Thus Hedda’s thought processes can be largely attributed to her father, demonstrated onstage by her increasing retreat into a private backstage sanctum full of objects from her home: the pistols, her father’s portrait and piano. Ibsen’s keen use of stagecraft chooses this careful use of the stage, along with Hedda’s passing comments and conduct with other characters, as alternative forms of expression to explicitly revealing dialogue or monologue.
Whereas in Hedda Gabler, aristocratic standards of the father are taken over by the daughter as an act of paternal duty, Miss Julie expresses a resentment of the social expectations foisted upon her by her position as her father’s daughter. Unlike General Gabler’s child, Miss Julie exhibits a desire to descend from the pedestal she’s been brought up on. Dramatically this has already been demonstrated by her willingness to talk, dance and flirt with Jean, her social inferior. The intoxication of the wine, the celebrations and the circumstances, also play their parts in formulating the scenario presented to us. The crucial factor in Strindberg’s play, as mentioned in his preface, is the sheer multiplicity of factors, and her upbringing by an aristocratic father concerned with honour and reputation is certainly one of them. Significantly, Strindberg’s use of the monologue in his play (again justified in his preface and here partly attributed in Miss Julie’s case to the alcohol she has consumed), allows his character to vocalise her feelings openly to the audience:
Miss Julie: I’ve climbed to the top of the pillar, and am sitting there, and I can see no way to descend. When I look down, I become dizzy, but I must come down – but I haven’t the courage to jump. I can’t stay up there, and I long to fall, but I don’t fall. And yet I know I shall find no peace till I come down, no rest till I come down, down to the ground.
Analysing Hedda’s position in the Tesman’s household, it is striking how much of her dissatisfaction can be attributed to the legacy of her father’s upbringing in alignment with a patriarchal structure. Her desire for control over social situations (just like her father’s over her during childhood) is physically demonstrated in the first three acts of the play by the way she moves characters around the stage: it is she who directs Brack and Tesman into the inner room so that private conversations can be conducted with Thea and Lövborg; it is she who controls who stays and who goes to the party (specifically Lövborg). This control over others is mirrored in Miss Julie’s early instruction of Jean. But Hedda’s sheltered upbringing as a female aristocrat leaves her lacking the means of supporting herself. Having been raised in her father’s house, she would find it psychologically inconceivable to take the step down in society (and necessary change in her accustomed physical environment) which a highly reduced income would necessitate. As a result she is willing to marry a man who might provide the required income, even though it is a union which leaves her bored and frustrated. She has become dependent on a man she detests, one who, with his slippers and frequent visits to his aunts, is a polar opposite to her father. Hedda’s dependent status in a patriarchal society, when combined with the psychological legacy of her upbringing, has rendered her almost helpless in determining her own fate. An upper-class female is not expected to possess the skills to support herself, and her childhood has made her largely dependent on men (to exist). She has been thrust into a ‘Catch-22’ situation, with nominal control over her own future.
Hedda’s subsequent actions are discernibly derived from such factors. Apparently unable to control her own future, she is presented with the next best alternative in Thea’s example: one can attempt to have an influence over another person’s destiny. In her ‘child’, the manuscript she worked on with Lövborg, Thea has exhibited a potency much envied by Hedda; this is theatrically symbolised by her hair, which Hedda constantly fondles with envy. Unable to dictate her own situation, Hedda is her father’s daughter in so much as she too desires an active role, to be of importance, to play ‘General’; she has fallen in love with the idea of masculine authority and action. As Caroline Mayerson suggests, her subsequent attempts at shaping Lövborg’s destiny into something romantic prove the symptom of this:
It is this tradition to which the pistols and Hedda (in her own mind) belong, and it is, after all, the General only as glimpsed through his daughter’s ambitions and conceptions of worth that is of real importance in the play. These conceptions, as embodied in Hedda’s romantic ideal of manhood, may be synthesised from the action and the dialogue. The aristocrat possesses courage and self-control. He expresses himself through direct and independent action… but the recklessness is tempered by a disciplined will, by means of which he “beautifully” orders both his own actions and those of others on whom his power is imposed. He shoots straight – to defend his life or his honour, and to maintain his authority.
