The War at Sea, Lived Memories and the Politics of Emotion in Vigdis Stokkelien’s Trilogy on Gro

Abstract

In recent years, Norwegian cultural production has increasingly foregrounded the experiences of sailors serving aboard merchant vessels allied with the British during the Second World War. These men endured not only physical injuries from submarine and aerial attacks, but also profound psychic trauma, often manifesting in post-war alcoholism and depression. However, the war at sea also left indelible marks on women’s bodies. This article examines Vigdis Stokkelien’s trilogy on Gro—Lille-Gibraltar (Little Gibraltar, 1972), Båten under solseilet (The boat under the sun sail, 1982), and Stjerneleden (The star joint, 1984)—to explore how emotions as fear, shame and pain circulate between different individuals and groups during the war and in war memories. Drawing on affect theory, this reading of Stokkelien’s novels demonstrates how what happened at sea marked Norwegian bodies and national identity for a long time after the war.

1. Introduction

Over the past fifteen years, Norwegian public discourse has demonstrated a pronounced interest in the fate of war sailors. These were merchant seamen who were forced to act as soldiers when they found themselves involved in war actions in the years 1940–1945. Acclaimed films such as Krigsseileren (War sailor1, 2022) and Jon Michelet’s six-volume novel epic En sjøens helt (A hero of the sea, 2012–2019) have garnered widespread popularity, while historians have underscored their significance in shaping public understanding of wartime experiences.2 These filmatic and literary expressions have contributed to Norwegian cultural memory of the Second World War in an important way. However, the narratives almost exclusively focused on men and male experience: As is often the case in memories of war, the experience of soldiers and others directly involved in armed fire is central and overshadows the experience of women and children staying at home.

Feminist readings of the Second World War in Norwegian literature have illuminated the wartime experiences of women. Special interest has been shown in women derogatively called “whores of Germans” (tyskertøser) and Jewish women subjected to persecution.3 Scholarship has also revisited Torborg Nedreaas’ debut collection Bak skapet står øksen (Behind the cupboard stands the axe, Nedreaas 1945), containing many short stories that render female experience of the German occupation of Norway,4 as well as Herbjørg Wassmo’s trilogy on Tora (Wassmo 1987), the daughter of a German soldier. Contemporary literature has likewise reflected on wartime romances, often initiated by an interest in personal history of the author. However, these narratives, often focusing on the harsh post-war condemnation of women’s love affairs during the war, do not specifically address how women were affected by the naval war.

To date, no study has examined literary descriptions of Norwegian women affected by the war at sea, nor those who lived with Norwegian sailors returning from the oceanic battlefield. My focus here is the work of Vigdis Stokkelien, specifically her trilogy chronicling the life of Gro: Lille-Gibraltar (1972), Båten under solseilet (1982), and Stjerneleden (1984). Although largely forgotten today, these novels warrant renewed attention for their contribution to the discourse surrounding war sailors.5 Through Gro—who, like the author herself, experienced the war from a coastal vantage point as a young girl and later worked as a radio telegraphist—Stokkelien explores the enduring impact of maritime warfare on a woman’s life. Spanning the years 1940 to the 1970s, the trilogy also illustrates the war at sea and how memories of the marine war were transmitted to the generation coming of age during the Cold War.

In what follows, I concentrate on Stokkelien’s portrayal of Gro’s body, as it emerges through the novels’ intense rendering of the circulations of emotions. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed [2004] 2008), I show how fear, shame and pain circulate importantly between the different groups involved in the war, drawing sharp boundaries, for instance, between friends and enemies in the Norwegian population. In addition, the “intensification of feeling” brings out the limits of the human body (Ahmed [2004] 2008, pp. 24–25), and as I will show, Gro’s female body becomes fundamentally marked by emotions triggered by war actions. An important aspect is Gro’s final decision to kill herself, as the result of her body having become intolerable for her.

While much solid and important Norwegian research on literary depictions of war memory so far has been inspired by psychoanalytically grounded memory studies and trauma theory6, Ahmed’s perspectives allow for a renewed understanding of how national politics can be influenced by war memory even today. According to Ahmed, emotions generate a sense of identity by delineating the bodily surface that separates self from other. Ahmed stresses that there are multiple contact zones between different subjects, as well as between subjects and objects. She writes that “life experience involves multiple collisions with objects and others. It is through such collisions that I form a sense of myself as (more or less) apart from others, as well as a sense of the surfaces of my body” (Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 26). The nature of these “others,” and the dynamics of emotional interaction, create sedimented relations shaped by gender, class, and ethnicity. Highlighting the interactions between subjects and how emotions circulate between groups and individuals rather than how subjects individually suffer from, or are psychologically affected by, war memories, Ahmed’s theory offers tools for readings of Norwegian literature that supplement psychoanalytical approaches.

