The Theatre of Revolt

To all appearances, August Strindberg would seem to be the most revolutionary spirit in the theatre of revolt. Actually, that distinction must go to Ibsen, but Strindberg is certainly the most restless and experimental. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually reaching after shifting truths, he seems like a latter-day Faust with the unconscious as his laboratory — seeking the miracle of transmutation in the crucible of his tormented intellect. The metaphor is precise, for transmutation — the conversion of existing material into something higher — is the goal of all his activity, whether he works in science, turning base metals into gold, or religious philosophy, turning matter into spirit, or in drama, turning literature into music. His entire career, in fact, is a search for the philosophers’ stone of ultimate truth through the testing of varied commitments. In his theatre, where almost every new work is a new departure, he experiments with Byronic poetic plays, Naturalistic tragedies, Boulevard comedies, Maeterlinckian fairy plays, Shakespearean chronicles, Expressionistic dream plays, and Chamber works in sonata form. In his religious and political attitudes, he covers the entire spectrum of belief and unbelief, skirting positivism, atheism, Socialism, Pietism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Swedenborgian mysticism. In his scientific studies, he ranges from Darwin to the occult, from Naturalism to Supernaturalism, from physics to metaphysics, from chemistry to alchemy. His literary work is one long autobiography, whether it takes the form of confessional novels, misogynistic short stories, revolutionary verses, anguished letters, scientific treatises, theatrical manifestoes, or short plays, full-length works, double dramas, and trilogies. More than any other dramatist who ever lived, Strindberg writes himself, and the self he continually exposes is that of alienated modern man, crawling between heaven and earth, desperately trying to pluck some absolutes from a forsaken universe.

Because of his restless Romanticism, and particularly because he initiated an alternative “anti-realistic” theatre in opposition to Ibsenist “realism,” Strindberg has generally been regarded as Ibsen’s anti-mask, the nonconformist Bohemian in contrast with the stolid, practical bourgeois. At first sight, indeed, the two Scandinavians do seem separated by a much wider gulf than the boundary that divides their two countries. Compare Pillars of Society with A Dream Play. The one, tightly structured and carefully detailed, proceeds from the daylight world of domestic problems, casual discourse, and social awareness; the other, shadowy in outline and fluid in form, emerges out of a chimerical world of fantasy, delusion, and nightmare. Yet, these two plays are extreme examples of each man’s art; and the contrast between the two playwrights, while unquestionably strong, has been somewhat overemphasized at the expense of their similarities. As a matter of fact, both are part of the same dramatic movement, sharing certain general traits which have rarely been explored.

Undoubtedly, Strindberg himself is largely to blame for this unfair emphasis, since he had a tendency to define himself against Ibsen, and spent most of his career directly or indirectly attacking what he thought to be the older man’s themes and forms.¹ His hostility is understandable. When Strindberg came to artistic maturity, Ibsen was considered the master dramatist of Europe — and like all figures of authority to Strindberg, he was therefore ripe for attack. Yet, Strindberg never understood Ibsen very well, and his antagonism often seems to be based on rather willful misconstructions of the Norwegian’s work. It is clear, for example, that while Strindberg was obsessed with the conflict between the sexes, this subject hardly interested Ibsen, except as a metaphor for a wider conflict between man and society. But since Strindberg had come to regard art (and life) as a battleground in which there was no room for subtlety or neutrality, he became convinced that Ibsen was the fervent champion of his hated enemy, the emancipated woman.

The play that convinced him was, of course, A Doll’s House. For in spite of the fact that, in early years, Strindberg had identified deeply with Ibsen’s Brand, he always preferred to couple Ibsen with this more domesticated work, which he called “sick like its author.” Here he found the seedbed for that “Nora-cult” of feminism which he saw infecting Scandinavia like a loathsome pestilence; and ignoring the complexity, ambiguity, and essentially nonsexual character of A Doll’s House, he simply concluded that Ibsen was the leader of the other side, fomenting plots to undermine masculine domination. As a result of this initial misunderstanding, he mistakenly interpreted Ghosts as a treacherous attack on Captain Alving, a dead man no longer able to defend himself against character defamation;² he assumed that The Wild Duck was a libel on his family life, thinking that Ekdal’s doubtful paternity of Hedwig was meant to suggest that he, Strindberg, was not the father of his own child; and he found in Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder (two plays which did not support his convictions about Ibsen’s feminism) conclusive evidence that Ibsen had fallen under his spell and changed his views. Throughout his life, Strindberg was subject to severe paranoiac symptoms, in which fears of persecution alternated with delusions of grandeur; and while his ability to transform these symptoms into art constitutes one of the most thrilling triumphs of modern drama, his paranoiac tendencies hardly qualify him for objective evaluations of other people’s work and motives. Yet, it is Strindberg’s view of Ibsen’s subject matter, coupled with that tiresome characterization of Ibsen as a mouthpiece for social problems in realistic form, which dominates most comparisons of the two dramatists.³

If these assumptions are correct, and Ibsen is merely the champion of bourgeois realism and the emancipated woman, then the gap between the two men is unbreachable. Since the assumptions are quite wrong, let us attempt to close the gap a little. Where do Ibsen and Strindberg join hands in the theatre of revolt? Quite clearly, in their basic artistic attack. Both are essentially autobiographical writers, exorcising their furies by dramatizing their spiritual conflicts; both are subject to a powerful dualism which determines the changing direction of their themes and forms; and both are attracted to the more elemental aspects of human nature. But above all, both are Romantic rebels whose art is the unrelieved expression of their revolt.

In the beginning of his career, in fact, Strindberg’s point of departure is almost indistinguishable from Ibsen’s. “I am Jean-Jacques’s intime when it comes to a return to nature,” he writes to a friend in 1880. “I should like to join him and turn everything upside down to see what lies at bottom; I think we are so much entangled, so terribly much regulated that things can’t be put right, but must be burnt up, blasted, and then begun afresh.” Two years later, at the age of thirty-three, Strindberg puts these sentiments into verse form. In a poem called “Esplanadsystemet” (The Building Program), he envisions the young razing everything to the ground, while a respectable pillar of society looks on with disapproval:

“What! This is the spirit of the times! Demolishing houses!
Dreadful! Dreadful! What about constructive activity?” —
“We’re tearing down to let in light and air;
Don’t you think that constructive enough!”⁴

Even as late as 1898, in The Road to Damascus, Part II, Strindberg — through the mouth of the Stranger — is still expressing his determination to “paralyze the present order, to disrupt it,” envisioning himself as “the destroyer, the dissolver, the world incendiary.”

In these images of demolition, the destructive fantasies of a total revolutionist, Strindberg joins Ibsen in his uncompromising revolt against modern life. Finding common roots in Rousseau and the Romantics, each hopes to redeem mankind from spiritual emptiness through desperate remedies: Strindberg by clearing away rotten buildings, Ibsen by torpedoing the Ark — both by unremitting warfare on all existing social, political, and religious institutions. The negative, individualistic, and essentially antisocial quality of these attacks exposes their metaphysical sources. Both playwrights begin as messianic rebels, animated by strong religious needs, and determined to war on the God of the old while advancing towards something new. Strindberg’s early plays — works like The Freethinker, The Outlaw, and Master Olof — are often strongly reminiscent of Ibsen’s Brand and Emperor and Galilean in their rebellion against God, sometimes even embodying open attacks on God as the author of madness and the father of evil. In the epilogue to Master Olof, for example, it is God who maliciously introduces misery into the world (“The creatures who live [on Earth],” He declares, “will believe themselves gods like ourselves, and it will be our pleasure to watch their struggles and vanities”), while it is Lucifer, the rebellious son who, Prometheus-like, tries to bring good to man, and is outlawed for his pains.

Strindberg’s identification with Lucifer, rebelling against a mad, merciless, mechanical Will, is quite clear throughout the first phase of his career. In his opposition to established authority, Strindberg also identifies with related figures like Cain, Prometheus, and Ishmael — all rebels against God — willingly, and sometimes rather theatrically, embracing their pain and torment as well. Like Ibsen voluntarily exiled from his native land, Strindberg wandered over Europe, alienated from the world of men even when most honored there. “Born with nostalgia for heaven,” he writes in Inferno, “I cried even as a child over the filthiness of existence, finding myself homeless among my parents and society.” He often describes himself as a pariah — “a beggar, a marked man, an outcast from society” (Inferno) — outlawed from paradise, his brow marked with the sign of the rebellious son. Strindberg’s admiration for religious rebels presses him well beyond the usual revolutionary postures to an embrace of Satanism, under the spell of which he practices black arts, worships the occult, and studies the transmigration of souls, pursuits which he considers dangerous and diabolical. As the Confessor says, in The Road to Damascus: “This man is a demon, who must be kept confined. He belongs to the dangerous race of rebels; he’d misuse his gifts, if he could, to do evil.” Strindberg’s flair for self-dramatization leads him to exaggerate his demonic activities, for they were really harmful to nobody but himself (he suffered severely from sulphur burns). But there is no doubt that he thought himself pledged to Lucifer by a kind of Mephistophelian pact.

This seems like a much more radical form of rebellion than anything found in Ibsen. But as Strindberg implies in Inferno (“Ever since childhood,” he writes, “I have looked for God and found the devil”), his revolt against authority is really the reverse of his desire for authority, just as his Satanism is actually an inverted form of Christianity. In consequence of this shaky posture, Strindberg’s revolt is always a little nervous and uncertain, rather like the act of a man in constant dread of retribution. And while Ibsen’s messianism remains consistent, Strindberg’s is gradually tempered by his fears of divine revenge from an omnipotent power. Even when he considers himself a freethinking atheist, these fears are never far from the surface. He became an unbeliever, as he declares in Inferno, when “the unknown powers let slip their hold on the world, and gave no more sign of life.” But when these “unknown powers” do begin to appear to him in the ’nineties, his messianism becomes less and less defiant, until he finally becomes convinced that the powers are personally guiding his destiny, and revealing themselves to him in every material object.

Even then, however, vestiges of his messianic defiance remain. He wishes to do the will of these nameless authorities, but even in his moments of submission he “feels rebellious and challenges heaven with doubts.” Reflecting on the wayward history of his beliefs, he even begins to blame the powers for his own spiritual uncertainty:

You have directed my destiny badly; you have brought me up to chastise, to overthrow idols, to stir up revolt, and then you withdraw your protection from me, and deliver me over to a ridiculous recantation! . . . When young I was sincerely pious, and you made me a free-thinker. Out of the free-thinker you made an atheist, and out of the atheist a religious man. Inspired by humanitarians, I advocated socialism. Five years later, you showed me the absurdity of socialism; you have made all my enthusiasms seem futile. And supposing that I again become religious, I am certain that in another ten years, you will reduce religion to absurdity.
Do not the gods play games with us poor mortals . . . !

(Inferno)

These tones reveal the equivocal nature of his surrender. He would like to be obedient; yet he cannot suppress the suspicion that the powers are malevolent humorists who kill men for their sport. Thus, even when Strindberg seems to have repudiated his revolt, he is still rebelling against the authorities he both hates and fears.

