Victoria
Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her
own life. Then Strindberg stole it
Sunday 22
July 1888 was a glorious day in Copenhagen, warm and sunny. The city was
celebrating an outdoor exhibition of the latest architectural ideas, thousands
of people had filled the narrow cobblestone streets, all sweaty and waving the
Danish red-and-white flag. The world seemed as beautiful as the future was
promising. But for the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson neither the world,
nor the future, registered any more. She had rented a small room in the Leopold
Hotel, just by Kongens Nytorv, and bought herself a razor knife and a handheld
mirror. She’d spent the previous evening writing goodbye letters, then waited
for the unbearably slow flow of time to pass midnight. Only then, with the
mirror in one hand and the knife in the other, she cut her own throat. The
hotel maid found her body in the morning.
Details of
Benedictsson’s death detonated through the Nordic cultural bourgeoisie. The air
was full of fragments of her life; one knew this, and the other that. Famous
friends published obituaries in the Scandinavian newspapers, and her portrait
was on display in bookstore windows. Speculations as to the cause of her death
crossed each other like arrows of gossip. Bad finances was one theory, unhappy
love another. In the scandalous newspaper Aftenbladet, the owner of the Leopold
Hotel declared that Mrs Benedictsson was undeniably tense and hysterical. There
were two beings in her, he claimed, that fought each other: her father had
cultivated a wildness in her nature, while her mother taught her only to pray.
Meanwhile,
her friend August Strindberg was almost starving. His marriage to Siri von
Essen was falling apart, and he lacked a home as well as a steady income after
having sunk himself in scandal with his sexually explicit essays. Accused and
tried for blasphemy, he’d fled Sweden. Now, exonerated from the charges, he had
a hard time finding publishers. He feared for his state of mind, but no one
seemed to want him, not even the psychiatrists he consulted.
Strindberg
and Benedictsson had become friends in Copenhagen. At first, Strindberg had
reluctantly admired her, but when she turned out to be more successful than him
(only the fourth woman ever to receive a sizeable grant from the Swedish
Academy), his friendliness turned into fierce envy. As soon as he heard about
her suicide, he began writing the play of his life, out of, as one friend put
it, ‘an unrelenting and cruel cannibalism without the slightest hint of
compassion’.
She was
born Victoria Maria Bruzelius in the south of Sweden in 1850, at a time when
women lacked human rights and the Western world was undergoing relentless
change – a time Friedrich Nietzsche later compressed into three words: ‘God is
dead.’ With industrialisation came capitalism. The creation of banks and
factories followed, amid the birth pangs of communism and liberalism,
constantly fighting over people’s minds. As The Communist Manifesto (1848) states
with poetic clear sight:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”
Frightening
times – and strangely polarising, for, if God is dead, what takes God’s place?
Science, research, rationality, some answered triumphantly. Loneliness and
rootlessness, said others. Or, immorality and capitalism. God is dead, long
live modernity!
Victoria
grew up in a village so small one could blink and miss it on passing though.
Her parents were well educated but lacked money. On top of that, they were old.
An awkward, lonely child, her mother taught her most of the skills a girl of
the bourgeoisie had to know – French, piano, sewing, embroidery – plus all
there was to know about God’s truth and punishment. Her father, on the other
hand, seemed to be the king of freedom. The two of them would ride over the
open fields and he’d teach her to wrestle, whistle and shoot. Galloping to keep
up, Victoria duly wrestled, whistled and shot, doing her best to be the son her
father longed for.
For a time,
both were happy, before a singular moment when everything changed. The
sensitive young girl watched her father realise – she literally saw it happen –
that, indeed, she was not a son. She registered the change of expression in his
eyes and interpreted it as rejection and contempt. From that moment, she not
only hated being a girl, she despised the characteristics within herself that
she identified as feminine, and couldn’t stand women in general.
She grew
tall (183 centimetres, or just over 6 feet) and strongwilled, determined to be
a painter. Twice she asked for her father’s permission to study art and was
twice denied. The second rejection broke her down. Now 20, she deplored the
options ahead of her: working as a governess or staying at home as an unmarried
daughter. So, when an old suitor turned up – Christian Benedictsson, 30 years
her senior, a widower and father of five – she married him. With a postmaster
for a husband, she saw opportunity; being a married woman would grant her a
certain amount of freedom. Yet it took just months for her to realise that
she’d merely exchanged one dependency for another. Later, she described the
marital institution as state-sanctioned prostitution; her husband was obliged
to support her for the rest of her life, while she, in turn, was obliged to
provide her body.
Victoria
Benedictsson proved an excellent stepmother, but when she had a daughter of her
own, there was no affection. The baby girl was the fruit of an old man’s lust.
When she became pregnant a second time, a dark mood took hold of her; for
several weeks of the pregnancy, she wouldn’t eat. Born on 22 July 1876, her
daughter was christened, named Ellen, then died. Benedictsson’s diary notes at
the time went silent. But there are clues to her state of mind, to the guilt
and relief that consumed her. From that time on, she identified with Lady
Macbeth, a woman who had committed the worst of crimes.
Benedictsson’s
private notes were often made in a cipher of her own invention, to ward off
prying eyes. They reveal that village life bored her. That she found people
narrowminded, unintelligent and gossipy. In secret, she started to write short
stories inspired by Charles Dickens, sending them to newspapers under male
pen-names. Although rejected, she received good advice along the way: study
your surroundings, young man. Get to know your world and the people in it.
Skåne was
her landscape: the windy fields, muddy village streets and forest groves where
lily-of-the-valley grows and where people go hunting for rooks, those metallic
black birds that obscure the sky when they take off in flocks. In response to a
world transforming at steam-engine speed, people were nostalgic for premodern
society: the countryside untouched by time, which they perceived as authentic
(much like now). Benedictsson’s short stories about the people of Skåne and
their ways, published under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren, were an immediate hit.
‘Ahlgren is the future and hope of Swedish literature,’ the critics cried, not
knowing that Ahlgren was a 33-year-old married woman with six children. An
unexpected star was born.
For much of
the 1880s, Scandinavia was engaged in a heated cross-border literary debate
about male and female sexuality, power and subordination, set off by the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) – and fuelled by
the book The Elements of Social Science (1861) by the British doctor George
Drysdale. Ibsen questioned the gilded cage of bourgeoise women, lacking all
rights but the one to please others, while Drysdale argued that men’s and
women’s genitals were muscles that needed regular exercise in order not to
atrophy.
