We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

Björnson took me back with him and gave me a copy of his Gauntlet in Fräulein Klingenfeld’s German translation, which is a new and more severe edition of his former work. We often saw each other afterwards, but he never made me such a long speech again; I was not the right sounding-board for him. And here I must add, for the enlightenment of my possibly astonished readers, that conversations such as these were quite common at the time when the moral movement was raging in the north.

I happened to be in Copenhagen the following year when Björnson’s great moral tournament was announced. He spoke in one of the largest theatres in Copenhagen. Troops of “enlightened” peasants had come from the country to hear him; they looked strangely out of place with their black neckties and short whiskers as they pushed their way through the front seats, between Copenhagen elegants and worthy ladies of ripe years. The whole place was crowded to overflowing. I had a ticket for the evening reception which was given in honour of Björnson by a committee of the women “progressionists” of Copenhagen who formed the advance-guard of the emancipation movement, and I intended going there when the lecture was over.

Björnson appeared. A desk had been placed on the stage in front of the curtain, which was lowered. He mounted it, and stood looking like a righteous lion with a shaggy, grey mane, his eyes firmly closed, his lips compressed, the very incarnation of fanatical energy, “the man” for the masses. He began to speak. First he thundered, then he lowered his voice; first the words fell like hard stones, then his voice shook with emotion; he commanded, he entreated, he became by turns a man of learning, a pastor, a prophet and a jailor. But the effect produced upon the people of Copenhagen was not great. They applauded him very casually, the Danes—even in the lower stratum of society—are too æsthetic and critical, too conscious of being the possessors of an old and refined culture, to adopt the simple Norwegian modes of thought. Shortly afterwards Björnson visited the provincial towns and sowed his seeds throughout the whole of Scandinavia, where they took root.

I went home after the lecture feeling disappointed and depressed. It had sounded so hollow, and considering the past of this great writer and the future expectations of the three countries respecting him, it seemed to promise little for the hopes which the young generation had fixed on him and on him only. It made me shudder to think of the speeches in which the representatives of a dozen old maids, and about as many discontented wives, would sing his praises in consequence of his words this day. The lecture, which was called Monogamy and Polygamy, was the great divide between his yesterday and his to-morrow; it was then that the words were spoken: “So far and no further.”

He had been too crude and too pathetic for the people of Copenhagen. But the further he travelled into outlying districts, where culture was less advanced, the more this crudeness and pathos gained him influence, and as this tournament resulted in a change in the moral conceptions of Scandinavia which was destined to rule over family life as well as public life—a change which assumed the authority of a whole school of contemporary thought of which Björnson was the speaking trumpet, and as this school continues to gain ground in Germany the more surely, the more it becomes conscious of being the expression of the experience of a class, it deserves a more careful investigation.

What then was the subject of Björnson’s lecture?

It was a repetition of that speech of his in the Bois de Boulogne, only it was a larger and more detailed generalisation of the same, because in it he no longer dealt with noble-minded men and women, but with all men and all women. He had two fundamental doctrines which he used as his starting points: Woman’s complete equality with man respecting marriage, and the unconditional adaptive capacity of mammals.

Whether the latter doctrine is included in the German version of Monogamy and Polygamy, I cannot say, as I have not got it by me. But with the exception of what the American lady doctors had told him, Björnson founded his argument in favour of the reform of the sexual relations on the following anecdote: He met a man who had a large cage in which he kept a dog, a cat, a rat, a mouse and a bird. He fed them well and taught them to overcome their natural instincts of enmity and to live peaceably together. “And they all prospered well, very well, and loved one another much, very much.” It evidently had not occurred to Björnson that the chief characteristic of this story is the parable of the cage and the domestic animals. It is a well-known fact, that in zoological gardens the ravenous animals are kept apart from the peaceful ones, as the latter are ready to die of fear and misery from the mere smell of the others, even without seeing them. But Björnson places the cage first as a matter of course—the great cage of society filled with domestic animals and house parasites which have been tame for generations, and are indolent and blunted in their instincts. Too satiated, too lazy and too degenerate to fight, the dear little creatures vegetate in close proximity to one another, which is exactly what well-fed domestic animals are in the habit of doing, even without a cage. And then with a bold logical venture, he compared this state of things to the most central and most complicated of human relationships. If even the unreasoning animals are able to overcome their natural instincts, he argues, man also, after being sensibly reasoned with and encouraged by example, after many generations of training will be capable of adapting his strongest instinct to moral precepts and finally attain the ideal of pure sexlessness. Is not the daughter of the “educated classes” chaste? Have we not many millions of chaste old maids? Then why should not we have chaste old bachelors, and why cannot we have chaste young bachelors as well? Arise, you women! Strike! Refuse to be made “the laundry for unclean men”! Twice before he gave this lecture, Björnson had dealt with the same subject—in Thomas Rendalen and in The Gauntlet; the last of these two is the best known in Germany. In both works he declares that there should be only one moral standard for men and for women, and that this standard should be that of women.

The supporters of the movement in favour of the emancipation of women in Scandinavia baptised themselves into the name of Björnson, and adopted his confession of faith. The life, temperament, and superfluous energy of man was brought under the horizon of woman, and the eternal active was to allow itself to be remodelled by the eternal passive, because the latter was statistically in the majority.

At the time when Björnson was giving these lectures and writing these books, there was another movement which had just reached its zenith in the north, and which, by its opponents and by the emancipated daughters of the middle class, was known by the designation of “free love.” Its leaders were Arne Garborg and Hans Jaeger, who pleaded for the universal recognition of the socialist ideal as follows: That the conditions of society might be so ordered as to render prostitution unnecessary, by making early unions possible and marriage no longer a sacrament. Both parties were anxious to abolish prostitution, which is an evil that is not mentioned in Germany, although here also the emancipation movement (still in its infancy) is interested in it. It was the aim of Garborg and Jaeger to hasten its destruction by making it economically possible for early unions to be contracted in love, whereas Björnson and the women’s rights party sought another means, i.e. the mortification of the flesh.