics of Europe. Tourists who ventured this far north often did so because they wanted to get off the beaten track and into the wild, primitive and undeveloped areas of Europe. They chose Sweden precisely because it was not among the places that everyone had the inclination, funds or ability to visit. And the reports brought back by those who went seldom helped to improve foreign attitudes to Sweden and its inhabitants. Grand Tour representations of Sweden have been explored by Barton (1998) and Davies (2000) in their respective studies of travel writing produced from the late eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century. Their studies both show that images of Sweden were certainly considerably more ambivalent than those of the interwar period and not infrequently unfavorable. Though positive images did circulate, tourists from these decades tended to portray the country as a backward and stagnant nation where entrepreneurial spirit and energy was stifled by state intervention. It was said that the farming seemed primitive and neglected, and the impoverished inhabitants lived in miserable huts (Barton, 1996, p. 5).

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Those tourists who came during this period did find redeeming features, but not in the political, cultural or social life. Rather, Sweden was a place were the blase´ tourist would be able to ‘rough it’ in the wilderness. It was a country where the tourist bargained uncomfortable living and travel arrangements for the experience of exhilarating natural environment and a scenery that evoked sublime sentiments. It was tentatively suggested that Sweden could offer commercial benefits for industrialized nations if the great tracts of land with abundant natural resources of timber and iron were to be properly exploited. Furthermore, it also held modestly promising prospects for immigrants who failed to make a living in more densely populated areas. But all in all, Sweden was a country that did little to contribute to the fortunes of Europe, or warrant a place among its great nations. Not until the interwar period and books like Sweden—The Middle Way was this image comprehensibly contested. Childs’ book portrayed Sweden as a nation that emerged from the turbulent years of the First World War in a similarly drained and difficult situation to the rest of Europe, but had gone on to develop in a unique direction. At the end of the First World War, Europe had to begin the reconstruction of demolished infrastructures and economies. At the forefront of this were debates over whether capitalism or communism was the best way forward. While most countries chose one or the other of these paths, Sweden proceeded down a different trail, balancing desirable elements from both while avoiding many of the pitfalls (Berman, 2006, p. 152). The Swedish model, as described by Childs in his book, fused the benefits of a healthy private sector with government regulation and a flourishing cooperative movement. This created a successful market economy that allowed for improvements in living standard, a highly developed social welfare system as well as economic growth (Childs, 1936). This was the image that Roosevelt referred to (Leuchtenburg, 1997, p. 301; Swenson, 2004, p. 1), popularized in America by Childs’ travel book, and it contrasts to the more unfavorable perceptions of Sweden in earlier eras. From the discrepant images it is obvious that something happened to transform the idea of Sweden. Perceptions of Sweden as something of a backward burden on the shoulders of Europe in the nineteenth century changed to the 1930s view of the country as a model of civic organization, whose political and economic ‘middle way’ demonstrated how modern nations could negotiate the pitfalls of progress. The change in Anglo-American discourse corresponds to and registers the significant transformation that Sweden experienced throughout this time. Tourists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries visited a rural country where agriculture was the means of support for an overwhelming majority. But from the 1870s things begun to change; Sweden underwent a late but rapid industrialization between 1870 and 1890 and the economy evolved at a rate that made economists talk about the ‘Swedish Wonder’ (Haukner, 2006). The old four-tiered socio-political hierarchy was replaced by modern class divisions and during the first decade of the twentieth century legislation secured universal male suffrage. By the end of the First World

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War the country was fully industrialized, and the later part of the interwar period is recognized as something of a watershed in Swedish political history. This was the time when the Socialdemocratic party moved from the radical left fringe to centre stage as a people’s party—a position it would retain for most of the twentieth century (Ottoson, 2002). Keeping these developments in mind, the discussion will now explore what tourists who visited the country throughout these formative years made of the Sweden they experienced. TOURING SWEDEN—MODERNITY UNFOLDS Two of the four travel accounts chosen to illustrate representations of early interwar Sweden are by British tourists. Two Vagabonds in Sweden and Lapland (Gordon and Gordon, 1926), written by the English couple Jan and Cora Gordon who were both born in upper middle-class families in Britain. Jan and Cora traveled extensively in Europe and USA from 1916 to 1933, and they were active not only as writers but also as painters and musicians (Bryant, 2008). The second English narrative is Unknown Sweden by Steveni (1925). Steveni was a correspondent in Russia for twenty-five years and wrote historical and political treatises on the nation, most notably a volume assessing Russia’s strengths at the start of the First World War (1914). He also published a work called The Scandinavian question (1905) on pan-Scandinavian relations. The two American accounts, Sweden and its People and The Sweeties of Sweden are written by Medill (1924) and Reynolds (1928) respectively. Medill was born in 1879 and produced several travel accounts of European countries during the interwar years, as well as books on antiquities and a volume on historical hoaxes. Reynolds wrote a book on Paris (1927), as well as A Cocktail Continentale (1926), on Europe through the eyes of the cocktail connoisseur. His style of writing has been called ‘experiential travel writing’, and placed in the tradition of authors like Hemingway. The experiential tourist focused on experience as destination, similarly to the sentimental or romantic tourist. But rather than indulge in profound emotions, the aim was to experience the ‘Gay Paree’ of the destination: the bars, clubs, dancing and races. The experiential tourist forewent sights and monuments for entertainment and high society playboy life (Field, 2006, pp. 29–43). While the authors of these accounts may arguably be considered more politically informed and interested than average tourist, none of them visited Sweden because of its social or political developments the way that the political pilgrims of the 1930s. Instead they all motivated their trips with reference to the interest the country held as a tourist or holiday destination, pointing out the ease of access, the quality accommodation or abundance of interesting sights, or—in the case of the Gordons, the potential for experiencing authentic village life. The authors of these travel accounts can thus be said to be more similar to tourists whose objective is to spend leisure time abroad for reasons of pleasure or cultural discovery.

