Keats and Fanny Brawne
By Charlotte Wilson
He tried to pour the torrents of his love
Into a tiny vase; a trinket—smooth,
Pretty enough—but fit to hold a rose
Upon some shrewd collector’s cabinet.
Toward that small moon the wild tides of his love
Reared up, and fell back, moaning; and he died
Asking his heart why love was agony.
And she? She loved the best she could, I think,
And wondered sometimes—but not overmuch—
At poor John’s queer, unseemly violence.
A New Woman from Denmark
Marguerite Swawite
Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
From the north, whence Ibsen’s Nora challenged the world as far back as 1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström’s, which has but now appeared in Edwin Björkman’s translation, we must remember that it was written in 1907—before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.
Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction. Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude, has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum. These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong—a conclusion weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.
Be that as it may, the chief protagonist, Karen, is quite a normal person—except in the matter of courage, of which she possesses an inordinate amount. But then all new women are courageous to a fault. She is a woman of twenty-eight, mature, cultivated, and a successful professional writer. Her most salient claim to consideration in the early scenes of the play is her quiet assurance in the right of her position. She voluntarily opens up her past to the professedly liberal physician who seeks her hand.
“Some years ago I—lived with a man.... You are a widower yourself. You may regard me as a widow or—a divorced wife.”
And when he spurns her action as squalor, she indignantly replies, “Doctor, how dare you. A phase of my life that at least to me is sacred, and you cast reflections on it, that—”
There is a brevity, a terseness, about her words that create greater sense of her power than would any amount of emotional pyrotechnics. In the later scene with her father she is equally as simple:
“The sum and substance of it is this: I have been married twice.... I mean that twice during my life—with years between—I have given myself, body and soul, to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death.” Then follows the recital of the two love affairs—the first with a brilliant but very poor journalist who died prematurely, and the other with a sculptor, Strandgaard, whom she left on the discovery of his faithlessness.
Her vision is of a time of greater freedom for self-expression:
“... the day will come when we, too, will demand it as our right—demand the chance to live our own lives as we choose and as we can, without being held the worse on that account. Of course, I know that this is not an ideal, but merely a makeshift meant to serve until at last a time comes which recognizes the right of every human being to continue its life through the race.”
Her justification is the characteristic one:
“I have, after all, lived for a time during those few years of youth that are granted us human beings only once in our lifetime, and that will never, never come back again. What have these other ones got out of their enforced duty and virtue except bitterness—bitterness and emptiness? I have, after all, felt the fullness of life within me while there was still time, and I don’t regret it!”
The clash with her father whom she loves tenderly she accepts as inevitable in spite of the pain it must bring them both. The ecstasy of a great vision softens to the note of personal loss as she leaves him:
“Yes—I do pity you, father! Don’t think my heart is made of stone. The sorrow I have done you cannot be greater than the one I feel within myself at this moment, when perhaps I see you for the last time! But how can I help that I am the child of a time that you don’t understand? We have never wanted to hurt each other, of course—but I suppose it is the law of life, that nothing new can come into the world without pain—”
Because Karen advocates a course generally denoted by the term (of wretched connotation) free love, she is not to be confused with those of lesser fineness who are fighting at her side. For instance, with Stanley Houghton’s heroine in Hindle Wakes. Anyone who sees in Karen another Fanny Hawthorne, has failed to understand Karen’s position. She is a woman of culture and of ideals in all matters of life, and especially in that of the sex relationship. “I have given myself, ...” she says, “to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death.” This is a far cry from Fanny’s reply to Alan: “Love you? Good heavens, of course not! Why on earth should I love you? You were just someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amusement—a lark.” To Karen the relationship is justified only by depth of passion, and she entered it with as great a solemnity and glow of consecration as did ever a serious woman a church-made marriage. To the many camp-followers of “established” feminism, those who don or doff their principles with the transient fashion,—to them Karen must seem a humorous, if not a pitiable figure. For she dares to have beliefs and gallantly cleaves to them.
Karen, then, is a new woman in the sense that in the moment of crisis she did not accept as inevitable the reply of convention, but weighed her need against the law, and, finding the latter wanting, fulfilled her need at the sacrifice of the law. On the other hand, she is not of those who break laws for the intrinsic pleasure of destruction.
“Of course,” she admits, “it would have been ever so much more easy for me if, while I was still young, some presentable man, with all his papers in perfect order and a financially secure future, had come and asked for me—”
And she welcomes marriage with the good Doctor Schou in an attitude unpleasantly reactionary:
“... I believe every woman who has reached a certain age—and you know I am twenty-eight—will, without hesitation, prefer a limited but secure existence by the side of an honest man to the most unlimited personal freedom.”
