Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping sound like that of a little bird; in later times—in the times of the celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler, etc.—they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of “women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.
The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid. She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....
Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul throughout all ages.
Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type of woman.
The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller, created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature, with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,” they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.
Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in all the unreal reality of their being.—There still remains Ibsen’s woman.
Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his works, and as she stands before us in real life.
II
“Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), Gina, Hedvig (The Wild Duck), Fru Alving (Ghosts), Nora (The Doll’s House), Petra (An Enemy of the People), Selma (The League of Youth), Lona (The Pillars of Society), Solveig (Per Gynt), Agnes (Brand), Swanhild (Love’s Comedy)—here are the women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the analyser, the doubter.