On the other hand, his surrender has made him modify the form of his revolt. For just as Ibsen, trying to discipline the messianic tendencies of Brand, disguises his rebellion in the objective social mode of Ghosts, so Strindberg adapts his messianic rebellion, later in his career, to conform with his new desire to submit. The cry of pain one hears in the passage above, in fact, is to become Strindberg’s most characteristic tone in such later plays as Easter, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata — for there his revolt is existential, directed against the meaninglessness and contradictions of human existence. Thus, while Strindberg and Ibsen both begin at the same point of departure, they soon develop in different directions. Ibsen, continuing to believe in the importance of the will, begins to measure his rebellious ideals against the social reality: he seeks a spiritual and moral revolution which will transform the soul of man. Strindberg, coming to believe in a strict determinism (the higher powers), loses faith in his rebellious ideals: he seeks deeper spiritual insights in order to resolve his own painful dilemmas. Ibsen continues to reject God; Strindberg wavers between affirmation and negation, finally giving way to a melancholy fatalism which one never finds in Ibsen. For while Ibsen works through to a Greek tragic form, his rebellion remains strong and constant. Strindberg finally works through to a Greek tragic mood, his rebellion partially dissipated by his effort to accept and understand.

On the other hand, while Ibsen is the more faithful rebel, Strindberg is the more faithful Romantic, for he will make fewer concessions to the world beyond his imagination. It is here, in the comparative degree of their involvement in the world of others, that the essential difference between the two playwrights is exposed, for Ibsen offers a superficial deference to external reality which Strindberg totally refuses. This is not to say that one is objective and the other subjective — both are essentially subjective writers, insofar as each makes his own internal conflicts the subject of his art. But since Ibsen’s resistance to the demands of his unconscious is stronger than Strindberg’s, and more disciplined by the real world, he is willing to disguise his spiritual autobiography in the conflicts of semiobjectified characters, while Strindberg remains the unashamed hero of his work, endorsing his psychic, marital, and religious attitudes through the medium of his art. Consequently, while Ibsen will measure the consequences of rebellion on the happiness of others, Strindberg concentrates almost exclusively on the conflicts in the rebel’s own soul.

In other words, Classicism is a mode totally alien to Strindberg, even when he seems to be exploiting it. For even the techniques of “Naturalism” are, for him, a springboard for his unabashed Romanticism. Unlike Ibsen, he is unable to test his subjective responses on the objective world because, also unlike Ibsen, he doesn’t much believe in the objective world. Anticipating Pirandello, Strindberg works on the assumption that the world beyond his imagination has no fixed form or truth. It becomes “real” only when observed through the subjective eyes of the beholder, and (here he differs somewhat from Pirandello) especially “real” when the beholder has poetic, clairvoyant, or visionary powers. Strindberg’s subjective relativism explains why his art always turns inexorably in on himself and his own responses; in a world of elusive truth, only the self has any real validity. Thus, if Ibsen is primarily concerned with self-realization — or blasting avenues of personal freedom through the cramped quarters of modern society — Strindberg is primarily concerned with self-expression — or justifying the superiority of the poet’s vision in a world without meaning or coherence. Both are Romantic goals and closely allied. But since Strindberg lacks even Ibsen’s grudging respect for external reality, he is by far the more self-involved Romantic, one who worships the “cult of the self” (as he puts it in Inferno) as “the supreme and ultimate end of existence.” In his personal life, this ego-worship often takes the form of severe psychotic delusions in which Strindberg loses his grip on reality altogether; and it robs his art of such Ibsenist virtues as self-discipline, detachment, and dialectical power. But it provides Strindberg with a Dionysian vitality which carries us along in spurts of ecstasy, lyricism, irrationality, cruelty, and despair — and a dramatic technique which, in his early plays, is almost totally free from the need for balance or moderation, and, in his later ones, has almost totally burst the bonds of restraining rules.

Because of his commitment to a subjective art, it is impossible to analyze Strindberg’s work without some reference to his life, especially to that dualism which, like Ibsen’s, plagued him throughout his career. In Strindberg’s case, this dualism was psychological rather than philosophical, and began at the moment of his birth. The child of a tailor’s daughter who had seen domestic service, and a déclassé shipping agent who claimed to have noble blood, Strindberg was inclined to regard these circumstances as the source of all his later troubles, interpreting them in a manner which is always psychologically revealing, if not always psychologically accurate. In The Son of a Servant, for example, Strindberg expressed his conviction that — since he was conceived against his parents’ will (i.e., illegitimately) — he was born without a will (i.e., essentially passive and feminine). And since he identified his father and mother with the highest and lowest classes of society, he concluded that this inheritance accounted for his vacillation between peasant servility and aristocratic arrogance.

On top of this, Strindberg’s childhood followed an almost Classical Oedipal pattern. He adored his mother with a passion he was later to call (with astonishing frankness) “an incest of the soul,” and he hated his father as a powerful and threatening rival. Like Strindberg’s feelings throughout his life, however, these early emotions were confused and contradictory. Since his mother had rejected him in favor of his brother Axel, he sometimes detested her as well — feeling at times that she was the dearest creature on earth, at other times that she was depriving him of love and nourishment.⁵ And since he generally measured his own weakness by his father’s strength, he tempered his hatred of the older man with a kind of cringing fear and respect.

The consequences of Strindberg’s ambivalence towards his father were later to be realized in his ambivalence towards all male authority, notably in his alternating rebellion against and submission to the higher powers. His ambivalence towards his mother had a different effect, determining the shape of his love life and his general attitudes towards women. Like those Romantics described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, Strindberg had split his mother in two — the chaste Madonna and the erotic Belle Dame Sans Merci — and, unconsciously recapitulating his early feelings later in life, he vacillated between an intense worship of the female and an even more intense misogyny. Strindberg was himself aware, in more lucid moments, that his misogyny was “only the reverse side of my fearful attraction towards the other sex” (in his early years he had even been a partisan of free love, companionate marriages, and feminism!). Yet, caught in a tight neurotic web, he was never able to transcend his ambivalence, and alternated between regarding women as evil vampires, sucking out his manhood, and virtuous maternal types who gave him the comfort he so sorely craved.

Sometimes he revealed this ambivalence by dividing women into two distinct classes: (1) the “third sex” — composed of emancipated females — whom he detested for their masculinity, infidelity, competitiveness, and unmaternal attitudes, and (2) older, more motherly women (generally sexless) — such as Mamma Uhl, his mother-in-law, and the Mother Superior of the hospital of St. Louis ⁶ — whom he adored for their kindness and compassion. More often he tried to combine the two types in one person — and when he succeeded, he usually married her. For he was always attracted to women he could love for their maternal qualities and hate for their masculinity, reacting to them with bewildering changeability.⁷ Consider his violent feelings towards his first wife, Siri Von Essen, as described by Strindberg in Confessions of a Fool. So long as she was married to another man, and their union remained “spiritual,” Strindberg worshiped her as a superior being — idealizing her aristocratic bearing, “white skin,” and ethereal purity (“frigidity,” according to her unromantic first husband, Baron Wrangel). It was Strindberg, too, who encouraged her to go on the stage, but as soon as they were married, he began to accuse her of careerism and competitiveness, not to mention lesbianism, infidelity, drunkenness, coquetry, uncleanliness, bearing him another man’s child, doubting his sanity, trying to dominate him, and not keeping the accounts! In his next two marriages — to Frida Uhl, an ambitious journalist, and Harriet Bosse, a lovely young actress almost thirty years his junior — the pattern repeated itself, though with diminishing intensity, as Strindberg gradually realized that his ambivalent feelings stemmed from his own psychotic disorder.

Strindberg’s tendency to find a comforting mother and an evil wanton in every woman he loved accounts for his curious attitude towards erotic relations. He expects to have his spirit elevated through romantic love, only to find he has been dragged down into the mud:

In woman I sought an angel, who could lend me wings, and I fell into the arms of an earth-spirit, who suffocated me under mattresses stuffed with feathers of wings! I sought an Ariel and I found a Caliban; when I wanted to rise she dragged me down; and continually reminded me of the fall. . . .

(The Road to Damascus, Part III)

What he is describing here is the sexual experience; and what he implies is a profound distaste for the sexual act. This distaste — accompanied throughout his life by a pronounced revulsion to all physical functions and secret fears for his virility — provides some clue to Strindberg’s vacillating feelings. For his hatred of the flesh was probably the consequence of his nostalgia for the spiritual purity he enjoyed during childhood, when he was permitted to love his mother with a love beyond the body. When he matured, however, and began seeking his mother in the women he married, he had to deal not only with the divided love-hate feelings he inherited from that early relationship, but also with the incest taboo. It was this taboo that caused him to transform the mother-woman into a spider-woman — he had to justify his attraction to her — and when this transformation failed, he became impotent as an unconscious defense against his own guilts.⁸ As for his obsession with female domination, Strindberg’s desire for a mother reduced him to a weak and passive dependent, while his intellect rebelled against his childlike state. In short, Strindberg wished to have the purity and passivity of the child and the masculine aggressiveness of the adult. Desiring to dominate and be dominated, seeking eros and agape in the same woman, he was the victim of contradictory needs which left him in perpetual turmoil and confusion.

I must apologize for this bare Freudian treatment of Strindberg’s dualism; but so much of it has been established, or at least suggested, by Strindberg himself⁹ that the analysis is essential, especially since the roots of Strindberg’s art are so clearly sexual and pathological. In Strindberg’s dualism, moreover, we will be able to see the nucleus not only of his sexual problems, but of his various artistic, scientific, religious, and philosophical attitudes as well. For the struggle in Strindberg’s mind between the male and the female, the father and the mother, the aristocrat and the servant, spirit and matter, aggressiveness and passivity, is the conflict which determines the direction of his career. If we project Strindberg’s dualism onto the whole of his drama, we shall be able to understand his development from Naturalism to Expressionism, from scientific materialism to religion and the supernatural, from a convinced misogynist to a resigned Stoic with compassion for all living things. We shall also understand the changing nature of Strindberg’s revolt, for his conversion from messianic prophet to an existential visionary is directly connected with the resolution of Strindberg’s conflicts after years of horrible suffering.

The mature writings of Strindberg fall into two well-defined periods, separated by the Inferno crisis — a dark night of the soul lasting five or six years, during which Strindberg wrote no dramatic works at all. To his first period (1884–1892) belong works like The Father, Miss Julie, Creditors, Comrades, and about nine one-act plays, in which the recurring subject — treated further in the essays, stories, and autobiographical novels written during this period — is the battle between men and women. Almost all of these works are conceived in a Naturalistic style, which is contradicted in execution by a number of non-Naturalistic elements — especially the author’s undisguised partisanship of the male character and the masculine position. Strindberg’s control of the Naturalistic method is further weakened by his tendency to strip away all extraneous surface details, and sometimes even to sacrifice character consistency and logical action, for the sake of his concentration on the sex war.¹⁰ Still, there is no doubt that Strindberg thinks of himself as a Naturalist during this period — not only in his approach to playwriting but in his approach to science and metaphysics as well. Having abandoned the religion of his youth, he is now a freethinker, with inclinations towards atheism; and having been converted to Darwinism, he tends to conceive of characters in terms of the survival of the fittest, natural selection, heredity, and environment. Buckle’s relativistic approach to history has taught him to doubt all absolute truths; and his interest in empirical science has encouraged him not only to experiment with the chemical qualities of matter, but even to regard human beings as objects of scientific curiosity, to be examined without pity or sentiment.

