The Father

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1887

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Lamp

At the end of the second act of The Father, the Captain hurls a burning lamp at Laura. His anger overcomes him, and his violent words turn into violent actions. The lamp becomes a symbol of the moment when he snaps, the attack showing that he has lost his grip on reality. The Captain's verbal rage at the women in the house is now a hot war.

More broadly, the lamp reflects the Captain's mental state. The purpose of a lamp is to cast light—to expose the reality of a room. By extinguishing the lamp in a violent fashion, the Captain descends into the darkness of his obsession, paranoia, and misogyny. He is alone and he is lost, unable to see a way out. The destruction of the lamp plunges the Captain into a literal and a figurative darkness.

The Captain's violent behavior has severe consequences: By attacking Laura with the lamp, the Captain has opened himself up to legal sanction. The legal system that typically protects men like the Captain can now punish him.

The House

The play's family drama is entirely contained within the walls of the family house, which becomes a physical representation of conflict. Family members lock one another in rooms, lurk in doorways, or expel one another to a different part of the house, using the house's geography to fight. By controlling the house's physical space, the characters control one another.

The house is also a symbol of civilization and safety. The cold, the snow, and the unknown which lurk outside the house present just as much of a threat as the people inside. At one point, the Captain becomes so angry with the women around him that he exits the house, leaving its warmth for the cold outdoors. By the time he returns, his mental state has worsened. This element of the play is a clear reference to Shakespeare's King Lear, which also memorably features a power-hungry man duped by the women of his family, then exiled to a stormy outdoors where he loses his grip on sanity. In The Father, the Captain venturing outside of the house marks his symbolic departure from society's rules and moral boundaries.

Guns

Guns, tools of violence and war, decorate the play's house set. Their placement in the house symbolizes the potential for discord and violence that lingers in every scene of the play. The guns symbolize the barely restrained power hiding in the characters, waiting to be unleashed.

In an incredible bit of perfect timing, Strindberg wrote this play only a year before the famed Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov made his famous remark that "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off." And so it is in The Father: no sooner has Laura called for Nojd to empty the guns that the Captain attempts to grab one to shoot his daughter to prevent her from disobeying his whims. Laura understands her husband well, realizing that his mental state will propel him inevitably toward violence. Her order to unload the guns symbolizes her greater intelligence and foreshadows her inevitable victory.

After the Captain reaches for the gun and finds it empty, the gun becomes a symbol of his defeat. The Captain is a military man, so the removal of his weapon's potency is an important symbol: Laura has rendered him powerless. Lurking within the unloaded gun is the impotence imagery of shooting blanks—an ironic reference to the Captain obsession with Bertha's paternity. By unloading his gun and denying him the opportunity to demonstrate his martial prowess, Laura is denying the Captain the chance to father an even greater violence. He is worried about his capacity to bring life into the world, while Laura removes his capacity to remove life from the world. The gun is an important symbol of the totality of Laura's victory. Not only does it show the ingenuity and careful planning of Laura, but it also plays against the Captain's greatest fears.