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Cleanliness as modernity Jan and Cora Gordon traveled through Sweden in 1924, and the impressions of the country that they recorded in Two Vagabonds in Sweden and Lapland demonstrate a profound concern with dirt and cleanliness. As they disembark at the quay of the Swedish capital, their first comment is that they have been reassured, repeatedly, that they are about to visit the ‘cleanest country in Europe’. But contrary to what might be expected, and for reasons that I will discuss below, they are not at all pleased with this state of affairs. For much of their time in Sweden their main objective is to escape Sweden’s ‘cleanliness’. As Jan and Cora begin to explore the capital, they are ‘horror struck’ that humans can be as neat as the Swedes (1926, p. 102). They hasten to comment upon the cleanliness of the quay in Stockholm, the cobblestone streets and the ‘clean but clearly indigent’ porter whom they recruit to transport their belongings (1926, p. 64). The capital reveals itself to be irretrievably lost with its efficient organization and air of busy commerce and they leave the city and hurry on to pursue their quest elsewhere, the goal for which is variously described as ‘romance’, ‘character’ or ‘a simple and natural life’. More of the same follows as they visit an affluent manor on the coast, where they describe the Swedish servants as having the ‘surface appearance of gentility’, similar to the ‘upper middle classes’ in Britain, ‘though cleaner’. As the days go by and they get to know their native hostess, they find out that she is much disturbed by some fishermen who reside on the shore that belongs to the estate. She claims that they are dirty, but when the authors go to inspect the settlement they entirely fail to see any uncleanliness. Quite on the contrary, Jan and Cora find them decidedly ‘cleaner than elsewhere in the world’ (1926, p. 7). The ever desperate quest forces them to move on, this time to a small peasant village in Va¨rmland, a shire located in the middle of Sweden. Their hopes are high: they intend to ‘go native’ and ‘rough it’; staying for a prolonged period of time in the house of a local farmer. But not even in Va¨rmland do they find the romance that they are seeking. Instead they write that ‘Swedish neatness reigns everywhere’; even the cow stables are ‘rustic, clean and domestic’ and they ridicule the orderliness at length (1926, p. 68). The attention that Jan and Cora accord cleanliness is by no means unique, though their response differs from the other tourists’. All tourists to Sweden dwell repeatedly and at great length on the cleanliness, neatness, orderliness, healthiness, brightness, airiness and efficiency of Swedish society. The obsession reaches its height in descriptions of cityscapes. Medill, Reynolds and Steveni are all very impressed with Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo¨: the three largest urban areas of the country. They admire the spotless streets, bustling activity and the clean, well-swept waterside of the capital, where ferries rapidly shuttle back and forth, shipping commuters to their daytime occupations (Medill, 1924, p. 36). The great open, airy spaces and parks are described and the tourists emphasize how citizens spend their leisure time in constructive, sensible and active pursuits. Sports and outdoor