Scandinavian intellectuals began asking if women should be allowed to have sex before marriage, learn about their bodies, masturbate? Should men stay chaste until their wedding night, or would they die if their urges were held back? (A thesis that Strindberg supported, by the way.) At the centre of it all stood the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, the man whom Benedictsson would come to love in the last two years of her life. He’d risen to fame translating John Stuart Mills’s The Subjection of Women (1869), to which he added a preface, pleading between the lines for women’s erotic rights, as a complement to Mills’s advocacy of women’s economical, legal and social rights. Brandes’s translation swept like a firestorm through Scandinavia, as tens of thousands of women found in it words for describing their predicament. He became their unofficial leader, and a role model for working-class reformers and students who yearned for a less rigid society.
Brandes became the most important critic in northern Europe. He introduced Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the Nordic countries and discovered Nietzsche. (As proof of his central position in European culture, Brandes’s daughter kept a ‘friend book’ where admirers left greetings. There are signatures by Otto von Bismarck, Maurice Ravel, Claude Monet, Albert Einstein, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Leo Tolstoy, H G Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. Sigmund Freud personally sent his book on dream interpretation to Brandes.)
During
Benedictsson’s lonely years of writing in the attic of the postmaster’s house,
she read every word Brandes wrote. He was a beacon of light in the intellectual
backwaters of the Swedish countryside – a guide to the higher education she
coveted, but was denied because of her gender. ‘I have a man’s brain in a
woman’s body,’ she noted.
When she
published her first novel, Money (1885), she found instant celebrity, never
mind that a jealous neighbour denounced her, revealing her true identity to the
press. Having gained confidence and prestige as Ernst Ahlgren, she decided to
transform herself into him altogether. After all, Ahlgren wasn’t obliged to
kiss Postmaster Benedictsson. Ahlgren could sit up all night smoking, eating
grapes and discussing literature with his newfound literary friends.
Benedictsson’s
transformation wasn’t so much about becoming a man, as becoming free. Like a
female Houdini, she started breaking out of the corseted cage of womanhood: the
stepchildren could take care of themselves, her young daughter was left to her
grandmother. The old postmaster found himself forced into a deal he didn’t
want: freed from the obligation to support her, he lost his right to have sex
with her. Finally, the village where they lived, with all its small-town
busybodies, was so sharply dissected in a short story by Ahlgren, that the male
villagers clubbed together to threaten her with physical violence. Step by
step, the old ties were cut. Victoria became Ernst. She – or he – set off to
Stockholm and was celebrated by the cultural elite. Unusually tall, dark-haired
and always dressed in black silk, maybe to conceal the fact that she hardly had
any money to keep up with fashion, Ahlgren even flirted. At 35, she discovered
what turned her on; only the intellectual connection between equal minds awoke
her sensuality.
Ahlgren
seems to have moved back and forth along the gender line seamlessly. Her male
friends called her ‘brother Ernst’ and she frequently signed her letters with
the cross-gender ‘mother Ernst’. One friend described her as:
“… a woman without anything on the outside
revealing what goes on inside. He takes pride in hiding it and the whole world
thinks Mrs Benedictsson is a lovely person. But to himself, Ernst Ahlgren
laughs at them all – and portrays them in his books.”
Note the
fluid pronouns. But Stockholm ultimately proved to be as petty bourgeois as
Benedictsson’s home village. She was free, but incredibly lonely. In a bid to
find others as ‘free and wild’ as herself, she left for Copenhagen, hometown of
Brandes.
In October
1886, Ahlgren invited Brandes to her room at the Leopold Hotel and, politely,
he came to visit. He had heard of her, after all, and knew that they shared
literary ideals. They discussed literature, the current debate on sexuality and
marriage; he confided in her about his mistresses and marriage. She proved a
good listener. He told her he liked her. Imagine that! The postmaster’s wife
had turned herself into a progressive, celebrated writer, and was now in an
intimate, face-to-face conversation with her idol. She tried to stay cool but
fell in love. As soon as Brandes left, she jotted down every word and every
pause, like sheet music. All must be documented. They soon met again. Then they
kissed.
Her private
notes, which had consisted of quotes, outbursts of anger or joy, or anecdotes
to use in her writing, now shifted into the purest autofiction, before the
genre was coined. Narrating in the past tense, with pace and with structure,
she tells the story of a great man who comes to visit an intelligent woman in a
hotel room. They talk, they kiss and then something more happens. Ahlgren fell
in love, to be sure. But it’s equally true that she was in search of working
material. She saw herself as an eater of other peoples’ lives, and she had
stumbled upon a treasure. Meeting by meeting, she created a story about
manipulation and subordination, about sexuality, hatred, lust and fear. She
extracted every ounce of their relationship, and turned it into literature.
Karl Over Knausgård couldn’t have done it better.
One painful
twist to the story appeared early on. The very reason their meeting took place
was that Ahlgren had made it as an author, and Brandes was curious. But while
she’d found success by breaking out of the gender cage, it became apparent that
Brandes hadn’t the slightest interest in a woman who had dismantled her
femininity. To keep his attention, she must turn herself back into a woman. She
cursed herself for betraying herself, nevertheless she changed her hair to
please him, and stayed in her room just in case he might show up. She also
started keeping a record of his friends and mistresses, then tried to befriend
them. Was she a woman in love? A writer who used herself to make art? An
intellectual stalker? The answer to all these questions is yes.
After almost a year of talking and kissing, Brandes seemed to lose interest. He had repeatedly asked for sex – he would never seduce her, he said, he wanted sex only if she wanted it just as much – but she’d declined. Now, she panicked and offered him the last thing she had left to give, or so she saw it. They had sex a couple of times, and then he truly lost interest. Still the real blow came when her second novel was published and he called it a ‘ladies-book’. Ahlgren, whose mark of pride lay in writing matter-of-factly and without sentiment, ‘like a man’, was devastated. On top of that, Brandes’s brother Edvard, unaware of their relationship, slaughtered the book in a review in the daily Politiken. Now, it all stood clear to Benedictsson. She wasn’t enough of a woman to be loved by Georg Brandes, nor a good enough artist to be respected by him. She sought out her father’s revolver and made sure it worked.
Meanwhile,
Strindberg watched her closely. They both stayed for extended periods at the
Leopold Hotel, shared friends, and spent time together. He was intrigued by
her, unsure what kind of creature she really was. A woman? No. But not a man
either.
Ahlgren
dismissed the idea of suicide by gun, worrying that she’d only end up hurt, not
dead. Instead, she got a hold of morphine. She informed a close friend of her
plans and asked him to be there, as she waited for death. Not surprisingly, the
poor bloke couldn’t handle the situation, so he knocked on Strindberg’s door
and told him of the goings-on down the hotel corridor. Strindberg was suddenly
wide awake and intensely curious. It turned out that Benedictsson threw up and,
this time, failed to die. Condemned to survive, she took off for Paris, visited
friends, even published a book of short stories (which Brandes quite liked).
