Helga Johansen’s book Hinsides, En psykologisk Redegjørelse, 1900 [Beyond. A Psychological Account] was republished in 2013 by the Danish publisher Gladiator in their classic Sandal Series. In this series, the works of several women writers, many rooted in the Modern Breakthrough, have gradually been republished.

Beyond received an enthusiastic reception from literary critics, who emphasised that it was a forgotten masterpiece.1 Only a few literary critics had heard of the book or its author before it was brought to the public’s attention by the publisher. Although the critics’ superlatives were well deserved, Helga Johansen had by no means been forgotten in women’s literary research. In this field, she was a well-known author, praised for her literary qualities—for instance, in 1983 in Pil Dahlerup’s dissertation Det moderne gennembruds kvinder [The Women of the Modern Breakthrough] and, in 1994, in the third volume of A History of Nordic Women’s Literature, in which Birgit Mortensen and Inger-Lise Hjordt-Vetlesen discuss her writings (Vetlesen and Mortensen 1993). Helga Johansen had been known for many years among women literary researchers, but the rediscovery had apparently never reached the leading male critics. This did not happen until the 2010s, when Beyond was highlighted as “a mad gem of a book” (Frantzen 2013).

Viggo Johansen, Helga Johansen, kunstnerens søster, (1866-1900).

KMS1651, Statens Museum for Kunst. <https://open.smk.dk/en/artwork/image/KMS1651>.

The international exploration of the history of women’s literature, which has been going on since the 1980s, was also met with interest in Denmark and led to some changes of the curriculum of literature at colleges and universities. However, the research on women authors was also met with a repressive tolerance. It was as if someone had said, “Well then, fine and skilfully done, girls, but may we move on?” The many studies of women’s literature had little impact on popular literary histories, such as Søren Gravesen’s and Steen H. Mogensen’s Saxo & Co. (Gravesen and Mogensen 2003), intended for primary schools. In this publication, the Modern Breakthrough counts only one woman (the Norwegian author Amalie Skram), and in the official Danish curriculum canon, Karen Blixen was the only female writer.2 The official canon is currently under revision with the specific aim of including more women, and the revised canon will be published in October 2025.3 The canon initiative proves that the public interest in and resentment of literary research into women’s literature is impossible to ignore. New authors and researchers have begun to explore research and archives, such as the author and publisher Hans Otto Jørgensen, who included Helga Johansen’s Beyond in his series of classics.

A Novel Based on the Personal Experience of the Author

Helga Johansen’s psychological account deals with the author’s own experiences as a psychiatric patient, detained against her will at Sankt Hans Hospital, in Roskilde.4 The book was published in 1900 under the pseudonym Hannah Joël.

Some readers may feel they have encountered a similar story in Amalie Skram’s 1895 novels Professor Hieronimus and På Sankt Jørgen [At Saint George’s Hospital], which were republished in paperback editions in 1977. It is quite true that Helga Johansen belongs to the psychiatric literature of the modern breakthrough and that she follows up on the psychiatry debate sparked by Amalie Skram’s books, a debate in which psychiatric professors also participated (Engelstad 1984 and Gradenwitz 1985).5 Helga Johansen’s novel was also debated, but with a different starting point and perspective. In Amalie Skram’s novels, the main character Else Kant is stressed and exhausted by an artistic crisis sparked by the pressure of being a wife and mother. She is not mentally ill, and she does not fall ill despite the enormous pressure she is subjected to in the 6th ward of the municipal hospital and later at Sankt Jørgen Hospital, whose chief physician is nevertheless empathetic and seeks to help the patients.