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life dominate; all the town dwellers exhibit healthy, rosy cheeks and bright eyes (Reynolds, 1928, p. 133). The southernmost metropole, Malmo¨, is described as an impressive place where even the poor and the working classes are clean, well-dressed, well-mannered and orderly (Steveni, 1925, p. 45). Gothenburg is nothing less than a model of civic organization: bright, clean, neat and orderly with a tidy and respectable working class (Steveni, 1925, p. 163). As any student of Western travel writing will be aware, cleanliness and dirt have a long history and an important role to play in travel narratives. In a tradition that can be traced from Grand Tour narratives of the eighteenth century through to colonial travel literature, writers often spent great quantities of ink on describing the dirty bodies, habits and habitats of the people they visited, be it southern Europeans or colonized natives in the Pacific. In the latter case, the representations of natives as unclean served the ideological purpose of establishing difference, physical debasement and ultimately the moral inferiority of the colonized to the ruling Europeans. This justified their subordination and the appropriation of their lands by the imperial power (Spurr, 1993, p. 79). In the former case, such links may be weaker because of the lack of an explicitly colonial context, but the theme still created a difference and superiority on the part of the clean tourist in relation to the dirty inhabitants. And the power of the trope of cleanliness to demarcate and control perceived social inferiors was not limited to foreign people or colonized bodies. It had the same function in discourse on the pauper and working classes in British society, establishing clear links between hygiene, moral stature and the right to participate in the ruling institutions of society. The descriptions of London slum areas by middle and upper class Britons often bore an uncanny resemblance to those of Indian and African cities (McClintock, 1995, p. 153; Mohanram, 2003). But the dichotomy of cleanliness and dirt has been central not only to colonial and social discourses of power such as these; it also played a crucial role in constructions of modernity that became integral to the western world during the nineteenth century. In her influential study of the conceptual mores of uncleanliness and impurity, Douglas (1991, p. 35) argued that the fear of dirt and contamination is a response to violation of certain boundaries. According to her analysis, dirt is matter that has strayed outside its place—the spatial area that has been culturally sanctioned as its ‘proper’ place. What passes as unclean in a specific cultural context says more about how that particular culture orders and categorizes its environment than it does about the amount of filth adhering to the objects of discourse. In western society dirt has come to be so closely associated with pathology and ideas about bacteria and germs that this element has become obscured. But it is significant that the descriptions of Swedish society and urban environment quoted above often mentioned cleanliness in the same breath as neatness, tidiness and order, rather than elaborating on the absence of smell, filth and contamination. In colonial discourse, representations of people who are lacking in cleanliness are often accompanied by more or less vivid descriptions of the latter kind, sig-

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nifying disgust and repulsion towards the subject of the discussion. But although the representations of Sweden do contain references to the bright, light and airy spaces, concepts that can be seen as opposite to the malodorous, filthy and dark, the emphasis is clearly on the former set of terms, associated with organizing, with creating and maintaining systems where each object or phenomenon is located in its ascribed place. This suggests that the analysis offered by Douglas is highly profitable for understanding how the trope functions in writings on Sweden. Given this notion of cleanliness as maintenance of conceptual boundaries, it comes as no surprise that it was a central theme in ideas of modern progress. A prominent feature of cultural modernity was the desire to control and utilize the environment, to impose human will on nature and make it conform to the needs of society, to optimize its efficiency (Punter, 2007). One way that this tendency found expression was through the emergence of institutions such as asylums and prisons, as discussed by Foucault (1977). The desire to control and increase efficiency also resulted in the emergence of various discourses of science, one of which was sanitation and health. During the nineteenth century these ideas became central to the identity of the increasingly influential middle class and attention to individual and urban sanitation became closely associated with personal and moral improvement as well as with social progress and the mission to civilize those who had yet to ascend to the level of the British middle classes (Davidoff and Hall, 1987; Mohanram, 2003). Even to this day sanitation remains a powerful marker of modernity and progress, and it is often foregrounded in debates on modernization drives in less developed countries (Helman, 2004; Brody, 2006). In foregrounding spotlessly clean spaces the tourists establish Swedish society as modern and its culture as progressive. This shows that the rhetorical device of cleanliness works both ways. Lack thereof announces inferiority, as has been shown by work on colonial discourse, while its presence constructs a space for emulation. But the focus on Swedish cleanliness and the way it is linked with orderliness and civic organization is also revealing for what it says about concerns in British and American society at the time. In pressing the question of how even the lower classes are orderly and clean, the tourists unveil anxieties concerning the behavior and appearance of their counterparts in British and American cities. The preoccupation expresses a deeply felt fear of degeneration and threat from the lower classes, a preoccupation that surfaced also in the interested that eugenicist policies attracted in both interwar America and Britain (Boudreau, 2005; Stone, 2002). At times the writers even juxtapose the urban cityscape of their own homes with that of Sweden and marvel over the lack of criminality, drunks, beggars and filth in the latter. Steveni goes as far as to suggest that the absence of such unwanted elements in Sweden was due to the fact that they were all deposited in the US and the UK (1925, p. 163). He refers to the significant emigration that took place around the turn of the century, when a great number of the poor rural population left for the shores of America (Jonsson, 1999). And though it may be offered as a self-deprecating