She also had a huge success with a play in Stockholm, but nothing seemed to
help. In the summer of 1888, she booked a room at the Leopold once more, bought
a razor and a handheld mirror, and patiently awaited 22 July – the birthday of
her baby girl who died – turning it into the last day of her life. Strindberg
immediately got down to work on the play Miss Julie:
“ Someone
commits suicide. ‘Business worries,’ says the business man. ‘Unrequited love,’
say the ladies. ‘Physical illness,’ says the sick man. ‘Shattered hopes,’ says
the failure. But it may well be that the motive lay in all of these things, or
in none of them, and that the dead man concealed his real motive by emphasising
quite a different one that shed the best possible light on his memory.”
In his
play, Strindberg underlines the upbringing of the drama’s unfortunate female
protagonist, raised as a boy and thus become half-woman, half-man. The
emancipated woman, he continues, is not a ‘good species’ but must self-destroy.
Subsequently, he indicates a suicide by the female lead – with a razor. Just 19
days after Benedictsson’s death, Strindberg sent the finished manuscript to his
publisher. The dead Victoria Benedictsson had become Miss Julie.
Beyond the
fact that he stole Benedictsson’s gender-ambivalent childhood, the combination
of both sexes in her grown-up identity, and the details of her gruesome
suicide, she doesn’t seem at first glance to have much in common with the
fictional Miss Julie. The protagonist of Miss Julie is an upper-class woman who
manipulates the valet Jean into sex, and then takes her own life. Nevertheless,
the core of Strindberg’s drama, and of both the real and the fictional woman’s
fate, is the lifelong struggle between strength and weakness that inevitably
leads to her downfall.
Benedictsson
would probably have approved, even applauded Strindberg’s theft. After all,
she’d trained herself to become an almost scientific consumer of other people’s
fates. She admired an objective eye, and always tried to ‘dissect’ her feelings
and thoughts in order to become a better writer. This was the creed of
modernity. Artists were to stay true to reality and shun the sentimental or
false, according to its leading apostles – Ibsen and Brandes. But, above all,
Benedictsson had fed on her own fate like the ouroboros forever swallowing its
own tail. Over the last two years of her life, her diary transformed into the
novel of her life as she was living it, with a delay of only a few days.
The hatred
and euphoria she experienced transformed into text so fresh it steamed like the
meat of a recently slaughtered animal, as she herself put it. This was
literature quite inappropriate for a woman to express, and unthinkable to
publish at the time. Only by leaving it to a male friend, who published it in
portions over the next 30 years, would it become a bestseller, as forceful as
Strindberg’s novel The Defence of a Fool (1893) would be. Only Benedictsson’s
fool was a woman – her own being, her curse and her prison. Taking her own life
was the final escape.
The real
Miss Julie. By Elisabeth Åsbrink. Aeon, March 14, 2024.
At the time
of her death, in 1888, Victoria Benedictsson was a celebrated author. She was the
first of the literary group ‘Det unga Sverige’ (Young Sweden) to receive a
grant from the Swedish Academy. This signified her having been admitted to the
cultural establishment that she had for so long believed herself to be excluded
from as a woman and “a pariah, a mangy dog”. Before Victoria Benedictsson
settled on the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren, she had long vacillated between the
alternatives ‘Tardif’, the tardy, and ‘O. Twist’, the unwelcome. To Victoria
Benedictsson, writing is just as symbolically loaded as her choice of a
signature appears to be; it is an analysis of the problems associated with
female identity, with being a gender and not a human being. “I am a woman. But
I am an author – am I not, then, something of a man as well?” she wonders in January
1888.
Her own
life was short and ended tragically. Thirty-eight years old, she took her life
in a hotel room in Copenhagen. For a period of a few years in the middle of the
1880s she was astonishingly productive. Her career as an author falls between
1884 and 1888, in which period she published two novels and two collections of
short stories as well as several plays and newspaper articles. Simultaneously,
she kept an extensive diary and corresponded energetically with many of her
colleagues. Her intellectual vitality during this short period stands in
contrast to the image of a sickly, doomed person, which has dominated her
posthumous reputation.
In the last
part of her life, Victoria Benedictsson worked as though possessed on many
different literary drafts. In her diary she exclaims: “I want to write about
women. And if – after having written the most daring and honest things I know –
I still feel as I do now, then I want to die.” Common to these texts is that
they deal exclusively with the relationship between the sexes, and especially
with the woman’s possibilities for both self-realisation and love.
The Voice
From The Dark
Victoria
Benedictsson’s extensive literary estate includes a number of drafts that are
of great interest both as regards their plots and their aesthetics. The female
figures are driven towards disaster, while the style becomes increasingly
modern in its pitch black, piercing brevity. Was Victoria Benedictsson’s last
insight that the woman can only be described as a tragic subject? The
posthumously published prose piece “Ur mörkret” (Eng. tr. From the Darkness) is
conceived as a confession. The situation is surprisingly similar to a
psychoanalysis, with a male analyst listening to a female patient stretched out
on the couch. According to Freud, who around the same time developed his method
with the aid of middle-class Viennese women, the role of the analyst is to try
to render meaning and coherence to the patient’s fragmented life story. Axel
Lundegård, the colleague and friend who ‘inherited’ Victoria Benedictsson’s
unpublished manuscript, took that role upon himself when he reconstructed “Ur
mörkret” on the basis of the various drafts that existed at the time of her
death.
The bitter,
languishing Nina of the story confides her wasted woman’s life to a silently
listening male friend. “Everything is shameful for a woman because she is
nothing in herself; she is only part of her sex.” Nina can be seen as a double
victim of the patriarchal ideology that Victoria Benedictsson compliantly noted
down after having listened captivated to Georg Brandes lecturing on the
different natures of man and woman, in Copenhagen in the winter of 1886:
“A real man primarily possesses power,
power in everything he does, power to bend others to fit into his plans, and to
use them as tools, power to hold a woman fast!
“And what
is ‘the womanly’? The ability to love completely and without conventional
considerations: warmly, fully, vigorously. To be brave, sacrificing, strong;
everything through love, without jealousy, without any ulterior motive; simply
because it is her nature to love.”
The Nina
figure is provided with a history that confirms the fact that this ideology is
very much in force. She has been exposed in turn to the contempt of her father,
her husband, and her lover, and she turns their misogyny both inwards, towards
herself, and outwards, towards other women. A modern reader might easily
interpret “Ur mörkret” as a paradigmatic account of a typical woman’s lot in
the shadow of the patriarchy. But that is not an exhaustive reading. The story
is in fact full of contradictions in its investigation of the inner logic of
the patriarchal ideology. It turns out to be Nina, and not the men in her life,
who possesses the ‘male’ virtues of competence, industry, veracity, and
honesty, and this makes the text ambiguous and ambivalent. The insight of the
text is greater than that of the plaintive Nina.
