We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

The curious thing in this life was that the influence of these two great antipodeans was held in the balance, and the one appeared as continuing the work begun by the other.

One would have thought that it was impossible, and that the influence of the one would not have allowed itself to be ingrafted on the work of the other. Imagine Heyse’s refined sensualism beside Ibsen’s negation of the senses! Between the disciples of the one, a comprehensive sympathy; between the others—no mercy. That there is no mercy to be found amongst the people of our day—that each one is imprisoned in the iron harness of his own interests—that was just the terrible news that Ibsen imparted to us in his dramas, when he urged us to help ourselves because there was no other help to be had.

Yet the figures of Ibsen’s principal women are to be found in Heyse, for before Ibsen Heyse had already met with and understood the apparitions with which Ibsen has revolutionised us; Heyse discovered the same highly developed type in a few solitary specimens which have only been discovered by Ibsen many years later.

There is Nora, for instance, who has become the platform woman. I do not think that anyone has ever explained in what Nora’s sacrifice for her husband consisted. It rests upon Heyse’s fundamental principle—the incommensurable, i.e., that which cannot be measured by the common standard. In the essay upon Heyse I have enlarged upon this. In Nora’s eyes love is the great miracle, the gift that one receives without having done anything to deserve it. In her eyes there is nothing above or below that can be compared to love. That is how she loves her Helmer. Social duties and other considerations, unless they are in some way connected with him, have no existence for her. Her husband takes the place of the entire network of engagements and obligations with which most people, especially women, occupy the greater part of their lives. Everything that is exists for her only in its relation to him; if it bears no relation to him, it has no existence for her either. Her love is her religion, her law book, her moral code, and the sole object of her being. And her great disappointment is this: that for Helmer love is not the incommensurable, it is not the thing which is of chief importance in his life. She had given herself to him entirely, but he had not given himself in like manner, and the discovery freezes her heart and her senses. The much-talked of “miracle” in which she can no longer believe is nothing other than the awakening of the incommensurable in Helmer’s soul.

Here we have the fundamental instinct of human nature which both Heyse and Ibsen, independently of one another, discover to be the absolute and all-ruling motive in the lives of hundreds of the women of their time. Heyse was the first to immortalise this variety, and in his Children of the World he calls her Toinette; Ibsen calls her Hedda Gabler. She is the sexless woman who is filled with spiritual emotions, and who, though utterly passionless, is a mistress of the art of attracting and fascinating the man, though the mere thought of abandoning herself to him fills her with a feeling of unconquerable horror. It is a type which has considerably increased in numbers and lost in charm during the last ten years; the woman who is really emancipated and entirely freed from man, the unmarried professional woman who is perfectly contented with her lot and who preaches happiness in independence—Björnson’s apostles of purity with Svava at their head, or Hauptmann with his Anna Mahr and the brother and sister theory (Lonely People), which same doctrine is now being ardently preached by the aged Tolstoy.

Björnson’s Svava is also forestalled by Heyse in the person of a young girl of noble family (In Paradise) who sends away her strong, handsome young lover as soon as she discovers that he has lived with another woman.

Thus we find that the heroines of the Scandinavian problem-novel are no northern discoveries, but are developments of this century who had their origin in real life, where Heyse, who understood women, found them, and made them known to the public in his writings long before the problem-novel was invented.

In the meantime external conditions have undergone a considerable change.

Heyse’s woman was an aristocrat who was protected on all sides, but Ibsen’s woman lived alone in the midst of that universal “struggle for life,” which is the peculiar feature of our time, and Björnson’s reformer was a woman of the people, who elbowed her way alone through the crowd, and preached morals to men.