Barnboken: Tidskrift för Barnlitteraturforskning (Nov 2019)
Toninas ideal och Pellas praktik: Konsumtionskultur och uppfostran i Ingegerd Granlunds Tolv brev till Tonina och signaturen Claques Pellaböcker
Abstract
Title: The Ideals of Tonina in the Practices of Pella. Consumption and Disciplinary Regimes in Ingegerd Granlund’s Tolv brev till Tonina and the Pseudonym Claque’s Pella Books The article explores how discourses on teenage femininity in the popular advice manual for teenage girls Tolv brev till Tonina (Twelve Letters to Tonina, 1956) by Ingegerd Granlund, are contextualised and negotiated in the equally popular series for young girls by Anna Lisa Wärnlöf, pen-name Claque: Pellas bok (Pella’s Book, 1958), Pellas andra bok (Pella’s Second Book, 1959), Pella i praktiken (Pella in Practice, 1960), and Lennerboms (The Lennerboms, 1965). These texts were published in a time of transition, just before the waves of protest ignited by those born during or just after World War II. This generation would later challenge many norms of the time, but this is not yet discernable in the advice manual or the Pella novels, both narratives of transition from childhood to womanhood. Teenagers emerged as a specific group of consumers in the post-war years; especially the young female body transpires as a focal point of attention for disciplinary regimes and discursive practices. In the advice manual these discursive patterns are quite clear; the teenage girl becomes a respectable woman through carefully measured practices, and a never-tiring attention centred around the body, in constant need of correction. In the Pella novels, we meet a range of normative feminine identities, but one person stands out for belonging to a different class than the others, her body being in need of these correcting discursive practices in order to pass as respectable. The article analyzes the presence of attention geared towards money and material things in these texts. The well-dressed female body and the well-matched closet are assets, not just a sign of good taste but also of respectability, interpreted as class. Class, expressed as style, is clearly marked out: the body most severely judged is the (young) feminine body labeled as working class.
Keywords