In her
self-analysis, Nina appears a prisoner of ideology, crushed between the
inherent polarities of language: masculinity = good, “everything”; and
femininity = bad, “nothing”. In despair she searches, in her language, for a
third, utopian alternative, “neither man nor woman, merely a living being”.
This construct recurs almost obsessively throughout the story. But to reside in
a “merely” – to be a neuter – is an impossibility. All that remains for the
woman who does not want to be ‘woman’ and cannot be ‘man’, which is the highly
desired condition, is, with a triple negation, a “watered-down, bloodless nothingness”.
And this is where Nina finds herself during her long confession. Her body on
the couch is literally devoured by a “nothingness”, a “hollow-eyed” darkness,
out of which her monotone and tormented voice is heard.
But from
this empty position, a resistance is built up, against all odds, when Nina
insists on absence. Her refusal to be a woman in the sense of being an object
for the man makes her an anti-subject, a “merely”, an empty form to reside in.
And gradually the darkness turns out to be the real protagonist of the story,
the site of the unconscious, the enigmatic, the utopian, the very hollowness of
the language. “Ur mörkret” can be read as Victoria Benedictsson’s literary
testament.
Nina’s
self-understanding in Victoria Benedictsson’s novel “Ur mörkret” (1888; Eng.
tr. From the Dark):
“I had
learned to see with my father’s eyes; I saw from a man’s point of view what it
means to be a woman – repulsive, repulsive, one great misfortune from our very
birth! I felt like a mangy dog. This is when the humility emerged that is my
character’s brand and incurable flaw. Oh, the spot in my brain! How soft and
sensitive it grew so that each barb could penetrate! How much I understood when
it came to this single thing: to comprehend something that was as incomprehensible
to other women as the twittering of the birds.”
Two years
earlier, she had proudly and full of contempt dissociated herself from what she
saw as Alfhild Agrell’s “hollow”, “dreary”, and “sickly affected pessimism”, in
order to write instead “so that people get happier and better from reading”. If
this were to fail, it would be better, Victoria Benedictsson thought, not to
write at all. It may seem as if she, with “Ur mörkret”, had ended up in an
aesthetic impasse. And then again! The fact that she did not destroy the
manuscript fragments indicates that she had a feeling that it was this kind of
contradictory literary texts, which defied unambiguous interpretations, that
would ensure her a place in literary history.
The first
scholar to take Victoria Benedictsson seriously as a female artist is Jette
Lundbo Levy. She sheds light on Benedictsson’s grandiose attempt at presenting
a third point of view, distinct from the men’s message of free love, but also
from the women’s movement’s puritan reply to this message (with the demand
that, before marriage, men had to be just as sexually inexperienced, just as
‘pure’, as women). Lundbo Levy reads Benedictsson at several different levels,
compares her private diary entries and letters with published material, and
asks herself why Benedictsson did not entirely succeed in describing, in an
elaborated literary form, her complex feelings with regard to the dilemma of
femininity. What determines Benedictsson’s writing is rather what Lundbo Levy
calls “the aesthetics of the double gaze”, the tension between a ‘male’ gaze
that creates one literary form and a ‘female’ gaze that creates another. “Ur
mörkret” (Eng. tr. From the Dark) is a clear example of this aesthetics and its
inherent tension.
The
Programme
Victoria Benedictsson’s
conscious aesthetics embraces three different writing projects. Firstly, she
wanted to write for ordinary people, “for those who work”. Secondly, she wanted
to “submit problems to debate”, and, as Georg Brandes advocated, present the
great contemporary questions in a realistic, engaged prose. And thirdly, she
wanted to describe her own inner development, her ever more trying struggle to
make the woman, the human being, and the author hang together. She made her
debut as an author in 1884 with the favourably received collection of short
stories Från Skåne (From Scania) by ‘Ernst Ahlgren’. In addition to romantic
stories about being an artist and being the chosen one, the collection includes
a number of descriptions of the lives of common people, with sharply drawn
portraits of people from the Swedish province of Scania. In varying ways, the
Danish-Norwegian Magdalene Thoresen, the Dane Henrik Pontoppidan, and the
Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had already created a tradition of portraying
‘the people’, but Victoria Benedictsson renews the genre by focusing instead on
the observer. She lets traditional patterns of life be reflected in the eyes of
an outsider, and her sense of humour shoots down every attempt at idyllising.
Instead, it is the repetition, the stagnation, and the sluggishness that
dominate in her description of country life. A recurring image is the clay that
clings to the wooden shoes, holding you back and making your gait heavy and
clumsy. “– The road is one big puddle, and the feet get stuck in the clayey
soil, which is so sticky that it ties you down […].”
The soil
ties you down and holds you back. The feelings of security and homeliness
easily turn into the feeling of being cooped up. This was what Victoria
Benedictsson increasingly experienced in her own life. Gradually, the life as
the wife of a postmaster in an ill-matched marriage in the small community of
Hörby became too restricted for her; she longed for wider horizons, new
contacts and impulses. The newly opened railway made it easier for the author,
who had a bad leg, to travel to Stockholm, Malmö, or Copenhagen. And she
grasped the opportunity.
A part of
her luggage was her unique literary friendship with the writer Axel Lundegård,
ten years her junior, whom she had met at the home of his parents in Hörby.
“Complete openness!” was the watchword between the two colleagues, who read
each other’s manuscripts and offered each other criticism and praise. It was an
unusual, intense, but by no means conflict-free friendship that developed. In
their correspondence, which grew extensive in the autumn of 1884, they
discussed the craft of writing and the ideas of the time. Both understand that
unprejudiced communication with someone of the opposite sex is important, but
to Victoria Benedictsson it was invaluable. She writes to Axel Lundegård:
“This is what interests me most in the
world: the equality of the sexes, not only in a social context but first and
foremost in their own consciousness, for that is what matters. And now I’ve
come to something in your letter: ‘If we are to benefit at all from our knowing
each other, we have to talk about everything without reservation.’ Yes, yes,
yes! There’s nothing I want more than that. Haven’t I, ever since I was a
child, been waiting for these words, and no one has said them to me until now!”
The
possibilities offered by the period’s patriarchal marriage for “equality of the
sexes” is what she examined in the two novels she completed.
Less on
account of her writing than of her personal fate, Victoria Benedictsson has
become the female fixed star in the literary sky of the Swedish 1880s. As such,
she often eclipsed the period’s other female authors. However, it is the image
of tragic femininity that emerges in literary history, a frigid, plain, and
strained heroic figure, who committed suicide as a result of unrequited love.
This
interpretation is based on the comprehensive biographical source material
formed by the handwritten volumes of Stora boken (The Big Book). Select parts
of this unequalled ‘self-confession’ were published, under the name of the
editor, Fredrik Böök, as the ‘love novel’ Victoria Benedictsson och Georg
Brandes (1948; Victoria Benedictsson and Georg Brandes). That book has fixed
the image of Victoria Benedictsson as the tragic heroine of the 1880s, a
mixture of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. She
is, in fact, considered to be the model for both these characters.
