Abstract
In this article, I argue that orphanhood and motherlessness as presented in drama reinforce the gendered representations used in nationalist processes. I examine the plays presented by the Finnish Theatre Company (founded by the Finnish nationalists in 1872) in 1872–76 and analyse their contribution to the gendering of the nation. In Finland, the idea of collective nationality was established during the nineteenth century by defining an ideal ‘Finnishness’ and creating ‘national’ imagery, especially through the arts. One of the most enduring representations was the embodiment of Finland, the Finnish Maid. As the theatre was one of the nationalist’s central institutions, I argue that it had a strong role in producing imagery for their uses, and that its early repertoire reinforced the gendered representation of the nation, emphasising youth and virginity as its main features. The study’s focus is on orphanhood and motherlessness as vehicles for intensifying the feminine representation of nationality. The ubiquity of orphan girl characters and the absence of mothers emphasise the sexual metaphor of a defenceless virgin, the notions of ‘true’ origin and the nuclear family as a scale model of the nation. Simultaneously the representations naturalise the gender categorisations established in the Western cultures during the nineteenth century.
This article examines orphanhood and motherlessness as literary and theatrical building material for the representation of a nation as feminine. The focus is on a specific place and period of time, but the aim is to gain insight into the network of complex connections between pan-European cultural nationalism and the categorising gender discourse of the nineteenth century. I approach the subject by analysing the dramatic literature performed by the Finnish Theatre Company (in Finnish, Suomalainen Teatteri), established by the Finnish nationalist intelligentsia in 1872. The main objective of the Finnish Theatre Company (hereafter, ‘the FTC’) was to foster the Finnish language and to create language-bound national imagery by producing ‘national’ literature and drama. 1 From its establishment, the theatre promoted itself as a national theatre of Finland. 2 Here, I take a close look at the repertoire presented by the company in order to analyse orphanhood as a means of creating nationalist representations. I discuss the utility of the female orphan for embodying the features attached to the imagined Finnish identity. I argue that the characters carry meanings advantageous to the nation builders, creating gendered metaphors for the nation that were in keeping with the societal gender discourse and hierarchies of the era.
Nationalism has been studied extensively in recent decades and the notion of nations as imagined constructions has become generally accepted. 3 The importance of gender in conceiving nationalist processes has also garnered significant attention. 4 I ground my study on the existing interdisciplinary examination of nationalism and gender that demonstrates the strong and complex connection between the ideals of nationality and gender roles that were established in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, forming a strict category an accepted and ‘natural’ femininity. 5 The long Western tradition of representing geographical areas or ideas of collectives through female personifications manifested itself in Finland during the nineteenth century as an embodiment that became known as ‘The Finnish Maid’ (in Finnish, Suomi-neito). 6 The FTC did not explicitly declare that it promoted this personification, but scholars have provided views on the theatre’s role as a producer of the feminine representation of Finnish nationality. 7 My approach relies on the notion that the FTC’s mission and distinctive quality as a national institution is manifested in its repertoire. 8
Looking at the company’s early repertoire and focusing on its female characters, I see one feature that leaps out as applying to most: orphanhood. Of the eighty-four plays performed during the first five years, forty-two include one or more central female figures that are orphans, making fifty female orphan characters altogether. Orphanhood is a widely examined subject in studies of Anglo-American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are many themes and attributes attached to the literary orphan of the era – such as malleability, the development towards one’s ‘true identity’ and the idealisation of the concept of family – resonating strongly with the concepts employed by nationalist movements of the nineteenth century. However, the connection between the orphan myth and the imagery of nationalities is a topic not yet explored fully, especially with regard to gendered representations. Additionally, I claim that in particular the motherlessness of orphan characters contributes significantly to the imagery of nation-making. And while studies have provided many insights into orphanhood in prose literature, the same does not apply as robustly to the study of drama.