Inspired by Ahmed’s thinking, I will trace how emotions are revealed as moving and working in the memory that takes much place in Stokkelien’s trilogy. Tracing the effects of fear, shame and pain on the formation of groups and identities that are part of the trilogy’s plot, my reading of Stokkelien’s three novels—set during the last months of the war, in the years 1955/56 and in the 1970s—demonstrates how emotions rooted in war experience travel through time. The aim of my article is thus twofold: I want to throw light on female experience of the war at sea, both during the war and by way of war memory, as it becomes clear by the case of Stokkelien’s Gro. Replacing the today often realised post-memory perspective—telling how war memory affects those who did not experience the war—with a reading of a series of three books that trace the development of memory work in a woman over many years later, I further want to show how emotions triggered by the war at sea can shape Norwegian bodies and identities for a long time afterwards.

2. Historical Background: War Sailors in Norwegian Culture and in the Work of Stokkelien

Following the German invasion of Norway on 9 April 1940, sailors of Norwegian merchant vessels found themselves abruptly conscripted into warfare—often without prior military training.7 Subjected to relentless assaults from both sea and air, they lived under constant threat from German U-boats and Japanese kamikaze fighters. Survivors bore witness to shipwrecks, disease, and grievous bodily harm. During rare periods of leave, many sought refuge in the taverns and brothels of foreign ports. After the war, many of these survivors were heavily traumatised, found themselves without jobs and developed alcohol addictions.

Public discussion has largely focused on the delayed and inadequate financial compensation afforded to these sailors. Their service was not immediately recognised as military, and thus they were denied veteran status. Upon returning home, many were met with accusations of abandonment—some were told they had been “on holiday abroad” while the domestic population endured hunger, torture, and occupation.8 This reception was enhancing their traumatic experience, compounded by the revelation that the promised remuneration for sailing in war zones would not be delivered.

During the war, the Norwegian government-in-exile in London established Nortraship, a state-owned company that managed the merchant fleet and supplied Allied forces with essential materials. Sailors’ wages were deliberately aligned with those of British seamen, with the assurance that supplementary payments were being withheld in a special fund to be distributed post-war. However, when most sailors returned—often not until August 1945, following the conclusion of the war in the Pacific—they discovered that the fund had been used to reimburse shipowners for wartime losses. While those with visible injuries received some financial support, others were left with nothing. It was not until the 1970s that limited compensation was granted, and only in 2013 did the Norwegian Minister of Defence issue an official apology for the state’s treatment of war sailors.

Throughout her life, Vigdis Stokkelien was interested in sailors. Born in 1934 in Kristiansand and having her formative years in Mandal and on the island of Ny-Hellesund, she left secondary school after her first year and trained as a radio telegraphist.9 At the age of eighteen, she joined the merchant fleet, sailing to destinations including the Caribbean, India, Indonesia, and Singapore. Upon returning to Norway at twenty-five, she began a career in journalism, working first for Agderposten and later for Nationen. Her reporting focused on shipping and cultural affairs, though she also published novels and short stories. Stokkelien died in Sweden in 2005, having spent much of her adult life there.

One of her early novels, Granaten (Stokkelien 1969), is overtly political, addressing the plight of sailors returning from war suffering of various forms of anxiety. Lacking job security, many lost their livelihoods after refusing to sail oil tankers into war zones during the 1950s and 1960s. The protagonist, Trygve, is blacklisted after demanding repatriation from a weapons-laden vessel and is accused of communist agitation. Unable to secure further employment, he ultimately takes his own life. As Ragnhild Lome notes in Vagant, the novel—particularly following its critically acclaimed film adaptation—brought public attention to the cruelty of blacklisting practices (Lome 2022). Stokkelien was known by her contemporaries as an engaged author fighting for the rights of sailors.

3. The Reception of Stokkelien and Her Choice of Narrative Technique in the Trilogy on Gro

Although Stokkelien was a well-known author during her lifetime, her work has since fallen into obscurity. Paradoxically, this neglect appears partly attributable to feminist criticism, which accused her of insufficient engagement with issues considered central to women’s lives at the time—such as abortion, motherhood, and domestic labour.10 Instead, Stokkelien wrote about sailors, shipowners, colonialism, and war—topics often characterised by Marxist and feminist critics of the 1970s as “male concerns.” While her work was acknowledged by male contemporaries, it was later marginalised by feminist scholars and effectively excluded from literary history.

