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The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg (1907)

Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote four ‘chamber’ plays in 1907. To emphasise their affinity with music and that they were a cycle on related themes he gave each one an opus number. The Ghost Sonata is Opus 3. Strindberg later wrote that the four pieces taken together made up ‘his last sonatas’ on the analogy of a composer like Beethoven. Themes and ideas from one play were picked up and modulated in others. Some critics have made direct analogies to sonata form, describing the first of the play’s three scenes as a busy allegro, followed by scene 2 as a largo punctuated by long silences, the third and final scene being an andante, followed by the coda of the Student’s final speech.

The Ghost Sonata and its three cousins were written after another hiatus in Strindberg’s play-writing (the first one 1892 to 1898; this one 1902 to 1906).

Chamber pieces were very much a la mode. Max Reinhardt had just opened the Kammerspiele in Berlin. Strindberg was approached to write smaller pieces by actor and impresario August Falk who created a small theatre seating 161 guests in Stockholm, and named the Intimate Theatre, which for the 3 years of its existence became a centre of theatrical innovation.

Translator and editor of the Oxford University Press edition, Michael Robinson, quotes passages from Strindberg’s letters explaining what a chamber theatre was. The bit that caught my eye says, ‘No predetermined form is to restrict the author, for the motif determines the form. Consequently, freedom in treatment restricted only by the unity of the ideas and the feeling for style’ (quote Introduction page xxxi).

The Ghost Sonata is surprising from the start, the initial surprise being that it’s set outside. If any playwright suited grim claustrophobic interiors it’s Strindberg but this one is set outside a modern (in 1900) block of flats. Also, for the first time it doesn’t have a small cast (The Father: 6, Miss Julie: 3, Dance of Death: 3) but a relatively large one of 16. Mind you, they are all given generic type names (the Old Man, the Student, the Milkmaid and so on).

But all this is trivial compared with what follows. Although it has a realistic enough setting, the relations between all these people are a dreamlike fantasia.

The Ghost Sonata is in three scenes, each of which (rather inevitably) contains a death. Having read 13 plays by Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg I wonder if these Great Playwrights knew how to write a play which doesn’t end in a death of one sort or another (murder, suicide, accident).

Is The Ghost Sonata a modernist version of a fairy tale? The Old Man and the Student both explicitly compare what’s going on to a fairy tale. On this reading a heroic young Student, born on a Sunday and therefore in folklore able to see more clearly than other people, is introduced into an expensive modern house which from the outside he regards as paradise, through the intervention of an all-powerful fairy godfather (the Old Man, also named Hummel) and here encounters the fair damsel he had glimpsed from the street and who languishes in thrall to a vampire-like Cook.

True up to a point but, like the musical analogy, this interpretation leaves out all the weird details and the unaccountable reversals. The young damsel he’s meant to rescue fades away and dies. The fairy godfather who smuggled him in and, at many points of Scene 1 is compared to the Devil or Mephistopheles, half way through Scene 2 his powers desert him and he too is killed.

Or you could summarise The Ghost Sonata as: an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair named Hummel overhears a thirsty Student named Arkenholz asking what appears to be thin air for a drink. (The Student thinks he is asking a Milkmaid for a drink. Why can no one else see her but him?). Anyway, this Hummel enlists the Student to enter a haunted house on a beautiful Sunday morning and rescue a young woman trapped inside…

But the characters are uncanny and unpredictable. Inexplicable things keep happening. At the formal dinner which is the centrepiece of Scene 2 the Old Man unmasks everyone present, pointing out that they’re hypocrites with false identities. And yet somehow it’s he, the unmasker, who meets his death. Not violently. He just shrinks and fades away.

What are we to make of the Mummy who, the first time we’re shown into her room talks and behaves like a parrot and yet slowly gains ascendency over the Old Man until it is he who starts talking parrot style.

There is much talk of this world being a hell or purgatory in which nobody is who they seem, in which nobody is responsible for their actions. The student calls it:

STUDENT: This world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death, this world of endless change, disappointment and pain…

Michael Robinson associates this with Strindberg’s late conversion to the teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg who thought the visible world was a purgatorial preparation for a better one after death. But Strindberg characters talked like this before he’d read Swedenborg (and in fact so do Ibsen’s characters). It seems to have been standard Scandi noir, the same Scandi attitude that inspired Edvard Munch to his cheery paintings.

In any case, none of these ‘rational’ explanations account for the Old Man standing up in his wheelchair addressing a crowd of beggars, for the vampire cook, for the Colonel who is an impostor and only held together by his corset, or for the Mummy who starts out talking like a parrot, who hides herself away from the room which contains a statue of her as a nubile young woman, and who ends up stopping time itself!

At the end of the play the entire room, the ‘hyacinth room’ where the Student meets his admired beloved, disappears – presumably this just means the lights are dimmed right down to darkness – and replaced by a large copy of painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous and super-symbolist painting, The Isle of the Dead.

The Ghost Sonata lacks the relatable angst of ‘The Father’, ‘Miss Julie’ or ‘A Dance of Death’ and yet in many ways, because of the teasing transformations, the general absurdity and uncanny, dreamlike transformations, I think I enjoyed reading it the most.

The Ghost Sonata anticipates surreal plays and writings – the entire dream ethos of surrealism– and foreshadows the theatre of the absurd which was to become a dominant force in mid-twentieth century theatre.

Credit

I read ‘The Ghost Sonata‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

Strindberg reviews

The Father (1887)
Miss Julie (1888)
Dance of Death (1900)
The Ghost Sonata (1907)

Play reviews

The Dance of Death by August Strindberg (1900)

There’s a big gap between ‘Miss Julie’ in 1888 and ‘The Dance of Death’ in 1900. Although the Strindberg scholar Michael Robinson argues for a significant evolution in Strindberg’s thinking about drama over that period, ‘The Dance of Death’ feels very similar to ‘The Father’ from 13 years earlier.

Once again we’re thrown into the middle of an extremely unhappy, wretched, miserable marriage between a mature couple, the husband alternating between cunning abuse, controlling behaviour and pathetic weakness, the wife alternating between self pity and her own plans for vicious revenge. Into the middle of this psychological inferno comes an old friend who knew them both when they were young and who now acts as a kind of lightning rod for their mutual hatred and nasty scheming.

Act 1

On a remote island, old captain Edgar is in charge of the artillery garrison protecting a massive ancient fort. He and his wife Alice live in the round tower of the fort with views out over the battlements. Their opening dialogue makes it quite plain they’ve endured ‘twenty-five years of misery’ in each other’s company. They keep up the sort of civilised facade punctuated by barbs and sarcasm familiar from hundreds of plays like it about marital misery. And endless self-pitying laments:

‘twenty-five years of misery…’
‘I’ll soon have forgotten how to laugh…’
‘Life’s boring enough as it is…’
‘Yes, it’s quite terrible. Life is terrible…’
‘we really are the most unhappy people in the whole world…’
‘sometimes I believe our whole family’s been cursed…’

Points that emerge are that:

1) The captain is ‘an old man’ and is now forgetful, he keeps getting little details wrong, adds up simple numbers incorrectly. Is this meant to indicate incipient dementia?

2) He is an anti-social cranky old man. He thinks everyone else on the island i.e. all the other officers and middle-class people like the doctor, are scum’, ‘because everyone is scum’ (p.115) ‘scoundrels all of them’ (p.125). No surprise then that:

3) They never get invited anywhere and spend all their time at home hating each other.

4) Their servants keep leaving because they’re so hateful. In fact in a small scene just a few minutes into the play they call the current servant Jenny to light the lamps and Alice is so rude and domineering to her that Jenny quits.

5) Alice bitterly regrets giving up her promising career in the theatre to marry Edgar, a promising young officer who, in the event, has amounted to nothing.

Kurt

They both discuss how Kurt has arrived on the island. Kurt is Alice’s cousin and the captain blames him for fixing him up with her i.e. arranging their hellish marriage, although Kurt repeatedly insists this wasn’t how it happened (‘It wasn’t quite like that but never mind…’, p.124, cf pages 128 and 148). Indeed on page 132 he gives a full explanation to Alice of how the captain asked Kurt to be a go-between with Alice and Kurt, knowing that Alice was herself quite a handful, refused. Doesn’t stop the captain repeatedly blaming him, though. In much the same way the captain keeps insisting that Kurt abandoned his children, despite Kurt repeatedly denying it and pointing out that when he got his divorce his children were simply awarded to his wife (p.129).

From the couple’s dialogue we learn that 1) Kurt is divorced and his wife got the kids 2) he went off to America to work 3) now he’s back and he’s a quarantine officer and he’s been sent to the island to institute a quarantine, something about cholera.

So enter Kurt and the rest of Act 1 consists of polite chit-chat laced with acid barbs, during which Kurt (and the audience) are introduced to more aspects of the couple’s mutual loathing…

Naturalism

From Michael Robinson’s discussion of the previous play in this volume, ‘Miss Julie’, and Strindberg’s correspondence with Zola, I learn that a key aspect of the naturalistic approach was an explanation of the characters’ heredity and environment. This play gestures towards that in the scattered references to the captain’s upbringing. He reminds Kurt (and anyone else who’ll listen) that he came from a humble background and had to fight for everything, that his paths has been strewn with ‘thorns and stones and flints’. Which explains his embattled psychology, his feeling that he is surrounded by enemies on all side, which explains his anti-social animus (p.126).

