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92 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1887
"Ah, my tough lion's skin that you would take from me. Omphale! Omphale! You cunning woman who loved peace and learnt to disarm us. Awake, Hercules, before they take your club away from you! You want to trick us out of our armour, too, and made believe it was only tinsel. It was iron, you know, before it was tinsel. It used to be the smith who forged the soldier’s tunic; now it's the seamstress. Omphale! Omphale! Raw strength has given way before treacherous weakness. Damn you, woman! A curse upon all your sex!"The Father is a conceptually simple play: husband and wife, man and woman, captain and housewife, atheist and believer, are at war, in battle � a battle of the sexes. What is at stake is power, or more specifically, control over their daughter and her future. In the end, wife/woman wins: she convinces important others that her husband has lost his mind, and eventually succeeds in driving him insane (by suggesting that he may not be the father of their child) so that he is put into a straightjacket and loses all power of attorney (and ultimately all power � including that of life). The play at times feels slightly caricatured; especially the character of the wife, Laura, is not particularly well developed � lacking flesh and blood, so to say. The air of misogyny, for which Strindberg was infamous, is somewhat misty in The Father. For instance, against the Captain's diatribes, here is Laura:
"It's strange, but I've never been able to look at a man without feeling I'm superior."Laura is strong and intelligent; but of course, Laura is also cruel and cunning and destructive and self-interested. She is the antagonist to the protagonist Captain. So perhaps the attack on women is not so balanced, in the end, as it would appear.