In 1989, the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin published The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, she notes that many stories depend heavily on a hero with a sword or weapon as a central object, while bags seem boring and insignificant.
Le Guin argued against the idea of weapons being the most important tool in a novel. Novels themselves are not “sword-shaped”, she suggested, but bags of ideas bundled together. It might be unexpected to link Le Guin to Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories. But Moominmamma is a perfect example of the kind of hero Le Guin was imagining.
The story Jansson tells in the first Moomin book, The Great Flood (1945), is not a conventional hero narrative. It is a bundle of experiences the Moomins encounter as they make their way through an uncertain environment. If the story functions more like the “bag” – of ideas, people, places and their relationships to each other – then the ideal object to sit at the heart of the story is a handbag.
