SOURCE: Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. “Strindberg's Early Dramas and Lacan's ‘Law of the Father.’” Scandinavian Studies 71, no. 3 (fall 1999): 311-24.

[In the following essay, Blackwell discusses contemporary attitudes toward sex roles and how Strindberg expressed them in his plays.]

As the erosion of European patriarchal structures accelerated through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many distinguished and important (largely but not exclusively) male readers and producers of culture responded to this development with varying degrees of horror, outrage, and counterattack. As two such pivotal figures, both August Strindberg and Jacques Lacan are central to the cultural conversation this development engendered and have been critiqued in light of the gender issues implicit and explicit in their respective representational systems. Ross Shideler notes, for instance, that

seizing on his century's rapid changes in cultural and scientific knowledge, Strindberg fictionalized what Foucault might call the “discontinuities” of his age. … Supported by much of the Victorian thought and post-Darwinian science of his day, Strindberg consistently … portrays and defends in both his earlier Naturalistic and his later so-called Expressionistic works the male dominance that he sees as biological fact. … [He] portrays both the challenge to the Victorian patriarchy and family and the response to that challenge.

(226, 229)

Lacan's centrality to this discussion is likewise evident in the keen and sustained attention he and his thought on patriarchal systems as well as on much else have received for many decades.

Interestingly these two authors represent certain patriarchy- and gender-related issues in strikingly similar ways, even as Strindberg's views are often seen as subjective aberration and Lacan's, just as often, as abiding “human” psychological truth. An investigation of two early Strindberg dramas, Fadren [The Father] and Fröken Julie [Miss Julie] in light of Lacan's thought on the Symbolic phase of human development and the Law or Name of the Father can serve to reveal some of the ideological connections between these two ostensibly extremely strange bedfellows.

A brief summary of some of Lacan's theories on this subject might be helpful or appropriate here. Those ideas which are most pertinent to this enterprise concern his notion of the Symbolic stage, that period in human development that Freud called the “Oedipal.” This stage of life is especially important because, as Sarup notes, “it is through the Symbolic order that the subject is constituted” (85). This period for Lacan is distinguished by all naming and symbolic identification which are, for him, a function of the Law of the Father, as well as by the child's learning the lessons necessary for “normal” human development to take place. The force that teaches these lessons is designated by a number of interchangeable terms: the phallic signifier, the phallus, the name of the father, the law of the father, the paternal metaphor, and the master signifier, to name but a few.

The primary goal of the Symbolic stage of development is a separation from the mother and an identification with the name or law of the father. For Lacan, the father is equivalent to the principle of law. Thus, the paternal metaphor, the Name of the Father, the Phallus, and the Law of the Father function to sever the close ties between mother and child. As Ragland-Sullivan explains, “the Father's Name(s) offer the mediation of language as a means of flight or escape from, mastery of, a fusion too profound to fathom” (86). But Bergoffen takes issue with Lacan (and implicitly Ragland-Sullivan who is by and large an apologist for the ramifications of Lacan's thought for feminist issues) on this point contending that here aggression becomes “a subtle war of men against women. … Woman is given a place in the Symbolic only so long as she assumes the name of the mother. In assuming this name, however, she consents to her murder. Her role in the family romance is to recognize the Name of the Father. As mother, woman authorizes the phallic order” (287). Woman continues to be permitted a place in the Symboic only as the mother and only if she represses her need for a relationship with her child in favor of supporting and sanctioning the phallic order.

If the child is to escape the suffocating bond with the mother and achieve full subjectivity, it is essential for him (the use of the masculine pronoun is required by the linguistic gender system of French) to acquire the “name of the father.” Grosz points out:

The child becomes a subject only with reference to the name-of-the-father and the sacrificed, absent body of the mother. … In introjecting the name-of-the-father, the child … is positioned with reference to the father's name. He is now bound to the law, … given a name, and an authorized speaking position. … The symbolic father is the (ideal) embodiment of paternal authority, the locus from which patriarchal law and language come.

