[In the following essay, Carlson provides an in-depth view of the play Easter.]

One might argue that Easter only narrowly deserves to be included among Strindberg's major plays. Although audiences have been attracted to what was for Strindberg an unusually serene and reconciliatory tone, there is an awkwardness about the play. The playwright's effort to inform his drama with the solemnity of religious ritual observance by hanging the act structure on the temporal divisions of the Easter Passion—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Eve—led to uneven results. References to Christ are so numerous, analogies to the Passion so obviously drawn, that the effect produced is embarrassingly close to religiosity. Despite these weaknesses, however, the play is redeemed by an elemental power centered around one of Strindberg's most captivating and mythopoeically expressive characters: Eleonora.

The setting is realistic-naturalistic, at least on the surface: the Heyst home, located in a university town identified by scholars as Lund in southern Sweden.¹ The family is a troubled one. Mr. Heyst is away in prison serving time for embezzling trust funds, and his wife stubbornly says she believes him innocent, hoping his sentence will be overturned on a technicality. The present breadwinner is Elis, her son, a young teacher of Latin, who, like the Stranger in To Damascus, is profoundly alienated from the world and from himself. For a number of reasons he has become bitter and frustrated: because his mother refuses to accept that his father was guilty; because his friend and pupil/disciple Petrus has not only stolen ideas from his unfinished dissertation but appears to be trying to steal his fiancée Kristina as well; because Kristina offers him help and love, which he cannot accept; because he is obliged to provide a home and tutoring for a young orphan, Benjamin, whose trust funds were among those embezzled by Mr. Heyst; because another of his father's victims, Mr. Lindkvist, seems to have moved to town as a creditor come to claim his due; and finally, because he was compelled to have his mentally disturbed sister Eleonora institutionalized. Elis sees himself suffering as Christ did, and among the more blatant references to the Passion in the play is his reaction to the news that Petrus has befriended someone whose politics Elis abhors, the local governor: “and [Petrus] denied his teacher and said: ‘I know not the man.’ And the cock crowed again! Wasn't there a governor once called Pontius, surnamed Pilate?” (33, 85). This and lines like Mrs. Heyst's exclamation: “Oh God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” turn the family ordeal into perhaps too direct a parallel to the Passion (86). Because the Imitation of Christ becomes too palpable, its ability to set off poetic resonances is blunted, and other, perhaps more important mythic images are obscured in the process.

As in The Father, with which Easter seems at first to have nothing in common, the energy core is a group of characters who constitute an archetypal configuration: the eternal feminine. It is the task of the respective protagonists to integrate this configuration into their lives, but whereas the Captain succumbs in this effort and is lost, Elis is reborn and saved. The reason for the difference is a shift in focus; each play is dominated by a different phase of the archetype. In the first the phase is the maternal, that of the Great Goddess, who knows nothing but the secret of her womb. In the second it is a reunion of mother and daughter—beuresis²—a context of enormous creative potential for spiritual transformation. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Strindberg drew attention to one of the most eloquent examples in myth of heuresis: the story of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, and her daughter Persephone.

Persephone—or Prosperine as she is known in Ovid's Metamorphoses, a Strindberg favorite—while picking flowers is tricked by Hades, lord of the underworld, into reaching for a particularly lovely narcissus. The moment she touches the flower, the earth opens up and Hades spirits her away to his realm. Demeter becomes distraught over her daughter's disappearance. The result of her anguish is that all vegetation ceases to grow, and mankind is threatened with famine. Zeus is forced to intervene and negotiates an agreement with his brother Hades: Persephone may return for eight months of every year to her mother, but she must spend the winter with her husband in the underworld. And so, once a year, after mother and daughter are reunited, the earth becomes green again.

In Easter, details of the myth have been changed and the sequence of events has been rearranged, but the essential elements are present. The time is spring and Eleonora/Persephone returns from the mental institution. The vague but evocative outlines of her description of the place put one in mind of the sterile home of anguished shades in the dark regions of the underworld.

ELEONORA:
… there, where I came from, where the sun never shines, where the walls are white and bare as in a bathroom, where only weeping and wailing is heard, where I sat away a year of my life!
BENJAMIN:
What do you mean?
ELEONORA:
Where people are tortured, worse than in a prison, where the damned live, where unrest has its home, where despair keeps watch night and day. A place from which no one ever returns.
BENJAMIN:
Do you mean worse than a prison?
ELEONORA:
In prison you are condemned, but there, you are damned! In prison they question you and listen to you. There, no one hears you!