This desire is expressed in her handling of her father’s pistols. The pistols have an immediate association with individual power and action, the ability to dictate and control situations. Hedda’s random firing of them at the beginning of Act Two illustrates that by this stage, she isn’t too concerned what shape this power takes (ie. whether it involves directly her own fate or someone else’s), it is the principle of having a participating role that is the issue. The pistols are phallic symbols, signifiers of power in a patriarchal environment, which she is denied in her role as an upper-class, female housewife in the public eye. Thanks largely to her father’s upbringing and the lack of a mother figure, Hedda is more attracted by the masculine concepts existing in society, rather than by the traditional female roles of ‘wife’ and ‘mother’.
Miss Julie’s situation is also bound up in the tensions between social and psychological factors originating from her family. However (in contrast to Ibsen), Strindberg chooses to place this in a specific context relating to the archetypal struggle between the sexes. Miss Julie is torn between her simultaneous hatred and desire for men, as well as her continual sense of honour and later consciousness of her fallen state. Her relationship with Jean, once consummated, leaves her desperately trying to rationalise the act itself by explaining it as ‘love’. Yet Jean points out this is just a desperate attempt to rationalise a product of circumstances, and the blow delivered to the inbuilt sense of honour derived from her father, provokes a violent reaction. The conflict resident within the character is explicitly framed in terms of the mother and father’s influences in her childhood. The battle between male and female, the continual struggle of which Strindberg was ever conscious, provides the means of expressing the conflicting elements of her personality, to the extent where the individual is almost lost in the tide:
Miss Julie: Who is to blame for what has happened – my father, my mother, myself? Myself? I have no self. I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother…
Strindberg’s dramatic use of the monologue allows Miss Julie to vividly recollect the immediate history of her family: her mother’s vehement rejection of patriarchal authority which led in turn to her father’s social exclusion and the attempted reversal of conventional sex roles; how this finally led to her father’s protestation, and how the two subsequently waged war on each other until her mothers death. Miss Julie is the product of such a marriage: a confused creature constructed from a brutal amalgamation of her mother’s instincts and father’s social mores. Thus, she possesses not only a human desire for relationships but also a deep-rooted hatred of men, a desire to break free from the shackles of her role in society, yet also a keen sense of honour that proves her bane after her ‘fall’ with Jean. It is the clash of what Strindberg referred to as “the passionate character of her mother and the upbringing misguidedly inflicted on her by her father”. The environmental factors that Strindberg depicts onstage, combined with this chaotic internal chemistry, all contribute to the circumstances of the play. The impossibility of reconciling them leads to Jean’s proposition of suicide as a form of escape.
Hence, both daughters’ suicides can be partly attributed to their family’s influence. As Miss Julie ultimately isn’t permitted to excuse her violation of honour as ‘love’, so the failure of Hedda’s romantic visions (first motivated by the prospect of finally having a role in another person’s destiny), leads to her death. When Miss Julie leaves the stage for the final time, Strindberg has made sure that we are explicitly aware of all the factors that have played their part. In her own confined state, Hedda perceives the only way of having a role of importance can be through delivering Lövborg ‘to himself’. His subsequent failure to control himself at Brack’s party and return “with vineleaves in his hair”, followed by his ignoble death (when she had provided him with the means of a ‘glorious’ exit), denies Hedda any chance of fulfilling her longing for significance. For her, a future in the Tesman household is psychologically impossible: Thea and Jorgen have moved out of her sphere of influence, and the focus on Lövborg’s work seems to re-emphasise she won’t have any significant role to play in future affairs. Married to a man to whom she doesn’t relate, pregnant with a child she doesn’t want, with a future as a housewife in a house isolated from the city (the ultimate form of domesticity that so revolted her as illustrated by her reaction to Jorgen’s slippers), Hedda’s life becomes the antithesis to her father’s role, and complete anathema to “General Gabler’s daughter”. Additionally, Brack occupies a position of power she simply cannot bear; continually entering as he has done from the back door, his presence represents potential social scandal. Hedda has not been raised to be psychologically content with such an existence. Ibsen presents a catalogue of social and psychological factors that all contribute towards Hedda’s death.
