ABSTRACT
Romantic love allowed individual choice, but only to choose a spouse. Works of Nordic fiction had since 1839 intermittently explored confluent love. This mating morality sanctified convenience, reward, and self-realization through “free love,” meaning serial pair-bonding interspersed with uncommitted copulation. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) lit the fuse of this ideological bomb. When the play ends with “the door slam heard round the world,” the protagonist, Nora, shuts the door on romantic love to seek individualistic self-realization. Ibsen became the father of modern drama, and Nora abandoning her family became the inflection point for a literary contestation over tomorrow’s mating morality. The Modern Breakthrough became Scandinavia’s greatest contribution to world literature since the sagas. Inspired by the era’s Darwinism, the authors of this movement sought to uncover the reality of Homo sapiens’ evolved mating nature. Each interpreted Darwin to fit their own agenda, suggesting naturalistic understandings of “free love” and “true marriage,” some of which were laughable while others landed authors in prison. This chapter reveals that the most prescient author was Hans Jæger, “the rabid dog” of the Kristiania Bohemians and the most infamous man of the Modern Breakthrough.
