The Father

"I don't suppose the boy's that innocent, one just can't know, but one thing's for sure: the girl's guilty." 

The Captain hints at his latent misogyny when trying to determine whether Nojd is responsible for Emma's pregnancy. Without evidence, the Captain insists that "the girl's guilty" (43): Nojd get the benefit of the doubt, but Emma is wrong by default. The Captain never states what exactly Emma has done to make her guilty. Instead, for him, Emma—and all women—exists in a state of perpetual guilt simply because she is a woman. 

"And when she'd got it, she'd hand it back, saying it wasn't the thing itself she wanted, just the fact of getting her own way." 

Laura is strong-willed. Like her husband, she relishes an argument. The subjects of these arguments are often irrelevant, and the result rarely matters. Instead, the ability to triumph over someone else is all that matters. From the Captain's perspective, this is a negative quality in Laura, and all women, even though the Captain is guilty of the same behavior. The opinion is more illustrative of his hypocrisy and his misogyny than any of Laura's qualities. 

"The will is the backbone of the mind; if it's impaired, the mind simply disintegrates." 

Laura and the Captain both possess steely wills, which cause them to refuse to back down in any situation. The doctor claims that the mind of an individual will disintegrate if the will is impaired, but in this household, an individual disintegrates when submitting to the will of another person. 

"But now, at the crucial moment, you betray me and go over to the enemy."

Even though the Captain has turned to science, he struggles to leave behind his military past and his conflict-based view of the world. His perspective is stark and binary: Every person is either enemy or ally, and he feels the need to wage war against his enemies. The Captain is discovering that he suddenly has very few allies and a great many enemies.

"You've got much worse things that can see all the way to other planets." 

Bertha is an oasis of innocence in a house marred by a power struggle. While adults around her battle one another for control of her future, she struggles to see the difference between their points of view. Her grandmother is a spiritualist, and her father is a scientist. To the teenage Bertha, both spiritualism and science seem equally impenetrable—and equally demanding of faith. Both science and spiritualism seek to explain the world but do so in different ways. For a young girl, neither explanation is satisfying or understandable.  

"She doesn't take any notice of me."

Laura claims to act with her daughter's best interest in mind, but she struggles to convince Bertha to agree with her. For all his flaws, the Captain at least asks Bertha what she wants from her life—even if, like Laura, he disregards her response. Both parents are alienated from their child, but both remain certain that they should dictate the course of her life. 

"It's strange, but I've never been able to look at a man without feeling I'm his superior." 

Though the Captain's misogyny is the most harmful in the play, his wife has internalized the divisive way in which he views the world. She subscribes to the same social division between genders and—just like her husband—she views herself as inherently superior. However, the difference is that the Captain believes this in a world that drastically favors him, while Laura believes this in a world that marginalizes her based on her gender. While her views are superficially similar to those of her husband, they rest on a foundation of experience rather than an inherent social bias. 

"Yes, but I never said that."

Laura explicitly lies to her husband. He claims that she suggested to him that Bertha might not be his child, but she denies that this ever occurred. Laura is manipulative—a modern reader would call what she does gaslighting: planting insidious doubts in the Captain's mind. First, she hints that Bertha is not his daughter; then she denies that she ever said such a thing. 

"All is fleeting, all is vanity." 

Nurse Margret reads from a hymn at a moment when she feels the need to be closer to God. As she reads the hymn, the line "all is fleeting, all is vanity" (58) speaks to the feeling that nothing is permanent in life, including the domestic happiness of the household or the sanity of the Captain. Everything slowly deteriorates as the vain, self-centered characters clash with one another. The vanity of the characters becomes their downfall. 

"No, you can't see it; but it's there, all the same."

The Captain is stuck in a rhythm, constantly searching for things that might or might not exist. His scientific instruments provide evidence for his theories about science. In a similar fashion, he feverishly searches for evidence that every female member of his household is against him, using even the slightest affront to justify his opinions about women. The Captain uses his love of science as a frame for his paranoia. 

"Their instinct for villainy is quite unconscious." 

The Captain views women as deceptive liars, but he does not blame them for this behavior. His misogyny is patronizing, assuming women cannot help their innate, biological tendencies toward deceit. 

