The Ghost Sonata Historical Context

The Ghost Sonata Historical Context

Dream Plays and Psychoanalysis

Strindberg began his successful literary career in the 1880s writing the kind of realistic dramas that were made popular by playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888) are both considered to be masterpieces of realism, depicting natural characters in mundane, ordinary surroundings. By the turn of the century, however, Strindberg was reshaping reality on the stage to correspond to his own tortured, nightmarish vision of life. In "dream plays" like To Damascus, a trilogy produced between 1898-1901, The Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907), time and location are often vague and unpredictable. The characters are personality types rather than individuals, and they are mainly alienated, lost human beings struggling with the sins of the flesh while seeking some kind of spiritual fulfillment.

Strindberg's accomplishments in these plays prefigure such major avant-garde literary movements as expressionism and the Theatre of the...
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