Theatre as an art form possesses an extraordinary ability to produce and repeat representations. I argue that the FTC contributed to the process of creating the representations and in conveying and popularising them for nationalist purposes in Finland. Following the ideas of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and playwright Friedrich Schiller, and binding together the Finnish language and national culture, the Finnish-minded intelligentsia perceived the arts as organically linked with the creation of the nation. Theatre gained a special position. It was even claimed that there was no other intellectual or emotional force (including in science and arts) that could affect the people and their customs the way theatre could. 9 The performances were important occasions for gathering and appearing in the bourgeois society that was taking shape. Joep Leerssen has noted that the emergence of the concepts of the public, public sphere and public opinion in eighteenth-century Europe was, among other things, linked to the ‘immense public function of the theatre’. 10 In Finland, this occurred mostly during the nineteenth century, when there were not yet many channels to express political, cultural and social issues; in that sense, I regard the theatre as a part of the developing public media of the time. It is also worth noting that the FTC’s sphere of influence was not restricted to the capital, as the first years’ activity was mainly based on tours around Finland. 11
This article focuses on the repertoire performed between 1872 and 1876, that is the first five performance seasons of the company. By the end of that time, the FTC had succeeded in gaining stability and establishing its agenda as a promoter of ‘Finnish culture’. In 1874, the Senate of Finland considered the FTC eligible for receiving annual state aid; the following year the company was able to buy its own building, and thereby stabilise the operation. 12 The company’s aim was to promote vernacular drama, but since it was still very scarce, the vast majority of the early repertoire was of foreign origin. The great number of imported plays was a common custom of nineteenth-century theatres that nationalistic histories, including Finnish theatre history, tend to omit. 13 From the eighty-four plays, twenty-four were introduced as domestic and sixty of foreign origin, those being: German 27, French 16, Danish 7, Swedish 3, Austrian 1, Hungarian 1, not clear 5. Although I mention the origins of the plays I refer to, I do not analyse them according to those written originally in Finnish and those translated from other languages. The early Finnish playwrights adopted the themes and structures from Central and Northern European models and many of the plays that were produced as originally Finnish are likely to be adaptations. However, many of the translated plays include changes in venues and names that made the plays better address the Finnish context.
In the beginning of the FTC’s operation the emphasis was on the entertaining singspiel, small amateurish comedies and depictions of folklife, but the goal was to produce more serious drama year after year. Hence the plays form an uneven group of texts in terms of genre, artistic quality, and the later success or the fame of their writers. However, my aim is to build a general outline of the themes and features related to (female) orphanhood and to consider their connection to the process of gendering the idea of a nation. Thus, I treat the plays as one body of texts. As mentioned, from the eighty-four plays produced forty-two contain orphan girl characters, and it is this subset that constitutes the material for this article (see Play List for a complete list of the plays). 14
There are important questions of methodology in reading a large dramatic corpus, of what gets lost or left out. There are limitations to a largely textual analysis to theatre research, since dramatic texts at their simplest are ‘only a sequence of lines that [the characters] say plus what other characters say about them’; hence, these texts should be understood as plans or ‘skeletons’ for the performers to bring alive on the stage. 15 Yet this study does not examine the ways the actors expressed the characters or the immediate reception of the plays. From the Finnish performances of this time, there are hardly any visual documents to evidence the staged performances. I discuss the cultural–historical discourses by analysing the textual material the company used with the understanding that the plays contain several thematic worlds, and the one that I have chosen – orphanhood – is only one of many. Because it is impossible to discuss the fifty orphan girl characters separately within a single article, I concentrate on the most illustrative. In addition, it is important to note that I am not examining the plays as an expression of the playwrights’ personal nationalist (or other) aspirations, but as material in the hands of a nationalist theatre.
Gendered Nation and the Study of the Orphan Myth
Like all identity formation, the idea of nationality is built on inclusion and exclusion. Origin and continuity have become particularly central to the definition of collective identity. 16 Repeated ideological and political efforts by nationalist leaderships are required to create a sense of continuity in national culture. The abstract notions of nationality need to be presented in ways that make them imaginable by the population. 17 As Ruth Roach Pierson says, ‘Nations are constructions, fictions; but the politicians and intelligentsia who articulate nations into being – the missionaries of nationalism – start with already existing materials.’ 18 The female body has provided a particularly useful representational instrument for nation builders.
