As a little boy August was as weak as other little boys. He adored his mother. He was shy, acutely sensitive, morbidly self-conscious, keenly resentful of injustice. He was not his mother's favourite, he was nobody's favourite, and this embittered him. The mother soon became an object of analysis; he was torn between love for her and contempt for her faults, which he discovered through making comparisons between her and his father. He says that a yearning for the mother followed him through life. The future misogynist was fostered by the child's passionate and unrequited love for the mother. When in later life Strindberg's attacks upon women were criticised, he defended himself by declaring that he chid woman because he loved her so well.
Disgust with the daily drudgery and routine of the household was aroused at an early age. He speaks of the family as an institution for providing food and clean clothes, where there is an eternal round of shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing.
"Glorious moral institution," he cries; "holy family, inviolable, divine institution for the education of citizens in truth and virtue! Thou pretended home of virtues, where innocent children are tortured to speak their first lie, where will-power is crushed by despotism, where self-reliance is killed by narrow egoism. Family, thou art the home of all social vices, the charitable institution for all lazy women. The forge for the chains of the breadwinner, and the hell of the children!"
This passage follows the description of an unjust punishment which was meted out to August. He was accused of having drunk some wine out of his aunt's bottle, and upon blushing in response to his father's question was beaten as the culprit. Fear of the physical pain made him confess the deed which he had never committed, and, upon telling his old nurse that he had suffered innocently, he was again seized and now beaten as a liar as well as a thief. After that day he lived in constant anxiety. The world was a cruel and unfriendly place; there were enemies everywhere.
"Who drank that wine?" he repeatedly asked himself. The search for a satisfactory reply to that question and to Similar questions was not abandoned, though it was futile. The hostility to social injustice and enforced criminality to which, later on, he gave literary utterance, had a remote though ineffaceable connection with the abducted contents of the wine bottle.
His ideas about God were vague, and chiefly formulated through saying daily the Swedish child's prayer: "God who loveth children." The windows of the house over-looked the old churchyard of Klara. When there was a fire in the night the church bells were tolled in a manner which struck horror in the heart of the child. The whole household was awake. "There is a fire," ran the whisper. He cried and tried in vain to go to sleep again. Then his mother came, tucked him up and said: "Don't be afraid; God will protect those who are unhappy." The following morning the servants read in the paper that there had been a fire, and that two people had been burnt to death.
"That was God's will," said his mother. Sacha incidents did not pass him by. The apparent inconsistency between the expectation of faith and the tragic reality troubled him and caused his first religious doubts.
The old church with its graves became the symbol of gloom, and of the joyless fate from which there is no escape. During the cholera epidemic of 1854 the child of five watched the paraphernalia and ceremonies of death from the bedroom window. In the churchyard below, gravediggers were at work, stretchers were carried past, dark knots of people were seen to assemble round black boxes. The church bells tolled incessantly.
One day his uncle took him and his brothers inside the church. In spite of the beautiful walls in white and gold, the sound of the music which was like that of a hundred pianos, and kneeling white angels, his attention was riveted on two figures. Amidst the praying congregation two prisoners in chains were doing penance. They were guarded by soldiers and dad in long, grey cloaks with hoods over their heads.
He was told that these men were thieves. A feeling of oppression by something horrible, by an incomprehensibly cruel and relentless force, overcame August, and he was glad to be taken away.