Midsummer's Eve

Midsummer’s Eve frames a contrast between public festivity and Victoria’s estrangement from it. Although the holiday began as a celebration of the summer solstice, she notes that it now falls on the third Friday in June regardless of the sun’s position. Its long, bright night surrounds her with celebration but offers no sense of belonging or renewal.

Calendar and Present-Day Setting

Midsummer’s Eve is a Friday, and Victoria reflects on the distance between the holiday’s solstice origins and its fixed placement on the third Friday in June. The calendar date, she observes, does not follow where the sun is. That mismatch introduces a tension between inherited seasonal meaning and a modern, standardized holiday.

On the way down into the metro, Victoria watches drunk people carrying bags of food into the cool carriages. She regards them with contempt as obedient sleepwalkers and thinks she has nothing to celebrate. She is heading back to Sofia Zetterlund’s house in Tyresö treatment location. Later, across the road from the house, a group has taken over a lakeside jetty for a Midsummer meal, making celebration visible even as Victoria remains apart from it.

Ritual Recalled Through Memory

The party by the lake and the smell of dill from the kitchen lead into Victoria’s memories of Midsummer in Dalarna. Those celebrations began with a trip to the Dala River to watch the church boats, followed by dancing around a midsummer pole that the men erected with conspicuous effort. Women wore wreaths of flowers and laughed, but the apparent festivity was precarious: once vodka flowed, men compared their partners unfavorably with other women and could slap and insult them.

The recollection turns from adult celebration to the children’s position within it. Victoria remembers having little money for fizzy drinks or sweets and wandering while other children bought candyfloss and raffle tickets. The holiday’s communal rituals therefore carry a double inheritance: seasonal pageantry and laughter coexist with humiliation at home and the exclusion of children who cannot share in its pleasures.

The Long Light and the Holiday’s Meaning

When Sofia Zetterlund says she is going to bed, Victoria stays on the stone steps, listening to a nightingale and to the sounds of the party on the jetty. The evening has become a night almost as bright as day, and the scene recalls Midsummer celebrations in Dalarna without restoring their warmth. Instead, the memory exposes the violence embedded in the festivities she once witnessed.

The closing landscape resists an ordinary division between day and night: the sun remains visible over the horizon, disappears for only about an hour, and rises again. This brief darkness echoes Victoria’s distance from the holiday’s promised celebration. Midsummer’s Eve gathers people around food, dancing, and seasonal custom, while its brightness leaves her alone with the memories those customs also contain.