The invention of the concept of solitude

What one can learn in Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley about being alone

Abstract

This article argues that we lack a word in Danish for the positive aspects of being alone. We use Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley novels as a literary resource for a critique of our contemporary world with its hypostasis of the social on the one hand and widespread loneliness on the other. We point out that the valorization of being alone in a cultural-historical perspective is strongly gendered: traditionally, men could walk alone with pride, while women who were alone were seen as puny, pathological or dangerous. Promoting solitude through Jansson’s writing is in this way also a queer reading of it because we are challenging a patriarchal legacy in the cultural history of solitude.