Back to the play, they prepare for a thin supper and the captain keeps up his raillery of Kurt, irritating him by accusing him of arranging the couple’s marriage and of abandoning his kids. The way the captain repeatedly asserts these things and Kurt repeatedly denies them show not only the captain’s domineering ignoring of other people’s points of view, but also point to the deeper repetitions of the play. Outsiders come into the prison of the marriage and only slowly discover that they can’t change the script or situation…

As they’re talking the captain suddenly has one of his turns. He slumps in his chair and goes into a sort of catatonic trance. Alice tells Kurt they can say anything, the captain can’t hear them. This allows Alice to be more candid than ever:

ALICE: I’ve spent a lifetime in this tower, a prisoner, watched over by a man I’ve always hated, and now hate so boundlessly that the day he dies I’ll laugh out loud for joy. (p.131)

Kurt asks the obvious question, why haven’t they parted and she makes the kind of symbolic, poetic reply that they can’t. They are doomed to live a torment to each other forever. Hence, the dance of death.

ALICE: Can you guess why he fears death so much? He’s afraid I’ll remarry.
KURT: Then he does love you!
ALICE: Probably. But that doesn’t stop him from hating me. (p.133)

And Alice’s wailing laments:

ALICE: Oh, if only the house’d catch fire…If only the sea would rise and swallow us up! (p.135)

In fact, the captain had been roused from his stupor by the blowing of a trumpet outside, had leaped to his feet and exited the tower room. Now, five minutes and a lot of wailing from Alice later, he re-enters. He knows full well Alice has been slandering him behind his back. He asks her to play his favourite piece on the piano, the Entry of the Boyars.

While she plays it on the piano the captain performs a wild Hungarian dance until he abruptly collapses behind the table. It’s only when Alice has quite finished that she and Kurt realise what’s happened and rush over to the captain. Alice breathlessly asks if he’s dead and when Kurt says No, sighs with disappointment.

They manage to revive him and get him into a chair. When Kurt promises to fetch the doctor the captain, typically, threatens to shoot him, alienating them both. Yet the next moment he has another faint spell and both Alice and Kurt are genuinely concerned for him.

It struck me that this alternation between real dislike of the captain and then, when he swoons, just as real concern, the movement of attraction and repulsion which recurs throughout the play as the captain alternates between being a rude bastard and being a helpless invalid, it struck me that it’s this motion which forms the dance of the title.

Anyway, Kurt nips off to see the doctor which allows Alice and the captain to alternate between being the weak invalid and sniping at each other. When Kurt is a long time returning the captain, with typical ill grace, calls him a scoundrel, a coward and a bastard (p.140). With comic timing that’s exactly when Kurt re-enters.

Kurt says the garrison doctor is, of course, familiar with the captain’s condition and instructs him to stop smoking cigars and lay off the alcohol, so Kurt takes away the cigar in the captain’s mouth and removes the glass of alcohol.

It’s by now late. Alice bids goodnight. Kurt exits to get some bedding to make up a bed for the captain on the sofa. The night winds blows open the doors at the back of the set and an eerie old woman, like a witch, appears. The captain is terrified. She insists she was just passing when the door swung open and gently closes it and walks away. Although done in a realistic mode it feels like an interruption of the genuinely supernatural. It crystallises the occasional references to the supernatural, to vampires in particular, which dot the dialogue. Fin-de-siecle. Horror.

When Alice re-enters with some bedding, the captain asks who was that and she just replies, Oh must old Maja from the poorhouse.

Alice exits again, this time heading for bed. But the captain begs Kurt to stay with him and so they stay up for a bit talking about midnight issues, death, is there an afterlife, what would it be like? Then they finally bid each other goodnight.

Act 2

Same set, the morning after the night before. Kurt and Alice enter, the captain is still asleep on the sofa. Kurt describes how they stayed up having schoolboy discussions about life, concluding ‘he really is the most arrogant person I’ve ever come across’ (p.145).

In his defence (why?) Alice explains (see my note on naturalism, above) that he came from a poor home, with many brothers and sisters. His father was a good-for-nothing so from an early age he had to support the family by giving lessons. he had to forgo the pleasures of youth to support siblings he didn’t bring into the world. He went without a coat so his brothers and sisters could be properly dressed.

Changing tone, she remarks that he really is extraordinarily ugly. This made me wonder what any actor who’s cast in this role must make of the fact that they’re partly chosen for their ugliness.

Alice explains that the captain raised their children to hate her. he was most successful with their daughter Judith who once hit her (Alice). They both agree he’s a monster and Kurt admits that sometimes, when they knew each other as young men, after they’d argued, his image would grow in Kurt’s imagination to enormous size and terrify him.

The monster awakes and apologises to Alice for not kicking the bucket. Kurt sensibly suggests he should make a will. The captain refuses, is rude, then falls back unconscious again.

Then he revives again and starts quizzing Kurt about this assignment of h is, to set up a quarantine station. He says he should send for his children to join him and then, yet again, indicts Kurt for abandoning them, a charge Kurt, yet again, rejects but the captain ignores. It’s a dance, a ritual, with the same conversational gambits repeated over and over.

Alice re-enters with a bouquet of flowers which has been sent to the captain by the non-commissioned officers from the garrison. When Alice tells him the Colonel has granted him leave, the captain obstinately says he won’t take it, which triggers a sarcastic speech from Alice:

ALICE: You see, Kurt, here’s a man for whom no laws exist, no rules apply, no authority matters…He stands above everything and everyone; the universe has been created for his private use; the sun and moon revolve merely to carry his praises to the stars; that’s my husband! This insignificant captain who couldn’t even become a major, whose puffed-up pride makes him the laughing stock of those he supposes fear him; this lily-livered brute who’s afraid of the dark and believes in barometers right down to and including the final curtain; a barrowload of muck and second-rate muck at that! (p.150)

Despite all this the captain insists on putting on his full military uniform and setting off to see the non-comms. After he’s gone Alice tells Kurt how he’ll eat and drink with them and slander his fellow officers. She looks out the window and sees him on the battlements opening his cape to the wind, as if he wants to catch a chill and die.

But Kurt demurs: explains how on the contrary the captain had been asking questions about his (Kurt’s) life and family. That, Alice explains, is because he’s a vampire (p.152), seizing hold of other people’s lives and sucking the energy out of them. Alice warns him that the captain will batten on Kurt’s children and use them against him.

And this is the point where Alice confirms Kurt’s suspicion that it was the captain who was responsible for having his children taken away from him. Explains how Kurt confided all his feelings in him and sent him to intercede with his wife but, when he met her, the captain started flirting with her and, to ingratiate himself, gave her advice on how to win custody of the kids. Kurt is, understandably, appalled.

Kurt asks Alice why she married such a monster. Because he seduced her, because she wanted to make her way in society, because his career seemed to have prospects. He promised her a good life, a beautiful home, but once they were married all she found were debts.

INTERMISSION

Act 3

The stage directions make a point of noting that Alice’s hair is quite grey.

It’s two days later. Kurt comes to tell Alice that the captain’s on a steamer returning from town. He took his gloves and wore boots, so she knows he went to see the Colonel and pay social calls. They both remark how changed the captain is since he gave up drinking alcohol.

Kurt remarks on her grey hair and Alice says it’s been like that for years, but now she’s stopped dying it. She points out that this ‘barracks’ used to be a prison once (and is, of course, again, for her and her demon husband).

Kurt remarks how since his flirtation with death, the captain’s had a funny appearance, his face has a kind of phosphorescence and his eyes dance like will o’ the wisps.

Anyway, enter the captain who quickly moves to the attack: he reveals that he’s arranged for the transfer of a promising young cadet to the island… and it’s Kurt’s son! Kurt says he doesn’t want this but the captain points out he has no say in the matter, the children are in the custody of their mother and…he’s been to see her and got her to sign off on the decision! Alice turns to Kurt and whispers ‘Now he must die!’ as if we’re in a Shakespearian tragedy.

Next he takes a look at the will which he asked Alice to get a lawyer to draw up, review and agree, checks it’s all in order and then…tears it up and throws it on the floor. Another muttered exchange between Alice and Kurt who says the captain is ‘not a human being!’ (p.158)

Next the captain announces that while he was in town he had divorce papers drawn up and presents them…Alice will be kicked out of the house she’s been maintaining for 25 years. Not only this, but he has decided to replace her with a younger, prettier model (p.159).

Alice is so disgusted she takes off her wedding ring and flings it at him, he catches it, calmly puts it in his pocket and asks ‘the witness’ i.e. Kurt, to make a note of her behaviour.

Goaded beyond endurance, Alice now tells Kurt about the time the captain tried to kill her by pushing her off a jetty into the sea. The captain calmly replies there were no witness. Yes, Judith saw it! Alice replies. But will never testify, the captain smugly says.

Then, in his insufferably pompous style, the captain announces that ‘the enemy has ten minutes’ to withdraw its forces and walks out the French windows, leaving Kurt and Alice to seethe with anger, hatred and revenge.

Kurt says that up to this minute he hadn’t wanted to get involved, but now the bringing of his son to the island, against his wishes, without his permission, is the last straw. ‘He must die.’

Alice tells him the captain’s worst enemy in the garrison is the Ordnance Officer and that she, Alice, knows that her husband and a colleague have been embezzling funds. A quick word to the OO and her husband will be arrested and imprisoned and – she becomes a little hysterical – she’ll dance on his head, she’ll dance to the tune of the Entry of the Boyars.

She gets so carried away that she sort of bewitches Kurt who calls her a devil. She asks if he remembers how when they were children together (remember, they were cousins) they got engaged? Kurt is bewitched, runs over, picks her up and bites her neck till she shrieks, presumably a reference to the way they’ve both been calling the captain a vampire.

INTERMISSION

Act 4

Same scene in the evening. The captain alone is in a frenzy of destruction: he tries to play cards but gives up, goes to the window and throws the deck out the window. The window makes a rattling noise in the wind which scares the captain. He goes to the drinks cabinet, gets out three bottles and throws them out the window. He takes out some cigar boxes and throws them out the window. He had been wearing glasses and after inspecting them for a moment, throws them out too.