In addition to her thematic choices, feminist critics also objected to what they perceived as a “masculine” style in Stokkelien’s writing: Stokkelien exposed the misery and violence of sailors by using short, clear sentences, for instance. A more nuanced assessment has nevertheless been offered by Rakel Christina Granaas in her contribution to the Norsk litteraturhistorie (Norwegian Literary History of Women Writers). Granaas highlights the intense anxiety about the future expressed in Stokkelien’s novels, as well as the author’s political scepticism towards NATO membership and American capitalism. She clearly reads Stokkelien’s text from a psychoanalytic perspective, when she stresses how the author conveys the experience of living in a collective nightmare where “time stands still or goes in circles. The linear progression loses its function as a basic structure supporting the action when the fictional characters’ states of consciousness are a constant back and forth between past and present.”11 (Granaas 1990, p. 183). Pieces of memory are often repeated in Stokkelien’s texts, and this produces the effect of a lived memory, one may add: the protagonists live through the past many times.

In what follows, I take up Granaas’s suggestion that Stokkelien’s novels resemble nightmares due to their narrative structure but propose an additional reading of them as also showing how emotions work politically. Most striking when it comes to the narrative technique is the overwhelming proliferation of emotions conveyed through the descriptions of Gro’s sensations by the third-person narrator in the trilogy. The narrative discourse in Stokkelien’s novel corresponds closely to what Dorrit Cohn, in Transparent Minds (Cohn 1978), explores as a blend of psycho-narration and narrated monologue. These modes present Gro’s impressions embedded within concrete scenes—impressions for which Gro herself only partially finds words or conceptual clarity. An illustrative example appears in the opening pages of Båten under solseilet, where Gro, in her role as radio telegraphist, is described driving through Karachi, having accompanied a sick sailor to hospital. Returning to the boat, she travels alone, a journey that could be dangerous for a Norwegian woman. However, the way emotions work in Stokkeliens’ text, brings out that not fear, but shame is what marks her body. It is the shame she feels, understandable to the reader due to her being both cold and hot, that marks out her body as female and white:

“She shivered. The golden light in the gown was reflections from the sun that stood just above the town. Women, men, and children with bundles and carts clogged side streets and alleys, all wanting to enter the road that led to the harbour. An old man with a little girl in his arms sat in the dust in front of the horse-drawn cab. Gro tried to look over the two of them, toward the sky behind, at the white buildings. Suddenly she began to sweat, her hair came loose, falling damply over her shoulders. Gro grew thirsty.”12

(Stokkelien 1982, p. 12)

This passage exemplifies both how Stokkelien describes Gro’s sensations and how the female body becomes part of the politics of emotions, to use Ahmed’s formulation. Gro is initially described as cold, she feels also distanced to the women, men and children in the streets. As a white traveller she is permitted to navigate the chaos in a vehicle and she and the other Norwegian sailors have access to a hospital, while the sick inhabitants remain on the ground, unaided. Gro initially tries to ignore the impressions of the streets; however, when lifting her eyes over the crowd, she discovers the white buildings and starts to sweat. Short time later, she stops the cab and offers the old man and little girl a lift.

While not directly mentioned, it thus becomes clear to the reader that Gro experiences shame, and that this emotion lets her become aware of her privileged body and of the colour it has. She even describes herself soon afterwards, with bitter irony, as a “memsahib” (Stokkelien 1982, p. 13). Stokkelien’s novel shows the reader how the emotion of shame contributes to political awakening, here: Gro’s critique of colonialism and her recognition of the system that separates her body from others. In the remaining part of the novel, the plot shows how Gro is increasingly critical of how citizens of Western countries exploit the resources found in the East as well as the people—often women—who live there. Importantly to say, however, this textual work of emotions also becomes part of the archive of Stokkelien’s reader: Stokkelien’s reader will remember Gro’s sudden insight into the meaning of the white, female body and what consequences this insight has for her political outlook. The text’s emotion has left an impression. Reading Stokkelien with Ahmed, brings thus attention both to how the main character Gro gets politically conscious, and how even the reader might get affected by the circulation of emotions.

In the following, I will trace more closely how emotions work in Stokkelien’s trilogy. Most importantly, fear, shame and pain move between different subjects and groups that are presented in the trilogy. Volume I, Lille-Gibraltar, is set during the last months of the war and the moment of peace in 1945. Gro experiences intense fear, associated not only with the German soldiers, but also the “good” Norwegians that hate the female members of her family since they were partly in love with, or helping, German men. Volume II plays out in 1955–1956. Gro works on a Norwegian oil tanker, since she feels forced to stay abroad due to how Norwegian authorities handle war history. However, while shame moves from her and her family over to other Norwegian s at home, the shame inflicted on her by the colonised people in the East turns her body into a sign of everything she finds problematic. In Volume III, Gro has returned to the island where she spent the war. Emotions of fear, shame and pain are shown as travelling in her memory and push her into loneliness and self-contempt. Finally, she feels the need to get rid of her body and takes her own life.