To this should be added that, in contrast to most of her contemporary female colleagues, Victoria Benedictsson adopted a rather humble attitude with regard to the question of the relationship between man and woman. In a letter of 1886, she confides the following theory to her friend Ellen Key:
“If men
want to regard us as small, clever pals, then we should be pleased, for this
is, I believe, nature’s intent. That a few women – one or two in each century –
rise above the crowd, does not change anything for all the rest of us average
human beings.”
The
(Im)possibility Of Marriage
The novel
Pengar (1885; Eng. tr. Money) opens with young Selma being persuaded to ‘sell’
herself to the rich country squire Kristersson. Their intimate life is a
torment that soon makes her realise that marriage without love and
companionship is not much better than prostitution. Unlike the protagonist of
Amalie Skram’s novel Constance Ring (Constance Ring), which appeared in the
same year, Selma succeeds in breaking out of her marriage. Pengar is a typical novel
of the 1880s, a well-written plea against early marriage and marriages of
convenience, but above all against the sexual ignorance that was considered the
young middle-class girl’s finest dowry. Victoria Benedictsson does not shy away
from describing the sexual life of the spouses. The wedding night is
experienced as a rape, and the tale about King Lindworm, who exacted the
promise from his queen that she would never enter his chamber when he is
asleep, is woven together with Selma’s thoughts about what is most forbidden.
For through her marriage she has had the same experience as the queen, who,
defying the prohibition, discovered a coiled, “scaly monster” in the king’s
bed: “Now her curiosity was satisfied. But she could never forget that sight,
and each time King Lindworm took her in his arms, it was as if he resumed the
form of the scaly monster, so slithery and cold that his embrace made her
writhe in agony.”
Fru
Marianne (1887; Mrs Marianne) was Victoria Benedictsson’s great venture. It was
to prove to everybody that she was a great author and not just one among the
group of emancipated writing ‘ladies’ who were somewhat looked down upon. But
to her great disappointment it was received precisely as a ‘ladies’ novel’. Fru
Marianne is, on the surface, a Madame Bovary story with a happy ending. The
spoiled middle-class daughter Marianne is purified by her marriage with Börje,
the upright son of a farmer; she is put to the test in a “flirtation”, as it is
called, with Börje’s best friend, Pål; and she eventually finds her true self
in motherhood and marriage.
Marianne’s
transformation is illustrated in a dramatic manner: when the novel begins, she
lies stretched out on her sofa, indolently reading French novels, “suck[ing]
the eroticism of the novels as a child sucks its thumb: if it was not
nourishing, at least it offered a kind of consolation”. She is described as a
narcissistic sexual being, an object of beauty for men. Three hundred pages
later she strides around in rough, striped aprons, energetically occupied in
the weaving room and in the vegetable garden. As the mother of a young son, she
possesses an insight into herself that is diametrically opposed to the insight
she had as a young girl:
“There would be alternating periods of happiness and sorrow, the serenity of happiness, and hard times. She knew that now. Her life would look like other people’s lives: not romantic or like a fairy tale, but prosaic and ordinary.”
Fru
Marianne has been read as a conservative contribution to the ‘morality controversy’
of the 1880s – or as a regressive utopia. The same longing gaze back towards a
more meaningful and coherent female life in the country household is found in
such varied authors as Selma Lagerlöf, Elin Wägner, Agnes von Krusenstjerna,
and Moa Martinson, as well as in the, even nowadays, extremely popular novels
set in country houses. However, in Victoria Benedictsson’s time, the most
closely related author was August Strindberg who, in the preface to Giftas I
(Eng. tr. Getting Married), proclaims the peasant marriage to be an ideal. But
any reading that stops there is going to ignore the inner resistance of the
novel, Fru Marianne, to its own project. Firstly, the comradely marriage
between Marianne and Börje is rather an attempt at a more radical version of
Ibsen’s modern, idealistic view of marriage – played out on a realistic and
historically relevant backdrop: at the end of the nineteenth century, ninety
per cent of Sweden’s population still supported themselves as farmers.
Secondly, the character of Pål is crucial, and not only to the plot. In the
‘unconscious’ of the text, his refined, ‘female’ eroticism is a disquieting and
triggering element, which aestheticises the writing and casts a double gaze
upon the plot, the figures, and the motifs. He is an aspect of Börje, of
Marianne, and of the yearning that is the driving force of the text. Pål is the
erotic and the aesthetic in one figure, who has to be banned at the level of
the plot in order for Benedictsson’s realistic project to be carried out. The
reader feels the ambivalence, and it is also reflected in the superficial
reception of the novel.
A Great
Variety Of Women
Despite the
fact that Victoria Benedictsson regarded Georg Brandes’s rejection of Fru
Marianne as a “death sentence” to her writing, she is very productive in the
autumn of 1887. She writes stories about the lives of common people, begins
writing the novel Modern (The Mother), and finishes the recently discovered
comedy Teorier (Theories).
In Teorier
we meet a type of woman who, in line with the message of Fru Marianne,
represents an alternative to the middle-class ideal of the young girl. In the
1880s, which the Swedish historian of literature Gunnar Ahlström has so aptly
called “the gloomy hey-day of the antimacassars”, Benedictsson’s mouthpiece,
the young, spirited Hortense, favours occupations completely different from
embroidery, piano-playing, and novel reading. She keeps both feet planted
firmly on the ground and does not take any interest in the interminable
discussions of morality, but rather in cookery and housekeeping.
The comedy
Teorier (Theories), which was never performed in Victoria Benedictsson’s
lifetime, may be her attempt at leaving “Some words to my dear daughter”
(“Några ord till min kära dotter”). But unlike in Anna Maria Lenngren’s
(1754-1817) famous poem bearing this title and written a hundred years earlier,
there is only the slightest bit of irony to be found in Teorier. Here,
Benedictsson has her young heroine plainly declare that she prefers Hagdahl’s
cookery book to Max Nordau’s social analyses.
Teorier was
performed for the first time in 1988 by Stockholms Studentteater (The Stockholm
Student Theatre).
Hortense,
Marianne, and Selma are figures that go against the stream of female portraits
of a determinist stamp, which are characteristic of the 1880s. Their positive
air and the happy endings of the works are important parts of Benedictsson’s
‘programme’. Also in the fragmentary manuscript of the novel Modern, which was
completed by Axel Lundegård and published in 1888 in both his and
Benedictsson’s name, it is a vigorous and self-confident woman, albeit of an
intellectual kind, who is described. In the words of her son, she is “a
barbarian woman”, who competes with her son’s dollish-pretty and bland fiancée –
and loses. For she cannot bring herself to recognise her own identity conflict
in that of the other woman: “She was not able to hear that a lack as deep as
her own was hiding in that over-excited laugh.”
