We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise between the two.

Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales, followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with his earlier ones.

In 1869, Ibsen wrote The League of Youth, which was the first of his social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called A Bankrupt, and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s satire, i.e. the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons, and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.

The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and finally—but, as I think, chiefly—the example of Ibsen. Björnson, as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him, until one came who showed him the way.

Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in The Editor. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama entitled The New System; while in Leonarda, the snivelling morality of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced views of the grandmother.

Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and amendment might ensue.

Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or economical question on which he had not a weighty—often an ominously weighty—word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new, brand new problem appeared above the horizon.

This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a human being and then a woman, it had been handled by Ibsen many years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s “works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered. Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity, her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries, mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and worshipped her intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics, bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they had succeeded in proving their intellectual gifts, although in order to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians, superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts, and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children, and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry and expense.

Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never been the pioneer of any cause. It was only when the movement was well started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only too great a success.

The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved, and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds: freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness, the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.