I should like to take Strindberg’s women one by one and examine them
in connection with his personality and temperament, as it originally
was, and as it became when accentuated by friction with his social
surroundings and influenced by the atmosphere of the age in which he
lived. His women are a set of dismal, mischievous, heartless creatures,
only fascinating so long as the man is young and easily duped;
afterwards, when he develops into the great mind who sees through the
small mind and mimics it, they become ever more and more shrewish, less
attractive, more perverse, till at last the day comes when the man
with the great mind has grown sufficiently old and wise not to allow
himself to be led by the nose any longer, and the woman, whose name is
baseness, is finally dismissed.
The woman? Yes, for there is only one woman, the same woman whom he
has described in all his principal works during the fourteen years
of his authorship. It is a type that never varies, but grows more
exaggerated each time, and he clings to it as though it were the only
sounding-board for his cutting discords.
Strindberg is already to the fore in his first book, _The Red Room_.
The hero, Arvid Falk, is himself. He is a man who has not yet found
his own self, who does not venture to believe in himself, and who
hopes in no future; a poor, penniless fellow who allows himself to
be overawed by every bragging, self-confident person--in a word, a
peculiar, unhappy, harum-scarum individual who is not yet awake to the
consciousness of the ego.
There is only one woman in this book; she is Arvid Falk’s
sister-in-law, and has married above herself, she is a lazy and
indolent person, coarse-minded and untruthful, stupid and vulgar.
This bashful man, who is like a timid savage, and the vulgar woman have
as yet nothing to do with one another, they are types upon which the
gaze of the young genius first fell--they represent his ego and his
type of woman.
In _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ he has developed body and temperament. It is
the description of a woman’s many phases: discontent, happy love,
the child, the quarrel after marriage, coquetting with others,
reconciliation--it seems as though it had been written in a paroxysm
of love. The description is outwardly full of admiration, inwardly
full of psychological analysis. It is the work of a seer who worships,
while awake, the woman whose true self he perceives in his sleep and
already despises. _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ was acted at the Dramatic Theatre
of Stockholm, and Strindberg’s wife played the part of heroine with
great success, the only success she ever had on the stage. His next
work was a book called _Marriages_, which consists of twelve stories of
married life, black with the weft-yarns of life, beginning with pain,
ending with death. He describes the tame love of the latter end of the
nineteenth century which, fast bound hand and foot, drags her span of
existence through economical, pathological and “universal human” gulfs.
He describes the young student who engages himself to a fully developed
girl of fourteen, who, during the ten years of their engagement,
becomes a thin, shrivelled, nervous being, he marries without loving
her and she grows to look more wretched than ever after giving birth
to numerous children. He describes how the penniless young man brings
the poor girl home, and they do not know how to bring up the children
on an insufficient income; the couple are isolated from their social
surroundings and forced to live in a back street, where their children
play about in the gutter.
He describes how the young notary and his wife begin their married
life by giving expensive dinners, because it is only possible to be
young and newly married once in a lifetime. And when the child comes,
the bailiff comes too, and all the fine furniture finds its way into
the creditors’ pockets, and the old father-in-law, the Major, who
had foreseen what would happen, takes charge of his daughter and
grandchild, while the young husband is left to become a celibate. He
describes a man who both in character and temperament is predestined
to be constant in love and marriage, but his wife, though of good
family, is dissolute and wicked. He has to pay for her riding lessons
and to entertain her lovers, look after her children and conceal her
drunkenness--he is chained to her, he cannot free himself, he is
monogamous in spite of his better judgment.
Or else he describes the marriage of a private tutor with a lady of
noble birth who has never experienced a single womanly feeling, abhors
her duty as a wife, and only does not refuse her husband when she
wishes to obtain something from him. At the same time she is anxious
to enjoy all the social advantages of a married woman, and for the
sake of her frugal caresses the poor honest fellow allows himself to
be chosen a member of all the associations and public institutions in
which her empty vanity wishes to shine, till at last, much against
his inclinations, he becomes a member of Parliament. In the midst of
these tales of woe, of social and intellectual privation, Strindberg
describes himself in a story about an author and his family, called
_The Bread Winner_, in which many of his brethren will recognise
themselves. It describes the great author who gets up in the morning to
make his own coffee, while his wife and the servants are still asleep,
it describes him hard at work till the evening when he throws himself
down upon the bed dead tired--Money! Money! All for Money! It tells
of every single unsatisfied longing of which our age is possessed, of
the everlasting means which never ceases to become an end in itself.
