"The
Father." That part of the woman-hater legend which one encounters most
often is that Strindberg was revealing his own marital miseries in
the sex conflicts of these dramas, particularly in "The Father,"
notwithstanding the fact that this play was written five years before
his first marriage was dissolved, and little more than two years after
his avowed hesitancy to undertake the dissection of womankind on account
of the "happy erotic state" in which he was living.

And that his analytical labors and personal experiences, far from
bringing about an acquired aversion for woman, never even let him be
warned, is attested by the fact of his having founded three families.
One is forced to suspect that instead of being a woman-hater, he was
rather a disguised and indefatigable lover of woman, and that his wars
on woman and his fruitless endeavors to get into harmony with the other
half of the race were, fundamentally, a warring within himself of
his own many-sided, rich nature. He said of himself that he had been
sentenced by his nature to be the faultfinder, to see the other side of
things. He hated the Don Juans among men as intensely as he did the lazy
parasites among women--the rich and spoiled ones who declaimed loudest
about woman's holy duties as wife and mother, but whose time was given
up to being hysterical and thinking out foolish acts,--these women
enraged him.

However, the psychology of woman represents but one phase of Strindberg.
In a book called "The Author," styled by him "a self-evolutionary
history," which was written during the germinating period of the
realistic dramas, but was not given out for publication until 1909,
there is a foreword which contains the following significant avowal from
the Strindberg of the last years: "The author had not arrived in 1886;
perhaps only came into being then. The book presented herewith is
consequently only of secondary interest as constituting a fragment; and
the reader should bear in mind that it was written over twenty years
ago. The personality of the author is consequently as unfamiliar to me
as to the reader--and as unsympathetic. As he no longer exists, I can
no longer assume any responsibility for him, and as I took part in
his execution [1898] I believe I have the right to regard the past as
expiated and stricken out of the Big Book." The "execution" in 1898
referred to was the spiritual crisis through which Strindberg passed
when he emerged from the aby