[In the following essay, Lingard examines the relationship between Julie and her father in Miss Julie in light of contemporary ideas of parental and sex roles.]

It may seem surprising how frequently single-parent families are found in plays written at the turn of the twentieth century. The number of plays by Ibsen Chekhov, Brecht, Strindberg, and Shaw that involve single-parent families is remarkable, particularly as the issue of single parenthood itself rarely surfaces in the action. But upon examination, we can see how these fictional families often reflect the social dynamic of their era. As we encounter Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt, the Prozorov sisters, the children of Mother Courage, Grusha's son, Miss Julie, and the daughters of Heartbreak House, the effect of the single-parent family is an important but implicit part of the action. These plays are not “about” the particular dynamics and politics of the single-parent family; indeed, the family make up seems almost accidental, not essential to the plot. It is, however, a critical part of the symbolic structure of the play.¹

In these plays, the single-parent family symbolizes dysfunction and reflects a dysfunction in the culture as a whole. They focus not only on the symbolic meaning of one part of the parental unit but also on the absence of the other part. This imbalance in the dramatic family creates a gap or lack in the social analogy that, as the play unfolds, symbolizes a lack in the culture itself.

The single-parent family, as a dramatic tool, necessarily partakes of the conventional symbolism of the mother-father-child unit. The normative family system, which has its foundations in the sexual division of power and knowledge, becomes an increasingly critical and complex component in drama written and produced at the turn of the century. This emphasis is largely a result of two phenomena: “the immense upheavals in the condition of women at the turn of the century”;² and the theories of sexuality developed at this time by Sigmund Freud, especially in his work on the repressed unconscious (particularly in women) in Studies in Hysteria (1895) and on the significance of infantile sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).³ Today, feminist theorists working with psychoanalysis

[attempt to decenter] the reigning phallus from its dominant position in the symbolic order. They refuse ritual acts of obedience to the phallus, they refuse to accept the inevitable oppression of women described by Freud and Lévi-Strauss as the sine qua non of human culture: the obligatory journey from clitoris to vagina; the inevitable exchange of women.⁴

At the turn of the twentieth century, however, Freud's impact on the collective consciousness of the culture was unmediated by feminist rebuttal and his constructions of sexuality were readily absorbed into the educated person's understanding of the family unit.

Thus, because of these influences, the situation of women in the family enjoyed a particular emphasis in turn-of-the-century drama. As Finney points out,

[r]ather than being confronted with the standard heroines of nineteenth-century farce and melodrama, turn-of-the-century theatergoers were treated to Shaw's Major Barbara and Candida, Synge's Pegeen Mike, Strindberg's Laura and Miss Julie, Wilde's Salomé, Ibsen's Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler, Wedekind's Lulu, and a wealth of other individualized and memorable female characters.⁵

In this period, the dramatist turns his unrelenting eye to the burgeoning issues of gender and power. In the two plays this article focuses on, Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie, Ibsen and Strindberg situate themselves differently in relation to the social and psychological debates; nevertheless, both are engaged in a formative cultural conversation.

This article examines the diverse social commentaries enacted through a dramatic focus on a particular type of single-parent family, the father/daughter unit, in two turn-of-the-century plays.⁶ In Ibsen's tragic Hedda Gabler (1890)⁷ and Strindberg's naturalistic Miss Julie (1888),⁸ the single-parent family creates a forum for social commentary through the inter-relations among the presence of the father, the absence of the mother, and the confusion, desperation, and choices of the tragic heroine, the daughter. While Ibsen and Strindberg have distinct visions of modern society, and Strindberg uses the issue of class to enhance his depiction of gender, the similarity in the role of the father and the fate of the daughter links these plays.

The daughter in these dramas finds herself at a social and sexual impasse, the fate of the individual woman representing symbolically the fate of the culture which shapes her. Grasping for a power and autonomy her society will never grant her, she paradoxically denies and represses her inherent female power, thus participating in her own submission. The daughter is reduced to paralysis by the culture's construction of her sexuality, and her state of mind represents vividly the horror of this Foucauldian situation:

HEDDA:
[…] I often think there is only one thing in the world I have any turn for.
BRACK:
[drawing near to her]
And what is that, if I may ask?
HEDDA:
[stands looking out]
Boring myself to death. Now you know it.