(102-103)

Like Persephone, Eleonora is a blend of innocence, sadness, and joy. In Greek mythology Persephone was referred to as “the maiden whose name may not be spoken.”³ When Eleonora appears and announces that she is a member of the family, Benjamin is surprised.

BENJAMIN:
How strange that no one has ever talked about you.
ELEONORA:
People don't talk about the dead!

(59)

Both Persephone and Eleonora suffer terribly as the consequence of a momentary, pitifully innocent temptation: the desire to possess a flower. Eleonora, on her way home from the institution, takes a daffodil from an unattended florist's shop. Although she leaves payment for it, she later comes to fear that the money may go astray and that she will be accused of theft.

Strindberg could not have chosen a more appropriate flower, and, with his deep interest in botany, could not have been ignorant of the various meanings associated with it. The daffodil's genus is Narcissus, Persephone's flower. The Swedish name for it is påsklilja, which translated literally would be “Easter lily,” and the lily, like the rose, is a traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary. As he did in To Damascus, Strindberg uses a flower as an ambivalent symbol of both the bond that joins and the tension that divides mother from daughter in the eternal-feminine configuration.

The basic rhythm of the play as of the myth—separation and reunion—is the counterbalancing movement of life itself, the diastole and the systole. For most of the play Mrs. Heyst does not fully and warmly acknowledge her daughter and in fact has been distant with her for some time. When Eleonora presses her mother's hand to her lips, Mrs. Heyst “restrains her emotion,” according to the stage directions (80). But then comes Easter Eve and the end of alienation:

ELEONORA:
You kissed me, Mother. You haven't done that for years.

(110)

Mrs. Heyst has come to understand the sacrificial role her daughter plays as the messenger of vernal hope:

MRS. Heyst:
This child of sorrow has come with joy, though not of this world. Her troubled feelings have been transformed into peace, and she shares it with everyone. Sane or not, for me she is wise because she understands how to bear life's burdens better than I do, than we do.

(105)

A complication interrupts. The arrival of the newspaper confirms Mrs. Heyst's fear that Eleonora will be charged with theft of the flower and once again incarcerated. Like Demeter, she laments that her daughter must return to the darkness.

MRS. Heyst:
She's lost … found again and lost.

(108)

But like the final emergence of a spring whose return has been prolonged, the eventual establishment of Eleonora's innocence is certain. The triumph of Persephone is as inexorable as was her tragedy in the lengthening shadows of the preceding autumn. The florist finds the money the girl left behind; mother and daughter can once again be reunited.

The realization of the significance of her daughter's redemptive suffering has an enormously liberating effect upon Mrs. Heyst. She can now see through the veil of self-deception that clouded her vision. “Was I sane, Elis, was I sane when I believed your father was innocent? I was certainly aware that he was convicted on tangible, material evidence and that he had confessed!” She is free of the suffocating power of the past and can see that Elis is still trapped in delusion, that he cannot yet accept one of life's most demanding, but vital challenges.

MRS. Heyst:
And you, Elis, are you in your right mind when you can't see that Kristina loves you … and believe instead that she hates you?
ELIS:
It's a strange way to love!
MRS. Heyst:
No! Inwardly, she's been frozen by your coldness, and you're the one who hates. But you're unjust, and so you have to suffer.

(105)

The reunion of mother and daughter is not the climax of the play. Elis has more lessons to learn before the lost harmony he misses, both in himself and in his family, can be completely restored. What the heuresis, the vernal miracle, does is to set the stage for this restoration, and Strindberg enhances and amplifies the reunion by enveloping it in vegetation imagery.

Scholars have speculated that the source for the family name was a Belgian spa Strindberg visited for a fortnight in 1898: Heist-op-den-Berg.⁴ This may be, but heister is the German word for sapling or young tree. And there are other surnames in the play associated with trees. Petrus' last name is Holmblad, or Islet-leaf, and Benjamin's feared tutor is Algren, or Alderbranch. The creditor Lindkvist's name could be translated as Linden-switch, and switch reinforces the recurrent theme in the play of chastisement and punishment. Elis receives an anonymous gift of a bundle of birch twigs, which leads to the idea that he is in need of a “birching.” But he senses that there may be a positive side to the gift: chastisement can lead to repentance, and repentance to reconciliation. Elis himself says the twig might carry the promise of an Aaron's rod, the stave of Moses's brother, which bloomed miraculously as a sign that God had chosen him (51).

