The Path from Inferno to the Chamber Plays: Easter and Swedenborg

The Path from Inferno to the Chamber Plays: Easter and Swedenborg STEPHEN A. MITCHELL Response to the 1901 Swedish premiere of Easter, Strindberg's modern passion play, was sharply critical. Tor Hedberg, for example, complained: "The entire [play] is superficial and sentimental and concludes in a childish moral. ... Those who are edified by such may be so, but for my part, I decline.'" Yet despite this strong negative reaction, the play has been staged many times in the past eighty years, a fact which surely reflects the delight of audiences in seeing a drama in which Strindberg has, as Walter Johnson says, made the "interpretation of the Easter message believably human and comfortingly warm.,,2 Clearly, the resolution of the various moral and economic dilemmas faced by the members of the guilt-ridden Heyst family provides the play with a satisfying conclusion and an overall structure which underscores the play's concern with basic Christological tenets. Especially prominent among these concerns is what Strindberg, in reference to Easter, later calls satisfactio vicaria, the soteriological concept which is present in much of Strindberg's post-Inferno production.3 The fact persists, however, that although audiences and performers have been drawn to this drama, the work has remained notoriously resistant to interpretation beyond the most superficial level, as Aage Kabell and Martin Lamm lament;4 in their frustration, some have even gone so far as to dismiss it as "muddled" and "childish.,,5 Recently, Harry G. Carlson suggested that we . have failed to appreciate fully the allusions Strindberg had in mind in Easter, and thus missed much of the play's meaning.6 His fascinating examination of the play's various classical and biblical dimensions places the work into an interesting mythological context. The present study seeks to expand this mythico-religious background somewhat and to identify elements of the play with a further late Strindbergian wellspring, namely, the writings ofEmmanuel Swedenborg.7 It is in essence a defense of Easter, for if the play appears wanting in dramatic tension and clear action, I contend that this fact resides in STEPHEN A. MITCHELL the failure of audiences to interpret fully what they see on stage, rather than in any deficiency in the structure or content of the work itself. The highly complex nature ofthe play can be demonstrated, for example, by examining the figure of Eleonora, the Easter girl (paskjlicka). She is a character Strindberg had long been developing: according to his own testimony some ten years after writing the play, she had already been "prepared" in Inferno and Advent.8 He also makes it clear in a letter written to Harriet Bosse that Eleonora has had at least one other model: "She is ... related to Balzac's Siraphita, Swedenborg's niece."· Furthermore, critics and students of Strindberg have also been quick to point out the similarities between Eleonora and Strindberg's sister Elisabeth, who spent her last years in an asylum in Uppsala, a sister to whom Strindberg felt so close that he writes of her in another letter to Harriet Bosse: "She was like my twin."lo Thus, three elements typical of Strindberg's authorship shape the role ofEleonora in Easter, namely, his habit of reworking the "same" character time and again in his literary production, his heavy reliance on Swedenborg and Swedenborg-influenced works for his own post-Inferno writings,II and the consistent incorporation of autobiographical events into his works. This concatenation of influences in Strindberg's writing forms the basis for the following examination of Easter, speCifically the thematic relationship this play bears to such earlier works as ltiferno on the one hand and to later works such as The Ghost Sonata on the other. The content and structure of Easter provide the audience with a drama which traces a classical comic curve, if in severely truncated fashion. The isolated family, held up to public ridicule in its glass veranda, is threatened with becoming even further cut off from society in the small university town; but in the end, Elis and the rest of the Heyst household are spared by Lindkvist's kindness, and the play concludes in the hope of the family's eventual reintegration into...