The Father

Over the course of his career, Strindberg was heavily influenced by the French playwright Émile Zola—particularly Zola’s 1881 manifesto “Naturalism in the Theatre.” Along with Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, The Father is considered one of the most important contributions to naturalism on the stage. Departing from the melodramas and so-called “well-made plays” that were popular in his time, Strindberg rejected tight, carefully-constructed plot structures because they failed to represent the real world and how humans navigate it. In general, plot is secondary to the naturalists who prize characterization above all else. Not only that, this characterization, and the conflicts that arise between characters, are depicted as the result of discrete hereditary and environmental factors.

For example, the power dynamic between Laura and the Captain is in large part the result of inherently sexist legal and religious conventions governing women and men. The battle for Bertha’s future is a really a staging ground for these characters as they navigate a gender status quo under threat from modern cultural developments, including Darwinism and occult spiritualism. This is a departure from plays that ascribe characters’ motivations and actions to internal moral or spiritual worldviews, with heroes imbued with innate goodness and villains imbued with innate wickedness. In The Father, the characters are painted with greater ambiguity, as neither Laura nor the Captain are entirely heroic or entirely villainous. By extension, the divine or moral justice that falls on characters in less naturalistic plays is absent here, replaced by a more corruptible institutional justice that sends the Captain to a mental asylum and places full control of Bertha’s future in Laura’s hands.

In addition, The Father sets itself apart as a naturalistic play by eschewing magic and other implausible forces in favor of narrative qualities driven by characterization and cultural institutions. Moreover, the characters’ behavior and speech patterns are rooted in reality. Although they may do and say extraordinarily things—as befits the extraordinary emotional situation they are in—the characters are never exaggerated in a manner disproportionate to the stakes of the play, as they sometimes are in melodramas. And unlike in more romantic dramas, the characters are human beings first and symbolic representations second. Finally, it is important to point out the distinction between realism and naturalism. Although both genres seek to depict characters as real human beings, naturalism goes further in its efforts to ascribe hereditary and environmental causes behind the characters’ behavior.

One of the Captain's many problems is that he insists on seeing the world in purely binary terms. After a long and storied career in the military, he can only view the world as a stark, combative place. To him, everyone is either a friend or an enemy, so every conflict is a zero-sum battle. Nuance or compromise does not exist for a man who views the world in such strict black and white terms. Bertha's future becomes a part of one of these battles. The play does not portray Bertha as a particularly gifted artist or as having a vocation to teach, so whether she becomes a painter or schoolteacher is irrelevant. Instead, to the Captain, what matters is who prevails: he or Laura.

This binary worldview makes the Captain easy to manipulate. Laura handily drops a few hints that soon blow up into acute paranoia about Bertha's paternity, and about the motivations of the women in the house. A stark example of the Captain's descent into obsession with potential enemies is his treatment of his childhood nurse, Margret. Margret cares for him deeply; however, when she refuses to adhere to his blunt view of the world, she ceases to be his ally. The Captain immediately considers Margret an enemy, unable to accept any form of dissent.

Laura also tends toward a binary view of the world. She accepts the Captain's premise that their power struggle can only have one winner and cannot be resolved with compromise. The Captain and Laura see themselves as good and the other as evil. Their binary view of the world means that one of them will inevitably be destroyed.