2 - Strindberg and the woman question

Summary

In 1913 the prominent Swedish poet and novelist, Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940), was quoted by the Stockholm daily, Aftonbladet, on dying gloriously. He observed that he had always dreamt of dying in battle, to fall among the crowd on a dusty road. The rhetoric of male bravery in this remark accorded with that of a generation for whom, in 1914, 'the full and hideous flowering of the politics of masculine dominance finally become more candidly proclaimed than ever before in history', and, for a period during the 1880s, Strindberg too had looked with envy at Germany, Bismarck and militarism. In a frequently cited letter to Heidenstam from January 1887, he wrote that in Germany one could still find men who were real males (SL, pp. 221-2), in contrast to Sweden where, as a result of the movement for the emancipation of women, society had become weak and female. According to Strindberg, Sweden was no longer a place for strong men who longed for traditional gender roles and masculine authority and, like the Captain in The Father, he passionately mourned the past. To understand why he wrote so much about the troubled relations between men and women, one therefore has to take into account his sense of loss. He held up the past as a mirror to modern, changing times where middle-class women no longer accepted male dominance. The problem of how to deal with women concerned him throughout his life, and it is striking how, although in different ways, Strindberg continually returned to this issue in his writings.