Ulla Winblad - A Dual Character

A Dual Character

Paul Britten Austin summarizes Ulla Winblad's dual nature:

"Ulla is at once a nymph of the taverns and a goddess of a rococo universe of graceful and hot imaginings".

Fredman's Epistles are distinctive in combining realism - drink, poverty, gambling, prostitution, old age - with elegant mythological rococo flourishes, enabling Bellman to achieve both comic and elegiac effects. Britten Austin cites Afzelius:

Several of the most personal poems are staged with a heavy overlay of classical mythology ... It is as if a curtain with a whole rococo world of gods and goddesses on rosy clouds ... were suddenly raised, revealing a tavern-interior with shaky chairs, spilled and shattered glasses, staggering clients and sluttish barmaids

The sluttiest of the barmaids "on the rosiest mythological clouds" is of course Ulla Winblad. In Epistle 36, (Concerning Ulla Winblad's flight), Bellman "at his most rococo" describes Ulla asleep in a tavern bedroom - while the owner peeps through the keyhole and three excited drunks wait outside. As she wakes, three rococo cupids assist her with make-up, perfume, and her hair. Then she runs into the bar, revives herself with a glass of brandy, and leaves with the blindest of the waiting fellows, "leaving the inmates of the tavern, shaken, to contemplate Ulla's glass where she has left it, empty and broken on the bar."