The conflation of a solid and homogenous nation (its roots, continuity, honour or vulnerability) with idealised representations of women and strict gender roles has led to the multifaceted societal control of (female) sexuality throughout Europe and beyond. 19 And while there is a wide range of male personifications in the imagery of nation-making, their female counterparts have seemed more effective. As Tatiana Kuzmic has argued, the male personifications ‘are less compelling, especially when it comes to rallying cries and mobilizing people [men] on behalf of a nation. […] A nation, like a woman, is an entity for which men will live and die.’ 20 Similarly, the Finnish-minded nationalists of the late nineteenth century found it essential to prove the nation’s originality (the idea of one genuine origin) and continuity by demonstrating that at the ‘heart’ of Finnishness something had remained and would continue to remain the same no matter what the circumstances. 21 Nevertheless, only a particular kind of female was qualified to represent the origins of this (desired) nationality. In addition to gender, the most distinctive features expressed by almost all variations of the female embodiment of Finland were youth, innocence and vulnerability. The personification integrated the ideals of Western bourgeois femininity and ‘peasant romanticism’, a phenomenon essential to German-inspired nationalism adopted by the Finnish intelligentsia. 22
One of the reasons we cannot discuss the creation of nationality without the gendered dimension is the developing social dichotomy of gender. Throughout the Western world, the definition of genders and their roles in society was established at the very same time as ideas of collective nationalities were spreading. Certain qualities, such as virtue, piety, morality and innocence, were categorised as feminine. 23 Also in Finland, these discourses occurred simultaneously and supported each other in many ways. The so-called ‘polarity ideal’, which emphasised the essential differences between men and women, became popular, containing the conceptions of men as active and rational and women as passive and emotional. 24 Embedded was the quest for the naturalisation of gendered power relations both within the nation and the family. 25
In large part, the fusion of the concepts of gender and nation has been made possible especially through means of art. 26 The feminisation of Finnishness became established by representing Finland as the virginal maiden in visual arts, poetry, caricatures and schoolbooks yet orphanhood has not been analysed as a characteristic of the representation of Finland although it is one of the earliest features of the whole concept. The very first abstractions of Finland as a nation were built on its relationship to the former ‘mother country’, Sweden, and the prototype of the literary personification of Finland was of Swedish origin. After the region was separated from Sweden and incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1809, 27 a personification named ‘Aura’ was established to personify Finland. 28 In Aura the attributes of innocence, helplessness and youth merged with orphanhood: as the embodiment of Sweden – Moder Svea – had been particularly maternal since its early days from the late seventeenth century, Aura represented Finland as a young girl separated from Mother Svea, stolen by ‘the Eastern giant’ and waiting grievingly for a saviour. 29
My enquiry into the function of female orphan characters in the repertoire of the FTC draws upon the studies of orphanhood in nineteenth-century Western literature more broadly. I take this wider angle based on the understanding of early cultural nationalism as a pan-European phenomenon, spreading ideas, methods and literature throughout the European continent. 30 The Finnish nationalist intelligentsia closely followed developments in European literature and sought to establish perception of historical connection to Western European culture and civilisation. 31 Orphans became central characters in Western novels during the eighteenth century, and literary scholars have explored the metaphorical implications of the figure in depth. Orphans allegorise various issues from class difference and economic disparity to different kinds of physical and spiritual exile. 32 They embody the individual’s experience of isolation in the developing modern society. 33 Some scholars, especially those who have studied the representations of ethnic minorities in the United States, have identified the potential of the orphan figure as a vehicle of nation-building. According to Maria Holmgren-Troy, the orphan works ‘as a prism, refracting and reflecting ideas about national identity and belonging’. 34 In the European context, there is little research explicitly tackling the connections between the abstractions of nationality and the orphan myth. However, there is a lot of analysis of concepts embodied by the literary orphan figure that, in my view, resonate with those used in the creation of Finnish nationality. In the sections that follow, I will discuss those concepts, including the idealisation of ‘origins’, the myths of family and mother, the youth and innocence of female orphans, and the educational hierarchy formed between the orphans and the males who ‘find’ them.
Embodying the Importance of the Family and Origins
In the very first performance of the FTC, a ‘tableau’ produced in 1872 (Alkajaisnäytelmä by Tuokko, ‘The Opening Play’), 35 a young and orphaned ‘child of Hellas, a daughter of eternal poetry and art’ wanders in poor health in barbarian lands. After hearing that poetry is as native and natural to the North as it is to Hellas, the orphan makes her way to Finland, finding a new home in which to recover and flourish. 36 This first orphan girl of the FTC has a strongly allegorical appearance, connected to the nationalists’ desire to evidence the potential and originality of ‘the Finnish culture’. While this orphaned child of Hellas operates on a rather poetical and stylised level, that is not the case for most orphan characters of the repertoire. On the contrary, orphans are standard characters in all the genres presented: be it a tragedy, comedy, a folk play or a short musical play, the orphan girls are present. 37
The large number of orphan characters forms a striking contradiction to one of the most central notions of nationalist thinking, that is the notion of family. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the family served as one of the cornerstones of Western concepts of the modern nation and society. As Geoff Eley has stated, nationalist ideologies throughout Europe adopted the concept, both to allegorise the idea of a national collective but also to replicate the patriarchy of familial forms. The metaphor was excellently suited for the vocabulary needed for nation formation, simultaneously upholding ‘the gender regimes of men’. 38 The Finnish-language nationalists were very fond of presenting the notion of family (a married couple and their children) as a scale model and the moral backbone of a functional nation. 39 The whole existence of the nation was considered dependent on the realisation of the main purpose of marriage, which was to bear and bring up children. But above all, the philosophy was that the emotional bond for one’s native country, the habits of the fathers and the mother tongue could only be produced in the loving environment of one’s family. 40 Considering this, one could think that the stories told on the stage that was promoting nationalist aims would depict families in their idealised form. But the vast majority of the repertoire produced somewhat different imagery of family life. All of the forty-two plays considered here highlight orphanhood one way or another. Many of the orphan characters are the protagonists of their plays, but even when that was not the case, in some way orphanhood emerges as a matter of relevance in the narratives.
