SOURCE: Wilkinson, Lynn R. “The Politics of the Interior: Strindberg's Chamber Plays. Scaninavian Studies 65, no. 4 (fall 1993): 33-50.

[In the following essay, Wilkinson examines a group of five plays known as the Chamber Plays: Oväder (Storm Weather), Brända temten (The Burned House), Spöksonaten (Ghost Sonata), Pelikanen (The Pelican), and Svarta handsken (The Black Glove).]

In 1907 and 1908, Strindberg composed five plays for performance at his own small theater in Stockholm, Intima teatern or The Intimate Theater. Oväder or Storm Weather, Brända tomten or The Burned House, Spöksonaten or The Ghost Sonata, and Pelikanen or The Pelican were written in 1907; Svarta handsken or The Black Glove followed a year later. Numbering the plays opus one to five, he called them Kammarspel or Chamber Plays. In his choice of names, Chamber Plays and The Intimate Theater, Strindberg harked back to innovative small theaters set up on the continent from the 1890s onward, especially Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus in Berlin, which had opened in 1905. Nevertheless, as Reinhardt himself recognized, Strindberg's Chamber Plays represented the best of their kind, the most successful and suggestive attempts at creating a new kind of drama that might be called, like Strindberg's establishment in Stockholm, intimate theater.¹

The notion of an intimate theater seems to represent a contradiction in terms. How, one might ask, can one combine intimacy or privacy, on the one hand, and theatricality, traditionally associated with the making public of gestures with far-reaching public consequences, on the other? At first, the idea of an intimate theater seems to imply a retreat from politics, a withdrawal into private worlds sealed off from the large-scale cocophonous conflicts of mass politics and industrialized or industrializing societies into the kind of spaces where chamber music might be performed. It may be difficult to imagine what kind of theatrical performance might take place within such settings.

Many turn-of-the-century dramatists or would-be dramatists did, in fact find this combination of privacy and theatricality a problem. In Germany, intimate theater was often aligned with the interests of a bourgeoisie anxious to escape from any kind of politics, especially the politics of the left and to focus on individual psychology rather than public life. Some authors took the apparent dissociation of public and private one step further, turning to the creation of unperformable dramas intended for reading only. Mallarmé is one such writer, but a focus on the mind as a little theater also characterizes the work of Freud, who drew heavily on dramatic tradition, including Ibsen as well as the Greeks. Unperformable dramas had proliferated in European literature in the nineteenth century, but the tendency reached its apogee at the turn of the century. As the studies of cultural historians such as Carl Schorske have suggested, European fin-de-siècle culture gave pride of place to psychology, and it was, in fact, overwhelmingly psychological in focus, often appearing to substitute psychology for politics. But attempts to separate the two were never entirely successful. Even Freud's theater of the mind, Schorske insists, grew out of and reflected developments in Viennese and European politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²

Strindberg's Chamber Plays draw on both earlier forms of intimate theater and the psychological culture of turn-of-the-century Europe. His interest in psychology—in mesmerism, hypnosis, and the theories of Charcot—dates back at least to the 1880s. In contrast to many European writers, however, Strindberg almost always ties his psychological interests explicitly to questions of power, domination, sexual difference, and politics. In this respect, the highly psychological Chamber Plays are no different from his earlier work. References in the plays to work and to the household as an entity that transcends private life and the nuclear family lend these plays a political dimension missing in many similar works produced on the continent.³

This is an aspect of these plays that is easily overlooked when they are read or performed in isolation. Even Reinhardt's brilliant productions tended to present them as intensely isolating versions of what the Germans call Ich-Dramen. In this country, the only play of the series often performed or read, The Ghost Sonata, is interpreted in a similar light, as evidence of Strindberg's absurdist and apolitical view of life in the decade preceding his death in 1912.⁴

Written with performance in a small theater in mind, Strindberg's Chamber Plays have an essentially dialogic dimension that is lost to interpretations that view them in isolation. As a sequence, however, the plays take on a very different meaning, forming part of a narrative that questions and redefines traditional notions of public and private and of the role of politics within individual psychology and the home.

I

The implications of Strindberg's interpretation of European intimate theater can best be seen against the background of two contemporary movements in turn-of-the-century culture that give pride of place to private and psychological themes: psychoanalysis and art nouveau. Strindberg's psychological interests often parallel those of Freud, and the staging of The Chamber Plays at The Intimate Theater conformed to a European style, art nouveau, that both drew significantly on late nineteenth-century psychology and, like the work of Freud, appeared to affirm the separateness of interior space. Recent work on both subjects, however, has emphasized the public and political dimensions of the most private aspects of both psychoanalysis and the art nouveau movement. These interpretations have important implications for our understanding of Strindberg's late work.

Critics such as Schorske have focused attention on a widespread tendency in turn-of-the-century Europe to attempt to substitute psychology for politics. The work of Freud stands at the center of Schorske's study of Viennese culture at that time. For the intellectual historian, Freud's “discovery” of the unconscious is repeated in many forms in the aesthetic, cultural, and political life of the city. Arguing mostly on the basis of an interpretation of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams as an autobiographical work, Schorske suggests that Freud turned to the invention of a new branch of psychology, or even a new science, out of frustration because political careers were closed to Jews. He criticizes Freud, however, for his turning away from the public or political implications of his theories. The Greek Oedipus, Schorske notes, had also been a king (199).

Fin-de-siècle Vienna has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of turn-of-the-century Scandinavian culture, especially for the work of Strindberg. The Swedish writer's interests, many critics have remarked, parallel the work of Freud very closely. If, in the 1880s, he read Charcot and other pre-psychoanalytic psychologists, by the first decade of this century, he was writing plays that aimed to present on stage visionary sequences that followed a kind of dream logic. What has been noted far less often is the coincidence of Strindberg's psychological and political interests. Most often critics identify one or the other with rational or irrational, worldly or other-worldly, interests. Cultural histories such as Schorske's show that this is untenable. To an even greater extent than Freud's, Strindberg's psychological interests were inseparable from his political desires and beliefs. Indeed, works such as The Chamber Plays are about the impossibility of separating the two.⁵

The parallels between The Chamber Plays and psychoanalysis are striking. Ever the autobiographer, Strindberg recounts aspects of his life throughout these plays and in ways which suggest a therapeutic aim: the urge to confess is often tempered with a quest for absolution or relief from guilt or anxiety. Although the tendency is perhaps most pronounced in The Ghost Sonata, all of these plays follow Strindberg's A Dream Play in their reproduction of a kind of dream logic that diverges from the linear and apparently explicable progression of events associated with rational, waking experience. Moreover, in The Chamber Plays, as in Freud's studies of the first decade of this century, the focus is on an interior drama reflecting and repeating events which have taken place within a household and above all in the triangle: mother, father, child. Several of the plays refer to a child who should be saved. In two respects, however, the plays diverge from Freud's family narratives: in their emphasis on work and who does it and in the evocation of a radical change in the structure of the household. These themes tie Strindberg's late plays more closely than any of Freud's studies to politics and political change.

Because Strindberg was so prolific a writer, his opinions on political issues are well documented. But this wealth of information has both advantages and disadvantages, for it is easier to determine what he thought about specific issues than it is to discern coherent patterns in his politics: his commentators often point, for example, to his simultaneous espousal of the cause of the working classes and denigration of the women's movement, both liberal causes, in the 1880s. Some see no other mainstay in Strindberg's political thought than a constant sympathy for the underdog.⁶ There have, however, been some notable attempts to make order out of this apparent chaos. Sven-Gustaf Edqvist, for example, has convincingly pointed to the affinity of Strindberg's writings in the 1880s to contemporary anarchism. More recently, Björn Meidal has attempted to show how Strindberg's theological interests informed his thinking about politics in the first decade of the twentieth century, above all in his history plays. Our understanding of Strindberg's politics during the last decade of his life has been further nuanced by the publication of the newspaper articles he wrote during the last years of his life, articles which made him the hero of the Social Democrats and the Labor Unions.⁷The Chamber Plays, however, have almost always been viewed in complete isolation from these aspects of Strindberg's writing.

In the context in which they were first produced, these works were intricately bound up with politics. Both the founding of The Intimate Theater and Strindberg's later reentry into Swedish journalism in a debate over the role of the Social Democrats represent attempts on his part to participate in the political culture of Stockholm, where he had been living in relative isolation since the beginning of the decade. But the degree to which politics and aesthetics are intertwined in The Chamber Plays is most strikingly indicated by their debt to a style which focused on domestic interiors to the apparent exclusion of politics and contemporary society.

Both in the design of his own Intimate Theater and in the settings of the individual Chamber Plays, Strindberg drew on art nouveau. A passage from Öppna brev till Intima Teatern or Open Letters to The Intimate Theater comments on the use of this style in August Falck's staging of The Pelican and, moreover, suggests the relation of the style of this setting to the action of the play:

Den första uppsättning jag såg på Intiman var Pelikanens. Jag överraskades av ett rum i l'art nouveau-stil, med möbel därefter. Det var både riktigt och vackert, men där fanns något mera i det rummet; det var stämning, en vit doft av sjukrum och barnkammare, med något grönt på en byrå ditsatt av en osynlig hand. “Jag ville bo i det rummet,” yttrade jag, fastän man anade den tragedi son här skulle spela sin sista akt med den antika tragediens rysligaste motiv: oskyldigt lidande barn, och humbugsmodren, Medea.

(L, 291)⁸

(The first production I saw at the “Intimate Theater” was that of The Pelican. I was surprised by a room in art-nouveau style, with matching furniture. This was both appropriate and attractive, but there was something else in this room: this was atmosphere, a pale fragrance of the sickroom and nursery, with something green on the bureau that had been put there by an invisible hand. “I'd like to live in that room,” I uttered to myself, although one could sense the tragedy that would come to play out its last act here with the most horrifying themes of classical tragedy: innocent, suffering children and the humbug-mother, Medea.)

[my translation]

The passage evokes Strindberg's intense ambivalence concerning the domestic interiors which were the central feature of art nouveau decoration: he wanted to live there, but could not, and saw them as the site for the most terrible conflicts, conflicts which had their origins both in the family and in the world outside the home.

The art nouveau interior marks the culmination and, to some extent, the disintegration of a style of interior decorating that had echoed and affirmed the bourgeois separation of home and workplace in nineteenth-century Europe.⁹ Its emphasis on crafts and organic form pointed in two very different directions. If it suggested a radical separation of the home from any kind of industrialized labor by denying the world of the factory, it also brought work back into the home. In her path-breaking study of the style in France, Debora Silverman has shown how the radical dissociation between interior and workplace reflected transformations in the French labor market. She further points out how the art nouveau interior reflected changing views of the inside of the human body, above all in the pre-psychoanalytic theories of Charcot and other French psychologists. The art nouveau household, as she presents it, is an ideological construction which allows itself to be read in terms of the interests of its inhabitants.

There is, unfortunately, no correspondingly general study of art nouveau in Scandinavia, although the catalogue of Kirk Varnedoe's recent exhibition of turn-of-the-century Scandinavian art and Lara-Vinca Masini's overview of the international art nouveau movement suggest how important the style was there. One can, however, point to Strindberg's awareness of the speciousness of the separation of home and work and to his suspicion of the genuineness of the crafted furniture. On several occasions in the second Chamber Play, for example, characters remark on the “fake” qualities of the supposedly valuable furniture in the house: like the mother in Strindberg's remarks on the art nouveau setting of The Pelican, it is “humbug.”¹⁰ Further, as in the theoretical writings of Charcot and Freud, the interiors of The Chamber Plays are sites which are traversed by invisible currents: stämning—atmosphere—or desire. Strindberg's own essays on psychology suggest the extent to which he was aware of the coincidence of the two.¹¹

Perhaps Strindberg's relation to art nouveau in Sweden is best understood from the point of view of his early friendship with the most famous practitioner of the style in that country, Carl Larsson, whose sketches of Strindberg in the 1880s point to a time when the Swedish writer believed that the idyll suggested in art nouveau representations of the interior was possible. Larsson's well-known paintings of households decorated in the best of the Scandinavian craft tradition and filled with happy children represent everything that The Chamber Plays do not: these plays suggest, if anything, a nightmarish reversal of the dream.¹²

But this reversal is not just a result of the fact that the families they represent are almost always very unhappy. If as Silverman has shown, how French art nouveau interiors betray the traces of work outside the home, the settings and plots of The Chamber Plays make the presence of work explicit: dissatisfied and vengeful servants wreak havoc in the most private areas of the household in one play; in another, a building razed by fire disgorges the people who have done all the work to maintain it. Moreover, along with the kinds of work traditionally performed outside the middle-class household, The Chamber Plays also bring into focus activities not traditionally viewed as work at all: housework. Issues related to work—its distribution, its reimbursement, its monotomy or lack of productivity—make the inhabitants of the worlds of Strindberg's Chamber Plays as unhappy as more specifically biological or sexual problems.

In these plays, the representation of work transforms the home into a political space. The middle-class interior of the nineteenth century can be viewed as a late expression, perhaps even a caricature, of the Greek oikos, the private realm of necessity where the unfree, women and slaves, catered to the needs of the body, while male citizens discussed politics in the public squares. The term is at the root of the word economics and evokes the problematic relation of politics to economics in political thought since the Greeks. Some political theorists, notably Hannah Arendt, see the separation between public and private suggested by the oikos as a healthy one, arguing that the lack of separation between politics and economics in much political theory and practice since the French Revolution has corrupted politics. More recently, however, some theorists have reexamined the separation between household and politics implied by the oikos in the light of the political aspects of housework. Although the history of this debate is beyond the scope of this essay, juxtaposing Strindberg's interiors to the notion of the oikos emphasizes the distance between the two. Despite his misogyny, he is far closer to a feminist evaluation of housework than even a radical economic theorist like Marx. There is, moreover, no area in these interiors not traversed by politics, economics, or desire. The personal here is political.¹³

The Intimate Theater thus served to debunk a generally accepted distinction between public and private, political and domestic spheres. In the performances of The Chamber Plays there, this redefinition drew not only on the action of the plays, but also on their settings. Spectators entered the “intimate” theater only to be brought face to face, more often than not, with a set showing a city street through which they had to pass in order to reach the interiors where the domestic dramas took place. Further, in case the audience forgot the relation of what they saw take place onstage to some kind of larger pattern or design, Strindberg had had the stage framed by large reproduction of Böcklin's paintings, The Isle of Life and The Isle of the Dead.¹⁴

In Strindberg's Intimate Theater, thus, politics, the interior, and theatricality entered into a new relationship with one another and one which could best be experienced by participating in a performance of one of the Chamber Plays there or in a similar theatrical space. If, then, the interiors represented in the individual chamber plays make sense in a larger political and institutional context, what about the relationship of the individual plays to one another? Can they, too, be seen as embedded within a larger social or cultural context? Does this change the way they should be read or performed? In order to address these issues, I turn first to a scene from The Ghost Sonata that critics have most often characterized as both jarring and enigmatic and then to a reading of The Chamber Plays as a whole.

II

In the final scene of The Ghost Sonata, a virginal young woman, the pampered daughter of an aristocratic household, expires, apparently at the mere thought of housework. “What,” she asks the Student who has come into her room to ask for her hand in marriage, “is the wrong thing you know?” He is able to respond quite briefly: his most detested task is sorting the laundry. She, in contrast, has a whole list, comprising all the chores the maidservant refuses to perform or performs badly. The list makes for one of the odder monologues in dramatic history:

Att sopa efter henne, att damma efter henne, och att göra eld i kakelugnen efter henne, hon bara lägger in veden! Att passa spjällen, att torka glasen, duka om bordet, dra upp buteljerna, öppna fönstren och vädra, bädda om min säng, skölja vattkaraffin när han blir grön av alger, köpa tändstickor och tvål, som alltid saknas, torka lampglas och klippa vekar, för att lamporna icke skola röka, och för att lamporna icke skola slockna, när det är främmande måste jag fylla dem själv.

(XLV, 203-04)

(To sweep up after her, to dust after her, and to start the fire in the stove after her—all she does is throw on some wood! To adjust the damper, to dry the glasses, to set the table over and over again, to pull the corks out of the bottles, to open the windows and air the rooms, to make and remake my bed, to rinse the water bottle when it's green with sediment, to buy matches and soap, which we're always out of, to wipe the chimneys and trim the wicks to keep the lamps from smoking—and to keep the lamps from going out I have to fill them myself when we have company.)

[146]¹⁵

And think, she goes on to add, what would happen if one had, as well, to take care of the children's room—and presumably its inhabitants. She can, she tells the student, never marry him. As if in response to her complaints, a third figure appears at the door, the Cook, who carries a Japanese bottle in her hand and whom we should probably imagine as a woman of gigantic proportions. This person, the Young Woman believes is responsible for the spiritual and physical ills of her employers. “Jo, vi få många rätter, men all kraft är borta” the Young Woman had complained,

How kokar ur köttet, ger oss trådarne och vatten, medan hon själv dricker ur buljongen; och när det är stek, kokar hon först ur musten, äter såsen, dricker spadet; allt vad hon vidrör förlorar sin saft, det är som om hon sög med ögonen; vi få sumpen, när hon druckit kaffet, hon dricker ur vinbuteljerna och fyller med vatten.

(XLV, 200)

(We get course after course, but all the strength is gone from the food. She boils the beef until there's nothing left of it and serves us the sinews swimming in water while she herself drinks the stock. And when we have a roast, she cooks all the juice out of it and drinks it and eats the gravy. Everything she touches loses its flavor. It's as if she sucked it up with her very eyes. We get the grounds when she has finished her coffee. She drinks the wine and fills up the bottles with water.)

[144]

Like the monologue on housework, this list, too, evokes the tedium of everyday life, as well as the absolute dependence of even the most ethereal of human beings on the repeated performance of household tasks that make life possible. This passage also suggests—more clearly than the outburst on housework—that all is not right with the young woman, as well as the household as a whole. Would a sane person blame her weakness on the presence of a vampire-cook in the kitchen?

But if the Cook's appearance resembles a nightmare, her words affirm the validity of the young woman's fears. Further, this woman, who knows what it is to perform the kinds of tasks the Young Woman abhors, gives a political interpretation to her actions: “Ni suger musten ur oss,” she tells the pair,

och vi ur er; vi tar blodet och ni får vattnet igen—med koloriten. Det är kolorit!—Nu går jag, men jag stannar ändå, så länge jag vill!

(XLV, 205)

(You suck the sap from us and we from you. We take the blood and give you back water—with coloring added. This is the coloring! I'm leaving now, but that doesn't mean I haven't stayed as long as I wanted to.)

[147]

The exploited, the cook suggests, take their own back in any way they can.

Whereas the Cook's words imply that class conflict and exploitation lie at the root of the household's problems, the young man sees them as a sign of the universal rottenness of human beings, especially women who, like the one he has just proposed to, are especially dangerous because they look so beautiful. This insight evokes in him a memory from his childhood: how his father had been driven to madness by former friends who had, the son believes, been turned against the family after its head told the truth about them. The Student tells the story in the longest monologue of the play—some 600 words—aware, perhaps, but untroubled by the fact that the young woman is dying before his eyes. Her death is the occasion for him to invoke Buddha and chant a stanza of a translation of Sólarljóð. Finally, he blesses the spirit of the dead young woman and disappears. A gigantic reproduction of Böcklin's painting, The Isle of the Dead, takes the place of the student, the young woman, and the Hyacinth Room.

What to make of this scene? Does it explain, diagnose, or merely embroider upon the situation in the household as a whole? What is its relation to the other four plays in the collection? Does it make sense at all? And what about its literary value? Can a play which focuses on housework pass muster?

The consensus of Strindberg's critics has been that it does not. Most see this scene as representative of the failings of The Chamber Plays in general: a lonely and aging dramatist cannot resist “confessing” his aversion to the household tasks he is forced to perform after the departure of his third and last wife. The references to household tasks represent a discordant note in the “music,” the dream-like atmosphere, of the collection.¹⁶

Yet the scene makes perfect sense within the contexts of both The Chamber Plays and Strindberg's work as a whole. It represents the penetration or initiation of the Student, who in this work represents the role of the wandering observer, into what he has imagined as the innermost sanctum of the household he had previously admired from the street. Like his predecessors, the Stranger in To Damascus and Indra's Daughter in A Dream Play, the Student in The Ghost Sonata discovers that the interior, however sealed off or insular it may appear, is as rife with conflict and disharmony as the world outside. If he gives a psychological interpretation to the death he witnesses, the interaction of the three characters onstage suggests that the explanation for the event must also include political and social conflict. Significantly, the laboring body which dies is female, and that death is represented as tragic.

The scene marks a turning point in The Chamber Plays sequence, although Strindberg probably did not recognize this fact until he began work on the next Chamber Play which would take up where A Dream Play left off. This fragment, which he soon abandoned, is set within the frame of the painting which appears at the end of the third scene of The Ghost Sonata and which was reproduced at one side of the stage in Strindberg's Intimate Theater: Böcklin's The Isle of the Dead. In this fragment, also entitled “The Isle of the Dead” (“Toten-Insel”), a corpse comes to life in the afterworld, only to take up the young girl's lament about housework: he, too, has suffered from the apparently meaningless, repetitious tasks of everyday life. Even for Strindberg, however, the representation of housework in the afterworld seems to have been too much. The remaining two plays represent a reorientation towards the social world: housework, like labor in general, may be tragic, but it is very much a this-worldly and practical concern.

The final scene of The Ghost Sonata by no means represents the first depiction of repetitious and non-productive work in Strindberg's dramatic production. Consider, for example, the striking parallels between this sequence and Miss Julie, which was written in 1888 but had recently been revived and which Strindberg had very much in mind when he composed The Chamber Plays. In the earlier work as well, three characters, a man and two women, confront one another. In the later play, however, the relation between gender and class has shifted considerably. Just as Julie, like the daughter of The Ghost Sonata, is aristocratic, both Jean and Kristin are servants, although he, like the student in the later play, is anxious to move up in the world. In the earlier play only one character is represented as working. Although Kristin is female, she lacks both the malevolent intelligence of the cook in The Ghost Sonata and the pathos of the daughter of the house: Kristin is what she does. The later play, on the other hand, psychologizes conflicts surrounding work and class status. The cook resents, rather than identifies with, her job, and the Young Woman has been psychologically and perhaps physically crippled by an upbringing which has rendered her incapable of taking on the least practical task. Julie's fall and probable death suggest that as an anachronistic class, the aristocracy is in the process of withering away and dying. Twenty years later, the demise of apparently anachronistic class systems no longer seemed so fated: the problem, it seems, lies not with the existence of specific classes, but rather with the tendency of human beings to repeat and relive the hierarchical patterns of the past even within the most intimate aspects of their lives. In Miss Julie the characters were to some extent psychologically bound to inherited social roles, but in The Chamber Plays it is impossible to tell where psychology leaves off and role-playing begins.

Both Strindberg and Freud would agree that the young man and woman in The Ghost Sonata fail to marry because of patterns established within their families in early childhood. Where the two differ, however, would be in the extent to which this explanation is viewed as complete. For the psychoanalyst, all later conflicts are experienced in terms of the individual's earliest experiences within the family; for Strindberg, on the other hand, both in The Chamber Plays and elsewhere, the family is an integral part of the social structures surrounding it, structures which are presented as in constant flux. Strindberg and Freud differ markedly in their representation of the relation between social and sexual difference. Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in their depiction of women servants. The nursemaids in Freud's case studies, for example, who often witness or participate in scenes of infantile seduction, are presented almost exclusively as surrogates for the mother.¹⁷ For Strindberg, however, nursemaids and women servants are both women and servants, in The Chamber Plays, as well as elsewhere. The Cook in The Ghost Sonata is a caricature both of a nurturing mother and of a loyal servant. Certainly, gender and class, motherhood and servitude, overlap for Strindberg for very personal reasons: in the opening volumes of his autobiographical novel series, he had represented himself as Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Serving-Woman). But if in his works of the 1880s, gender and class serve as markers denoting the inferiority of certain social groups as well as individuals, in The Chamber Plays, the very notion of a hierarchy that this implies seems to have come into question. Like Freud's work of the same decade, these plays seem to have a therapeutic purpose, but their implications are social and political as well as private and psychological. Curing the malaise evoked in plays such as Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata will require more than rescuing a child, a motif which runs throughout the collection: it may very well entail burning down or at least reordering the entire household.

III

One of the reasons The Chamber Plays have so often been viewed as unacceptably enigmatic is that both directors and critics have insisted on approaching the plays separately. The metaphor most often used to describe their possible unity—a unity most often depicted as flawed—is musical: certain themes, leitmotifs, run throughout the works. Each play, for example, focuses on a single building, and in several, there is a question of a fire and a child to be rescued. And here, as in Strindberg's other “dream dramas,” at least one character assumes the role of an observer who both participates in and stands outside of the situation represented in the play. Generally, too, there has been a tendency to view Opus 5, The Black Glove, which Strindberg composed in late 1908, apart from the others.

Unlike the first four plays, written entirely in prose, The Black Glove contains substantial passages in verse. Further, it ends happily with the restoration of a lost child to its mother and of order to a household, and its links to public ritual and festivities—the action takes place at Christmas and turns on the activities of a jultomte or Christmas elf—set it apart from the far more tortured and private worlds of the others. For many critics, The Black Glove, like Strindberg's other late verse dramas, such as Abu Kassems tofflor (Abu Casem's Slippers) and Stora landsvägen (The Great Highway), represents a decline in the powers of the aging dramatist. The play detracts from the accomplishment of the first four Chamber Plays.¹⁸

This view of The Black Glove, however, grows out of the reception of Strindberg's “dream dramas” in general, a reception which emphasizes the personal and idiosyncratic, almost to the total exclusion of public aspects of performance. First of all, only two of the plays have often been revived, Opus 3, The Ghost Sonata, and Opus 4, The Pelican, and performances of these two, perhaps taking their cue from Max Reinhardt, have emphasized the aspects of the plays which suggest private nightmares. Second, The Chamber Plays have become part of a myth that sees Strindberg as the precursor of the ego-dramas of German Expressionism.¹⁹ What the expressionist interpretation of Strindberg fails to see, however, is that The Black Glove might very well represent a conclusion to The Chamber Plays, a conclusion which ties the unmasking of private anguish in the first four plays to the possibility of transformations in the social world at large.

In this play, the loss and recovery of the child take place within an interior that is shown to be an integral part of a larger community, a house in which injustices can be remedied. The resolution of the conflict, moreover, takes place both through economic redistribution—the servants are paid their just wages—and through a kind of personal transformation: the young wife learns the value of her relationships to other people. And the conclusion of the play suggests a redefinition of politics to include values often associated with the domestic interior: a healthy community will include, to some extent, at least, the kind of nurturance a mother offers her child.

Strindberg himself left the relationship among the five plays open to conjecture, for although he wrote copiously on The Chamber Plays and his Intimate Theater, nowhere does he explicitly address this question. The Open Letters to the Intimate Theater suggests certain common thematic concerns among the five plays, some underlying models, such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and locates Strindberg's own attempt to found an intimate theater in the context of similar enterprises on the continent, but it gives no explicit instructions for the performance of these plays. Nor were they produced as a cycle at The Intimate Theater. Originally, as well, Strindberg seems to have planned a series of twenty chamber plays—one of several vast projects he scaled back or abandoned during this decade.²⁰ As a cycle, The Chamber Plays may very well represent a fragment of a larger project, although, of course, this possible fragmentary nature does not preclude their forming a coherent whole. What is clear is that Strindberg intended to include The Black Glove among The Chamber Plays and that this play makes explicit a public and social dimension of the dramas that may be hidden if the plays are read or performed separately.

IV

If, then, The Black Glove represents a kind of conclusion to The Chamber Plays, what story or stories do these plays tell? Charles Mauron's psychoanalytic interpretation of Racine's dramas suggests one way of reading the sequence as a whole. For the psychoanalytic critic, the secular plays of the seventeenth-century dramatist represent different stages in a replay of the Oedipal conflict, evoking a much earlier stage of male character development projected outwards onto history.

The Chamber Plays invite a similar reading. The resonances of the black glove in the play by that name, for example, are a good illustration. Lost by the young wife, it circulates throughout the building before the old man in the attic makes possible its return. The glove, which contains the woman's wedding ring, figures both desire and loss. The glove circulates as a fetish—a symbolic representation of the phallus—from one man to the next clearly suggesting that issues associated both with castration and the formation of male identity are important aspects of The Chamber Plays.

But such a reading may miss the extent to which Strindberg's evocation of an “unconscious” differs from that of Freud. Mothers, not fathers, predominate in The Chamber Plays, while their representation of a psychological interior is far more suggestive of social and political issues than is the case in Freud's work of the same decade. In a manner similar to the embedded structures of The Intimate Theater, the sequence of plays called The Chamber Plays evokes an interior which is at once unspeakable and penetrated by the world outside.

Like Freud, Strindberg often worked on the basis of self-analysis, and autobiographical references in The Chamber Plays suggest how he drew on aspects of his personal experience in his construction of dramatic interiors which, like Freud's account of dream processes, might be recognized as typical, rather than idiosyncratic.

Storm Weather is the most explicitly autobiographical of The Chamber Plays. Strindberg began this play shortly after he learned of his third wife's remarriage and in letters indicated that it was very much about this subject and was intended to hurt her.²¹ In Storm Weather, an aging man, called simply “Herrn” or “The Gentleman,” observes his former wife and his child after her remarriage: by the end of the play, he seems to have accepted her departure—although not without considerable bitterness—and his imminent death, evoked by the first lighting of the street lamps of the year and the approach of winter. Similar situations recur throughout the plays in the depiction of old age, motherhood, lost children, and outsiders who peer longingly into the interiors of apartments from the city street outside. In the final play of the sequence, however, The Black Glove, it is most perfectly echoed and in a manner which suggests that Strindberg was consciously attempting to work through both his personal loss and what he felt was a fundamental injustice in marriage. Here, too, the representation of the young woman is not without bitterness: the Christmas elf punishes her for her lack of concern for others—her failure to appreciate her marriage or to pay her servants adequately—by temporarily removing her child. The young woman's carelessness takes the concrete form of the lost glove containing her wedding ring. Only when she realizes the value of what she has lost does the young woman find both child and ring. The character who is above all responsible for making this possible is the old man in the attic, who presents himself as a philosopher emmeshed in the web of a lifeless system and as the young woman's father. His feelings towards her are more husbandly than paternal, and the young woman's husband is significantly absent throughout the play. The old man both returns the glove to her and appears to clear the way for the restoration of peace in her marriage and in the household as a whole: he does this not only by sacrificing his claim to her, but also by dying.

If Storm Weather and The Black Glove constitute a kind of narrative frame, the three middle plays form a cycle of their own: Opus 2, The Burned House, opens on the smoking ruins of the childhood home of the central character, while Opus 4, The Pelican, closes with the suicidal rush into a fire in the home by a brother and sister who attribute all of their present unhappiness to their upbringing by a cruel and stingy mother; Opus 3, The Ghost Sonata, it should be noted, also opens with a reference to the mysterious collapse of a building, from which the protagonist, the Student, has rescued a child who has since disappeared.

The action of The Burned House suggests what is at stake in this embedded structure. As the characters sift through the ashes, they attempt to determine, not only who was responsible for the fire, but also what really happened in the past. The fruit tree in the background, which has burst prematurely into blossom in the heat of the fire, suggests a renewal that can only come through a radical break with the past but stands in sharp contrast to the dialogue of the characters, who are incapable of forgiving, forgetting, or changing: like most of the characters in The Chamber Plays, they seem doomed endlessly to repeat their mistakes and those of others. The Burned House thus can be read as posing a question which the following two plays attempt to answer: What are the origins of the failure of the old men in Storm Weather and The Black Glove to live what might be considered a good life, a life which is not only productive but also includes other people?

As three stages of an investigation, The Burned House, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican take us backward in time towards the possible origins of the frame situation in an unhappy childhood. The returning stranger of The Burned House is middle-aged (the family nurse, fru Vesterlund, is still alive) and contemplates the smoking ruins of his childhood home as if from a great distance, while in The Pelican the protagonist still inhabits the rooms he grew up in and, in the final scene, believes that he has returned to his childhood. The Ghost Sonata, the middle play, also falls into this pattern, although this work is by far the most complex of the entire collection. Here the protagonist is a young man who has left the house of his childhood, a student who perhaps believes himself to be free. In this play, however, all ages are represented and the failure of the student to break away from the past might be characterized as overdetermined. There are nothing but unhappy, criminally inclined, and physically stunted characters in the household evoked here. How could the young man have chosen differently?

The situations evoked in the three middle plays of The Chamber Plays seem to call for a solution far more radical than that proposed in The Black Glove, which points to a renewal of traditional obligations and rituals. The juxtaposition of fire and nature, especially in The Burned House and The Pelican, suggests both the anarchist tendencies of Strindberg's writing of the 1880s and the more recent aesthetic theories and practice of French writers in Mallarmé's circle, in whose work the evocation of a kind of secret fire in things was often bound up with a belief that violence, particularly fiery violence, was the best way to bring about social change.²² But if Strindberg's belief in the rottenness of social structures had not changed since the 1880s, except perhaps to become even more profound, he no longer seems to think that a simple tearing or burning down of traditional structures will improve things. After the fire, the characters of The Burned House reproach one another endlessly, able to see the tree, but unable to decide what to do about it.

The five plays thus can be read as presenting five moments in time or aspects of a single situation. As a group, they pose a central question: What is to be done? The Black Glove suggests one solution: the happiness of the mother and child and the peace in the house point to the possibility of the renewal of old bonds and obligations, a return to the family, as a means for reconciliation, both with the past and with other people. As a whole, however, The Chamber Plays are more enigmatic and open-ended than the final play might suggest. What comes to the fore here is a kind of dialogic process in which the events and structures of the past are unearthed, held up to the light, scrutinized, and discussed, perhaps even changed.

This narrative reconstruction of the unity of The Chamber Plays suggests how Strindberg transformed personal experience into an aesthetic artifact. He worked from the outside in, the most autobiographical aspects of the plays occurring in the first and last plays of the sequence, which function as a kind of frame. Within the embedded structure of the series, he moved backwards in time in order to evoke common patterns underlying the conflicts represented in Storm Weather and The Black Glove. The process here recalls the unearthing of childhood experiences in psychoanalysis, which also attempts to help the adult by “saving” the child, except that what is called for in The Chamber Plays is a kind of reciprocal working through of the past, on the part of both playwright and actors and their audiences.

The embedded structure of The Chamber Plays series echoes the interior of The Intimate Theater. Each apparent interior gives way to another, until one is no longer certain what is inside or out, and the process seems infinitely regressive, infinitely suggestive: What interiors, after all, lurk just beyond the periphery of our vision?

Both text and performance, then, invite us to imagine our way into an interior space that is both very private and common to all of us. One can, if one chooses, compare this space, never actually seen on the stage or put into words in the text, to psychoanalytic notions of an unconscious. If so, Strindberg succeeded in evoking an unconscious that is thoroughly political.²³

V

If Strindberg's Chamber Plays are among his most progressive works, it would be a mistake to see his politics as unambiguous—even here. In a clear-sighted late essay, Raymond Williams singles out the work of the Swedish dramatist as the one of the most prominent examples of the uncertain political implications of European avant-garde art at the turn of the century. In Strindberg's writing, as in many modernist works of art, a call for political change exists side by side with blatant misogyny and other forms of contempt, as well as a dangerous admiration of violence. We need, Williams argues, to rethink the work of Strindberg and other modernist artists precisely in the light of the ambiguous political heritage of modernism. Such a reevaluation is obstructed by interpretations and performances which emphasize the dream-like and psychological aspects of the plays at the expense of their public and political dimensions; even Reinhardt's productions, which might be seen as the prototypes of later performances emphasizing the isolating dream-like qualities of The Chamber Plays, were not divorced from German politics in the first decades of this century. As Peter Jelavich has shown, the transformations of theatrical space implied by the invention of the carbaret and intimate theater, as well as more spectacular forms of entertainment, were closely bound up with the development of and reaction against mass culture and politics at this time of the period. Theatrical production in Germany at this time was dependent on the need to find—or create—a theatrical and political community, a problem which was also of crucial importance for Strindberg when he wrote The Chamber Plays for his Intimate Theater.

In contrast to productions at The Intimate Theater, Reinhardt's stagings of The Chamber Plays were commercially as well as aesthetically successful—even in Stockholm. While it is sometimes claimed that the German director compromised the political and aesthetic ideals of less profitable avant-garde ventures, his expressionist Strindberg productions were ground-breaking.²⁴ Moreover, Reinhardt is to my knowledge the only director to have staged all five Chamber Plays, although never in sequence.²⁵ One wishes he had taken the step, consistent with one important precedent for both his own and Strindberg's work, Wagner's Ring, of directing all five plays in sequence.

The one recent performance to emphasize the political dimension of Strindberg's late work, Ingmar Bergman's The Ghost Sonata of 1973, illustrates some of the problems confronting a director who stages one of these plays in isolation. If Bergman directed certain scenes, above all the confrontation between the cook and the young man and young woman, to bring out the element of class conflict in Strindberg's text, the political implications of these sequences are overshadowed by the play's ending, which, in Bergman's production, is even bleaker and more isolating than Strindberg's. For the final scene, he chose not to exhibit the Böcklin reproduction, but rather to let the stage gradually darken.²⁶

Many directors and critics have found the appearance of The Isle of the Dead at the end of The Ghost Sonata time-bound and distracting. Bergman's decision, then, reflects a common desire to cut through those aspects of the play that have a period flavor to its aesthetic and existential core. This choice, however, removes a political and narrative dimension implied by the ending of Strindberg's text, where the painting points not only to another chamber play he never finished, but also other places, other communities, in this world as well as—possibly—the next, and to the implications of the student's actions.

Strindberg's Chamber Plays need to be read and seen in relation to one another, as part of a sequence that includes The Black Glove. Such performances might take as their model other cycles produced during the last 150 years, cycles intended, like The Chamber Plays, to bring into being a new theatrical and political community. Stagings might also reflect more closely early presentations at Strindberg's Intimate Theater. Most late twentieth-century versions of The Ghost Sonata, it is true, take place within a small theatrical space. Few, however, frame the stage with reproductions of Böcklin's painting, so that the final appearance of The Isle of the Dead also suggests the consequences of one possible choice at the end of the play. Allusions should be made to the political issues at stake in Strindberg's version of intimate theater: to the parallels between Strindberg's criticisms of the nuclear family and depiction of the larger community residing in a single house and the development in Sweden at this time of a notion of the state as a home for all its members. Similarly, it should be made clear that Strindberg's very mixed representation of women in these plays, often attributed solely to the failure of his third marriage, reflects public debates on women's participation in any kind of state. And it would be helpful to tie the fires of The Burned House and The Pelican to more than a personal anarchism.

Further, it would be illuminating to emphasize the voyeuristic aspects of The Chamber Plays, which like many of Strindberg's dramatic works anticipate the development of the film close-up in their attempt to bring the spectator closer than ever before to the character onstage. The dissolution of traditional distinctions between public and private in these works has its dangerous or oppressive aspects. A good performance might make the spectator aware of his or her desire to see what under some circumstances might better be left unseen.

Such a performance of Strindberg's Chamber Plays would have more than an antiquarian value. It might bring us face to face with the ambiguous political heritage of modernism and our own participation in it.²⁷

Notes

1. On the subject of Max Reinhardt and Strindberg, see Kvam; and Styan esp. 33-50.

2. On turn-of-the-century theater, see Gould; Szondi, Das lyrische Drama; and Jelavich esp. 39-85 and 236-46. For a suggestive discussion of the poetic or readerly aspects of The Chamber Plays, see Sprinchorn, Introduction.

3. Rokem discusses Strindberg's representation of public and private in the context of cinematic aspects of his plays.

4. Even those critics who do approach the collection as a whole emphasize the affinities of The Chamber Plays with music and poetry. See, for example, Hallberg; Sprinchorn, Introduction and Ward 239-68. An allegorical interpretation of the plays can be found in most commentaries on them; for a representative study, see Sprinchorn, Strindberg 246-75.

5. The best overview of Strindberg's intellectual development is still Lamm's August Strindberg. On Strindberg's attitudes towards women, see Boethius, although this study covers Strindberg's work only through the mid-1880s.

6. Most critics make this point. See, for example, Boethius and Steene.

7. The articles have been published by Järv. See Meidal for a discussion of the debate.

8. All references to Strindberg's works in the original Swedish come from Samlade skrifter. The new edition of the Kammarspel, volume 58 of August Strindbergs Samlade Verk (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1991), came into my hands as I was working on the final revision of this article. The same is true of Eivor Martinus's attractive translation of all of the Chamber Plays. Martinus also makes a case for the performance of the entire series, although her suggestions differ from my argument here that they should be presented in sequence: “In an ideal world, I would like to see these five plays performed in repertoire, using the same set, starting with the autumn play, Opus 1 where the action takes place both outside and inside the building, proceeding to Opus 5, The Black Glove which also uses the whole building and takes place at Christmas, then on to The Pelican which is confined to a claustrophobic flat that goes up in flames; this leads naturally on to the burnt house in After the Fire early in the spring, finishing in a surreal landscape in The Ghost Sonata. With a dozen actors, an imaginative set and trimmed versions of the plays it could be a riveting experience” (12).

9. For an overview of representations of the bourgeois interior and some common interpretations, see Perrot. See also Adorno, Benjamin, and Rybczynski.

10. See Samlade skrifter 40: 114; and Sprinchorn et al., The Chamber Plays 79.

11. See especially the essays, “Hjärnornas kamp” (“The Battle of the Brains”), “Nemesis divina,” “Mystik—tills vidare” (“Mysticism—for Now”), and “Själamord” (“Soul Murder”), in Samlade skrifter 22: 123-157 and 163-201. There is, unfortunately, no overview of Strindberg's psychological theories. But on psychology in his work in the 1880s, see Lindström. See also Vogelweith.

12. On Strindberg's opinion of Carl Larsson at the time he wrote The Chamber Plays, see his essay in En blå bok 2, “Hopljugna karaktärer” (“Characters Composed of Lies”), in Samlade Skrifter 47: 780-88. See also Lagerkranz esp. 123-144, and 406-07.

13. See Arendt esp. 22-78. For a sympathetic but critical evaluation of her position, see Pitkin. For Arendt, as for many of the economic thinkers she criticizes, housework, like all repetitive labor, is intrinsically apolitical.

14. Few interpretations of The Chamber Plays call attention to the presence of reproductions of both paintings in The Intimate Theater. For a recent exception, see Fraser. See also Stockenström and Vowles.

15. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the first four chamber plays come from Sprinchorn et al., The Chamber Plays

16. See, for example, Ollén, Strindbergs dramatik 258; and Lamm, Strindbergs Dramer 2: 401.

17. See Swan, however, for a wide-ranging interpretation that emphasizes the political dimensions of Freud's representation of women servants. See also Grigg; McGrath 213-17; and the essays collected in Bernheimer and Kahane for a consideration of Freud's representation of women from a mostly Lacanian perspective.

18. Meyer's appraisal of The Black Glove sums up the arguments for its omission: “The Black Glove is a Christmas piece, a slight morality play about a shrewish young woman who loses a ring and accuses her servant of stealing it; for this, she is punished by having her small daughter stolen from her, regaining her only when she herself has been chastised and purified. Strindberg wrote it, as he did Abu Casem, in humdrum verse and, like Abu Casem, it was rejected by the Stockholm theatres but performed by a touring company in the provinces, with his daughter Greta in the lead” (522). In the introduction to her very recent translation of all of the Chamber Plays, however, Eivor Martinus gives a far more positive interpretation of the play that emphasizes its links to the first four of the series.

19. Even Szondi fails to see beyond this myth. On the implications of this interpretation, see Sokel's very useful survey.

20. For an overview of the genesis of The Chamber Plays, see Paul 86-96.

21. On the autobiographical aspects of Oväder, see Ollén 241-47; and Meyer 476-77.

22. For an account of anarchist tendencies in Strindberg's work through 1890, see Edqvist. The theme of fire in The Chamber Plays also recalls the aesthetics of some French writers in Mallarmé's circle who not only espoused anarchist theories but also were activists. On this subject, see Halperin.

23. The notion of a political literary unconscious has been explored from a Lacanian perspective by Jameson.

24. For a balanced assessment of Reinhardt's work, see Styan esp. 1-16.

25. See Styan, 128-56, for a list of Reinhardt's productions. He staged Strindberg's Black Glove on February 26, 1918, at the Kammerspiele in Berlin.

26. See Törnqvist for a detailed account of this production.

27. I would like to thank Peter Jelavich and Linda Henderson for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

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