Strindberg’s conception of the war between the sexes was undoubtedly influenced primarily by the emotional crisis he was experiencing with Siri Von Essen; but his convictions about sexual relations were supported by certain philosophical sources as well, which Strindberg (like the Captain in The Father) consulted in order to find support for his attitudes. It is highly probable, for example, that Strindberg read Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes, which affirms that sexual attraction is a diabolical invention for the propagation of the race by the “will of the species . . . ready relentlessly to destroy personal happiness in order to carry out its ends” — and that the satisfaction of this will leaves the lover with “a detested companion for life.” Strindberg’s readings in Nietzsche must also have confirmed him in his sexual attitudes, for the philosopher shared many of Strindberg’s prejudices — not only against Ibsen (whom Nietzsche called “that typical old maid”) but against the emancipated woman (“Thou goest to women?” Zarathustra asks. “Do not forget thy whip!”) When Strindberg sent The Father to Nietzsche, in fact, the German philosopher replied that he was highly pleased to see “my own conception of love — with war as its means and the deathly hate of the sexes as its fundamental law . . . expressed in such a splendid fashion.”

In the next few years, a good many more Nietzschean conceptions appeared in Strindberg’s work, for he becomes the single most important influence on Strindberg in this period. Under this influence (which lasted until the philosopher went mad, and sent Strindberg a letter signed Nietzsche Caesar!), Strindberg continues to develop a rigorously masculine program, which consists in despising weakness, worshiping the superhuman, and regarding life as a war to the death between master and slave, strong and weak, possessed and dispossessed. Strindberg also shares with Nietzsche an overwhelming contempt for Christianity, a religion he declares is fit only for “women, eunuchs, children, and savages.” And since he finds Christianity to be a weak and female religion, he begins to reject the softer Christian virtues — like compassion, sympathy, pity, and tenderness — as also suitable only for women.

In their place, Strindberg exalts the hard masculine virtues. The most admirable quality for Strindberg, at this time, is strength — strength of will, strength of intellect, strength of body. Thus, his male characters are often conceived as Nietzschean Supermen, endowed with the courage to live beyond the pale of commonplace bourgeois morality. For Strindberg professes to find a grim pleasure in the tragic quality of human existence and the tough, predatory character of human nature. It is this Nietzschean ecstasy, in fact, that Strindberg opposes to Ibsen’s tamer livsglaede when, in the preface to Miss Julie, he declares: “I myself find the joy of life in its strong and cruel struggles.” In his discipleship to Nietszche, as in his discipleship to Darwin, Strindberg sometimes vulgarizes, exaggerates, or distorts the master’s ideas. Nevertheless, his attraction to Nietzsche is unusually strong — so strong, in fact, that he describes the philosopher’s influence on him in the imagery of marriage: “My spirit has received in its uterus a tremendous outpouring of seed from Frederick Nietzsche, so that I feel as full as a pregnant bitch. He was my husband.”¹¹

We would not pause to find any significance in such metaphors were it not that Strindberg’s life and work also suggest his feminine passivity. For there is abundant evidence that Strindberg’s defiant masculinity is more an impersonation than an actuality, designed to conceal the weaker, more womanish aspects of his nature. Strindberg was sometimes perfectly conscious of this — he often expressed the thought that he should have been born a woman — but, at this time at least, he is at great pains to hide it. It is clear, however, from his fears for his virility and his fears of being dominated, that, even when he seems to be blustering most, his masculine identification is highly uncertain. As for the Strindberg hero, he may look like a Nietzschean strong man, but he is quite often in danger of being symbolically castrated. For while the author, in his paranoiac fantasies, will identify with the robust heroes of antiquity, his artistic honesty makes him put these fantasies in perspective: his Hercules is often robbed of his club and set to do women’s tasks at the distaff.

Strindberg himself is aware of the ambiguous manliness of his male characters, though not of the reasons for it. In discussing the hero of The Father with Lundegard, he writes: “To me personally, he represents a masculinity which people have tried to undervalue, deprive us of, and transfer to a third sex. It is only in front of women that he appears unmanly, because she wants him to, and the laws of the game compel a man to play the part that his lady commands.” We may safely question whether “the laws of the game” are responsible for the Captain’s passivity; but something unmans him, as it unmans almost every male character Strindberg creates in this period. For the typical development of his “Naturalist” hero is from a position of aggressiveness to a position of helplessness: in The Father, the Captain ends up in a straitjacket; in Creditors, Adolph collapses into an epileptic fit; and even in Miss Julie, where the male triumphs, Jean becomes a sniveling coward at the end, shivering at the sound of the Count’s bell.¹²

In all these plays, the antagonist is a woman — more accurately, an emancipated woman — an Omphale who will not rest until she has reversed roles with her Hercules, and assumed his position of authority. The conflict of these plays, therefore, is provided by the opposition of male and female, and the issue is not resolved until one of them has conquered. As a member of the “third sex,” the typical Strindberg heroine (Laura, Miss Julie, Berta, Tekla) has a strong masculine streak in her nature too — sometimes even stronger than the man’s, for while he occasionally expresses a childlike desire for tenderness, she remains adamant until she feels herself invulnerable. The paradox of this struggle, therefore, is that while the male is physically, and often intellectually, superior to the woman, he frequently falls victim to her “treacherous weakness”; for, in all plays but Miss Julie, the heroine lacks honor and decency, pursuing her ends by subtle, invidious, and generally “unconscious” means. Yet, even when Strindberg permits the woman her victory, he feels compelled to demonstrate her basic inferiority. When she competes with the man in a worldly career, as in Comrades and Creditors, it is only through his help that she succeeds at all; and the man must be brought to realize, as Strindberg was brought to realize, that the sexes cannot coexist on equal terms.

The Father (1887), though by far the most aggressive work Strindberg ever wrote, is typical of the plays of this period. The work has a contemporary domestic setting, and contains a few hints about the importance of heredity and environment, so Strindberg sent it to Zola as an example of the New Naturalism (Zola admired it, but criticized its obscure social milieu and its incomplete characterization). Yet, it is incredible that The Father could ever have been taken for a Naturalistic document. It is more like a feverish and violent nightmare — so irrational, illogical, and one-sided that it seems to have been dredged up, uncensored, from the depths of the author’s unconscious.¹³ Furthermore, Strindberg’s identification with his central character is so explicit that it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the author or the character is speaking; and Laura is such a highly colored portrait of Siri Von Essen that the character is almost totally malevolent — and sometimes quite incomprehensible without some understanding of Strindberg’s confused attitudes towards his marriage. Strindberg himself was perfectly conscious, at the time he wrote it, of the subjective nature of his play: “I don’t know if The Father is an invention or if my life has been so,” he wrote to Lundegard, “but I feel that at a given moment, not far off, this will be revealed to me, and I shall crash into insanity from agony of conscience or suicide.” Strindberg was actually to do neither, though for a long while he was very close to both. But in The Father, he was clearly “acting a poem of desperation,” hoping to placate his furies by giving his personal history full dramatic expression.

He was also endeavoring to pay off an old score. For Strindberg partially designed The Father as a reply to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, using Laura as a diabolical contrast to Nora Helmer. One might say that both plays attack conventional sexual attitudes, Ibsen dramatizing the woman’s revolt against the tyrannizing male, and Strindberg the male’s revolt against the tyrannical woman. But despite the superficial neatness of the parallel, it is not very accurate. For while Strindberg had a personal stake in the “woman question,” Ibsen was completely indifferent to it except as a metaphor for individual freedom. Nora’s real antagonist is not Torvald, but society itself, insofar as it restricts her desire (shared by most of Ibsen’s heroes) for self-realization. The Captain’s antagonist, however, is Woman, and he is opposed only to those social conventions which grow from a misunderstanding of the venomous female nature. With the issue reduced to a struggle between the sexes rather than a conflict of ideas, Strindberg’s work differs from Ibsen’s even in its use of props. In A Doll’s House, for example, the lamp is an instrument of enlightenment, underscoring significant revelations — but in The Father, it is purely an instrument of aggression: the Captain throws it at his wife after a particularly trying interview.

For while A Doll’s House uses the techniques of the well-made play, hinging on tortuous twists of plot and reversals of character, The Father has a positively relentless power which carries it through, without psychological complexity or manipulated action, to a violent and furious conclusion. Compare Ibsen’s elaborate stage directions with Strindberg’s peremptory notes. The setting of A Doll’s House is so carefully documented that the Helmer household is as tangible and solid as the real world, but the walls of the Captain’s house seem flimsy and penetrable, as if incapable of containing the explosive forces within. Actually, the setting of The Father is less a bourgeois household than an African jungle where two wild animals, eyeing each other’s jugular, mercilessly claw at each other until one of them falls. It is not to Zola’s Naturalism that we must turn for precedents, but to works like Kleist’s Penthesilea and Shakespeare’s Othello — and to Aeschylean tragedy, for, like Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the Captain and Laura are monolithic figures hewn out of granite, and stripped of all character details extraneous to their warring natures.¹⁴

Because of the intensely subjective nature of the play, it is somewhat difficult to separate Strindberg’s conscious artistic design from the distortions unconsciously introduced by his sense of personal grievance. On the basis of its bare plot, The Father seems to have been conceived as the tragedy of a freethinker. The Captain, a vigorous cavalry officer,¹⁵ who combines a military career with scientific work, has lost his belief in God and the afterlife. Consequently, he must — somewhat like D’Amville in Tourneur’s Jacobean play The Atheist’s Tragedy — seek his immortality almost exclusively through his child Bertha. He therefore attempts to educate her mind and mold her will in strict accordance with his own views, so as to leave a piece of himself on earth after his mortal remains have decayed. This brings him into conflict with his wife. For while the Captain wishes to rear Bertha as a freethinker, preparing her to be a teacher and eventually a wife, Laura wants her to have religious training, and to follow an artistic career. In order to achieve ascendancy, Laura proceeds to destroy her husband. Having learned from the Captain’s adjudication of a paternity suit against a subordinate that no man can be sure he is the father of a child, she proceeds to pour the henbane of doubt in his ear about the true paternity of Bertha. His growing jealousy and suspicions, aggravated by his wife’s success in frustrating his career, eventually goad him to acts of violence for which he is declared insane. At the end, when he is immobilized and impotent, Laura proclaims her victory and seizes the prize: “My child! My own child!” (Emphasis mine)

But Strindberg, who had a deeper intention than this in mind, proceeds to universalize the action. When the Captain, writhing in a straitjacket, turns to the audience and cries, “Wake, Hercules, before they take away your club,” his words ring with all the activistic force of Marx’s call to the workers to shake off their chains. Clearly, The Father is designed as a kind of allegory, with the Captain as Everyman and Laura as Everywoman, an object lesson to sanguine husbands, urging them to revolt against their domineering wives. The play, then, is really about a struggle for power which began long before the dispute over Bertha’s education. Considered thus, it is not only the tragedy of a freethinker but the tragedy of a Romantic as well, for it is intended to mirror the strife which rages beneath the surface of all modern Romantic marriages.

In this sphere of action, the Captain is portrayed as a clumsy giant who, having learned too late the true nature of women, is brought to suffer the consequences of his early innocence. When he first married Laura, he had worshiped her as a superior being, attempting like most Romantics to find salvation through his love. But, like most Romantics, he had failed to reconcile his desire for a mistress with his need for a mother. The two desires were, in fact, irreconcilable, for as Laura tells him: “The mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy.” Yet, it is to the mother in Laura that the Captain turns in his moment of greatest suffering, even though it was the woman in Laura who is the cause of it: “Can’t you see I’m helpless as a child? Can’t you hear me crying to my mother that I’m hurt? Forget I’m a man, a soldier whose word men — and even beasts — obey. I am nothing but a sick creature in need of pity.” If the Captain were willing to remain in a state of childlike dependency, there would be no strife, for Laura can accept him as a child; but since the Captain feels compelled to assert his masculine power, she hates him “as a man.”¹⁶ The two faces that Laura shows the Captain lead him to act with alternating tenderness and hostility towards her, an ambivalence reflected in the mood of the play where the energy of battle is occasionally broken by nostalgic interludes, during which the two antagonists pause to reflect, in tones of gentle poetic melancholy, on the mother-child relationship which was their only ground for mutual affection.