However astonishing this contradiction between nationalist family ideals and the enormous number of orphan narratives in the repertoire of the FTC may seem, it was not exceptional. Scholars of Victorian fiction have observed that from the late eighteenth century to the fin de siècle, the orphan is an omnipresent character in Western literature. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century British novel is claimed to openly undermine the ideologies of family it is assumed to maintain.
41
This mind-tickling paradigm opens up numerous representational possibilities.
42
One is to perceive the orphan characters as actually promoting the ideal of family and the emotional entity only a family can construct. The characters long for their lost families but also the love they imagine having lost in them, whether they have ever lived with those families or not. An orphaned girl in the German play Päivölä (orig. Sonnwendhof) narrates: I have been so alone. As far as my memories go, no-one’s hand has ever cuddled me, no mother has held me to her bosom, no-one has gently put her hand on my shoulders; oh, I wish I could once cry my heart out on a loving chest.
43
However, I argue there to be more in it. In their separateness from their birth families, besides reinforcing the ideal of the family itself, the orphan characters of the FTC’s repertoire embody the centrality of the original Finnish identity. In all the plays, the importance of origin is clearly articulated through the orphan figures. I read the characters as forming a nationalist abstraction of ‘finding’ one’s origin – becoming aware of one’s identity. The notion of one genuine origin that reflects the idea of the collective identity is embedded in nationalist processes. 45 The literary orphan figure, on the other hand, has often been interpreted to be in pursuit of a ‘true’ identity, indicating the fulfilment of some potential. 46 According to Carolyn Dever, in the absence of parents, the orphan is left with a personal mystery that motivates the search for origins on different levels. 47 In the plays examined, the orphan’s need to connect with her origins is, in most cases, not expressed as a dynamic activity of searching but rather more as a sense of not-belonging. The longing underlines her separateness from her original background, emphasising the notion of true identity and culture stressed by Finnish nationalists.
The pain of the separation from the loving original family is manifested especially in several plays in which the guardians treat the orphans abusively, using them as free labour, ensuring they remember being taken in by the family out of mercy. The caretakers speak rudely about the orphans as in the German play Sirkka (orig. Die Grille): ‘the hussy becomes older day by day and its [sic] livelihood becomes more and more expensive. It eats a lot but does little work.’ 48 Often the orphan receives harsh guidance from her guardian, as in the Finnish play Nummisuutarit (‘Heath cobblers’): ‘You are still late, you slut. If you are not here in a second, I will twist your neck, because today I am not in a playful mood.’ 49 Similar narrative structure has been traced in the ‘sentimental and post-sentimental’ orphan girl novels of the nineteenth century. Joe Sutliff Sanders finds the genre to be driven by ‘a story about girls adopted into families who are less than thrilled to accept them’. 50
The alienation of the orphan can also occur in her ‘original’ home, as in the Danish play Sven Dyringin koti (orig. Svend Dyrins Huus) in which the father’s new wife has subjected the children of the dead mother to extreme misery, almost starving them to death. The stepmother has broken the previously close relationship between the father and his children; the now-motherless first-born, who is particularly mistreated, tries to keep the memory of her dead mother alive. 51 From the perspective of nationalist imagery, this kind of cruelty illustrates the agony one must bear under the culture that is not the ‘original’. Mistreated in the foster home, or by a foster parent, the orphan expresses the notion of a true (spiritual) home situated elsewhere. Emotions have been argued to be an essential driving force in the nationalist projects. 52 This narrative of an orphan girl suffering and separated from her original family (repeated in numerous plays performed by the nationalist theatre) invites the audience to feel compassion and to embrace the idea of a Finnish culture and identity in need of rescue and protection.
When expressing a personal need, the orphan is likely to get a response denying her cruel treatment, like in the Hungarian play Mustalainen (orig. A szigany): ‘you ungrateful creature, haven’t I taken care of you and raised you as if you were my own child?’.
53
The imagery potentially arousing pity in the audience is accentuated by the complete virtuousness of the orphan girl herself. Despite the mistreatment, the girls are presented as thoroughly modest and virtuous and as quietly accepting of their circumstances. In Nummisuutarit, the orphan character Jaana even regards the cruelty as a guarantee of her innocence: I thank you for the hard treatment you have given me! If you would have addressed softness to me, or let me throw myself into indecency, I might be a miserable girl now, deserving nothing but disdain from everyone. But I thank you, for now I can freely look into the eyes of my father [who has returned after many years of absence] and my fiancé.
