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61 What does perspective have to do with free will? The brief exchange that Gertrud and Nygren have about “free will” is particularly significant, as Dreyer has Gertrud approve Nygren’s belief in free will in contradistinction to the grim fatalism of her father, who, she says, taught her that everything was predetermined. She makes her point by quoting words her father used to tell her: “You do not choose your destiny any more than you choose your wife or your children.You get them, but you do not choose them.” But, significantly, what Dreyer has Gertrud quote in this scene are not words from her father, but words adapted from dialogue in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel The Serious Game. The Serious Game’s main female character, Lydia Stille, is, as we have already noted, also based on Maria von Platen, but it is not she who is given this advice in the book by the newspaper editor Markel; it is Arvid, the semiautobiographical stand-in for Söderberg, who is on the verge of marrying a woman he doesn’t love. And Markel is a complicated choice for the character to give such advice. “Markel,” Söderberg writes, “was a bachelor, involved in an old unhappy love relationship with a woman who was no longer young, but nevertheless young enough to deceive him with almost anyone”—a woman, in other words, very much like Gertrud. Markel functions in The Serious Game as a secondary, paternal image of Söderberg himself, here giving his younger self the bitter advice born of his own Gertrud-like relationship. In having Gertrud articulate her belief in free will by quoting from, and rejecting, words spoken by a pathetically paternal version of Söderberg from  Hjalmar Söderberg, The Serious Game, trans. Eva Claeson (London: Marion Boyars, 2001). Thanks to Amanda Doxtater for pointing this out.  Ibid., 84. W hat d oes p ers p ect ive have to d o w ith f re e w i ll ? 62 his novel about her, Dreyer creates the perfect example of Strindberg’s “walking scrapbook,” a character arguing for its own self-determination by quoting its own author (here figured as her “father”), against, Dreyer could perhaps imagine, that author’s very own intentions. It is a declaration of independence from her “source,” but made through words provided by him, very much like the image in the tapestry behind her, an image both excessive to but grounded in the text that motivates its presence. The very ground of Gertrud’s existence, as a willing, desiring self, is staked in this tragic twilight zone between fictional and real selfhoods. In a terrible and moving letter Maria von Platen wrote to her friend the critic Oscar Levertin on May 31, 1906, following her breakup with Söderberg (a letter Dreyer would have read, as it was reprinted in Sten Rein’s book), von Platen talks about how she commenced her affair with Söderberg: “I fell in love with M.B., wrote to the author whom I didn’t know at that point and had never met, told him that it would make me very happy if he at some point wished to drop me a line or two. And thus it became many lines, eventually without sense or reason.” By “M.B.” she means Martin Birck, the hero of Söderberg’s first great autobiographical novel, Martin Birck’s Youth. If Söderberg was to turn von Platen into a fictional character to make sense of her, von Platen herself had already, even before she met him, fallen in love with Söderberg through the sense she had made of his fictional alter ego. And when his writing turned from “a line or two” into “many lines,” it may have precipitated their love affair, but is also became text “without sense or reason.” Summing up this emotional journey (mediated through Söderberg’s words) that brought her into her relationship with Söderberg, von Platen adds: “But now when I look back, it was like being seated on a bridal chair, blindfolded [att gå i brudstol med förbundna ögon].” As a bride, blinded by words—by the very words that bind her to their  Von Platen continues to resonate in Scandinavian literary and social history as a woman who embodied a kind of “free will”; a recent biography of her by Kurt Mälarstedt is entitled Ett liv på egna villkor (Stockholm: Wallström...

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