The Domestic-Personal Sphere
When Almira first moved both out of her family house to the neighboring country to a one-room flat with two fellow students, she enjoyed her newfound freedom to the fullest. The walls of the apartment were paper-thin, and the large brutalist building reverberated with student parties. When Almira traveled to Sweden to complete her studies, she found that students were expected to be much quieter. She noticed that many lived alone, and that Swedes valued preserving a specific personal sphere and clear personal boundaries.
Scandinavians spend significantly more time remodeling their homes than people elsewhere in the world (Gullestad 1991: 484). According to anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, this is an expression of how the home is conceived: a last bastion against the ever-advancing modernization, regulation, and rationalization of society. This regulation and rationalization has led to the establishment of an egalitarian middle-class ideal in which an individual becomes whole in the home and the private, not the public, sphere. Part of the subject’s work in establishing an identity is to continually preserve the home as a space for becoming whole, by creating a “neat but in some ways fictional separation” between the private sphere inside the home and the outside world (Gullestad 1991: 489, 494).
Having a home is broadly associated with the existential notion of having a place in the world. Home is not only a place where one resides and from which one departs out into the world; it is also a place to which one can return (Vacher 2010: 31, 55). Inside the home, one finds oneself in a protected position from which one can establish a relationship with the outside world (Gullestad 1992: 135). It is considered a private sphere and a “zone of subjectivity” within which the subject constructs itself; furnishing and decorating the home becomes part of this process (Pint 2016: 63). As Ahmed puts it, the relationship between home and inhabitant is symbiotic: “The lived experience of being at home hence involves the enveloping of subjects in a space which is not simply outside them: being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other” (Ahmed 2000: 89).
The entity that emerges when personal sphere, identity-making and domestic sphere fold into each other – the domestic-personal sphere – is most likely characteristic for Scandinavia in general as well as for Almira and Claudia in particular. As we shall see, Almira seems to have internalized the importance of maintaining what might be called a “fictional separation” between the private interior of the home and that which is external to it and finds it deeply problematic that Claudia attempts to influence her behavior in the home. Claudia, for her part, has her own reasons for becoming extremely disturbed by noises from her neighbors that penetrate her domestic-personal sphere.