A Complicit Reading Strategy: Exposing Censored Themes of Intimacy in Swedish Alfhild Agrell's Raddad

This article proposes an ethical reading position by taking the author's socio-historic censorious situation into account and by adopting a complicit reading strategy in order to expose silenced themes of intimacy. It does so through textual references to the 1883 play Raddad (Saved) by the Swedish female playwright Alfhild Agrell. By taking the point of departure in Helen Freshwater's idea of an inclusive model of censorship, Judith Butler's theory of reiteration, and Toril Moi's claims of the political potential of a reading mode starting in the concerns of the text, I establish the theoretical basis for a complicit reading strategy. I then present the gendered period-specific censorious situation of the 1880s in Sweden, in which the aesthetics of idealism influenced censorship in the theatres and also regulated playwriting. I demonstrate a vacillation between self-censoring and exposing themes of intimacy in Agrell's play, proposing that this should be regarded as a specific rhetoric produced by an awareness of gendered censorship. Finally, by leaning on phenomenological and new materialist instruments of analysis, I present an embodied reading strategy for Agrell's play in response to its specific individual poetics and concerns, to expose its full gender/feminist potential.

Automated summary

This article proposes an ethical reading position by considering the author's socio-historic censorious situation and employing a complicit reading strategy to reveal silenced themes of intimacy. It does so by referring to Alfhild Agrell's play Raddad (Saved) and drawing on theories of censorship, reiteration, and embodied reading.