"Friendship can only exist between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view"
About this Quote
Strindberg frames “friendship” as an exclusive club policed by sameness, then uses that narrow definition to smuggle in a broader thesis: men and women, as society constructs them, are fundamentally alien to each other. It’s a provocation disguised as sociology. The opening clause sounds like common sense, almost blandly empirical, until the second sentence turns the screw: difference isn’t personal or accidental, it’s “by the conventions of society” and effectively at birth. He’s not merely claiming gender incompatibility; he’s naturalizing a social script so thoroughly that it reads as destiny.
The intent is diagnostic and combative. Strindberg, the dramatist of marital war, writes like someone cross-examining modern intimacy: if friendship requires aligned “interests and points of view,” and society trains men and women into opposing outlooks, then heterosexual companionship becomes structurally impossible. That’s the subtextual sting. He’s relocating the failure of relationships from individual morality to social design, while still keeping the punchline: don’t expect harmony across a manufactured divide.
Context matters. Strindberg worked in a late-19th-century landscape of shifting gender roles, “New Woman” anxiety, and embattled debates about marriage, labor, and authority. His line captures a period when equality felt, to many men, less like liberation than a hostile renegotiation of power. The irony is that he names conventions as the cause, yet treats their effects as fixed; it’s critique and capitulation in one breath. That tension is precisely why it works: the sentence performs the trap it describes.
The intent is diagnostic and combative. Strindberg, the dramatist of marital war, writes like someone cross-examining modern intimacy: if friendship requires aligned “interests and points of view,” and society trains men and women into opposing outlooks, then heterosexual companionship becomes structurally impossible. That’s the subtextual sting. He’s relocating the failure of relationships from individual morality to social design, while still keeping the punchline: don’t expect harmony across a manufactured divide.
Context matters. Strindberg worked in a late-19th-century landscape of shifting gender roles, “New Woman” anxiety, and embattled debates about marriage, labor, and authority. His line captures a period when equality felt, to many men, less like liberation than a hostile renegotiation of power. The irony is that he names conventions as the cause, yet treats their effects as fixed; it’s critique and capitulation in one breath. That tension is precisely why it works: the sentence performs the trap it describes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
|---|
More Quotes by August
Add to List
