We Women and Our Authors — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Voice That Refuses to Be an Appendage

Marholm’s prose is marked by a distinctive rhetorical strategy: she frequently poses questions that her male subjects have avoided. “Who am I? and not: Whose am I?” she writes, condensing a generation’s shift in self-perception into a single contrast. The phrasing is pointed, almost aphoristic, and it recurs in various forms throughout the opening chapter. She does not adopt the detached tone of a scholarly survey; instead, she writes as a woman addressing other women, using “we” and “our” to create a sense of shared experience. This collective voice is not merely stylistic—it signals her argument that women’s self-understanding is still nascent, “helpless beginners filled with desires, needs and claims, which they themselves do not understand.” The language is precise: women are not yet fully conscious of their own longings, and Marholm’s task is to bring those longings into the open.

Björnson and the Politics of Proximity

In the chapter on Björnson, Marholm shifts from general diagnosis to a specific case study. She recounts a journey through Norway, where a peasant driver points out Björnson’s home and explains why the author is beloved: he is a “homely man” who goes “straight ahead.” The anecdote is not decorative; it grounds Marholm’s analysis of Björnson’s influence in concrete social relations. She contrasts the peasantry’s “healthy strength” with the “decadence of the middle classes,” a term she uses without irony. The middle class, she argues, is characterized by “narrow horizon,” “commercial self-satisfaction,” and “snivelling morality”—a list that echoes Ibsen’s own indictments. Yet Marholm is careful to distinguish between authors: Ibsen, the “revolutionary bourgeois,” wields a “scorpion whip,” while Björnson, the peasant’s son, preaches reform but still sees middle-class life as “the highest normal condition.” The distinction is subtle but crucial to her argument about how male authors limit women’s possibilities even when they seem to champion them.

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: A Diagnosis Without Cure

Marholm’s treatment of Ibsen is among the most incisive in the book. She focuses on Hedda Gabler, reading the play not as a tragedy of a misunderstood woman but as a clinical dissection of a “sexless nonentity.” Her language is deliberately harsh: Hedda “stupidly sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring” and retains “nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire.” The analysis is grounded in Ibsen’s own details—the officer father, the upper-commercial-class milieu—but Marholm pushes further, arguing that Ibsen’s method is to “take her and throw her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on her lips.” The phrase “æsthetic formula” is key: Marholm suggests that Ibsen, for all his insight, ultimately reduces Hedda to a symbol, a case study that confirms his own worldview rather than opening up new possibilities for women. The critique is not that Ibsen is wrong, but that his vision is incomplete—a diagnosis without a prescription.

Marholm’s book is best read as a series of provocations rather than a systematic treatise. She expects her reader to be familiar with the works she discusses, but she does not simply explicate them; she argues with them. The most rewarding approach is to track her recurring concerns—the tension between economic independence and emotional fulfillment, the way literary form can both reveal and conceal, the difficulty of speaking as a woman in a critical tradition dominated by men. Her own voice, sharp and engaged, offers a model for that struggle.

That rainy afternoon, Marholm’s insistence that male authors hand women their own reflections left me restless. I set her down and wandered, half-accidentally, into an old biographical discourse. Its quiet attention to a forgotten man’s character felt like a mirror turned away—a relief. There, too, was the same struggle for individuality, but without the weight of borrowed voices. A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck Delivered before the New-York Historical Society, May 17th, 1870 — Background and Themes became my afternoon’s second companion, and I wondered if every book is a waiting door.