He stumbles round the furniture and finds a candelabra and lights all the candles. He smashes the piano keyboard with his fist, locks it then throws the key out the window then lights the candles on the piano. He goes to a table with his wife’s portrait on it and tears it to pieces. Puts photos of his son and daughter in his breast pocket but sweeps all the other family photos off onto the floor and kicks them into a pile. A thought occurs and he goes to a desk, takes out a bundle of letters wrapped in ribbon and throws them into the stove.

He goes to a door and discovers a cat outside, lifts the cat into his arms and strokes it, then exits.

The overall effect must be to create a darkened room full of wreckage and filled with flickering candles.

Enter Alice with her hair newly dyed black and dressed up the nines. Kurt arrives, looking nervous. Alice grandly announces that she’s lined up 6 witnesses to testify to the captain’s embezzlement. Now she’s just waiting for confirmation to come via the telegraph machine placed on a desk in the set.

Kurt is not so triumphant. She commands him to kiss her which he does unwillingly. He reminds her that he used to be friends with the captain. But she embraces him and, again, he is overcome with lust and bites her neck.

They rapturously talk about going into town, to the theatre, dressed to impress, she doesn’t care who sees them. So, Kurt says, it’s not enough for her that her husband should go to prison, she also wants to publicly humiliate him? Yes, she replies.

Kurt reflects that it’s as if the old prison walls exude evil which is absorbed by the people (Edgar and Alice) who live here (a touch of naturalistic explanation for human motivation).

When Kurt says that, while she was talking, he was thinking about his son, Alice hits him across the mouth with her glove. He immediately asks her to forgive him. She domineeringly insists that he gets down on his knees and kisses her foot and Kurt puts his forehead right down to the ground and does so. And then melodramatically wonders what has come of him and whether he’s… in hell!

Enter the captain looking ill and decrepit using a stick. He asks to speak to Kurt alone and, when Alice leaves, he talks about the humiliations he’s endured all his life (‘I don’t believe anyone has suffered as many humiliations as I have’), and how he’s struggled to live out his belief that one must forget the past and move on:

CAPTAIN: Cross out and go on! (p.167)

Turns out he is feeling weepy and sorry for himself because he’s just back from seeing the doctor who’s told him he doesn’t have long to live.

And now it becomes plain that the captain doesn’t appear to remember anything he’s done: he has no knowledge of ordering Kurt’s son to be posted to the island, he doesn’t remember instituting the divorce of his wife. When he asks him about the Ordnance Officer the captain has nothing particularly bad to say about him.

Kurt is baffled by these replies which only confirm his own sense that he doesn’t know who he is any more, we are all enigmas, he neither knows or understands anything…

When he looks out through the window Kurt can see an assembly of soldiers. The captain explains they’re probably off to arrest some poor so-and-so. And suddenly Kurt realises he doesn’t want the captain to be charged and sent to prison. So he asks whether the telegraph machine which is due to bring the fateful message of his impending arrest can be turned off?

When he asks why he pushed Alice off the jetty into the sea the captain can’t explain why he did it, just on an impulse. It seems so alien from him that he can’t believe it actually happened. And suddenly Kurt is overcome with friendly feelings for his old friend of so long ago, and shakes his hand and claps him on the shoulder.

It’s at this moment that Alice re-enters to see the friendly pair. She asks whether the fatal telegraph message has arrived yet (Kurt says no) so decides she will hurry destiny along a bit and sets out to deliberately humiliate her husband by kissing Kurt in front of him, insulting the captain, telling him he was always too stupid to see how she was manipulating him.

The captain leaps to his feet and has a swipe at her with his sabre but only succeeds in slashing the furniture before collapsing to the floor – during all this Kurt remains sitting perplexed by everything, paralysed by the weird hell he’s got himself into.

So when Alice goes towards Kurt he rejects her advances, in fact he pushes her away so strongly that she falls to her knees and tells her to go to hell, he’s leaving, ‘Goodbye! Forever!’ (p.170)

Both of them plead, in unison, for him to stay but now, maybe, at last realising how he’s been drawn into their endless war and wanting shot of both of them, Kurt repeats goodbye and exits.

Now it’s just the two of them. The captain tells her the doctor says he hasn’t much longer to live and also that all the other things he said were untrue (about co-opting Kurt’s son, about the divorce, about the new young wife).

Deprived of the vision of a new life with Kurt, Alice realises she’s stuck with the captain, that she’s just taken steps to ruin his life, which will ruin hers as well. The family name will be in tatters! The children will be expelled from school and their lives ruined!

She babbles about what a terrible mistake she’s made and how can he ever forgive her and she vows to love him properly now, all of which he affects not to understand.

Just like Miss Julie she keeps babbling that ‘there’s no way out’, noone can help her etc, which triggered speculation of whether she, like Julie, might kill herself.

And then the telegraph starts clacking which prompts Alice to hysterics, she prays and prays and prays to God to help her…and yet, when she reads the printout…it’s not about the criminal charges at all but about some other trivial matter!

Alice sits on a chair and bursts into hysterical weeping. The captain talks to her with unusual tenderness. She wonders what’s changed him. He says that when he had his collapse he was, for a moment, on the other side of the grave and that, although he’s forgotten the details, it gave him a tremendous sense of hope. He had the feeling that they’d been condemned to torment each other but now, at last, had somehow done it enough and that phase was finished…

They look round at the wrecked room and he tenderly suggests they tidy it up. It seems as if, amazingly, this might be some kind of happy ending, but then…

But then he sits down and a change comes over him. He abruptly reverts to his former shrewd calculating self. In a hard voice he sums up the situation: she has failed. She didn’t get to leave (with Kurt) and also didn’t get him, the captain, locked away. And with horror Alice realises that they’re back to where the play began, if anything even worse, because now she’ll be forced to be nursemaid to her invalid husband:

ALICE: This must be everlasting hell! Is there no end to it?

The captain repeats the idea broached at the start of the play, that outsiders enter their battleground, for a while ameliorate it, but always leave in the end:

CAPTAIN: Everyone who comes near us becomes evil, and then goes their way…Kurt was weak and evil is strong… (p.173)

And the captain is given a long final speech in which he says he has no idea whether life is a joke or a tragedy. He supposes in a few months they’ll be ‘celebrating’ their silver wedding anniversary and will invite all the usual suspects, funny old world, isn’t it?

Periodically in this act, the captain has used the expression ‘cross out the past and go on’, go forwards, as he explained to Kurt. Now he suggests they go ahead with their silver wedding plans and gets Alice to grudgingly acquiesce, which allows the last words of the play to be the captain saying:

CAPTAIN: So, our silver wedding! –––[Gets up] Cross out and go on! – Alright then, let’s go on!

Which, of course, instantly reminded me of Waiting for Godot, written 50 years after this play yet directly in its lineage.

ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.

A nightmarish vision of human lives always moving forward, but always stuck in the same place.

Circularity

The point (as in Godot) is that nothing changes. Their lives just go round and round. Each day contains the same insults and sarcastic jibes. Trapped like rats in the same maze.

CAPTAIN: Haven’t you noticed that we say the same thing every day? Just now, when you made the same old reply, ‘In this house, anyway’, I should have answered with my old, ‘It’s not just my house’. But since I’ve already given the same answer five hundred times already, I yawned instead.’ (p.121)

Not only the same old conversations but the same appearance of others, interlopers into their hell.

Early on in Act 1, the captain points out how even when outsiders intrude into their hellish marriage, even these intrusions take the identical form: the newcomer releases both of them, makes them both happy, to begin with…and then fails and leaves them back in the same old rut (p.122). And this, of course, is exactly what happens with the arrival of Kurt – a new player enters the scene, shakes things up for a few days, persuades both of them that they can change their lives, but then is slowly miserably disillusioned, weakens and finally abandons them back to their endless dance.

The dance between the two hateful partners is complemented and complicated by the periodic arrival of a new, third dancing partner, which, for a while, changes the shape and rhythm of the dance, but, in the end, the old rhythms and patterns reassert themselves.

Insofar as two people who hate each other are trapped together it anticipates not just Waiting for Godot but Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944) and any number of other miserabilist plays about not just the hell of other people, but the hell of the endless repetitiveness of existence.

Michael Robinson’s notes

Robinson is a leading Strindberg scholar having, for example, edited his letters, and it shows. His introduction and notes are extremely focused, erudite and illuminating. It’s definitely worth buying this edition for the clarity and range of his analysis. From his introduction to ‘Miss Julie’ I took the following points:

Playwriting hiatus Between 1892 and 1898 Strindberg abandoned play-writing altogether, a period when he devoted himself to photography and painting and spent away from Sweden, in Berlin or Paris. In Paris he became acutely aware of the new movement of Symbolism which was replacing the scientific naturalism he had inculcated from Zola, and he spent a lot of time among alchemists and occultists.

The Inferno crisis It was also the period biographers refer to as the Inferno Crisis, a period of intense psychological anguish, self examination and recreation. It has this melodramatic name because he (characteristically) chronicled his experiences in an autobiographical fiction, ‘Inferno’ (1897).

The influence of Swedenborg Robinson tells us that a formative influence in pulling Strindberg through the Inferno crisis was the writings of Swedish mystical writer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772). Swedenborg described the correspondences between the visible world here below and a higher world of meaning. Swedenborg considered human existence in this life as a kind of purgatory in which we are purified in readiness for the life beyond.

New meaning These trivial-sounding ideas had a big impact on Strindberg. Up till then he’d thought of the world as an amoral chaos well suited to the scientific analysis of naturalism. Swedenborg helped him rethink the world as based on order, pattern and divine correspondences. In a nutshell, it was a way of returning to the comforting sense of order and meaning granted him by his boyhood Christianity, but without actually having to have Christian faith.

The Dance All this sheds light on ‘The Dance of Death’. For a start the whole thing is set in a prison (heavy symbolism) which the old lags nicknamed ‘Hell’ symbolism). Indeed at one point Kurt says he can virtually smell the corpses and feel the poison leeching out of the walls. And the couple at the centre are clearly caught in a hell of their own making, as per Swedenborg’s theories. And yet two more things: the patterns and repetitions which give the play its sense of existentialist hopelessness, they also point to pattern and meaning, no matter how dire. And then the captain’s reporting to Kurt that, during his first big collapse, he had a sense of travelling to the other side of the grave and bringing back with him an immense sense of hope.

Now, admittedly, ‘hope’ is the last quality you associate with this annihilating play. But it is there, peeking from behind the curtains…

The Dance of Death

Obviously the title references an old, well-worn subject from the Middle Ages, the dance of death or dance macabre. Thousands of images and poems repeated the same basic message that in the midst of life we are in death, but cranked up into a macabre and ghoulish image of dancing skeletons. Obviously there are no skeletons or indeed deaths, in the Strindberg play, the title just invokes the aura of this ancient trope. And the mention of ‘dance’, in particular, indicates the way the stylised repetitions and recurring situations which the play is based on, can be loosely interpreted as a dance.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel

Credit

I read ‘The Dance of Death‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

Strindberg reviews

The Father (1887)
Miss Julie (1888)
Dance of Death (1900)
The Ghost Sonata (1907)

Play reviews

Miss Julie by August Strindberg (1888)

According to Michael Robinson in his introduction, ‘Miss Julie’ dates from Strindberg’s ‘Naturalist’ phase although, as explained in my notes to ‘The Father’, he was only ever superficially a naturalistic writer. There are only three characters – Miss Julie, a servant Jean (a man) and the cook Kristin.

Plot summary

It’s Midsummer’s eve, in Sweden the setting for traditional festivities, and we’re in the big kitchen of a mansion belonging to the Count. The Count has gone away to visit relatives leaving Miss Julie alone with the servants. (Incidentally, Robinson explains that the word used for ‘Miss’ in Swedish could also be translated as ‘Lady’ giving ‘Lady Julie’. Worth bearing this in mind to emphasise the class divide between her and Kristin and Jean.)

Jean the handsome young male servant enters to be greeted by the cook, Kristin, who’s frying something. Jean describes Miss Julie as quite crazy. There’s a dance going on in the barn and when he walked past it Miss Julie spotted him, came running over, and insisted he dance a wild waltz with her.

We learn that Julie has just broken up with her fiancé. Jean tells Kristin he saw the moment it actually happened. Julie was with her young man down at the barn and, believe it or not, was training him to jump over her riding whip. Twice he did it but the third time refused, snatched the whip out of her hand and tore it to pieces. (This little anecdote obviously introduces a pleasantly BDSM vibe of discipline and domination.)

Turns out Kristin was frying Jean’s dinner, a nice kidney. Jean gets a good bottle of wine to drink with it. As he eats, the pair agree that Miss Julie takes after her mother, fond of slumming it with the staff but the next minute insisting on punctilio and respect.

Miss Julie enters, she wants some oil or potion off Kristin but semi-flirts with Jean. She asks him to go back to the dance with her but Jean demurs saying a) he’s just promised Kristin a dance and b) tongues will wag if Miss Julie dances with him multiple times. Outraged at the thought, Miss Julie nonetheless insists and off they go.

PANTOMIME: In silence Kristin tidies up the kitchen, takes off her apron, smooths out her dress, fusses with her hair. Jean re-enters repeating his line that Miss Julie is mad, apologises to Kristin, puts his arm round her but at this moment Miss Julie re-enters and is not pleased with what she sees.

Julie and Jean talk in a fragile tone of jocularity and facetiousness which is clearly a form of flirting. Julie wants to take Jean back to the dance but insists he change out of his livery. There is a moment’s implication that he might strip there and then in front of her but he insists on going into an adjoining room, returning wearing formal evening wear. He even makes a little speech prompting her to ask where he learned to talk so well and he explains he was for a while a sommelier at a grand hotel in Switzerland which is also where he picked up his French.

Julie asks for a drink and doesn’t mind if it’s a common beer. They both notice has fallen asleep and Julie jokes that she’ll make a fine wife, she probably snores too. Jean says no, she doesn’t. Julie asks how he knows. And so on. Flirtation between young mistress of the manor and a handsome member of the staff. Where do you think this will end, then?

More flirting. Julie tells him to get a drink for himself, and then to toast her, so Jean gets on his knees and playfully toasts his lady, but then she insists that he kisses her shoe which, after a moment’s hesitation, he does.

Jean warns her that someone might come in, that tongues are already wagging back at the dance, so Julie attempts to wake Kristin up, not least by tweaking her nose, but the cook has been hard at work all day and won’t wake. So Julie now orders jean to come outside and pick her some lilac. His refusal makes her call him a natural aristocrat. He repeats that people will…but she says who cares. None of matters anyway:

JEAN: You know, you’re strange.
JULIE: Perhaps. But then, so are you – Besides everything’s strange. Life, people, everything’s a scum that drifts, drifts on across the water, until it sinks, sinks. (p.79)

They share dreams. She has a recurring dream that she’s sitting on top of a pillar and desperately wants to get down but doesn’t know how. He has a dream of movement in the contrary direction. He dreams he’s lying under a tall tree in a dark wood. He dreams of making it to the very top of the tree where there’s a fine view and he can plunder the golden eggs from their nests, all he needs is to make it to the first branch, but the trunk is thick and slippery and he can never quite reach it.

They make to go outside and pick flowers but Jean stops in the doorway. He’s got something in his eye. Julie orders him to sit in the chair so she can have a look. He quivers a bit so she slaps his hand and tells him again to sit still. Such a baby and with such big strong muscles (she says, squeezing his biceps). She gets it out with her handkerchief and then demands that he kisses her hand. He tries to say something else but she insists.

He says the situation is dangerous but then steps forward, puts his arm round her waist and goes to kiss her. She slaps him. He asks if she’s serious and when she says yes, says she plays too seriously. He’s getting back to his duties and picks up the Count’s boots to clean them. She orders him to put them down.

JEAN: No. They’re one of my duties which don’t include being your plaything. (p.81)

Out of nowhere she asks if he’s ever been in love and this leads into an extended passage where he describes growing up as one of seven siblings in a miserable hovel and only ever seeing the great walled orchard of the Count’s mansion which seemed like paradise. And he describes how one time he went into the garden with his mother to weed the onion beds but there was a church and he’d never seen anything so magnificent. So he snuck inside but then someone came in so he flew out through a secret exist and went running through the grounds till he came to brambles and his underneath them, and that’s where he saw a pink dress and white stockings and realised it was the Count’s daughter, Julie about his own age. And he’s been in love with her ever since.

Julie isn’t particularly struck by the being in love part and wonders whether all poor children feel like that and comes out with the stunning platitude: ‘It must be a tremendous misfortune to be poor.’

Jean continues his boyhood reminiscence, describing how the next Sunday he washed and scrubbed and put on his best clothes to go to church to get a glimpse of her but then returned to his hovel and wanted to die. And he tried to, too. He stripped an elder bush and placed all its branches and leaves in an oat bin and climbed in and closed the lid, under the impression that elder was poisonous. Well, it didn’t kill him thought it did, indeed, make him ill for a while.

She asks where he learned to be such a good storyteller and Jean says he’s read a bit and been to the theatre, and from overhearing posh people talk sitting on the coachman’s box or rowing a boat. He remembers one time when Julie and a girlfriend had an explicit conversation and was shocked by the language they used. Maybe there isn’t such a difference between the classes as people make out…

She insists that ‘we’ don’t behave like ‘you’. Irritated, he asks if he may retire to bed. Julie refuses and commands him to row her out onto the lake. If this was a movie that would make a really good scene… But this is a play so we’re stuck in the same set, the kitchen.

Tired and nettled, Jean tells Julie to go to bed. Julie refuses to take the advice of a servant. They both hear the voices of the estate staff coming closer singing a song. Julie says they’re ‘her’ people and they love her, but Jean disabuses her; they may eat her food but afterwards they spit.

With the crowd approaching Jean says there’s only one thing for it, they better hide in his room. Julie hesitates but he promises to behave honourably and they both go through the door into his room.

BALLET: The peasants enter, dressed in their best clothes, with a fiddler, they produce kegs of booze, drink and then dance in a circle. Presumably this goes on for a while before they finally finish up and exit.

After a pause Julie emerges from Jean’s room. When he emerges, for some reason he is convinced that they have to leave, right now, right away. This is puzzling. Is it because the peasants saw them – but there’s no indication of this at all in the text. is that why the peasants came up to this house? Why couldn’t they assume that Jean was in bed and Julie had gone back to the big house? Or is it that they’ve had sex? There is absolutely no reference to it, their clothes aren’t disarranged, am I projecting this onto the play?

Anyway, Jean says they must leave right away and – remember how she described him as a good storyteller – paints a colourful picture of them running off to start a hotel in Switzerland or to the Italian lakes where the sun always shines, where he will run the whole business while she will sit like a queen ordering her servants about.

Quite enchanted with this vision, Julie asks him to take her in his arms and addresses him, for the first time, by the informal du. However, Jean remains standoffish and continues to use the more formal Swedish word, ni. He explains that as long as they stay in this house there will be barriers between them. And he is almost superstitiously in awe of His Lordship – he only has to hear the bell (on the wall of the kitchen) and he starts like a frightened horse.

No, they must go far away, to a country which is a republic, somewhere where he can be himself, for he wasn’t born to bow and scrape. He reminds her of his dream about the tree. All he needs is to make it to the first branch and then there’ll be no stopping him. In ten years he’ll be rich. Someday he might even be a Count!

But they must stay cool and calm, and he invites her to sit down and discuss it. But Julie is beside herself. Only a minute before he was kissing her shoe. Now she asks him to kiss her but he refuses.

Now he seems to be the one in a position of power. Having just read ‘The Father’ and Michael Robinson’s explanation of it as epitomising the kind of half-conscious struggle to subjugate and defeat the other person in a relationship – is that’s what’s going on here? Will the whole narrative take the shape of an X with Julie starting the play confidently dominating Jean but them both following opposite trajectories as Jean rises to supremacy over her and Julie sinks to subjugation?

Anyway, Jean explains that to make this hotel fantasy come off he needs a backer, someone with money. Julie says don’t look at her, she doesn’t have anything that doesn’t belong to her father. Well, replies Jean coolly lighting a cigar, it’s all off, then.

It’s here that the play first hints that they did have sex during the peasant ballet.

JULIE: Take me away from here, from the shame and dishonour!–Oh, what have I done? My God, my God!
JEAN: So that’s your tune now, is it?–What you’ve done? The same as many a one before you!
JULIE [screams convulsively]: And now you despise me!–I’m falling, I’m falling! (p.89)

The falling obviously also referring back to her dream of being in a high place, feeling dizzy and scared of falling. So they did have sex and she has placed herself in his power.

JULIE: What terrible power drew me to you? Was it the lure of the weak to the strong? Or of someone falling to someone rising? Or was it love? Was that love? Do you know what love is?
JEAN: Me? You bet I do! Do you think it was my first time?

Yes, they had sex and he has conquered her. Symbolically he gets out a bottle of wine which she recognises as belonging to her father. Well, isn’t it good enough for his son-in-law? he taunts her. Suddenly, she has become the most wretched woman in the world:

JULIE: Is there anyone anywhere as miserable as I am now?…Oh God in heaven take my miserable life! Take me away from this filth into which I’m sinking. Save me!

And Jean, also, completely changes character. Now he calls her a whore. He tells her that the sweet story about gathering the elder and lying in an oat bin, that wasn’t him, he heard that about some other kid. Was it a lie, not really: it’s just the kind of tripe you tell a girl to get her in the mood and into bed.

She tries to restore her domination over him by ordering the lackey to stand up, but he just lazily calls her a lackey’s whore, a servant’s tart and then tells her to shut up.

The metaphor of height, of her being down and him being up, is flogged for all it’s worth. He says not only has she debased herself but made her lower than any woman of his class. No woman of his class would offer herself so wantonly, you only saw that behaviour in prostitutes and animals.

The stage directions brutally say Jean is beginning to feel amorous again and so he switches his tone back to flattery and goes towards her and slips his arm round her waist again but this time she wriggles free and tells him to stop.

She demands more wine, drains the glass, and asks for more. Then declares that he’s told her all about his life; if they’re going to run away it’s only fair that she tells him all about here. Cue a long monologue.

This is really florid and dramatic. Her mother was a commoner who (improbably) was a believer in women’s equality and women’s emancipation ‘and all that’. When her father fell in love with her, she refused to marry (bondage) but consented to him becoming her lover. Then along came baby Julie and the feminist mother determined to raise her as a boy, teaching her all the boyish skills. On the whole estate women were put to men’s work and men were put to women’s work and the whole place went to rack and ruin.

Finally her father seized back control of the estate and made moved the genders back to their traditional roles, and married her mother. Then came a great fire which burned down the house, stables and barn, which happened just after their buildings insurance had expired, so they were reduced to penury. They were left penniless and had to sleep in carriages.

But then her mother suggested he borrow money from a friend, a brick merchant who insisted there be no interest. With this money they rebuilt the house. Now Julie reveals that it was her mother who burned down the house, that the brick merchant was her mother’s lover who she had given the next egg she’s inherited and this is what the merchant had ‘loaned’ the father. Frankly, I found this tangled story a bit confusing but the upshot is that her mother was embittered and taught Julie to hate all men.

Thus she fits into the misogyny and man-hating stereotype we encountered in ‘The Father’. Her mother taught her to hate men and never be a slave, rather to enslave them. That’s what she was doing to the fiancé Jean saw her making jump over her whip down at the barn that time. So she hates all men except, at moments, when this (sexual) weakness comes over her.

So what shall they do? Run away, she says. And hate each other forever? No, live together and enjoy a couple of days, a few weeks and then – die.

Not really a practical plan, more a gloomy Gothic fantasy and Jean isn’t impressed. He chucks more cold water on their fantasies. She murmurs in poetic reveries about the perpetual sunshine and flowering orange trees of Lake Como but he harshly says it often rains and the only oranges he saw were in grocer’s shops. No, the way to make money is rent out holiday cottages for 6 months and rely on the fact that after three weeks ‘loving’ couples will be climbing up the walls and quit, but be forced to pay the 6 month rental. Then rent them out again.

In other words all the fine poetic visions which jean articulate in the first half of the play he spends the second half pouring cold water on and revealing the crude hucksterism behind his so-called ‘business plans’.

He throws in more insults for good measure. When she says he owes him something he tosses her coin, as to a cheap whore. Then he says he’s not willing to enter into a mésalliance, meaning marriage with an unsuitable person, because now, thanks to her half drunken confession, he’s able to say that at least nobody in his family is an arsonist!

He’s starting to find the whole situation tiresome and just wants to go to bed, but she insists there must be some way out. She could stay but…he points out the chances are they’d do it (have sex) again and sooner or later be caught.

She must run away by herself then write to His Lordship and explain she was seduced (though not by him). But she pleads she isn’t strong enough. She doesn’t know what to do. She can neither stay nor go and begs him to tell her what to do. The reversal is complete. The super confident Count’s daughter has not just been brought low but so low that she no longer has any will power. She has been abolished as a person. This is very reminiscent of the condition Captain Adolf is brought to at the end of ‘The Father’ when his wife so comprehensively destroys him (mentally and psychologically) that he says he doesn’t even exist any more.

So Jean orders her to go upstairs, get dressed in her travelling things, get money, then come back. She exits and Jean spends a while doing sums in a notebook. Then Kristin enters. She is dressed in white ready for church.

She starts to dress him for church too but notices the mess the place is in (he explains about the peasants coming and dancing there), notices he’s tired (he says he was up all night talking to Miss Julie), notices the two glasses of wine (yes, he says they drank a bit). And then, with that woman’s intuition, she guesses that they had sex, and he admits it.

Inevitably this triggers a telling-off in which Kristin tells him how vulgar and disgusting he’s been, how disappointed in Miss Julie she is, and vows she won’t stay in this house a minute longer. In fact she means at the next quarter day, in October. Not being English the situation doesn’t blow her mind and she still insists that they, Jean and Kristin, are going to be married. But if they’re going to leave the estate she says, he’ll have to think about getting another job and runs through a list of very low class demeaning jobs like being a doorman. Obviously we’re meant to compare this with all the big poetic ambitions he described to Julie, running a hotel on Lake Como and all.

The sun has now risen on Sunday morning. They hear walking about upstairs and Jean plants the idea that it might be the Count returned without telling anyone. Kristin hurries back to her room and Jean signals Julie to come in. She enters the kitchen, dressed in travelling clothes with a birdcage.

She begs him to run away with her now, says she can’t face sitting on the station platform or in a railway carriage by herself, thinking everyone is watching her. But worst of all followed by all the memories of the happy midsummer day celebrations of her girlhood, oh it’s the memories which will haunt her.

He says Yes, OK, let’s leave right now with what we’re standing in. But she insists they take along the cage with her pet bird (a siskin), the only thing she loves any more, while he, of course, absolutely refuses. She can’t leave the bird to languish behind her and so in a hysterical few seconds she finds herself agreeing to it being killed. Jean seizes the bird out of her hand, takes it to the kitchen chopping block, raises the axe and decapitates it.

Julie shrieks and runs over to stare at the blood, transfixed. This leads to a really intense, half-demented, page-long speech in which she not only declares that she now hates Jean but wishes to see his brains on the chopping block, wishes to see his penis cut off and floating in his blood, to drink from his skull, to roast his heart and eat it whole!

She declares she’s changed her mind. She’s not going to run away. In a surge of self-destructive fury she wants her father the Count to find out everything, for her father to find his desk broken open and all his money stolen, to call the police and for her to confess everything, everything! And then he’ll have a stroke and die and it’ll be the end of the line and their coat of arms will be broken on the coffin and he, Jean, will end his days in gaol!

Amazing speech! I bet actresses love playing it!

Jean mock applauds but at that moment Kristin re-enters. As I say none of them are English so there’s no weeping and wailing over sexual morality. Instead Julie runs over to Kristin and optimistically calls her the only friend she has left in the world and begs her to save her from that monster (Jean). (Jean calmly goes over into his room to have a shave.)

Kristin regards her coldly, so Julie has a brainwave. What if all three of them ran away to Italy. They could all three set up a hotel with Julie funding it, Jean managing it and Kristin supervising the food?

She launches into another page-long monologue, a rehash of all the images Jean used in his fantasy of running a hotel earlier on, speeding up, faster and faster, the images tumbling out of her mouth in truncated phrases until something snaps and she starts to slow down and admits about the rain and the hard work and hesitates and then finally breaks off.

Phlegmatic Kristin has listened to this hysterical rhodomontade and simply asks Julie if she actually believes anything she’s just said. Crushed, Julie slumps into a chair and puts her head in her hands and says she doesn’t believe in anything any more!

Jean comes in from his room, razor in hand. Kristin turns to him and says, So you were thinking of running away with that, indicating the pathetic weeping wretch who was Julie. Jean suggests she a bit more respectful of her superior. Superior!

Jean and Kristin have a fight in which she points out how lowly he really is, selling oats at the estate gates while he accuses her of creaming money off the household budget and taking bribes from the butcher. Still coming to church? No, he thinks he’ll stay here now.

Kristin says she’s going to church and she’s going to pray the Lord for forgiveness, for herself and for some she knows, pointing at the other two. Julie asks, wonderingly, if she believes all that. Yes Kristin does, simply and uncomplicatedly, believe in the religion of her childhood. God saves sinners, and she exits, with the parting shot that she’s going to tell the groom not to let any of the horses out…in case certain people should be thinking about leaving before the Count gets home.

For the umpteenth time Julie asks Jean what she should do, can he see any way out? For someone of her class who has so degraded herself…he hesitates.

Julie has picked the cut-throat razor Jean had been shaving with up off the table. Aha. After all this talk of no way out and being trapped and total despair, what do you think she’s going to do with a razor? Should she…and she makes a gesture as if cutting her throat. Jean says he couldn’t do it because he’s a man, which triggers Julie into delivering a last great soliloquy summarising her personality and plight:

JEAN: Have you never loved your father, Miss Julie?
JULIE: Yes, very much. But I’ve hated him too. I must have done so without realising it. It was he who brought me up to feel contempt for my own sex, as a half-woman and half-man. Who’s to blame for all this? My father? My mother? Myself? But I have no self of my own. I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother and this last idea, that everyone’s equal – I got from him, my fiancé – which is why I called him a swine. How can it be my own fault, then? Shift all the blame onto Jesus as Kristin did? — No, I’m too proud for that, and too intelligent — thanks to my father’s teachings — and all that about a rich man not getting into heaven, that’s a lie — Kristin’s got money in the savings bank, she won’t get in at any rate! Whose fault is it? — What’s it matter to us whose fault it is; I’m still the one who’ll have to bear the blame, suffer the consequences. (p.108)

Suddenly things really speed up when there’s suddenly two rings on the bell which has been sitting silent on the wall all this time. Jean jumps up as if stung and goes to the speaking tube. We hear him saying yes sir, no sire, at once sir, and he is obviously talking to the Count who has obviously returned.

Julie is on tenterhooks because she thinks he’ll have discovered his broken-into desk and her burglary but instead he just wanted his coffee and boots. Julie is relieved but only temporarily. What can she do? She cannot leave and cannot stay, can’t live, can’t die. She begs Jean to order her what to do, to order her ‘like a dog’. (Her journey of abasement has now taken her down below the level of human.)

But the Count’s return has weirdly disempowered Jean too. he says he is incapable of giving orders. So Julie kinkily suggests they role play, better, that he practices hypnosis on her. Yes, he feels like she’s being hypnotised, the room feels like it’s full of smoke, his eyes are burning like red coals, yes, she is falling under his influence, yes it’s so warm and light (she says as the dawn sunlight falls full on her face) and peaceful…

Jean picks up the razor and hands it to her and tells her it’s…a broom. She must go now, out to the barn and…he whispers something in her ear…Thank you, she says, but the play actually ends with Jean still agonising and wailing that he, too, lacks strength, is a slave to the bell, if only he could mute the bell with wads of paper, but it isn’t the bell, it’s the commanding will behind it and…now…while there’s still time…quick…before it’s too late…before the truth comes out…before the police are called…

All this time he had been cringing but now he masters himself and straightens up, telling them both there is no other way. And then, as she had begged, he gives her a firm unambiguous order: Go!

And she exists towards the barn where she will cut her throat.

Michael Robinson’s introduction

Robinson is a leading Strindberg scholar having, among other achievements, edited Strindberg’s selected letters and selected essay, and it shows. His introduction and notes are extremely focused, erudite and illuminating. It’s worth buying this edition for the clarity and range of his analysis. From his introduction to ‘Miss Julie’ I took the following points:

In media res

‘Miss Julie’ throws the audience straight into the action. There’s no introduction to the leading characters, no build-up to the party in the barn, it’s already half-way through when Jean staggers back from it. It’s obviously conscious artifice but may also reflect the fact that he wrote the play in just two weeks, July to early August 1888.

It represents Strindberg’s major achievement as a naturalist writer for the theatre… (Introduction, p.xiii)

Unpublishable

The language is so ‘naturalistically’ coarse that his usual publisher refused to publish it and the play had to wait 18 years for its first performance.

The Preface

Strindberg’s extended Preface to it ‘remains the single most important manifesto of naturalism in the theatre. This is partly because it is a study of individual behaviour under the pressure of heredity, history and environment, all elements which Jean and Julie describe at length about themselves.

Zola

To some extent this was to please the French novelist and leader of the school of Naturalism, Émile Zola. Strindberg had sent Zola a copy of his previous play, ‘The Father’, but Zola replied that he found the characters too abstract and ahistorical, lacking a properly realised social setting. So ‘Miss Julie’ set out to remedy this shortcoming. And which is why in the Preface Strindberg lists no fewer than 13 hereditary and environmental factors which drive Julie’s behaviour.

True story

Strindberg claimed the plot of ‘Miss Julie’ was based on a true-life event but never specified what it was allowing scholars ever since to speculate. Robinson gives details of three notorious incidents and characters from the period, before going on to say that the play in fact, as with all Strindberg’s works, mostly reflected his interests at the time.

Siri von Essen

In particular it drew on the class dynamics of his own affair with Siri von Essen. While Strindberg was the son of a serving girl (as described in the first volume of his recent autobiography, ‘The Son of a Servant’, 1886), Siri von Essen came from an old Finnish-Swedish family of landed gentry and was married to a baron when Strindberg first met her. In his autobiographical novel, ‘A Madman’s Defence’ (1895) Strindberg was to describe the seduction of the aristocrat by the servant in ways which echo ‘Miss Julie’.

Theory of the mind

Above and beyond the naturalism he was at such pains to emphasise, Strindberg’s conception of Miss Julie reflects his developing theory of psychology. From his studies in contemporary psychology and philosophy (he had just been introduced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche), Strindberg had developed the notion of ‘characterless characters’, that humans don’t have one fixed and recognisable character, but instead:

‘an ensemble of reflexes , a complex of urges, drives and instincts [which are] alternately suppressed and unleashed’ (quoted p.xvii)

In the Preface Strindberg has another go at expressing the notion of the self as:

‘conglomerates of past and present stages of culture, bits out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once very fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as a human soul is patched together’ (quoted p.xvii)

Elsewhere he was to describe it as the bricolage (‘something constructed or from a diverse range of things’) of the modern self. You can see how this points towards what we think of the distinctly early twentieth century, Modernist conception of the self, broken into fragments in everything from cubism to Joyce’s Ulysses, but already present here in Strindberg’s thinking as early as 1888.

Symbols

Lastly, Robinson notes the use of fairly obvious literary references throughout the play to provide depths and resonances. Thus the love affair of the servant and the high-born lady echoes the swineherd and princess of the fairy tale. It invokes the Greek myth of (the hunter) Actaeon and (the goddess) Diana, a direct reference because Julie’s thoroughbred bitch which mates with the gamekeeper’s mongrel is named Diana. In their dialogue the pair invoke the example of the high-born Pharaoh’s wife who falls for the lowly slave Joseph.

More profoundly the fall of Julie from her position of confident command re-enacts The Fall of Man, a context created by Jean’s extended description of how, as a boy, he broke into the Count’s walled garden which he regarded as Paradise. And it was full of apple trees. And he stole an apple. So a burst of Biblical underpinning right there.

Absent God

Lastly, you could argue that the God who is absent from the drama of The Fall (played out by Adam, Eve and the serpent alone) is represented by the Count, who never appears, or is even heard, in the entire play, and yet whose presence looms over it, invoked repeatedly throughout the dialogue, reducing Jean to quaking fear at the thought of his commands and incapacitating Julie with terror.

Credit

I read ‘Miss Julie‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’ translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

Strindberg reviews

The Father (1887)
Miss Julie (1888)
Dance of Death (1900)
The Ghost Sonata (1907)

Play reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on October 16, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Sweden, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/16/miss-julie-august-strindberg/

The Father by August Strindberg (1887)

NURSE: Why do two people have to torture each other to death?

In the English-speaking world August Strindberg (1849 to 1912) is famous for a handful of plays characterised by intense plots and hysterical characters. But in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translator Michael Robinson is at pains to point out that this handful of dramas is just a fraction of the output which makes Strindberg such a major literary figure in his native Sweden.

For a start Strindberg wrote what is widely considered the first modern Swedish novel, ‘The Red Room’ (1879) but he also wrote weighty histories, short stories, poems, essays, scientific studies, sociology, books on occultism and more. At some points he dropped writing altogether and devoted himself to painting, creating at least 117 accredited works which push beyond Victorian realism into an early Expressionism, especially his depictions of stormy seascapes.

Back to the plays, Strindberg wrote more than 60 and in a wide variety of styles or genres, starting with plays about Swedish history and moving onto naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and then, in his later pieces, experimental pieces which anticipate expressionist and surrealist techniques.

The Father

Act 1

This is a play about a very unhappy marriage. Adolf is a middle-aged captain in the cavalry. He lives at home but still has authority over a company of soldiers. Twenty years ago he married Laura, the sister of the parson who he enjoys chatting to. But Adolf and Laura are at daggers drawn. They have been married for 20 years and the marriage has degenerated into outright hatred.

The Captain is extremely rude, brusque and controlling towards her, controlling her movements, monitoring every penny she spends. Slowly it emerges the enmity is rooted in a religious divide. Laura, her mother and the Captain’s old maid, Margret, are all devout Christians. The Captain, on the other hand, is a freethinking atheist. More than that he’s a would-be scientist. He is undertaking serious research into the mineralogy of meteorites using a spectroscope. Typically, his wife misinterprets this as a mad claim that he can see life on other planets through a microscope.

