Britt-Marie Was Here

Baking soda, Britt-Marie’s go-to cleaning agent, helps her cope with stressful or unusual situations through cleaning, but it also represents safety. By using baking soda on the mattress, she convinces herself that her sleeping place—a place of vulnerability and a state that is similar to death, which she fears—is safe. In addition, by presenting a clean mattress at hotels, she hopes to avoid gossip from hotel staff that she and/or Kent is a slob, guarding herself from the ghosts of her mother’s criticisms. Spiritually, she equates sodium bicarbonate with the human soul, as the body loses both after death. Therefore, by constantly surrounding herself with baking soda, she also wards off death, and perhaps subconsciously preserves her dead sister Ingrid. It is not until the rat knocks over Britt-Marie’s baking soda at the end of the novel that she no longer needs its protection.

Britt-Marie has a similar attachment to Faxin window cleaner. Ever since discovering Faxin in a newspaper ad after Ingrid’s death, Britt-Marie has clung to it as a representation of her worldview, much as it was advertised. She often narrows her worldview to a limited focus in her isolated environments: her mother’s disdain, Kent’s condescension, her own perceived incompetence.