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joke on the part of the writer, it does convey a genuine concern about the conduct of the lower classes at home, as well as a sense of the home society being swamped by a mass of unwanted paupers bringing with them much feared disorder. But what is the meaning of the appalled response of Jan and Cora Gordon as they are confronted with the same spotless space that other tourists find reassuringly modern and orderly? Jan and Cora state that they do not travel to ‘seek cleanliness’. ‘Cleanliness and capitals’ are ‘uninteresting ornaments’; they have little to do with the ‘flavor of a country’ and are thus best avoided (1926, preface). Instead the couple travels to seek out havens where ‘old culture’ still survives; clinging on to life under constant threat from the ‘looming ghostly shadow of progress, development, modernity’ (1926, p. 80). What the much coveted traditional culture actually amounts to is never made explicit in the text; it is constantly alluded to but never defined. The only way to get an idea of what Jan and Cora are looking for is through an examination of what they try to escape. During their visit to the countryside manor with its supposedly dirty resident fishermen, they state that they dislike cleanliness because it is ‘bourgeois’, ‘materialistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ (1926, p. 27). Jan and Cora would obviously agree with the connection discussed above, between middle-class ideology and a preoccupation with cleanliness. In a corresponding, but curiously reversed way they also attach moral values to dirt or the lack thereof. Cleanliness still signifies modernity and progress, but instead of being celebrated as something desirable, as improvement, it becomes a sign of decline. Ultimately, it comes to symbolize the loss of a traditional culture that reigned before the era of machines, order and organization became the melody of the day. It marks the degenerative effects of modern development in the shape of dehumanization and a sense of inauthenticity. The desperate attempt to get away from clean and spotless Sweden is part of a quest for the authentic and the real, but at stake is not only the social fact of modern progress or traditions, authenticity or artifice. The portrayal of the quest is also crucial to the Gordons’ own identity construction. As mentioned at the beginning of this article Jan and Cora were both born in upper middle-class families in Britain. But by traveling independently and supporting themselves through various artistic endeavors they pursued a bohemian life style outside the respectable middle class mainstream, and in this they differed from other tourists of this study, a difference in identification that has great implications for how they experience and represent Sweden. They are, in fact, prime examples of the group that Fussell (1980) has termed as ‘antitourists’, trying by any means to distinguish themselves from other tourists in their quest for simple, authentic village life. Cleanliness as racial purity Returning to the general depiction of Sweden, we have already seen that it is not only the spaces; streets, houses, parks and waterfronts that

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are notably clean, but also the quay side porter, the fishermen—indeed the working classes taken as a whole. Sweden is generally graced with a population of notable personal hygiene. And as the preoccupation with sparkling and spotless spaces turns to the Swedish body, it becomes almost obsessive in its nature. The texts dwell expansively on how the robust, muscular and clean Swedish giants working in mines and on farms all end their day by swimming naked in the lakes (Steveni, 1925, pp. 147–148). They comment on how Swedish farmers perform the same dirty work just as all farmers across the world but without the toil leaving any mark on their bodies, they remain neat and clean (Reynolds, 1928, p. 149). What is implied through this is that soil and filth actually fail to get a hold on the body of the Swedish men in the way that it would on men of other nations. These men are not only the cleanest in the world because they wash frequently, though indeed they do. But in addition, and more importantly, by virtue of some inherent quality they seem to be immune to filth even when exposed to it—dirt simply slides off. This is interesting for the way it discursively establishes the Swedish people as pure by nature. These almost erotically charged descriptions represent a marked difference from the way the Swedish people were pictured during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the hygiene of the population, if mentioned at all, was perceived to be less than satisfactory. As discussed above, this change can partly be tied to the successful modernization on which Sweden embarked. But I would also like to suggest that the trope of cleanliness when applied to the Swedish body signifies not only the corporeal efficiency linked to progress and modernity; it also constructs a sense of racial purity and superiority. The same preoccupation with issues of race is expressed in the constant allusions to the Swedish people as ‘Norsemen’, ‘Vikings’ and the ‘Nordic race’. Much attention is accorded to the origins of the present day Swedes, their ancestry harking back to the old Nordic race: the Norsemen or Vikings. The Nordic heritage is manifest in physical appearance: the Swedish exhibit the tall, sturdy and athletic bodies of the giant Vikings. They are the ‘physically most highly developed’ people of the world (Steveni, 1925, p. 25); the men are strong ‘giants’, the women ‘lithe’, ‘healthy’ and ‘up-standing’ (Reynolds, 1928, p. 153). This theme reflects a broader phenomenon in English- and Germanspeaking countries during the first decades of the 20th century; an increased popularity of and preoccupation with the Scandinavian race and culture. These ideas had their roots in the nineteenth-century rise of social Darwinism, and after the turn of the century resulted in the rise of ‘Nordicism’; the belief that a supposed ‘Nordic race’ was qualitatively superior to the remainder of mankind and was in fact the creators of all civilization (Gregor, 1961, pp. 351–360). During the 1920s authors like Guenther (1923, 1926) in Europe and Stoddard (1922, 1924) and Grant (1916) in America published several pseudo-scientific volumes, presenting evidence from archeology, anthropology and philology, promoting these ideas to a wider public. In the US the prominence of the Nordic race was advocated, for example, by Carl Brigham who carried out IQ tests on immigrants in order to establish what races

