Cleanliness and cleansing

Cleanliness and cleansing form a recurring psychological and moral vocabulary in Victoria Bergman’s story. The idea begins as an apparent refuge from the damage of childhood, surfaces in the urge to erase the physical traces of a concealed past, and later becomes a possible consequence of revenge. Yet its meaning remains unstable: feeling cleansed may bring relief, but it does not necessarily restore memory or settle what revenge costs.

Cleanliness as a substitute for desire

Sofia Zetterlund explains cleanliness through the idea of libido: motivation, longing, and the wishes that orient a person toward life. She describes a common psychological account in which destructive childhood relationships, especially with parents, can disrupt that drive. In her examples, a fear of germs or compulsive handwashing can make cleanliness itself the overriding dream and desire. The point is not that every person harmed by parents becomes violent; Jeanette Kihlberg immediately challenges that simplification by observing that troubled parental relationships do not turn everyone into a serial killer. The exchange keeps the explanation from becoming a single-cause diagnosis.

For Victoria, however, the connection is intimate. She recognizes that she has struggled for cleanliness throughout her life, while Sofia’s account gives the impulse a psychological shape: the wish to be clean may stand in for a damaged capacity to want other things. Victoria sees Jeanette as someone whose appetite extends beyond food to knowledge and experience, and as an intact person with an undisturbed libido. That contrast makes cleanliness more than a habit. It marks the distance Victoria perceives between a life organized around survival and one still open to desire.

The hidden room and the work of erasure

The idea becomes material in Victoria’s home. Her concealed room holds notes and newspaper cuttings, and she understands that she will soon have to burn them, tear the room’s walls apart, and dispose of what is inside. The decision is not simply an effort to tidy a space: the documents and walls have become reminders of the lies that helped her stay alive. At home, those reminders are so pervasive that she feels she can hardly move without meeting them again.

This intended destruction makes cleansing an act of separation from her background. But Victoria also recognizes a limit in the archive: she needs to learn how to remember properly rather than continue searching for answers in static documents. The papers preserve traces, yet they cannot by themselves produce a reliable or integrated memory. Her plan to remove them therefore sits beside a different task, not a replacement for it: letting Victoria act without letting herself disappear. Cleansing the room may clear away objects and evidence, but the thought does not claim that destroying them will resolve what they represent.

Revenge, confrontation, and release

Later, Victoria considers whether revenge can provide a more inward form of cleansing. Sofia describes its psychological meaning as involving both a physical confrontation with an enemy and an internal process of resolution and self-awareness. In this account, cleansing is not merely a clean surface or a vanished record; it is a hoped-for change in a person’s relation to what happened. Victoria recognizes the idea as familiar, as though it restores a way of thinking that once seemed possible.

Her own account of Lars Magnus Pettersson offers a specific, complicated instance. She says that she no longer hates him and, looking back, believes a false memory helped her get over him. The guilt attached to that memory had sometimes felt unbearable, but in the present she feels cleansed in relation to him. Relief does not erase uncertainty: she wonders whether, somewhere deep down, she had always doubted that he was dead, and admits that the past remains hazy. The false memory’s effect is therefore not presented as recovered truth. It helped her move beyond hatred, while leaving the facts and her earlier feelings unclear.

The unresolved promise of cleansing

Victoria’s thoughts turn from Lars Magnus Pettersson to Madeleine, whose motives she has been trying to understand. Her notepad contains at least fifteen pages of suppositions, many of which she suspects may be wrong or presumptuous; she has begun from the possibility that Madeleine is driven by feelings she herself has known: hatred and revenge. That inference makes the prospect of cleansing precarious. Victoria’s own sense of release cannot establish what Madeleine feels, nor can it show that revenge will have the same effect for her.

The question is left open: Victoria wonders whether hatred, too, can be cleansing. The uncertainty matters because the story has given cleansing two opposed forms. It can be the compulsive wish that replaces desire, or the hoped-for resolution after a confrontation with the past. Victoria’s relief concerning Lars Magnus Pettersson supports the possibility of release, while her uncertain memories, planned destruction of the archive, and conjectures about Madeleine prevent that possibility from becoming a final answer. Cleansing names an aspiration toward self-understanding, not proof that the past has been washed away.