It is in these contemplative scenes that the origin of the struggle is revealed. When his romantic expectations of marriage had failed, the Captain — resenting his slavery to a woman he had offered himself to as a slave — began to sublimate through intellectual activity; and his life with Laura turned into “seventeen years of penal servitude,” presided over by a ruthless, competitive warder. For Laura, who could respond to her husband only when he came to her as a helpless child, was repelled by his sexual embraces (“The mother became the mistress — horrible”), and determined to avenge herself by dominating the marriage. Though Strindberg only faintly suggests this, it is likely — considering his filial relation to Laura — that the Captain shared her revulsion for physical contact. But his recurring doubts about his manhood made him misconstrue her reaction and become even more aggressively ardent: “I thought you despised my lack of virility, so I tried to win you as a woman by proving myself as a man.” This fatal mistake resulted in total warfare between them, to which the dispute over Bertha provides only the catalystic climax.

The struggle is the substance of the play, and it turns the entire household into an armed camp. Its outcome, however, is foreordained, since the house is crawling with women, and most of the men in the area are too conventional or too gentlemanly to accept the Captain’s interpretation of the female character. As the Captain looks desperately about him for allies, determining who is “in league against me” or “going over to the enemy,” the sides divide; and Strindberg’s personal stake in this war leads him to divide his characters as well, judging them wholly on the basis of their attitude towards the Captain’s position. The Father includes, among its dramatis personae, an Ibsenist Doctor and Pastor, but they are judged by standards quite different from Ibsen’s. Doctor Ostermark, for example, acceptable enough when Strindberg sees him as a humanist, a scientist, and a male, is condemned when he becomes a muddleheaded tool of Laura’s; and the Pastor, while occasionally satirized for his religious beliefs is tolerated because of his masculine sympathy for the Captain.

As for the women, Strindberg marks the deck by identifying all his female characters — those onstage and off — with some form of quackery. And since he associates women, at this time, with religion and superstition, their quackery invariably takes a supernatural form. As the Captain notes:

The house is full of women, all trying to mold this child of mine. My mother-in-law wants to turn her into a spiritualist; Laura wants her to be an artist; the governess would have her a Methodist, old Margaret a Baptist, and the servant girls a Salvation Army lass.

Bertha herself believes in ghosts, and practices automatic writing upstairs with Laura’s mother; and even the Captain’s old nurse, Margaret — the most sympathetic woman in the play, since she is the most maternal — is called hard and hateful in her religious convictions. It is Margaret, too, who deals the Captain his death blow by tricking him into the straitjacket (she pretends that she is the mother and he the child, and she is fitting on his woolen tunic). For sweet as she may be, her female nature instinctively aligns her with the Captain’s enemies. Since the Captain, like Strindberg at this time, is a rationalist, a materialist, and a misogynist, the lines are drawn between intellectual freethinking men and irrational, superstitious, and malevolent women. And on this sexual battlefield, almost everybody seems to act in rather mechanical conformity with his or her unconscious alliance.

This sounds dangerously like paranoia; and it is certain that the Captain’s persecution complex is one of the major factors in his mental breakdown. But since Strindberg shares his hero’s paranoiac distemper, he is clearly undecided about the state of the Captain’s mental health. We are as befuddled as the Doctor, for example, as to whether the Captain’s acts of violence are to be construed as “an outbreak of temper or insanity.” Is he a healthy man driven insane by Laura’s poisonous insinuations or are the seeds of madness present in his mind before the play begins? Strindberg hedges. On the one hand, he sees the Captain as a relatively stable man on the verge of an important scientific discovery ¹⁷ who, infuriated by the false rumors his wife has spread about his mental condition, the frustrations she has put in his way, and, most of all, the doubts she has sown about the paternity of his child, is goaded into madness (“All steam-boilers explode when the pressure-gauge reaches the limit”). In this view, the Captain’s sense of persecution is perfectly understandable since he is being persecuted — not only by Laura but by every woman in the house. On the other hand, Strindberg suggests that the Captain’s will has been diseased since birth, that he fears for his sanity before the action begins, and that Laura’s stratagem merely exacerbates a dangerous existing condition: it is in cases of instability, as the Doctor tells Laura, that “ideas can sometimes take hold and grow into an obsession — or even monomania.” Thus we have a character who fears for his reason, yet believes his reason to be “unaffected”; who declares himself, by turns, both weak and strong of will; who is subject to persecution mania, yet actually being persecuted. In short, Strindberg, unable to objectify his own difficulties, hesitates between writing a balanced play about a paranoiac character and a paranoiac play about a balanced character — illogically introducing elements of both.¹⁸ Before ambiguity of this kind, we must simply fold our hands, admitting the futility of trying to extract any logical consistency from this intensely subjective nightmare.

Yet, like a nightmare, The Father does possess a kind of internal logic, which makes all its external contradictions seem rather minor; and it maintains this dreamlike logic right up to its shattering climax. For it assumes total warfare between men and women, in which unconscious thoughts are as blameworthy as explicit actions, and every woman in the world is either adulterous or treacherous, and, therefore, the natural enemy of man:

My mother did not want me to come into the world because my birth would give her pain. She was my enemy. She robbed my embryo of nourishment, so I was born incomplete. My sister was my enemy when she made me knuckle under to her. The first woman I took in my arms was my enemy. She gave me ten years of sickness in return for the love I gave her. When my daughter had to choose between you and me, she became my enemy. And you, you, my wife, have been my mortal enemy, for you have not let go until there is no life left in me.

In the weird logic of the play, the Captain’s conclusions are perfectly correct, for just as he was defeated by the evil Laura, so is he finally led into the trap by the maternal Margaret. Caught in a net like Agamemnon, roaring like a wounded warrior, he can shout that “rude strength has fallen before treacherous weakness.” But though he remains defiant, it is perfectly clear that it is his own weakness which has betrayed him — for over the straitjacket lies the soft, vanilla-scented shawl of the mother. Even at the last moment, his fatal ambivalence is clear, for after spitting his curses on the whole female sex, he lays his head upon Margaret’s lap, declaring: “Oh how sweet it is to sleep upon a woman’s breast, be she mother or mistress! But sweetest of all a mother’s.” And blessing Margaret, he falls into a paralytic swoon. But though the Captain has ceased to struggle, Strindberg’s revolt against women continues to the end. For the “blessed” Margaret has betrayed this freethinker once again — falsely claiming that “with his last breath he prayed to God.”

Slanderous, prejudiced, one-sided, these are certainly accurate descriptions of the play. Having dramatized the hostility which accompanies all romantic love, and having discovered some of the psychological reasons for it, Strindberg would seem to have invalidated all his insights through his exaggerated misogyny; yet these very exaggerations provide the play with its impact, and the very unfairness with which it is executed provides its momentum. Fourteen years later, in The Dance of Death, Strindberg will take up similar characters in a similar situation, treating them with much greater balance, detachment, and cogency; but the tortured, consuming, inflammatory power of this play is something he will never equal again.

In Miss Julie, written a year later (1888), Strindberg seems to have gained a good deal more control over himself and his material. The play is a decided advance in objectivity, generally free from the author’s paranoiac symptoms. And while the subject of the work is still the mortal conflict of the sexes, it is, significantly, the male who conquers here, and the female who goes down to destruction. The victory of Jean, the valet, is assured by the fact that he has nothing feminine in his nature at all. Compared with the hero of The Father, in fact, he seems to be pure brute, for he shares neither the Captain’s sense of honor, nor his need for motherly comfort, nor his lacerating doubts about his manhood. As Strindberg describes Jean, he possesses “both the coarseness of the slave and the toughmindedness of the born ruler, he can look at blood without fainting, shake off bad luck like water, and take calamity by the horns.” Strindberg, attracted as usual to masculine strength, identifies deeply with Jean in many ways, and is exhilarated by his brutishness, though he is too fastidious to make a complete identification with this ambitious servant. Nevertheless, as his conception of his hero suggests, Strindberg is feeling much more security in his own masculinity at this time. And the play embodies, in abundance, those qualities which Strindberg associates exclusively with the male: discipline, control, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and strength.

In the fine preface he has appended to the work — obviously composed in a mood of brashness, confidence, and high spirits — Strindberg documents his achievement, giving these male virtues their aesthetic and philosophical equivalents. For here he expounds his theory of Naturalism. Beginning by ridiculing the debased ideas found in the commercial theatre, Strindberg goes on to repudiate, as well, all drama with an ethical motive, where the spectator is induced to take sides or pass judgments. We do not know if he would include The Father in that category, though it certainly belongs there. But Miss Julie, at least, is offered as a work without tendency, moralizing, or subjective prejudices: a simple scientific demonstration of the survival of the fittest. Strindberg concedes that the fall of his heroine may arouse pity, but he attributes this response to the spectator’s “weakness,” and looks forward to a time when, through the progress of science, audiences will be strong enough to view such things with indifference, having dispensed with those “inferior and unreliable instruments of thought called feelings.” Echoes like these of Darwin and Nietzsche, Strindberg’s scientific and philosophical authorities during his “male” period, resound throughout the preface, and so do echoes of Zola, Strindberg’s masculine dramatic theoretician. For Miss Julie is undoubtedly the closest thing to a Naturalist drama that Strindberg is ever to write. The hero and heroine — as “characterless” as real people — have been provided with an elaborate social-psychological history, and are controlled by their heredity and environment; the action is loose, natural, and compact without being plotty; the dialogue has the aimlessness of real speech; and the acting style, makeup, costumes, settings, and lights have all been designed for a minimum of artificiality.

Yet, despite all these unusual concessions to the “real,” Miss Julie is not, strictly speaking, a Naturalistic work — partly because of the ballet, mime, and musical interlude Strindberg introduces into the work in the middle, but mostly because the author is constitutionally incapable of Naturalist impartiality.¹⁹ It is true that Julie is much more objectively conceived than Laura and that Jean is a much more complicated character than the Captain. But if the play has an appearance of detachment, this is because an entirely new element has been introduced which balances Strindberg’s sympathies. For if, formerly, Strindberg was mainly concerned with the sexual war between men and women, he is now examining a social conflict as well, between a servant and an aristocrat. And while he is still identifying with the male as a Hercules in combat with Omphale, he is also identifying with the female as a Don Quixote in conflict with an unscrupulous thrall. In short, Strindberg has not suspended his partialities, he has merely divided them. Both Jean and Julie are projections of the splits in the author’s nature — the male versus the female, and the aristocrat versus the servant — and, in each case, he is defending himself against the side that he fears more.