Stokkelien’s autobiographical rooted texts about Gro, with their special narrative technique, stress both the importance of war memory as well as the work of emotions circulating in memory. Ahmed has described how different emotions inscribe different characteristics in certain objects, resulting for instance in certain groups of people labelled disgusting and worthy of hate. Emotions are central for the work of politics and the identity of a nation. In the case of Norway, as Stokkelien’s trilogy brings out, the shame that sticks to certain groups of the Norwegian nation such as women helping wounded Germans or sailors afraid of war fire, is splitting the national body even today.

4. Fear in Times of War: Gro’s Adolescence in Lille-Gibraltar

In the first volume of the trilogy, Lille-Gibraltar (1972), Gro lives with her maternal grandmother and her aunt Mathilda in a summer house on an island just south of the Norwegian coast. The narrative unfolds during the final weeks of the war, immediately preceding Norway’s liberation in May 1945. The family had hoped to find refuge in a peaceful rural setting, but the neighbouring island—strategically located on the sea route between Denmark and Norway—was soon transformed into a German military base. Prisoners of war were forced to construct a fortress and submarine harbour mere metres from Gro’s home.

Gro’s awareness of her gendered body is heightened by her domestic environment, where she lives surrounded exclusively by female relatives. Her family is politically divided: her father fled to England to fight the Nazis; her mother, a Christian pacifist, died by suicide under the strain of the occupation. Two of her mother’s sisters volunteered as nurses, treating both German and Norwegian soldiers injured by the war. Another aunt married a German officer who later took his own life upon learning of the atrocities committed in concentration camps. The family thus embodies a complex spectrum of wartime allegiances, ranging from resistance to perceived collaboration.

The third-person narrator presents fragments of Gro’s memories, hallucinations, and reflections, often in the present tense to underscore the enduring emotional resonance of past events. The novel opens with a nightmare in which Gro envisions her grandmother’s house engulfed in flames, the water stained red: “The flame seized the old house—sparks sprayed out into the strait. Mother’s sister, Mathilda, burned like a torch, they speared Ottar and Grandmother on the bayonets. And she herself—dipped in tar and adorned with feathers”13 (Stokkelien 1972, p. 5). As becomes clear by what is told later in the novel, this vision reflects Gro’s fear of post-war retribution against her family. Her schoolteacher, who despises the Germans, has warned that those lacking national loyalty would be “dipped in tar and adorned with feathers,” echoing ancient Roman punishments. With this cultural reference Stokkelien’s novel stresses how the fear that works on Gro’s imagination nourishes itself from a classical archive, i.e., texts transmitting the fear of those exposed to the anger of Romans. The imagery of Gro’s nightmare, the effect of her fear of being punished, is not something that comes from her personal fantasy, but is inscribed to her by her teacher’s formulations.

Fear works in this novel politically on several levels, by splitting the nation into different groups. Initially, Norwegian inhabitants fear the occupying Germans, as well as the resisting Norwegians fear Norwegian collaborators. Gro’s father must escape because he has been actively resisting the occupation, and he is subjected to torture several times. However, Stokkelien’s descriptions do not stop with the fear of Norwegians but also bring in the fear motivating German soldiers. This becomes clear when Gro and her aunt Mathilda discover the body of a German deserter beneath their doorstep: “It is the sentry lying there, halfway on dry land, on a strip of fallen pillars. The clenched hand outstretched, the sea playing with his hair, his legs bouncing like fish tails. Gro knows he is dead anyway”14 (Stokkelien 1972, p. 27). Fearing that ten other German soldiers might be executed for aiding his desertion when the body is found, Gro and her aunt discreetly dispose of it, rowing out to sea to sink it—haunted by the possibility of being seen.

Further, the novel consistently emphasises how the military situation inscribes itself on Gro’s body, where other sensations connect with her fear. Gro is hungry and sleepless. Her adolescent body is portrayed as vulnerable: It is receptive to external stimuli as Gro is grappling with her emerging sexual desire and menstrual pain, and while she is exposed to the romantic entanglements of her aunts. The adolescent perspective draws readers into Gro’s psychological and emotional turmoil, as she begins to associate pain with sexual desire. Gro is forced to witness the sexual lives of Russian prisoners and Leif, a Romani man subjected to forced labour. These individuals spend their leisure time playing cards and engaging in sexual activity. Gro projects some of this erotic energy onto her schoolmate Ottar, whose father supports the Nazis and whose mother, Cecilia, teeters on the edge of breakdown, fearing peace more than war.

