"Ingen har egentligen förstått hur radikal jag är": Skammen som smärtpunkt, jämlikheten som vision hos Lars Ahlin

This article-based dissertation, titled ”No One has Truly Grasped How Ra
dical I Am”: Shame as a Site of Pain and Equality as a Vision in the Works of
Lars Ahlin, comprises four articles and an introductory chapter. The pur
pose of the thesis is to illuminate shame as a central site of pain in Ahlin’s
authorship and to broaden the understanding of his Christian vision of
Equality. This is accomplished through thematic analyses of a series of mo
tifs that have received little or no attention in previous research. Further
more, the study examines how these motifs relate to the tension between
shame and equality in the novels under examination.
The first article investigates human characters’ responses to non-human
animals in the novels Kanelbiten (1953), Stora glömskan (1954), and From
ma mord (1952), within a framework of animal ethics and animal-rights
theology. The second article analyses the engagement with the biblical fi
gure of Sophia Wisdom in Kanelbiten, Min död är min (1945), and Bark och
löv (1961), situating the discussion in a feminist theological context. Both
articles draw intertextual connections to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brot
hers Karamazov (1879–1880). The third article examines the socially criti
cal ritual practices depicted in Kanelbiten.
The fourth article turns to Min död är min, Kanelbiten, and Bark och löv.
It highlights how Ahlin’s multifaceted maternal motif is intertextually con
nected both to critiques of patriarchal structures grounded in domination,
competition, violence, and war, and to the radical vision of societal mot
herhood rooted in care, cooperation, community, and solidarity that forms
the core of Elin Wägner’s Väckarklocka (1941) and the women’s literature
of the 1930s and 1940s. Like the first two articles, the fourth also emphasi
zes the intertextuality within Ahlin’s own oeuvre, thereby contributing to
a broader and deeper understanding of the motifs examined in the thesis.
In dialogue primarily with feminist theologian Carol J. Adams’s central
concept of the ”absent referent”, the introductory chapter underscores
the interconnection of children’s, women’s, animals’, and nature’s
vulnerability to violence and domination in patriarchal society, which
confronts the reader in Ahlin’s novels. Adams’s ethics of care perspective,
like Wägner’s social vision, stands as a counterforce to hierarchical
society, thereby reinforcing the concept of societal motherhood as the
hallmark of the Christian vision of equality in Lars Ahlin’s works.

Keywords: Lars Ahlin; shame; hierarchies; animal ethics; feminist theology;
ritual theory; societal motherhood; care ethics; Christian vision of equality.