54
Importantly, the humility and gratitude expected from the orphans links with the ideals and expectations placed upon real-life women in the division of gender roles in the national construction. Humble submission to their circumstances was among the main characteristics of the ideal bourgeois woman of the century. Besides adding to the nationalist concepts of original identity and of family as the basis of the sought-after nation, the orphan characters fortify the imagery connected to gender categorisation.
Consolidating the Nationalist Mother Myth
One particular detail of the orphanhood emerging in these plays merits special consideration. For orphaned characters who have lost only one parent, the lost one is always the mother. This means that all fifty orphan girl characters discussed are motherless. Hence the main type of female character in the whole body of plays is portrayed as being raised by her father, grandfather, uncle, or occasionally a non-related foster family or stepfamily. Additionally, the plays contain hardly any adult female characters depicted in a favourable light considering the gender ideals of the era. 55 The only adult women who are presented positively are the mothers who are already dead. This is striking, considering the centrality of the concept of motherhood in the ideals of nation-making. I argue that the all-encompassing motherlessness of the characters needs to be read against this ideal.
The nineteenth century brought motherhood to the very core of the Western notions of family and home. In middle-class societies, mothers were increasingly seen as the main educators of the new citizens, especially when it came to manners and morals. 56 The symbolic potential of women as mothers was deployed broadly in many nationalist movements. The maternal metaphor involved the idealisation of motherhood as the moral backbone of the nation as well as the guarantee of its physical existence. 57
The Finnish nation-makers embraced motherhood as the bedrock of family and home and simultaneously the self-evident calling of womankind. The key notion for female identity was the assumed motherliness of every female: their ‘natural’ ability to nurture and understand. 58 The symbiosis of women and home was linked to the national project by invoking the role of family as a guarantee of societal balance and as a basic requirement for national construction. 59 As in many European models, Finnish nationalist thinkers separated female and male citizens into dichotomous categories with totally different characteristics of masculinity and femininity. 60 The mission to become a mother was seen as a female privilege and the objective of all the education given to girls/women was to teach them to respect and pursue this national duty of honour. The view was extended to involve women who, for one reason or another, could not have a family of their own, and to make so-called ‘societal motherhood’ – caring and educating of the underprivileged people of society – their calling. 61
It is obvious that motherless orphans are not unique to the repertoire of the FTC. On the contrary: motherlessness appears to be such a characteristic feature of the time that it merits recognition as a literary tradition. 62 Dever has even argued: ‘To write a life, in the Victorian period, is to write the story of the loss of the mother’. 63 The high mortality rate of real-life mothers of the era is commonly offered as an explanation for the lack of literary mothers, but the general conception of the extent of death in childbirth is fortified by the prevalence of maternal mortality in fiction. Furthermore, the image of the dead mother appears to be central to the whole construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. 64 Hence, the overall motherlessness in the plays can be understood as reinforcing the general Western mother myth. Moreover, the almost total absence of living, physically present mothers in the plays performed by the FTC fostered the aims of the nationalist project. In order to express nationalist ideals through a young female, to incorporate those ideals into the character, what could be more convenient than to expose her to a glorified picture of her dead mother as a moral model? This is manifested in dozens of the plays where the surrounding community repeats stories praising the orphans’ dead mothers, producing the desirable image of femininity. The departed women are invariably described as sweet and humble, self-sacrificing creatures above criticism. 65 The moral pressure set on the orphans is confirmed by repeatedly comparing them to their mothers: ‘Oh! How she reminds me of her mother, that good Madelaine … the same pleasant smile […] and the same heart.’ 66 Or: ‘You are a bright picture of your mother. You are as beautiful and fine as she was. You have her gentle eyes, but you also have her virtuous heart.’ 67
The orphan girls’ development in the plays is not only controlled by setting up an ideal dead mother, but also by encouraging the girls to aspire to be like their mothers by complimenting them on their similarities. The mechanism is familiar both to the gender discourse and the nationalist conception of the nineteenth century. 68 It is easy to sanctify a dead mother when the corporeality, bodily desires and mundane faults that would be inconsistent with the nationalist gender ideals can be left out of the picture. This use of motherlessness confirms that developing an ideal is more successful when the original model is not physically present. 69 As the orphans of the plays are without fail presented as willing to adopt this model femininity, they are put up on a moral pedestal on which they are looked up to but on which the room to move is narrow and controlled. The structure naturalises the stereotype of female moral superiority, representing the female as a guardian of gender-specific national morals. 70 Similarly, the orphans embody an ideal all but analogous to the feminine representation of the Finnish nation.