(71-2)

Lacan asserts that culture is always patriarchal: “C'est dans le nom du père qu'il nous faut reconnaître le support de la fonction symbolique qui, depuis l'orée des temps historiques, identifie sa personne à la figure de la loi” (Écrits 278) [“It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of this symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (67)]. For Lacan, the law represented by the father encompasses all psychological and social structures. “The Name-of-the-Father was the symbol of an authority at once legislative and punitive” (Bowie 108). The Symbolic order, then, is synonymous with learning language and the lessons of patriarchal law; it “lays out the social hierarchy determined by the Name-of-the-Father. It decides what the relationship of all the beings of the society is according to socially sanctioned codes” (Lorraine 67).

The Symbolic stage is first and foremost the phase during which the child achieves language. This accession to language, in Lacan's view, occurs under the law of the father. For him, the Law of the Father is the law of language (Muller 402). Language is the symbolic system, with its rules and structure, which the child has to negotiate if it is to situate itself in the social order, that is to say in patriarchal society. Or as Grosz notes, “The paternal metaphor names the child and thus positions it so that it can be replaced discursively by the ‘I’, in order to enter language as a speaking being” (Grosz 104). Lacan also asserts that it is the paternal that provides the child with “l'authentification du néant de l'existence” (Écrits 433) [“the authentification of the nothingness of existence” (143)]. While this claim might seem to fly in the face of the common sense, empirical observation that, since the mother is almost always the caregiver, she rather than the father usually teaches the child what lessons it learns at this stage of life, in fact Lacan tries to circumvent this problem by positing that the mother, operating in the Symbolic and upholding the Law of the Father, transmits the latter as effectively as the father himself.

The phallus, Lacan's “signifier of signifiers,” his “transcendent symbol,” that defines each subject's access to the Symbolic order, is central to his system. Thus, the phallus embodies the primacy of the Law of the Father.

The subject perceives the Phallus as the transcendental signifier that will restore coherence and unity, for it acts as the source of meaning. … Culture assumes the role of the Name-of-the-Father and performs as the holder of the Phallus. The Phallus is the source of meaning which promises the satisfaction of desire in the Symbolic world. The desire for control through possession of the Phallus becomes the primary motivating force of the subject. … [All of which] sets in motion a nexus of desire and control that is used to sustain social hierarchization. In attempting to centre the Self, the subject displaces its desires onto a control of the Other, the site which allows the subject to delineate itself through a series of distinguishing “differences.”

(Walton 7)

But Lacan went to some pains to argue that the phallus is not a male-specific symbol, contending that it applied equally to men and women and stating repeatedly that the phallus has nothing whatsoever to do with the penis.

The problems with using the phallus as a gender-neutral and “universal” signifier should be obvious. Despite Lacan's strong contention that the phallus is a gender-neutral term, he is suggesting that only one sexual organ has the power and force to be a candidate for his “transcendental signifier” or, as Bowie puts it, that “only one organ [can] mean” (128). Given the extensive historical association in our culture between the phallus and the penis, we cannot simply dismiss this association as irrelevant; for us, if not for Lacan, the phallus is the penis. Thus there is considerable slippage between his thought and the demands empirical experience places upon his late twentieth-century reader:

As the word suggests, it is a term privileging masculinity. … The valorization of the penis and the relegation of female sexual organs to the castrated category are effects of a socio-political system that also enables the phallus to function as the “signifier of signifiers”. … The symbolic function of the phallus envelops the penis as the tangible sign of privileged masculinity, thus in effect naturalizing male dominance. … By means of the phallus, the subject comes to occupy the position of “I” in discourse.

(Grosz 122-3, 125)

Or, to quote Bowie, the phallus is the “male genital transcendentalized” (142). Lacan's thought is, then, undeniably phallocentric, surely in large part because he comes out of Freud, especially early Freud. His notions about the Symbolic and the Law of the Father were first developed in the 1930s, in the heyday of a certain kind of Freudianism which was itself a response to the erosion of European patriarchal structures.

