Abstract This chapter approaches the issue of what it was to be a man in nineteenth- century Sweden by studying the life of the ‘gender- bender’ Therese Andreas Bruce (1808– 1885). It is here argued that masculinity was not about finding oneself but creating oneself. More than most other people Bruce created and invented a life of his/ her own.
What was it like to be a man in nineteenth- century Sweden? Or rather: what was it like to be a man for someone who was not only born by a woman but also born to be a woman, but who nevertheless from the very beginning considered himself a man and was prepared to draw the consequences of that consider-ation to the furthest?
The topic of this chapter is a handwritten autobiography by someone who was born in 1808 as Christina Therese Isabelle Jeanette Louise Bruce and who died as Ferdinand Andreas Edvard Bruce in 1885. This entirely unique docu-ment was edited by me, together with a collection of letters from the years 1859–
1881 and a melodramatic verse narrative ‘Hämnd och försoning’ (‘Revenge and atonement’) from 1868– 1869, written by the same person, in a book entitled Therese Andreas Bruce: En sällsam historia från 1800- talet (Therese Andreas Bruce: A Remarkable Story from the Nineteenth Century). The book also con-tains a long introductory chapter composed by me.1
By highlighting illustrative examples from the book, I will demonstrate how Bruce, from his very birth declared to be a girl, but from early on feeling like a boy and firmly resolved to live his life as a man, must struggle for a high
1 Inger Littberger Caisou- Rousseau, Therese Andreas Bruce: En sällsam historia från 1800- talet, Göteborg/ Stockholm 2013. All translations from this book that occurs in this chapter are mine. I am grateful to Yvonne Maria Werner who has not only inspired me in my research but also wrote a letter of recommendation when I applied for a printing grant.
standard of what he considers a male identity, characterised by entities such as courage, strength, power, and firmness. Certainly, Bruce’s noble birth – his father Adam Bruce was a member of the armed forces and held varying offices at the royal court – initially may well have facilitated his norm- breaking activ-ities, though his father’s opposition was early on rigid and also other members of the family brought forward their objections.
Assuredly, Bruce, often called a ‘disguised young lady’, is a very special man, who later on gives birth to a child and who wants, but is not allowed, to marry a woman. Still he never depicts himself as a woman, not even a masculine or manly woman, but as a heterosexual man who wants to be respected as such by those around him. Therefore, it is the more urgent for Bruce to reject any-thing with a feminine touch and try to demonstrate that manliness in his case is not a temporary disguise but an integrated part of his personality. At the same time, he constructs his masculinity from the very bottom, and he has a constant readiness to defend it. To that extent Bruce’s text illustrates how the apprehen-sion of manliness in the nineteenth century directly and indirectly is discussed and negotiated and how manliness is a form of performativity; the clothes, but also gestures and one’s conduct make the man!
Bruce wrote his autobiography at the end of his life and there are two over-lapping versions, a draft and a fair copy, with small divergences between them.
The handwriting of the fair copy is neat and easy to read. Surprisingly it ends in the middle of a page, whereas the draft goes on until an account of a crisis with religious implications when Bruce is about forty years old. It is scarcely probable that the narrative was intended to end in that way. Probably the author fell ill and died before the fair copy was completed, but why does the first version not continue right on to the writing Bruce’s moment in time? Maybe the remaining part of the draft has disappeared or been destroyed. In any case, Bruce mani-fests his talent for literary writing. He knows how to create a narrative to keep the reader’s attention alive. It is also evident that he envisioned an audience as he opens his narrative with an invocation to an imagined reader; in one passage he even employs a formulation like ‘to confess to the whole world’.2 However, he never mentions in what way he intended to publish the narrative of his life.
What genre does Bruce’s text belong to? I have called it autobiography, the concept Bruce makes use of is ‘description of life’, and it certainly has features of both autobiography and memoir, but could as well be designated a narrative of development or confession (of sin). Even if the author is eager to emphasise
2 Littberger Caisou- Rousseau 2013, p. 228.
the veracity of what he writes his narrative is obviously, like any other autobio-graphical text, arranged, thereby manifesting fictive features. Moreover, Bruce’s narrative is also a kind of apology. The author does not conceal his own faults and deficiencies, quite the reverse, one of his main aims is to warn the reader not to live such a sinful life as his. At the same time he constructs an image of himself as honest and honourable, a man worth the reader’s sympathy rather than blame. One could also say that Bruce’s narrative of his life functions as a kind of retrospective creation of his masculinity. In constructing a vividly longed for masculinity Bruce creates himself as a historical person and a man.
Research on different kinds of gender transformations is not very extensive so far. Yet Bruce’s case is not unparalleled, and what makes it unique is the fact that he has written the narrative of his life. With the exception of Lars Molin’s (called Lasse- Maja, 1785– 1845) autobiography, though written from a different transsexual perspective, Bruce’s is principally the only autobiographical narra-tive from this time written by a transsexual person hitherto known in Sweden.3 In Maria Lindeberg’s travel book Bref från Paris (Letters from Paris) from 1827 one reads about a working- class woman aged about 50 who makes her living from mason work, always dressed as a man and who has totally adopted a man’s manners and his way of walking. The remarkable thing according to Lindeberg is that no Frenchman makes fun of her, whereas a Swedish woman of the same predicament would be defamed and forbidden to work.4
An illustration to how Swedish society actually reacted to a woman who like this fictive French woman chose to live and act as a man, about a hundred years before Maria Lindeberg composed her text, is the story of a lieutenant colonel’s daughter, called Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar, from the province of Småland in southern Sweden. In 1713 she abandoned her female dress as it prevented her from succeeding, left for Stockholm and assumed the name of Vilhelm Edstedt.
Later on she arrived in Kalmar, in south- eastern Sweden, where she enlisted in the artillery and got married to a young woman. The marriage was a happy one, but as Ulrika Eleonora later on was persuaded by her relatives to once again wear her female dress she was brought to court in 1729 because of her affair with a woman. The sentence was one month in prison. The male dress and the
3 For example, Lasse- Maja, Den beryktade Lasse- Majas äfwentyr: efter nyare upptäckter och anteckningar om denne stortjufs märkwärdiga stölder, äfwensom hans många äfwentyr, såwäl i karlkläder, som förklädd till qwinna, under hwilken förklädnad han utförde många djerfwa puts med både Herrar och Damer, Stockholm 1887.
4 Maria Lindeberg, Bref från Paris af ett resande svenskt fruntimmer, Stockholm 1827.
fascination for military life, as well as the love affair with a woman and problems with the authorities, all these are common factors for Stålhammar and Bruce.
Unique of its kind is an autobiography, with an introduction by Michel Foucault, written by the French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (1838– 1868), who like Bruce had been allotted a female identity but chose to live as a man, however with a tragic outcome.5 In my book I compare Barbin’s text with Bruce’s. Suffering is a mutual guiding principle, but also the stoical and sup-posed masculine attitude to conceal one’s pain at all costs.