| "The Father marked the beginning of
Strindberg's popular and even scholarly reputation as an extreme misogynist.
The evidence for such a view is of course abundant, yet nothing is simple
about Strindberg's attitude towards women; certainly, no uncomplicated,
comfortable theory or antifemale bias will do much to uncover the psychological
. . . substance of his work.
Richard Gilman, "Strindberg's Invention," January 1990 |
|
| The Swedish playwright, novelist, and short story writer August Strindberg (1849 -1912) has been considered one of the most infamous misogynists of all time, his women characters often standing as models of deceitfulness and ignominy. Yet was this man, himself thrice a husband and a deeply devoted one at that, a man who reportedly worshipped women -- was he really the woman-hater that his critics have made him out to be? Certainly "misogyny" is a convenient theory to hang him by, but a reexamination of the role women-and-myth played in Strindberg's artistic and personal world-view leads me to think that a different constellation of feelings toward women underlay his great work, a constellation altogether missing in any of the misogynist's virulent hatred. | |
 |
One reason Strindberg was considered a woman-hater is that contemporary critics constantly pitted his autobiographical plays, which graphically depicted his marriage problems, against those of the more celebrated "feminist" playwright, Henrik Ibsen. (A cursory look at the exploits of Peer Gynt should raise questions as to the label of the latter dramatist.) Written in 1879, Ibsen's A Doll's House had, with the liberation of his character Nora, opened the door for women, igniting what was to become a heated issue for all of Europe. Strindberg's play The Father appeared a year earlier -- and his character, Laura, was an aggressive, deceitful, machinating wife. |
| Swedish playwright (Johan) August Strindberg, in this 1896 lithograph by Edvard Munch, is partly byt suggestively framed by the figure of a woman. Strindberg's chief works include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), Creditors (1888), A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907) Image: Copyright Munch Museum, Oslo, 1993. | |
| In the same year of The Father, Strindberg
wrote a scathing view of women in A Madman's Defense, continuing a diatribe
of paranoia already seen in his short story collection Married (1884).
In Married, Strindberg actually refers to A Doll's House, attacking the
principle of liberation as anathema to the institution of marriage.
Now Strindberg's first marriage, to Siri von Essen, was a turbulent ordeal, full of many bitter quarrels over money, power, and progeny. When this marriage began to crumble in 1887 -- they would divorce four years later when he was 42 -- critics wasted no time subjectifying The Father and A Madman's Defense as apparent opportunities to "woman-bash." True, autobiographical misogyny permeated Strindberg's oeuvre, yet seldom are the reasons for this perversion clearly theorized. "Comfortable" theories include Strindberg's lack of motherly love as a child. Others attribute his anti-feminism to a greater sociological movement prevalent in the contemporary works of Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bachofen, all avidly read by the playwright. (More prosaically, Strindberg shared the view common in much of late 19th century Europe that women should not venture into politics, business, or professional life, unless it be as a teacher, nurse, or midwife -- but this outlook alone can't justify labeling him as a misogynist.) |
|
| I make no attempt here to answer what many scholars and psychoanalysts have been unable to clearly ascertain, but an examination into the mythology of woman as studied by Strindberg -- and symbolized in The Father -- may take the sting out of what appears to be a virulent hatred of women. That is, after looking first into convenient theories implicating Strindberg's Freudian past, we'll probe his more profound interest in woman/myth, perhaps discovering that the infamous "misogynist" was very much in love, in awe, in worship, and greatly in fear of the opposite sex. |
 |
| Strindberg's 1886 photograph of his first wife Siri von Essen, who was married to Strindberg for thirteen years. their union served Strindberg as a source of much animosity when he wrote The Father. Image: by permission of the Strindbergmuseet in Stolkholm, Sweeden | |
| A few telling facts about Strindberg's
childhood clearly set the stage for interpretations of arrested psycho-sexual
development. His mother had been his father's mistress, giving birth to
three illegitimate children before their wedding. She died when Strindberg
was thirteen, after a marriage plagued by financial strain amid moral and
physical squalor. Soon after, Strindberg's father remarried, and the step-mother
would become the source of much tension for the teenaged boy. It is not
surprising that in later life the playwright had questions of his own legitimacy
and problems with paternal identification, as suggested by the autobiographical
motifs in The Father.