Notably, Kress can argue that “once he identifies the phallus as the signifier, as the basis of our signification system, Lacan reconceives the relationship between femininity and the phallus, arguing not just that the phallus fails to encompass femininity adequately, but that it actually seeks to limit femininity” (1-2). He continues maintaining that “Lacanian psychoanalysis both identifies and critiques the phallus as signifier. … If that signifier fails to ‘portray the truth of the subject,’ then Lacan's rereading not only allows the concept of femininity itself to examine that signifier, but also enables us to ask different questions and to discover ways other than the phallus … to reconceive … subject positions” (13). But the fact that Lacan perceives these issues in terms of “femininity” and “masculinity,” that subjecthood is defined in terms of its relationship, however negotiated, to the phallus suggests that this system of thought is still deeply imbued with conventional notions of gender difference.

Because embracing the Name and Law of the Father is so pivotal, for Lacan, to “normal” human development, the rejection of them leads to an anarchy of the self. He claims in many places that non-acceptance of the Father leads to psychosis; to reject the Father is literally insanity. Thus he asserts in “Du traitement possible de la psychose” that the psychotic has foreclosed the paternal metaphor and has thus been unable to find a subject position for himself within the Symbolic order. “Foreclosure” refers here to the exclusion of the Name of the Father from the Symbolic order, entailing a failure of the paternal metaphor and a concomitant reassertion of the connection with the mother (Écrits 558, 577).

Strindberg's Fadren, as Margareta Fahlgren has argued, is deeply informed by patriarchal values (85-109). One of the first visual clues in Fadren as to what kind of world we are entering comes in the initial stage directions. There are, we are told, “vapen på väggarne: gevär och jaktväskor” (11) [weapons on the walls, guns and hunting bags], and the captain is dressed in “släpuniform och ridstövlar med sporrar” (11) [fatigues with riding boots and spurs]. This specifically masculine space and costume are elaborated upon as we discover that the captain is a scientist as well as a military leader (32-3). Indeed Strindberg's letters emphasize the masculinity of this character (Brev VI, 282). Thus the father and his maleness are directly associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the perpetuation of culture, as he is in Lacan. That this individual, who is given a number of conventional masculine attributes, aligns himself with the Law is not surprising. After bragging that he can take care of the Nöjd problem, he fails quite badly and then commands that “Då får saken gå till tinget” (15) [Then the case will have to go to court].

Shortly hereafter the whole issue of paternity and the law is developed more fully. In a singular twist of logic, the captain argues that although we can not know if Nöjd is guilty, we certainly can and do know that the girl is guilty. Such logic of course allows him to sidestep the culpability of the male in this situation, leaving the female to take all responsibility. The role of the law in sexual relations is expanded when the captain, who might be directly espousing Lacan's Law of the Father, claims that “Barnen skola uppfostras i fadrens bekännelse, enligt gällandt lag” (24) [Children are to be raised in the faith of their father, according to current law]. Continuing this judicial metaphor, already on the next page, the captain asks Laura, “Och har domen redan färdig?” [Has the judgment already been handed down?] to which she responds, “Den är skriven i lagen” [It's written in the law], and he rejoins, “Det står icke i lagen vem som är barnets fader. … Klokt folk påstår att sådant kan man aldrig veta” [The law doesn't say who is the child's father. Intelligent people maintain that one can never know such things], to which finally Laura argues “Det var märkvärdigt! Kan man inte veta vem som är fadren till ett barn. … Hur kan fadren då ha sådana rättigheter över hennes barn?” (25-6) [That's strange! Can't one know who the father of a child is? … Then how can the father have such rights over her child?]. And here Laura has articulated the problem in its most essential form. It is precisely because a man can never know absolutely whether or not a child is his that masculine culture must create so many repressive mechanisms for women, to control their fidelity and their freedom, must create laws and customs that elevate the authority of the father and diminish the role of the mother. One suspects that it may be precisely this kind of masculine thinking that lies behind Lacan's persistent need to ennoble the father in order to delineate the mother and her values as that which must be abandoned. In a statement resonant of the Lacanian father, the captain shouts “Nej! Jag låter ingen inkräkta på mina rättigheter” (43) [No! I won't let anyone encroach on my rights]. We note that, as in Lacan's model, neither the child nor the mother have any rights in Strindberg's male world. Or in Adolf's words, “[Modren] har sålt sin förstfödslorätt i laga köp, och avträtt sina rättigheter mot att mannen drager försorg om henne och hennes barn” (24) [(The mother) has sold her birthright and given up her rights in return for her husband's assuming responsibility for her and her children]. Such rights must be sacrificed for the “healthy” development of the child.

The centrality of paternity and of absolute knowledge about paternity reflects the drama's overarching parallel between God the Father and the father in a family (Ambjörnson 12-27). These issues culminate as the play progresses. The captain desperately cries “Laura, rädda mig och mitt förstånd. … Om barnet icke är mitt så har jag inga rättigheter och vill inga ha över det” (67) [Laura, save me and my sanity. … If the child isn't mine, I have no rights and don't want any over her]. Here it is clear that this struggle is about control of the child, but also about patrilineage, as we also see in the captain's statement shortly hereafter: “For mig som icke tror på ett kommande liv var barnet mitt liv efter detta. Det var min evighetstanke. … Tar du bort den, så är mitt liv avklippt” (67) [Since I don't believe in immortality, the child was my afterlife. She was my concept of eternity. … If you take that away, my life is severed].

What the two parents want for their child is telling; the father wants her to become a teacher since with that profession she can support herself and yet if she marries these skills would stand her in good stead with her own children. The mother, of course, wants her to be a painter, because she has shown an inclination in that direction and would appear to be good at it. We note that Adolf's choice for her is one of the “helping” professions to which women have been relegated since virtually time immemorial. The only real objection the captain lodges to Bertha's becoming an artist is that she was complimented on her work by a young man who was infatuated with her. One can, however, wonder how reliable he is on this point given how unreliable he is on so many others. It is pure speculation, of course, but one might wonder if his real objection is that painting is not a “womanly” profession and instead is one in which the authentic self (which, in Strindberg's thought, women do not have) is expressed. Lacan, of course, suggested that in the Symblic, the most important period of human development, the child must break with the mother and become aligned instead with the father. The woman's role during this phase is to support the paternal, to promote the will, the “Law” of the father, just as Adolf is asking Laura to do.

Of how Strindberg sees Adolf, we know a bit from his letters where he praises his character, his nobility, and his temperament. But as a reader or spectator, it is difficult to see him in the purely positive light Strindberg casts over him. He barks orders at his underlings (11), deals with his wife contemptuously when she turns in the household accounts (22), and treats her rudely and imperiously on several occasions before the conflict between them develops (22-3, 25, 43). He further rejects the notion of compromise with Laura as to Bertha's future, arguing quite condescendingly that compromise is completely impossible, whereas it is, of course, nothing of the sort.

As much as the captain likes to identify himself with strength, will, and law, the play implies that such identifications are wishful thinking on his part. Already at the beginning of the drama, he fails completely at solving the Nöjd problem, defeated by someone who is characterized as his military inferior. Too, for a self-avowed man of strength and will, he is remarkably self-pitying (69, 87, 93). Alternating with the self-pity is the posturing that is evident in his character development; imperiously he proclaims to Laura: “jag är en soldat, som med ett ord kan tämja människor och kreatur; jag begär endast medlidande som em sjuk, jag nedlägger min makts tecken och jag anropar om nåd för mitt liv” (69) [I am a soldier who with a single word can tame people and animals; I request only compassion as someone who is ill, I lay down the symbols of my power and I call for mercy for my life]. Yet it is clear that this man is no more capable of taming animals than he is of controling himself; his claim to the contrary is so much vainglory (perhaps it is this manifest weakness that leads Lagercrantz to claim that the captain's tragic flaw lies in the conflict between male and female in his character [194]). Finally he elevates himself to veritably transcendent, mythological status (Lacan might say an embracing of the paternal metaphor) when, toward the end of the play, he draws several parallels between himself and Hercules, both male figures robbed of their masculinity.