There is
thus an impressive range of female characters in Victoria Benedictsson’s
writings. The woman as a sexual object for the man, “the ennobled animal”, is
found at the one extreme, and the dream of the woman as a human being rather
than a sexual being at the other. However, she never succeeded in portraying a
‘free’ woman who had full access to both intellect and sexuality. Instead, the
future image of the woman can be discerned in the tension between the different
types of women, representing different life alternatives. As a female author
Victoria Benedictsson invests her own divided self and allows her masochistic
self-hatred, which is in constant and violent strife with her equally strong,
rebellious ambition, to manifest itself in the texts and develop into
characters as incompatible as Mrs Victoria and ‘Ernst’. In her repeated
attempts to bridge the two antagonistic views of life, Victoria Benedictsson
asks: is it possible to survive as a thinking woman, as a female subject with
both head and heart intact?
The
Bewitched
‘No!’, one
is tempted to say upon reading the unfinished prose piece “Den bergtagna”
(1888; The Bewitched), written towards the end of Victoria Benedictsson’s life.
Concurrently she was working on a play with the same theme, a fragment that was
completed by Axel Lundegård and printed in 1890 (Den bergtagna; Eng. tr. The
Enchantment). Yet, the manuscript of the play is quite different from the prose
version and deals primarily with different ways of handling a love affair and
of living with one. In the prose piece, on the other hand, the inherent tragedy
of the love affair is described. Step by step, the text records the various
stages of the love affair and how the pliant and devoted woman is inevitably
entangled in the cunning seducer’s net and driven towards destruction. It is
the papers left by a deceased woman that are presented in the frame story, and
the note is struck already in the opening words: “I am not defending my life; I
am defending my death.”
The
bewitched woman’s background is that of an ordinary middle-class Swedish woman,
but during a sojourn in Paris she comes into contact with a renowned sculptor,
who seduces her. The love affair inspires him to make a new group of
sculptures, the completion of which means that she has to make room for a new
admiring mistress who is to inspire him to make his next masterpiece. These are
conditions that the bewitched woman accepts, with open eyes.
But the text contains disruptions and questions that are troubling. At a visit to a museum, the Swedish woman is captured by a challenging self-portrait in which a diametrically opposed type of woman makes her entry: an artist who holds her own! As a contrasting picture to this vigorous woman, the reader is offered a glimpse of the bewitched woman, who in this context – in contrast to the previous first-person narrative – is described in the third person. It is a picture seen from a male perspective, and it shows a content sexual object, a happy woman enjoying the approaching summer – but just like the summer, she is doomed. “What radiated from this face was happiness – a quiet and secret, a deep and mysterious happiness, like the sea in which everything can drown, sink, and disappear, while on the surface the sun is shining and all is calm.” The external, male, gaze can depict her in a bright painting. The inner, female, gaze knows that it is impossible for the bewitched woman to be redeemed once she has stepped into the forbidden, free love, which she knows will end with the man abandoning her: “[…] to me neither happiness nor beauty existed, there was only a desolate emptiness, boundless and deep as the sea I was looking at.”
In “Den
bergtagna”, the complex and contradictory aspects of femininity are concisely
expressed in the central group of sculptures, “Ödet” (Destiny), in which an “enormous
female figure with strong limbs” climbs across the “discarded” body of a
drowned young woman, who has the features of the bewitched woman. Apparently
totally unaffected by the peacefully resting female corpse, the surreal figure
gazes “ahead, strongly and coldly – out into the distance, towards an object
that is invisible to others”.
The
vigorous ‘over-woman’ can be interpreted as a personification of the
masculinity that Brandes applauded, an ideal that possessed the “power to bend
others to fit into his plans, and to use them as tools”. But the group of
sculptures may just as well be seen as a fixed image of the artistic conflict
that Victoria Benedictsson struggled with and never managed to solve.
In “Ur
mörkret”, the analysis of the masculine principle was taken to its purest and
most deadly logical conclusion. The final image in “Den bergtagna” seems to
point to something further still and to suggest that this can go on only as
long as the feminine principle allows itself to be trampled down.
“‘Free
love’ has poisoned my life – love? – what a name for such a thing! I have to
die, for I cannot live. But I shall not be hanged in silence. Shame and
ignominy shall cling to my death as they have clung to my life, but that shame
shall be lifted up on a scaffold, high above the heads of the crowd; there, a
pillory shall stand as a warning, and I shall impudently bite my teeth together
during the disgrace, for my destruction shall be a blow to the doctrine that
you are preaching, the doctrine that I have always loathed, the doctrine I did
not dare to stand up against, because you were stronger than I, because you
tied me with the tendons that you had drawn out of my own body, because my
thought saw clearly, but my physical nature, like a famished assailant, put its
hands in front of its eyes in order to steal a crumb or two in the meantime.
“I hate
your doctrine, I hate it – hate it! It has nothing to do with free love.
Nothing!
“I have
known you for a long time. I have no esteem of you – and yet I love you.
“I have
drunk the mountain troll’s potion; I cannot live among my people. But I want to
breathe, breathe, breathe before I die – I want to speak my own language and
cry out his name, the name that is going to cost me my life!
“The
mountain troll – the mountain king. The king of vice – the great, intoxicating,
bewitching king of vice.
“But not a
human being.”
From Stora
boken III (The Big Book), 14 January 1888.
The Diaries
From 1882
until a month before her death in July 1888, Victoria Benedictsson kept a
diary, the so-called Stora boken (The Big Book), published in three volumes in
1978-84. Supplemented with calendar notes and correspondence with her closest
friends, Axel Lundegård, Ellen Key, Gustaf af Geijerstam, her stepdaughter
Matti, and others, it provides an exceptionally rich source of biographical
material. The diary can be read as a moral chronicle of the 1880s in the Nordic
countries. Benedictsson is adamant that nothing human should be alien to her.
Everything that has to do with love or sexuality, with the relationship between
the sexes, interests her and is noted down in Stora boken. Often she uses a
code in order to be able to inform her “Ernst” or “Old book” about her secret
thoughts on abstinence, birth control, syphilis, and prostitution, all the
things that women were not supposed to know anything about.
“Good
night, old Ernst! I am glad that you are not abandoning me. Sleep well, you
sceptical old fogey. You and I, we are some couple! Ernst and Victoria.”
From Stora
boken (The Big Book).
In Stora boken the parties, the gossip, and the scandals of family life in the small town of Hörby are described as well as her encounter with the big city:
“Stockholm, 5 November 1885. I still feel so
terribly lost and a stranger. And then my foot really hurts. But there is
something else. My whole being is tormented by a suppressed, brewing hatred.
