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NATURALISM IN TRANSITION: STRINDBERG'S "CYNICAL" TRAGEDY, THE BOND (1892) STRINDBERG'S SO-CALLED NATURAUSTIC DRAMAS of the late 1880's and early 1890's can only be tenned naturalistic with certain important qualifications. If The Father (1887) is naturalistic, its naturalism is the kind of "grandiose art" of which Strindberg found examples in Emile Zola's play Therese Raquin (1873) and the novel Germinal (1885).1 By grandiose naturalism Strindberg meant in this context a powerful, elemental art strongly colored by the temperament of the author, an art which does not refrain from an occasional heightening or exaggeration of reality for dramatic effect. Of this type of naturalism both Therese Raquin and The Father contain several exampl~s. One need only recall in Zola's play the drastic scene ill which Madame Raquin, rendered hysterical with rage, discovers the crime of the guilty lovers Therese and Laurent, and in Strindberg's violent drama the climactic episode where the Captain throws the burning lamp at his wife Laura, after he has been infonned that he has only been a breadwinner and a means for her to conceive the child. Again Miss Julie (1888), Strindberg 's most completely naturalistic play, is not in all respects genuinely naturalistic. The play contains touches of symbolism, as in the mention of the incident involving the dog Diana and the killing of Julie's canary by the valet Jean. Julie's pedigreed dog by consorting with a lowbred cur has demeaned itself, much as the aristocratic Julie is later to do with the servant Jean. The dog episode symbolically foreshadows Julie's fate. This is also true of the bird-killing scene. Strindbergs symbolic use of this effect reminded the famous Swedish Strindberg scholar Martin Lamm of Ibsen's use of the wild duck in the play of that name.2 Finally Creditors (1888), Strindberg's third major naturalistic drama, shows several significant modifications of naturalistic techniques. The diabolical woman Tekla in this play is characterized as a "cannibal" who devours her men body and soul. The sinister creditor Gustav, a Nietzschean supennan of uncanny perspicacity, occasionally is described in anything but naturalistic tenns. Even when 1. August Strindberg, "Om modernt drama oeh modem teater," in Samlade 8krifter (Stockholm, 1913), XVII, l!,289. 2. Martin Lamm, Stnn4berg. dramer (Stockholm, 1924), I, p. 307. 291 292 MODERN DRAMA December absent he "haunts" the two guilty lovers Tekla and Adolf. He "takes on dimensions," and his "black hand" appears between the couple when they are about to help themselves at table. Clearly, the step from this kind of "naturalism" to romanticism on one hand or expressionism on the other is not very far. That Strindberg was in fact by the late 1880's growing tired of the rigid aesthetic principles imposed by doctrinaire naturalism is proved not only by these modifications of naturalism in The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors but also by certain passages in his essay "On Modem Drama and Modern Theatre" of March, 1889. His impatience with naturalism (not the Zolaesque variety, however) is indicated by his severe and incisive criticism of Henry Becque's drama Les Corbeaux (1882). Strindberg considers this play an example of "misunderstood naturalism" and scornfully refers to it as "photography" and "devoid of temperament."3 A patient and fairly objective presentation of drab reality is not sufficiently powerful emotionally to hold Strindberg's interest for long, even though-as in Becque's drama-the objectivity may be colored somewhat by irony. Strindberg climaxes his criticism of Becque's naturalism by summarily dismissing admirers of Becque's art as "soulless."4 In view of these circumstances, the student of Strindberg's theater begins to suspect that toward the end of the 1880's Strindberg, feeling hampered and ill at ease in naturalistic positivism, is gradually beginning to grope for a new, non-naturalistic form in the drama. Therefore , it may come as a surprise to some to find Strindberg, as late as 1892, composing six brief plays most of which must be characterized as predominantly naturalistic. Why, one wonders, does Strindberg persist in writing in the naturalistic form which he apparently had begun to find outdated and unsatisfactory? Martin Lamm...

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