The Red Room

"The Red Room" is the room of life that holds the motley crowd of pretenders, the high and the mighty and the out-at-the-elbow folk who persist in living a life of humbug, that ends in the cessation of mental and spiritual growth. Religious swindle and charitable fraud are excoriated; the sheep's clothing is stripped from malicious women and hypocritical men who minister to their own vanity by ostentatious works of charity. The book presents, as it were, a section of a crowded street, with all the passersby, rich, poor, good, bad, high, and low, held up for a microscopic analysis of their souls, which Strindberg sees as sheathing their bodies. In his pitiless subjectivity Strindberg is the most ruthless of novelists and dramatists; that is why we turn from him with a kind of dread. Before his searching vision our self-excusing withering; we feel that God would pity us where this man has judged. And yet no one—such is the duality of the man—is more lenient or loving toward humanity than Strindberg in his illumined moments. "The Red Room" ends with one of those transfigured scenes of wedded bliss that Strindberg, who could not be happy married to any woman, was able to conceive.