In her study of gendering the concept of Finnishness, Johanna Valenius has seen the literary female characters’ lack of living or positively represented mothers as a way of omitting the possibility of a matrilineal order, reinforcing patriarchy. 71 Regarding the orphan girls in the plays, this is especially so. By presenting mature women in a negative light, the plays make the young orphan characters the most central – often the only – representatives of positive womanhood. By and large, the repertoire of the FTC implies the ideal age of female to be no more than seventeen and this applies to all the orphan characters. The age is often mentioned, as in the Swedish play Levoton yö (orig. Den oroliga natten), in which a public servant approaching his thirties sighs in delight after proposing a motherless young girl: ‘Only 17 years … Seventeen years … just the age that I find most loveable to a girl …’. 72 This age preference supports the bourgeois gender ideals of the era, emphasising the innocence and (sexual) ignorance of women. 73 Considering the strictly fixed roles of men and women, bearing the mother’s responsibility to teach the tasks and manners of the female to the daughters, 74 but without any example of adult womanhood, the motherless characters appear ignorant of physical femininity, their own appeal or sexuality, thus confirming these ideals. Consequently, I perceive motherlessness as having a multi-layered relation to the control of female sexuality, a phenomenon often present in nationalist projects. For the continuation and purity (both moral and biological) of the community and culture, which have been conceptually connected to women, female sexuality has constituted a threat. 75 Adopting bourgeois sexual morality, nation-builders in Finland were expecting modesty and a certain incorporeality from their ideal women, transforming those ideals into the gendered embodiment of Finland as well. 76
The orphan girls also form an expression of loyalty, that being an essential attribute both of ideal femininity and the idea of collective nationality. 77 In the forty-two plays analysed, the lack of mothers emphasises the characters’ dependence on their fathers, grandfathers or foster parents. The guardians enjoy endless, unquestionable allegiance and admiration from their daughters/wards, who invariably place their guardians’ wellbeing above their own personal needs. 78 This loyalty is stressed by reminding the orphans of their responsibility for their guardians’ happiness. The commitment is reinforced by the guardians’ strict control of the girls and the underlined unwillingness to part with them (to give them away to any suitors). As the father in the Finnish play Lemun rannalla (‘On the banks of Lemu’) states: ‘I do not tolerate someone prematurely stealing away my rose, taking away my only joy here in life.’ 79 The grandfather in the German play Kukka kultain kuusistossa (orig. Sie hat ihr Herz entdeckt) has similar feelings towards his granddaughter, expressed in an older, poetic style in Finnish: ‘You, the only ray of sunshine in my life, oh, you dear Aina! Yet your innocence delights my old heart and the cleanliness of your heart makes it happy.’ […] ‘Oh, her innocence! How could I be such a fool that I would let my virtuous child into the world that is vain?’ 80 In their (assumed) fear of losing the remaining guardian, the literary orphan figures have been considered as embodiments of extreme faithfulness. 81 The motherlessness of the orphan girl characters leads to a strong reliance on fathers and hence contributes to the desired patriarchal undertone of Finnish nationality.
To Be Found, Loved and Educated
A fundamental metaphor of Finnish-language nationalism was the union of the intelligentsia and the so-called ‘Finnish people’, the latter imagined in its ‘pure’ state, yet in need of being educated. 82 The romanticised image originated in the nineteenth-century pan-European current of nationalism that no longer saw a nation’s culture as its activity or artistic achievement, but as a manifestation of its fundamental identity that would be found in the folklore traditions and popular customs of ‘the rustic peasantry’. 83 In the background of the developing interest in the ‘people’ was the nostalgia that the intelligentsia, who lived in a society that was gradually getting more complicated, felt for the ‘original’ and ‘simple’ peasant culture. It was also about the desire to gain support for the political aims of the rising Finnish bourgeoisie, who were yearning to gain the position of the old aristocracy. 84
Several plays presented by the FTC, whether they were originally Finnish or not, contain a narrative supporting this metaphor. The union of the intelligentsia and the peasantry manifests in love stories that portray an orphan peasant girl discovered (usually from a village or from woods) and passively surrendering to be loved, guarded and educated by a well-educated male (but who is still a peasant at heart). 85 Such plots connect to the nationalist ‘discovering’ of the culture, nature and people. These activities in nineteenth-century Finland were both symbolic and historical. Throughout the whole century, an integral part of ideological actions of male university students, forming the core of the Finnish-minded intelligentsia, was to travel to the central parts of the Finnish region to ‘find’ the true Finland and Finnishness. 86 In the love stories of the FTC, the orphan forms a representation for this original, simple Finnishness to be found from the countryside.
