Quest for Identity: A Study of Strindberg’s THE FATHER

I have been a great fan of August Strindberg and through this article I have made an attempt to explore and   examine the theme of ‘quest for Identity’ which is one of the major concerns in Strindberg’s Play “The Father”. In the process of examination of the play the  focus is on the protagonist, the captain who, struggles hard to establish his identity as a good father, a sincere husband and a hard working research scholar and above all a man with strong morals and convictions. His only Endeavour is to retain his male identity in fact; but every moment he feels that his identity is at stake. He is not prepared to surrender his male pride and power which receives frequent threats, actually an obstruction comes from his wife, the opposite sex. And the result is a clash of identities and power. The captain is forced to enter into conflicts, which result in misunderstanding and bitterness, loss of peace of mind and family happiness and marital harmony. His death brings an end to his struggles and efforts for assertion to his superiority and individuality. Ironically failure and tragedy become his ultimate destiny.

A person’s identity lives in the soul, not in the body even though the body influences the soul”, says Spinoza. Through all his actions the captain wants to show that his identity lives in the soul. His love for his daughter, his wife and his research work is the expression of his soul. Laura, his wife on the other hand, lives in her body not in her soul and there comes the difference. The captain wishes to live with his Visions, “fancies, ideas and illusions”, His ‘genius’ for him ,his science and his philosophy, determine his identity. His child Bertha is his “idea of immorality”. He is proud of his unaffected brain, which can perform both his professional duties

Every person loves to have a separate entity. As long as he is within the nature, he has no awareness of himself and has no need to search for his identity. But once he finds himself out of nature, he goes for the answer of the most difficult question, ‘who am I’. He begins to feel that he is the subject of his actions. For him the sense of identity becomes vital. He wants to be free from any kind of authorizing presume  and wants to be the centre of attraction at any cost and wanders madly for a kind of status identification. The needs to feel a sense of identity, starts from a very condition of human existence.Man is driven to do anything to acquire this sense of identity.This kind of difficult search leads him to conflicts and struggles and involve a lot of risks. The same thing happens with the captain of the play. It is the story of a frustrated father and his infatuated wife, blinded by infatuation for her own daughter. More correctly it is a story of father’s quest for his authentic fatherhood and his wife’s intention of capturing power to dominate for her daughter and others.

The story is all about on the question of bertha’s education and upbringing. The husband and the wife think on the question of bringing their child in their own ideas. There is a serious clash of ideas and rights. The captain, a vigorous army officer, a free thinker who combines a military career with scientific work, has lost his belief in God and afterlife. The Atheist’s tragedy seeks his immorality almost exclusively through his daughter bertha. He wants to be identified by his daughter after his death. So he therefore attempts to educate her mind, mould her views with strict accordance with his own views. His own plan is to send Bertha away from home and to have trained her as a schoolmistress with justified logic.

Being the father he strongly believes in his due importance that it is he who should have most voice in her upbringing but unfortunately meets with nothing but mere bitterness and opposition. His own desire brings him in conflict with his wife Laura and he feels obstructed. As a scholar and intelligent person he thinks that his daughter’s upbringing by many women of his house will be a sort of “trying to mould a character like a piece of patch work”. When the pastor points out that everybody in the house is a godfather, the captain humorously tells that it is “like going to cage full of tigers” The entire household is at “sixes and sevens”.

Both the characters differ in opinion. The captain is really confused whether he does have any value or not at a place, he runs of his own.  After all it is his own house and he should have some kind of identity and weight but unfortunately he is not getting that. Here a question does arise if the child does not have a clear ambition regarding his or her career and the parents disagree, then who shall decide the child’s future, and then the answer is obviously the father only because it is the father who has been doing the hard work of arranging the bread and butter for the family. He pays the piper and that’s why he has the rights to call the tune and also takes all the responsibilities. But here the unfortunate father is not allowed to function independently because each and every member in this family has a different opinion.

The captain lives with an illusion that he has a happy family and he is the supreme authority of that heaven. His wife, whom he loves so much, is sober and sacrificing. He strongly believes that he has been doing the job, both as a father and husband perfectly well. But things are not the same as they appear to be. Laura is least concerned about the research activities as they seem meaningless to her. She strongly objects the theory of her husband’s intellectual activities and ideas which can have a strong impact on the innocent mind bertha and drive her away from the general values of life. The captain wanders in a world of mere illusion which keeps him happy.

Laura, the wife at once sets herself to win over the captain’s potentials, establishing her superiority .She does not like her husband, buying scientific books for his research work. She thinks that her husband is mad enough to try for what is happening in the remote planet through a microscope though it is originally a spectroscope. She also mentions that the captain is changing his mind more often. Being unfaithful, she steals his important letters, related to his research work. Certain things show our dislike towards Laura. May be she cannot tolerate her husband’s sensational rise to a position of immense in the research field. But on the other hand, the captain believes that he is true to his duties and maintaining a perfect balance between his dual responsibilities in spite of all his busy schedules. Such actions from Laura, exposes the real nature of their relationship and compels him to believe that she has no feelings for him at all.

Coming back to the education of Bertha, the captain sees a mere reflection oh his moral values in his child. But Laura’s attempt to bring up the child in her own model clearly shows her desire to establish her own power. The captain says;

How could they? I want her to live her in the town you want her to live at home. Mathematically, a compromise would mean that she stayed at the railway station—half-way between the two. It is one of those knots that are no untying you see (act1,sc iii)

Being the Strindbergian hero, the captain is not going to give up the fight so easily as he says “the whole house is at sixes   and sevens, Laura won’t let Bertha go, and I can’t let her stay in this mad house”. in such a difficult situation, Laura does not have any alternative than telling the deadliest truth to drive any father mad and the captain is not an exception. Laura questions his paternity (simply that you don’t know that you are bertha’s father…..i said Bertha is my child and not yours….suppose I were ready to put up with anything) which destroys the delicate equilibrium of the father’s fatherhood. In addition to that the wicked wife also admits that she doesn’t have any respect for his desires and feelings. Perhaps this was sufficient to drive the captain mad. He becomes an innocent victim under sheer lust for power, driven mad, meets his final destination; death

Throughout the whole play, the captain struggles hard in quest of his identity: identity as a father, identity as a husband, identity as a man with definite points of view and finally identity as a male. He struggles a lot with never ending sufferings. The paradox of this struggle is that when the, male is intellectually and physically superior to women, then he is in danger zone of her treacherous weaknesses. The captain’s revolt against women continues till the end and he never gets his identity back. The captain’s revolt continue till the end, for the old Margaret betrays her by pretending falsely, claiming that, “in his last moments he prayed to God”