Strindberg’s split sympathies can be detected even in the preface, though in disguised form. Despite his pretense at scientific impartiality, for example, his misogyny is still perfectly clear, for he characterizes Julie as a “man-hating woman,” a type that “forces itself on others, selling itself for power, medals, recognition, diplomas, as formerly, it sold itself for money.”²⁰ Similarly, though he affects a Darwinian indifference to the supersession of the “old warrior nobility” by the “new nobility of nerve and brain,” he admits that the aristocrat’s code of honor was “a very beautiful thing,” and that the new man rises in the world only through base and ignoble tactics. Strindberg’s admiration for the sexual aristocracy of Jean, in fact, is qualified by his sense of the servant’s inherent vulgarity: “He is polished on the outside, but coarse underneath. He wears his frock coat with elegance but gives no assurance that he keeps his body clean.” Jean’s lack of cleanliness is not something designed to endear him to Strindberg, who throughout his life had an intense revulsion to dirt; but it signifies that if Jean is the sexual aristocrat, he is the social slave, just as Julie is the sexual slave but the social aristocrat. In each case, Strindberg’s sympathies, despite his protestations of neutrality, are enlisted firmly on the side of the aristocracy.

The dramatic design of Miss Julie is like two intersecting lines going in opposite directions: Jean reaches up and Julie falls down, both meeting on equal grounds only at the moment of seduction, in the arms of the great democratizer, sex. Both are motivated by strong internal (in Julie’s case, almost unconscious) forces which propel them towards their fate — underscored by social-sexual images of rising and falling, cleanliness and dirt, life and death. These images inform the entire play but are unified in two contrasting poetic metaphors: the recurring dreams of Jean and Julie. In Julie’s dream, she is looking down from the height of a great pillar, anxious to fall to the dirt beneath, yet aware that the fall would mean her death; in Jean’s, he is lying on the ground beneath a great tree, anxious to pull himself up from the dirt to a golden nest above.

The crossover is the crux of the action: Jean seduces Julie during the Midsummer Eve festivities, and then induces her to cut her throat in fear that their impossible liaison will be discovered. Julie’s descent, therefore, is a movement from spirit to flesh, motivated by her attraction to dirt and death. She unconsciously desires to degrade herself, to be soiled and trampled on, and when she falls, she ruins her entire house. Born, like Strindberg, of an aristocratic father and a common woman (her mother is associated with dirt through her fondness for the kitchen, the stables, and the cowsheds), Julie finds in her parentage the source of her problems. Her father’s weakness has taught her to despise men, and the influence of her mother, an emancipated woman, has encouraged her to dominate and victimize them. Jean has seen her with her weakling fiancé, forcing him to jump over her riding crop like a trained dog; and in the torrent of abuse which pours from her after she has been seduced, her hatred of men is further underlined. On the other hand, neither her class arrogance nor her sex hatred is total. Her fiancé has filled her with egalitarian ideas, so that she tempers her aristocratic impudence with democratic condescension (“Tonight we’re all just happy people at a party,” she says to Jean. “There’s no question of rank”). And her natural sexuality, heightened by suggestions of masochism, weakens her masculine resolve (“But when that weakness comes, oh . . . the shame!”). Like Diana, her wayward bitch, she is a thoroughbred who consorts with the local mongrels, since her unconscious impulses lead her, against her will, to roll herself in dirt.

By contrast, Jean’s ascent is associated with cleanliness and life, and is a movement from the flesh to the spirit. He wishes to be proprietor of a Swiss hotel; and his highest ambition is to be a Rumanian count. Like Julie, he is trying to escape the conditioning of his childhood — a childhood in which filth, muck, and excrement played a large part. As we learn from his story of the Turkish outhouse, his strongest childhood memory is of himself on the ground yearning towards cleanliness. Having escaped from the Turkish pavilion through its sewer, he looked up at Julie in “a pink dress and a pair of white stockings” from the vantage point of weeds, thistles, and “wet dirt that stank to high heaven.” At that time, he went home to wash himself all over with soap and warm water. Now he is still washing himself, in a metaphorical sense, by trying to rise above his lowly position and aping the fastidious manners of the aristocracy. For just as Julie is attracted to his class, so is he impelled towards her. He has become a lower-class snob through his association with his betters, wavering between an aristocratic affectation of French manners and tastes, and a slavish servility amidst the Count’s boots.

The contrast between the two characters is further emphasized by their conflicting views of the sexual act and the concept of “honor.” Despite her mother’s influence, Julie believes rather strbngly in Romantic love and Platonic ideals, while Jean, despite his rather pronounced prudishness, regards love merely as an honorific term for a purely animal act — as Iago would put it, as “a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.” Jean, indeed, is the Elizabethan Naturalist come to life in the modern world, though, unlike the Elizabethan dramatists, Strindberg does not make the Naturalist a villain. Jean is superstitious, and pays lip service to God (a sign, Strindberg tells us, of his “slave mentality”), but, in effect, he is a complete materialist, for whom Platonic ideals have no real meaning whatsoever. Though he admires Julie’s honor, he knows it is only a breath; truth, like honesty, is wholly at the service of his ambition, for he will lie, cheat, and steal to advance himself; and as for conscience, he might say, had he Richard III’s eloquence, “It is a word that cowards use.” It is because of his pragmatic materialism that Jean so values reputation, whereas Julie, the idealist, seems to scorn it. For like the Elizabethan Machiavel, Jean knows that it is external appearances rather than personal integrity that determines one’s success in the world. Strindberg undoubtedly views this unscrupulous valet as a link in the evolution of the Superman.²¹ And though he secretly disapproves of all his values, he is willing to countenance Jean, in spite of his baseness, because of his effective masculine power.

Jean, therefore, differs from the Captain in his toughness, self-sufficiency, and total lack of scruples; but Strindberg has apparently decided that Iago’s ruthlessness, rather than Othello’s romantic gullibility, is the necessary element in achieving victory over the female. Yet, if Jean is no Othello, then Julie is no Desdemona either; and just as Julie learns that Jean is not a shoe-kissing cavalier, so Jean is disillusioned in his expectations of Julie. Jean’s disenchantment is signified by his growing realization that the aristocracy is also tainted. For, in getting a close look at Julie, he sees that she, too, has “dirt on your face,” and that the inaccessible golden nest is not what he had hoped:

I can’t deny that, in one way, it was good to find out that what I saw glittering above was only fool’s gold . . . and that there could be dirt under the manicured nails, that the handkerchief was soiled even though it smelled of perfume. But, in another way, it hurt me to find that everything I was striving for wasn’t very high above me after all, wasn’t even real. It hurts me to see you sink far lower than your own cook. Hurts, like seeing the last flowers cut to pieces by the autumn rains and turned to muck.

Julie, in short, has achieved her unconscious desire. She has turned to muck, and been cut to pieces by the rain. And now there is nothing left for her but to die.

In this act of expiation, Jean serves as Julie’s judge and executioner; but it is in her death that she proves her social superiority to Jean, even though she has been sexually defeated by him. In the most obvious sense, of course, her suicide signifies his victory; just as he chopped off the head of Julie’s pet songbird, so he must chop off hers, lest she decapitate him (the sermon in church that morning, significantly, concerned the beheading of John the Baptist). But if Jean triumphs as a male, he is defeated as a servant, for her honorable suicide, a gesture he is incapable of, makes his survival look base.²² Strindberg dramatizes Jean’s ignobility by his servile cringing at the sound of the Count’s bell. Slobbering with uncontrollable fear, he hypnotizes Julie into going into the barn with his razor. But despite this display of will, it is Julie, not Jean, who is finally redeemed. Hitherto convinced of her own damnation because of the biblical injunction that the last shall be first and the first last, Julie discovers that she has unwittingly attained a place in paradise through her fall. For she learns that “I’m among the last. I am the last” — not only because she is last on the ladder of human degradation, but because she is also the last of her doomed and blighted house. As she walks resolutely to her death, and Jean shivers abjectly near the Count’s boots, the doubleness of the play is clarified in the conclusion. She has remained an aristocrat and died; Jean has remained a servant and lived; and Strindberg — dramatizing for the first time his own ambiguities about nobility and baseness, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, purity and dirt — has remained with them both to the very end.

The Father and Miss Julie, twin prayers in Strindberg’s worship of the masculine and the finest works of his first phase, are followed within a few years by a profound spiritual crisis, during which Strindberg’s last resistance to the feminine and religious aspects of his nature is broken, and after which his art undergoes an emphatic change. Strindberg’s harrowing diary of this crisis, Inferno — along with The Road to Damascus, an autobiographical trilogy written after the crisis was over — documents the history of his artistic, sexual, and religious “conversion.” Strindberg, after divorcing Siri in 1892, has separated from Frida Uhl in 1894, a year after their marriage. Living like a derelict in Paris, he has repudiated the drama and given himself over entirely to scientific experiments; his literary output during a five-year period consists primarily of three technical treatises. Despite his apparent dedication to science, however, Strindberg is becoming increasingly interested in the supernatural, as he grows more and more convinced that there are unknown powers guiding his destiny. Actually, Strindberg is preparing to renounce what he calls the “antiquated, degenerate science” of the nineteenth century as limited and unimaginative. “Familiar with the natural sciences since my youth,” he writes in 1895, “and later on a disciple of Darwin, I had discovered the inadequacy of a scientific method which recognized the mechanization of the universe without recognizing a divine Mechanic.” Strindberg’s quest for this “divine Mechanic” is a sign of his growing need for a religious view of life — a need he first expresses, inversely, by his worship of Luciferian evil, his Satanic appearance (he had adopted, at this time, a cape and beard), and his occult experiments. Nevertheless, Strindberg’s revolt continues unabated. Even when he gives up his Satanism, he remains too rebellious to commit himself to any creed or institution for long. Sometimes he is attracted to Catholicism, primarily because of its mother-worship in the cult of Mary; sometimes to Buddhism, because “I am, like Buddha and his three great disciples, a woman hater, just as I hate the earth which binds my spirit because I love it.” These short-lived commitments, themselves so ambivalent, indicate Strindberg’s continuing dualism. Searching for absolutes, Strindberg is perpetually pressed back into relatives, still too proud to bend his spirit to any higher authority.

It is this “devilish spirit of rebellion,” as Strindberg puts it in The Road to Damascus, that “must be broken like a reed.” And it is partially broken, after a prolonged period of unrelieved physical and spiritual torment. For Strindberg, his persecution mania growing, becomes convinced that he is being hounded by invisible enemies who are discharging poisonous gases into his room, and trying to electrocute him by means of an infernal electrical apparatus. Fearing for his sanity, he flees Paris to consult a number of baffled doctors, only to be afflicted with electrical shocks in every European city he visits. In the home of Mamma Uhl, his mother-in-law and a Swedenborgian Catholic, however, he does find some relief — under her consoling influence, Strindberg relaxes like an unhappy child awakening from a dreadful nightmare. Yet, even with her, Strindberg’s old ambivalence manifests itself. Believing that the feminists have laid a morbid plot against his life, he begins to suspect even his mother-in-law of complicity: “I had forgotten that a female saint is still a woman, i.e., the enemy of man.”

Under the sway of this maternal woman, though, Strindberg continues his readings in Swedenborg, in whose mystical visions he finally discovers what he thinks to be the explanation for his months of agony. He has been suffering from a religious state called Devestatio — God has been seeking him, and he has been too proud to let himself be found. Freed from his torment after this insight, Strindberg determines to live a life of repentance. And, indeed, he gives up both his occult and scientific studies, begins to wear a habit of monkish penitential cut, and even considers entering a monastery after the publication of Inferno. As for his philosophical position, this, we learn from a crucial passage in The Road to Damascus, Part III, has progressed from a harsh one-sidedness to a compassionate doubleness in his acceptance of life’s contradictions:

Thesis: affirmation; Antithesis: negation; Synthesis: comprehension! . . . You began life by accepting everything, and then went on to denying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehending everything. Be exclusive no longer. Do not say: either — or, but: not only — but also! In a word, or two words, rather, Humanity and Resignation.

