Revisiting The Father : Precarity and subversive performativity

Abstract

The ambiguity of August Strindberg’s approach to women has engendered varying interpretations, including accusations of misogyny. Among his allegedly misogynistic plays is the 1887 naturalistic masterpiece, The Father. Chronologically coinciding with the rise of the women’s movement in Sweden, The Father, rather than endorsing a misogynistic culture, allows for an alternative reading that contributes to the destabilisation of gender binaries and an understanding of gender identities as relational and performative. In its portrayal of a fierce struggle between a seemingly diabolic wife and a supposedly tyrannical husband, the play delves deeply into the dynamics of gender and the subversion of normatively established orders. This article analyses Strindberg’s play in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the ‘femme fatale’ and Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity to illustrate how the play’s central characters performatively subvert the hegemonic norms by which they are constituted.

Keywords

August Strindberg gender Judith Butler performativity sexuality Slavoj Žižek

Introduction

August Strindberg’s The Father (1887) is a psychological drama examining gender as a parameter of power relations. The play exposes the audience to the portrayal of a seemingly diabolic wife in conflict with a supposedly tyrannical husband, both involved in a fierce power struggle that is meant to reveal one of the two as the stronger in the end. Much as Laura, the central female character, shows a strong will to rise against Captain Adolph, her husband, Adolph tries his best to subjugate his wife. However, during the course of the play, he experiences a shift away from the normative patriarchal patterns of domination towards a precarious position with no authority.

This analysis of The Father (in English translation) will focus on the concept of performativity¹ within the terms of the play’s text.² Drawing on Judith Butler, I seek to highlight the connection between performativity, precarity³ and the subversion of gender norms by arguing that both the central male and female characters showcase the notion of gender as a set of performative acts with subversive potential. Employing performativity theory, this analysis will contribute to an understanding of The Father’s presentation of gendered power struggle as it seeks to demonstrate that the central characters in the play can only be, or perform, a gender in relation to the Other. Their relational gender identities, moreover, diverge in important ways from normative understandings of gender.

In The Father, Strindberg’s male and female protagonists subvert Western stereotypical understandings of male dominance and female subordination. In the first section, I introduce the concept of performativity in relation to what I interpret as the play’s underlying depictions of gender as non-binary. An analysis of the central male character of the play, Captain Adolph, will then be followed by a detailed examination of the female character, Laura. In order to identify Laura’s subversive gender performativity, I also draw on Slavoj Žižek’s commentary on the concept of the ‘femme fatale’ in his The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000). Here, he draws on Jacques Lacan and Butler to propose a contrasting definition of ‘the classic femme fatale’ as the ‘internal transgression’⁴ of the patriarchal symbolic universe and ‘the new femme fatale’ as a real threat against the patriarchal order. I propose that Laura, as Žižek’s ‘new femme fatale’, subverts paternalistic authority through her gender performativity. The last section of this article will locate the basis of Laura’s performative acts in her precarious position as a woman not recognised by the law, and illustrate how she subverts the normative order within the terms of those very norms that act upon her. Her subversive performativity also puts Adolph into a precarious condition that eventually strips him of any civil and family rights.

Strindberg and performativity of identities

In ‘The Pre-modern Strindberg’, Ann-Sofie Lönngren points out the presence of pre-modern⁵ discourses of sex, gender and sexuality in Strindberg’s authorship, where sex is not only perceived as one rather than two but is also organised hierarchically rather than dichotomously (2015). The hierarchical model, lasting from the ancient times to the eighteenth century, assumed ‘male and female bodies as hierarchically, vertically, ordered versions of one sex’ (Laqueur, 1990: 10) and interpreted the female body as an inferior and inverted version of the male body. In the eighteenth century, sexual differences began to be interpreted in a revolutionary way in which male and female were assumed to be two opposite sexes. Lönngren’s reading of Thomas Laqueur stresses that the pre-modern model posited gender as prior to sex and viewed identity as subjected to acts rather than notions of essence (Lönngren, 2015: 10). In Strindberg’s writing, Lönngren argues, sexuality is similarly defined in terms of acts (pre-modern discourse) rather than identity (modern discourse). Such representation of sexuality, which Lönngren interprets along the lines of the pre-modern one-sex model, is exemplified in The Father and can be analysed within the terms of Butler’s poststructuralist account of gender performativity.