The children run about aimlessly, while the servant girls read novels
and the wife allows her friends to pity her for her husband’s neglect.
His mornings are spent in feverish effort which exhaust him till he is
ready to faint, but the whip of anxiety and uncertainty urges him on
till the post comes, and he opens his letters with a beating heart;
the remainder of the day, until the late dinner hour, is consumed
by negotiating with extortionate publishers and pressing creditors,
corresponding in three languages with foreign newspapers, and reading
reviews where anonymous rivals seek to deprive him of the goodwill of
the public by which he lives, pointing at him with their inky fingers,
leaving a dirty smudge on his reputation. And he is defenceless. How
is he to punish the nameless vermin who lay their maggots in his
flesh and afterwards fly off? Then follows the dinner in a strange
restaurant, where the celebrated author is expected to contribute
wit and intellect to the conversation, and people are offended if
the exhausted man stares at his plate in dyspeptic silence. In the
evening, when he would like to be with his family, his wife goes to a
party or to some place of entertainment. And one day the overworked
“bread-winner” dies suddenly, his wife faints in the conventional
manner, and her old women friends--with or without petticoats, as the
case may be--exclaim in pained sympathy: “Poor unfortunate woman! He
always was inconsiderate towards her, in life as in death!”
It is real life that Strindberg has described in his _Marriages_, that
real life which the many live, but of which only the few are conscious.
It is the profound inadequacy of the closest relationship, which
neither our grandparents nor our fathers and mothers experienced, but
only the children of the eighties of the nineteenth century. Everything
in our day--joy no less than suffering--leaves a bitter after-taste on
the tongue, which neither mineral waters, baths nor digestive pills
can rid us of, since the evil is not of the body but of the soul, and
proceeds from the incapacity to lead a vegetative life, or to resign
oneself to circumstances. Formerly this discontent was general, and
in Strindberg’s works the blame was equally divided, but a couple of
years after the publication of _Marriages_, a change took place. The
universal picture of the age retreated, and everything pointed to woman
and man’s relation to her. In the course of a few years there appeared
a collection of dramas evincing a hatred of woman quite unparalleled
in the literature of the world. It was just at the time when the
Scandinavian movement for the emancipation of women was in full swing,
with its natural accompaniment of women authors, and the air was filled
with cries for equal justice to both sexes, the married woman’s rights
of property, the man’s pre-nuptial chastity, etc.
It would be impossible to say that the Swedish ladies were graceful
in their manner of introducing the new order of Society. Seldom has
anything more discouraging been witnessed than the manner in which
they enforced their demands upon men--demands which were in part quite
reasonable. Woman forgot her womanhood and relied upon the thickness of
her skull and her elbows, and in this her masculine phase she was by
no one more seriously taken than by Strindberg. He waxed warm in the
delight of the conflict. Armed to the teeth with the entire arsenal
of superior qualities pertaining to man, brain and pockets filled to
overflowing with the latest results of investigation, he went forth to
wage war against the Amazons. He went forth because he wanted to be
with them, for he loved the emancipated type. The emancipated woman
attracted him, which the pious Marthas were never able to do, and
because he loved her and because she appealed to his emotions, for that
reason he also hated her, for with him hatred is another form of love.
He aimed at the wife in three dramas. The first attack took place in
_The Father_.
The fable of _The Father_ is comparatively well known. A Captain is
bullied by the three women in his household, he is driven half mad by
them and is reported to be quite mad, and is literally, not merely
figuratively, put into a strait waistcoat. These three women are his
wife, his mother-in-law (who does not appear in the piece), and his
nurse. The three conspire together. The wife and the nurse drive him
mad with their petty arguments, and the mother-in-law’s bell ringing at
stated intervals serves to precipitate his desperation.