In addition to the surnames and numerous mentions of Eleonora's daffodil, there are other tree, flower, plant, herb, and fruit references scattered throughout the play. A bird dropped a twig at Elis's feet as he walked past the cathedral, and he wishes it had been an olive branch; he remembers the willows and linden trees in bloom by the family's summer cottage as well as a student song in which birches and lindens were mentioned. Mrs. Heyst peels apples for applesauce. Eleonora says she heard starlings talking in a walnut tree, and she speaks with authority about the psychic effects produced by consuming henbane and belladonna; furthermore, she is conversant in “the silent language of the flowers” (67). As Elis reads the painful proceedings of his father's trial, a word catches like a thorn in his eye (77). A rumor says that a tulip was stolen and not a daffodil (84). Eleonora identifies with flowers that have blossomed prematurely and must endure a late spring frost—anemones and snowdrops—and she looks forward to the coming of violets.

The repetition of vegetation images is as pervasive as similar details in the background of a medieval tapestry, and the cumulative effect reinforces the Demeter-Persephone leitmotif. Even the order of associations has a natural rhythm: Eleonora and the daffodil, Mrs. Heyst and the apple—virgin with flower, mother with fruit.⁵

There are other mythic resonances in the play in addition to those connected with vegetation. The bird that dropped the twig at Elis's feet was a dove, and although the twig was not an olive branch, Elis took it as a token of peace. The Heysts await the coming of spring as Noah awaited the waters of the Deluge to recede. The day before Easter was to premiere, Strindberg wrote to Harriet Bosse, who was playing Eleonora: “I … thank God He sent you, the little dove with olive branch, not the birch. The Deluge has ended, the old has drowned, and the earth shall again be green.”⁶

Elis complains that everything is obscured by a “black veil,” which suggests the material, earthly prison of profane space and concrete time. To penetrate this veil, according to Mircea Eliade, it is necessary to return to a decisive cosmic moment in which profane space is transformed into transcendent space, and concrete time into mythic time.⁷ Eleonora is the catalyst of this transformation. Her very presence turns the realistic moment into the magic of “once upon a time.” “For me,” she tells Benjamin, “time and space do not exist” (61). Her mission is to bring important messages, as Mrs. Heyst says, which cannot be adequately defined in terms like rational or irrational. Benjamin admits to Eleonora, “I really don't understand the words you're saying, but I think I understand what you mean” (62); and “It seems that everything you say, I've already thought myself” (69).

The feeling of “once upon a time” is established quickly in the moments immediately prior to and following Elonora's first entrance. A solemn mood is set as objects are handled almost ceremoniously, and allusions are made to punishment, spring, and hope.

ELIS:
[taking the birch bough from the dining room table and placing it behind the mirror]
It wasn't an olive branch the dove brought … it was a birch! [He exits. Eleonora enters from upstage, a sixteen-year-old girl who wears a pigtail down her back. She is carrying a yellow daffodil in a pot. Without seeing, or seeming to see Benjamin, she takes the water carafe from the sideboard, waters the flower, and places it on the table, where she then sits opposite Benjamin, watching him and imitating his gestures. Benjamin reacts in surprise.]
ELEONORA:
[pointing at the daffodil]
Do you know what this is?
BENJAMIN:
[childishly, simply]
Of course I know—it's a daffodil! … But who are you?
ELEONORA:
[friendly, but sadly]
Yes, who are you?

(58)

What a splendid entrance! Our attention is riveted upon the girl and the flower through a sweep of scenic action that is at once simple and concrete, strange and evocative. When Eleonora imitates Benjamin's gestures and repeats his question, an interesting effect is achieved: on the one hand, we are witnessing a meeting between troubled adolescents—an insecure boy and an emotionally disturbed girl; on the other hand, we are watching Benjamin on the brink of an archetypal confrontation, face to face with a counterpart, or double, whose purpose, at least in part, is to introduce him to the mystery of the eternal feminine, to bring warmth and encouragement to someone who up till now has seen the world as cold and inhospitable.

But if Eleonora brings a hopeful message of vernal renewal and rebirth to the Heyst home, the message is tinged with melancholy. The return of spring can only partly mitigate the painful knowledge that the earthly passage remains a vale of tears. If Eleonora is Persephone, she is also, in the manner of Strindberg's polyphonic mythology, Sophia, the Gnostic figure of divine wisdom, fated to “suffer every possible kind of suffering.”⁸ Eleonora even suffers with distant loved ones: with her father in prison and her sister in America. Her illness, she says, is “not a sickness unto death, but to the glory of God.” In her brother's life she is not just his mentally ill sister, she is also, as Strindberg himself described her in a letter, “Christ in Man.”⁹ Elis, in his reluctance to deal with her, becomes a variation of the Ahasuerus motif: the man who tries to deny the calling from the Christ within.