Following Lönngren’s citation of a one-sex model, and before an investigation into how performativity works in Strindberg’s drama, an important question needs to be addressed: How could Butler’s gender performativity theory link with the pre-modern one-sex model? In ‘Renaissance Body Matters: Judith Butler and the Sex That is One’, Belinda Johnston draws a connection between Renaissance understandings of gender – the one-sex model – and Butler’s performativity of gender – that is, her argument that gender is a social construction reified through performance ‘rather than being the expression of essence’⁶ (2001: 81). In this regard, she cites Laqueur’s ideas about Renaissance understandings of the body as one-sex and draws attention to his observation that masculinity and femininity were conceived as hierarchically organised rather than being dichotomously fixed by nature (Johnston, 2001: 79). In Laqueur’s formulation, prior to the seventeenth century, male and female bodies were not opposites, and gender was, in Laqueur’s terms, a ‘sociological’ rather than an ontological category. In other words, to be a man or woman was to hold a place in society and assume a cultural role rather than ‘to be organically one or other of the two incommensurable sexes’ (Laqueur, 1990: 8). Thus, Laqueur argues, the modern binary model of sexual difference fails to account for the pre-modern constructions of the sexed body (Johnston, 2001: 78). Johnston maintains that Butler’s argument that gender is not an ontological but a performative state provides a contemporary language to describe the Renaissance understanding of gender that rejected a binary male-female model and dismissed the idea of sexuality as essence (2001: 81). Provided that such a perception of gender can be traced in Strindberg’s writings, focusing on Butler’s account of gender performativity offers an innovative framework to examine gender and identity politics in Strindberg’s drama, adding to our understanding of the underlying discourses of gender in Scandinavia towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Lönngren’s study proposes that ‘in Strindberg’s authorship, sexual preference is not essence, pre-disposition and identity, but rather forms out of social circumstances that make individuals commit certain sexual acts’ (2015: 14; emphasis in original). This can be further elucidated in relation to Butler’s position in Gender Trouble, where she holds that gender neither expresses an essence nor aspires to ‘an objective ideal’, and thus, the idea of gender is created through various acts without which ‘there would be no gender at all’ (1999: 178). Gender, therefore, is understood by Butler as an act rather than a fact, and ‘the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established’ (Butler, 1999: 178; emphasis in original). The possibility for agency, then, resides in a subject’s ability to vary the terms of this repetition. Similar impressions about the dynamics of gender are conveyed through Strindberg’s plays dealing with male-female relationships. In The Father, the protagonists’ presentation of gender undergoes a shift away from a normative conception towards one of a subversive, performative nature.

The Captain

The tension in The Father is formed around a wife and husband’s opposing views on how to educate their daughter: while the Captain wishes to send Bertha to town to become a teacher, Laura insists that she should stay home and practice painting. Within critical commentary, the Captain is widely referred to as a pillar of patriarchy, and Laura is frequently conceived as a horrendously destructive woman. However, my argument is that the play portrays characters with fluid identities rather than dichotomously opposing genders. The Captain goes beyond representing a stereotypical masculine figure conceived as the contrary counterpart to the feminine. This representation of gender identity as fluid (rather than a natural given) connects with Butler’s contention that identity is performatively constituted through a reiteration of the same norms that the subject also resists. The Captain begins the war with Laura by referring to ‘the law’ as an agent that can legitimise his supremacy as a man and a father:

CAPTAIN: According to the law as it now stands, children are brought up in their father’s faith.

LAURA: And the mother has no say in the matter?

CAPTAIN: None whatever. She sells her birthright by legal contract and surrenders all her rights. In return, the husband supports her and her children.

