Marguerite Swawite
Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
From the north, whence Ibsen’s Nora challenged the world as far back as 1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström’s, which has but now appeared in Edwin Björkman’s translation, we must remember that it was written in 1907—before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.
Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction. Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude, has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum. These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong—a conclusion weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.
Be that as it may, the chief protagonist, Karen, is quite a normal person—except in the matter of courage, of which she possesses an inordinate amount. But then all new women are courageous to a fault. She is a woman of twenty-eight, mature, cultivated, and a successful professional writer. Her most salient claim to consideration in the early scenes of the play is her quiet assurance in the right of her position. She voluntarily opens up her past to the professedly liberal physician who seeks her hand.
“Some years ago I—lived with a man.... You are a widower yourself. You may regard me as a widow or—a divorced wife.”
And when he spurns her action as squalor, she indignantly replies, “Doctor, how dare you. A phase of my life that at least to me is sacred, and you cast reflections on it, that—”
There is a brevity, a terseness, about her words that create greater sense of her power than would any amount of emotional pyrotechnics. In the later scene with her father she is equally as simple:
“The sum and substance of it is this: I have been married twice.... I mean that twice during my life—with years between—I have given myself, body and soul, to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death.” Then follows the recital of the two love affairs—the first with a brilliant but very poor journalist who died prematurely, and the other with a sculptor, Strandgaard, whom she left on the discovery of his faithlessness.
Her vision is of a time of greater freedom for self-expression: