In his sixty-three years from 1849 to 1912, he was the author of more than fifty plays, as well as short stories, poems, novels, and an autobiography. In short, he was a prolific writer. Nevertheless, it was on his plays that all his fame rests. These plays fall into well-defined categories: (1) Early Work; (2) Children’s Plays—which he fell back on in his happy moments; (3) Realistic Plays—which took a stab at the drab and stuffy theatrical conventions of his day, and to which belong two well-known plays, The Father and Miss Julia; (4) the Historical Cycle—in which he sought solace after a period of turmoil, trying to escape into the past; (5) the Mystical Plays—which he wrote later in his life, when he found relief and comfort in religion; and (6) his ‘Chamber Plays’—written for his Strindberg Theatre in Stockholm.

The Father was written in a painful period of his life, when his marriage with Siri Von Essen had almost dissolved. One could contend that much of the torment of this period permeates the play; to my mind, a great deal of this torment was, to put it mildly, a figment of his fecund imagination. No doubt, the acrimonious marriage depicted in The Father has some bearing on Strindberg’s own married life with Siri, but the evil and petulant Laura is not to be taken as a portrait of his vivacious, albeit empty-headed, wife. On another note, fatherhood, one of Captain’s obsessions, was one of the predicaments that Strindberg himself often faced. His persecution complex led him to believe that his children were not his own—a frustrating and self-destructive suspicion that sapped his strength and sanity. As for any autobiographical references in the play, there is not a scintilla of evidence that Siri ever opened Strindberg’s letters; in fact, it was the other way around. It was he who opened her letters in order to confirm his suspicions that she was unfaithful to him. Furthermore, Strindberg and Siri often quarrelled over their children’s education, and his wife once called in a doctor—like Laura—as she began to suspect his sanity.

There is no denying that the conception of Laura as ‘monstrous’ and ‘sinister’ has placed her at the beginning of a line of evil mothers in Strindberg’s plays, which is said to have anticipated contemporary feminist theory. It stands to reason that a man not very sanguine about women’s progress and equality should try to portray them as harridans baying for men’s blood! After all, in his autobiographical novel A Madman’s Defense, Strindberg calls emancipated women ‘fools’ and ‘half-women’. Although Laura is indeed the monster that Strindberg intends her to be, her behaviour is partially explained by the situation she finds herself in. While the Captain is an eminent scientist, Laura appears to be uneducated and ignorant of most scientific matters that are of interest to her husband. In a society that trains men for a grand future and women for a trivial present, Laura’s lack of knowledge is tantamount to social disability. Moreover, what is evident early in The Father is her lack of financial power—when she goes to the Captain for money and is almost upbraided by him.

Her exclusion from the power that the Captain is entitled to manifests itself in her wish to have her daughter Bertha with her, in the home, countered by the Captain’s desire to send his daughter away, to become an atheist and an independent woman. Feeling socially impotent, Laura asserts herself by exercising her power as a mother, perhaps in her attempt to ‘immortalise’ herself. On deeper reflection, she is hardly a feminist. As Richard Hornby (1982: 34) notes, "if Laura were truly a feminist, she would want these very things for her daughter." Among the din of their quarrels, it seems that the Nurse has made a probe of the whole matter, when she tells the Captain, "A father has things beside his child, but a mother has only her child."

The myth of ‘maternal omnipotence’ is the leitmotif of the play. Under the sway of a mother who clings to her only source of power, her child, in order to wipe her husband—and all male domination—off the face of the earth, physically or morally, both Strindberg and the Captain witness the demise of patriarchy. The Father insidiously reverses, even flouts, the patriarchal belief system, attributing power and merit to sensuality –the woman’s realm—rather than to intellectuality—the man’s realm. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, nature itself has endowed women with an indisputable power, maternity, which can never be impugned. As Freud comments in ‘Family Romances’, "‘pater semper incertus est’," while "‘mater est certissima’." The formerly benighted Laura now reigns supreme, vehemently fanning his suspicions of infidelity by intimating that Bertha is not his child. His inability to determine the paternity of his daughter is presaged in his first conversation with Bertha, when he says of the meteoric rocks he examines, "I can study those and tell if they contain the same elements as Earth. That’s all I can see" (my emphasis).

Flying in the face of Mosaic religion, Laura helps the Captain ‘see’ the compensatory nature of patriarchy—a social construct making up for man’s inability to prove his fatherhood. Now she and her ‘double’, Bertha, have the last word. This bond, however, seems to be more of a ‘mutiny’ than a mother-daughter relationship. Laura is not committed to motherhood for its own sake but rather for the power it affords her. Yet, this artificial love proves strong at the end of the play, with Laura’s final line, "My child! My own child!" followed by the Pastor’s pious "Amen!" Given Strindberg’s consummate skill in shedding light on the deepest recesses of the human psyche, it is no wonder that Eugene O’Neill once said: "He is the master, he is our guide. He is the Father [my emphasis] of modern theatre, THE BOSS."