The Father – August Strindberg, 1887 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★½

Throwing Away the Envelope

What would a battle of the sexes look like if participants were less motivated by sexual desire and more by Nietzschean will to power? The Father sets the struggle of man versus woman, or rather husband versus wife, in exactly that context.

Whether the play is valid, illuminating, or entertaining as presented is a different question. I didn’t find it so, but I was born a century after the intended audience. They found this drama convincing enough to help lift its author, August Strindberg, to international fame.

In the play, an army captain named Adolf plans to send his daughter Bertha away to become a teacher. He is opposed by his wife, Laura; she wants Bertha at home. Adolf insists that as the father, he has final authority, true enough in 19^th-century Sweden. Laura throws shade on that contention by floating the possibility Adolf is not the real father:

LAURA: How can you know what nobody knows?

CAPTAIN: Are you joking?

LAURA: No, I’m simply applying your own theory. How do you know I haven’t been unfaithful to you?

CAPTAIN: I can believe a good deal of you, but not that. And if it were so, you wouldn’t talk about it.

LAURA: Supposing I were prepared for anything, for being turned out and ostracized, anything to keep my child under my own control. Supposing I am telling the truth now when I say: Bertha is my child but not yours. Supposing…

CAPTAIN: Stop it! [Act One]

Adolf’s inability to be sure of his fatherhood proves his ruination. So does the support Laura gains from a group of supporting players, each with their own reasons for siding with her. Even daughter Bertha, who actually wants what her father wants, is too cowed to say so.

Peter Fjelstrup as the Captain and Thilda Fønss as his daughter Bertha in a 1918 stage performance in Copenhagen. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father_(Strindberg_play). 

I was reminded of a line from a classic sixth-season “Simpsons” episode, “Homer Vs. Patty And Selma,” where Marge Simpson gets flak from sisters Patty and Selma about this boob of a husband she married.

Selma sneers: “Granted, you got some kids out of him, but when the seeds have been planted, you throw away the envelope.”

In The Father, Captain Adolf discovers he is that envelope. His response includes several quips about the innate awfulness of the female:

DOCTOR: There it is, Captain, a man – as I think Goethe says – must take his children on trust.

CAPTAIN: Trust, where a woman’s concerned? A bit of a risk. [Act Two]

The Elizabeth Sprigge translation embraces a misogynistic reading, though interpretations might differ in other hands. Strindberg himself was known as a feminist for his time, though like a lot of progressives, a bit of a hypocrite, too. He was hard on his wives and treated his own daughter like a science project.

Reading Strindberg – through his vehicle of Captain Adolf – denounce how women operate is wearying, not only considering Strindberg himself but the way he stacks the deck in this play. Captain Adolf is the fair-minded arbiter of science and reason, while wife Laura schemes and pounces. She would be twirling a mustache on stage, if only she could grow one.

LAURA: Now you have fulfilled the unfortunately necessary functions of father and bread-winner. You are no longer needed, and you must go. You must go, now that you realize my wits are as strong as my will – you won't want to stay and acknowledge my superiority. [Act Two]

Siri von Essen, a Finnish actress and Strindberg's first wife, is believed to have fueled Strindberg's depiction of the calculating, menacing Laura in The Father. After much friction, the couple divorced in 1891, four years after The Father's publication. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg. 

Passages like the above make me wonder if Sprigge’s translation might have missed some nuance; some suggestion of mercy from Laura, perhaps; or else provoking cruelty from Adolf.

There are exchanges where Laura asks the father to compromise on his plans for Bertha, which he shrugs off. But his point there is reasonable: What compromise can there be between one parent who wants to let the child live in another town and another who wants to keep her at home – except to put her up at a railroad station between the two locations?

Laura suggests they let Bertha decide, but Captain Adolf won’t go along: “[Y]ou have a fiendish power of getting your own way, like all people who are unscrupulous about the means they employ,” he tells Laura in Act One.

All this would be good melodrama if there were more ambiguity involved. But Laura’s bitch signals burn bright. She really doesn’t care about Adolf, only her ability to live off either him or his pension while dominating Bertha. For much of Act One, Adolf ignores the warnings, even from Laura’s pastor brother. Soon it is too late.

At one point Laura connects her animosity to Adolf to the fact they had sex, something she describes more like rape than love. Yes, she gave her consent and enjoyed it enough at the time, but felt “tainted” after. “The mother became the mistress – horrible!” she fumes in Act Two.

This might have touched off an interesting tangent about intimacy issues, but I sense that would have detracted from Strindberg’s main concern, which was how wives crave dominance in a relationship. He keeps coming back to that, again and again:

CAPTAIN: You want complete power over the child, don’t you, with me still there to support you both?

LAURA: Power, that’s it. What’s this whole life and death struggle for if not for power?

CAPTAIN: For me, as I don’t believe in a life to come, this child was my life after death, my conception of immortality – the only one, perhaps, that’s valid. If you take her away, you cut my life short. [Act Two]

The Father impressed many literary heavyweights of Strindberg's time, including Émile Zola, who wrote: "Your piece is one of the few dramatic works which has moved me profoundly." Image from https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/10-things-you-should-know-about-emile-zola/.

Adolf does have his own agenda here, which becomes clearer as the play goes on. Yes, his interests mirror Bertha’s, but like other atheists, he has a special interest in his only child adopting his point of view. It’s a question of “immortality” for him, or at least of fending off personal oblivion beyond his immediate lifespan.

But since he isn’t on the same power trip Laura is on, it’s hard to feel anything but resentment about how she treats him, Strindberg’s main and often only point. When the captain asks Laura why they ever married in the first place, you wish you could ask him why did he.

The Father is sometimes described as a pioneering example of “naturalism” in play-writing, where characters act like real people rather than puppets to help tell a story, addressing real-life issues and social concerns. Like another such Scandinavian play said to be similarly pioneering, Ibsen’s The Ghosts, it is hard now to see anything particularly natural in the people or events depicted here.

Strindberg even has one of the characters mention The Ghosts, as if inviting comparisons. That play dealt with the horror of venereal disease, this with the specter of infidelity, so there are real-world concerns. Only they aren’t handled in a real-world way.

Characters lay out subconscious motivations too openly:

LAURA: I may 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. I have never given a thought to my actions – they simply ran along the rails you laid down. My conscience is clear, and before God I feel innocent, even if I’m not. You weighed me down like a stone, pressing and pressing till my heart tried to shake off its intolerable burden. [Act Three]

A climactic confrontation in The Father, as staged by the Bench Theatre at the Havant Arts Centre, Havant, U. K. in 1993. Image from https://www.benchtheatre.org.uk/plays90s/father.php. 

Strindberg’s attitudes toward human relations, particularly with women, revolve around power. Another play of his, 1890’s The Stronger, comprises a single monologue delivered by one woman to her husband’s former lover. It winds down with her sneering at her mute adversary:

“You couldn’t learn from others, you couldn’t bend, and so you broke like a dry stick. I did not. Thank you, Amelia, for all your good lessons. Thank you for teaching my husband how to love. Now I am going home – to love him.”

Not every play is compromised by being set in a time of different values and social mores. Strindberg’s own Miss Julie, published the year after The Father, revolves around questions of class, nobility, and the scandal of premarital sex and holds its own very well. The two main characters in that play have resonance, depth, and believability; all traits missing from the players here.

Instead, a weird Darwinian philosophy dominates The Father. Even Sprigge’s warm-worded introduction calls out Strindberg’s cardboard depiction of Bertha and the other secondary characters. And the two main characters are flat as pancakes. It’s not just the inevitability of the resolution that bothered me, but my failure to care about it.