But the endings of the two plays differentiate in tone, and this illustrates Ibsen and Strindberg’s fundamentally different perspectives. In Miss Julie, the final feeling is of futility. Neither Jean nor Miss Julie can be held completely responsible, and so there is an air of helplessness over proceeding. Like an animal, Miss Julie has found herself the victim of her own human existence; the battle of the sexes, both those enacted onstage between her and Jean, but especially between her parents, have helped render her almost helpless, and the tragic atmosphere that pervades the close of the play is obvious. Family for Strindberg, with its inherent conflict between male and female, is yet another factor to be counted among the “multiplicity of motives” cited in his Preface.
In Hedda Gabler, Ibsen denies his protagonist absolute tragic status by allowing Tesman and Brack to have the final word:
Tesman: (shrieking to Brack) Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Think of it!
Brack: (half-collapsed in the easy-chair). But, merciful God! People don’t do such things!
Brack repeats Hedda’s oft repeated mantra concerning social propriety, and the effect is to render the closing moment almost comic. Hedda has finally taken her destiny into her own hands. Her use of the General’s pistol symbolically reaffirms that it is an act born out of psychological necessity, a psychology stemming from her father’s influence (not unlike Strindberg’s “old warrior nobility”). But the action continues after Hedda’s death; life goes on, and choosing simply not to participate isn’t a constructive solution. Fundamentally, while Strindberg’s characters are presented as beings caught in archetypal patterns of conflict, a Darwinian battle to determine the stronger from which it is impossible to escape, Ibsen insists that the individual is capable of breaking the cycle. Though Ibsen never suggests such an act would be easy, our final image of Hedda’s death is one deliberately tinged with absurdity to remind the audience that what has been enacted onstage isn’t simply the tragedy of the human condition. Hedda’s life has been largely shaped by the psychological and social concerns created by her upbringing as General Gabler’s daughter; but her death isn’t ‘necessary’ in the same way Miss Julie’s appears to be. In the pregnancy she so despises, Ibsen may even have provided a tangible opportunity for Hedda to change things in the future through the upbringing of her child. Mayerson observes that, “in emotionally repudiating her unborn child, Hedda rejects what Ibsen considered woman’s opportunity to advance the march of progress” (p. 132). The play has a number of points to make about women’s existence in the Norwegian society of the time, but in the context of this question, it ultimately suggests that genealogies, the psychological and social legacies of one’s family, aren’t necessarily insurmountable obstacles for individuals.
Whereas Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie explore the effects a father never seen has on his child, Strindberg’s The Father is designed to provide an insight into a father’s battle for control over his family. Despite offering a different character’s point of view, several of the dramatic techniques resident in Miss Julie are exhibited. Even more importantly, Strindberg again insists on placing the family of the play in the context of a Darwinian battle of the strongest. It is natural for us to expect similarities between The Father and Miss Julie due to the close proximity of their writing, but the points made about Strindberg’s later work help provide an additional insight into the playwright’s main concerns. In The Father, Strindberg raises a further issue concerning family: can any father know (in a time before genetic testing) if his child is truly his? Furthermore, how does the subsequent uncertainty effect the position and authority of a father in a patriarchal household? Perhaps the most important fact to consider is that in this play, Strindberg is consciously focused on an archetypal family role: the play is called The Father not Captain Adolf after all. The direct quotations of Shakespeare the literary references from numerous sources regarding a father’s dilemma, and the echoing of the father’s situation in both his servants as well as the Pastor’s own experiences (he confides “Do you think I haven’t been all through this?”), are all designed to emphasise that the circumstances presented, in the playwright’s opinion, are universal; the sphere of reference is ever outward.
