Triangular, Homosocial, Lesbian: A Queer Approach to Desire in August Strindberg’s Novel A Madman’s Manifesto

Introduction

How can a nonnormative approach reveal new meanings in literary texts? I claim that literature is usually understood through heteronormative concepts of gender and sexuality, which means that different-sex desires become a taken-for-granted entity.² René Girard’s concept of “triangular desire” in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) might, however, be used as a starting-point from which it is possible to escape this assumption. Girard’s proposition that desire always happens between at least three parts—in that the desired object is given value from something or someone outside itself—entails the possibility of questioning earlier, unproblematized directions, drives, and motives for love and desires within literary texts.³ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has previously discussed this potential in Between Men (1985), in which she simultaneously criticized and developed Girard’s concept. By coining the term “homosocial desire,” she pulled relationships between individuals of the same sex into a potentially erotic sphere, which creates further possibilities for questioning the hegemonic status of different-sex desire within literary interpretations.⁴ Such questionings had, however, already been formulated by well-known Swedish author August Strindberg (1849–1912) at the turn of the twentieth century. Internationally, he is acknowledged mostly for plays such as The Father (1888), Miss Julie (1888), and A Dream Play (1902), but Strindberg also wrote many novels,⁵ and it is in the novel Black Banners (1904) that he states: “Jealousy is man’s sense of purity, which holds his thoughts free from being led into another man’s sexual sphere, through the wife. A husband who is not jealous is a sodomite. I saw a man who enjoyed his wife’s coquetry, and who loved the house-friends.”⁶ The quote is interesting because it employs the word “sodomite,” originally a religious term for a person involved in nonreproductive sexual acts such as same-sex sexual practices.⁷ This means that an implicit connection is drawn between the cuckold and the man who is erotically interested in other men, thereby connecting with Girard’s and Sedgwick’s theories.

This dynamics of the erotic triangle—the intrigue in which two figures are rivals over the attention of a third—is a clear and thoroughgoing aspect of Strindberg’s writings, particularly common in the dramas. However, the triangular constellation was first looked at as a more fundamental aspect of the intrigue in the provocative novel A Madman’s Manifesto (1887–88). This novel was written in French and not legally published in Swedish until 1914, two years after the author’s death. The first time it was printed was in a German translation in 1893, when it was subjected to charges of indecent and harmful descriptions.⁸ A Madman’s Manifesto has, together with Black Banners, been the text by Strindberg that has been received with the most “aversion and dismay,” but it has also been labeled “the most extraordinary love-novel in Swedish literature,”⁹ and it is generally considered a modernist masterpiece.

A Madman’s Manifesto has traditionally been seen as the story of Strindberg’s marriage to his first wife, Siri von Essen, which is probably one of the reasons why earlier research to a large extent directed attention toward the dynamic relationship between the literary characters Axel and Maria. Preset assumptions with regard to the literary tradition of different-sex love-stories is yet another reason for this interest, of course, and the attention of the reader is, in fact, explicitly guided in this direction right at the novel’s beginning. This happens when Axel realizes he has fallen in love with Maria:

At that minute I was seized, troubled down to my marrow, as if before a vision. The sense of veneration which I bear in me emerged completely, with the desire for a cult. The gap left by dispelled religiosity was filled: the need to adore reappeared in a new form. God was relegated. Woman took his place.

(25)¹⁰

Such a forceful declaration of love from man to woman defines A Madman...