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were the most intelligent. Brigham’s contention was that his data proved beyond doubt the superior intellectual ability of the Nordic race (1923)—a conclusion that played a part in generating public opinion in favor of the subsequent race-based US Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. The same ideas of the Nordic race as ‘civilization builders’ underpinned the eugenics movement that gained strength during the interwar period. The most common reason given for involuntary eugenic sterilization in America during the first half of the twentieth century was feeblemindedness, a term that, as Anna Stubblefield has persuasively argued, operated as racialized concept incorporating all ‘off-white’ ethnic groups; those who were eastern or southern European rather than Nordic or Anglo-Saxon (Stubblefield, 2007). The connections between cleanliness and orderliness on one hand, modernity on the other, and the concept of race become even stronger when read against the attention that tourists accorded the ethnic unity of Sweden, a characteristic they were much impressed by. While Medill remarked that the Swedes had retained their ’racial integrity’ through independence and isolation (1924, p. 3); Reynolds maintained that ‘all Swedes are Swedes’, ‘equal, the same breed’, ‘no flotsam and jetsam of humanity, no risk, you know what you get’ and contended that the lack of cultural and ethnic diversity, ‘explains a lot, such as why the jails are empty’ (1928, pp. 69–70). The Swedish race and culture was seen to be resilient and dominant; it didn’t yield or assimilate when encountering others. An example of this was how Swedish settlers in Finland never lost their own language and customs, even after generations, and it was approvingly remarked that they seldom intermarried with the Finns (Medill, 1924, p. 9). Ethnic homogeneity was preferable; Sweden fared decidedly better without ‘Finland and alien races’ (Steveni, 1925, p. 160). Cleanliness as moral purity Yet another way that these texts connect ideological issues with cleanliness and map them onto the Swedish body is through the strong emphasis on the Swedes as great lovers of sport and outdoor life. This is illustrated, for example, in descriptions of the parks of the capital, where citizens spend their leisure time taking part in various vigorous sporting activities such as swimming and running. The Swedish frequently engaged in physical activities for both leisure and improvement, and the contemporary passion for an athletic lifestyle was explicitly linked to the ancient Nordic blood flowing in their veins. We are told by Steveni to remember that these people are ‘Vikings’ and that it was ‘always the custom of Norsemen to perfect themselves in every form of manly sport, so that they could better be able to acquit themselves in the battle of life’ (1925, p. 18). The attention paid to the Swede as active and athletic resonates with the ideas and ideals of physical self-improvement that were central to the physical culture movement in Britain during the interwar period. Motivated by the concerns that the British male was no longer fit to defend his coun-

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try—a concern which arose as the number of men rejected by the military service increased after the Boer War (Davin, 1978) the physical culture movement made explicit the link between moral stature and cultivation of the body. The movement was part of an internationally reverberating trend with followers in the settler colonies as well, and its proponents argued that part of the way to achieve the former was though perfection of the latter: through exercise, correct diet and care of the skin the British people would be molded into strong, healthy individuals ready to face any challenge against their empire or race (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2006). The link between a healthy, fit and clean body and moral soundness that lay at the core of the physical culture movement is indeed confirmed by the tourists’ opinion of the Swedish character. According to the three male tourists, the Swedish were an independent people, intolerant towards external oppression and concerned with their liberty (Medill, 1924, pp. 3–4. Steveni, 1925, p. 25, 72). Steveni states that the Swedes possessed a ‘sense of justice, honesty, and responsibility’ were justifiably proud, polite, kind-hearted but devoid of the ‘soft sentimentality’ of the southern races (1925, pp. 27–28). He describes the peasants as ‘genial, intelligent, alert and energetic’ and their willingness and ability to employ scientific innovation is emphasized (1925, p. 72). Medill writes that the Swedish peasantry was made up of men who were ‘rich, free and independent’ (1924, p. 60). Reynolds accedes that the Swedes were ‘hospitable, innocent, law-respecting and natural’, possessing ‘wholesomeness’, ‘realness’ and a lack of sophistication that was not due to ignorance but rather a ‘refreshing naivete´‘ (1928, pp. 71–85). There was nothing base or degenerate in the characters of the Swedish; they were ‘real‘, not ‘cheap’, ‘vulgar’ or ‘tawdry’ (Reynolds, 1928, p. 153). Thoroughness, fierceness, obstinacy, perseverance and indomitable energy are other characteristics that recur in the texts, and in a passage describing the warrior king Carl XII, Steveni elaborates on how the monarch exhibited all the qualities most cherished by the Swedish: ‘love of truth, straightforwardness, manliness, strength, courage, fearlessness, honesty, directness, piety and an intense obstinacy’(1925, p. 74). Both the representations of contemporary Swedes and their ideal correspond closely to a construction of masculinity in terms of the powerful warrior, an image that resounded not only within the Nordicist movement discussed above, but also in another ideological trend— one that bore a contradictory relationship to the desire for progress, efficiency and cleanliness that has so far characterized this discussion of how notions of modernity inflected the American and British tourists perceptions of Sweden. Parallel with the positive discourse of modernity examined in the above discussion was a discourse that critiqued the progress of modern society on the grounds that it was degenerative for the human race. It ‘over-civilized’ and ‘effeminized’ humanity with its increasingly comfortable existence, one in which all toil and suffering was eliminated through medical care, controlled living conditions, technology and machines. Proponents of these ideas argued that modern progress resulted in spoiled and incapable