To investigate this subject, Strindberg provides the character of the Captain, who from his first entrance in undress uniform, riding boots and spurs, appears the physical embodiment of male capability. He is also a character created with the ability to analyse his own fluctuating position in the household, throughout the narrative. In granting the main character this capacity to recognise his own situation and even occasionally be amused by it, the character is intended to tread the border between serious and comic. Strindberg himself maintained:
I suggest, though I don’t usually interfere in these matters, that the Captain be given to an actor of normally healthy temper who, conscious of his superiority,
goes loftily and cynically, almost joyfully, to meet his fate, wrapping himself in death as in a spider’s web which he is impotent to tear asunder. A deceived husband is a comic figure in the eyes of the world, and especially a theatre audience. He must show that he is aware of this, and that he too would laugh if only the man in question were someone other than himself. That is what is modern about my tragedy… no screams, no preachings! Subtle, calm, resigned.
The audience are provided with a rare view of the main protagonist’s psychology at work, just as if he were a Hamlet, yet in a play generally regarded as one of the author’s most naturalistic. Just as in Miss Julie, Strindberg takes care to realistically integrate the theatrical technique of the monologue to make explicit how the situation is having an effect on his characters. The Captain is thus capable of giving the audience an analysis of his emotions throughout the play, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Miss Julie.
The background to the action of the play itself is a fight for supremacy between patriarchy and matriarchy in a household; a source of continual tension that is brought to a climax through the debate over a daughter’s future. Husband and wife fundamentally disagree about what is best for their child, but the conflict seems to be regarded purely in terms of principle. Any concern for the child’s welfare is frequently pretence. The Captain’s lucid grasp of his own motivations provides him with the means of expressing what his own daughter actually signifies for him: “I do not believe in resurrection, and to me this child was my life hereafter. She was my idea of immortality – perhaps the only one that has any roots in reality. Take her away and you cut short my life”. To Laura, the matter is all to do with the current balance of power; her brother (the Pastor) reflects, “it wasn’t the thing she wanted, simply the fact of having her will”. Bertha herself even confides that “She doesn’t pay any attention to me”, whereas the Captain at least consults his daughter’s opinion (though importantly, after he has already made up his mind). Bertha herself is rarely on stage, and furthermore, she never objects to her father’s plans about her future:
Father: Would you like to go and live in town, and learn something useful?
Bertha: Oh, I’d so love to live in town and get away from here – anywhere! As long as I can see you sometimes – often! In here everything’s so gloomy, so horrible, like a winter night.
What the figure of the daughter does do is draw attention to the environment of the family house, specifically the “gloomy” atmosphere pervading it. The home is not the warm, comforting place it should be, but another battlefield. Furthermore, the child appears little more than a possession to be fought over, one which (caught between the conflicting wills of her parents), struggles to have a will of her own. Though the story of the daughter is largely subordinate to the main marital conflict, what proves remarkable is the recurrence of this topic via the Captain, in his almost passing observation that “Mother and father had me against their will, and so I was born without a will”. Individually this passage could be construed as insignificant, but the theme of dislocation from one’s parents is touched on again in Act Three: “My mother was my enemy. She didn’t want to bring me into the world because my birth would cause her pain. She robbed my first embryo of its nourishment, so I was born half-crippled”. The Captain refers to his mother always in the context of one of the several women he has been at war with, and so Strindberg’s utilisation of mother-son, father-daughter relationships is specifically intended to emphasise their context within the continual battle of the sexes. This heavily echoes extracts from the later play Miss Julie, specifically the main character’s earlier cited reflection: “Who is to blame? Myself? I have no self! I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother…”. In the closing stages of Miss Julie, it is her pet finch that was “the only living thing that loves me”, any reference to her father being conspicuous by its absence. As Raymond Williams observed, the child doesn’t even have to be active. In a passive state, it is still “a weapon and a prize in the parents’ continuing struggle, itself unwanted… continually unwanted, since there is no final place for it where it was born, and yet the loss of this place is an absolute exposure”. Once again, Strindberg is shown to provide an explicit depiction of the psychological pressures under which his characters operate.
