"I come from crap country, and you come from luxury country": Ugly Encounters in Scandinavian Au-Pair Novels

In the new millennium, the use of au pairs in the Scandinavian countries has increased steadily.¹ Women hire au pairs because of a perceived time bind; without help, the woman in the Scandinavian household is likely to reduce her workload outside the home (Liversage, Bille, and Jakobsen 2013, 16). This may come as a surprise to those who have come to think of the Scandinavian countries as particularly happy and egalitarian. British journalist Helen Russell, for instance, decided to move to Denmark for a year to explore Danish happiness. Attending a language class, she finds herself surrounded by, among others, half a dozen Filipino girls working as au pairs. Russell wonders: "'Isn't everyone supposed to be equal in Denmark? Aren't Danes supposed to do their own cleaning and child rearing?'" (2015, 69). The answer, according to a 2013 report on the Danish au-pair program, is no. Public institutions take care of children during work hours, and, increasingly, au pairs take care of housecleaning in general and watch the children during stressful moments at home, such as mornings and right before dinner (Liversage, Bille, and Jakobsen 2013, 16).² As the report points out, this is far from unproblematic. While the term "au pair" suggests that the relationship between host family and au pair encompasses a cultural exchange between equals, in reality, it is full of violations and gray areas.³ Subsequently, the au pair is a figure who continually receives much attention in politics and the media as she (usually a female) evokes questions of global inequity.

Literary texts also explore the relationship between host families and their au pairs. Contemporary novels from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, however, frame the au-pair issue not only as a general question of class inequality (as suggested by Russell above), but also as a gender issue. Domestic work, including the hiring and use of au pairs, is primarily the woman's responsibility (cf. Liversage, Bille, and Jakobsen 2013, 16); she is the one who has to find a replacement so that she may work full-time and thus contribute to the gender-equal ideal of the Scandinavian welfare state. Yet hiring a less privileged woman to carry out domestic tasks evokes guilt and unease rather than happiness. Hence, in the novels, we find a guilt-triggering au-pair figure raising questions of femininity, feminism, and global sisterhood. The novels may be apocalyptic, chick-lit funny, or deadpan realistic, yet they are all steeped in irony, indicative of ambivalence, uncertainty, and what Sianne Ngai calls "ugly feelings" (2005). As opposed to the more pragmatically perceived real-life circumstances described in the Danish au-pair report, we find that the fictional motivation for getting an au pair is the protagonist's uncomfortable mixture of altruism, welfare-state ennui, and existential emptiness, as well as the sense that she needs more time to live up to the ideal of what a woman should be at work, at home, and in the bedroom. It is a mixture of feelings of emptiness and inadequacy that points to an overall lack of (affective) happiness in the so-called happy countries.⁴ And rather than solving the problem, the au-pair figure ends up illuminating it—leaving further reflection and possible action up to the reader.

In the following, I analyze Sara Kadefors's Fågelbovägen 32 (2006; Paradise Lane⁵), Selma Lønning Aarø's Jeg kommer snart (2013; I'm Coming [2015]), and Kirsten Thorup's Tilfældets gud (2011; The God of Chance [2013]), in light of the happiness discourse of the World Happiness Report, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild's (2002) notion of global woman, and, finally, Ngai's (2005) conceptualization of "ugly feelings," in order to show how alleged Scandinavian virtues such as happiness, social equality, and gender equality are questioned as postfeminist issues in literary works that tend to produce an affective counter-discourse to the scientific happiness discourse of research institutions and reports that focus on evaluative happiness.⁶ Here, the...