At age twenty-six Strindberg had a passionate love affair with the wife of Baron Wrangel, the woman who would become his first wife. Both Siri von Essen and the Baron had exercised a certain parental influence over Strindberg, which, in her case, attracted the boy as a surrogate mother. The result was a confusion between Mother/Wife/Mistress that permeates much of his later work, especially the stories in Married and his play The Father. The autobiographical motifs are unmistakable. Strindberg's marriage to Siri failed -- and in his stories of married life his protagonist is jealous of a "Baron" who dances with the hero's young, beautiful betrothed. She and the hero marry, but the union is unhappy. Research into "marriage" as a cause of human misery becomes the focus for the fictional protagonist -- and also for the flesh-and-blood author. In the stories, the hero falls in love with the wife's cousin (it is not clear whether this occurred in reality) and the marriage fails miserably after reference to a play called A Doll's House (clearly autobiographical). Not coincidentally, the hero is a captain in the navy, as the protagonist of The Father is a captain in the army. Many other incidents from Strindberg's real life, depicted first in the stories, are transferred as well to The Father. Of particular note, in Married the Captain lays his head on the cousin's lap, crying desperately for a happy marriage, hoping for one that is "good and true"; in The Father, the Captain too lays his head on Laura's lap, weeping like a child. This time the tears are the result of a fight over a question of his paternity. The Captain and Laura's marriage is crumbling from a power struggle: the power of women in the Captain's house, the power of Laura to solely determine the paternity of their child, the power of Laura as Mother/Wife/ Mistress (all three of which he needs but cannot tolerate). Strindberg, in fact, questioned Siri on fidelity
and on the paternity of their child, defending his accusations through
a parallel in The Father, employing the vehicle of myth:
Captain: "The Odyssey, Book 1, line 215. Telemachus to Athene. 'My mother indeed declares that Odysseus is my father but I myself cannot be sure -- since no man knows for certain his own begatter' . . . and the Prophet Ezekiel: 'the fool saith, "Lo, here is my father," but who can tell from whose loins he hath rightly sprung.' That's pretty conclusive, I'd say." (Translation by Marowitz, p.265)Near the end of the play, the Captain's -- I would argue, as well, Strindberg's -- Oedipal fixation is reaffirmed in the lines "Bend over me so I can feel your breast. Oh, it's so good to sleep on a woman's breast -- a mother's or a mistress's -- although a mother's is best" (p.287). |
|
| If Strindberg's anti-feminism had its roots in his childhood experiences with his step-mother (or in his lack of experience with his real mother) it was exacerbated not only by failed marriages and the supposedly pro-feminist Ibsen play -- but also by a prevailing late nineteenth century philosophy that depicted women as inferior and evil. Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hartmann all supported the anti-feminist movement. In 1870 John Sheridan Le Fanu introduced the first female vampire (women as sucking the life from men) in Carmilla. (And Carmilla's victim was named Laura.) Ten years earlier, Gustav Moreau -- Matisse's teacher -- exhibited his famous femme fatale, Salome, to prevailing gynephobic delight. Munch's famous "Vampire" portrait was exhibited in 1893 during the time of the painter's acquaintance as a painter. (Indeed, three years later Munch would do Strindberg's portrait.) Also in 1893, Aubrey Beardsley illustrated the famous final scene of Oscar Wilde's Salome, Wilde evidently having written his play as a call for the mass murder of women. | |
| By this time the playwright had been influenced: "Woman already by nature is instinctively villainous," he writes (Brev, Vol.5, p.178). Ideal woman was represented by the good wife-mother, her archetype being Mother Earth. The opposite, the New Woman (Ibsen's Nora stood as a prototype) threatened the existing image of the Ideal and was seen as vampire or whore. Her archetype was the Terrible Mother. | |
 |
In 1886, the year before the appearance of The Father, Strindberg contacted Johann Jakob Bachofen, a Swiss philosopher and mythologist. Bachofen theorized that patriarchal society was preceded by two levels of matriarchy ("Mother right"). The first and lowest stage, termed the "Terrible Mother" and identified with Aphrodite, described a nomadic life in which the male is subordinated to the female principle and in which "the feminine right of the earth" wears an aspect "dark as the inexorable law of death." Night, here, in mythic terms is identified with the earth, and the mythologic Terrible Mother is seen as sending forth matter from darkness to light, only to ultimately consume it again. |
| Harriet Bosse, the playwrights's third and final wife, in a 1904 photograph. Bosse found Strindberg to be a loving husband and father. Image: by permission of the Strindbergmuseet in Stolkholm, Sweeden | |
| Based on extensive research in Greco-Roman
myth, Bachofen's theory proposed a second stage, identified by lunar symbolism,
in which Aphrodite is transformed into Earth Mother (Good), becoming wife
and mother, receptive to man. In Bachofen's third stage, the astronomical
designation shifts from lunar to solar, coordinate with the shift in social
relations from "mother right" matriarchy to "father right" patriarchy.