And worst of all, she, who throughout the play declares herself unconvinced of guilt or stain, at the close of the first act becomes quite mawkishly sentimental over Heine’s pretty line, “May God forever keep you so fair, and sweet, and pure.”
Because Karen exhibits these painful inconsistencies, she is no less possible or real or worthwhile. We who know many women emerging in diverse odd shapes from the travail of awakening have discovered just as inconsistent a combination of precipitation and reaction; and thus will it ever be until we have at length worked out our way to the most serviceable harmony. It is for this very reason that Karen is interesting: she is no superwoman, but our own imperfect sister.
Of the other characters there is but one deserving special comment—Karen’s mother, who to me is the most remarkable person Bergström has here created. She confesses to her husband that she has known for three years that Karen had been living in Paris with Strandgaard, but had kept the knowledge to herself because it had been too late to interfere, and because she did not regard the calamity as others would have in her place. From a terrible and bitter experience with another daughter, Gertrude, who had gone insane through the abrupt breaking off of a long engagement which had aroused primitive passion and left it unfulfilled, Mrs. Borneman had reached a revolutionary conclusion:
“... from that day I have—after a careful consideration—done what I could to let our children live the life of youth, sexually and otherwise, in as much freedom as possible. The result of your educational method, my dear Kristen, is our poor Gertrude, who is now confined in an insane asylum, as incurable. The result of my method is Karen, I suppose. I don’t know if it is very sinful to say so, but I feel much less burdened by guilt than I should if conditions were reversed.”
When Karen, however, defends her course as an abstract ideal of “every human being to continue its life through the race,” and appeals to her mother to understand, Mrs. Borneman retreats with, “I wash my hands of it, Karen. I don’t dare to think that far....”
It was her motherhood that had forced upon her the courage to overlook the law, and not any desire to throw over the old to set up a new law. The glory of the new vision means nothing to her in comparison with her husband’s suffering to which she herself has added. She is the promise of a new type—the awakened mother.
As for the play as a whole, it appears to me that Mr. Bergström has tried to say too much in the slight space of one short play, for he has two distinct themes—the right of woman to love and life, and the relationship between marriage and children. The first is the chief theme, which is worked out in the story of Karen; the second is too important to be employed as a subsidiary thread, and instead of adding richness to the first it rather clutters and confuses it with unnecessary baggage. Mrs. Borneman pities one of her sons because he cannot afford to have children on his slender salary, and feels that her other son is not justified in blindly bringing child after child into the world, depending upon the rest of the family for their maintenance. She asks her husband:
“So it is not enough for two people to live together in mutual love?”
“No, Cecilia, that has nothing to do with marriage. What is so inconceivably glorious about marriage is that, through it, God has delegated His own creative power to us simple human beings—that He has made us share His own divine omnipotence.”
The poor professor is made consistent to the point of absurdity, and the main issue befogged, when he cries out to Karen:
“And yet I could have forgiven you everything—your wantonness and your defiance—if you had taken the consequences and had a child! If you had had ten illegitimate children—better that than none at all! But you have arrogantly defied the very commandments of nature, which are nothing but the commandments of God!”
Perhaps this matter was included for the sake of Karen’s reply:
“Do you think I am a perfect monster of a woman, who has never felt the longing for a baby? Not me does your anger hit, but that society which will not regard it as an inevitable duty to recognize the right of every human being to have children—as a right, mark you, and not as a privilege reserved for the richest and the poorest. There are thousands of us to whom the right is denied—thousands of men as well as women. But we, too, are human beings, with love longings and love instincts, and we will not let us be cheated out of the best thing that life holds!”
Technically the play is not so perfect a thing as Mr. Björkman’s unbounded encomiums would make us believe. It opens, for instance, in the good old fashion scorned by Ibsen—with the gossip of servants, who are here engaged in laying the table instead of in the time-honored task of dusting. The whole action is cast within some eight hours, thus causing a use of coincidence to the straining point. The most commendable feature of technique is the admirably sustained suspense: the story of Gertrude overshadows the entire piece from the opening scene to Mrs. Borneman’s avowal in the last act. The powerful use of the story as contrast to Karen’s career is also unusual.
And yet in spite of its faults—perhaps because of them—we have found Karen Borneman the most stimulating play of the year. We hope one of our two organizations dedicated to the drama will put it on in the near future.
When the ape lost his wits he became man.—Viacheslav Ivanov.