All these people are the enemies of my innermost aspiration. They think of life
as a game, and to me it is serious. Everywhere I am met by a haze of lies and
falseness; it is as if it is going to choke me, and at the same time my muscles
tighten in powerless fury. What are these people rambling on about! Women’s
rights, the workers’ cause. Idle talk. Oh, it is all idle talk! […]
“I wish I
were in a big city where nobody knew me, where I were thrown out like a small
stone and able to hide on the bottom, able to feel life rubbing against me on
all sides but not being upset by it, only being shaped, slowly being shaped
into something perfect […].”
A telling example of the difficulty involved in portraying a complex woman is the novel about Lady Macbeth and the artist’s calling that Ellen Key, in her book about her friend, says that Victoria Benedictsson dreamed of writing. Already in 1880, Victoria Benedictsson writes in Stora boken (The Big Book) about her fascination with this female figure, and in 1885 she tells Axel Lundegård that “[e]verything will come to life in my long novel Lady Macbeth, unless I lose my touch or die before then. What a childhood! A goldmine. And what a phenomenal memory I have for facts!”
The
strength of her identification with the figure emerges from these lines written
a couple of months before her suicide: “I understand Lady Macbeth, for my hand
also seems to me to have got a stain that cannot be washed away; it is the
feeling that someone else is looking down upon me. I am so proud that I cannot
bear that.”
In Victoria
Benedictsson’s imagination, Lady Macbeth is the active and proud woman who
accepts the consequences of her ambition – a woman whom it is nearly impossible
to describe in sympathetic terms, especially if she is also to personify the
artist’s calling.
Here are offered keen-eyed psychological portraits of many of the period’s young authors, such as Ola Hansson, Oscar Levertin, Stella Kleve, Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler, Alfhild Agrell, and Ellen Key. And above all Georg Brandes, who turns her into the bewitched woman. Before Victoria Benedictsson is dragged into the magic circle of the Mountain King, she sees herself more as an author than as a human being. This is also how she wants to present herself at encounters with her colleagues in Stockholm or Copenhagen. The big question is how a simple, ascetic attire can be combined with supreme elegance. “A shadow of Catherine of Medici, and there you have the style […]. An ‘intellectual aristocrat’, an old, tyrannical, hard, cunning woman: there you see what I can signal with my dress and what I should signal. Above all: old. Otherwise all the other things will lack effect. Black plush in the light, black satin during the day; jets in daylight and black pearls in lamplight; on my head black velvet or black spangle. Heavy, expensive, indifferent. Voilà.”
Victoria
Benedictsson’s conscious staging of herself as an older, sexually neutral
artist is an important part of her identity as an author. It is against this
background that it becomes clear why her relationship to Brandes was so
disastrous. When he looks down upon her both as an author and as a woman, the
studied attire falls off, and she stands completely naked, bereft of her armour
and thus, in her own eyes, bereft of the possibilities of life.
The diary
begins in a harmless way as an author’s ‘storehouse’ with anecdotes, folktales,
copies of letters, fragments of conversations, and observations, but before
long it changes character and becomes an instrument of self-analysis. At an
early stage, Victoria Benedictsson realised that her diary might be published,
and, starting in 1885, her editing efforts become obvious. Her demand for truth
involved her having to appear in all her complexity and also exposing her less
appealing sides. Gossip, indiscreet speculations, and above all a drawn-out
analysis of her own feelings slowly gain prominence in the pages. She sees
herself most clearly in her relationship with men, above all with her ‘comrade’
Axel Lundegård – their emotionally loaded intellectual relationship dominates
Part Two – and with Georg Brandes – who dominates Part Three.
In her diaries Victoria Benedictsson takes the step into modern times. It is a contemporary of ours who is speaking here and who, thanks to her unswerving loyalty to her own experiences, makes a Virginia Woolf or an Anaïs Nin seem tame. After Victoria Benedictsson nobody else has, in an equally ruthless way, tested introspection as a method to uncover the contradictions of the female sexual being. Read closely, the diary, with its increasingly detailed analysis of a woman’s state of mind, leaves the impression of a stubborn refusal to play the men’s game. It also conveys a persistent striving for truth in the erotic as well as in the intellectual power struggle between the sexes. Victoria Benedictsson fearlessly treats her own experiences as raw material for literature. Thus, for example, her relationship to Brandes is gradually given the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For Victoria Benedictsson had at a much earlier stage noted down the outline of the dramatised rendering of the tragic love story, which took place in 1886-88. Scenes from other close relationships to men, such as her love interest in the Swedish-American Charles Quillfeldt at the end of the 1870s, or her friendship with the young Axel Lundegård in the middle of the 1880s, are written into the Copenhagen tale about Georg Brandes, with some lines rendered verbatim.
The diaries
follow very closely the divergent curves described by Victoria Benedictsson’s
writing career and life experiences up to her final suicide. “My diaries are
not to be destroyed […]”, she wrote, well aware that it is with her diaries
that she takes the step into modern times.
Many female
authors used the Modern Breakthrough to discuss the question of how the woman
was to develop a certain independence in the context of marriage, often through
paid or creative work. Others, as for example Agrell and Edgren Leffler, took a
step further in their criticism of the patriarchal institution of marriage. But
only few, apart from Stella Kleve and Victoria Benedictsson, ventured to
address the burning question as to how the power structure leaves its traces on
female sexuality; or the question as to how female desire could be realised in
a society with an institutionalised double standard of morality. It was
considered inappropriate for women to openly express their opinion on the issue
of sexuality. It was bad enough, the establishment thought, when the male
authors did so.
I Want To
Write About Women. By Christina Sjöblad. The History of Nordic Women’sLiterature, July 14, 2011.
Victoria
Benedictsson has been called the model for Hedda Gabler. As her play premieres
here, it prompts harsh questions about her suicide - and that of other women
artists, says Germaine Greer
In Zola's
L'Oeuvre, the artist Claude Lantier, having sacrificed all his relationships
for his work, hangs himself in front of the masterpiece he knows he can never
finish. Though suicide may be considered an occupational risk for any ordinary
mortal who sacrifices all for his or her art, historically only a tiny
proportion of male artists have ended their own lives. A much higher proportion
of the much lower number of women artists have crowned their achievement with
suicide. Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, better known in her own time by
the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren, killed herself in 1888 using the same method as
French painter Constance Mayer did in 1821, by cutting her throat with a razor.
Both deaths are usually ascribed to unrequited love. Mayer was distraught when
Prud'hon failed to marry her after his wife died; Benedictsson was rejected by
the critic Georg Brandes, the Danish Harold Bloom of those days.