Throughout the novel, women’s fear of being punished for not having the “right” desire is underlined, as her grandmother fears the revenge of the Norwegians on her daughters who have worked for the Germans. In The Politics of Emotion, Ahmed describes how emotions can move through different objects, as for instance, when different individuals can be seen as fearful. While Gro certainly fears the German soldiers, she also fears those who fear the Germans, namely the “good Norwegians”. While Gro herself does not have any direct relations with the Germans, her aunts have, and thus, she identifies with them and the group of “whores of Germans”. Fear works to place her in a political landscape of sedimented relations between groups, and she becomes part of the group of “collaborators” without having collaborated.

In the novel’s closing scenes, Gro’s body becomes an object of hatred, a vessel for the displaced rage of those oppressed during the war. After the liberation, Ottar’s father is arrested, and Gro fears for her aunt Eli, who risks public humiliation as a “Nazi whore.” The atmosphere becomes unbearable, the children cannot stand the possibility of the object of fear passing by, to use Ahmed’s formulation (Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 65), of not knowing what they should be afraid of. They flee to the neighbouring island to gather information, “Lille-Gibraltar,” where they find abandoned provisions and become intoxicated. Ottar kills a lone German soldier, after he has confirmed rumours of mass gassings in concentration camps. Frightened, the children attempt to flee, but Gro is caught by Leif and two comrades, who rape her. Stokkelien’s depiction of the assault is stark and unflinching.

“Leif grins. The black hair falls down on his forehead, he opens her legs wide, his big penis trembles—and he has thought—and gosh, he slowly drills it into her, and she tenses her body, bends her hands towards his chest, but he laughs and drills himself in and moves and breathes and she cries, screams, writhes, her stomach trembles and she goes limp […] And they lift her legs higher and bend them out and she can’t even scream or breathe as they do something to her and laugh and say,—look, just like a whore, and they rip her open more and more.”15

(Stokkelien 1972, p. 93)

In the scene, Gro’s body becomes a placeholder for the women in her family who had loved German soldiers, and an open site for male revenge, a temporary solution to suppressed trauma. Stokkelien thus shows, to use Ahmed’s formulation, how “the openness of the body to the world involves as sense of danger” (Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 69). Leif’s use of the word “whore” further transforms her body into an object of disgust and political vengeance. In this way, Gro’s body is further violated and politicised, due to the emotions that work in the former prisoners of war. The politics of fear and hate turn her body into something that becomes part of the group of women who feel they do not belong to the “good Norwegians”, they are estranged from the national body.

Gro survives the assault by escaping while the men search for more alcohol. Meanwhile, Ottar throws grenades at the fort, and the two flee by boat. The volume ends not with a vision of peace, but with an image of national collapse. Janniken Øverland describes the apocalyptic ending with these words: “The book culminates in an explosion, murder and rape scene that pairs violence, sexuality, death and humiliation in an almost sadistic orgy”16 (Øverland 1977, p. 253). While Øverland interprets this as sadistic excess, I argue that Stokkelien’s depiction reveals how emotions work to mark Gro’s female body as something open for invasion, and how her memory becomes permeated by the experience of pain. The war has turned her body into a battlefield where death is highly possible, while the limits of her body are unclear due to the constant fear of being, to again borrow Ahmed’s formulation, “taken in by others” (Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 78).

5. The Politics of Shame After the War: Båten Under Solseilet

The second volume of the trilogy, Båten under solseilet (1982), published a decade after Lille-Gibraltar, draws directly on the author’s experience as a radio telegraphist. The narrative unfolds aboard the oil tanker Marianne, which trades in the East during the years 1955–1956. Gro has left Norway with the intention of never returning. She has severed all ties and ignores letters from her grandmother, aunts, and former neighbours, who wish her to settle into the life of a respectable Norwegian woman—of one who has forgotten the war (Stokkelien 1982, p. 6). While it is fear that called forth Gro’s nightmares and dominated much of the action in Lille-Gibraltar, the emotion that prominently works in the second volume is shame.

As in Lille-Gibraltar, the narrator in Båten under solseilet focuses on Gro’s inner life, rendering her thoughts and feelings through a combination of past-tense narration and vivid flashbacks, often presented in the present tense. Most of the text is conveyed through narrated monologue, while the flashbacks take the form of direct monologue, immersing the reader in Gro’s emotional and psychic landscape. It soon becomes clear to the reader that Gro’s decision to train as a radio telegraphist was strategic: the certification offered her, as a woman, a rare opportunity to escape Norway via the sea.

