He aimed at the wife in three dramas. The first attack took place in The Father.
The fable of The Father is comparatively well known. A Captain is bullied by the three women in his household, he is driven half mad by them and is reported to be quite mad, and is literally, not merely figuratively, put into a strait waistcoat. These three women are his wife, his mother-in-law (who does not appear in the piece), and his nurse. The three conspire together. The wife and the nurse drive him mad with their petty arguments, and the mother-in-law’s bell ringing at stated intervals serves to precipitate his desperation.
But what makes these three women conspire against the man who is master of the house? The nurse and the stepmother, says Strindberg, are of an advanced age, consequently sexless, consequently men-haters.—Good. But the wife?—The wife is also a man-hater.—Why?—Because all women are men-haters, with a few exceptions.—That is all very well, but it does not explain why the nurse, the mother-in-law and the wife should combine together. Mutual forbearance is not exactly a feminine quality, and to begin with, it is extremely unlikely that his nurse should live on friendly terms with the wife’s mother. Yet in spite of that they combine. Why?—In order to embezzle the books that are sent to him, to pamper his mother-in-law and to spoil the child. From pure wickedness in fact? Well and good. But why do they not vent their wickedness upon one another?—Because they are all three equally stupid, and that is why they prefer each others’ company. Strange that the pretty young wife should not be bored with the two old women! Something is surely rotten in the state of Denmark? No, there is nothing rotten, it is the normal condition of all families.—That is all very well, Captain, but have you ever asked yourself whether your wife is satisfied with you?—To this question the author is wont to give an answer which, owing to its plainness, we cannot quote here. But I think that in this instance the author renders the psychology of the woman too easy. The lords of creation are apt to be rather conceited. Time is short and choice is limited, and in most cases the woman takes whoever she can get, and it often happens that she does not care for him afterwards. The more he loves her, the less she cares for him, and there we have the tragic conflict. The man does not observe it and goes on loving, the woman knows that he does not observe it, is offended, and revenges herself by tormenting him. He bears it patiently and loves her, but his love is clumsy and brutal. Now the woman gains the upper hand. She sees that he has not found her out and she knows that she will never be rid of him, the thought goads her anger, she feels that she is unpunished, and by degrees she becomes a fury. Who is the greater fool of the two?
The Comrades deals with the same problem. Axel sacrifices himself in slavish subjection to his wife, who has artistic pretensions. He not only paints her pictures, but he also sees that they are accepted for the Salon and his own rejected. He works hard to earn money, and she throws it away in making merry with her friends. If he loses patience, she propitiates him with caresses. He lives solely for her, but she preserves an attitude of reserve towards him and is stupidly coquettish, easily attracted by other men, an all too tender confidante to her unmarried women friends. The society which she introduces into his house is a perfect menagerie of abandoned persons. Another yet more unhappy husband appears on the scene and confides in Axel. His wife has been a drunkard for many years, his daughters, who are still quite young, have had their minds polluted, but he allows them to be with their mother because he loves her. The dialogue between man and wife is a continual dispute with really clever variations on a limited theme. Here, as in The Father, there is the same reasoning of the great mind with the small one, which ends by the great mind becoming perplexed, yet always anxious to resume the fight. Final result: the woman is cast out and the man finds that his life is not worth living.
In another story, called The Creditors, we find the same woman and the same man, but this time the man is split in two halves—the one half consists of a great mind and the other of a sensitive nervous system. The sensitive nervous system becomes epileptic from exhaustion brought about by the efforts of the great mind (who has lived so long without a better half) to concentrate its energies and rub up its dialectics to the sharpness of a razor. By virtue of this dialectic razor the breach between Adolf and Thecla is completed, but when she throws herself sobbing over the husband who is stricken before her eyes, the great mind is thunderstruck. Is it possible that she loved him after all?
In his drama, Miss Julia, the instincts of the upper and lower classes rebound upon one another with terrific fury. John, the son of the maid-servant, who is the best male character that Strindberg has ever created, gains the victory in a brutal struggle with his wife. In this piece Strindberg seemed to assert his deliverance from the clutches of woman, and afterwards, in his Playing with Fire, the man conquers again. A superficial abuse of the opponent is the inevitable accompaniment of a victory, and in By the Open Sea, the super-man triumphs over the dubious maiden, whose obvious dissoluteness he—the noble man with the great intellect—is extraordinarily slow in perceiving, and after seriously compromising her, he leaves her unmarried as a punishment.
III
Strindberg’s next novel, Tschandala, is one of his least known works; as literature it is of comparatively small importance, but as a contribution to the psychology of the author it is an exceedingly valuable production.
Strindberg had gone to spend the summer in a country lodging where the proprietors are notoriously bad people. An ordinary man would have perceived the fact at once, but Strindberg’s imagination began to work and swelled itself into a book of gigantic proportions. The outward circumstances remain the same, but the scene is pushed back a century and becomes a war between the patrician with the great mind and the plebeians with the small minds, who do all that they possibly can to ensnare him and to bring about his ruin. The only reason given is the envy felt by inferior minds and small souls for the great and noble. It is difficult to understand how a learned and distinguished man can exist with his wife and children amid such extremely revolting surroundings as those described, unless he is too poor to make a change; it is still more difficult to understand why he should have any dealings with the populace, unless it is that he takes a psychological interest in their study. The landlady’s gipsy lover, who rules the house, has got him almost in his power, when the distracted lodger resolves on a plan whereby to annihilate him, well knowing that the ignorant man is subject to superstitious fear. He allures him into the meadow at night, and by the aid of a magic lantern he causes superhuman figures to pass before him. The trick is successful. The tormented and ignorant landlord dies from his fear of ghosts.
This single instance proves to how great an extent Strindberg works upon his own experiences, and it also shows that his imagination is of a nature to magnify everything to a degree that is quite immense. It is a characteristic trait in his nature. His imagination is not the weak, tame, conventional imagination of a bourgeois, which is elsewhere commonly met with in literature. It is the imagination of a savage, in which every impression is echoed a thousandfold on the sounding-board of fear. It is fresh as the wind that blows from the mountains and no less incessant. It is always at first hand, and that is the secret of its power. After reading Strindberg you may raise objections against his arguments, but at the moment you are forced to agree with him. There has never been an author who could convince with such brutal authority as he.