Elis's name is close to Elisa, the Swedish name for the Biblical Elisha, to whom Elijah passed his mantle, the symbol of the prophet's calling and mission, but also, in the language of Gnosticism, of the body, the earthly garment of flesh and blood, which must some day be exchanged and transcended. That Strindberg was aware of this twofold meaning is attested in a letter he wrote to Torsten Hedlund in 1896: “Cf.: Elijah's mantle! Nessus's shirt!”¹⁰ In Easter the symbolic values of the mantle as calling and the garment as burden are made manifest in Elis's overcoat. In the opening scene he is seen removing the coat and hanging it up. “You know”, says Elis to Kristina, “it's so heavy—[hefting the coat with his hand]—as if it had soaked up all the troubles of winter, the sweat of anguish and the dust of school”(39). When Eleonora passes the coat, she pats it sympathetically, and says “Poor Elis!”(70). Mrs. Heyst points to it and scolds her son: “I told you, that coat is not to hang there!”(71). For her, it represents unpleasant truths she would rather not be reminded of.

If Elis's name leads one to think of Elisha and Elijah, Helios, the Greek god of the sun also comes to mind. And if the coming of spring suggests the return of Persephone, it also suggests the return of Helios.

ELIS:
Look, the sun has come back again … He went away in November. I remember the day he disappeared behind the brewery across the street. Oh, this winter! This long winter!

(40)

Later, the presence of the moon is felt.

ELEONORA:
Go and draw the curtain, Benjamin. I want God to see us.
[Benjamin rises and obeys. Moonlight falls into the room.]
ELEONORA:
Do you see the full moon? It's the Easter moon! And now you know that the sun is still there, though it's the moon that gives us the light!

(97)

In some mythologies a brother-sister kinship exists between the sun and moon, and in alchemy, the arcane science with which Strindberg was so preoccupied during and after the Inferno years, there is the androgyne, or “Rebis,” a being signifying the merging of opposites and the end of the agony resulting from the separation of the sexes. Strindberg's attitude toward the concept of the androgyne is revealed implicitly and explicitly in letters in which he identified two of the models he used for Eleonora. The real-life model was his mentally ill sister, Elisabeth, whose life seemed mystically bound with his own. “She was like my twin,” he wrote in a letter to Harriet Bosse in December 1904.¹¹ The fictional model for the Easter girl was the androgynous central character of Balzac's Séraphita, whose parents were disciples of Swedenborg. Explaining Easter to Harriet in a letter in 1901, he refers to “Eleonora's kin, Balzac's Séraphita-Séraphitus, the Angel, for whom earthly love does not exist because he-she is l'époux et l'épouse de l'humanité. Symbol of the highest, most perfect type of human being, which haunts much of the very latest modern literature and which some people feel is on its way down to us.”¹²

The androgynous aspect of the relationship between Elis and Eleonora helps to explain the different ways the characters complement each other. Beyond the balancings of male-female, brother-sister, sun-moon we have Elis, as a teacher, associated with the life of the intellect, and Eleonora, poor, mad Eleonora, associated with the irrational and the dark world of the unconscious. Elis dreads her return from the institution, but she is a part of him that he cannot repudiate. Their closeness is revealed in the girl's description of her brother as her “only friend on earth” (69).

Mother, beloved, and sister/androgyne: Elis must settle accounts with each of the faces of the eternal feminine, but, as in To Damascus, the ultimate, superior creditor, the one to whom the hero must eventually answer is a masculine, paternal force. Just as the Stranger and the Lady are haunted on their pilgrimage by reminders of the Doctor, so the Heysts are constantly made aware that Lindkvist is approaching, frighteningly: in act two he stands by the street lamp outside, and his shadow on the curtains expands enormously—expressionistically—as he starts toward the house.

Again, as in To Damascus, it is the maternal confrontation that prepares the protagonist for the paternal confrontation. Mrs. Heyst serves two functions in this regard. First, by finally accepting the fact of her husband's guilt and reuniting with her daughter, she dissipates much of the tension in the house. Second, she provides an important answer to Elis's question of whether the family ordeal has come to an end.

ELIS:
Now can we throw the birch on the fire?
MRS. Heyst:
Not yet! There's something else.
ELIS:
Lindkvist?
MRS. Heyst:
He's standing outside.
ELIS:
Now that I've seen a ray of sunshine I'm not afraid to meet the giant. Let him come!