Retrospective scenes reveal the emotional toll of the immediate post-war period. Gro recalls being delivered to her paternal grandmother—an ardent supporter of the resistance—who demanded that she renounce her maternal relatives for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. Gro lives again through the scene—told in the present tense—where her grandmother forced her down on her knees and compels her to recite a litany of denunciations:

“Say:—My German uncle Erster was a mass murderer, I am glad he is dead. Elise, who married him, a German whore. Eli, who cared for the wounded German soldiers at the front, should be hanged; Mathilda is a traitor. Our neighbour down at the harbour who now, thank the Lord, is in prison must be shot. I will never play with Ottar, his son. Ottar’s mother, Cecilia, is a German whore. I swear to the Lord that I will never see any of them again.”17

(Stokkelien 1982, p. 10)

This scene marks a turning point in Gro’s emotional development. The shame Gro felt regarding her aunts’ wartime relationships with Germans moves to another object, the person demanding an admission of shame. In 1945, women who had loved German soldiers were deemed dishonoured, their bodies “infected” by enemy contact. Love, in this context, was politicised and interpreted as betrayal (see also Langås 2025, p. 2). To preserve national purity, Norway sought to purge these women, many of whom interned in camps and forced to scrub away the symbolic “dirt” of occupation. However, Gro herself was officially classified as “clean”, since her father fought with the resistance. In the scene, her grandmother tries to make her feel ashamed with reference to different authorities. Gro reacts to the formulation she uses, that include phrases spread by the Protestant Norwegian state church, like those about traitors being hanged for their crimes. Due to the behaviour of her grandmother, she identifies even more closely with her maternal relatives. She feels shame not for their actions, but for the unjust judgments they endured.

In addition, Gro now feels contempt, and partly hatred, towards her Norwegian family. As Ahmed describes it, emotions can sediment in a judgement of those provoking them:

“[…] to be touched in a certain way, or to be moved in a certain way by an encounter with another, may involve a reading not only of the encounter, but of the other that is encountered as having certain characteristics. If we feel another hurts us, then that feeling may convert quickly into a reading of the other, such that it becomes hurtful, or is read as the impression of the negative. In other words, the ‘it hurts’ becomes, ‘you hurt me’», which might become, ‘you are hurtful’, or even ‘you are bad’.”

(Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 28)

Accordingly, Stokkelien’s Gro ends up in judging other “good” Norwegians as bad, as morally disgusting. Gro’s emotions are shaped by stories she has heard, and by actions performed upon her body. Her grandmother’s coercion transforms Gro’s perception of the resistance into one of moral violence, prompting her escape from these “good” Norwegians representing the nation. Gro also reflects on the gendered double standards of post-war justice. While male doctors who treated German soldiers were often exonerated, female nurses were vilified and punished. Her aunt Eli, for instance, provided medical care to both Norwegian and German soldiers, guided by professional ethics rather than political allegiance. Yet her actions were interpreted as immoral, her body rendered “unhealthy” by association.

Throughout Stokkelien’s novel, it becomes clear how emotions work politically, marking some Norwegian bodies out as shameful, dirty, unworthy and open for aggression. Trained by a former lover who recognised her trauma (due to the rape), Gro resists verbal and physical assaults by her fellow sailors aboard the Marianne. She even escorts fellow sailors to hospital after they contract gonorrhoea during visits to brothels. Observing their behaviour, Gro sees how they treat female bodies as vessels for their own psychic repair—objects to be penetrated in order to reaffirm their masculinity, and this inflicts further national shame on her.

This dynamic is especially evident in the case of Kragerø, a war sailor traumatised by multiple shipwrecks. He repeatedly attempts to assault Gro, but she resists, even breaking his nose at one point. To reassert his dominance, Kragerø ostentatiously hires prostitutes, including an eleven-year-old girl sold by her grandfather in the port of Karachi. The girl is raped not only by Kragerø but by four other sailors (Stokkelien 1982, pp. 55–56). Gro is powerless to intervene and ends up feeling shame for not helping, as well as hating herself for her helplessness. She also starts to hate her fellow Norwegians and Western nations that inflict shame on her more broadly, since they exploit Eastern women to heal their own wounds. Thus, while feminist readers as Øverland (1977, p. 253, see also quotation above) criticised Stokkelien for being sadistic and excessive when rendering violent actions in close connection with sexuality, the depiction of brutal sexual encounters as those to be found in Båten under solseilet, for instance, are in fact a necessary part of the author’s project to show how emotions as fear, shame and hate circulate between subjects.