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individuals. The ease of the emerging, technologically advanced society, created physically and intellectually weak people, prone to selfindulgence, idleness and lack of self-control. This fear of degeneration furnished a desire for a ‘simple’, physically active and disciplined life style, a desire that was significant throughout the decades around and following the turn of the century. It was embodied in Britain by the Rambler movement, for example, as well as the previously mentioned physical culture movement. A notable advocate of this reaction the modern life-style and the accompanying values generated by modern progress was president Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted the idea of a ‘strenuous life’ as a way to prevent individual and racial degeneration. But ideologies that criticized modern progress on these grounds offered no simple opposition to, or analysis of, its effects. Its hostility towards increased reliance of technology to the detriment to human self-sufficiency overlapped with a focus on perfection and fulfillment of individual potential—an ideal bewilderingly similar to the improvement ethos that was central to positive notions of modernity. These unresolved tensions created significant contradictions within the discourse, as its proponents celebrated material progress but feared its consequences, often unintentionally reinforcing the bourgeois values they set out to criticize through a focus on rational improvement and control (Foucault, 1979; Lears, 1981, p. 57). One way to understand the fear of degeneration expressed in the anti-modern ideology discussed above would be to view it as yet another manifestation of the ethic of progress and advancement. The incongruity apparent serves to articulate the fundamental instability of the concept of modernity, and it highlights the difficulty inherent in studying a notion that has been used to designate not only a historical epoch (Cooper, 2005), but has been associated also with notions as incompatible as the expansion of human consciousness on the one hand (Bell, 1990 and the limiting imposition of Eurocentric institutions and ideologies on the other (Chakrabarty, 2000), to name just a fraction. A possible way of resolving the tension in the above discussion is to argue that a definition of modernity as a conscious quest for advancement and betterment carried within it the ideological tools that made its critique possible. But regardless of such attempts to understand the ambivalent aspects modernity, the manifestation of the tension in travel writing on Sweden from the 1920s points to its significance and ubiquity, as the anti-modern sentiments surfaced in a worship of force, masculinity and military virtues that underpinned not only totalitarian movements such as National Socialism and Fascism, but also the ‘back to nature’-lifestyle promoted by more liberal strands as a way of creating capable and efficient members of capitalist society (Trentman, 1994, pp. 583–625; Lears 1981, p. 100; Frye Jacobson, 2000). It is thus evident that the British and American travel accounts occupy a nexus where discourses of modernity, anti-modernity and Nordicism overlap, underpinning a notion of the Swedish as the ideal. The Swedish people hail from a distinguished race of old

