Abstract
Popular among young American readers since the early 1930s, Maj Lindman’s two series of children’s books—Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and Flicka, Ricka, Dicka—continue their long publishing histories in the U.S. These nostalgia-filled adventures about the Swedish triplet boys and girls construct positive values of childhood independence and cooperation. At the same time, they often associate these positive values with white racial features in ways that can be problematic for critical readers. This article examines Maj Lindman’s construction of racial identity by analyzing Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Gingerbread, the volume that gives the fullest commentary on whiteness in either series by offering dark images of its main characters. After falling into a vat of gingerbread batter and turning dark brown, Snipp, Snapp and Snurr spread chaos in their town, disturbing the peace, disrupting the market economy, and offending bourgeois propriety. Following Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and others who have critiqued similar representations of Africanized figures in American art, this article explores the extent to which Lindman was “playing in the dark” (Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1993) with this inaugural Snipp, Snapp, Snurr volume, engaging a white race ideology rooted in “Old-World” stereotypes but easily translatable to a “New-World” politics of race. Implications for critical parent-readers and Scandinavian-American identity will be considered.
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Notes
In America, each series consists of ten titles. This article mainly considers the thirteen volumes in print when my family was reading them prior to 2011 when previously out-of-print volumes were re-issued.
Literally the “people’s home,” the folkhem stands for the welfare state promoted through Social-Democratic politics in Sweden since the late 1920s. Modeled on “a traditional paternalistic family structure” (Broberg and Tydén, 1996, p. 95), the folkhem stresses “a tight-knit national community striving for a class-transcending social order based on peace, justice, progress and democracy” (Rosenberg, 2012, pp. 7–8).
In Imperial White (2007), Radhika Mohanram argues that women and women’s sexuality were central to drawing the ideological boundaries of race in the nineteenth century because women “could dilute the ethnic/racial group” by giving birth to mixed-race offspring (p. 34).
The Svenskt författarlexikon, 1900–1940 (Swedish Dictionary of Authors) lists Snipp, Snapp, Snurr. En lustig saga för de minsta (Snipp, Snapp, Snurr. An Amusing Tale for the Littlest Ones—translation mine) as the first Snipp, Snapp, Snurr title (Åhlén, 1942, p. 485). Staff working at The Swedish Institute for Children’s Books in Stockholm confirmed it as the Swedish version of The Gingerbread in an e-mail message to me on January 8, 2014.
The Svenskt författarlexicon (Åhlén, 1942, p. 485) lists Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Yellow Sled (1936) as occurring three years prior to the corresponding Swedish volume, Snipp, Snapp, Snurr och den gula kälken (1939). Flicka, Ricka, Dicka and the New Dotted Dresses (1939) occurred a year before the first Swedish volume about the same three girls, Rufsi, Tufsi and Tott.
Between 1870 and 1914, approximately one-sixth of Sweden’s population left the country, a majority emigrating to the United States (Broberg and Tydén, 1996, p. 78).
Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Red Shoes.
Following Morrison (1993), I apply the terms “Old World” and “New World” to help conceptualize European and American aspects of The Gingerbread. I use these terms with reservation, however, understanding their Eurocentric nature which seeks to erase knowledge of indigenous civilizations in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans.
Sexual gossip surrounded Badin’s time in the court, including the rumor that he fathered Princess Sophia Albertina’s child (Pred, 2004, pp. 33–58).
In her foreword to Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Red Shoes, Alice Dalgliesh introduced the book and series to American readers by saying, “It is one of the few stories we have in which children actually do something for someone” (Lindman, 1932/1962).
Flicka, Ricka, Dicka and the Girl Next Door (1940) turns the tables on the triplets, making them the ones who provide a higher-class girl the ego-reinforcing experience of getting dirty with labor.
In Flicka, Ricka, Dicka and the New Dotted Dresses (1939), the girls help a forest-dwelling woman with her daily chores. Dressed in rags and carrying a bundle of sticks, the woman evokes images of Romani-Swedish people who were under racial investigation by the state at the time this volume appeared and targeted for sterilization for the burden they were believed to pose to society (Broberg and Tydén, 1996, pp. 126–128). In contrast, Lindman’s story expresses no fear of the woman nor any need to change her.
A WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org) search shows no Snipp, Snapp, Snurr or Flicka, Ricka, Dicka titles published outside the US since 1959.
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Rick Lybeck is a Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Literacy and English Education at the University of Minnesota. He holds an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies and an M.A. in English from the same institution. He currently lives in Mankato, Minnesota with his wife and two daughters.
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Lybeck, R. Constructing Scandinavian-American Identity through a Chaos of Darkness: Maj Lindman’s Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Gingerbread . Child Lit Educ 46, 22–37 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9223-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9223-1