In keeping with Lacan's perception of women and their role it human development, Strindberg's women are defined in terms of their biology. The captain's statement “När kvinnor bli gamla [har de] upphört vara kvinnor” (71) [when women get old, they've stopped being women] suggests clearly that women cease to be women when they are no longer sexually attractive or capable of bearing children. Likewise, Lacan sees women in terms of their biology, specifically their ability to bear and bond with children. Once the Symbolic phase sets in, the mother's role becomes to support and sustain the Law of the Father. Any departure from those activities constitutes a deviation from her “right” role.

This “natural essence” of woman appears several times in Fadren. Laura explains that she loved Adolf as a child, but that when his feelings changed her blood felt shame: “Modern var din vän, ser du, men kvinnan var din fiende” (70) [the mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy]. Of course this notion is congruent with Lacau's system in which woman is biology and man represents the law; indeed woman must be cast aside for the child to learn the law. But not only is woman biology, she is also outside of the law and poses a threat to it. Laura's own brother describes her as not even having a conscience, her crime “ett omedvetet brott; omedvetet” (80) [an unconscious crime, unconscious]. But Strindberg goes on to characterize women as a sex as essentially immoral. Thus, Ollén is not so far off the mark when he describes Laura as a “helveteskvinna” (65) [hell woman]. Describing two similar women of his experience, the captain says of all women: “Det är just detta som är faran, att de äro omedvetna om sin instinktiva skurkaktighet” (62) [That's just the danger, that they're unconscious of their instinctive depravity].

Virtually all the women in the play are characterized as irrational. Laura's “irrationality” is clear, but the nurse too is a rabid Baptist, the mother-in-law wants Bertha to be a spritist, the maids try to convert her to the Salvation Army, and the grandmother makes her do “automatic writing” at night. Women are, then, consistently associated with forces of anti-reason. Thus, Adolf wants to get rid of his mother-in-law and his old nurse, a desire that we can again see in light of the threat that femininity poses to the masculine order once it can no longer serve through sexuality or child bearing.

Ultimately this male hostility to women is described as out and out warfare: “Det är mannen och kvinnan mot varandra oupphörlight” (20) [It's man against woman constantly]. Ultimately, the captain describes their relationship: “Det är som ras-hat detta” (72) [This is like racial hatred], for as his prose writings from the late 1880s demonstrate, Strindberg equates female inferiority with the ostensible inferiority of people of color, in the process making some of the most offensive racist and mysogynist remarks in the annals of Western literature. As the play draws to a close, the captain spews forth a litany naming all the women who have been his enemies. In this respect, Strindberg goes beyond even Lacan's misogyny; while the psychologist posits the beneficial necessity of women both as mother (primarily before the Symbolic stage) and as Other to man's subject, Strindberg sees all women as failing men, as fundamentally defective.

Fröken Julie conforms to the same Lacanian framework as Fadren but in an even more overt way. Prominently located on the set are the speaking tube and servant's bell for the count to call and command his servants. There are also continuing references to his boots which Jean must clean before his return. These references that are peppered throughout the text (133, 138, 150, 188) serve as persistent aural and visual reminders of the count's constant absent presence, of who really holds the power in this household. The power the count wields is expanded to an equating of his person and the law when Julie and Jean clarify that they live within a system of patrilineage in which only the male transfers the title and the power pertaining thereto (158). This sense that Julie has transgressed against a powerful patriarchal dictum is clear also in her comment: “Tänker ni att jag kan se min far i ansiktet efter detta? Nej! För mig bort härifrån: från förnedringen, och vanäran!” (153) [Do you think I can look my father in the face after this? No! Take me away from here: from the humiliation and dishonor!].

