Revisiting the Moominmamma

The art and life of beloved illustrator Tove Jansson

Recognized in the 1940s as one of Finland’s most gifted painters and illustrators, Tove Jansson was increasingly identified with the “snork,” her signature character. With the publication of “Moomins and the Great Flood” in 1945, hersnorks became “moomintrolls,” happy, peaceful creatures threatened by forces beyond their control, and forced to examine their views of themselves. The children’s book, alas, sold only 219 copies. A sequel, “Comet in Moominland,” also sank with barely a trace.

But by the mid ’50s, with the publication of five more books, including “Finn Family Moomintroll” and “Moominsummer Madness,” all featuring sharply etched characters, and not-at-all apocalyptic plots mixing fantasy with everyday experiences, Jansson’s fame began spreading around the world. Moomintrolls were becoming a cottage industry, appearing in comic strips and picture books, on pens, piggy banks, wastepaper baskets, skirts and aprons, as toys and edible figurines.

In “Tove Jansson,” Boel Westin, a professor emerita of literature at Stockholm University, draws on interviews with Jansoon as well as her journals, letters and personal archive in a comprehensive and informative account of this unconventional, fiercely independent and private artist.

Westin examines Jansson’s intimate and at times ambivalent relationships with her parents, Viktor (Faffan) Jansson, a sculptor from Helsinki, and Signe (Hamm) Hammarsten, an illustrator from Stockholm. Westin also documents Jansson’s search for romantic and sexual partners, male and female, who shared her demands for freedom and equality.

Westin identifies the distinctive features of Jansson’s Moomintroll books. Appalled by the carnage of World War II and her father’s preference for fascism over communism, Jansson decided to become an apolitical artist, “a so-called individualist depicting lemons, writing fairy tales, collecting weird objects as a hobby and detesting associations and societies.”

A bold, modern writer

Influenced by Freudian and postFreudian psychology, Jansson believed children are “often spellbound by what is unspoken and disguised.” And that “the risky but meaningful undercurrent is not incompatible with the child’s own inaccessible sense of mystery, tenderness, and cruelty.”

Thus, although pictures should at times be graphic in their juxtapositions of darkness, light and shadow, to ensure that young readers used their imaginations, everything should not be illustrated or explained.

In “a bold concept, modern for its time,” Westin suggests, Jansson used moomintrolls as a “camouflage” to express her own need to ward off despair and find “something lost or unattainable.” Playing a role as a protective “moominmamma,” Jansson wrote books in which people are nice to each other, while introducing but not explaining threats and “symbols of identification and self-obsession that have so littleto do with the immature reader.”

Jansson, Westin reveals, came to regard Moomins as a burden as well as a blessing. Writing, illustrating, and promoting the books left precious little time for still life painting. And her characters prevented Jansson from returning to the security of her “secret cave.”

“I could vomit over Moomintroll,” Jansson wrote.

With the publication of “Moominvalley in November” in 1970, Jansson said goodbye to the trolls. As they faded into abstractions, however, she left readers with shadowy images of “shiny puffed-up plants” and “strong new colors,” springing up through the decay.

“Purified of dreams, illusions and families,” Westin writes, the valley might be open to something and someone new.

In the ensuing decades, she wrote short stories and novels (including “The Summer Book,” described as “a minor masterpiece”), a libretto for an opera, television scripts, and songs, helped curate a museum exhibition, painted portraits and a spectacular mural for a day nursery.

She also struggled with lung and breast cancer in the 1990s. She had a debilitating stroke in 2000, lived for about a year in a nursing home and died on June 27, 2001.

The announcement of her death included a soliloquy by Snufkin, one of her moomin characters:

“I wander where life takes me in my ancient greeny hat,

I play my tunes in daytime and I play them in the night.

And I keep no thing around me because I always must be free

To find new songs and sing them to my own melody.”