The Bear Woman: Ramqvist’s Uneven Art of Returning

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoilers: discusses scenes from throughout The Bear Woman.

Early in Karolina Ramqvist’s The Bear Woman, a young woman falls asleep beside the man who will abandon her on an island. Their carriage bumps along frozen ruts; her head rests against him, and drool travels down her chin. We have been given the comfort of the journey, the surrender of a sleeping body, before the narrator begins to doubt whether they could have traveled in a carriage at all.

The woman is Marguerite de la Rocque, whose reported ordeal in the sixteenth century draws a Swedish writer into years of research. Accounts of her abandonment and survival preserve enough to provoke the imagination while leaving much of the life beyond recovery. Around this incomplete history, Ramqvist builds a novel in which the narrator’s family, journeys, reading, and attempts to write continually interrupt and alter the past she is pursuing. The island keeps receding as she approaches it, though the book repeatedly gives us something definite to picture.

Certainty can change within a sentence. Before the departure, the narrator writes: “I don’t know how long she waits for him to arrive, but I’ll write that it’s winter.” The admission of ignorance carries us straight into a decision about weather. Soon there are hooves on frozen ground, darkness inside a carriage, and a girl drowsing against her guardian. The declaration that this is being written remains close enough for us to remember its provisional status, while the physical details invite the ordinary trust with which we enter a scene. Ramqvist can question the grounds of a story without depriving it of a body.

Research subsequently unsettles the carriage, which the narrator comes to regard as an improbable luxury. Its familiarity belongs partly to the historical dramas she has already seen. The ease with which she pictured the journey has smuggled a social arrangement into it: Marguerite travels in the comfort conventionally supplied to an important woman. Rewriting the departure requires her to leave on horseback. The girl who slept against Roberval is now mounted separately, and the road extends through a less sheltered landscape. An uncertainty about transport changes the intimacy and protection we had imagined between them.

Both journeys remain available to the reader. A corrected historical account might simply replace the first with the second; Ramqvist preserves the act of replacement, along with the narrator’s susceptibility to an attractive image. We acquire a past and a history of how that past has been pictured. Even the revised version continues into details the narrator cannot recover with certainty, so research never supplies a final vantage from which the imagining can be dismissed. It keeps changing the conditions under which imagining takes place.

I enjoyed the openness of this movement. The prose is light enough to carry us between a research problem and an ordinary embarrassment without making either a solemn occasion. In one small episode, apparent gaps in a source lead the narrator to imagine a possessive male researcher withholding what she needs; the fantasy collapses when she discovers that she has been consulting the wrong volume. Her error survives in the book with its disproportionate resentment intact. That willingness to retain the unflattering stages of attention helps produce the sincerity I felt while reading, and makes the narrator’s company agreeable even when her company becomes demanding.

The cost of staying with the writer

Writing takes up an increasing share of that company. The narrator examines the protection it has afforded her, the solitude it maintains, and her uneasiness about surrendering its place in her life. These reflections belong to the novel’s central difficulty: pursuing an absent woman can become a way of withdrawing from the people who are present. Their recurrence also gives the book some of its least rewarding stretches.

Early in this reflection, writing has permitted the narrator to explore human life “without actually having to participate myself.” The passage develops the appeal of escaping dependence, vulnerability, and the scrutiny directed at women. Much later, writing is called an addiction, and the refuge is described again: “I would never need anyone else as long as I had my writing.” Between these formulations lies a great deal of research and family life, yet the second returns us to an exemption already explained in the first. The narrator can meet the demands of living by converting them into text, preserving an imagined distance from their consequences.

The later passage is more severe with her. Shame and self-disgust have gathered around a practice whose protections she once needed, and the word “addiction” makes dependence on writing itself harder to evade. Still, I found the accumulating explanations less compelling than the situations that put this dependence to work. Once the book has made her retreat into writing intelligible, another account of why she retreats can prolong our acquaintance with the problem without substantially changing it. The repeated assurances that she has now seen her condition more clearly begin to ask for a recognition the reader has already had.