The absence of the count is central to this play. Indeed Margareta Wirmark holds that the count and his role in the drama suggest the omnipresence of the late nineteenth-century patriarchy in the background of Strindberg's work (87). Not surprisingly, this figure is consistently equated with proper rule. Kristin's criticism of Jean for stealing the count's wheat specifically equates this act of breaking the law with disloyalty toward the count and his patriarchal system. Too, as Kristin makes clear, the count and the authority he represents, symbolize in this play rightly stratified society; Julie's fall is one of violating the laws of that patriarchal stratification: “jag [har] aldrig sänkt mig under mitt stånd. Kom och säg att grevens kokerska haft något med ryktarn eller svindrängen! Kom och säg det!” (183) [I've never sunk beneath my station. Just say that the count's cook has had anything to do with the stableboy or the swineherd! Just say that!].

The count's association with the Law of the Father is also apparent when Julie explains the story of her parents' marriage and recounts that before getting married her mother gave all her money to her lover so that it was not, as it should have been by law, under the control of her father. The lover stole the money as a result of which the father lost his rightful resources with which he might have better reestablished his proper rule. Jean, despite his low birth, also strives to wield the patriarchal authority represented by the count. Indeed, his highest life goal is to be to go to Rumania where he “kan—märk väl jag säger kan—sluta som greve!” (150) [can—note well that I say can—end up as a count]. Another manifestation of proper rule is that this father, like Lacan's, imparts the lessons of life to his children. Julie tells us that there is not a lesson she has learned that she has not received from her father and that, more specifically, “tack vare min fars lärdomar” [thanks to my father's teachings], she learned that she cannot “skjuta skulden på Jesus” (187) [put the blame on Jesus], an important lesson to the Strindberg who, at this point in his life, sees religion as an impediment to the search for and embracing of truth.

The great authority and the law and rule thereof that the count embodies appear also in the dread he inspires in those left behind while he is away. His power is so great that even his boots terrify Jean (150). All three of the major characters in the drama express fear and apprehension about the count's eventual return (168, 174f., 179). Indeed it is he whom Jean and Julie are trying to flee when they develop their travel plans, his disapproval and his wrath, an attempt doomed from the outset.

At the same time that the count is described in terms of metaphors of absolute power, proper rule, correct law, and beneficent teaching, Strindberg also represents him as a martyr. He is described as someone who has suffered “så mycket sorg” (173) [so much sorrow], as a man who wanted to commit suicide but could not (186). The reason behind this pain is (hardly surprisingly, for Strindberg) his relationship with a woman. Julie's mother was of “ofrälse härkomst, något mycket enkelt” (160) [common family, something very undistinguished], an indication for Strindberg of her essential inferiority. Her initial refusal to marry the count suggests her defiance of the law with all that that means to both Strindberg and Lacan. She furthermore did not want to bear a child, an even worse sin in their eyes, for a woman who refuses to become a mother violates the very distinction between subject and other on which Lacan's and Strindberg's sexual ideologies are based. The mother furthermore inverts “natural” difference by setting the men on the estate to “women's work” and vice versa. With no explanation from Strindberg as to why or how, this inversion resulted in the property's almost going under. But as soon as the father revolts, takes over the management of the property, and forces Julie's mother to marry him, i.e. reestablishes proper rule, the mother (it is strongly hinted) sets fire to the entire estate at precisely that window of opportunity when it is not insured thereby taking her revenge.

The mother's misrule is, Strindberg suggests, also to blame for the psychological chaos of Julie's personality and character. She claims she has both loved and hated her father, that while all her thoughts come from him, all her passions come from her mother (187). Julie's psychological confusion can be seen as precisely the kind of Lacanian psychosis that arises when an individual rejects the name or law of the father and thus is unable to position himself as a subject. The base mother, who compels the father to borrow her money from her lover to fix up the estate, is also described as degraded earlier in the play when Jean claims she was most comfortable in the kitchen and barn and went about with dirty cuffs (122). Woman's rule, then, is mis-rule; the “natural” law is for the male to assert his authority, as in Lacan's Symbolic stage. Woman, for Strindberg and Lacan, is that which must be conquered or transcended. Interestingly the conflict between the sexes is also laid at the feet of women; Julie states that it was from her mother that she learned hatred for men (163) and claims that her having slept with Jean is her mother's revenge on her father. Blaming the mother is, of course, a rationalization, for both Strindberg and Lacan, for the conflict between men and women that arises primarily because patriarchal authority needs to keep women in the position of other in order to retain its position as subject.