In the final act, the Captain reflects on how his marriage was once happy, in a time where the relationship was primarily maternal. Only when the Captain assumed his position as patriarchal ‘head’ of the family through his new role as ‘father’, did the conflict start: the arrival of Bertha provided something to lay claim to. This scenario emphasises Strindberg’s fundamental point of view: that relationships between sexes are essentially competitive. When the Captain was Laura’s ‘little boy’ under her control, they could maintain a state of ‘armistice’; once this equilibrium dissolved, her natural impulse was to regain authority by any means. Thus, Strindberg suggests, the fundamental structure of families will always lead to a struggle for dominance. In Laura’s case, this involved the systematic emasculation of her husband. She leaves all patriarchal authority redundant (as Strindberg termed it, “impotent”). The Captain’s scientific reputation and honour have been gradually eroded, and the crucial blow is struck through the obliteration of the primary objective of patriarchy: the continuation of the father’s line. Having sacrificed his life and honour in the belief that through his child a form of immortality was obtainable, the uncertainty concerning Bertha’s origins illustrates how the whole patriarchal construction of fatherhood can be quickly rendered defunct. Bertha’s unwillingness to side exclusively with the Captain against her mother destroys any remaining hopes of victory in the battle with his wife:
Captain: You must only love me! You must only have one soul, or you will never find peace, nor shall I. You must have only one thought, and you shall have only one will, mine.
Bertha: I don’t want that! I want to be myself!
Captain: I won’t let you do that! You see, I’m a cannibal, and I want to eat you. Your mother wanted to eat me, but she couldn’t. I am Saturn, who ate his children because it had been prophesied that otherwise they would eat him. To eat or be eaten! That is the question.
The conscious echoing of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” is intended to resonate with a theatre audience, once again emphasising the universality of the struggle. The child’s position is that of a pawn in a heightened game of power between its parents. The Captain is left unable to lift a finger in response: when he reaches for his revolver, a symbol of masculine phallic authority presiding over the household from its mounting on the wall, Laura has symbolically robbed it of its potency by taking its ammunition. The stage-image constructed for the close of the play demonstrates how the matriarchy’s final victory (attributed in part to women’s own security regarding the origin of their children) has led to the father figure being reduced to a state of second childhood. The defining role of patriarchal authority in the family, the position of ‘father’, has been rendered literally impotent by the removal of the daughter as a route to immortality; by extension, the logic that first legitimised the sex-conflict instigated through the undertaking of the role of ‘father’ has collapsed. This alternative perspective is what differentiates the play. Whereas Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie touch on the influence of father on the daughter, The Father examines the function children have within the concept of fatherhood, and how they are inevitably drawn into the archetypal struggle of which we are all part. Ibsen and Strindberg had fundamentally different opinions, but the re-emergence of topics concerning the family and the role of the father proves they both felt compelled to deal with them, and regard them as truly universal themes worth investigating theatrically.