Elis is confident to the point of cockiness, and Mrs. Heyst warns him, “You know what happens to those who are proud” (111). We are reminded of the Mother's warning in To Damascus: “Pride must be cut down” (29, 74).

Lindkvist, a wonderfully grotesque invention, is a bogeyman out of Dickens, and his entrance is a combination of the terrifying and the absurd. Strindberg realized that the character would present problems, that his presence could spill a performance over into farce; Lindkvist, he insisted, must not be played by a comic actor.¹³

[Lindkvist enters from the right. He is an earnest, elderly man of weird appearance. His gray hair is arranged in an upswept forelock and trimmed at the temples in the manner of a hussar. Big, black bushy eyebrows. Short, close-clipped black sideburns. Round, black hornrimmed eyeglasses. Large carnelian charms on his watchchain; a Spanish cane in his hand. He is dressed in black with a fur coat; top boots with leather galoshes that squeak. When he enters, his eyes are riveted probingly on Elis. …]

(33, 112)

The “upswept forelock” and earnest mien are reminiscent of the stern God of Strindberg's creation play, who has “horns like the Moses of Michelangelo.” But as with the Doctor in To Damascus, this godlike figure has given up throwing thunderbolts. Much of his bite has gone, and even his bark is more jovial than frightening: “Do you know who I am? … [disguising his voice] I am the giant of Skinflint Mountain, who scares little children!” (124-125). And as in many fairy tales, the protagonist's fear of the confrontation is worse than the confrontation itself. Lindkvist has good reason to want vengeance, but he does not seek it. On the contrary, he points a way for the hero to break out of the circle of guilt and anguish that torments him. To be sure, Elis still has a hard lesson to learn: he must recognize that he needs the saving grace of love, which he has lost, and that he has tendencies toward hubris that must be curbed.

ELIS:
Why don't we just hand his paper over to the hangman? That way we can at least be spared this lengthy and painful execution.
LINDKVIST:
I see.
ELIS:
Young or not, I ask for no mercy, only justice!
LINDKVIST:
Is that right? No mercy, no mercy!

(113)

Elis sounds like the Stranger refusing charity from the Abbess. But Lindkvist's arguments—now persuasive, now coercive—melt Elis's defiance and cause him to agree to resolve his differences with Petrus and Kristina. Lindkvist points out that his own family has suffered much because of Heyst's embezzlement and that Elis in his stubborness risks sacrificing his mother and sister on the altar of pride. What finally wins the day is the fact that Lindkvist has come not with a destructive claim but a healing gift. Although he has been wronged by Heyst, forty years earlier Elis's father was the only one in town to befriend him in a time of trouble. Because of that act of generosity, Lindkvist can now cancel his claim; the gift he brings is forgiveness, and with it, reconciliation. “You see,” he says, “there is a charity which goes against justice and transcends it! … That is mercy!” (115).

If the analogies in Easter to the Passion seem too obvious or facile, one cannot deny the naive power of the ending effected by the gifts brought by the two angels, Eleonora and Lindkvist. As Lindkvist brings forgiveness, Eleonora brings an infinite capacity for bearing suffering so as to lighten the burdens of others; she is Sophia: victim and redeemer in one. Strindberg indicated the archetypal dimension of the reconciliation in a letter to Harriet Bosse on the day Easter was premiered (April 4, 1901): “The Lost Father wants to be introduced to his children—you have been given the honor of reestablishing the relationship.”¹⁴

The message of the Passion, the return of Persephone, the wisdom of the melancholy Sophia, the creditor's forgiveness, and Elis's new-found capacity to accept love and mercy all coincide with the vernal promise of the Easter season. However forced some of the details in the play may seem, the resolution is no moment of simplistic mawkishness. The Heysts, all of them, have earned the right to turn their backs on the darkness and walk toward the light.

Notes

1. Martin Lamm, August Strindberg, trans. and ed. Harry G. Carlson (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), p. 367.

2. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 318-319.

3. Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: The New American Library, 1953), p. 54.

4. See Aage Kabell, “Påsk og det mystiske teater,” Edda 54 (1954):164.

5. See Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 307.

6. Brev 14:57.

7. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Meridian, 1963), p. 296.

8. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 301-303, on the passion of Sophia.

9. Brev 14:16.

10. Ibid., 11:253.

11. Ibid., 15:88.

12. Ibid., 14:34.

13. Ibid., 13:329.

14. Ibid., 14:58.