"That glory would only emphasize your own insignificance."

The Captain is hugely self-centered, which means that he projects his emotional state on to other people. He believes that Laura sees herself as caught in a battle between glory and insignificance though she shows no sign that she fears insignificance. The Captain's accusation reveals his own fears: He worries that the women in the house will overpower him and make him insignificant. The attacks he levels at his wife are about what he fears the most. 

"I won't appeal to your feelings, for you don't have any, that's your great strength."

The Captain has constructed a version of Laura, imagining a villain who cannot be reasoned with. The Captain needs to create this exaggerated version of Laura, turning her into a formidable ally because he cannot tolerate the idea that he might lose to a regular woman.

"What has this whole life-and-death struggle been about if not power?"

The argument between Laura and the Captain abandons all pretense that their disagreement is about Bertha. Though they speak about their differences of opinion regarding her future, they are actually locked in an existential battle for control of the household. Bertha has become merely a symbol of their disagreement: They no longer care about their daughter's wellbeing while claiming to act in her interest. 

"And my mother's to know nothing about this." 

Laura's fight for independence is not only against her husband. She also keeps secrets from her mother, worried that her mother will interfere in her plans and prevent her from doing what she feels is best for her daughter. Laura's mother has old-fashioned ideas about propriety and social acceptability—just as she is trying to cajole Bertha into becoming a spiritualist, so too will she object to Laura gaining the upper hand in her marriage. 

"I really can't help admiring you."

The pastor is supposedly a man of God, but he confesses that the breadth and scope of his sister's amoral plan is admirable. He is impressed that Laura has orchestrated the downfall of her husband in a way that grants her everything she wants. For all his religious training, the pastor can put morality aside and side with his sister when he discovers that she is about to be the locus of power.

"I never use a mirror."

This confession echoes the hymn condemning vanity Margret reads earlier in the play. The Father deplores vanity: Characters act in selfish ways, but they always insist that it's for the greater good. Laura lies and manipulates, but here, she insists that she is so free of self-pride that she doesn’t even look at her reflection—clearly an exaggeration meant to evoke sympathy for her supposed altruism.

"I'd rather do it myself, gently, ever so gently."

Nurse Margret is one of the few sympathetic characters in The Father. Though she initially refuses to put the Captain into the straitjacket, she soon capitulates—at least this way, someone who loves him will imprison him. Margret has a maternal bond with the Captain and does not want him to suffer. Unlike that of most of the characters, her behavior is not self-interested and prioritizes the feelings of others.

"A man never knows anything, he only believes."

The Captain has spent the entire play positioning himself as a man of science, but his confession in the third act rejects the very concept of knowledge. The Captain presents himself as an objective and wise scientist, but here, he reveals that his loyalty to science is a kind of faith in itself—a fetishizing of logic, rather than an actual search for the truth. 

"I believe you're all my enemies."

In the final few scenes of the play, the Captain fully embraces his misogyny, declaring that all women are his enemies. He sees the world in such stark, gendered terms that even women who love him and who want to help him are his enemies. 

"If only they had some foundation, then at least there'd be something to hang on to."

As the Captain reaches his embarrassing end, he realizes that his paranoid behavior lacks any basis to justify his monstrous behavior. He assaulted his wife and attacked everyone who cares about him for nothing. Still, his ego means that he does not wish he had acted differently; rather, he wishes that his unsympathetic actions could be justified in some way. 

"Who's the physical father of the spiritual child?"

As the Captain plunges deeper into paranoia and fear, his thoughts become more abstract and metaphysical. He stops viewing Bertha as a person, but as a "spiritual child" (73) who represents everything that he fears the most. The self-proclaimed scientist has embraced the abstract spiritualism he once rejected. Whereas he once based his actions and beliefs on substantial evidence, now he can only believe in spirits and imagined figments.

"A curse upon all your sex!" 

Even in his lowest moments, just before he suffers a heart attack, the Captain cannot abandon the hate that has come to define him. His final words curse an entire gender for crimes that he has invented. The pure, rampant misogyny that has taken over his mind means is the only coherent speech he has left.