Stokkelien’s Båten under solseilet portrays every character aboard the tanker as haunted by war memories. The captain drowns his grief—particularly the loss of his wife—in alcohol, while also Gro medicates herself with whisky. She is acutely aware of the past’s intrusion into the present: “The past always came back when she was supposed to have a day off.”18 (Stokkelien 1982, p. 94). However, despite the violence and degradation she witnesses, and the shame she feels on behalf of her fellow Norwegians, Gro clings to the possibility of love. She has learned to enjoy her sexuality and maintains a relationship with Miro, a Yugoslavian doctor who fled from Austria with the German troops, now living in Indonesia. Miro, who lacks a passport due to his refusal to distinguish between Allied and Axis soldiers during the war, now treats both guerrilla fighters and colonial settlers. His political neutrality leads to deportation, and he is forced to flee to Australia.

The attraction between Miro and Gro, as it results in the experience of skin touching skin, of feeling both the connection and the loneliness of human embodiment (see also Ahmed [2004] 2008, p. 25), brings out Gro’s identification with Miro’s official status as displaced individual. Yet she knows their relationship has no future. Gro dreams of escaping the earth altogether, imagining a vessel sailing toward the sun—a reference to the song that gives the novel its title. “Båten under solseilet” was sung by Ottar’s mother upon hearing of the German invasion in April 1940. The image of the flying boat stresses both wartime longing and post-war disillusionment.

In the final chapters, Gro’s physical health deteriorates. Diagnosed with malaria in Singapore, she is advised never to sail in tropical climates again. Returning to Norway, she carries Miro’s child, convinced that she will never see him again. At Copenhagen airport, she encounters Ottar, who is returning to confront his father: Despite his wartime collaboration with the enemy, Ottar’s father now enjoys a comfortable life in the capital of Norway. Gro and Ottar’s political attitudes, shaped by years of emotional trauma due to inflicted fear and shame, stand in stark contrast to the official narratives of a proud Norwegian identity after the war. Stokkelien’s text thus shows how the nation is split by hatred, a product of emotions such as fear and shame that circulate during the war and afterwards.

6. Lived Memories of Pain in the 1970s: Gro’s Disgrace in Stjerneleden

The final volume of the trilogy, Stjerneleden (1984), depicts the last days of Gro’s life. She has returned to her maternal grandmother’s house on the island in the South of Norway, and the narrative begins around 1976—some twenty years after the events of Båten under solseilet. Gro’s daughter Ellen, the child of Miro, is now a politically engaged young adult. Miro has emigrated to Sweden but has since died, likely of cancer. Gro’s husband Heming, a war sailor from a prominent family of ship captains, has spent recent years aboard dilapidated vessels trading in war-torn regions. He is now missing, and their son Alf is being raised in close proximity to Gro’s grandmother.

Gro suffers from debilitating back pain, which confines her to bed and necessitates morphine and whisky for relief: “A sharp pain cut through her back. Now the morphine was wearing off…”19 (Stokkelien 1984, p. 6). Her memories of pain, imagination, and observations intermingle, creating a narrative in which temporal boundaries blur. Gro frequently finds herself reliving past traumas, such as her fear of post-war vengeance: “A shiver of fear running through the body. —An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the teacher used to say—you will be tarred and feathered and impaled on bayonets and hanged…”.20 (Stokkelien 1984, p. 7) These recollections signal that the fear still works on her body by ways of memory. The fear of painful actions (performed by the “good” Norwegians), memories of painful experience (the gang rape on Lille-Gibraltar) and the pain in her body that she fights with morphine at the time of narration, blur and bring out a female body defined by emotional wounds.

The novel unfolds as a long interior monologue, a reckoning with Gro’s life—what Ottar calls “holding doomsday over herself” (Stokkelien 1984, p. 120). Gro reflects on her relationships with Heming and Ottar. Both men are characterised by a destructive relationship to female sexuality, resulting from their experiences as sailors and participants of the war. Heming was turned into a war sailor at the age of fifteen, since he, as the son of a skipper, was sent to start his life on board as early as possible. On his return home, he found his father bitter, his mother confused and his little sister dead. The authorities completely neglected him and other sailors on their return, no one acknowledged their contribution to Norway’s war (Stokkelien 1984, p. 41).

Heming, who married Gro when she was pregnant with Miro’s child, initially treats Gro with affection. However, once married, he begins to view her as a “respectable wife,” as a woman he expects would be incapable of showing desire. When Gro exposes her sexual longings, Heming responds with contempt, likening her to an expensive prostitute. This degradation transforms Gro’s body into an object of shame that is constantly threatened by pain—an emotion that fuels her hatred toward Heming. This brings out how sailors of war turn into threats to the nation, since the pain they experienced during the war at sea moves on to the women they try to live with after the end of the war. Sailors of war thus hinder themselves from being honoured as heroes of the war by the women close to them. Living with their painful memories, they inflict disgrace on the bodies of the women they are married with.

