SOURCE: Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. “Strindberg's Early Dramas and Lacan's ‘Law of the Father.’” Scandinavian Studies 71, no. 3 (fall 1999): 311-24.

In the following essay, Blackwell discusses contemporary attitudes toward sex roles and how Strindberg expressed them in his plays.

As the erosion of European patriarchal structures accelerated through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many distinguished and important (largely but not exclusively) male readers and producers of culture responded to this development with varying degrees of horror, outrage, and counterattack. As two such pivotal figures, both August Strindberg and Jacques Lacan are central to the cultural conversation this development engendered and have been critiqued in light of the gender issues implicit and explicit in their respective representational systems. Ross Shideler notes, for instance, that

seizing on his century's rapid changes in cultural and scientific knowledge, Strindberg fictionalized what Foucault might call the “discontinuities” of his age. … Supported by much of...