In Helga Johansen’s novel, the narrator wavers between portraying herself as mentally ill and as a dedicated exhausted—yet healthy—woman who, through a grave misjudgement of her situation, ends up in a psychiatric ward where she had previously been hospitalised. At the beginning of the book, the narrator states:

Now that I’m sitting in the carriage, I understand how wrong it is to be going to the hospital. […] However, common sense tells me that it is travel that I need. I have, of course, lived too monotonously and a little interruption is needed. Too much have I followed my inclination to live so quietly [sic] I was happy to live in books and keep the outside world from me. […] How could I think of hospital when it was life I needed?6

Already it can be seen here that the reader becomes part of the narrator’s doubts and perplexities. The narrator has studied on her own, struggled with difficult philosophical questions and she seems to be tired from her lonely ruminations. But the reader quickly becomes aware that the narrator is an unreliable narrator whose narrative contradicts her reasoning and interpretations of events. Her interpretation cannot be trusted, and in the same way the story shows that she cannot trust herself or her own judgement. There is a particular double unreliability at play: the narrative’s rejection of the narrator, and the narrator’s rejection of her own narrative. The narrative is a hall of mirrors of unreliability that gives the reader a disturbing insight into a human mind in deep crisis, both in relation to herself and her surroundings. The reader gradually gains insight into the fact that the narrator is addicted to opium and that she has forged prescriptions to obtain the drug. She has also saved a larger portion in a bottle, which she empties to commit suicide during her hospitalisation. But by then she has become so accustomed to the drug that she does not die from the large overdose. The stay at the hospital, Sankt Hans, makes her more and more mentally unclear and makes her sense of reality slip away. The monotonous, grey world in which she is placed confuses her senses, and the outside world loses its contours. She tries to hold on to the colours and the difference between light and dark, and she believes that it is the sleeping medicine, chloral, which she consumes that exacerbates her crisis.7 The narrator believes that it is precisely the medicine that makes many of the patients ill: “Who is insane here? Only a few, all the others are sick with drugs.”8

The main character Hannah herself is increasingly afraid of going insane but is assured by the local professor that she will not. It is rare, he says, that a melancholy like hers passes into “madness.” The book does not provide any diagnosis of Hannah’s condition nor any denial that she is mentally ill. Beyond shows that Hannah’s condition and her experience of illness do not match any of the diagnoses used at the time. They are the result of a completely incalculable interplay of relationships in her life in a structural patriarchy in which women have no legal capacity; they do not have access to studies but are left to their own speculations and artistic experiments; the female gender is considered by the dominant thinkers in medical science to be “the sick sex” (Dahlerup1983: 30), and drug abuse is easy to practice. In psychiatry of the time, there was no diagnosis of “melancholy”—this is before Sigmund Freud’s essay Trauer und Melancholie9 [Mourning and Melancholia] (1917) and modern conceptions of the concept of melancholy (Enderwitz 2015: 21-60).

Hannah feels trapped between light and darkness. She can enter neither the world of light nor darkness, causing her to thrust her arm into a burning candle to feel the light, and she contemplates an arson attack on the hospital. She also assaults a caregiver and a fellow patient and tries to strangle them, even though she values both of them highly. Her attacks come out of the blue—even the narrator does not comprehend her own actions. The course of events suggests an act of self-harm that moves the pain from her mind to her body. Both she and caregiver Marie cry bitterly over her unexpected and incomprehensible act.

The longer her stay at Sankt Hans Hospital lasts, the weaker Hannah becomes. Reality loses its fixed contours, and Hannah uses what little strength she has to stay within the light and dark stripes she has set around herself and her bed. She feels safest when she leans her upper body over the edge of the bed, lowers her head and rhythmically sweeps her hair back and forth across the floor. The scene becomes a harrowing image of everything being turned upside down in her mind. She must keep her head down to feel up. Part of the experience of the disease is that the connection between language and reality is dissolved. She has found a certain foothold in what she calls her “Defiance” (126), but now her language is beginning to fail her; the words no longer mean what they used to, and the sick Hannah must navigate an unfamiliar and uncertain world:

Everything here is a game of exchange. Pain is not pain, and heart is not heart. There is nothing at all here that hurts me. But there are impressions that go to the head like strong drink and intoxication.