Thus, in conversation with the pastor, the Captain gives vent to venomously misogynist sentiments, claiming it’s like living in a cage full of tigers and:

CAPTAIN: It’s man against woman, all day long, without end… (p.8)

What’s brought the situation to a head is the couple’s furious argument about what to do with their daughter, Bertha, aged 17. Laura wants her to stay in the household, subject to the Christian influence of her, her mother and maid. There’s also talk of indulging Bertha’s alleged talent at painting.

The Captain, on the contrary, wants to get his daughter out of this snakepit of superstition, away from ‘a bunch of ignorant and superstitious women’, to send her to lodge with an atheist lawyer in town, and to have her trained as a schoolteacher.

When a new young doctor arrives, Dr Östermark. Laura has engineered his arrival, having forced the old doctor to retire. Now she makes sure to meet him first and brief him about her husband’s ‘madness’ but the doctor in facts acts as a kind of chorus and intermediary. He hears both sides giving their versions of the story. For example he listens to the Captain complaining that his scientific researches are being hampered because the booksellers he’s sent off to for books he needs haven’t replied. Later the doctor finds out from Laura that she has been intercepting the Captain’s mail and destroying these very letters. So when the captain calls Laura his ‘enemy’ it’s not far from the truth. There really is a war between them.

In a big argument the captain, in his rigid legalistic way, insists that a father has complete and utter control over his child, to which Laura malevolently replies, well, what it Bertha isn’t your child, if I was unfaithful? Then all the captain’s high and mighty legal rights evaporate.

Act 2

He’s so infuriated he goes out for an extended sleigh ride. This gives Laura an evening with the new doctor to turn him against her husband. She tells the doctor it was the captain’s paranoid notion that Bertha isn’t really his own child. She tells him the captain has a track record of worrying about his sanity going back years, and the doctor is taken in by all this and takes her side.

When he still doesn’t return, Laura sets the maid Margret to sit up for him and she’s joined by Bertha who can’t sleep. She asks if it’s true that her father is ill and the maid confirms it, ill in the head. Of course the captain isn’t mentally ill he’s just a strict angry man, but the play shows us all the women in his household ganging up on him.

Margret packs Bertha off to bed and the captain returns from his ride. He goes straight to his photography album to look at photos of him and Bertha. He asks Margret if they look related, him and Berth, and questions the maid about the father of her child. Clearly he’s rattled by Laura’s suggestion that Bertha isn’t his daughter.

The doctor had stayed on to wait for the captain’s return and now they have an intense discussion about the nature of paternity. The captain talks about studies into crossbreeding horses and zebras. The doctor quotes Goethe who apparently said that every man must take the paternity of his children on trust to which the captain immediately responds:

CAPTAIN: Trust? Where a woman’s concerned? That’s risky. (p.30)

And then speechifies about the absurdity of paternity, asking the doctor if the very idea of a father walking along the street hand in hand with his children isn’t somehow absurd. He tells two stories about women he’s met who’s turned out to be immoral and seducible.

CAPTAIN: That’s the danger, you see, their instinct for villainy is quite unconscious. (p.31)

The introduction had mentioned Strindberg’s reputation for misogyny but it’s something else to be subjected to a play, and a character, so devoted to expressing an endless list of accusations against woman.

Anyway the scene with the doctor ends oddly, with an unnatural angularity to it. In fact it’s symptomatic of the way the relations between all the characters are oddly unrelaxed, feel like the speeches of puppets.

DOCTOR: Good night, then, Captain. I’m afraid. I can be of no further use in this case.
CAPTAIN: Are we enemies?
DOCTOR: Far from it. It’s just a pity we can’t be friends. Good night. (p.32)

The doctor exists and the captain goes over to the door and calls Laura in, for he realises she was listening just outside. He tells her he’s been to the post office and discovered that she’s been tampering with his outgoing and incoming mail, and also understands she’s been embarked on a campaign to persuade everyone he’s mad. As I say, the dialogue has a kind of programmatic, schematic aspect to it:

CAPTAIN: I won’t appeal to your feelings, for you don’t have any, that’s your strength. I do, however, appeal to your self-interest.

The scene gets odder for the captain lays out the possibility that all her scheming will actually drive him mad. But she must consider. If he goes mad he will lose his position in the army, then where will she be? If he goes mad he might commit suicide in which case she’ll lose his life insurance.

LAURA: Is this a trap?
CAPTAIN. Of course. It’s up to you whether you walk round it or stick your head in it.

The captain proposes an armistice. His terms are that she frees him from his doubts about Bertha’s parentage: is he the father? And. characteristically, Laura doesn’t respond at all like a real person would, but instead enters into the elaborate fencing, the strategising, as if in a game of chess, about which response suits her aims best.

The captain starts to rant. He compares himself to a slave who has slaved away and ruined his health and all for someone else’s child. He’s served 17 years hard labour in this cruel servitude. He works himself into such a state that he starts crying. He describes himself as a child in his helplessness before her scheming. And Laura walks over and strokes the hair of her poor man-baby and he goes into a kind of trance of remembrance, remembering how, when they married, he was a big tough officer on the parade ground but at home completely capitulated to her will ‘as to a higher, more gifted being’ (p.36).

Laura joins the reverie, describing how she felt like the mother of her man-baby but going on to explain how revolted she felt after sex because the pure mother had degraded herself to become the mistress – Ugh! So he tried to regain her by asserting his masculinity. But, Laura points out, that was his mistake. Again it all has the schematicness of a PowerPoint presentation.

LAURA: Yes but that was your mistake. The mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy; love between the sexes is a battle. Don’t go thinking I gave myself; I didn’t give, I took – what I wanted. (p.37)

Yes, the captain admits she had total power over him, could bend him to her will, could persuade him that a potato was a peach. But he awoke to his shame and sought to reassert his identity through some great act. But there was no war so it couldn’t be a military exploit. And that’s why he turned to science, hoping to make his name with his discoveries. And that is why her cutting off his letters to the booksellers is such a crime against the core of who he wants to be.

He bluntly asks her, Do you hate me? and she replies yes, when he ‘acts the man’, to which he gives another drastically misogynist reply:

CAPTAIN: It’s like racial hatred. If we really are descended from the apes, at least it must have been from two different species. (p.38)

It is a life or death struggle. At which Laura plays her trump card. She has an incriminating letter a copy of which has been sent to the court. She is going to use it to have him committed. What letter? he says. The one he wrote to the old doctor in which he discussed his fears for his own sanity. And now that he has served his function, he can be dispensed with, he’s no longer needed, as she exits through the door and the enraged captain throws the lighted lantern after her.

Act 3

Act 3 opens in the same living room, that evening. The door out of the room is jammed shit with a door wedged against it. Laura and the nurse are rummaging through the captain’s things. They both refer to the noise of pacing, banging, and then sawing, which they can hear from the room overhead. The implication is that the captain has retreated to (or been locked in?) his room.

The pastor arrives and we witness Laura lying to him as she has lied throughout the play, claiming the captain threw a lighted lamp ‘in her face’ whereas we saw with our own eyes him merely throwing it at the door she was closing after her. Violent, but not as precisely cruelly violent as she describes.

Obviously appalled, the pastor asks what she’s doing and she explains she’s informing all and sundry that the captain’s had a breakdown into madness, starting with his commanding officer in the cavalry. the doctor has sent to the local hospital for a straitjacket.

But remember the pastor is the captain’s friend. More importantly, he’s Laura’s brother and knows what a spoilt, cunning, scheming person she’s been since a girl. Now he directly accuses her of manipulating the situation so she can get her husband committed, take charge of the family money and have Bertha raised the way she wants. He calls her marvellously strong-willed and completely untroubled by a conscience but she gives as good as she gets, demanding, ‘Prove it!’ and of course he can’t.

Enter the new doctor who promptly says a) an assault has been carried out and so it’s entirely Laura’s decision, how she wants to proceed, which will decide whether her husband is sent to prison or an asylum. Under the pastor’s beady gaze she hesitates to condemn the captain so the doctor takes the initiative and says the asylum will be best; even a prison sentence will end and the man would be released to present a renewed threat. From the asylum he will never be released.

The doctor has brought a straitjacket with him and shows Laura, the nurse and pastor how to put it on a patient and buckle it to a chair or sofa. Question is, which one of them will jump the captain from behind and quickly wrap it round him? They all demur at which point very conveniently enters the common soldier Nöjd who’s arrived with a message from the colonel. The doctor is in the middle of asking him to straitjacket the captain when the nurse intervenes. She can’t bear some rough soldier to do it so she’ll do it.

At which moment, with the precision of a well-oiled watch, there’s a knock at the internal door and the captain himself enters.

The captain

He isn’t obviously violent. The reverse, he’s in a very bookish mood. He’s brought a load of books with him to prove his point about the fragility of fatherhood and quotes from the Odyssey and the Bible to the effect that a man can never be totally sure that his children are his own.

The captain goes on a ranting monologue that may well indicate he’s mad. He asks the pastor and the doctor if they’re confident their children are indeed their own and reminds them of a music tutor and lodger, respectively, who their wives might have taken a fancy too, and claims he sees them both going pale, and mockingly says he can see the cuckold’s horns growing on their heads.

When he goes on to say that the one big hope he had to be a scientist has been stolen from him and so his life is now empty and meaningless, I realised he is like Hamlet, and with that realisation wondered if the entire play is a sort of ‘modern’ domestic version of Hamlet, not least in its obsession with ‘true’ fathers. His monologue ends with abandonment:

CAPTAIN: Do what you will with me! I no longer exist! (p.47)

Then doctor and the parson sneak out, solely to allow Bertha to enter and for their to be a twisted father-and-daughter scene. This starts off sensible with him saying he doesn’t care about throwing the lamp at her mother but it descends into what sounds like genuine mania when he rants that she has two souls but must only have one, she must love him with all her soul, she must become one with her.