Nietzsche borrowed from Bachofen for The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and Strindberg
was heavily influenced by both men.
Strindberg's primary fear was a reversion of society back to the "dark" age of the Terrible Mother. The Father all transpires at night. The only "Good" woman in the play is the nurse -- the symbol of the Ideal Woman, Mother Earth. (Ironically, it is she who coaxes the Captain into the straight jacket, a metaphor for his complete immobility, his complete impotence and powerlessness by the end of the play.) Laura, on the other hand, is clearly the "Terrible Mother," the all-consuming, all-powerful, exaggerated New-Woman, sucking the blood (or bone-marrow, as the Captain himself exclaims) of her prey. |
|
| The importance for Strindberg of mythologic
and symbolic analysis such as those of Bachofen must not be minimized.
In addition to studies of alchemy, linguistics, and music, Strindberg was
dedicated to history and mythology. And a plethora of women characters
from plays and myths occupied his mind. More specific than just vampire,
whore or terrible mother, his obsessions included Lady MacBeth, Clytemnestra,
Medusa, Circe, Penelope, Medea, Agave, Delilah, and specifically Omphale.
The taking of Hercules's club by Omphale is, of course, a symbol of castration. According to Bachofen, "Every change in the relation between the sexes is attended by bloody events; peace and gradual change is far less frequent..." In The Father Strindberg uses castration imagery in several passages, including the Captain's direct references to Omphale ("Wake up Hercules! They're stealing your club!" [p.286]) and his lines referring to his dashed hopes for the marriage, "Then along came someone with a knife and made an incision . . . now I'm only half a tree . . . I just wither and die" (p.279). |
|
| Certainly the Captain -- and Strindberg
too, we may conjecture, in his understanding of himself -- was caught,
perhaps in a self-initiated way, in a Black Widow's web, not unlike Agamemnon
trapped and destroyed by Clytemnestra. Pentheus, too, was killed by his
mother, Agave. Medusa, like Mozart's Queen of the Night, is dark and immobilizes
her men once they see her. The gods warn Orpheus not to look upon Euridice
lest he be destroyed. This fear of women that gorgonizes them is a kind
of reciprocal of a more current catch phrase, "male chauvinist pig," as
if from Circe's power men have been turned into swine. So too, late nineteenth
century anti-feminism turned its perceived enemies into monsters.
Perseus, the great warrior, eventually slays Medusa. But in The Father, the Captain cannot muster the virility, desperate as he might wish to, to win this battle of the sexes. Interestingly, the focal point of a production of the play at the American Repertory Theatre in January 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the question of Strindberg's own sexuality. In this production, renowned director Robert Brustein had the Captain display particular machismo defending against his fear of his own female side. This interpretation is supported in a passage in Strindberg's Married in which, when first attracted to the Baron's wife (alias Siri), the hero says he had "met his man or rather his woman" (p.120). According to this theory, Strindberg/Captain fights with an inner confusion regarding sexuality, the confusion stemming more from an insecurity, a paranoia based more on inner male/female conflicts than on an outward manifestation of prevailing anti-feminism. In his memoir Days of Loneliness, Strindberg professed a life-long struggle for self-knowledge, deeming the difficult process "a most grateful study" (p.33). He certainly was aware of his own Oedipal tendencies. "He was honest enough," according Harry Popkin, writing an introduction for Miss Julie, "to set down all the symptoms of the Oedipus complex at a time when its symptoms were regarded, not as interesting signs of a well-known psychic disorder, but as an embarrassment that one did not acknowledge" (p.13). Strindberg also may have known that Omphale means "navel," associating it to the womb, which to him was the area from whence life came--and returned, according to the myth of the voracious consumption of the Terrible Mother. Strindberg's womb-tomb equation is manifested in a fear of the dark, cited by the biographer Gunnar Brandell. The Captain in The Father must get out of the house, a house taken over by women. That he is unable to escape by virtue of a barricade is testament to his, and Strindberg's, fear of death in "the womb." In Brustein's production, the Captain leaves the house only once, presumably to allow the next scene to reveal deceitful corroboration between the Doctor (symbol of "New Woman" sympathy) and Laura. In the script, the Captain remains in the house in spirit only, as if to witness his own destruction. Either way, the playwright confirms the terrible things that go on "in there." |