There is a sympathetic reading of the book’s delays as making the reader share the narrator’s frustrated search. That account fits the longing for a clear story which keeps running into incomplete evidence. It has particular force when the narrator hesitates before an episode of suffering she knows she will have to imagine. The delay then acquires an object: we feel what she is resisting as well as the resistance itself. My reservation concerns the stretches in which the explanation of resistance becomes familiar enough to make its further examination feel less necessary.

A late passage at the family’s summer cottage gives familiar thought a different force. After feeding the children and clearing the kitchen, the narrator attends to the growth around the house and the birds nearby. Her surroundings continue their lives independently of her anxieties. Returning to André Thevet’s account, she sees the island’s living world with a fullness previously obscured by her concentration on danger. Its vegetation, air, and creatures begin to furnish a place where Marguerite could survive. The thought that the world continues regardless of an individual was already available to her; the sensory expansion makes it newly bearable.

Here the interweaving of present and past enlarges both. Domestic calm changes how the historical landscape can be imagined, and that landscape gives the narrator another way of feeling her own small place in the world. Repetition can deepen an experience without delivering a new fact. The cottage passage supplies a generous standard for the book’s returns, one against which the renewed explanations of writing’s hold can feel comparatively restricted.

A souvenir with a second history

Some of the finest construction takes place over distances too large to register as a local turn of phrase. Near the beginning, the narrator describes a small souvenir from a visit to a château associated with her research: a parcel made from a dried leaf. It has become brittle through handling, and its veins barely hold around the contents. At this point we know how the object occupies the narrator’s present. The circumstances in which she acquired it remain withheld.

Much later, the book returns to the visit. The narrator has told her daughter she wants a piece of the wall, though she cannot bring herself to take it. A photograph briefly enables her to picture herself from outside, with the other people on the trip orbiting her research. The daughter’s impatience then provokes an anger powerful enough to empty the lovely afternoon of its appeal. Perception follows feeling with embarrassing speed: foliage and stone remain where they were, while their beauty becomes inaccessible to the person looking at them. Self-awareness has offered no reliable protection against a fit of temper.

The daughter lingers by the wall before joining her in the car. Ramqvist slows the disclosure through physical actions: a hand reaches across the console, a fist rests in the mother’s lap, the fingers open around a folded maple leaf. Inside is a small piece of the wall. The narrator unbuckles her seat belt to hug her. The explanation of the early souvenir is completed through a gesture which the angry mother had been in no condition to anticipate.

Read backward from this encounter, the brittle parcel has acquired another history. The narrator’s attachment to it includes the daughter who chose something to bring away for her; its worn state records the repeated handling of a gift as well as a relic of the historical search. The daughter’s practical response reaches across the mother’s absorption and makes something shareable out of it. Research has brought them to the place, irritation has nearly spoiled the departure, and the object carries away a tenderness that neither the archive nor the narrator’s account of her motives could have supplied.

Earlier passages already acknowledge the daughter’s separate life and the mother’s difficulty in giving it room. The gift makes that acknowledged relationship active in a new way. Its effect also depends on our having met the souvenir before we met the act of giving: the daughter’s care extends backward into the book’s opening, where the narrator seemed to possess the object alone. A small rearrangement in the reader’s knowledge joins two kinds of attachment that the research has often pulled apart.

For me, The Bear Woman remained a good read whose circling could have been shorter. I did not finish with transformed questions or feelings, and some of its examinations of authorship outlasted my interest in them. I did, however, go looking for the historical figures afterward: Ramqvist had made their incomplete lives sufficiently vivid to draw my curiosity beyond the novel.

Follow the uncertain historical record into Tanizaki’s The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.

Sources

Karolina Ramqvist, The Bear Woman. Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. First North American edition. Coach House Books, 2022. Originally published as Björnkvinnan by Norstedts, 2019.

James Scales, “The Bear Woman — Karolina Ramqvist,” Full Stop, June 29, 2022.