Gro’s moral code prevents her from seeking a divorce. She fears that doing so would ruin Heming’s reputation as a captain and as the son of a respected family. When Heming disappears—after having sent a letter to her stating he was sailing into a war zone with a ship loaded with ammunition—Gro refrains from reporting him missing. To do so would mean admitting the possibility that he had deserted, which would result in blacklisting. Gro remembers how she told Miro she could not live with him in Sweden because it would ruin Heming’s life:

“She who feels joy spreading throughout her body—who wants to wrap her arms around him—be there in the flat city—In his house that stands against the big forest, forever—answers:

—I can’t for Heming’s sake. If I make a fuss—call him officially—because he has gone ashore after the war zone—he may never get hired again. And he will have lost all honor forever…

Honour—

Our honour and our power…”21

(Stokkelien 1984, p. 181)

Gro’s reflections on honour in the memory of the scene are framed by allusions to canonical texts from Norwegian cultural history. She quotes the phrase “vår ære og vår makt” (“our honour and our power”), referencing Bjørnson’s poem celebrating Norwegian sailors and Nordahl Grieg’s 1937 theatre play, which critiques the exploitation of sailors by wealthy shipowners. Gro’s invocation of these texts reveals her belief that the honour of Norwegian women is bound to the fate of war sailors, whom the national cultural archive sees as representatives of the nation—even as she remains critical of the state’s treatment of both sailors and women.

Throughout Stjerneleden, Gro compares herself to her caretaker Beate, a woman belonging to the group of Romani living close to her hometown. Beate grew up with an abusive stepfather and has undergone seven abortions. She now enjoys the sense of control when offering sexual services, claiming superiority through her detachment from love. Gro has problems accepting Beate’s behaviour, while she also tries to understand her. Beate senses Gro’s growing contempt and takes revenge: In the final scenes, she washes Gro’s body and initiates sexual contact with her against Gro’s will, resulting in Gro’s experience of an orgasm. This final violation strips Gro of her remaining self-esteem, and the novel ends with the emotion of disgrace. Overwhelmed by pain, shame, and the accumulated weight of memory, Gro swims out into the sea, knowing that she will most certainly drown.

Gro’s suicide marks the culmination of a life shaped by emotions as fear, shame and pain that are circulating during the war and in war memories. Stokkelien shows how these emotions let Gro get conscious of the limits and the meaning of her female body, and she shows how this body affects national politics. The female body in pain threatens the establishment of a national identity; it splits the different groups of Norwegian soldiers into those who have used women as pain relievers during the war and those who have refrained from it. Further, the female body stays centre of the conflict between Norwegian women insisting on the right to their own desire, and those subscribing to the ideology prescribed by Norwegian authorities.

7. Conclusions

With her trilogy on Gro, Vigdis Stokkelien offers a compelling portrayal of the female body as shaped by the emotional legacies of the war at sea 1940–1945. In Lille-Gibraltar, Gro’s fear has her side with her aunts who are perceived as collaborating with the German occupiers. She is raped by former prisoners of war, who use her body to take revenge. In Båten under solseilet, Gro is supposed to feel shame on behalf of her mother’s family, but the object of shame turns finally out to be her fellow countrymen, and she experiences her body as marked by whiteness, initiating her political critique of Western Colonialism. In Stjerneleden, Gro lives through her memories, and the emotions she vividly recalls—fear, shame and self-contempt—merge with her present experience of physical pain. Ultimately, Gro feels disgraced and relinquishes her embodied existence, taking her own life. In Stokkelien’s rendering, the female body, shaped by the emotional residues of war, becomes unbearable to Gro.

While contemporary cultural productions rightly honour the contributions of war sailors—through films, documentaries, and novels—Stokkelien’s work reminds us of the women who lived beside, with, and through the trauma of these men. The emotions described by Stokkelien circulate between different groups, as fear experienced by Norwegian inhabitants, collaborators and «whores of Germans» to the extent that they sediment the relationship between the groups. However, Gro’s body is not merely a passive recipient of trauma, as a reading of the trilogy from a psychoanalytical perspective would have shown, but an active site of emotional transmission and part of the political situation.

Stokkelien’s trilogy should be recognised as part of Norway’s national war archive. Her novels demonstrate that emotions are not confined to the individual; they are moving, shaping relationships, and even political forces. Emotions as fear, shame and pain are not only personal experiences working in the body—they are historical forces that define bodies and national identity in generations to come, circulating by memories and texts. Through the case of Gro, Stokkelien brings out the female experience of the war at sea that has long remained marginalised, and in doing so, she expands the scope of Norwegian war memory as participating in the circulation of emotions.