Bibliography
Ellis-Fermor, Una, trans. Ibsen: Hedda Gabler and Other Plays
Penguin: London, 1983
Fjelde, Rolf, ed. Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays
Prentice-Hall International Inc: New Jersey
Mayerson, Caroline W. “Thematic Symbols in Hedda Gabler” 131-138
Lucas, F.L. The Drama Of Ibsen & Strindberg
Cassell: London, 1962
McFarlane, James and Jens Arup trans. Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays
Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1965
McFarlane, James ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen
Finney, Gail. “Ibsen and feminism” 89-105
Garton, Janet. “The middle plays” 106-125
Meyer, Michael, trans. Strindberg: Plays One
Methuen: London, 1982
Northam, John. Ibsen: A Critical Study
Cambridge University Press: London, 1973
Reinert, Otto. Strindberg: A Collection Of Critical Essays
Prentice-Hall International, Inc: London, 1971
Williams, Raymond. “Private Tragedy: Strindberg,” 48-56
Lamm, Martin. “Miss Julie,” 105-116
Johnson, Walter. “Strindberg and the Danse Macabre,” 117-124
Robinson, Michael. Strindberg and Genre
Norvik Press: Norwich, 1991
Törnqvist, Egil. “Strindberg and Subjective Drama,” 97-107
Kvam, Keva. “Strindberg as an Innovator of Dramatic and Theatrical Form,”
108-118
Thomas, David. Henrik Ibsen (Macmillan Modern Dramatists)
Macmillan Press: London, 1983
The texts used in this essay, to which all subsequent page references correspond to, are: Hedda Gabler, Ibsen: Hedda Gabler and Other Plays. trans. Una Ellis-Fermor (Penguin: London 1983). Miss Julie and The Father, Strindberg: Plays One. trans. Michael Meyer (Methuen: London 1982).
I have decided against any attempts to make distinction between modern audiences and those theatre audiences Ibsen and Strindberg were writing for at the turn of the century, as I feel this issue is irrelevant to the aims of this essay.
The Correspondence of Henrik Ibsen, trans & ed. by Mary Morison, 435, quoted from Ibsen: A Collection Of Critical Essays, 132
Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie,” Strindberg: Plays One, 93. Strindberg continually stressed the “multiplicity of factors” present in the play.
Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie”, 93.
“I made Miss Julie imagine herself to be in love so as to excuse her action and escape her feeling of guilt”, Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie”, p.98.
an example ofthe inherent sense of honour that also leads Miss Julie into ordering the destruction of her dog Diana after discovering it has been impregnated by a mongrel (in an obvious foreshadowing of her own situation)
“the Old Warrior nobility” psychology, Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie”, p. 93.
Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie”, p. 93.
In his preface to the play, Strindberg seemed to suggests otherwise, explaining that “when we have become as strong as the French revolutionaries it will do us good to see the forest cleared of old, rotting trees that have stood too long in the way of others with equal right to a time in the sun – as much good as watching the death of someone incurably ill”. However, I am inclined to sympathise with Martin Lamm’s observation that “our response to the ending of the play is less joyous because Strindberg, his professed objectivity notwithstanding, has conceived of Miss Julie’s destiny tragically. She is the refined aristocrat who succumbs in the struggle with the coarse proletarian” (Lamm, 115)
Cf. Ibsen’s speech to the Norwegian Women’s Rights League (1898): “It is women who are to solve the social problems. As mothers they are to do it. And only as such can they do it.” Speeches and New Letters of Henrik Ibsen, trans. by Arne Kildal, 66, quoted in Mayerson, 132.
Meyer trans, can be found on pages 59, 68 and 28 respectively
Meyer trans, Strindberg, quoted in Meyer trans, “Introduction to The Father”, Strindberg: Plays One.
“the masterpiece of naturalistic drama”- Lamm, “Miss Julie.” Strindberg: Collection of Critical Essays, 105.
The battle for power in the marital relationship of the Captain and Laura is partly represented onstage by the possession of the secretaire, from where the former literally holds the purse-strings over the latter in the first act. Strindberg’s positioning of Laura at the secretaire in the third act, rifling through its contents, is a deliberate theatrical technique that helps emphasise to the audience how she has gradually usurped her husband’s control.
Bertha is present in only three of the plays twenty-three scenes
Raymond Williams, “Private Tragedy: Strindberg,” Strindberg: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 49
vocabulary derived from warfare permeates the play, eg. The Captain’s “military secret (35) and later proposal of “an armistice” (57)
Strindberg, quoted in Meyer trans, 17.
One can only speculate as to whether Strindberg considered the tale of Hamlet as another Darwinian battle for survival .