This fear of an alien invasion of the soul, of losing himself in another, made him flee again and again from the prison-house of love. In all his books the attraction between man and woman is a duel between love and hatred. Sexual love is never spiritualised; it drags man into the illusions of Maya, it robs him of strength of purpose, of intellectual freedom. Hence Strindberg's men are ever struggling to get out of the clutches of woman. When the ties are too strong to be broken, when passion obscures reason, hatred is born. Anatole France calls himself "a philosophical monk." The monk is always by Strindberg's side, pointing out the degradation of carnal love, urging him to seek liberation at all costs. But he is not yet ready. He wants to go, and he wants to stay. And all his couples, autobiographical and purely imaginative, bum in the fires of love-hatred. "I love her," he writes in Inferno, "and she loves me, and we hate each other with a wild hatred, born of love, which is intensified by the great distance." In Fairhaven and Foulstrand the lover says: "At bottom we hate each other, because we love each other. We are afraid of losing our personalities through the assimilating power of love, and therefore we must break away sometimes so as to feel that I am not you...."
After some time love always becomes irksome to Strindberg. He longs for male companionship. He experiences a sense of relief when he is free from the woman, from the consciousness of always being watched. His voice resumes its manly tones, his chest expands. This trait subsists in his stories; it makes marital happiness impossible.
He can describe the marriage of souls with exquisite delicacy, the first hours of newborn tenderness, the maiden's innocence, the youth's wonder at the miracle which is taking place within his heart, the chaste abandonment of reserve before the unifying power of love. But when once love has descended from Heaven to Earth, Strindberg does not leave the lovers in peace. From earth's paradise they are driven to hell; they must hate each other, torment each other, devour each other's substance with the cruelty of vampires. Even the first kiss is fraught with untold dangers. In Midsummer—a sunny play emphasising the worth of man and the dignity of work, remarkably free from distressing problems—this pathological trait is introduced. Julius, a healthy young gardener, kisses Louise, his sweetheart, on the mouth, and the demoniacal depths of human nature are immediately revealed to both. Julius begins to understand the meaning of hatred, and gives utterance to startling thoughts. Louise no longer recognises his voice. "Why did you kiss me?" says Julius, "we ought never to have done that." "What happened?" says Louise. "I have just read in a book," answers Julius, "that when two innocent bodies, carbon and nitrogen, unite a dreadful poison is formed. The poison has been born on our lips, and hatred has been born out of our innocent love."
Shakespeare married a shrew. She served as an excellent model for his portraits of angry women. Led by a malignant fate Strindberg married three women who had interests outside the home. He loved the ideal of the womanly woman, the mother who lives for home and children. He came to detest the intellectual woman; she was to him the man-woman, a danger to the race, the enemy of man who steals his qualities because she is bent on his destruction.
In The Confession of a Fool his love for his first wife suffers at an early stage through the necessary introduction of business into the divorce arrangements. "Where is the charm of a woman who is always worn out with contention, whose conversation bristles with legal terms?" he asks plaintively. In Fairhaven and Foulstrand the second story of the Quarantine Master shows the same sad development: "... But this evening he found her ugly, carelessly dressed, with ink on her fingers, and her conversation was so business-like that she appeared to him in a detestable light." "A lady," he says in one of his essays on the art of the theatre, "must never be snappish or grumpy, even if her part is one of opposition. A lady should always be graceful, even in moments of anger."
Already as a youth he found it difficult to talk sense to girls. He denied that friendship could exist between the two sexes. The presence of emancipated and "free" women was sufficient completely to disorganise his work and temper. He told Uddgren that he did not feel happy in Switzerland, because he found women enjoying the same freedom as men in marriage. "I experienced a sense of peace when I came to Bavaria where the men are the rulers in marriage, and the women are obedient and faithful. The mere fact of returning to these old-fashioned, patriarchal conditions was sufficient to restore my literary powers which, during the last time in Switzerland, had been in abeyance."
In an essay entitled Woman-Hatred and Woman-Worship, published in 1897, Strindberg wrote: "As I have the reputation of being a woman-hater, and people amuse themselves by calling me one, I am forced to ask myself if I really am one. On looking back at my past life I discover that, ever since I became man, I have always lived in regular relations with women, and that their presence has aroused pleasant feelings in me, in so far as they have remained women towards me. But when they have behaved as the rivals of man, neglected their beauty and lost their charm, I have detested them by dint of a natural and sound instinct, for in them I sensed something of man, and an element of my own sex which I detest from the bottom of my heart.... Consequently, as I have been married twice and had five children, it is not very likely that I should be a woman-hater."
"The most beautiful thing I know," says The Stranger to The Lady in To Damascus, "is a woman bent over her needlework or her child." And The Lady crochets. The good women in his plays are all fitted for "the most beautiful thing": Gunlöd in The Outlaw, Margaretha in The Secret of the Guild, Karin in Eric XIV.
The following passage throws light, not only on Strindberg's attitude towards women, but on the attitude of women towards him: "To return to woman was to me to come back to nature, and in a corner of my soul I made myself unconscious, instinctive, a child, and thus renewed my power to think, act and fight.... I have always worshipped women, these enchanting, criminal minxes whose worst crimes are not registered in criminal statistics. But I have had sufficiently bad—or good—taste to tell them the troth, and they have revenged themselves by calling me woman-hater. Just think, if these priestesses of revenge knew how many successes with the fair sex their revenge has brought me! Inquisitiveness, the original sin of Eve, drew the little ingénues to the monster, and the monster put no obstacles in the way for even the most inquisitive to satisfy their curiosity ... many thanks, my charming enemies."
It is little wonder that a man so constituted should be appalled at the prospect of the New Woman with her independence, her clubs, her cigarettes, her politics, her sport. Monsieur Casimir Dudevant, the husband of George Sand, who was "just an ordinary man" was at first puzzled by his wife's extraordinary qualities, and then came to the conclusion that she was "idiotic." Poor Monsieur Dudevant! He was the forerunner of a long row of perplexed husbands, injured in their sense of the fitness of things. Strindberg merely made himself a spokesman for what the majority of masculine men feel in regard to intellectual women, even though they may not be capable of expressing it. Since he abandoned his early championship of woman's suffrage, he came to utter much bad and ill-tempered abuse of woman. Some of the things which he said of "lazy, stingy and cowardly woman," of her mental and physical inferiority to man, might well be included in Flaubert's Dossier de la Sottise Humaine. His arguments in favour of the theory that woman is an intermediary biological form, whose development has been arrested somewhere between man and youth, are interesting but unconvincing. The evidence he offers in support of his views on the general incapacity of woman—an incapacity which ranges from the handling of musical instruments to making coffee—bears the imprint of petulance rather than research. Sometimes there is a cross and quarrelsome tone in these utterances which reflects personal irritation, something of Alfred de Musset's words in Nuit d'Octobre: