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.
Related link
Strindberg reviews
- The Father (1887)
- Miss Julie (1888)
- Dance of Death (1900)
- The Ghost Sonata (1907)
- Play reviews
Books & Boots 