Introduction To English Literature Instructor : Dr.

Mugdad
Stage :First
Lecture 3
December 2,2024

AUGUST STRINDBERG
Swedish dramatist

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is considered Sweden's greatest author. Although

his reputation outside Sweden rests on his plays, in Sweden he is equally important
for his stories, novels, poetry, and autobiographical works.

August Strindberg was born on Jan. 22, 1849, in Stockholm. His father, although
poor, came from a good family; his mother had been a servant. Family life was
disharmonic; Strindberg felt he had been an unwanted child, and he suffered as well
from the class distinction between his parents. He began writing plays while a
student at Uppsala University. His first mature play, Master Olof (1872), written
when he was 23 years old, is considered Sweden's first great drama. It was rejected
by the Royal Dramatic Theater because of its "irreverent"—that is, realistic—
treatment of Swedish national heroes and because it was written in prose,
unthinkable for tragedy at the time. The play gives an excellent picture of
Strindberg's radical intellectual interests then: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Søren
Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, the Danish literary reformer George Brandes, and the
English historian Henry Buckle.

During these years Strindberg led an unruly life with a circle of young bohemians
and earned his living as a private tutor, insurance agent, journalist, translator (of,

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among others, Mark Twain and Bret Harte), and assistant in the Royal Library. He
married Siri von Essen in 1877; this marriage was the longest and most decisive of
his three marriages, which all ended in divorce.

In spite of Master Olof and other, lesser works, Strindberg was unknown when, in
1879, he published the novel The Red Room. This work was Sweden's first realistic
novel, a robust satire on just about everything Strindberg had observed in the
Stockholm of the 1870s. The novel was a scandal and made him famous overnight.

In the early 1880s Strindberg's work reflected the happy years of his marriage to Siri
and his growing confidence as a writer. His most successful play of the time, Lucky
Per's Journey (1882), was written for his actress-wife. However, he began to make
enemies, especially when he ventured into history-writing from a then radical point
of view. He responded, typically, with another social satire, The New
Kingdom (1882), much more bitter and personal than The Red Room, which stirred
up more hostility. He fled Sweden with his family in 1883, but before leaving he
published a collection of angry poems which, in form and style, were completely
new in Swedish literature.

In 1884 appeared a collection of stories, Married (the second, harsher collection

appeared in 1886), which reflected in their bold treatment of sexual matters the
influence of French naturalism. However, what outraged the public was the first
clear evidence in the stories of Strindberg's lifelong hatred of the feminist movement
and the emancipated woman. In his views on these questions, Strindberg stood alone
among major Scandinavian authors. A man who three times married ambitious,
career-minded women, he insisted that a woman's place is in the home. Thus he lost
the support of many liberal friends.

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Strindberg's enemies—their ranks now greatly increased—found a trivial occasion
to bring a charge of blasphemy against him. To save his publishers, he returned to
Sweden, stood trial, and was acquitted. The strain, however, was too much, and the
trial marked the acceleration of the persecution complex that led, a decade later, to
a period of nearly total madness.

In spite of the damage caused by the trial, the strain of trying to support a growing
family by his pen, and even, for a time, a total boycott of his work in Sweden,
Strindberg produced many of his greatest works in the last half of the 1880s. These
include the plays upon which his European reputation was first based—the
naturalistic dramas The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889)—
and the autobiographical novels The Son of a Servant and The Confession of a
Fool (the latter a ruthlessly one-sided account of his marriage to Siri von Essen).
Characteristically, in the midst of his growing personal troubles, he wrote one of his
happiest, freshest novels, The People of Hemsö (1887).

Strindberg's European reputation grew, and his plays created sensations when they
were performed in private theaters (to escape police censorship) in Denmark,
Germany, and France. However, overwork and the nightmarish breakup of his first
marriage led to further deterioration of his mental health, and he rejected the offers
of producers and turned to science (believing he could synthesize elements) and then
to alchemy (to make the gold he sorely needed), and finally he began to study the
occult and write for occult journals.