And deepens when he says he is a cannibal and wants to eat her, compares himself to Saturn who ate his own children. He then makes the Hamlet connection explicit by paraphrasing Shakespeare:

CAPTAIN: To eat or be eaten! That is the question. (p.48)

At which point the captain goes over to a wall with guns on it and takes down a pistol. he quickly discovers the women have removed all the bullets from it. At this moment the nurse enters and leads him like a child away from the wall and sits him in a chair. Then she gets the straitjacket.

She now recites memories from his boyhood, reminding him of the time they had to coax him into handing over a kitchen knife he’d got hold of (and she removes the gun from his grasp) and then how they had to coax him into his shirt by pretending it was made of gold – and while she weaves a spell of memories the captain, as in a trance, allows her to put him into the straitjacket.

Moments later he snaps out of it but it is too late, he is bound and straitened and cannot escape. When he asks why, the nurse replies to stop him killing his child to which he replies – genuinely bonkers now – why not kill her, at least that way she would go to heaven.

At his point Nöjd re-enters. The captain orders him to attack the nurse and free him, but Nöjd can’t, making the sexist point that a man just can’t attack a woman, ‘it’s in a man’s blood, like religion’ (p.50)

Laura enters. Am I your enemy? she asks. You’re all my enemy, the captain replies, every woman he’s ever known: his mother who didn’t want to bear him; his sister who bulled him; the first woman he slept with who gave him venereal disease; his daughter who chose her mother over him; and now her, his wife – all enemies. The captain is given a little rant about how modern love has gone to the dogs.

CAPTAIN: In the old days a man married a wife; now he forms a business partner with a career woman or moves in with a friend. – And then he seduces the partner or rapes the friend. Whatever happened to lovely, healthy sensual love? It died somewhere along the way…(p.51)

As you know, I despise all expressions by any author of the idea that the world is going to the dogs, that the world is, specially and uniquely in their time, going to hell, all morals lost, all values abandoned, modern life bankrupt yadda yadda yadda. All authors since the start of writing have expressed the same whining sentiment. All it does is convey an epic failure of imagination, a complete lack of historical awareness.

But Adolf goes beyond this to express a range of physical hallucinations. these may or may not be true of modern mental illness but they reminded me of the clichés of madness which are used in Elizabethan plays. He says he is trying to fight with shadows. He says his thoughts dissolve into thin air. He says his mind is catching fire and next second says he is cold, so terrible cold.

Laura strokes his hair while the madman remembers how they walked in spring woodlands amid flowers when they first courted. Now everything is lost. Who rules our lives? God, the pious Laura replies. He asks the nurse to lay his tunic over him (he’s lying on the sofa in a straitjacket).

He identifies with Hercules who was wrapped in a poisonous shirt by his deceitful wife. He tries to sit up to spit at the women but collapses back. He asks to lay his head on her breast. When she asks if he’d like to see his child he says he has no child, men can have no children, only women can have children which is why the future belongs to them, and he starts to pray like a child before falling backwards with a cry.

In the short last scene Laura calls in the pastor and the doctor to stand over the captain’s body. The doctor says Adolf has had a heart attack. He’s not dead but he may or may not regain consciousness. The nurse claims he was praying to God when it happened which makes the pastor perk up. The last incident in the play is cute and slick, ending it with a bit of pat symbolism like the punchline of a joke. Bertha comes running onstage:

BERTHA: [enters from the left, runs to her mother] Mother, mother!
LAURA: My child! My own child!
PASTOR: Amen.

The End.

Questions

So what just happened? Was the captain genuinely mentally unstable? Was the letter he wrote to the old doctor actually accurate? Was Laura not inventing any of it? Although we saw her explicitly lie, were her lies based on a true perception of the case?

And was he tipped over the edge, as he appeared to say at the end of Act 3, purely by the doubt Laura raised in his mind about his paternity of Bertha? She described it as a strategy of war, so was it just that one thing, the planting of the seed of doubt, which won the war for Laura?

So was the sustained misogyny of the captain’s attitude a reflection of the author’s own beliefs or, on the contrary, was the whole point that they were the hysterical rantings of an already damaged mind? Was there a conspiracy against him? Or was that the typical paranoid delusions of the mentally ill?

Michael Robinson’s introduction

Robinson is a leading Strindberg scholar having, among other achievements, edited a selected letters and selected essay, and it shows. His introduction and notes are extremely focused, erudite and illuminating. It’s worth buying this edition for the clarity and range of his analysis. From his introduction to ‘The Father’ I took the following points:

Not naturalist Although naturalist in appearance, ‘The Father’ lacks what naturalism meant for Zola or Ibsen. Zola’s method required the detailed description of the characters’ heredity and environment, the studied accumulation of biographical facts about each character which supported Zola and his school’s claims to be replacing fictional flummery with scientific objectivity.

Not Ibsen Nor does this play have much in common with Ibsen, whose plays are characterised by 1) immensely detailed description of the stage set and props, and 2) more importantly, the way a present crisis leads to a series of dramatic revelations about the past.

Present battle Instead ‘The Father’ takes place in a basic set and the past is barely referred to (except to say Laura was a stroppy child and Adolf had a difficult childhood). No, the focus is on something else, on the conflict entirely in the present, of ‘two implacable hostile minds’, bound to each other by desire and hatred. And a conflict which represents the deepest primal conflict, that between the two sexes of Homo sapiens:

LAURA: Love between the sexes is a battle… (p.37)

Indeed, on the question of the characters being epitomes or types, representatives of the two sexes, Robinson quotes from a letter Zola wrote to Strindberg explaining that it was precisely this schematic nature of ‘The Father’ which displeased him.

Soul murder In a review of Ibsen’s Romersholm, Strindberg talked about själamord meaning ‘soul murder’, describing the kind of half-conscious struggle to subjugate and defeat the other, within a destructive relationship. This is exactly what ‘The Father’ is, a battle to the death between Laura and Adolf, which requires none of the sociological detail of Zola or the revelations from the past of an Ibsen. It’s a straight fight taking place in the present.

Contemporary psychology This explains why Strindberg was a great reader of the up-to-the-minute psychology of his day, devouring books by English and French psychiatrists. These (especially the work of Jean-Martin Charcot in hypnosis which was to so influence Freud) reinforced Strindberg’s sense of the suggestibility of the human mind (a strange form of auto-hypnosis occurs at the end of his next play, ‘Miss Julie’). And it is this power we have over each other, the psychological effects we have on each other, and the way this power can be used to devastating effect, which ‘The Father’ dramatises.

Laura doesn’t just win the battle of the sexes, she wins it so comprehensively that she persuades the captain that he no longer exists (p.47).

Comments

Mad farrago, isn’t it? Now, in 2024, we are more sensitive than ever before to all aspects of misogynist and women-hating attitudes, with the result that this entire play feels off-the-scale misogynist, beyond the pale in its toxicity. Even the ‘modern’ introduction is written by a man and dates from 1998, a generation before #metoo. Imagine the articles and papers which must have been written about Strindberg by countless feminist academics over the past 30 years…

I suppose there are two or three reasons to be interested in it. 1) One is the simple historical one of understanding the impact Strindberg had at the time and in the generations of playwrights following him. the history of European drama. All I know is what’s in the introduction to this volume which I’ve summarised above.

2) The translator Michael Robinson, describes it as a relatively ‘realistic play’ but it isn’t, is it? The fencing between Adolf and Laura is entirely artificial. In the combination of precise logic and brutal gender enmity it reminded me of (what I remember of) the tragedies of Jean Racine (1639 to 1699), the logical, almost robotic statement of strategies of hatred and power coolly and calmly discussed between opponents who want to destroy each other. For me it all has a kind of weird, metallic flavour.

3) The extremity of the characters’ hatred leads to dialogue which reads like the purest melodrama. Half the dialogue given to the old maid seems designed solely to promote the claustrophobic atmosphere of doom and disaster:

Lord preserve us, whatever will be the end of this!
Oh, God have mercy on us all! Where will this end!

Lots of punctuation marks!

4) The child imagery. The play is saturated with it. The old nursemaid remembers caring for Adolf as a child. Laura and the captain remember the early days of their relationship when he was a child in her hands. At various moments when he’s angry with either of them, the captain insists he is not a child but, as has already been established, he has been and maybe in his core still is, a kind of helpless child. the extensive use of child-mother-father-parent imagery creates a complex web of dynamics and tensions, but the central one appears to be that the play’s title is deeply ironic. In many ways, the supposedly dominant, powerful Father turns out to be the most helpless and outwitted character of all.

But of course, this entire idea can easily be interpreted as a form of self-pitying male misogyny.

5) But most of all, I am sick to death of literature about the sex wars. As a man in 2024, I am sick beyond words at the saturation coverage of gender issues everywhere I look: in the art exhibitions I go to, in plays and movies, in documentaries, in TV shows, on the radio, on social media, in all newspapers and magazines, in the coverage of the US presidential election, in the coverage of the Olympics or any sport you care to mention, in the gender awareness courses I take at work, in the conversation of my wife and daughter and all their friends, I almost never get a break from the incessant non-stop discussion of gender issues, almost entirely from the point of view of angry, aggrieved feminists.

So I need a play like this – just one more rock in the Himalayan immensity of misogynist, gender-bating European literature – like I need a hole in the head.

Credit

I read The Father in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’ translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

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The Father (1887)
Miss Julie (1888)
Dance of Death (1900)
The Ghost Sonata (1907)

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