Lily Sundelin and Margrete Sundelin’s Mother-Daughter Bond

Lily Sundelin and Margrete Sundelin’s Mother-Daughter Bond is first presented as an intimate, bodily connection that Lily believes makes her daughter’s slightest need impossible to miss. When an intruder harms Margrete without Lily noticing, that confidence becomes a source of painful irony. In the aftermath, Lily’s devotion does not diminish; it gathers around protecting the child, even as vigilance and fear alter the family’s ordinary life and strain Lily’s closeness with Karsten Sundelin.

A Bond Imagined as Physical

Before the attack, Lily’s contentment is bound up with her family: husband, child, home, and garden. Photographs of Lily, Karsten, and Margrete hang on the kitchen wall, and she reads the three images as a picture of a complete, almost miraculous household. Her attention to domestic details is affectionate and assured rather than anxious. She kneads dough for a chicken and chanterelle quiche while Margrete sleeps beneath the maple in a bonnet and blanket crocheted by her French grandmother.

The care is practical as well as emotional. Lily prepares food, checks the time, and remains confident that she will hear Margrete sneeze, cough, hiccup, or cry. She imagines their connection as a thick mooring line: even a small tug would reach her like a vibration. In her private understanding, Margrete is present in her thoughts, blood, fingers, and heart. The language makes maternal attachment seem nearly sensory, a bond that reaches beyond the space between the kitchen and the pram.

That certainty is tested with devastating precision. Someone comes from the forest, reaches the pram, and pushes aside the crocheted blanket, while Lily feels nothing. The attack does not demonstrate that she loves Margrete less than she believes; it exposes the difference between emotional closeness and the power to detect or prevent danger. The contrast gives the earlier image of the mooring line its force: what Lily had imagined as an unfailing warning cannot protect the child from an unseen assailant.

The Attack and Its Immediate Aftermath

When Lily later notices that the blanket is crumpled, she first tries to explain it as ordinary movement by a baby. Then she sees the blood. Margrete is covered in it, and Lily freezes before falling to the ground, unable to get up. Her response is bodily and overwhelming: nausea rises in her throat, and she screams. The scene reverses the calm domestic rhythm of her earlier care; the pram and blanket, once part of a familiar arrangement, now disclose a danger she did not perceive.

Karsten reaches Margrete first, lifts her against his chest, and tells Lily to get the car. At the hospital, Lily clutches the child with an urgency that makes her tremble. Her attention is fixed on Margrete even amid the room’s pictures and health magazines. The narrative places the mother’s grip beside the household’s prior confidence: after the attack, closeness is no longer simply the ease of knowing that the child is nearby. It becomes an urgent effort to keep her safe.

Protection Becomes a Way of Living

A week before the incident, Karsten had photographed Margrete for the local newspaper. After the attack, that public image of the baby sits uneasily beside Lily’s wish to keep her daughter from harm. Margrete now sleeps in the middle of the double bed, wrapped in a soft pink blanket after her bath. Though the child is too warm, Lily cannot bring herself to remove it. The bundle reminds her of a cocoon, and she wishes that Margrete would never unfold, grow up, or leave the house for the wider world.

The damaged pram is discarded because blood has soaked through to its mattress and cannot be washed away. Karsten buys an expensive replacement, and proposes that Margrete sleep on the veranda, where Lily can see the pram from the window. Lily does not commit to the plan; she strokes Margrete’s cheeks and answers only that they will see. The proposal and her hesitation show how the attack has made visibility part of care: keeping the child in sight offers a form of reassurance, though it cannot undo what happened.

The parents arrange themselves around Margrete as a protective barrier, lying on either side of her while she sleeps between them. Their daughter’s peaceful breathing contrasts with the vigilance of the adults who encircle her. Later, Karsten wakes at three thirty in the morning to find Lily and Margrete absent from their bedroom. He discovers them together on the sofa in the unlit lounge, where Lily sits with the sleeping child in her lap. The cot has been brought into the bedroom, but Lily’s difficulty sleeping and her move to the sofa show that proximity alone has not restored her sense of safety.

Maternal Devotion and Family Strain

The attack continues to shape how Lily responds to Margrete’s care. As the child gains weight, a visiting nurse points this out. Lily surprises both the nurse and herself by rising so abruptly that her chair falls, then pounding on the table. The account does not explain her reaction further, but its force makes clear that even an observation about Margrete’s body can meet a fierce response. Lily is absorbed by the child, while Karsten watches her from outside that concentration.

The change reaches the marriage as well as the mother-daughter bond. Karsten’s thoughts turn toward his failure to protect his family, and he tries to exhaust himself with tasks such as repairing the garden fence and chopping wood. At night, when the three lie together with Margrete between them, he sometimes reaches carefully toward Lily’s shoulder or hair. She responds with an involuntary shudder, unlike the intimacy those gestures once carried. The child remains physically at the center of the bed, but the parents’ different responses to touch reveal how fear has altered the household around her.

Significance of the Bond

Lily’s attachment is neither shown as a cure for danger nor reduced to the trauma that follows it. Before the attack, it appears as confidence in a nearly instinctive connection; afterward, the same devotion takes the form of clinging, watching, and resisting separation. Her wish that Margrete remain a small, sleeping bundle gives emotional shape to a fear of the child’s eventual departure, while the visible precautions—the new pram and the parents forming a barrier around the bed—make that fear part of daily life.

The bond therefore carries both tenderness and vulnerability. Lily’s conviction that she would know if anyone harmed Margrete is contradicted by the attack, but the failure of that conviction does not sever their closeness. Instead, it leaves Lily more deeply occupied by the child and less able to return to the ease that preceded the violence. The relationship stands at the novel’s intersection of care and insecurity: love can gather a family around a child, yet cannot guarantee safety or spare the adults from the consequences of fear.