Humanity, Resignation, and the melancholy understanding of two conflicting positions — these are to be the tones struck in Strindberg’s drama from this point until the end of his career.

For Strindberg, at last accepting the ambivalence which had been in him since birth, has finally permitted himself to accept those elements in his nature which he had always feared the most and fought the hardest. Freudians might say that, after a long period of trying to identify with his father, he is now permitting himself to identify with his mother as well; theologians might say that he has finally found his way to God after a long period of resisting Him. Strindberg himself is inclined to interpret his experience religiously, envisioning himself as Paul of Tarsus, claimed by the Lord on the road to Damascus. But whatever interpretation one chooses, it is certain that Strindberg is now confirming those attitudes and accepting those influences which he used to reject as too passive, weak, or feminine. His new concern with the unconscious, for example, is evidence of his change — for he used to consider the unconscious the exclusive province of women; and his endorsement of religion, and even Christianity (fit for “women, eunuchs, children, and savages”), shows that he is no longer afraid of female spirituality. Instead of masculine mentors like Darwin, Nietzsche, and Zola — those theoreticians of a tough, ruthless view of life — Strindberg is seeking out more compassionate teachers, generally those with a spiritual or supernatural vision. Swedenborg is a crucial influence at this time, along with Buddhist theologians and Hindu philosophers; and Symbolist writers such as Maeterlinck, formerly too ethereal for Strindberg, are now his primary literary models. No longer defying the universe or trying to become God, Strindberg is now yielding to the unknown and seeking to do its will. Looking for correspondences rather than causes, he has replaced his former Naturalism and atheism with a new concern for the supernal forces behind material things.

The effect of Strindberg’s conversion is, of course, especially evident in his plays, where in this second phase of his career (1898–1909) it has profoundly influenced his conception of theme, subject matter, character, and form. Strindberg is still inclined to view the relations between the sexes as strife; but he is much more willing now to regard this struggle from the woman’s point of view. For, influenced by Balzac’s Séraphita — “he-she . . . l’époux et l’épouse de l’humanité” — Strindberg has at last determined to affirm the male-female split in himself. As a result, women begin to play a much more central, and sympathetic, role in his plays: The Lady in The Road to Damascus, Jeanne in Crimes and Crimes, Eleanora in Easter, the title character in Swanwhite, Indra’s Daughter in A Dream Play, the Milkmaid in Ghost Sonata — some of these are surrogates for the author, and all have that maternal quality which Strindberg so admired without any of the wantonness which used to accompany it. In addition, the religious piety of these women, formerly a stimulus for Strindberg’s scorn, is now a sign of tenderness, warmth, and virtue. In his new veneration for the religious life, Strindberg is anxious to exalt the worshiper — as he is anxious to exalt the priest (compare the sympathetic Abbé in Crimes and Crimes with the rather simpleminded Pastor in The Father). The frequent subject of his satire now, in fact, is his old impious self — the rationalistic, blasphemous male with aspirations towards the superhuman, like Maurice in Crimes and Crimes. For, in this second phase of his career, many of Strindberg’s plays are designed as acts of penance, in which he tries to expiate his sense of guilt, and scourge his desire for worldly vanities.

As for Strindberg’s dramatic techniques, the change in these can also be attributed to his conversion. In repudiating philosophical Naturalism, Strindberg repudiated dramatic Naturalism as well, scornfully classifying this genre as a symptom of “the contemporary materialistic striving after faithfulness to reality” (Notes to the Intimate Theatre). Gone is the compact form and psychological detail of Miss Julie. In their place has come a flowing, formless, fluid series of episodes — so feminine in their feeling of flux — in which Strindberg imaginatively uses lights, music, visual symbols, and atmospheric effects to cut through the materiality of life to the spiritual truths beneath. The Chamber play, a short episodic work in which Strindberg tries to approximate the condition of music, becomes an important experimental mode at this time, but even when his plays are longer, they tend to assume a musical form. Many of these works belong to that genre which we now call Expressionism. The term is apt only in suggesting that they are expressions of Strindberg’s unconscious. Such plays as The Road to Damascus, A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata, and The Great Highway are more accurately described, in Strindberg’s own phrase, as “dream plays.” For they are alike in their use of free form, so close to the form of a dream, and in their languid abstractness: locations are vague; space is relative; chronological time is broken; and characters possess allegorical names like the Stranger, the Student, the Poet, the Hunter, and the Dreamer. The dream plays are, of course, only a sampling of the works that Strindberg wrote during his second phase. Yet, even in his Shakespearean chronicle plays (Gustavus Vasa, Eric XIV), and his more realistic Chamber plays (The Pelican, The Storm), we are never too far from the author’s unconscious mind where the supernatural dominates and subjective fantasies are given full play: “I write best,” he remarks at this time, “in hallucination.”

On the other hand, it is important to realize that the change in Strindberg is just a question of emphasis: the qualities he is now openly admitting into his drama were always there, though forcibly suppressed. The unconscious source of his inspiration was perfectly clear, for example, in The Father, and so was the essentially passive nature of his sexual, emotional, and intellectual responses. In this later period, Strindberg, understanding his dualistic conflicts better, is no longer resisting them so vigorously. Yet, he has still not been able to resolve them. His short-lived marriage to his third wife, Harriet Bosse, for example, indicates that his sexual problems have remained fairly constant. And while the tone of his plays is more saintly and forgiving, his thematic concerns have also remained essentially the same. Even his new religious humility is modified by traces of the old skeptical arrogance: in Crimes and Crimes, Maurice agrees to go to the Abbé’s church to repent, but he will go to the theatre the next evening; and in The Road to Damascus, the Stranger — brought to the door of the Church in Part I — is still afflicted with doubts at the end of Part III, even though he is being initiated into a monastery. Like these characters, Strindberg remains in a state of suspension. If he is no longer fighting God, he is still questioning Him, for he is still a rebel, raging against the awful limitations of his humanity. He has tried to escape from life into a realm of pure spirit, but he cannot resist the pulls of the body which drag him back into the filth, muck, and flesh of the material world.

Strindberg, in fact, is becoming more and more obsessed with human grossness at this time. In Black Banners (1904), he writes of his nausea at the sound of men sucking their soup (eating was always a source of repugnance to him), at sweating and stinking human bodies, and at garbage heaps, toilets, and spittoons. Strindberg’s revulsion at dirt was inferentially suggested in Miss Julie; in his later works, his disgust is even more openly expressed. In The Ghost Sonata, for example, it is the task of “keeping the dirt of life at a distance” which weighs down the characters, for there Strindberg even seems to be revolted by such simple household chores as cleaning ink off the fingers and fixing a smoking chimney. The “dirt of life” is, of course, life itself, and especially the life of the flesh. For Strindberg’s hatred of dirt is intimately bound up with his lifelong disgust at the physical functions of man, especially the physical expression of love which he sees as a base animal act degrading a lofty spiritual feeling.

In the light of his attitude towards the body, Strindberg’s commitment to a life of spirit becomes a little clearer, for he tends to regard the physical world, to borrow John Marston’s imagery, as “the very muckhill on which the sublunarie orbes cast their excrement.” It was Freud who observed that to attempt to rise above the body is to treat the body as an excremental object; and there is no question that Strindberg possesses what Norman O. Brown has called the “excremental vision”:²³ he equates the human body with dung. Lesser writers with similar feelings (Maeterlinck is one) generally respond to their hatred of the flesh by turning away from reality altogether, creating a never-never land of airy fantasy. But the superior genius of Strindberg lies in his ability to confront his feelings courageously. It is, in fact, the inescapable interdependence of body and spirit, lust and love, dirt and flowers, which forms the major theme of these later plays, where he tries to explore, in dramatic terms, the melancholy Yeatsian paradox: “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” He cannot affirm this paradox; he will no longer try to deny it. He will only, in accordance with the Hegelian synthesis he has adopted, try to understand it. But in this desperate effort at understanding, where Strindberg projects his tortured dualism onto the whole of life, his existential rebellion finds its greatest expression.

Of all the works that Strindberg wrote during this period, A Dream Play is probably the most typical and the most powerful. To judge from the parallel dreams of Jean and Julie, Strindberg always believed in the significance of the dream life; but here he has converted this conviction into a stunning dramatic technique. Though the “dream play,” as a genre, is probably not Strindberg’s invention — Calderón, and possibly even Shakespeare in The Tempest, anticipated his notion that “life is a dream,” while Maeterlinck certainly stimulated his interest in the vague, spiritual forces “behind” life — the form is certainly his own, in which time and space dissolve at the author’s bidding and plot is almost totally subordinate to theme. The Dreamer, whose “single consciousness holds sway” over the split, doubled, and multiplied characters is, of course, Strindberg himself, who is also present as the Officer, the Lawyer, and the Poet, and, possibly, as Indra’s Daughter. As he describes the Dreamer in his preface, “For him there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples and no law. He neither condemns nor acquits, but only relates, and since on the whole, there is more pain than pleasure in the dream, a tone of melancholy, and of compassion for all living things, runs through the swaying narrative.”

Because of the absence of “secrets,” A Dream Play is even more self-exploratory than The Father; but although a direct revelation of Strindberg’s unconscious mind, it is almost entirely free from any personal grievance. For Strindberg, the drama is no longer an act of revenge, but rather a medium for expressing “compassion for all living things.” In A Dream Play the world is a pestilent congregation of vapors; the miseries of mankind far exceed its pleasures; but, for these very reasons, humans must be pitied and forgiven. The prevailing mood of woe in the work stems from the author’s sense of the contradictions of life, some of which are suggested by the Poet in the Fingal’s Cave section. After chancing upon the sunken wrecks of ships called Justice, Friendship, Golden Peace, and Hope, this Poet offers a petition to God in the form of anguished questions:

Why are we born like animals?
We who stem from God and man,
whose souls are longing to be clothed
in other than this blood and filth.
Must God’s image cut its teeth?

Indra’s Daughter quickly silences this rebellious questioning — “No more. The work may not condemn the master! Life’s riddle still remains unsolved” — but it is the unraveling of this painful enigma of existence which is the purpose of the play. Consequently, the work is structured on similar contrasts, conflicts, and contradictions: Body versus Spirit, Fairhaven versus Foulstrand, Winter versus Summer, North versus South, Beauty versus Ugliness, Fortune versus Misfortune, Love versus Hate. Even the sounds of the play communicate Strindberg’s sense of the dissonance of life: a Bach toccata in four-four time is played concurrently with a waltz; a bell buoy booms in chords of fourths and fifths. For, in this work, life itself is no more than a disordered and chaotic struggle between opposites, and the movement of the play is towards explaining the cause of these divisions.

