Taking a Stick to Women

...subduing his desire, sinks back "like a blanched lettuce plant that is tied together and put under a flower pot to make it as white and tender as possible, and by keeping it from the sunlight, prevent it from putting forth green leaves, from bursting into bloom, and above all, from setting seed...

...An antiemancipation story with more life and charm is "A Doll's House...

...Here we see not only how badly prepared the writer and his generation were for love and marriage, but with what narrow, staid and unimaginative concepts and antinatural expectations they approached it...

...In neither, no matter how hard they try, can husband and wife give each other the essential sustenance they require...

...He can actually pause appreciatively over "sweet Portuguese onions that smelt like a dancing girl when she is warm, and lobster a la daube that had a whiff of the seashore in it . . . and chicken stuffed with parsley that reminded you of gardeners...

...Yet are they really ideological...

...Worst of all, dallying at the inn comes to an end...

...Alas, she finds a "serious woman"—which to Strindberg can only mean, like "cultured woman," a creature hostile to nature...

...Perhaps something irretrievably melancholy in the state of Sweden militates against the cheerful communion of souls and bodies...

...she goes dancing with railway colleagues...

...Certainly there is little to choose between the hostility of Strindberg's stories and the lonesome chasm of Ingmar Bergman's films, like Hour of the Wolf...

...Once again, it is not the reformist fervor that captures the reader, but the concrete vivid counterpoint of temptation and withdrawal, the real garden where "The domestic cat, warm and replete with milk fresh from the cow, slinks from the chimney corner, and treads carefully among the narcissi and the daffodils, fearful of getting tousled and wet with dew before her lover comes...

...A naval captain and his wife have formed the habit of meeting, after his two-month summer voyages, at an inn on the island of Dalaro...

...Nonetheless, it is precisely the unstable, exaggerating Strindberg who stirs us...

...I'm your slave...

...a satirical swipe at Ibsen, whose play of the same name was then a rallying point for feminist discontent...

...And part of the fascination lies in our astonishment that such antagonisms can continue unabated, that such stark feelings can persist un-ameliorated, without our finding them ridiculous...

...whistles, flags, ferries, the confusing animation of the streets all intrude vigorously into the clarity of the message...

...You'll find the dolls dancing and the squanderbirds singing and twittering, and joy enough to lift the roof off...

...Persona, and Portrait of Anna...

...one of the better stories in the collection (partly because it is long enough for us to become involved with the privations of its ascetic hero) is not about wedlock, yet sets the cultural framework for the marriage stories...

...In "Natural Obstacles," the wife works as bookkeeper in the luggage department of the State Railways: "It was going to be a spiritual marriage on the right lines, they'd show the world that woman too was a being with a soul, not just a hen...

...Strindberg was undoubtedly more interesting and original in turning the stage lights so long ago directly on the tensions between the sexes than in his monomaniacal diatribes against emancipated women...

...In the many marriages that go to seed in Gelling Married, we glean, if only from the curt summaries and the ironic rhythms, that it is not so much institutions that have done the damage, but a private delinquency in the characters themselves, some puny pride or anemia of the affections...

...On the contrary, if we have ever entertained a nasty yen to torment or subjugate our mates, to rant or give way to extravagant paranoia, or if we have felt ourselves too mundane and rational, or simply too meekly married, we can, at least for three hours, envision ourselves being as cruel, powerful and intense as our darkest impulses have ever goaded us to be...

...A certain degree of neatness being essential to obsessive minds, Strind-berg has designated a kind of amalgamated culprit as the prime source of all this infelicity: church, school, motherhood—those forces in society that urge us to forsake our natural instincts and behave with propriety...

...What animals...

...The stories, despite their Olympian didactic mode, imply that in marriage we are the sum of our partner's strategies and immobility, and that we each invite, indeed conspire in, our own punishment...

...Four years later, her skin has already turned pale and her bosom has sunk...

...Shortly thereafter, the captain is dismayed to receive in his mail a copy of Ibsen's play and letters containing such disturbing questions as "Has our marriage been a true marriage...

...Luckily, this impoverished regimen is interrupted by an insignificant event: The schoolmaster finds his favorite restaurant closed for Midsummer Day and wanders helplessly around Stockholm, at first flinching with the distaste a typical middle-class Swede feels for the working classes...

...In Strindberg's vocabulary the word "spiritual" always adumbrates disaster, and soon the husband becomes much annoyed that his wife is sharing her desk with a "young puppy" who stares into her eyes and looks over her shoulder at the ledger...

...The boy swings in the sycamore tree with the gardener's daughter yet...

...Getting Married resurrects not this purgative dramatist, but an energetic polemical journalist who turned out 30 stories and two embattled prefaces to assail the women's rights movement of his day...

...a student puts his arms around a 14-year-old girl whose "hair was soft and golden as clear honey, and always sprang from her forehead like splashing water...

...There is often a connecting link in Strindberg between the fear of sin and the fear of life...

...illusions wither away...

...In that area, he unfailingly caused himself to suffer, and took it for granted that the rest of the world did likewise...

...Things decline rapidly...

...In "Needs Must," a story about a bachelor schoolmaster who has eaten crayfish in the same restaurant with the same companions every evening at 8:30 for 12 years, the agents of devastation are the secular ones of caution and frugality...

...In his bare tidy room there was not "a single picture taken from an illustrated newspaper because it had struck a sympathetic chord, there was not a single antimacassar crocheted by a loving sister, not a single photograph of a beloved face, not even an embroidered penwiper on the desk...

