Strindberg's childhood and youth, as described by himself in his autobiographical novel The Bondswoman's Son, present psychological features of exceptional interest. The circumstances of his early home-life and their effect upon the unfolding forces of his genius cannot be ignored by anyone who attempts to explain the varied strata of his artistic production.
His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with an equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings strongly subjective. His autobiography—"the story of a soul's evolution"—is an intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past selves, to record minute incidents and to extract reflexes from the bundle of emotions and thoughts which go to make up character. Nothing is lost, nothing is too insignificant for careful examination in the microscope under which he places every cell of himself. The confessions of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness of Strindberg's truth about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with himself, he scorns excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless exactitude. There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing psychologist and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range from the struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the calm of Alone, and the final visions of light.
The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under the titles The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room and The Author, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though the impressions of childhood are recorded with deep insight into the child's mind, we cannot forget that they were written down and interpreted by the man who had behind him years of tumultuous and bitter struggle for self-expression, and before whom the banquet of life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the preface to the fifth edition of The Bondswoman's Son, he tells us that when writing the volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw no longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away."
Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22nd, 1849. His father, whom in disparagement of his parentage he often calls "the grocer," was a merchant and shipping agent who had married a servant-girl, the mother of his three children. The father was a man of education and natural refinement who passed through many economical vicissitudes, culminating in bankruptcy at the time of August's birth. August was born a short time after the union between the parents had been legalised by the ceremony of marriage, and he was not welcome. His father bore his troubles with manly fortitude and resignation and cherished the ideals of the upper classes, whilst the mother was essentially of the people and remained so. He claimed a distant ancestral connection with the nobility of Sweden, his family having descended from the son of a peasant who was born in 1710 at Strinne in Angermanland, and who married a girl of noble birth. The discord resulting from the difference between his father and mother gave August his first impression of that class struggle which I throughout life held him in the bondage of a haunting problem, and which stimulated the development of his mordantly critical faculties.
Poverty, with its attendant cares and anxieties, reigned in the house by Klara churchyard, where, from a flat on the third floor, August began to survey life's difficulties. He tells us that he recollects fear and hunger as his first sensations. He was afraid of darkness, of being beaten, of offending people, of falling down, of knocking against things, of being in the way, of the fists of his brothers, of father's and mother's chastisements.
It was not easy to avoid being in people's way, for the parents with seven children and two servants lived in three rooms. The furniture consisted mostly of cradles and beds; children slept on ironing boards and chairs. Baptisms and funerals alternated. The mother developed phthisis after the birth of her twelfth child.
She was contented with her life, he tells us, for she had risen in the social scale and improved her own and her family's position. The father was less satisfied with his fate, for he had descended and sacrificed himself. He was tired, sad, severe and serious, but not hard.
Strindberg's recollections of his early impressions of the relations between his father and mother show the inception of the views on women and marriage which earned for him the title of woman-hater, and which found their most provocative expression in The Father and The Confession of a Fool.
"This is the father's thankless position in the family," he writes; "to be everybody's breadwinner, everybody's enemy." He concluded that his mother did not overwork herself, though his account of the daily life in the family does not support that view.