(57)

JULIE:
I can't go. I can't stay. Help me. I am so desperately tired. Order me to go. Set me in motion, because I don't know how to think or act any more.

(35)

One recognizes in these outbursts the phenomenon that Simone de Beauvoir addresses with her assertion that

what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego)—who always regards the self as the essential—and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman's situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman's liberty and how can they be overcome?⁹

These plays approach de Beauvoir's questions through their use of the single-parent family theme, and issues that will be raised by de Beauvoir and other feminists are climactically exposed in the final scenes of Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie. The deadly paralysis which causes the daughter's desperate cry places her in each play in a double bind from which suicide is perceived as the only escape.¹⁰ Although Ibsen and Strindberg were differently affected by the upheavals of the “woman question” at the turn of the century (Strindberg decidedly not sharing Ibsen's feminist sympathies), the final scene of each play serves as a grave condemnation of the position of women in the culture and the nature of human relationships between the sexes.

THE FATHER

As the primary parental figure in these two plays, the father assumes a particular importance in the family unit. His is the only parental influence enacted on the daughter during the drama (although, as we shall consider later, the mother's absence exerts its own influence on the family and, in particular, on the daughter). Because of the centrality of the father figure in the life of the daughter, what the father signifies in the play becomes a thematic focus in the action.

In both plays, the symbolic presence of the father is highlighted by the fact that, as a character, he never appears. In Hedda Gabler, he is dead before the play commences. His palpable presence despite his physical absence indicates the singular influence he must have had on his daughter while alive, to remain such a force in her life even after his death. …

General Gabler both begins and ends this play, in the opening focus on the portrait and in the critical role of the pistols in Act Four. His influence on his daughter, and his role in her eventual demise, is inescapable throughout the play, and suggests the importance of the father/daughter relationship in this tragedy. The father in Strindberg's Miss Julie similarly pervades the play even in his absence, suggesting his influential role in all of Julie's actions, but, in particular, in her choice of suicide.

Strindberg's Count is, however, a more complicated figure than Ibsen's General, and Julie's relationship with him is therefore more multifaceted than Hedda's unabashed identification with her father's power. General Gabler symbolizes power, law, and patriarchal control; the Count symbolizes these concepts and the loss of them through his unsuccessful suicide attempt, his cuckolding by his wife, and his servant Jean's trespasses. Despite these flaws in the stronghold of the father, Julie retains a sense of male power which she attributes both to her father and to Jean, as a surrogate, begging him in the last scene to “pretend that you are the Count and I am you” (45). The issue of class enhances the gendered division of power in the play, as Jean wields the power of the father over Julie despite her class advantage¹¹ but does not wield it over the Count, whose double advantage garners the respect of both Julie and Jean.

The Count's absence in the action of the play is balanced by his symbolic presence, evidenced by such items as the boots which Jean “places conspicuously on the floor” (12) at the play's opening and the servant's bell which precipitates Julie's desperate exit in the final scene.

Jean illustrates the Count's power, even in his absence, as he admits,

I feel insignificant if I just see his gloves lying in a chair! If I hear that bell up there I shy like a frightened horse; and look at those boots, standing there, stiff, arrogant—I feel my back beginning to bend at the very sight of them!

(26)

The relationship among gender, class, and power is further revealed in the coat of arms that represents the patriarchal line of inheritance in Julie's ancestry. Julie recognizes both the significance of the symbol and her own alienation from it in her exclamation that

God, it will be a relief to be finished with it all, all! If only it is finished. He'll have a stroke, he'll die, and we'll all be finished, every one of us, and I can have some peace … calm … eternal rest. The coat-of-arms will be smashed across the coffin, the Count's line at an end.

(40)

Julie's identification with her father and the power signified by his coat of arms is revealed by the title of the drama, Miss Julie, and this identification causes her to see his death as the end of everything, even her own existence. Simultaneously, however, she understands that such a breach in the father/daughter connection would be liberating for her, affording her “some peace … calm … eternal rest.” Her strange speech illustrates the paradox of her position: she identifies with, and even tries unsuccessfully to wield over Jean the father's power; however, she also recognizes that this power is a repressive force in her life.

