ShareStrindberg’s Evolution of Naturalism
by Daniel Olmstead, Company Dramaturg
August Strindberg
August Strindberg grew up poor and miserable in Stockholm, Sweden in the mid-nineteenth century, the son of a servant and a shipping clerk with pretensions to the aristocracy. Lost in a sea of twelve siblings, Strindberg’s early life is a litany of rejection: he failed the preliminary examinations at the University of Uppsala, and his early plays were all refused production. It wasn’t until the 1879 publication of his novel The Red Room, a story about early capitalism and abuses in Stockholm that he began to enjoy national acclaim.
Strindberg’s writing, often angry and rebellious, frequently placed him in opposition to the status quo. This made him a huge success with the younger generation and working class, but placed him at odds with the ruling classes in Sweden. Indeed, the furor over his publication of Swedish Folk at Work and Play—a confrontational social history of his home country—ultimately drove Strindberg to leave Sweden. He would spend the next few years in Paris, Switzerland and Denmark.
These years (1884-1889) were a difficult time for Strindberg. His marriage to Baroness Siri von Essen was falling apart, and his finances were deeply troubled. He turned to absinthe as a remedy for his emotional crises, which only made things worse. It was during this period that he wrote Miss Julie (1888).
August Strindberg subtitled Miss Julie “A Naturalistic Tragedy,” and set down, in his preface to the play, one of history’s most strident definitions of naturalist theatre:
I don’t believe in simplified, dramatic characters, and I think that authors’ judgements on people such as: that one is stupid, that one brutal, that one jealous, that one mean, must be challenged by naturalists, who know how complex the human psyche is and who know that ‘vice’ has a reverse side that rather closely resembles virtue.
Unlike the political rebelliousness of his earlier writing, Miss Julie was a shot fired across the bow of theatre itself. “It seems to me that theatre, like religion,” he wrote, “is heading towards redundancy. It has become a dying art form.” Naturalism was his attempt to revitalize the form, and to move theatre forward into the next century.
“Naturalism” can be a confusing name for a genre, frequently getting confused for realism. Just like modernism isn’t really modern anymore, naturalism can at times feel...unnatural.
The distinction between naturalism and realism is a subtle but important one: realists want to show what; naturalists want to show why. In other words, realism is primarily interested in depicting events as they actually happen, with every detail accounted for in a perfect simulacrum of life as we experience it. Strindberg found this approach mundane and uninteresting. He was more interested in depicting events that would explain why things exist the way they do. Heavily influenced by the discoveries of Darwin and other scientists ushering in a new era of understanding the world around us, Strindberg and the other naturalists wanted to apply the scientific method to human nature. In the case of Miss Julie, Strindberg attempts an impartial observation of what happens when you combine two people of different classes—and turn up the heat.
The play’s raw sexuality was too shocking to allow anyone to produce it at the time, but it has gone down in history as a masterpiece of naturalist literature. Strindberg would revisit the themes of this play several times over the course of his tortured life in such works as The Father and The Dance of Death (produced by Aurora in 1999). Although he was haunted by fears of persecution and mental instability for the rest of his life, he entered a very prolific period after moving back to Stockholm in 1898. In his unceasing efforts to find artistic truth in theatre, his writing moved away from naturalism and towards symbolism and expressionism in works like A Dream Play (1901), where he attempted to imitate the structure and logic of a dream.
All told, August Strindberg created 70 plays, as well as several novels, short stories, histories, and over 100 paintings. He died of pneumonia in May of 1912 at the age of 63.