This week,
the National Theatre premieres Benedictsson's play Den Bergtagna as The
Enchantment in a version by Clare Bayley, based on a literal translation from
the Swedish by Ben Anderman. (In Venne Moberg's translation, the play is called
Spellbound.) Benedictsson has been called, on very slender grounds, the Swedish
George Eliot, and identified as Ibsen's model for Hedda Gabler. Ibsen was a
friend of Brandes and may have heard the story of his dalliance with
Benedictsson, but there is nothing to suggest a connection between Benedictsson
and Hedda beyond the simple fact that in the play Hedda, too, commits suicide.
Strindberg is supposed to have drawn the idea of Miss Julie from Benedictsson,
but again they have little in common beyond the fact that Miss Julie, too, cut
her own throat, and the play was written within a year of Benedictsson's death.
Georg
Brandes was the most influential critic of his day, best known in Britain for
his four-volume work, Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century
(1872-1875). Widely travelled, more widely read in half a dozen languages and a
brilliant lecturer, he was appointed reader in belles lettres at Copenhagen
University in 1871. Because he was a Jew, a radical and suspected of atheism,
he was not awarded a chair for 30 years. Though, in 1872, he translated John
Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, he was more of a libertarian than a
feminist.
British
ignorance about all things Scandinavian has led to a series of mistaken
assumptions about the magnitude of Benedictsson's achievement. In 1871, when
21-year-old Victoria Bruzelius became the second wife of 49-year-old Christian
Benedictsson, the Swedish women's movement pioneered by prizewinning novelist
Fredrika Bremer had already achieved notable successes. The Swedish art
academy, conservatory and medical schools were open to women, and women were
attending university lectures. Even so, public attitudes, especially in the
provinces, were still narrow and conservative. Victoria bore her husband a
daughter, his sixth child, in 1873, and in 1876 another daughter, who lived for
three weeks. In 1881, she was injured in a riding accident and remained
bedridden for two years.
It was then
that she began to write. As she was to say herself, this was the happiest time
of her life. In 1884, her novel Money was published (under the name Ernst
Ahlgren), an extraordinary success for a writer with no qualification beyond
time on her hands. Money deals with the struggle of a young woman who wishes to
train as an animal painter and finds herself married off to the local squire
instead. As so often happens with female artists, Benedictsson's heroine
appears to be herself, married off as she was to the middle-aged postmaster of
a provincial town. Ernst Ahlgren soon made contact with leading feminists;
Ellen Key became her best friend.
In 1883, a
21-year-old Danish author called Adda Ravnkilde committed suicide in
Copenhagen. At that point, none of her work had been published. The next year,
her novel Judith Furste was ushered into the world with a foreword by Brandes,
and it may have been this that encouraged Benedictsson to think of him as the
best possible mentor for herself. Benedictsson was on a trip to Copenhagen to
catch up on culture and shopping, when her friend Axel Lundegard, knowing how
much she admired Brandes, suggested to him that he visit her in her hotel room.
Benedictsson told the story of her seduction by Brandes, ploy by ploy, first in
her diary, then in a short story in which the events are transposed to Paris
and Brandes becomes a Rodin-figure called Gustave Alland, and finally in her
play.
The short
story begins, "Upon investigation of the papers of the deceased, the following
was found." "The following" is a lengthy suicide note, which
might as well be Benedictsson's own. The nameless woman in the story does not
accuse her married lover; rather she commits suicide because anyone who has
been spellbound, as it were in the thrall of the Mountain King of Scandinavian
legend, can never return to live among ordinary people. In the original
Swedish, the clue is given by the title of the story, Den Bergtagna, which is
also the title of the play. In the play, as not in the story, the seducer is
present when the heroine's body is brought into the house, and is told:
"Look. Look what you've done." In Bayley's version Alland does not
answer; in Moberg's version, he appears to agree that the heroine's death is
his work.
Suicide is
never the fault of anyone but the perpetrator. Prud'hon did not kill Mayer and
Brandes did not kill Benedictsson, but the stigma remains. In both cases, the
woman's doomed relationship involved another major creative ego. Male artists
seldom make the mistake of falling in love with other artists, and almost never
with artists more successful than they. One megalo- maniac per household would
seem to be more than enough, but so many women artists cast themselves beneath
the chariot wheels of male artists with egos bigger and tougher than theirs
that a pattern seems to emerge.
The
rollcall of women artist suicides begins slowly at the beginning of the 19th
century with Karolina von Günderrode (1806) and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon
(1838), and gathers momentum with Ravnkilde and Benedictsson, Amy Levy and
Veronica Micle (1889), Eleanor Marx (1898), Elisaveta Aleksandrovna Diakonova
(1902), Laurence Hope (1904), Georgette Agutte (1922), Gertrude Bell (1926),
Charlotte Mew (1928), Dora Carrington (1932), Sara Teasdale (1933), Antonia
Pozzi (1938), Alfonsina Storni (1938), Robin Hyde (1938), Virginia Woolf,
Penelope Delta, Karin Boye and Marina Tsvetayeva (1941), Julia Acker (1942),
Anna Wickham (1943), Frida Kahlo (1954), Elise Cowen (1962), Sylvia Plath and
Kay Sage (1963), Ingrid Jonker (1965), Charmian Clift (1969), Diane Arbus
(1971), Anne Sexton (1974), Eva Bezwoda (1976), Danielle Collobert (1978), Ana
Cristina Cesar (1983). There was a lull, when the trend seemed to have worked
itself out, until in 2001 brilliant young playwright Sarah Kane hanged herself
with a shoelace, and in 2004 Iris Chang shot herself.
The saddest
reflection is that Benedictsson's obsession with Brandes caused a rift between
her and the feminists who could have helped her to survive it. In a doomed
effort to secure Brandes's love and esteem by engaging in the approved manner
with current issues, she wrote Fru Marianne, which he declined to read, and
within six months she was lying with her throat cut in the same Copenhagen
hotel room where he had seduced her. Her papers were given by her favourite
stepdaughter to Axel Lundegard, who had collaborated with Benedictsson on an
earlier play called Final. He published various compilations of these and, as
well as completing the play of Den Bergtagna, completed her novel Modern (The
Mother).
In the
play, the heroine is repeatedly warned off by Erna Wallden, an earlier victim
of Alland. She is a painter whom the experience of being debauched and
abandoned by Alland has made into an unhappy woman, but a better artist. For
Benedictsson to have written Erna into Den Bergtagna has the contradictory
effect of exonerating Alland for the heroine's death, which seems after all to
be a consequence of her own weakness. It is as if Benedictsson is admitting that
the only perpetrator of the crime against her is, after all, herself. Audiences
of The Enchantment will have much to disagree about - which is, according to
Brandes, exactly as it should be.
· The
Enchantment is at the Cottlesloe, London until November 1. Box office: 020-7452
3000.
Death and
the maiden. By Germaine Greer. The Guardian, July 26, 2007.
