Deviance and normality

Deviance and normality form a contested scale in the novel: what counts as abnormal depends on who sets the standard, and the label can carry consequences far beyond description. Through psychiatric history, official paperwork, and the handling of abuse allegations, the narrative connects classifications of conduct to the power to treat, disbelieve, protect, or exclude. Its recurring contrast is between the force of an institutional judgment and the complicated lives that judgment claims to explain.

A Scale Made by Institutions

At Sunflower Nursing Home, Victoria Bergman listens as Sofia Zetterlund explains that capsulotomy was intended to check behavior classified as deviant. Victoria’s response shifts the discussion from the operation itself to the authority behind its vocabulary: a person can be called deviant only against a scale already established as normal. She observes that psychiatry receives state support and reasons that political decisions therefore help determine what is considered sick. Psychology, she argues, has no comparably clear boundaries; in her view, people can be deviant and non-deviant at once. The category is thus neither a self-evident fact nor a stable description of a person. It is a judgment made within a system that draws the boundary.

Victoria’s argument is sharpened by her example of a fourteen-year-old boy subjected to six weeks of electric-shock treatment after his religious parents found him masturbating. The treatment followed their definition of unacceptable conduct, exposing how a supposedly medical response can enforce a family’s moral rules. Victoria goes so far as to say that religious belief ought itself to be considered deviant. Her provocation reverses the direction of classification: instead of accepting the dominant standard as neutral, she makes its arbitrariness visible by applying the label to those who usually wield it.

Treatment and the Cost of Correction

Sofia distinguishes capsulotomy from frontal lobotomy while placing both within a history of interventions intended to correct conduct judged aberrant. She explains that lobotomy severed the connection between the lower part of the brain and the frontal lobe, and that approximately one in six patients died. The Medical Council knew the risks but did not intervene. Most lobotomy patients in Sweden were women, described as dissolute, aggressive, or hysterical. These terms made social disapproval sound like a medical property of the patient, while the procedure imposed a grave bodily cost in the name of correction.

Madeleine Silfverberg’s treatment brings that history into the novel’s present account. Capsulotomy was used in the hope that cutting nerves in her internal capsule would reduce compulsive disorder and disruptive behavior. Sofia stresses that the procedure was not known to be fatal in the way lobotomy was, but that it failed and had the opposite effect. The comparison does not make the procedures identical; it shows a recurring institutional impulse to alter a person’s brain when behavior has been designated unacceptable. The stated aim of managing symptoms stands beside the consequences of intervening in the body, and the boundary between care and control remains unsettled.

Labels and Disbelieved Testimony

The same authority to classify appears outside the operating room. Madeleine maintained during years of treatment that Per-Ola Silfverberg had sexually assaulted her, that other men were involved, and that her mother, Charlotte Silfverberg, had approved. Her account was not accepted: she was considered psychotic and severely delusional and was heavily medicated. The account establishes both the allegation and the institutional judgment that discredited it; it does not, by itself, settle every claim Madeleine made. Its significance lies in the conditions under which her words were received. Once her testimony was organized under a diagnosis of delusion, the diagnosis became a reason not to believe the testimony.

A similar question of institutional attention surfaces when Jeanette Kihlberg confronts Gert Berglind about the investigation into Ulrika Wendin’s rape. She points out that the same investigator had overseen the discontinued case against Karl Lundström and asks whether he saw a connection. Berglind says that he did not. Jeanette then identifies a specific failure: when Annette Lundström supplied Karl with an alibi for the night of the rape, the case was dropped without checking whether her information was correct. This exchange does not explicitly diagnose anyone as deviant. Instead, it shows how an institution’s choices can determine which accounts receive scrutiny and which questions go unasked. The contrast with Madeleine’s treatment is not that the cases are identical, but that decisions about credibility and investigation help shape what can be known.

Memory, Records, and Normality

The novel also connects classification to the production of official records. Jeanette gathers a large fax output and reads a 1988 report from the National Board of Forensic Medicine stating that Victoria Bergman had suffered serious sexual abuse before reaching full maturity. Nacka District Court had consequently granted confidentiality for her personal details. Jeanette is struck by the report’s cold wording, especially its reference to full maturity. The document makes abuse legible through formal language and supports a protective legal measure, yet its impersonal phrasing also distances the reader from the person whose experience it records. Bureaucratic classification can therefore protect, while still reducing an individual history to administrative terms.

For Victoria, the struggle over what is remembered turns on another kind of norm: the brain’s selective handling of experience. While brushing rotting leaves from her windscreen wipers and roof, she thinks about deviations from the norm as things that can wake her from sleepwalking, even when they are not directly connected to the memories that surface. She reflects that trivial details, such as where a car was parked, can remain accessible while the mind suppresses something as grave as being raped by her father. This is not a claim that every memory follows one rule; it is Victoria’s attempt to understand the uneven access to her own past. The contrast makes ordinary memory both a shelter from overwhelming experience and an indirect route back toward it.

Taken together, these episodes refuse a simple opposition between normal and deviant. A medical category may authorize an invasive procedure; a psychiatric judgment may diminish the standing of an abuse allegation; an investigative decision may close a case without checking an alibi; and a court’s formal classification may help secure confidentiality. At the same time, the novel keeps the limits and consequences of each judgment in view. Deviance is not merely a trait attributed to isolated individuals: it is a boundary drawn by families, professionals, and institutions, with real effects on whose behavior is corrected, whose words are trusted, and whose history becomes part of the record.