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    The Father
    The Father
    The Father
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    The Father

    By August Strindberg

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The stormy personal life of the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg was punctuated with duels between the sexes, with ruthless, aggressive women usurping the supposedly male prerogative of decision-making and leadership. More than in any of his other plays, Strindberg explores this theme in depth in The Father.
    In exploring the emotionally charged battle of the sexes and the clashes between scientific and religious convictions, The Father vividly delineates the essential quality of a man’s relationship with his wife and his daughter. The problem of paternity, trivial at the outset, develops into marital upheaval and a no-holds-barred struggle between man and woman.
    Widely regarded as one of Strindberg's best literary efforts, The Father remains one of the most gripping psychological dramas of the theater.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMay 3, 2012
    ISBN9780486153865
    The Father
    Author

    August Strindberg

    Renowned Swedish writer, playwright and painter August Strindberg is known as one of the fathers of modern theatre. Born in Sweden in 1849, August Strindberg was raised in poverty. A multi-faceted artist given to extremes, he battled depression and emotional turmoils throughout his life. Strindberg was actively involved in the trade union movement and was especially admired by the working class of his time as a radical writer who zealously attacked social ills and hypocrisies in his work. After Strindberg was overlooked by the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909, a grass-roots petition campaign was launched in protest, which resulted in a large sum of money raised to compensate the cherished writer. Strindberg’s early plays were written in the Naturalistic style, the best known of which is Miss Julie, one of the most studied and performed dramas in the world to this day. When he broke with Naturalism, the versatile Strindberg found equal success in producing works informed by Symbolism. He proceeded to become one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. Strindberg’s most engaging dramas deal with the constant and consuming battle for power between the sexes, bound together in perverse and complex relationships in which desire is mingled with scorn, and negotiated within the strictures imposed on class and gender roles by social conventions. Strindberg continued to write of the alienated modern man, who is desperate and alone in a forsaken universe, until his death in 1912.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5

      A complex ,painful, and sad play .It portrays the tragedy of a man and his wife(Laura) struggling for the possession of their daughter(Bertha), he is a freethinker, a man of ideas. "
      The will ... is the driving force of the mind. If it's injured, the mind falls to pieces. "
      His wife is uneducated narrow minded, selfish,
      And very cruel who appears as an evil woman and a monster
      who succeeded at the end in driving him mad
      "
      It's terribly hard to be married ... harder than anything else. I think you have to be an angel."
      The father wanted to remove his daughter from the ignorant and superstitious atmosphere she is living in.

      "This house is full of women who all want to have their say about the child. My mother-in-law wants to make a Spiritualist of her. Laura wants her to be an artist; the governess wants her to be a Methodist, old Margret a Baptist, and the servant-girls want her to join the Salvation Army! It won't do to try to make a soul in patches like that. I, who have the chief right to try to form her character, am constantly opposed in my efforts. And that's why I have decided to send her away from home"

      He wanted to her to develop a strong character AND TO BE AN independent woman without any inference from any one,
      She interested only in the possession of her. Therefore she fights him with every means
      Even raising doubts in his mind ,that he is not the father of their child…
      And succeeded in making the Doctor, believe that he is actually insane
      And every one betrays him
      And he finally dies

      Strindberg Wanted to say that children should have the freedom to do whatever they wanted and not to be molded to the thoughts of either of their parents…
      "my father's and my mother's will was against my coming into the world, and consequently I was born without a will."
      .it conveys the effect of the father miserable childhood on how he was raising his daughter…
      And the mother bizarre and idea of the mother ,that see the function of father as a breadwinner

      "I have worked and slaved for you, your child, your mother, your servants; I have sacrificed promotion and career; I have endured torture, flaggellation, sleeplessness, worry for your sake, until my hair has grown gray; and all that you might enjoy a life without care, and when you grew old, enjoy life over again in your child. This is the commonest kind of theft, the most brutal slavery."
      And has nothing to do with her daughter that is only her alone….
      .she appear to be psychologically in balanced

      "Do you remember when I first came into your life, I was like a second mother?... I loved you as my child. But ... when the nature of your feelings changed and you appeared as my lover, I blushed, and your embraces were joy that was followed by remorseful conscience as if my blood were ashamed."

    Book preview

    The Father - August Strindberg

    e9780486153865_cover.jpge9780486153865_i0001.jpg

    DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

    GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI

    EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: T. N. R. ROGERS

    Copyright

    Copyright © 2003 by Dover Publications, Inc.

    All rights reserved.

    Theatrical Rights

    This Dover Thrift Edition may be used in its entirety, in adaptation, or in any other way for theatrical productions, professional and amateur, in the United States, without fee, permission, or acknowledgment. (This may not apply outside of the United States, as copyright conditions may vary.)