...Strindberg never ceases to preach that the wages of abstinence and caution are death, that women must put aside ambition and learn to be soft and solicitous...

...Usually the drift is in the opposite direction: His married couples incite one another to resentment or torpor...

...the man who rails alike at idle women and working wives, at matrimony and celibacy, whose only certainty is his romantic agony that first love is sure to fade...

...It is a poignant cry, and what is most touching of all is to discover that this overly passionate writer, so prone to criticism and complaint, is not devoid of the capacity for pleasure...

...Back home, he tells his mother-in-law...

...Finally nature takes a decisive hand, and the expectation of a second baby forces her to leave her job...

...the marriage bed is avoided or forbidden...

...In fact, a feminist editor and a federation organized to abolish prostitution (the Swedish feminists of the 1880s were, curiously enough, mainly Rightists and pietists) brought him to trial for blasphemy, basing their charges on a brief anti-religious passage in one of the stories collected in this volume...

...Written in 1884, the stories are timely enough today to steam the liberationist controversy to still another boil...

...love appears to be quite dead...

...Then she sniffs the lavender that is just coming out and calls to her mate...

...They collated together and seemed to be much more intimate and aware of what the other was thinking than he and she were, though they were man and wife...

...In "The Rewards of Virtue," the prohibitive litanies of religion sap the hero's strength...

...Invariably, too, his stories end with chiding or condescension: "She was his wife and comrade just as she had been, but she was also the mother of his children and that was best of all...

...The argument that wins us owes less to the cause of equality for women than to the congenial, salacious ambience of the story...

...The "woman question" settled down on Strindberg's mind like a persistent bee that he had to keep swatting...

...she is angered and shamed at becoming pregnant...

...When the husband tries to talk about forestry, she replies by talking about luggage...

...by the eighth summer, "she had tooth-ache . . . her voice was shrill . . . she dragged her feet when she walked...

...Autobiographical, as is most of Strindberg's writing, it describes the crippling impact a dying mother's warning against "low women" has upon a sensitive 13-year-old boy...

...Wherever we locate the blame for marital distress, though, we can hardly fend off the impression—especially from the grimmer second half of the book—that Strindberg further discerns some unaccountable underground spring of discontent governing the marital affairs of men and women...

...Even if he did hold these intellectual beliefs, surely he was neither wholesome nor quite rational when it came to visceral experience...

...Another instructive fable, this story is nevertheless perfect in pace and detail, perhaps because it is the only city story...

...If the tigresses treat me too damnably, I shall have to take a big stick to them...

...But it gives us a burst of confidence, as readers, to see him leave the confines of the turbulent bedroom for the large eclectic world of public debate outside...

...In The Father, for example, the wife demolishes her husband by making him doubt his child's paternity, in The Dance of Death, husband and wife are jousters in a lifetime duel: in Miss Julie, a combined upper-class and feminist upbringing has left the heroine only a dowry of arrogance and caprice to offer men...

...This querulous, unreasonable Strindberg puts us in touch with feelings we cannot admit and—while accusing us of disruption and inadequacy—teaches us to aspire to harmony...

...he thinks, but in the end he is so drawn to the jollity of a family eating sausage and dancing to the accordion that he cannot prevent his right foot from beating time to the music...

...You'll find a real doll's house there...

...Most of Strindberg's dogmatisms and aversions in some way follow the main conviction of this story: that in youth one chooses between two roads—either to respond freely to experience and look forward to health and contentment, or to accept the false, self-denying values fostered by social institutions and succumb to dessication...

...Her eyes were alive, her skin fresh and downy, like chamois leather...

...Fortunately, the captain is a real man who knows what to do, and a small infusion of feminine jealousy turns his wife into a real woman again...

...In "The Phoenix...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Probably not even the sunniest theatergoer remains totally impervious to the orgy of gloom that erupts from a Strindberg play...

...the stories, accordingly, are not meant to be complex like the plays, but didactic—clean little sermons, sometimes schematically spanning a lifetime in six pages, and often charged with a single (generally disapproving) idea...

...This idyll of marital refreshment continues undisturbed for six summers, until the captain innocently suggests that his wife look out for a companion while he is away...

...Traumatized by the contrast between familial beatitude and his own loneliness, he mends his ways and marries...

...I'm your slave," she cries out in chagrin...

...When women take up the cudgels," Strindberg wrote his publisher, "the devil is let loose...

...The Reward of Virtue...

...There dinner and wine, a boating picnic, and a big comfortable bed have all been providently arranged by the affectionate wife...

...Strindberg's plays mesmerize us less by the actual enactment of combat in the erogenous zone than by their astute inquiry into dynamics: the moves the adversaries make, almost as if against their own will, to spite themselves...

...the splendid Swedish editor and translator in whom, after three unsuccessful marriages, Strindberg has posthumously found the right woman, does not share this gloomy view of him...

...Her husband and Strindberg are mollified, however, and the marriage is saved...

...They drive for mulled wine to Lidingoboro, where he seduces her in a bachelor bed...

...Optimistic, hearty and unequivocal, she presents him in her informative preface as a robust man of the enlightenment, outspokenly modern in his concern for educational reform, decentralization of government, and eradication of class distinctions...

...Though sex is frequently hovering around Strindberg's mind, it is disarmingly unlike him to be so good-humored about it, and allow raucous allusions to landladies who are kept awake because of connubial esprit...