Unfortunately, this revelation does not extend to her actions, for she involves herself as a participant in that repression each time she threatens Jean with the symbols of the father's power. Jean is unconcerned by her threat that “My father will get home, find his desk ransacked, his money gone—and he'll ring the bell—that bell!—twice—for his manservant!” (40) for he knows that Julie has no access to this power herself. Like Hedda, Julie fails to see the potential power of her own, female influence, and, confused, she allows that natural source of power to be degraded into a victimized sexuality, in contrast with the natural force of the peasant dancers “with flowers in their hats” (25) who invade the kitchen exuding a powerful sensuality that even Jean respects.

In both plays, the physical absence of the father not only highlights his symbolic presence but also focuses attention on the dilemma of the daughter in relation to that symbolism. While the physical absence of both parents contributes to the foregrounded development of the daughter in each play, the father becomes, as we have seen, a symbolic presence through his absence, while the mother remains a symbolic absence as well as a physical absence. This parental presence/absence parallels the psychological development of self/other in the family and suggests a possible basis for the daughter's gender confusion in each play. The self/other dynamic is a key factor in the power relations of the family, for, as de Beauvoir recognizes, “[i]t amounts to this just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine.”¹² She continues, explaining that woman

is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her, she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.¹³

Thus, in patriarchal society, woman is denied full selfhood; she cannot appropriate the male as Other to define herself, so “‘[s]he’ is indefinitely other in herself,”¹⁴ alienating her from her own subjectivity.

In these plays, the daughter perceives her “self” in relation to her father as “other,” because of their sexual and social differences; however, she relates the father with herself, as he is her sole parent during the action of the play and she aspires to his power and thus perceives her mother, and the female principle in general, as “other.” This psychological contradiction, resulting from both identification with the father and recognition of difference from him, forms the foundation for both Hedda's and Julie's torment about and dissatisfaction with their place in the restrictive gender system of turn-of-the-century society.

THE MOTHER

The fathers in these plays have much in common. At first glance, the mothers do not seem to, particularly as Hedda's mother is not even mentioned and Julie's mother acts outside the conventional boundaries of her gender role, both in Strindberg's preface and in Julie's memories. But the mother's symbolism is similar in each play, and this symbolism reveals the thematic importance of the mother's absence to the daughters' development.

The symbolism of the mother figure can be gleaned from the action of the drama despite—perhaps even because of—the mother's physical absence.¹⁵. …

[The] absence of the mother in Miss Julie creates a similar confusion in the daughter between self and other. As Strindberg has given Julie's mother a particular role in the drama, her impact on the daughter is more complex than in Ibsen's play. Once again, though, the daughter's struggle is for power, as others struggle for power over her. While Strindberg claims a number of fantastic influences on Julie's behaviour in the drama, including

the festive atmosphere of Midsummer's Eve, her father's absence, her monthly period, her contact with animals, the inflaming influence of the dance, the cover of night, [and] the strongly aphrodisiac influence of the flowers,

(4)

many of these elements act as symbols of sexuality, in particular, female sexuality. Even the father's absence can be seen in terms of a break in the daughter's identification with him, allowing her hitherto suppressed, female sexuality to surface. Much can be understood about Julie's state of mind and her final exit by studying the effect on her sexuality of her relationship to her father and her mother's absence.

In his essay “Psychic Murder,” Strindberg explains that “the struggle for power is no longer purely physical … but has developed to become psychic, though no less cruel.”¹⁶ Julie, like Hedda, struggles with her own preconceptions of power, and invests her faith in the power of the father, ignoring and even denying the power inherent in her female sexuality. Albeit less potent than the power of the Count, the power of natural sexuality exhibited by the dancers is at least accessible to Julie; in denying it, she acts as agent of her own repression.¹⁷

The struggles among gender, class, and power provide the basis for Julie's final, desperate choice, beginning in the struggles between her parents for control of the child's belief system.¹⁸ Julie remembers of her mother that

[a]s far as I can tell, she never wanted me. I was left to myself, except that I had to learn everything a boy normally learns, just to show that a woman can be as good as a man. I wore boy's clothes, learned to tend horses instead of dairy work. I groomed them, and I was made to go hunting. I even had to learn to plough.

(31)

Through Julie's speeches and actions it becomes evident that neither the conventional system nor this inversion of it can solve her dilemma, which evolves from the binary opposition between male and female, not from her position on either pole. For Julie recognizes that her “mother has [her revenge on Julie's father]—through me” (44) by teaching her daughter “to distrust men and to hate them” (32), but she also admits that “it was my father who gave me my contempt for my own sex, he made me half woman and half man” (44).

Having stated her confusion, her entangled identifications with both her mother and her father, and her learned perception of both as the hated Other, Julie surveys her present situation, crying

Whose fault is all this? My father's, my mother's, or my own? My own? Blame myself, when I have no self left? I don't have an idea except from my father, I don't have a passion except those given to me by my mother. … Whose fault? What does it matter to us whose fault it is? I am the one who has to bear the guilt and the consequences.

(44)

Even as she realizes her dilemma, however, she remains caught in the system of binaries, associating intellect with the father and passion with the mother. It is not surprising, then, that she cannot begin to accept and integrate the two poles of her own being.

Julie's recognition of the influence of both her father and her mother on her present state aids our understanding of her confusion, torn between self and other. But although Julie, unlike Hedda, remembers her mother and can articulate her influence, the physical absence of the mother in this play retains a certain thematic importance. The absence of Julie's mother represents the mother's absorption (as other) into the father and the daughter's consequent identification with the father. This identification is enhanced by the opening parallel between Julie's ability to command Jean and the Count's ability to do so. It is only as Julie succumbs to her sexuality, unavoidably female, that she begins to lose the identification with the father (as Hedda does through pregnancy) and lose her power to control Jean. Strindberg's stage directions describe her, after intercourse with Jean, as “shy, very feminine”(26), no longer the commanding aristocrat of previous scenes. As Julie's actions illustrate, her attempt to repress her own female sexuality results in its overcoming her. The situation in which Julie finds herself with Jean is one that Hedda would rather die than experience with Judge Brack; and, eventually, Julie makes a similar choice rather than face the “consequences” (35) of this new, weakened position.

The final act of these two, tragic daughters results from their entrapment in a double bind created by turn-of-the-century society. Doubly alienated from both self and other, and from both mother (a learned alienation) and father (a biological and social alienation), both heroines choose death as the only perceivable method of transcending the double bind. Succumbing to her female sexuality and the social restrictions that accompany it is not a viable response to the double bind for either woman, hypnotized as she is by the power of the father. Hedda cannot bear the domestic burden of pregnancy and motherhood and the consequent damage to her identification with the father, and she articulates this position clearly:

BRACK:
[…] But suppose now that what people call—in elegant language—a solemn responsibility were to come upon you? [Smiling.] A new responsibility, Mrs Hedda?
HEDDA:
[angrily]
Be quiet! Nothing of that sort will ever happen!
BRACK:
[warily]
We will speak of this again a year hence—at the very outside.
HEDDA:
[curtly]
I have no turn for anything of the sort, Judge Brack. No responsibilities for me!

(57)

Similarly, Julie experiences and rebels against the new position that her sexuality has placed her in, interrupting her “shy, very feminine” (26) interlude to rage at Jean:

By God, I'd like to wade knee-deep through your guts, and drink your blood from your skull, I'd like to see your heart burned and roasted like mutton! You think I'm helpless; you think I love you, because my womb called for your seed—you think I'll carry your children under my heart, feed them with my blood, and give them your name!

(40)

Julie fears not her father's wrath; in fact, she presumes that the news of her escapade would kill him (40). What terrifies her and contributes to her decision to kill herself is the possibility that her female sexuality might overwhelm her, that “it could happen again. … And there could be—consequences …” (35).

