Introduction
“The Stronger” by play writer August Strindberg is an ironic work. It is one of the most famous of Strindberg’s one-act plays. He wrote it in 1889 for the Experiment Theater in Copenhagen. We need to mention some facts from his life that influenced his play “The Stronger”. While composing the work, August Strindberg had a love affair with Martha Hansen who was seventeen-year-old. Also, he had other relationships, as he always did, with at least two theatre actresses. His wife Siri always stayed with him as he returned to her after each love affair with other women. It is significant that he offered her the role of Madam X. She turned down this proposition at first but afterward accepted. Obviously, he considered his wife Siri the “stronger” in the real world and in real life.
The brief elements of the play
It may seem that there is nothing special about this play, that it is simple and commonplace. The two characters of the play are two women simply called Mrs. X and Miss Y. It is the turn of the 20th century, and here we can see the role and position of women in society. It is not important for them to have names; we know only a few facts about them (like they are some “objects”, not personalities). They are two actresses and they meet in a restaurant on Christmas Eve, one of them Miss Y, doesn’t even speak in the whole performance.
The play “The Stronger” is rich in irony and allegory. Although the play is very short, one can actually spend hours thinking about it and trying to understand its deep meaning. As the play progresses, we can see that Miss Y and Mrs. X are actually rivals – Miss Y is having a love affair with Mrs. X’s husband.
There are two different readings in the play. In the first, Mrs. X is an astute wife. The truth about Miss Y and her husband reveals to her. In the second reading, we can see Mrs. X as an apathetic and paranoid woman. The insecurity about her marriage has actually brought her to real slander. And here rises the question of who is “the stronger”. We have two variants: Miss Y, who maintains silence against Mrs. X’s dirty accusations (whether false or true). Mrs. X screams at her: “I hate you, hate you, hate you! But you – you just sit there, silent, calm, not caring—not caring whether it’s night or day, summer or winter, whether other people are happy or miserable—unable to hate and unable to love—motionless like a stork over a rat-hole” (Strindberg,1979). So, we have a question, if Miss Y is stronger in her independence. On the other hand, Mrs. X may be the stronger one, because she is courageous enough to accept the truth about her husband and she is able to go on. She says: “Thank you, Miss Y, for all the good lessons you’ve taught me. Thank you for teaching my husband to love! Now I am going home, to love him” (Strindberg,1979).
This shows us the first of the allegories from the play. This is the debate about gender roles in society of that time. Strindberg shows the fundamental duality of women’s role in society. Mrs. X is a devoted mother and wife, a woman who has lost all individuality because she has been entirely changed by the demands and caprices of her husband. She is a woman that enjoys the stability of family life. On the contrary side, we have Miss Y. She is an independent woman, who lives her own life in her own manner. That’s why she is able to make others fit her personality. But here is a paradox. Although she has such abilities and opportunities, in the end, she stays alone in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. I think that by such a stereotypical description Strindberg’s sets them off against each other. That is how through a quarrel between two of these women, Strindberg brings up the debate about the role of that time women in society.
But I think there is actually a deeper allegory in this play. Miss Y is a silent character. Mrs. X is able to carry on a conversation, make accusations, and draw inferences with Miss Y who does not speak to her at all. This image is similar to man’s interaction with God. In this play, Miss Y is not actually an individual. She is represented more like a human mirror, which Mrs. X uses in order to understand and, maybe, to interpret her own life. Here Mrs. X surfaces her discontent and insecurity; she is actually reconciling herself to them (as she thinks) by means of a dialogue. But this dialogue is totally one-sided. It is not necessary for Miss Y to say something. Her thoughts and feelings are not a part of the development of this story. By the end of this play, we do not actually know what has happened. But we know that Mrs. X believes that “the stronger” is a portrait of a human that can think through some contradictions in his or her own life, using another person (or the idea of another person) as a sort of a special sounding board for his or her own thought and analysis processes, and of the real fundamentally conditional and resolute nature of truth.
Conclusion
The ideas and thoughts of Strindberg, his experience, were revealed to us through his characters. It is impossible to make a statement of who is “the stronger”. As he said: “My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul. And I have added a little evolutionary history by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger, and by making the characters borrow ideas or “suggestions” from one another” (Strindberg, 1955).
Works Cited
Strindberg, August. The Stronger. Trans. Edwin Bjorkman. Urwin Brothers, 1979.