The power structure between the male ‘discoverer’ and the orphan he has found is clear. As expressed by one finder/founder in the French play Gringoire: ‘You are beautiful and pretty and rosy-cheeked as a spring flower, that kind of treasure cannot be left without an owner.’ 87 The orphan girl narratives in Western popular culture are regularly built on the premise that the orphan is in an ‘inferior position of power and dispossessed of rights or other forms of property’. 88 Mariglynn Edlins has also observed that despite often being the protagonist, in the love stories the orphan is depicted as passive, only able to respond to the actions of the counterpart character, ‘the lover’. The orphan is repeatedly outlined as dependent on the lover in order to maintain the livelihood or security, thus revealing a power differential between the characters. The positioning infantilises the orphan, ruling out any self-determination and autonomy. 89 These remarks are in line with the positioning between male and female – the lover and the orphan – of the plays presented by the FTC. I perceive the hierarchy fortifying the gendered power relations of the Finnish national structure of the era.
The romantic narratives of the plays invariably contain a development (or a promise of such) of the orphan girl discovered by the intelligent male character, and as such, they repeat the notion of the literary orphan as a composition of the development towards ‘the ultimate fulfilment of his or her true identity’. 90 However, I am inclined to agree with Teemu Ikonen who has criticised the simplistic perception of the orphan as a symbol of an individual’s possibilities of defining his/her identity. 91 Looking at the passivity of the orphan girl characters presented in the FTC, I find it impossible to perceive them as depictions of any kind of self-determination. This is connected to the gender of the orphan characters. Ikonen has pointed out that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, literary orphans were predominantly female in European literature, which tended to define the genre and plot of the novel. Whereas boy orphans appeared in adventure tales, orphan girls were featured in romantic narratives in which the orphan was raised by a male guardian whom she would often marry at the end. 92 Quite similarly, the plays examined contribute to the ‘fulfilment’ read in the literary orphan figure by positioning the orphan girls repeatedly as waiting to be found and educated.
The male characters in the plays take the educator’s role as natural. They approach the orphans with lines such as: ‘how unspeakably charming you would be if someone would smooth your slightly uneven nature? Young lady, I would very much like to complete your education! What do you say?’.
93
The female characters are willing, even eager to place themselves at the male characters’ feet (literally, in many cases) to listen and learn.
94
When the well-educated male cousin of orphaned Loviisa in the German play Toinen tai toinen naimaan (orig. Einer muss heiraten!) offers – after realising how lovely the girl is – to serve as a guide to her education, the girl expresses: (eagerly) Oh, how wonderful it would be to know all countries and nations the way that you do, to understand the essence of nature and to rise above the land to explore the journeys of the suns and worlds. How insignificant I feel when I raise my eyes to you from here and find myself lacking everything, everything except the desire to follow and understand you.
95
One clear factor reinforcing the metaphorical hierarchy between the orphan and the discoverer/guardian/educator is of course the youth of the orphans in the plays. Referring to the orphan stories in European literature, Eva König sees the choice to portray orphans regularly at a very young age as linked to the themes of becoming a civilised subject.
100
The notion comes close to the rhetoric of the Finnish nationalist thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century: We are a young people, at the beginning of our development, dependent on one another, tough in our character but faltering in our views, without experience, without clear opinions, without an awakened self-esteem and therefore easily susceptible to all influence, evil and good.
101
Conclusions
Theatre was a central institution for the cultural-nationalist project of the Finnish-minded intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century. Viewing their repertoire of performances as a manifestation of the FTC’s aims, the themes around orphanhood were representations of Finnish national identity. The theatre produced embodied representations of nationality to impact the thinking of its audiences.
I have argued that the themes of female orphanhood and motherlessness can be perceived as building material for the embodied and gendered representation of an ideal nation as evidenced in the repertoire of the FTC. The early repertoire, which consisted of both European and Finnish plays, introduced femininity with a clear emphasis on youth, innocence, vulnerability and dependence on male guardians. These were essential ingredients for the nationalist representation of Finland in the late nineteenth century. The astonishing scale of orphanhood and the motherlessness of the characters in the FTC’s repertoire worked as a means of reinforcing the impact of these features. Similarly, they worked as a medium to establish and naturalise the definitions and categories of gender that were central to the construction of patriarchal nationality.