|
 |
|
| Living room of Strindberg's one-time residence in Stockholm, now the Strindberg Museum. A statuette of jason holding the Golden Fleese, Strindberg's gift to Harriet Bosse on the day of their marriage on May 6, 1901, appears in the right rear of the picture. Image: By permission of the Strindbergmuseet in Stockholm, Sweeden. | |
| If Strindberg's more progressive contemporaries
worshipped the image of the new woman, Strindberg abhorred it in favor
of the Ideal Woman. "My superior intelligence," he wrote, "revolts against
the gyneolatry which is the latest superstition of the free thinkers" (see
Henderson). In fact, his fear of the womb bordered on gynephobia. While
the Captain says, "No woman is born to man" (p.247), Strindberg tried to
develop a theory to make such occurrences possible, doing so only later,
during his "inferno" period, a period of great stress, near breakdown,
and mental instability -- and also the time of his interest in alchemy
and theosophy -- a period recounted by Strindberg himself in his 1898 memoir,
Inferno. "He hypothesized that the earth was not spherical," Popkin tells
us, "and that men could create children without the help of women" (p.15).
In The Father, the Captain calls the first woman he ever held in his arms his "enemy." "She gave me ten years of disease in return for the love I gave her" (p.274). Whether Strindberg suffered the same ague is of negligible importance, but Brustein's review of Michael Meyer's 1985 biography of Strindberg is revealing, suggesting in the great Swedish writer more than a hint of homoerotica. Strindberg spoke of his own spiritual uterus, his feelings of being a bitch, his dreams of women as men and without breasts, his semen samples, his frustration with his own masculinity--all of which suggests that his fear of sexuality in women might have been more a confusion with his own sexuality. In The Father it was not only women who were portrayed
as the Terrible Mother, but the Roman God Saturn could also devour his
own children in Medea's image. So here Strindberg, in defense, becomes
the aggressor:
Captain: (To his daughter) "I'm a cannibal you see, and I want to eat you all up. Your mother wanted to eat me, but she couldn't. I am Saturn who devoured his children because it was prophesied that otherwise, they would consume him. To eat or be eaten . . ."It is not surprising that in the living room of the Strindberg museum, once the playwright's residence, stands a statuette of Jason holding the Golden Fleece ("just like a little prince in a golden coat," The Father, p.283). It was purchased by Strindberg on May 6, 1901, on the day of his third marriage, to Harriet Bosse, and is the main feature of the museum. Prototype of the triumphant hero, Jason returned home to Medea who, in a jealous rage, destroyed their children. It was a horrific deed that effectively disempowered the hero, emasculating the great warrior by placing the "club" of superiority within the sole purview of the Terrible Mother. If this interpretation sounds polymythic, so was the mythopoeic substance of Strindberg's The Father. Like Jason, the Captain loved women but felt betrayed, emasculated and immobilized to the brink of death by their power. This well might have been the eulogy to the otherwise infamous misogynist, Strindberg, himself. That he hoped to love an "ideal" woman is made clear in his early writings. More convincing was his inability to do so. Just how much he hated women has been amply documented, but the term misogynist was refuted even by his third wife. Harriet Bosse firmly believed Strindberg loved women. His ardor was made clear in many letters to her (he addresses her as his "Sublime beloved woman"). One such letter reveals his need for the protection of the traditional home, the kind he (and the Captain in The Father) never received: "...If tomorrow the church is closed, I shall break it open, if you say the word. And after the marriage ceremony we enter into our home which will protect us..." It was his fear of sexuality, masculine or feminine, his fear of the womb, of marriage as a newly defined institution, and of a reversion to a matriarchal society that, more than his hate, characterized much of his struggle. These fears are what are so clearly woven, with the use of myth, into The Father.
|
|
SOURCES
Bachofen, J. J. Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, translated by Ralph Mannheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
|
|
| Return to top of this page
Return to Vol. 4, no. 1 Table of Contents Return to Sextant Frontpage |
 |