Finally, as the play comes to an end, the count arrives and everyone present cringes in obedience to him. Tellingly, even after this arrival, the count remains both invisible and inaudible, retaining a veritably godlike authority, as Jean and Julie remain on stage overwhelmed with anxiety as to what will happen. As Julie nervously examines the few options left to her, she decides that what she must do is commit suicide, less as an escape for herself, than to “rädda hans namn” (188) [save his name], an action that aligns her with Lacan's powerful Name of the Father and suggests her reabsorption into the paternal metaphor and thus her redemption. After Jean commands her twice not to think (presumably so that she might follow her instinct towards self-sacrifice in the name of the father), the bell rings loudly twice. The demands of the father are asserted suggesting the re-establishment, after this night of misrule, of the “right” rule of the father.

Historically Strindberg found himself writing in a volatile period during which the nineteenth century patriarchy was being seriously eroded. Vacillating as always between deep-seated insecurities and an egomania of virtually unparalleled proportions, he confronted the problem of finding an adequate response to the threat posed to the Oscarian patriarchy by the increasing number of unattached, single women who were demanding certain legal rights that by contemporary standards seem tame indeed. Walton's comments on the same problem in Anthony Trollope's œuvre are, I think, pertinent to Strindberg's situation:

The centered subjects of the discourse are not themselves whole or unified, but occupy a privileged position and work to maintain and justify that position through control of others. By controlling, these subjects indirectly lend themselves the illusion that they are acting as sources of coherence and stability. … Exerting power lends the subjects the illusion of holding power. … These [works] display … ideological attempts to legitimize the social order and to affirm the hierarchy it generates. … Certainly, his [works] detail the operation of the Phallic drive, and this operation must be understood if masculinist ideology is to be divested of its seductive rhetoric and appeal. … Without [woman], the “unity” [man] desires cannot be achieved, for he lacks the Other which would consolidate his subject position. Woman's role in this discourse is covertly highlighted as a result, since it is her subordination that enables the perpetuation of the order.

(Walton 8, 162-3)

Of course one cannot deny the importance and value of either Strindberg's or Lacan's contributions to Western letters; the place of the totality of their oeuvres in our culture is (and certainly deservedly) assured. But by linking Strindberg's literary practice with Lacan's psychological theories, I am suggesting that both are responses to the erosion of European patriarchal structures. Shideler rightly points out that “what we see in The Father … is the disintegration of the patriarchal family, even as the play dramatizes the attempt of the family to determine its own rules in the absence of any absolute authority” (253f.). So too does Fröken Julie suggest the threat that newly independent women and female sexuality posed to these structures. The beginning of the dissolution of certain masculine systems prompted these two ostensibly extremely different figures to respond in strikingly similar ways, for androcentrism avails itself of many of the same methods and techniques to justify and perpetuate the “natural” superiority of the male whether that androcentrism plays itself out in a late nineteenth-century Swedish playwright or a mid-twentieth century French psychiatrist. The Law of the Father positions the male as subject, the female as other; the father's dominance as “proper rule,” the mother's as “misrule; men as rational and women as “irrational;” women as restricted to the realms of biology and “instinctive depravity” and the mere “name” of the father as worth dying for. Although contemporary feminist criticism is careful (and justifiably so) not to embrace the notion of a monolithic patriarchy, it is perhaps worth remembering that patriarchies, however divided spatially and temporally, can and often do use the selfsame strategies to naturalize male dominance whether within the realm of “natural law” or within that of the supposedly inexorable laws of the human psyche.

Works Cited

Ambjörnson, Ronny and Johan Cullberg. “Strindbergs Fadren och Fordringsägare: En guide till manlighetens paradoxer.” BLM 1 (1987): 12-27.

Bergoffen, Debra. “Queering the Phallus.” Disseminating Lacan. Ed. David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul. Albany: State U New York P, 1996. 278-87.

Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

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