LAURA: So she has no rights over her own children?

CAPTAIN: None at all. When you have sold something, you don’t expect to get it back and keep the money too. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 16)

These words appear to have been uttered by a tyrant, but the Captain only ‘acts out’ cruelty and supremacy – traits normatively associated with masculinity – in his wife’s presence. As the play moves on, he shifts away from the model of a consistently paternalistic and over-domineering husband/father. That he initially acts out normative masculinity is not to say that there is a ‘real’ gendered identity versus an ‘acted’ one. Rather, it suggests that gender is not an expression of essence but a performative act that is constantly effected and re-styled in relation to the Other. We can take as an example what happens in an early conversation between the Captain and the Pastor (Laura’s brother). In the presence of this male companion, the Captain sympathises with Emma, a servant girl impregnated by the servant Nöjd (who insistently denies fatherhood of the illegitimate child). In Laura’s presence, however, the Captain refrains from commenting on the girl being unjustly treated and instead admits that no one can be ever sure that he is the father to a child. This initially strong-willed husband, however, comes to confess towards the end of the play that he was actually ‘born without a will’ and was dominated by his wife:

CAPTAIN: … My father and mother had me against their will, and therefore I was born without a will. That is why, when you and I became one, I felt I was completing myself – and that is why you dominated … (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 41)

Another telling incident in the play happens when he is alone with Bertha, his daughter, and asks her opinion about whether or not she likes studying in town. As soon as Laura enters, he resists her proposal to ask Bertha’s opinion about leaving home and pretends not to care at all about his daughter’s wishes:

CAPTAIN: … I won’t allow anyone to interfere with my rights – neither woman nor child. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 26)

When Laura triumphantly plants the seed of suspicion in his head about his paternity, and he finds himself shattered by doubts and suspicions, the Captain admits his weaknesses to Laura and pleads to her:

LAURA: What? You, a man, in tears?

CAPTAIN: Yes, a man in tears. Has not a man eyes? Has not a man hands, limbs, senses, opinions, passions? … If you poison us, do we not die? Why should a man suffer in silence or a soldier hide his tears? Because it’s not manly?

LAURA: Weep, then, my child, and you shall have your mother again. Remember, it was as your second mother that I came into your life … (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 41)

The fluidity of gender identity is thus epitomised in the Captain. Though he initially acts out a normative masculine identity, he alternately performs gender in a way that diverges from a hegemonic understanding of masculinity. This does not suggest, however, that, as in a theatrical sense, he voluntarily chooses which gender to enact. Rather, within an ambivalent structure of constraint and agency, he re-enacts and re-signifies the terms of the cultural norms that act upon him, and by so doing, he contests what Butler would call ‘the rigid codes of hierarchal binarism’ (1999: 185). The Captain thus contributes to an understanding of gender as performative and relational rather than restricted by binaries. He performs both masculinity and femininity in their culturally understood sense. Despite his paternalistic gestures in the beginning of the play, he becomes a child to his nurse and gets tricked into wearing a straitjacket as she speaks in baby talk to him. It is clear that the Captain’s gender is performed only in relation to the Other. That is to say, his gender is not an innate identity coming prior to his relationship with others; rather, it emerges within discourse as well as embodied interactions and relationality. Towards the end of the play, the Captain submits to Laura, pleads to her and admits that as a man he shares with her the same weaknesses, emotions and senses that he had previously assumed belonged only to women. He thus subverts the norms of masculinity as framed within the terms of the heterosexual matrix.⁷

Laura

Strindberg’s Laura has often been interpreted as a vampire woman,⁸ a femme fatale, a monstrous-feminine figure or simply as a representative of the New Woman of late nineteenth-century Scandinavia, who demands her share in power and strives for independence and equality. Reading Laura as a stereotypical femme fatale would simply convey an underlying fear of the New Woman and the justification of the necessity of patriarchal control over women. Here I will offer an alternative reading, in which Laura’s performance is understood as ‘an act’; an act of ‘a true woman’ as articulated by Slavoj Žižek through his readings of Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller⁹ (2000). Žižek defines this act as one ‘of taking from man […] that to which he holds more than his own life’ (2000: 13). Through committing the act, the woman subverts symbolic domination, becoming a real threat to the patriarchal order. Rather than adhering to normative binary regulation, the gender dynamics portrayed in the play are, therefore, of a both performative and subversive nature. Laura’s subversion of the paternal law is only possible within the terms of cultural norms that act upon her and, as a ‘culturally constructed body’, she cannot be liberated to anything like a ‘natural past’ as there is no true body beyond the law (Butler, 1999: 119).

Influenced by Lacan, Foucault and Butler, Žižek’s discussion of the femme fatale revolves around the new film noir of the 1990s, which has as one of its literary antecedents Strindberg’s tragedies like The Father where a powerful female figure commits a horrifying hidden crime. Laura is a self-willed, subversive woman determined to win the right to manage her daughter’s destiny by preventing the dominating father figure from sending the child to study in town. She finally triumphs over her husband by deliberately leading him to insanity and death.

To accept Laura simply as a stereotypical monstrous-feminine or a femme fatale figure would deny her achievement as a winner and a transgressor of masculine order. As Žižek points out, the stereotypical femme fatale is an unacknowledged support of the patriarchal system rather than its subversion. Thus, the threat of the classic femme fatale is a false one ‘engendered by the patriarchal system itself’; it is the ‘male masochist-paranoiac fantasy’ that supports patriarchal domination (Žižek, 2000: 14). Žižek draws on Butler and Foucault’s conception of the femme fatale before he proposes his own definition of the ‘new femme fatale’. He notes that in Butler’s terms:

the femme fatale is the fundamental disavowed ‘passionate attachment’ of the modern male subject, a fantasmatic formation which is needed, but cannot be openly assumed, so that it can only be evoked on condition that, at the level of the explicit narrative line (standing for the public socio-symbolic sphere), she is punished, and the order of male domination is reasserted. (Žižek, 2000: 14)

Furthermore, in Foucauldian terms, the femme fatale is created by patriarchal erotic discourse ‘as the inherent threat against which the male identity should assert itself’ (Žižek, 2000: 14).

Laura, as the indisputable victor of the play’s war of the sexes and its fierce struggle for power, shifts away from the model of the classic femme fatale (the false threat to patriarchy) to become a real subverter of the patriarchal order. Her explicit triumph over her husband allows her to get the upper hand in determining her daughter’s future and in managing her household. If Laura were to indicate Strindberg’s fear of the New Woman, and if she were simply a stereotypical femme fatale, she would have been destroyed and overcome as a threat to patriarchal order. However, she is neither destroyed nor punished in order for male dominance to be restored. The transgressive female figure who ends up punished and conquered does not actually subvert the masculine order; rather, she is, in Žižek’s parlance, ‘a fantasmatic support of patriarchal domination’ (2000: 14). How then is Laura enabled to subvert male fantasy and overcome male dominion in reality?

The concept of ‘the feminine act’ can explain Laura’s subversion of the patriarchal order. The only way to pose a real threat against male domination and to subvert the patriarchal system, Žižek argues, is by committing the ‘ACT’. ‘An Act’, he clarifies, ‘is precisely that which disturbs the disavowed fantasmatic passionate attachment brought to light by the inherent transgression’ (Žižek, 2000: 13). He cites Miller’s definition of ‘a true woman’ as ‘a certain radical act’ so that he can interpret what he calls ‘the femme fatale in the new noir of the 90s’ as opposed to the classical femme fatale figure (Žižek, 2000: 13). According to his perspective, the ‘new femme fatale’ can be interpreted alongside Miller’s lines where ‘a true woman’ is defined in relation to:

[T]he act of taking from man, her partner, of obliterating, destroying even, that which is ‘in him more than himself’, that which ‘means everything to him’ and to which he holds more than his own life, the precious agalma¹⁰ round which his life turns. The exemplary figure of such an act in literature is that of Medea who, upon learning that Jason, her husband, plans to abandon her for a younger woman, kills their two children, her husband’s most precious possessions. It is in this horrible act of destroying that which matters most to her husband that she acts as une vraie femme, as Lacan put it. (Žižek, 2000: 13)

In this Lacanian description, Medea is invoked as a literary example of a true woman since she commits the act of taking from her husband that most precious object of desire, which he holds more dear than his own life. Laura shares with Medea a determination to deprive her husband of the most valuable thing for which he lives: his daughter. Although Laura does not kill her own child, by persuading Adolph into believing that the child is not actually his, she kills in him whatever hope and reason he could have to live. As she renders him childless, he finds no reason to live onwards:

CAPTAIN: For me, as I don’t believe in a life to come, this child was my life after death, my conception of immortality – the only one, perhaps, that’s valid. If you take her away, you cut my life short. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 39)

Laura gradually drives Adolph into insanity by arousing his suspicions and through acting on his area of greatest vulnerability – his role as a father. In the meantime, she carries out intricate plans to convince everyone that Adolph is mentally ill, which as the play’s Doctor notes, results in the Captain losing ‘both his civil and family rights’ (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 30). She is depicted as being extremely strong-minded and can be quite ruthless if it enables her to get what she desires. As she tells Adolph:

LAURA: … Now you have fulfilled the unfortunately necessary functions of a father and bread-winner. You are no longer needed, and you must go. You must go, now that you realize my wits are as strong as my will – you won’t want to stay and acknowledge my superiority. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 43–44)

Laura, being the first to bring up her own unfaithfulness and to question Adolph’s paternity, constantly plays with Adolph’s suspicions as she neither assures him to be right nor proves to him that he is wrong. She deliberately keeps him in an intensified state of vulnerability and emotional ambivalence. In the same vein as Žižek interprets scenes and characters from John Dahl and David Lynch’s movies, I argue that in The Father, by ‘acting as a true sadist’ and through ‘cruel manipulation of male fantasy’, Laura drops ‘the spectral aura of the traditional femme fatale’, showing ‘another version of the act of une vraie femme’ (Žižek, 2000: 15). She subverts male fantasy by brutally realising it and acting it out in real life. If Adolph is battling with the fantasy that his wife is unfaithful and evil, Laura acts it out directly to subvert his domination. As Žižek explains, ‘directly giving them [the male] what they hallucinate about is the most effective way to undermine their domination’ (2000: 15).

In the beginning of the play, Adolph adopted Nöjd’s argument that no one knows for sure who a child’s father is so that he could convince Laura that the maltreated servant girl would not be judged innocent by the law, being destined to lose against her male opponent. In order to put her plans into action, Laura resorts to the same argument: ‘You don’t know if you are Bertha’s father’, and then asks Adolph:

LAURA: … How do you know I haven’t been unfaithful to you?

CAPTAIN: I can believe a good deal of you, but not that. And if it were so, you wouldn’t talk about it. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 27)

LAURA: Supposing I were prepared for anything, for being turned out and ostracized, anything to keep my child under my own control. Supposing I am telling the truth now when I say: Bertha is my child but not yours. (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 28)

