The mixture of races was defined as a serious threat to the Swedish population, who was regarded as the whitest and purest population on earth. And further, the belief that a mixture of Swedish, Finnish and Sami blood had weakened the group genetically.
It is further made evident that the novel captures a perception claiming the so-called ‘Finns’ were of an inferior race. My analysis shows how the characters are racialized using such ideas as the Mongolian theory and the cephalic index. The Finnish-speaking minority living in the Torne Valley came to be considered racially different from the national majority, due to national and international race science – today understood as scientific racism– and anthropology. In this thesis, I examine the narrative by placing it in relation to the racial hierarchies permeating society during the initial decades of the 20th century. Aronson’s novel Hitom himlen(This Side of Heaven, 1946) captures the life in upper Northern Sweden, in the Torne Valley, during the beginning of 20th century. Her writings are considered to be progressive and ethical due to extensive feminist and eco-critical research. Stina Aronson (1892–1956) is a celebrated Swedish modernist who published twenty-five works during the first part of the 20th century. Low forehead, light eyes : A critical reading on the construction of race in Stina Aronson’s novel This Side of Heaven (1946) (English)
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