Orphanhood contributes to these discourses in numerous ways. The orphan characters’ separation from their original families highlights both the importance of origins but also the ideal of family. Another highly important feature is motherlessness, proving that the ideals of motherhood have the strongest influence in the absence of the real mothers. The nationalist and societal feminine ideal, as presented to the young and impressionable orphans, is confirmed through this disembodied, glorified model. The absence of adult femininity leaves the stage for the young female (orphan) characters that present no threat to the patriarchal construction of the nation, similarly confirming innocence and virginity as multi-layered features of the allegory of nation. The nationalist metaphor of embracing one’s true identity, that is the collective nationality and its ‘original’ culture, manifests through the young orphan waiting (passively and often unconsciously) to be found, eager to be educated and guided when the right male arrives. The repeating structure creates a link to the core narrative of Finnish-language nationalism: the orphan embodying the ‘true heart of Finnishness’ located in the peasantry, to be found, loved and cultivated by the intelligentsia.
The connection between the concepts of gender and nation is shaped through symbols and images that have been ‘imprinted deep into our psyches’, images often invested with sexual and erotic meanings. 103 In addition to forming sexualised metaphors of the ‘natural’, pure state of the nation, the orphan girl characters invite the male characters to provide them with protection, guardianship and educational guidance; those being exactly the attitudes the nationalists wished to evoke in the intelligentsia towards the idea of the Finnish identity. However, I do not claim that the representations were only to affect men. The women in the audience were equally exposed to the ideology of the prevailing power structures through the standardising representations provided. It is likely, too, that the ‘Cinderella-stories’ taking the orphan to a new level of civilisation appealed to the Finnish-language nationalists as a wider group seeking to establish its place and power in society.
The dramatic repertoire analysed here was performed in the Finnish context but mostly consisted of imported, European material. Here lies the paradox of nationalist projects. The representations created to express the originality and ‘true national identity’ of the country tend to be fusions of ideological innovations and already existing cultural strata. As Geoff Eley has stated, the creators of nationalist concepts have worked with the material available: ‘not with cultures of their own choosing, but with cultures directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’. 104 This is also clear in the material presented by the FTC, seeking to evoke national consciousness. It is not essential to grasp whether there was any intentionality in the FTC to produce as many orphan girl plays as possible. The orphan figure was a literary phenomenon of the era; but as standard imagery provided by a theatre that was producing the ideals and abstractions of nationality, the orphan girl becomes part of the representation of that nationality. The pan-European and in many ways intertextual bourgeois ideals served the nationalist needs by offering representations with the potential to channel (mostly masculine) dreams and desires into the idealisation of Finnishness. The young female orphan provided a means of articulating this sought-after form of nationality.
The power of the strongly metaphorical representations of gender and nation lies somewhere in the complex net of human thought and emotions. A young orphan girl character possesses great potential to create in the audience an emotional bond to the notions she was made to represent. However, the fundamental reason to look closely at the formation and use of the seemingly harmless and mundane representations is their highly stereotyping nature. And to quote an apt remark by Aleksi Ahtola, the stereotypes ‘justify the dominant power relations, prevent alternative readings but also create in people a sense of security which is based on groundless belief in general truths’. 105 All the phenomena we are living with today have their seeds in the past. Embedded in the gendered representations of nationality are gender categories and roles: the far-reaching imagery of accepted and ‘natural’ femininity and masculinity. Also embedded is the establishment of a gendered power structure on a societal but also on a conceptual level, which works through sexualised abstractions, rooting and naturalising the notions such as the ‘original’ and ‘foreign’, ‘pure’ and ‘dirty’, ‘accepted’ and ‘unaccepted’, falsely entitling the fear of ‘the other’.
Footnotes
Play List
This is a list of plays containing orphan girl characters performed by the FTC from 1872 to 1876, in order of the year of premiere (and alphabetically by author within each year). Many of the plays were revived several times in the years following the first production.
I have considered the earliest possible versions of the texts. With few exceptions, the plays have been examined as hand-written promptbook manuscripts used by the company, the repository being in the archives of the Theatre Museum of Finland (Teatterimuseo), Helsinki. I have examined those plays for which the promptbooks have not survived either from the actors’ part scripts (the plays by Laura Calonius, Rudolf Kneisel, Victor Hugo and Clara Andersen) or from printed versions (the plays by Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson, Aleksis Kivi, Zacharias Topelius, August Säfström, Adam Oehlenschläger and one play by Tuokko), with publication data noted below.
Swedish was the mother tongue of the Finnish intelligentsia for centuries. This is why plays that were ‘originally Finnish’ were in many cases written initially in Swedish. In this list, I have indicated those plays and included both Swedish and Finnish versions of some of the authors’ names. Among those who were ‘awakened’ to the cause of Finnish-language nationalism in the mid nineteenth century, it was popular to invent Finnish versions of the old Swedish-language names and to start using either both names or just the Finnish version. Additionally, I have included the titles of the plays in the original languages when possible; the English titles are mainly my own translations.