This latter exchange is emblematic of Laura distancing herself from a stereotypical femme fatale, and turning into ‘une vraie femme’. Laura, as a ‘new femme fatale’ is totally transparent; she can be ‘the perfect embodiment of what Baudrillard called the “transparency of Evil”’ (Žižek, 2000: 15), which Žižek defines as a paradox already observed by Hegel: ‘… sometimes, total self-exposure and self-transparency, i.e. the awareness that there is no hidden content, makes the subject even more enigmatic. Sometimes, being totally outspoken is the most effective and cunning way of deceiving the other’ (2000: 15). Laura embodies, moreover, other points of contrast with a stereotypical femme fatale. Her weapon is not sensuality, but her wits and strong will. If she is evil, her evilness is justified. Laura first tries to convince Adolph to change his decision concerning Bertha’s education and develops her plan after she is disappointed by him. She warns him that she will do her best to prevent Bertha from leaving home. She then commits ‘the act’, where she ‘fully accepts the male game of manipulation, and, as it were, beats him at his own game’ and thus is ‘effective in threatening the paternal Law’ (Žižek, 2000: 14). Laura transgresses the culture of male patriarchy by her ‘direct self-commodification and self-manipulation’ (Žižek, 2000: 13). She is not punished at the end of the play, nor is she destroyed for having challenged male authority. She is a new femme fatale, who, as Žižek explains, is allowed on stage to explicitly triumph and to survive ‘rich and alone over […] [Adolph’s] dead body’ (Žižek, 2000: 14).

In her transgression of normative femininity, Laura’s representation constitutes a subversive gender performance. As Butler notes in an interview with Fina Birulés (2009), a critical/disobedient subject does not accept the regulatory status of power and questions its legitimacy. Laura forms herself through resistance and outside a position of inferiority within a patriarchal social system. There is a performative element to her formation as a subject as she re-iterates and enacts gender norms in a new direction. By acting out wilfulness and cruelty, she adopts what is normatively and culturally associated with masculinity to bring masculine power down.

This analysis further indicates that Laura enacts gender in relation to the Other, just as the Captain alternates aggression and docility in interaction with male figures, his nurse, his daughter and his wife. He fluctuates between gendered expressions of femininity and normative masculinity. In the same way, Laura performatively enacts the role of a sympathetic wife, a heartless vampire and even a nurturing mother in relation to the Captain. As such, Laura and Adolph illustrate that gender is neither innate nor fixed; rather, it is a continuum, the very ends of which are normative poles of masculinity and femininity. Their gender performativity is made possible through an ambivalent relation between constraint and agency. In other words, performativity is enabled through ‘a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms’ rather than free play or self-presentation (Butler, 1993: 95).

Precarity and performativity

How does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require? (Butler, 2009: xiii)

Performativity, as noted earlier, is not a free and wilful performance but a citational practice that is made possible through a regularised repetition of the hegemonic norms that constitute a subject. Laura subverts the paternal law without rising above it since this subversion is inevitably a reiteration of the same constraining norms that she also resists. The law has the capacity to produce and constrain a subject at the same time; that is, it is simultaneously both productive and regulative (Butler, 1993: 95). This explains how, through a reiteration of norms, Laura resists the norms by which she is repressed and also produces anew the same conditions of repression for Adolph.

Strindberg’s presentation of Laura has garnered him accusations of misogyny. Kristina Sjögren’s thesis, for example, claims that Strindberg’s works like The Father show a longing for the time when men were in control and women did not demand a share in power (2010: 147). Nonetheless, we need to consider how Strindberg’s opening remarks in The Father may invoke the audience’s sympathy for Laura. Paradoxically enough, Adolph’s citation of the law in relation to women can enlist a sympathetic orientation towards Laura by exposing, right at the beginning, her precarious position as a woman and her lack of recognition before the law. The play’s opening and Adolph’s brutal references to the law give the audience the impression that Laura stands up against her husband in response to the patriarchal oppression he attempts to advocate. Laura subverts Adolph’s paternalistic authority through performative acts, and the gradual change in the balance of power subsequently destabilises Adolph’s position and affects his patterns of gender performativity. But how do precarity and performativity work together for Laura to claim what she requires as a woman and a mother?

As Butler argues, when ‘we think of subjects as the kind of beings who ask for recognition in the law or in political life’ and take account of how the terms of recognition such as gender and sexual norms condition who counts as a subject, then performativity proves to be linked with precarity on the basis of ‘who counts as a subject and who does not’ (2009: iv). In this regard, Laura, who as a woman is not recognised in the law, engages in a performative exercise to assert the right of custody over her child, which normatively only belong to men. She performs subversive femininity in manipulating her husband’s patriarchal understanding of paternity and eliminating him from the public and domestic sphere by transforming him into a mentally ill subject ineligible for recognition in the law. The Captain’s precarious position as an ill man leaves him with no right as a father and husband, and Laura, who had initially sought an egalitarian share in power, now stands in charge of her household, alone and undefeatable.