Like Faust, the play begins with a prologue in Heaven, a celestial colloquy over the lot of mortals. The god Indra explains to his Daughter that the earth is both fair and heavy because “revolt followed by crime” destroyed its almost perfect beauty. Listening to the wail of human voices rising from below, he determines to send the Daughter through the foul vapors to determine if human lamentation is justified. Indra’s Daughter, descending, becomes the central character of the play. Indicating how far Strindberg has come from his old misogyny, she is — like Eleanora in Easter — a “female Christ,” expressing the author’s sympathy for the fate of humanity and his readiness to redeem man by sharing in man’s sufferings. She is also Strindberg’s Eternal Feminine; each man finds in her sweet, forgiving nature the realization of his own particular ideal. To the Officer, the first of Strindberg’s dream surrogates, the Daughter is Agnes, “a child of heaven,” and in her encounter with this embittered character, the Daughter is already beginning to see some motive for human complaint. He is imprisoned in a Castle which grows, throughout the action, out of manure and stable muck. Likened to the flowers (they “don’t like dirt, so they shoot up fast as they can into the light — to blossom and to die”), the Castle is an image of life itself: the human spirit, trying to escape from the excremental body, aspires upwards towards the Heaven, but is always rooted in filth.²⁴

Against this paradox of life, the Officer strongly protests, striking his sword on the table in his “quarrel with God.” For despite his urge to aspire, he, too, is mired in filth. Like the Captain in The Father, he is another Hercules, doomed to an unpleasant labor: he must “groom horses, clean stables, and have the muck removed.” Imprisoned in eternal adolescence, he is being punished for a childhood sin, for he once permitted his brother to be blamed for the theft of a book which he himself had torn to pieces and hidden in a cupboard. When the Daughter offers to set him free from the Castle (i.e., from his neurotic fears and guilts), he is, however, equally dubious: “Either way I’ll suffer!” And when time and space dissolve back to the Officer’s childhood, we see why adulthood is just as painful as adolescence. In this scene, the Officer’s Father has given his Mother a silk shawl — still a symbol of maternal compassion for Strindberg. But she gives it away to a needy servant, and the Father feels insulted. In this life of shifting sands, what seems a generous act to one is an evil act to another; all of existence is suffering; and, as the Daughter observes now and throughout the play, “Humankind is to be pitied.”

But the Daughter, still believing in worldly redemption, exclaims, “Love conquers all”; and the scene dissolves again for the first demonstration that she is wrong. The setting is a stage door, much like the place where Strindberg used to wait for Harriet to finish at the theatre, and the motif of the scene is — waiting. Waiting for Victoria, his heart’s desire, with a bunch of flowers is the Officer, now freed from the Castle. But Victoria never comes. Time passes, with an accelerated whirring of lights; the Officer grows older and shabbier; the roses wither. The Daughter sits with the Doorkeeper, having taken from her the shawl (once the Mother’s), now grown gray from its absorption of human misery. For nobody is contented except a Bill-sticker who, after fifty years of waiting, has attained his heart’s desire: a net and a green fishbox. Yet, even he grows unhappy after a time: the net was “not quite what I had in mind,” the fishbox not quite as green as he had expected. Suffering the twin tragedies of getting and not getting what one wants, everybody in the world is afflicted with unhappiness. But behind a cloverleaf door (the Officer, poking at it, has an intermittence du coeur, recalling the guilty cupboard of his youth) lies the explanation of human misery and the secret of life. Yet, the Law forbids the opening of it.

The scene dissolves once again to the Lawyer’s office, where the Daughter and the Officer hope to get the door opened. Everyone there has grown ugly from “unspeakable suffering.” And the Lawyer’s face, like the Mother’s shawl, is marred by the absorption of human crime and evil. The second of Strindberg’s dream surrogates, the Lawyer shares with the Daughter some of the qualities of Christ. Like Jesus, he has taken on himself all the sins of the world; and like Jesus, he is in conflict with the righteous, who condemn him for defending the poor and easing the burdens of the guilty. When he is denied his Law degree during an academic procession, the Daughter’s shawl turns white, and she fits him with a crown of thorns. But since he too is a rebel, quarreling with God, she must explain to him the reasons for injustice: Life is a phantasm, an illusion, an upside-down copy of the original.²⁵ And the four Faculties (Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law) are merely voices in the madhouse, each claiming wisdom for itself while scourging the sane and the virtuous.

Determined to put her theory of redemption through love to the test, the Daughter marries the Lawyer. But it is in this familiar Strindberg domestic scene that the irreconcilable conflicts of life are most agonizingly dramatized. While Kristin, the Maid, pastes all the air out of the apartment, the couple engage in sharp quarrels over their conflicting tastes in food, furnishings, and religious beliefs. Neither is right or wrong. It is simply a condition of life that one’s sympathies are the other’s antipathies, “one’s pleasure is the other’s pain.”²⁶ The Daughter, stifling in the house, tied to her husband by their child, and revolted by the dirty surroundings, feels herself “dying in this air.” And when the Officer — now at the top of the seesaw of fortune — enters seeking his Agnes, the Daughter and the Lawyer decide to part. The Lawyer dissolves their marriage, comparing it to a hairpin. Like a hairpin, a married couple remain one, no matter how they are bent — until they are broken in two.

The Officer has decided to take the Daughter to Fairhaven, the land of youthful summer love, but through some miscalculation, they find themselves in Foulstrand, an ugly burnt-out hell, dominated by a Quarantine Station.²⁷ In this land, where life itself is a form of prolonged quarantine, young people are robbed of their color, hopes, and ideals, fortune turns to misfortune, youth becomes age. Strindberg’s third dream surrogate enters, a visionary Poet who embodies the theme of opposition. Alternating between ecstasy and cynicism, he carries a pail of mud in which he bathes. The Quarantine Officer explains that “he lives so much in the higher spheres he gets homesick for the mud,” leading the Officer to comment, “What a strange world of contradictions.” Yet, even in Fairhaven, the heavenly paradise, contradictions mar the holiday atmosphere. The pleasure of the rich is attained only through the suffering of the poor; the fulfilled love of beautiful Alice leaves the passions of ugly Edith unrequited; the “most envied mortal in the place” is blind. Even in this place, in short, happiness is fleeting and ephemeral; and the only way to sustain pleasure is to die at the moment of achieving it, as a newlywed couple proceed to do, drowning themselves in the sea.

It is, to be sure, a grim vision that informs this work, combining the woeful sense of vanity in Ecclesiastes with the Sophoclean plaint that it is better never to have been born. Despite his conviction that life is universal suffering, however, Strindberg seems to have exonerated human beings from responsibility for it. It is not mankind but the system which is evil — not human character but the immutable conditions of existence. For, as we learn in the Schoolmaster scene, where the Officer, once again imprisoned in adolescence, is forced to learn his lessons over and over like a child, life takes the form of an eternal recurrence, a cycle of return which defeats all efforts at progress, change, or development.²⁸ “The worst thing of all,” as the Lawyer tells the Daughter, is “repetitions, reiterations. Going back. Doing one’s lessons again.” Caught in his own repetition compulsion, locked in the pattern of his neurosis, Strindberg has found in his personal torment the universal agony of mankind, where one is forced to repeat mistakes, despite the consciousness of error. Thus, when the cloverleaf door is finally opened, the secret of life is discovered to be — nothing. The area behind the door is a vast emptiness.

Condemned by the righteous for bringing man the truth,²⁹ the Daughter has had enough. She has suffered with all humanity — more extremely than others because of her sensitive nature — and now she knows that human complaint is justified. Shuffling off her earthly bonds, as her companions cast their sorrows into the purifying flames, the Daughter prepares to leave the world behind. But first she must provide the answer to the Poet’s riddle, explaining the origin of the conflicts she has seen. Her interpretation, expressed in images of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, is the perfect symbolization of Strindberg’s dualism. In the dawn of time, she says, when Brahma, the “divine primal force,” let himself be seduced by Maya, the “world Mother,” the issue was the world — compounded ever since of elements both spiritual and fleshly, male and female, sacred and profane. Trying to escape from female matter, the descendants of Brahma sought “renunciation and suffering,” but this, in turn, conflicted with their need for sexual love. Torn in two directions at once, pulled towards Heaven and dragged down to Earth, man became the victim of “conflict, discord, and uncertainty” — the “human heart is split in two” — and that is why the immortal soul is clothed in “blood and filth.” Having given her answer, the Daughter blesses the Poet for his prophetic wisdom, and ascends to Indra, as the Castle blossoms into a giant chrysanthemum. It is the end of the dream, for the Dreamer has awakened; it is the orgiastic vision of the Poet, his mind dressed in its visionary Sunday clothes; but it is also the continual aspiration of the soul after the body has died.³⁰ In death only, Strindberg seems to be saying, is there redemption — for only in death are contradictions resolved, and the fleshly recoil finally stilled.

It was only through death, too, that Strindberg was able to resolve his own contradictions. When he succumbed to cancer in 1912, hugging a Bible to his breast and muttering, “Everything is atoned for,” he had at last found his way to that peace which, half in love with death, he had been seeking all his waking life. The conflicts within him had almost torn him in two; but his art is witness to the fact that he had never surrendered to his own despair. Always ashamed of being human, Strindberg rejected the external world so completely that he often bordered on insanity. But except for his most disordered years, he was usually able to convert pathology into a penetrating, powerful, and profound drama. This transformation was perhaps his most impressive achievement, for his art was in a constant state of flux, always yielding to the pressures from his unconscious. When he learned to control his misogyny in later years, and soften his resistance to the female principle, he faced life with the quietism of a Buddhist saint, sacrificing his defiant masculinity to the need for waiting, patience, ordeals, and expiation. But though his mood had changed and his spirit was chastened, his quarrel with God was never far from the surface. His rebellious discontent, expressed through a drama of perpetual opposition, had simply found its way into a dissatisfaction with the essence of life itself. Strindberg left instructions before he died that his tomb be inscribed with the motto of Crimes and Crimes: AVE CRUX SPES UNICA. But in view of his lifelong unrest and uncertainty, and his inability to commit himself to any particular creed, a more appropriate epitaph might have been the final lines from his last play, The Great Highway:

Here Ishmael rests, the son of Hagar
whose name was once called Israel,
because he fought a fight with God,
and did not cease to fight until laid low,
defeated by His almighty goodness.
O Eternal One! I’ll not let go Thy hand,
Thy hard hand, except Thou bless me.
Bless me, Your creature, who suffers,
Suffers Your sundering gift of life!
Me first, who suffers most —
Whose most painful torment was this —
I could not be the one I longed to be!

With his work in our hands, it is perfectly clear that this rebel’s eternal struggle with God is the key to his greatness. And it is the glory of his art that, despite his perpetual dissatisfaction with himself, few could wish him to be anyone other than who he was.

¹ Ibsen was perfectly aware of Strindberg’s antagonism towards him, and kept a portrait of Strindberg on his wall: “I cannot write a line,” he remarked, “without that madman standing and staring down at me with his mad eyes.” Later, he told an American writer about the source of his interest in Strindberg: “The man fascinates me because he is so subtly, so delicately mad.”

² See The Father, Act I, where the Doctor says: “And I should like you to know, Captain, that when I heard Mrs. Alving blackening her late husband’s memory, I thought what a damned shame it was that the fellow should be dead.” Either the Doctor or Strindberg did not attend to Ghosts very carefully, because, before the end of the play, Captain Alving’s blackened memory has been partially whitewashed again.

³ Pär Lagerkvist’s comments are typical. In order to praise Strindberg, Lagerkvist has to attack Ibsen, exploding all the rusty artillery of anti-Ibsenist criticism: “Ibsen, who was long the modern writer par préférence because he exhaustively plodded through all the social, sexual, and mental-hygienic ideas and ideals which happened to come up for discussion, merely weighs us down with his perfectly consummated and fixed form, impossible of further development. . . .” (“Modern Theatre: Points of View and Attack,” Tulane Drama Review, Winter 1961, p. 22.) At this point, it grows tiresome to repeat that Ibsen’s forms are far from fixed, and his basic subject matter has very little to do with social, sexual, or mental-hygienic “ideas.”

