Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht was the leading cultural figure and poet in Sweden for a number of years in the mid-18th century, at a time when women were not deemed fit to become authors or public figures at all. She was a strong and brave woman, who wrote sharp female emancipatory as well as anti-religious poems. Before anyone else in Sweden, she publicly engaged in enlightenment debate and dared to say what no one else dared.
Nordenflycht was an persistent and relentless challenger and transgressor of patriarchal borders from her early youth. She never accepted to be confined within the narrow boundaries of education for women. When put to needle work she hid philosophical books under her embroidery hoop. Nordenflycht was a feminist as well as an enlightenment pioneer. Using the same kind of unscrupulous, offensive strategies, her poetry – from her youth to her death – questioned, challenged and mocked societal and religious border regimes, scrutinized and attacked both earthly and heavenly patriarchy. She was also a forerunner in using subjective strategies hitherto unknown in Swedish poetry.
This paper investigates those literary strategies, in terms of the concept parrhesia, as understood by Michel Foucault – meaning truth-telling and complete frankness as well as deliberate subjectivity. Parrhesia is being there, investing yourself fully, including your own body. The parrhesiastes is characterized by great courage, daring to speak what she (in this case) knows is the truth in opposition to the orthodoxy and consensus of her time. The parrhesiastes is close to the prophet. What could we learn from Nordenflycht’s parrhesia regarding how to invest our bodies and our words to resist and attack the patriarchal border regimes of today?

Helene Blomqvist, associate professor in Comparative Literature, is a member of KuFo (the culture studies research group), one of Karlstad University’s prioritized research groups. She is engaged in the Nordic Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, in the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (IRSLC). Research interests: 18th-century literary history, narratives of 20th Century Sweden, narratology, semiotics, rhetoric, theory of genres and modes. All of her research borders on the history of ideas as well as church history and history of dogmatics. Blomqvist acquired her Ph.D in 1999, with a thesis on the thematic of secularization in the writings of Sven Delblanc. She has published studies on, among others, Pär Lagerkvist, P O Enquist and Agneta Pleijel, on theories of genres and modes, on literary teaching methodology and on Swedish literary history. The years 2012–2014 were spent on a project financed by the Swedish research council (Vetenskapsrådet) on the aesthetics of blasphemy. The project resulted in a monograph focusing the writings of Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht. She recently published an article on the influence of Martin Luther on Carl Michael Bellman’s Fredman’s Epistles, and also on how the problem of suffering and evil was articulated in poems of the 18th century – by Alexander Pope, Albrecht von Haller, Voltaire and Nordenflycht.

No co-author.