One can get used to this sound of something jarring. When one thinks about it, one feels about it that one is responsive to the fates that are destroyed here. But, when one sees a face from out there, a face that has belonged in the other world and that one has loved, the will rises to a leap. One wants to banish the knowledge that a shattered destiny waits for the other.10

The disturbed language and emotion drive Hannah to desperately seek points of reference. The colour red, glowing at night from a night light mounted on the ceiling, becomes one such point of reference, though it is also a sign of danger.

Something is missing from the living room here. Of red, here there is only the small star in the ceiling, which keeps a vigil at night. A single little star—and it is not red enough! One has to be able to carve out stars oneself and make them better. One can get stars out of a window when one smashes the pane… There can be no hole big enough through which to crawl, but I can make my hand bleed, so there is something that is more red in here.11

The colour red is metaphorically connected with blood and death and becomes a sign of the self-destruction that Hannah resorts to and tries to comprehend by remembering the beauty of a butcher’s shop where the meat glows red and beautiful.

In reflecting on her linguistic breakdown, Hannah arrives at the idea that language always casts shadows, and she tries to orient herself within networks of signs and shadows.

I… have had my thoughts on the surface and not noticed that words cast shadows that must be drawn up for there to be a world to live in. It is only now I know that it is not the edge that leaps out that is the important thing to get hold of—one must get away from the main entrance, rush quickly along the earth, then once again towards the cloud and all the way around the roof edge until one finds the place one came from. Only then is the word drawn up to be arranged in between the marks.12

Hannah must find her entrance into language and a room of her own language. One might think of Beyond as an attempt to enter the shadows of words—to explore the woman’s experience of illness, to escape from society’s “subjection of women” and to create an inhabitable world where there is room for a woman’s experience. Beyond, in that sense, is the “room of one’s own” that author Virginia Woolf wrote about thirty years after Beyond (Woolf 1929/1935). We are in the shadows of language, where the familiar connections between word and phenomenon crumble, and where the metonyms such as the colour red, the star, the shards of glass and the hair sweeping back and forth across the floor are linked together in a dangerous game of changing meanings. It is Hannah’s acute, artistic sensitivity to language that enables her to navigate this linguistic beyond and narrowly avoid dying or killing.

From the beginning of the book, the reader becomes aware of Hannah’s linguistic imagination through the unusual comparisons, such as when she compares the eyes of a doctor to egg yolks (Johansen 2013: 16) or when she mentions her visions of dancing fluff and tells of how the poisonous chloral turns her into a “Jumping Jack” (Johansen 2013: 144).

The book is thus also a testimony to the fact that the artistic text is necessary to reveal the structural subjection of women and the pathologizing of the female gender itself.

The novel culminates with Hannah persuading her brother to help her leave the hospital and take her home. When her brother informs the professor at the hospital about Hannah, he is told that Hannah is now his responsibility. Hannah moves back into her childhood home, keeps to herself and lives quietly. On Christmas Eve, she is alone and seems to come to a new understanding of herself. She wants to do good deeds to reform the world but ultimately concludes that it is enough if she can personally embark on the path of good, even though she “has not yet learned to walk” (Johansen 2013:263). She ends by saying that she has appealed the death sentence she believes she imposed on herself while in the hospital—“from herself to herself,” as she somewhat cryptically puts it—to emphasise that she must be the one to save herself.

The Connection between the Past and the Present

The women’s literature of the Modern Breakthrough has often been seen as an attempt to do away with the “subjection of women” and to bring their hidden and suppressed experiences to light. Dahlerup writes about this thesis in her dissertation Det moderne gennembruds kvinder (1983) [The Women of the Modern Breakthrough] and she claims that the reaction against the patriarchal image of human beings was the “nerve” of this literature, the centre from which all ideological and artistic tensions emanated (Dahlerup 1983: 11). Dahlerup’s interpretation is important and has served as an eye-opener to other researchers. But it is perhaps becoming increasingly clear that women’s literature also serves as a defence of artistic text and testimony, offering a means to articulate and validate women’s self-interpretations.