    Bibliographical Note

    This Dover edition, first published in 2003, contains the unabridged text of Edith and Warner Oland’s translation of The Father from August Strindberg: Plays, published by John W. Luce and Company, Boston, in 1912. The play was first performed and published in Swedish (as Fadren) in 1887. We have supplied a new introductory Note for the Dover edition.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Strindberg, August, 1849–1912.

    [Fadren. English]

    The Father / August Strindberg.

    p. cm.—(Dover thrift editions)

    9780486153865

    I. Title. II. Series.

    PT9812.F3E513 2003

    839.72’6—dc21

    2003048967

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

    Note

    JOHAN AUGUST STRINDBERG (1849–1912), who is honored as the foremost Swedish playwright, is often compared with Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian. Ibsen was two decades older, and his plays much more straightforward. Ibsen’s characters think and speak logically and consecutively, wrote Michael Meyer, who translated more than a dozen plays by each man and wrote biographies of both: Strindberg’s dart backwards and forwards. They do not think, or speak, ABCDE but AQBZC. The two men were well aware of each other. Strindberg’s earliest successful drama, Master Olof (written around 1873), shows Ibsen’s influence. And Ibsen, for his part, kept a portrait of Strindberg in his study; he called it Madness Incipient, and once remarked, I can’t write a line without that madman staring down at me with those crazy eyes.

    Strindberg certainly did have a good measure of craziness in his life, but he managed to transform it into art. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer. His published writings in Swedish total fifty-five volumes—novels, poetry, short stories, autobiography, history, and more than seventy plays. He was also a talented painter (his works have fetched record amounts at auctions) and an experimental photographer who attempted to make portraits of people’s souls by means of celestographs and crystallizations—photos made without the use of a lens.

    The Father (Fadren, 1887), one of his best, most lasting plays, is a powerful, riveting psychological drama that—like many of Strindberg’s works—has sometimes been accused of being misogynistic. It certainly focuses, as many of his best writings do, on a battle of the sexes and on what Strindberg sees as the insidious destructive power of women. The father of the title is a retired cavalry captain in a house full of women, a situation he says is like being in a cage full of tigers—and if I didn’t hold a red-hot iron under their noses they would tear me to pieces any moment. But who can reason with tigers? The poor captain lets his guard down a moment, and his destruction is assured.

    Many of the torments of Strindberg’s own tormented life seem to have focused on women. As the following Biographical Note makes clear, he was one of several children born to a bankrupt aristocrat and a former waitress, who married only shortly before Strindberg’s birth. His childhood was painful, poor, and full of tension, and after the death of his mother when he was thirteen, he hated the stepmother his father brought in to take her place.

    But if he believed women to be tigers, he still could not live without them. The first of his wives was Siri von Essen, who when he met her in 1875 was married to Baron Wrangel, an officer of the guards. She got a divorce for Strindberg’s sake, became an actress (she played the title role in Miss Julie in 1889), and married him in 1877 when she was seven months pregnant. (They lost that child, but later had two daughters and a son.) In 1891 he and Siri divorced, and in 1893 he married a young Austrian writer, Frida Uhl. They had a child in 1894 and divorced a year later. When he was fifty he met his third wife—a twenty-two-year-old actress named Harriet Bosse, whom he married in 1901 and soon had another child with. They divorced in 1904 but still slept together occasionally, and Strindberg claimed that he maintained a telepathic communication with her until she remarried. (In the Occult Diary he kept from 1896 to 1908, he wrote about the visits he believed he was receiving from her spirit—even as she was preparing to marry another man.)

    Strindberg died from stomach cancer in May, 1912, but his theatrical innovations far outlived him. As Michael Billington wrote,¹

    Strindberg envisioned the kind of theatre we all now recognise: one that banished needless intervals, removed painted props and scenery, simplified mask-like make-up and was based on a collaborative intimacy. [He] also wrote about sex with absolute realism, dramatising the compound of love, hate, fury and desire that characterises random couplings and permanent relationships. If Ibsen caught the tensions of the night before, Strindberg revealed the acrid taste of the morning after.... The idea of sex as a battleground and marriage as a lifelong torment is partly what makes Strindberg seem so modern: there is a straight line connecting plays like The Dance of Death and The Father with Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

    Besides Albee and Osborne, he strongly influenced Eugene O’Neill (who described him as the precursor of all modernity in our present theater), Samuel Beckett, the German expressionists, Harold Pinter, the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and countless others. On a purely theatrical plane, wrote Jens Bjørneboe,² Strindberg has become an inspiration, where Ibsen has become a burden, an immovable gravestone which preserves that form of theater which Ibsen mastered and therefore wished to keep unchanged. In dramatic world literature Strindberg has many descendants, Ibsen none.

    WARNER OLAND, who with his wife (the artist Edith Shearn) in 1912 made this translation of The Father and also wrote the Strindberg biography in the following pages, was quite an interesting character in his own right. He was born in Sweden

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