⁴ I am indebted to Evert Sprinchorn for calling my attention to this untranslated poem. The translations I have used in this chapter are those of Elizabeth Sprigge, except for that of Miss Julie, which is by Professor Sprinchorn, and The Road to Damascus by Graham Rawson. I have rendered the Inferno passages myself from the original French.

⁵ Love and nourishment are always closely related in Strindberg’s mind. His striking image of the Vampire Cook in The Ghost Sonata — who “boils the nourishment out of the meat and gives fibre and water, while she drinks the stock herself” — probably derives from his childhood feeling of love-starvation; the Milkmaid of the same play, on the other hand, is (reflecting the other side of Strindberg’s ambivalence) a symbol of female generosity and mammary abundance. The miserly Mother in Strindberg’s Chamber play, The Pelican (1907), who starves the household of food and love — thus murdering her husband and weakening her children — is another example of the ungiving, motherly Vampire.

⁶ “The nun is affectionate,” writes Strindberg in Inferno, “treats me like a baby, and calls me mon enfant, while I call her ma mère. How good it is to speak the word mother which I have not uttered for thirty years.” As he writes about the Matron to Frida Uhl, “The mere presence of this mère comforts and soothes me. La douce chaleur du sein maternel, as Baudelaire calls it (I think it was he), does me good.” Elizabeth Sprigge, in her sensitive biography The Strange Life of August Strindberg, has called attention to the soothing influence of this gentle woman on the ailing dramatist. Needless to say, I am indebted to Miss Sprigge’s scholarship throughout this chapter.

⁷ Strindberg writes to a friend about two letters he sent to Siri in the same day: “In one I told her to go to Hell; in the other, to come to Runmarö. Well! What of it? Moods that shift between love and hate are not madness!” All his wives remarked upon these continual alterations in feeling. Harriet Bosse, more sympathetic than the others, put it this way: “I have a feeling that Strindberg revelled in meeting with opposition. One moment his wife had to be an angel. The next the very opposite. He was as changeable as a chameleon.” (Letters of Strindberg to Harriet Bosse, ed. and trans. by Arvid Paulson, p. 87).

⁸ Strindberg’s uncertainty about his virility is clear throughout his letters; one of his greatest fears is that he will be considered inadequate as a lover. Writing to Harriet he remarks: “The day after we wed, you declared that I was not a man. A week later you were eager to let the world know that you were not yet the wife of August Strindberg, and that your sisters considered you ‘unmarried’. . . . We did have a child together, didn’t we?” (Letters to Harriet, pp. 52-58). Strindberg was also convinced that “where sensual pleasure is sought, there will be no children.” In view of his need to keep the sex act pure, it is remarkable that he was able to make love at all.

⁹ Strindberg eventually grew quite lucid about the origins of his feelings towards women; and though he could never cure himself entirely of his neurosis, he knew himself to be imprisoned in a cycle of eternal repetition, dating from his childhood.

¹⁰ Strindberg’s concept of Naturalism is not at all conventional. He rejects the typical Naturalist play as mere “photography,” insisting instead on a special form of conflict: “This is the misunderstood Naturalism which holds that art merely consists of drawing a piece of nature in a natural way; it is not the great Naturalism which seeks out the points where the great battles are fought, which loves to see what you do not see every day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these forces are called love or hate, rebellious or social instincts, which finds the beautiful or ugly unimportant if only it is great.” (“On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre,” 1889.)

¹¹ Strindberg is very fond of this image. He uses it again, after reading Hedda Gabler, to describe his imagined influence on Ibsen — though now the husband-wife roles are reversed: “See now how my seed has fallen in Ibsen’s brain-pan — and germinated. Now he carries my semen and is my uterus. This is Wille zur Macht and my desire to set others’ brains in molecular motion.”

¹² It should be noted that in two of these plays, the male figure is reduced to impotency by the connivance, direct or indirect, of an older man related to the female antagonist: Julie’s father, the Count, in Miss Julie; and Tekla’s first husband, Gustav, in Creditors. Under a Freudian analysis, the older man appears as a father figure, punishing the son, by means of a symbolic emasculation, for his incestuous relations with the mother. This submerged theme — as Denis de Rougemont has noted in Love in the Western World — is common to European love literature: its literary source is the Tristan myth, but its psychological source is the family romance. Strindberg’s tendency to dramatize the family romance is especially clear in Creditors, a play which evokes Strindberg’s feelings towards Siri and towards her first husband, Baron Wrangel. As Strindberg half understood (“I loved you both,” he writes to Wrangel. “I could never separate you in my thoughts, I always saw you together in my dreams”), Siri and Wrangel are unconsciously identified with his own parents. In Creditors, Gustav (Wrangel) revenges himself on Adolph (Strindberg) for stealing away his wife, Tekla (Siri) — father punishes son for his incestuous feelings towards mother. Thus, Adolph’s epileptic fit, at the end of that play, is really a symbolic castration.

¹³ Carl E. W. L. Dahlström very properly treats The Father as a form of hallucination in his book, Strindberg’s Dramatic Expressionism.

¹⁴ If The Father suggests parallels with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, The Pelican is very definitely a modern version of Choephori. Frederick and Gerda, the two dispossessed children, are Orestes and Electra, swearing vengeance on their mother for the “murder” of their father. The Aegisthus of the piece is Axel, the mother’s second husband and coconspirator.

¹⁵ It is interesting that the masculine profession which Strindberg gives his hero belongs to Baron Wrangel, who was also a Captain in the Guards — in Strindberg’s one-act play, The Bond, the hero is actually a Baron. Strindberg regarded Siri’s first husband in much the same manner as he regarded his father — as a figure of superior virility — and often tries to overcome his own weakness by identifying with Wrangel’s strength. Even in Creditors this partial identification is clear — for if Gustav is the father revenging himself on the son, he is also Strindberg revenging himself on Siri.

¹⁶ Considering that the Captain is so willing to act the part of the passive infant, in fact, he seems rather obtuse when, in Act I, he asks, “Why do you women treat a grown man as if he were a child?”

¹⁷ The ability to function as a scientist was always a proof of sanity to Strindberg, though it would not make much of an impression on a psychiatrist. In Act I, the Doctor is astonished to think that the Captain’s mind might be affected, because “his learned treatise on mineralogy . . . shows a clear and powerful intellect.” Strindberg alludes to his scientific experiments again in Inferno as proof that he could not be insane.

¹⁸ Strindberg’s hesitation is also evident in his conception of Laura’s character. Is she consciously evil, an Iago pouring doubt into Othello’s ear, a predatory animal who fights with everybody who thwarts her will? Or is she unconsciously wicked, the perpetrator, as the Pastor describes it, of “a little innocent murder that the law cannot touch. An unconscious crime.” Just as the Captain wavers between his love of the mother and his hatred of the wife, so Strindberg wavers between these two contradictory interpretations of Laura. When there is no more need to lie, Laura tells her husband, “I didn’t mean this to happen. I never really thought it out. I must have had some vague desire to get rid of you — you were in my way — and perhaps, if you see some plan in my actions, there was one, but I was unconscious of it.” To this, the Captain replies, “Very plausible” — but the plausibility of this explanation is exploded when we remember Laura’s other speeches to her husband, her cunning insinuations to the Doctor, and her conscious decision to proceed with her plan right after she has been informed that an insane man loses his family and civil rights.

¹⁹ It is doubtful if such a thing as Naturalist impartiality can ever be absolute, since the need for some principle of selection ultimately invalidates the fiction of artistic detachment. Yet, even a casual comparison of Miss Julie with, say, any work of Chekhov’s, will show how far short Strindberg falls of objectivity. Actually, Strindberg’s anger against emancipated women, his attraction to aristocratic Supermen, and his revulsion to dirt are attitudes which suggest he does not really share the Naturalist temper — a temper usually democratic, egalitarian, “advanced” on such social questions as female rights, and rather obsessed with the more sordid aspects of life.

²⁰ Actually, Julie — with her white skin, aristocratic bearing, and emancipated opinions — is another, more lucidly executed portrait of Siri Von Essen. And so there may be a touch of self-hatred in Strindberg’s remark that “degenerate men unconsciously select their mates from among these half-women.”

²¹ F. L. Lucas, discussing the play in his book Ibsen and Strindberg, calls Jean a “lout” and Julie a “trollop,” while calling Strindberg himself a “cad.” Lucas’s moralistic malice makes his criticism of Strindberg distorted, narrow-minded, and cranky. And though he will occasionally confess that, “My dislike of drunkenness, literal and artistic, may be morbidly excessive,” he does not realize how much these prejudices affect his understanding of Strindberg. Here is an example of an eighteenth-century mind confronting a modern mind, and recoiling in disgust.

²² Martin Lamm reports that, in Strindberg’s original conception, Julie was to snatch the razor from Jean’s hand with the taunt, “You see, servant, you cannot die.”

²³ See Brown’s fascinating study, Life Against Death. The excrementalist is appalled by the sexual act because it is consummated so near the excretory organs. Jonathan Swift, a writer obsessed with excremental horror, writes: “Should I the Queen of Love refuse/ Because she rose from stinking ooze?” Writing to Siri, Strindberg uses much the same imagery: “You’re walking in filth — you, the queen with the sunlit forehead.” Even the act of writing often seems dirty to Strindberg. To Siri, he says, “I can get poetry out of filth if I must,” and he tells Harriet, “To put things into words is to degrade — to turn poetry into prose!” After a while, Strindberg came to believe that the very act of living was filthy, and the only thing clean and pure was death.

²⁴ In The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg uses the image of the Hyacinth in the same manner. The bulb is the earth; the stalk is the axis of the world; and the six-pointed flowers are the stars. Buddha is waiting for the Earth to become Heaven: i.e., for the Hyacinth to blossom, aspiring above its mired roots. Both the Castle and the Hyacinth, of course, are also phallic images — the sexual organ is pitched in the place of excrement.

²⁵ This idea, like so many others, Strindberg probably found in Nietzsche, who writes in Zarathustra: “This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction and imperfect image — an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator. . . .”

²⁶ This, like everything else in the play, is a perception which Strindberg achieved through personal suffering. As he writes in Inferno: “Earth, Earth is hell, the prison constructed by a superior intelligence in such a way that I cannot take a step without affecting the happiness of others, and others cannot be happy without giving me pain.”

²⁷ The Quarantine Station is closely modeled on Swedenborg’s Excremental Hell. Describing this Hell in Inferno, Strindberg recognizes it “as the country of Klam, the country of my zinc basin, drawn as if from life. The hollow valley, the pine knolls, the dark forests, the gorge with a creek, the village, the church, the poor house, the dunghills, the streams of muck, the pigsty, all are there.”

²⁸ Evert Sprinchorn, in his interesting article, “The Logic of A Dream Play,” Modern Drama, December 1962, demonstrates how Strindberg invests the very structure of the play with this cyclical development — something he had already done with Part I of The Road to Damascus.

²⁹ Another Nietzschean idea, that the righteous are those who crucified Christ: “And be on thy guard against the good and the just!” he affirms in Zarathustra. “They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue — they hate the lonesome ones.”

³⁰ The image of the bursting Castle, as Professor Sprinchorn has suggested, is clearly sexual; and it is significant that Strindberg, like most Romantics, identifies sex with death.