As with Hedda, Julie's fear is partly of scandal, and this fear is also connected to her relationship with the father. As Julia Kristeva contends,

because of the privileged relationship between father and daughter, a woman takes social constraints even more seriously, has fewer tendencies toward anarchism, and is more mindful of ethics.¹⁹

In both dramas, death is preferred to scandal; more importantly though, it is preferred to sustained, female sexuality and the powerlessness that accompanies an identification with the mother. What does this say about the position of women in turn-of-the-century society?

Interestingly, although Strindberg's drama is based on a “real-life incident [which] … made a powerful impression on [him]” (3), in his preface to Miss Julie he considers the issue as one of “nature” rather than of the political and social conflict Ibsen's dramas reveal. He sees characters such as Julie and Hedda as aberrations of the natural order, not as products of an unsound social system. He claims

Miss Julie is a modern character, not because the half-woman, the man-hater, would not have been found at all times, but because she has now been recognized, has pushed herself forward and made a fuss. The half-woman is a self-assertive type, who sells herself for power, decorations, distinctions, and diplomas, just as she once sold herself for money, and she betrays her primitive origin. Hers is not a sound species, for it has no endurance. … Fortunately they are destroyed, either by a lack of harmony with reality, the unchecked eruption of suppressed instincts, or failure to obtain a man. The type is tragic, offering as it does the drama of a confused struggle against nature, but it is a relic of romanticism now being dispersed by the Naturalists, who wish for nothing but happiness—and happiness demands a stronger and a better species.

(5-6)

Strindberg is right on one point: happiness does indeed demand a stronger and a better species. And his statement that “[t]he heroine only arouses our pity because we are frail enough to fear that her fate might overtake us” (3) is especially true for women readers. However, these plays are tragic not only in terms of the daughter's demise, but also in terms of their stark depiction of human relationships. Both Ibsen and Strindberg, the latter quite accidentally, demonstrate through their portrayal of the father/daughter relationship a crippling double bind of the sort more easily recognized in the master/slave relationship. For despite the advantages of the father/master position in these binary partnerships, the dominant and the subordinate partners in these power dances are equally trapped within the static binary opposition. Until one or other breaks the silence and communicates about the double bind, it cannot be transcended: until it is transcended, social evolution is at a dangerous standstill.

Hedda's murder of her unborn child illustrates acutely this sterility that results from a paralysis in the evolutionary process, and Julie's suicide is at least in part an attempt to avoid the “consequences” of her sexuality, a child. That both women exit the stage with determination, “Miss Julie walk^[ing^] firmly out through the doorway” (45) and Hedda speaking her final lines “loud and clear” (110), has been mistaken for a positive sign, a sign that these suicides are powerful acts, acts of liberation. But to see the suicides as liberating is to miss the tragic point of these two plays. That this is the best alternative for these women is a pathetic reflection of their situations; that dying is their most powerful act comments on their powerlessness in life, a powerlessness made more poignant by their participation in their own repression. In opposition to the revoking of closure which in feminist texts represents liberation and possibility, the undeniably harsh closure of these two dramas constitutes a bleak imprisonment, with no hope for any significant liberation. As a comment on turn-of-the-century society, these final scenes indicate a need for change in the social codes, not only so that women survive and emerge as “a stronger and better species” but also so that human relationships as a whole evolve and flourish.

Notes

1. By symbolic here I intend a traditional use of the term, following such theorists as Northrop Frye in his discussion of the “archetypal phase” of symbols in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1957) and Claude Lévi-Strauss in his method of revealing analogies between very different aspects of life and society by seeing each as a structural system of symbols (Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans., John and Doreen Weightman, 4 vols. ([New York, 1966], 9-81). In this article, I use the terms symbolic and symbol to describe the capacity of particular textual objects, images, and characters to represent and reveal social and psychological constructs. In each case, as Cleanth Brooks has insisted, the context lends significance to the particular image, word, or statement. For instance, General Gabler's pistols are, as a signifier, related to their ritual significance and serve the symbolic purpose of representing masculine power as Hedda perceives it.

2. Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1989), 1.

3. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. A. A. Brill (Boston, 1950); Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, rev. ed. (New York, 1962).

4. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, “Introduction III: Contexts of the New French Feminism,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York,1980), 36.