In studying mysticism, theosophy, and especially the works of the Swedish mystic
Emanuel Swedenborg, Strindberg felt he had found an answer to why he (and
mankind generally) suffered so much. In finding an answer, he recovered his sanity,
and a new, perhaps the greatest, period of his authorship began.

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Strindberg's contribution to world drama was in two areas—naturalism and
expressionism. The naturalistic works, including such plays as The Father and Miss
Julie, follow the example of Émile Zola and other French writers in striving to
present as scientific and objective a picture of life as possible. However, as a
playwright, Strindberg was superior to Zola and most other naturalists. His
superiority lies just in his refusal to burden his plays with the mass of natural
scientific documentation naturalism demanded. He was forced by his own restless,
impatient nature—and his great dramatic sense—to seek daring shortcuts to what he
wanted to express. Furthermore, Strindberg became increasingly interested in "inner
states," especially the "battle of wills," and in the power of mental suggestion, from
his readings of pre-Freudian psychologists, criminologists, and authors such as
Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, the problems his plays dealt
with—often the battle between the sexes—were too personal for him to always
achieve naturalistic objectivity. His woman figures are often "vampires" (Tekla
in Creditors, for example), and their victims are often recognizable as Strindberg
himself. For these reasons, many of Strindberg's naturalistic plays threaten
constantly to break out of their naturalistic mold, and in their savagery, their
heightened realism, they point ahead to the expressionistic plays which follow the
"Inferno" crisis.

The expressionistic plays—such as To Damascus, The Dance of Death, and The

Ghost Sonata—depart, at their most extreme, from the naturalistic plays in that
Strindberg attempts to dramatize directly his emotions and view of life, neglecting
almost totally a logically developed plot, psychological motivation, and realism in
stage setting. Strindberg came to believe that life is a hideous dream and, in a number
of these later plays, dramatizes this view. There is a kind of "realism" in even the
most extreme of these plays, however—they are none of them like the moody, vague,

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symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, for example—but it is the aching, sharp-
edged, hallucinatory realism of nightmare, not of our waking life.

The themes of the later plays are the same as in Strindberg's earlier work: life's
pervasive, incomprehensible cruelty and the battle of wills in which the weaker is
mercilessly destroyed. But now there is a much more overt metaphysical
perspective: life is a kind of hell, or purgatory, from which we will someday be
released; there are "powers" that punish us for our sins; and "mankind is to be pitied."

Strindberg's influence on world drama continues to be considerable. European

expressionism around World War I owed much to his later plays, Pär Lagerkvist in
Sweden and Eugene O'Neill in America believed him to be the portal figure in 20th-
century drama, and the seeds of much recent experimental drama can be traced back
to Strindberg too.

Symbolism
Symbolism is a literary device where characters, objects, actions, or ideas are
ingrained or associated with a deeper meaning beyond the literal sense. Simply
put, symbolism is the idea that things can represent other things.

Symbolism can convey abstract ideas, themes, or emotions. It allows writers to

indirectly communicate complex concepts, create layers of meaning, and encourage
readers to think more deeply about underlying messages within a story.

Symbolism examples :There are many symbols that tend to be commonly

understood. For example, a dove is literally a bird but often symbolizes peace, hope,
or purity. A snake is literally an animal, but it symbolizes temptation and evil.

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 Homework
Q.1 Use your handwriting in writing pages 1 and 2.

Q.2 Write a summary and the themes of "The Father's Play"

Answer: It is about the struggle between parents over the future of their child;
resulting in the mother, using her cunning manipulative skills, subduing and finally
destroying the father.
The play explores themes of gender roles, power dynamics, and the struggle for
control within a family setting.
Q.3 Write the themes and summary of "Miss Julie" and "Creditors" and " The
Son of a Servant" and "The Confession of a Fool" .