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22 Why can’t images and words (and men and women) stay married in Gertrud? One of Söderberg’s most important predecessors, the great Swedish playwright August Strindberg, had solved the problem of his characters’ authorship in his own way, in his famous preface to Miss Julie (1888), by claiming that the human soul itself is nothing but a collection of texts: “My souls—or characters —are conglomerations from various stages of culture, past and present, walking scrapbooks, shreds of human lives, tatters torn from old rags that were once Sunday best—hodgepodge just like the human soul. I have even supplied a little source history into the bargain by letting the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger.” Strindberg hoped to neutralize the powerful desire his “characters” have for “souls” by neatly conflating the two terms, as his narratives stage the “stealing” of his own words. For Strindberg, the tragic irony is that in the modern world the “weaker” beat out the stronger more often than not: the “characters” steal the “author’s” soul. Perhaps the strongest figuring of such a “weak” soul is the vampire, a figure that haunted fin de siècle Scandinavian and northern European culture, most famously depicted in Edvard Munch’s paintings. Strindberg sees the vampire as a “soul-murderer,” a weaker soul who steals, through performance, the words that make up the soul of the stronger. In Strindberg’s version of “source history,” the author is vamped by his very own characters. The vamp is of course a feminine figure, and the gender politics of Strindberg ’s take on realism are virulently misogynistic: “I say Miss Julie is a modern character not because the man-hating half-woman has not always existed but  August Strindberg, Selected Plays, trans. Evert Sprinchorn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 208. W hy c a n’ t i m ag e s a nd wo rd s ( a nd m en a n d wom e n ) stay m a r r i e d i n G e rt ru d ? 23 because she has now been brought out into the open, has taken the stage, and is making a noise about herself.” What Strindberg doesn’t mention here, in his preface to Miss Julie, is that the tragic heroine of his play is in fact based on a real-life woman writer, Victoria Benedictsson. The threat of the half-woman is the threat of the writing woman, the woman who makes “a noise about herself .” So too in Strindberg’s play Creditors: the emasculating Tekla is a writer, her disarmed husband Adolf, a painter. The theme of the emancipated woman in Scandinavian realist theater (it is above all manifest in Ibsen, for example in A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler) is thus not just a theme, but a textual matrix through which is figured a whole complex of formal and ideological concerns. Realism creates the desire for real characters—those of the “weaker sex” who struggle to produce language they can claim as their own—and so creates an internal tension about the adequacy of its own textual authority. (One could give a version of the story of the transmutation of the confident realism of the modern breakthrough in Scandinavian literature of the 1880s into the symbolism, romanticism, and decadence that followed by tracing the fissures that this tension created.) In Dreyer, this realist desire for real selfhood is magnified to truly heroic proportions—and so too is its counterpart, the rhetoric of the authoritative, containing text. This battle between self and authority is often gendered. Indeed, virtually every film Dreyer made—from his first, The President (1918) to his last, Gertrud—takes as its theme the confrontation of women with the patriarchal powers that attempt to define and dominate them. Dreyer’s insistent centering of the female heroine can thus be seen as a continuation of this realist thematic/formal matrix, and at the same time a modernist attack on the foundations upon which it was built. The narrativized “anti-text” traces the fate of the “feminine” subject as it confronts authorities not only male but, significantly , “textual”: legal, religious, and artistic. Dreyer’s men nearly always represent specific institutions that use language as a primary means of gaining authority and wielding power. In Gertrud, Dreyer found a perfect way to depict that struggle. At one point  Ibid. [18.217.182.45] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:40 GMT...

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