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blood who are now reaping the benefits of modernity while avoiding its degenerative effects, through a carefully maintained racial integrity and a regime of disciplined, active and wholesome habits. At work in these texts are anxieties concerning race and class degeneration that resounded in both American and British culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. But the idealization of Sweden is not devoid of hierarchical notions. As noted above, the debasing tropes of travel discourse often functioned to create the cultural and social superiority of the tourists’ home country over that of the destination. In the case of Sweden, the tourists may represent the country as an example for emulation; an image of how the UK or America could have been had they been more successful in maintaining Anglo-Saxon cultural and racial integrity. But this does not mean that Sweden is their equal. Through a curious employment of belittling adjectives such as ‘cute’, ‘quaint’, ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘diminutive’ (Reynolds, 1928, p. 106) Sweden is assigned its place in relation to the greater nations. Sweden is civilized and modern, yes. But is still a country subordinated to the great empires of the modern world, if nothing else so by virtue of its inferior size and less substantial population. Steveni (1925, p. 103) makes a revealing analogy with a looking glass, tellins us that the northern country is ‘a mirror in which you can see a picture of England, small but accurate’. The idea that Sweden is a quaint rarity-show that sums up and displays all that is desirable in a society is also expressed in Medill’s assertion that Stockholm is a perfect little ‘toy city’ (1924, p. 32). Sweden is successful where the greater nations have hitherto failed, but no shadow is cast on the greater nations for the reason that the task for Sweden is so much smaller, and therefore infinitely easier to accomplish. If the discussion so far has focused exclusively on the panegyric construction of the Swedish man, looking at the corresponding descriptions of the Swedish women brings out a further interesting aspect how the ideas of modernity figure in the texts. The verdict on Swedish woman is as universally celebratory as those of the men. She is clean, athletic and respectable, and has a natural wholesome and innocent prettiness. The fair sex in Sweden is all rosy-cheeked market women and pretty blond waitresses (Medill, 1924, p. 53; Reynolds, 1928, p. 67; Steveni, 1925, p. 204). Particularly the playboy Reynolds is pleased with regards to the lack of artifice and sophistication in Swedish women, contrasting the to the flappers of New York, asserting that they are ‘refreshing as summer zephyr after the sophisticated, hip-shaking, gold-digging Broadway flapper’ (Reynolds, 1928, p. 68) This is notable because it highlights yet another context in which the progress of modernity has left Sweden unscathed. In Britain and the states, modernity also brought with it the flapper, or the New Woman; assertive and independent in a way that threatened the values of the middle classes and led to stigmatization of modern woman as sexually predatory and artificial (Pumphrey, 1987). Again, Sweden has negotiated a pitfall of modern progress, its women remaining innocent and wholesome despite social developments and progress.

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The unclean Lapps and greasy Finns Returning to the trope of cleanliness and its significant racial connotations, these are further reinforced when tourists leave the southern regions of Sweden behind and travel up north. The northern part of Sweden is the home of the aboriginal people of Scandinavia, the Sami, referred to by the derogatory term ‘Lapps’ in the texts. It also has a considerable minority of Finnish immigrants. The ethnic and racial homogeneity that was celebrated in southern Sweden is no longer a reality, and as the authors encounter the cottages and huts of the ‘Lapps’ and ‘Finns’ this change comes to inflect the use of cleanliness in the texts. The three single tourists are all to varying degrees appalled by the filthy persons and habits of the Sami and the Finns. Their judgments range from fairly moderate remarks on the dirty bodies, clothes and dwellings of the Sami, to virtual eruptions of debasing colonial discourse worthy the most ardent imperial explorer. And though this may come as no surprise, given the constructions of racial hierarchy discussed above, the sharp narrative turn is nevertheless somewhat shocking for the unsuspecting reader, lulled into a relaxed complacency by preceding pages filled with congenialities. What is truly remarkable, though, is the response of the rebellious bohemians Jan and Cora Gordon. It might reasonably be expected that the final escape from the confining in-authenticity of spotless Sweden would be relished, but this turns out not to be the case. Instead the lack of cleanliness displayed by the Lapps and the Finns is equally condemned. And while the peasants of Swedish Va¨rmland prepare for a festival by ‘cleaning the cleanliness’—persistently scrubbing away even though not speck of dirt is to be found (Gordon & Gordon, 1926, p. 113), the cottage of a Finn settler is instead characterized by a ‘greasy cleanliness’ (1926, p. 215), and the Lapps encountered are variously described as ‘brown’, ‘unwashed’ and ‘incredibly filthy’ (1924, p. 258, 211). Moving from the absurd cleanliness of the Swedish, to a somewhat dirty Finnish cleanliness followed by the outright filthy Lapps, these representations of decreasing levels of attention to hygiene construct racial difference and hierarchy within Sweden in the same way as in British colonial contexts (Spurr, 1993; Frye Jacobson, 2000, p. 124). The antagonism towards mainstream culture and bourgeois values that Jan and Cora identify with does not prevent their complicity in the creation of racial hierarchy, where white Swedish are placed on top, Sami on the bottom, with the Finns uneasily lingering between. And though not at all unexpected, it is still significant that this corresponds to an existing political and cultural pecking order, where the Swedish have exploited and oppressed Finish and Sami groups and occupied their lands in ways that share many characteristics with the colonial and imperial ventures of more populous nations (Jones, 1982). The textual inconsistency that arises as Jan and Cora evaluate different degrees of cleanliness results from an uneasy negotiation of traditional colonial discourses of power, and their own rebellious opposition to modernity. The concept of cleanliness is central to both,