The story of Helga Johansen’s rediscovery and artistic breakthrough is also a story about how literature from the past remains relevant to the present and should not be dismissed as closed chapters in the history of literature. This renewed attention to Helga Johansen and other women authors is the result of a literary-historical commitment that bridges past and present works. The rediscovery began with 1970s feminism’s search for historical roots in women’s literature. An incredible number of women had been omitted from Danish literary history, and a few were placed within what the first literary historian, Vilhelm Andersen, described as a peculiar province of culture (Andersen and Petersen, 1925: 711-712). The work A History of Nordic Women’s Literature, published between 1993 and 1998, stands as a testament to this feminist commitment to the past. It represented, in part, a form of presentism, seeking in historical texts ideas of liberation that had similarities to the present and viewing past works as still relevant today. It also embodied a feminist historicism that emphasized the diversity of women’s literature across history and showcased how it was shaped by and bound to patriarchal conceptions of womanhood, often with the point that women’s literature was marked by and tied to patriarchal conceptions of women.

Helga Johansen’s work makes the discussion of historicism and presentism relevant in a new way. In her introduction to the anthology Time: Documents of Contemporary Art (2013), art historian Amelia Grooms discusses how contemporary art constantly demonstrates that time is not an arrow that sends us all from the past into the future. In contemporary art, time thickens, revealing how different temporalities are interwoven and how works from vastly different eras begin to interact. In contemporary art, we see the time of history as “a concoction of coincidental encounters,” as Amalie Groom puts it. The literary historian Amy Elias also points to a new understanding of the relation between the past and the present in the study of history:

[…] when we look closely at how modern history is written, we see that secular, disciplinary history (particularly in the nineteenth century) moves not from the past to the present, but from the present to the past, as historians single out a moment in history and actually resuscitate figure-fulfilment logic to explain it (Elias 2016: 43).

In their introduction to presentism, David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale discuss the concept “strategic presentism” and emphasise that this useful presentism “requires that we think of the past as something other than an object of knowledge that is sealed off, separated from the present by the onrush of sequential time” (Coombs and Coriale 1987: 87).

Presentism might not just be “a method of projecting our ideas into the past” (Fischer 1970: 315). It is more than simply loading present ideas and present-day perspectives into the description or interpretation of the art and literature of the past. Rather, presentism is a way of examining how past literature continues to exist in the present—as a parallel and interpretive key.13 Presentism asks how a text speaks to today’s world, prioritising the reader’s current perspective and acknowledging that every act of reading is shaped by the time and place in which it occurs. Presentism treats literary meaning as fluid and evolving, not fixed in the past. As society changes, so too can a text’s significance.

In Nordic contemporary literature, there are several works that continue the tradition of the women of the Modern Breakthrough by depicting women’s institutionalisation and encounters with treatment and therapists’ perceptions of mentally ill women. For instance, Swedish author Linda Brostrøm Knausgård’s tale Oktoberbarn [October Child] (2019) depicts a young artist’s non-voluntary hospitalisation and the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) she received during a period of severe depression. Danish author Karen Fastrup’s autofictional novel, Hungerhjerte [Hunger Heart] (2018) tells the story of the author’s mental breakdown, her hospitalisation and how she slowly rediscovers her own artistic writing. Lastly, Norwegian author Hilde Rød-Larsen’s three-narrative 2022 novel Diamantkvelder [Diamond Nights] follows a woman reflecting on her youth, marked by anorexia and sexual abuse by a trusted older psychiatrist. What is remarkable here is that these works reveal how, through artistic writing, women trace the trail of all the contradictions, ambiguities and repression embedded in their histories. These narratives are the stories of a patriarchal treatment system’s pathologizing of the female sex—as well as stories of what it feels like to lose one’s footing, lose one’s language, be at the mercy of one’s own ideas, be ill and not know what is true and false. In a state of physical and mental collapse, the women themselves seek to treat their conditions and regain a foothold in both life and language. Here, it is the words and narratives of art that—if not redeeming and liberating—offer insight into what is going on in their inner and outer worlds.

Helga Johansen’s Beyond becomes a contemporary work—not because she is ahead of her time and anticipates the present, but through contemporary art.

