Negotiating Womanhood: Class, Affect and Gendered Socialization in the Joop ter Heul Series

This article explores how the Backfisch novel functioned as a site for negotiating traditional patterns and new possibilities for female subjectivity in the interwar period. Moving beyond polarized views that either dismiss the genre as conservative or celebrate its emancipatory potential, it approaches the Backfisch novel as a dynamic cultural form that registers both continuity and change. It focuses on one of the genre's most influential twentieth-century examples: Cissy van Marxveldt’s Joop ter Heul series (1919–1945). Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of distinction, the article traces Joop’s narrative arc as a gradual assimilation into bourgeois norms, whereby her initial rebelliousness is redirected into socially acceptable forms. This transformation depends on what Sara Ahmed terms the 'happiness duty’: the imperative to align oneself with socially sanctioned ‘happy objects’, such as domesticity and family life, to secure both personal and communal happiness. Through this lens, the article argues that the series exemplifies Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that happiness can operate as a tool of oppression, shaping both women’s aspirations and their consent to prescribed social roles. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that the interwar Backfisch novel engages with the changing zeitgeist while simultaneously reasserting the affective and social scripts of bourgeois femininity.