Laura’s initial assertion of the right to have rights is, as Butler notes in her discussion of Arendtian politics, a performative practice in itself (2009: vi). Different approaches to lay claim to power require ‘performative modes of expression’ which refer to ‘explicit speech acts’ as well as ‘to the reproduction of norms’ (Butler, 2009: x). Laura’s subversive gender performativity within the conventions of the pre-existing norms also reproduces conditions of precarity for her husband, excluding him from the domains of power. She thus acts within and resorts to the same law that excluded her from power in order to lay claim to power. Butler notes that: ‘The theory of gender performativity presupposes that norms are acting on us before we have a chance to act at all, and that when we do act, we recapitulate the norms that act upon us, perhaps in new or unexpected ways, but still in relation to norms that precede us and exceed us’ (2009: xi).

My claim that Laura’s gender performativity is subversive aligns with Butler’s account and suggests that Laura, as a subject, does not actually act beyond the norms that constitute her, but instead reiterates these norms, in a new way. Laura herself encapsulates this Butlerian assumption that we are not sovereign subjects acting deliberately and that we are always ‘in the process of being made’ (2009: xi) when she explains:

LAURA: But I didn’t mean this to happen. I never really thought it out. I may have had some vague desire to get rid of you – you were in my way – and perhaps, if you see some plan in my actions, there was one, but I was unconscious of it. I have never given a thought to my actions – they simply ran along the rails you laid down … (Strindberg, [1887] 1955: 55).

As such, gender performativity is the product of an ambivalent interplay between constraint and desire. Subversive strategies may not be, as Butler argues, ‘fully deliberate and intentional’, but they can nonetheless contest hegemonic gender norms (2009: xii).

Concluding remarks

Strindberg’s oppositional involvement with the feminist movement in late nineteenth-century Scandinavia has been more widely reported than any supportive attitude towards feminism on his part.¹¹ In a study that argues for Strindberg’s support of feminist values, Christopher J. Mitchell proposes that an analysis of his plays written in the last half of the 1880s ‘reveals a textual ideology of gender that pre-figures a great deal of twentieth-century “Western” feminist ideology, including Liberal, Marxist, and Radical Feminisms’ (1999: ii). These plays, as Mitchell argues, bring to the forefront radical feminist ideologies such as the understanding of marriage as an institution entrenched in patriarchal ideology (1999: 42), and highlight the unequal relationship of patriarchal dominance and female subordination. By employing Butler’s theory of gender performativity to read The Father, a play imbued with gender conflict, this article has sought to offer an alternative framework for the analysis of gender relations in the context of Strindberg’s drama as well as of first-wave feminism in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century.

Despite the fact that The Father incurred accusations of misogyny, I have interpreted the play as a critique of patriarchal conventions that work to exclude women. The failure to be recognised as a subject and her precarious position as a woman draw Laura towards subversive gender performativity that enables her to assert power over her husband, child and household. Moreover, Laura is not the only character in the play who subverts normative gender roles. Adolph also shifts away from the paternalistic male figure he appeared to be at the beginning, and ends up in a vulnerable and subordinate position in relation to the women of his household. By the end of the play, Laura’s act of subversion has excluded Adolph from power, reproducing for him the conditions of precarity and exclusion, as she leads him into becoming a mentally ill husband and father. Thus, Laura shows how performative subversion takes place within a context of norms and conventions that already constitute her as a subject. Adolph also blurs the boundaries of gender categories as he, similar to Laura, oscillates between normatively understood masculine and feminine gender traits. In this way, gender fluidity is highlighted and the notion of stable gender identity is undermined.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out while I was in receipt of a University Postgraduate Award and an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship at The University of Western Australia.

Notes

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