The Reception of Beyond

Helga Johansen based her book on her own experiences as a psychiatric patient and opium addict. She was a very gifted woman who wanted to become a teacher and study philosophy under the supervision of the famous professor Harald Høffding. She was the sister of the artist Viggo Johansen and had become disabled as a child following an accident. Viggo Johansen did several portraits of his sister, and when she was young, she joined the inner circle of the leading men of the Modern Breakthrough and wrote a long, very humble letter to leading critic Georg Brandes about her writing ambitions. His answer is not known, but in later letters, he writes to her about her publications, although he refuses to review Beyond. In addition to Beyond, her writing includes her debut book, Rids. Tre Monologer [Outline. Three Monologues] (1886), which consists of three dramatic pieces; and a philosophical debate book, Brev til Menneskene [A Letter to Humanity] (1903), which she published under the pseudonym Hannah Joël. The debate book is an urgent call to continue and radicalise the emancipatory ideas of the Modern Breakthrough and to set individuals free to think and express themselves. Johansen is inspired by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s thoughts about the individual and the self, and she believes that the men of the Breakthrough did not complete their renewal of the public debate and the ideas of their time. Ultimately, they did not want to break with the old symbols of power embodied in inherited concepts. To advocate the empowerment of both men and women, Johansen declares: “The kingdom must be governed by the citizen” (Johansen 1903: 17). In her speech on “the people,” she wants to give both men and women a share in civil rights. The time must come to an end when citizens are “pupils” under “schoolmasters” (Johansen 1903: 17).

Helga Johansen contacted the philosopher Harald Høffding and began extensive philosophical studies. Høffding wrote a review of Beyond in Tilskueren (The Spectator, which was also printed in his Mindre Arbejder, Tredje Række, 1913 [Minor Works. Third row]). In the review, he gives a fine characterisation of the importance of the work and emphasises that the book, better than any scientific treatise, “will work for the understanding of mental illness” (Høffding 1913: 79). Amalie Skram also wrote about Beyond in a 1901 review, in which she highly praised the book:

She hasn’t minced her words. She has told the full truth. The reader experiences the main character as a fine and noble human soul behind, overworked by spiritual work.

A few years ago, two books were published: ‘Professor Hieronimus’ and ‘At St. George’s Hospital’, which depicted hospital stays between the insane, and which were read with interest. However, these books bear no importance compared to ‘Beyond.’ […]
The gentlemen psychiatrists—poor them—should read this book repeatedly. They could learn from it.14

The poet Viggo Stuckenberg also praised Helga Johansen’s book in his review in Politiken (17 December 1900), which appeared on the front page of the newspaper. However, he did not like the subject of “insanity” and hoped that the author would indulge in “normal conditions” and depictions of daily life.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasise that it is promising to see Helga Johansen’s work in the light of the current discussions of presentism in literary research. Presentism interprets historical literary texts through the lens of contemporary values, concerns and understandings. Rather than trying to reconstruct the past as it was understood in its own time, presentism acknowledges that our current context inevitably shapes how we read and understand literature from the past. It is obvious that contemporary Nordic literature on gender and mental illness is a developer for the meaning of Helga Johansen’s book for literary critics. However, Helga Johansen’s book in turn, also contributes to the development of the psychiatric theme in recent literature. For instance, Beyond has reemerged as a subtext in Danish author Bjørn Rasmussen’s novel Pynt [Decoration] (2013), in which he explores both his own and a fictional woman’s mental health histories and the history of their gender trouble. He is captivated by Helga Johansen’s language and how it challenges the medical language in his own medical records, which are also included in the novel. Like Høffding, he is fascinated by the possibilities and beauty of Johansen’s artistic language:

When I pair the rigid and reductive journal discourse with Helga Johansen’s divinely beautiful sentences, this elastic materiality arises in the textual material, an openness to polyphony and diversity in the expression, for example an extreme alienation at the same time as a hypersensitiveness, which can come close to saying something about being human in the world.15

It seems that Helga Johansen’s auto-fictional masterpiece from 1900 is beginning to be read repeatedly, as Amalie Skram once suggested.