Gender in Kerstin Ekman's Witches' Rings
Rochelle Wright's Argument of Cyclical Narrative
Apr 29, 2009
Wright discusses Ekman’s novel Witches’ Rings, as well as her other novels, and how they all display the cyclic cycle of mankind and an ultimate sense of realistic and inevitable truth.
Rewriting History in Witches' Rings
In Witches’ Rings, Ekman paints a history of Sweden through the eyes of historically unconventional people. Wright states that “Ekman employs both a class and a gender perspective. By foregrounding female characters, particularly impoverished women…she provides an alternative to the bourgeois, male point of view that traditionally has dominated works of history as well as in fiction” (157).
While she has not completely abandoned male characters, as there are sections of the novel given from the point of view of F.A. Otter and Lindh, but the focus of the piece is to gain a different view of history. This reflects Wright’s idea of the “relativity of truth,” and that history cannot just be told from one perspective and be accurate (156). But Ekman takes this a step farther when she talks about Edla’s photograph: “But how to describe a face? …You recall it as if in a dream and afterwards you couldn’t possibly say what it looked like” (21). She is expressing the fact that history itself is ambiguous and untraceable and, like Sara Sabina’s nameless grave, Edla’s story and many others will slip wordlessly out of history.
Readers find their truth about the characters through their stories, and sometimes even more significantly, their lack of stories. Even Ekman’s narrative form of fragmented pieces reflects this view. Life is not a chronological record filled with easily listed details with nothing out of place or missing, but rather pieces of a puzzle that must be connected and, if needed, supplemented with imagination.
The Deer in the Meadow and the Cyclical Nature of Life
Wright also discusses the cyclic nature of Ekman’s narrative: “Stories don’t exist in a particular time. They happen over and over again” (165). Although this line is quoted from another of Ekman’s novels, this theme is especially relevant in Witches’ Rings. Tora discovers that the witches’ rings that she sees in the meadow are made by male deer chasing female deer in a sort of mating ritual (Ekman 246-7).
The female runs in an endless loop, tracing her steps again and again as though under a spell, and never breaks free of the circle. The women of the novel also seem to be trapped in this never-ending cycle. Wright notes that “narratives reflect certain archetypical patterns that underlie all human experience” (165).
All three generations of women (Sara Sabina, Edla, and Tora) are hard workers who bear children while young. They are also the prey of men. But Ekman offers a bit of hope for the women, and humanity as a whole, through Tora. She sees beyond the rings as the others have not. Like her foremothers, she has children to provide for. But instead of being content to stay and work for another, she starts her own baking business (Ekman 330-3). Although not completely breaking free, she is developing the tools for future generations to become even more liberated.
Looking to the Future
Through Ekman’s narrative, readers get a more accurate glimpse of the past. Her fragmented viewpoints and cyclic stories form a picture of history that is both mysterious and realistic. By looking at the past and forming ideas about it, humanity is in essence writing its own history, and through it their thoughts on the world, and ultimately shaping individual lives.
Sources: Ekman, Kerstin. Witches’ Rings. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1997.
Wright, Rochelle. “Narration as Transformative Power: The Fiction of Kerstin Ekman.” Gender-Power-Text: Nordic Culture in the Twentieth Century.
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