But what makes these three women conspire against the man who is master
of the house? The nurse and the stepmother, says Strindberg, are of an
advanced age, consequently sexless, consequently men-haters.--Good.
But the wife?--The wife is also a man-hater.--Why?--Because all women
are men-haters, with a few exceptions.--That is all very well, but it
does not explain why the nurse, the mother-in-law and the wife should
combine together. Mutual forbearance is not exactly a feminine quality,
and to begin with, it is extremely unlikely that his nurse should live
on friendly terms with the wife’s mother. Yet in spite of that they
combine. Why?--In order to embezzle the books that are sent to him, to
pamper his mother-in-law and to spoil the child. From pure wickedness
in fact? Well and good. But why do they not vent their wickedness upon
one another?--Because they are all three equally stupid, and that is
why they prefer each others’ company. Strange that the pretty young
wife should not be bored with the two old women! Something is surely
rotten in the state of Denmark? No, there is nothing rotten, it is the
normal condition of all families.--That is all very well, Captain,
but have you ever asked yourself whether your wife is satisfied with
you?--To this question the author is wont to give an answer which,
owing to its plainness, we cannot quote here. But I think that in this
instance the author renders the psychology of the woman too easy. The
lords of creation are apt to be rather conceited. Time is short and
choice is limited, and in most cases the woman takes whoever she can
get, and it often happens that she does not care for him afterwards.
The more he loves her, the less she cares for him, and there we have
the tragic conflict. The man does not observe it and goes on loving,
the woman knows that he does not observe it, is offended, and revenges
herself by tormenting him. He bears it patiently and loves her, but his
love is clumsy and brutal. Now the woman gains the upper hand. She sees
that he has not found her out and she knows that she will never be rid
of him, the thought goads her anger, she feels that she is unpunished,
and by degrees she becomes a fury. Who is the greater fool of the two?
_The Comrades_ deals with the same problem. Axel sacrifices himself
in slavish subjection to his wife, who has artistic pretensions. He
not only paints her pictures, but he also sees that they are accepted
for the Salon and his own rejected. He works hard to earn money, and
she throws it away in making merry with her friends. If he loses
patience, she propitiates him with caresses. He lives solely for her,
but she preserves an attitude of reserve towards him and is stupidly
coquettish, easily attracted by other men, an all too tender confidante
to her unmarried women friends. The society which she introduces into
his house is a perfect menagerie of abandoned persons. Another yet more
unhappy husband appears on the scene and confides in Axel. His wife
has been a drunkard for many years, his daughters, who are still quite
young, have had their minds polluted, but he allows them to be with
their mother because he loves her. The dialogue between man and wife is
a continual dispute with really clever variations on a limited theme.
Here, as in _The Father_, there is the same reasoning of the great mind
with the small one, which ends by the great mind becoming perplexed,
yet always anxious to resume the fight. Final result: the woman is cast
out and the man finds that his life is not worth living.
In another story, called _The Creditors_, we find the same woman and
the same man, but this time the man is split in two halves--the one
half consists of a great mind and the other of a sensitive nervous
system. The sensitive nervous system becomes epileptic from exhaustion
brought about by the efforts of the great mind (who has lived so long
without a better half) to concentrate its energies and rub up its
dialectics to the sharpness of a razor. By virtue of this dialectic
razor the breach between Adolf and Thecla is completed, but when she
throws herself sobbing over the husband who is stricken before her
eyes, the great mind is thunderstruck. Is it possible that she loved
him after all?
In his drama, _Miss Julia_, the instincts of the upper and lower
classes rebound upon one another with terrific fury. John, the son
of the maid-servant, who is the best male character that Strindberg
has ever created, gains the victory in a brutal struggle with his
wife. In this piece Strindberg seemed to assert his deliverance from
the clutches of woman, and afterwards, in his _Playing with Fire_,
the man conquers again. A superficial abuse of the opponent is the
inevitable accompaniment of a victory, and in _By the Open Sea_, the
super-man triumphs over the dubious maiden, whose obvious dissoluteness
he--the noble man with the great intellect--is extraordinarily slow
in perceiving, and after seriously compromising her, he leaves her
unmarried as a punishment.