5. Finney, 1. See note 2

6. The subject of the father/daughter unit in literature is receiving more critical attention in recent years. The study Daughters and Fathers (Baltimore, 1989), a collection of essays edited by Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers, addresses the subject from a cultural/historical perspective, but concentrates primarily on fiction and poetry by and about women. The dynamic of the father/daughter unit in drama has yet to be examined in sufficient detail by critical scholarship.

7. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, in Three Plays by Ibsen (New York, 1959). Subsequent references are from this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

8. Johan August Strindberg, Miss Julie, in Strindberg: Three Experimental Plays, trans. F. R. Southerington. (Charlottesville, 1975). Subsequent references to Strindberg's Preface and the play are from this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

9. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York, 1957).

10. A double bind is more than a mere contradiction because it cannot be resolved by a choice. According to Gregory Bateson, a double bind involves a genuine paradox: it is a situation that involves two equally correct but equally insufficient alternatives, each of which seems to be invalidated by the other (Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication, The Social Matrix of Psychiatry [New York, 1951]). In order to enjoy even marginal power in their social situations, Hedda and Julie would have to succumb to the construction of their gender that allows them access to power only through their sexual subordination to men. Faced with the paradox of desiring male power but only being able to access it through an acceptance and affirmation of her femaleness, her lack, the daughter has three options. She “may illogically deny the paradox and make a dogmatic choice, oscillate between the two contradictory positions within the paradox, or communicate about the paradox (thereby transcending it).” Richard M. Coe, “Logic, Paradox and Pinter's Homecoming,” Educational Theatre Journal, 27:4 (December 1975), 491.

11. John Ward explains that “[Julie] is declassé as a result of her sexuality” (58), demonstrating the important interrelationship between sex and class in Julie's environment. John Ward, The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg (London, 1980), 58.

12. de Beauvoir, xv. See note 9.

13. Ibid., xvi.

14. Luce Irigary, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 28.

15. Many feminist studies of the family, in history, religion, and literature, recognize the symbolic importance of the mother's absence in relation to the father's presence. Lynda E. Boose, in her essay “The Father's House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture's Daughter-Father Relationship,” observes that in the paradigm that the religious texts of Judeo-Christianity set up, father and son are made first analogous and then, in Christianity, synonymous. By the time the creation-fall narrative in the Hebrew text concludes, the story will have accomplished its father-to-son transmission, and Adam, the acknowledged son, will have graduated to the role of father. At this point the absent mother also will appear, emerging into designation out of the unnamed and unassigned female transgressor of the Father's garden. Within this narrative, what is conspicuously absent is the figure that lurks beneath the text, the figure who is also the one repeatedly subjected to erasure, extrusion, and transformation.

    In Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers, 48. See note 6.

16. Quoted by F. R. Southerington, in introduction to Strindberg: Three Experimental Plays, xv. See note 8.

17. Many critics have recognized the role of Julie's sexuality in the play; however, some have misconstrued its meaning, interpreting Julie's “strong sexuality” (Ward 59) as symbolic of female sexuality per se. It is, rather, a perverted version of the sexuality of the peasants, and as such it serves to weaken Julie's position rather than strengthen it. It is her distorted understanding of her sexuality that gives Jean the opportunity to exploit and manipulate her. This distinction, between female sexuality and the perversion of that sexuality, is essential to understanding the complexity of Julie's position in her father's house. However, as Strindberg provides only the character of Kristin against whom we could judge Julie's distorted sexuality, Julie's actions are easily mistaken for the symbol of female sexuality in general, rather than a particular perversion of it.

18. This struggle is violently played out in Strindberg's earlier drama, The Father (1887). The mother plays a focal role in this play, and Strindberg draws our attention to the particular combination of maternal power and social powerlessness embodied in Laura as she struggles violently with the Captain for control of their daughter's future. Gail Finney points out “the close and yet ambivalent relationship between Laura and Bertha” (216) in the play, observing that “Strindberg's recognition that the mother-daughter link is in part a reaction against the authority of the father unwittingly prefigures a central tenet of contemporary feminist theory” (217). This mother-daughter link is further problematized through Julie as she struggles with her identification with the omnipresent father.

19. Julia Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” Tel Quel (Autumn 1974), 135-40.