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though it carries very different meanings. In their narrative they vacillate between the two uses, thus rendering the narrative incoherent. Sara Mills (1991, p. 4) has coined the term ‘textual unease’ for similar inconsistencies in female colonial travel writing, arising from situations where the feminine gender role came in conflict with the dominant persona required by imperial contexts. In the case of the vagabonds in Sweden, matters are complicated even further when, towards the end of the journey, the Gordons encounter a Lapp family in whose hut they can finally reside in style. The mother of the family brings them bedclothes with the words ‘you mustn’t imagine us uncivilized, nor must you believe that we don’t know about cleanliness’ (Gordon & Gordon, 1926, p. 306). Suddenly the ‘other’ acquires a voice and the ability to contest stereotypes, while also establishing that a clean Lapp is a civilized Lapp is a good Lapp. But I would also like to suggest that, throughout their narrative, the Gordons’ dismay at inauthentic cleanliness and their quest to escape it is symbolically a quest for their own cultural past. The sturdy, romantic and hygienically relaxed peasantry they are trying to find are in effect the remnants of their own past. But the Lapps do not share the same history—the British were never boreal nomads. It doesn’t matter how dirty the Lapps are found to be, the cultural ancestors of the Gordons’ themselves can never be found beneath the filth. The dirt is thus emptied of its symbolic value and transformed back to mud on the floor and grease on human skin—inconvenient, potentially dangerous to the health and worthy of reproach. CONCLUSION It is often suggested that travel texts construe the visited country as a mirror through which an inverted image of the author’s own culture can be read (Nyman, 2000). These textual acts usually establish the visited nation as inferior. The present paper has argued, however, that the case of Sweden presents a significantly different picture. Sweden is not represented as inferior to Britain and America in the travel accounts: the country and its people are, on the contrary, celebrated as an ideal rather than instances of contrasting debasement. This paper has discussed how themes of cleanliness; urban, racial, cultural, moral and physical, were used to represent Sweden as progressive and modern. Through the concepts of modernity, cleanliness and race—all common rhetorical figures in travel writing—Sweden is depicted as a country where the people enjoy the benefits of progress and yet retain the bodily vigor and moral integrity that in many cases had to be sacrificed on the altar of improved living conditions. Furthermore, the paper has shown how a focus on cleanliness allowed tourists to launch an attack against the culture of modernity in a broader sense. The tourists Jan and Cora Gordon employed a theme generic to travel writing in order to criticize a culture that allowed and aided the destruction of what they perceived as authentic values. The use that the Gordons make of cleanliness is influenced

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by the same discourse that inform the other tourists, but their identity as anti-bourgeoisie, bohemian artists inflects the meanings they ascribe to what they see. This shows how a concept like cleanliness, saturated with cultural signification and central to a wide variety of discourses, will lend itself to agendas so different as to be conflicting in some contexts. In the case of the three male tourists Medill, Steveni and Reynolds, I would like to suggest that the texts function as a medium where the idealization of Sweden expresses race and class anxieties in the interwar societies of Britain and America respectively. It offers Sweden as an example of successful modernity. This construction is, however, made possible by the way the texts simultaneously establish identity between the Swedish culture/society and their own. The American Medill contends that ‘to us Americans, Sweden is almost like a part of ourselves’ and writes that Sweden and America have ‘many things in common, not only a democratic outlook on life, but a devotion to specialized industry, a lot of phones, prohibition of alcohol and command of the English language’ (1924, p. 18). The very modernity that is laudable in Swedish society is in fact what connects it with the US Similarly, the British Nordicist Steveni recruits evidence from philology and archeology to establish that the English are descendants from Swedish Vikings, assuring the reader that due to common ancestry, the English tourist will not be among ‘foreigners’, but people of the ‘same stock’ upon his visit to Sweden (1925, p. 13, 15, 25). Indeed, spending time in the country is even positively beneficial to the English because it is ‘good to return to the old Northlands’ of one’s ancestors every now and then. Playing the role of a contrasting image in this case, are the unsavory race and class elements in American and British society, and Sweden is the mirror through which they can behold their home country as it would have been without these segments of society. REFERENCES Barton, A. (1998). Northern Arcadia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Barton, A. (1996). Iter Scandinavium—Foreign travelers’ view of the late eighteenth century north. Scandinavian Studies, 68(1), 1–18. Bell, D. (1990). Resolving the contradictions of modernity and modernism. Society, 27(3). Berman, Sheri (2006). The primacy of politics: Social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boudreau, E. B. (2005). ‘‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage’’: Health versus heredity in the fitier family contests, 1920–1928. Journal of Family History, 30(4), 366–387. Brody, A. (2006). The cleaners you aren’t meant to see: Order, hygiene and everyday politics in a Bangkok shopping mall. Antipode, 38(3), 534–556. Brigham, C. (1923). A study of American intelligence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bryant, J.K. (2008). Jan and Cora Gordon—Biography. www.janandcoragordon.com. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Childs, M. (1936). Sweden—The middle way. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Submitted 14 July 2008. Final Version 13 March 2009. Accepted 29 July 2009. Refereed anonymously. Coordinating Editor: Christopher Endy

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