Children and «Prodigal sons»: on images of children in Strindberg’s writing

Abstract

The theme of childhood and images of children in Strindberg’s writing have been largely overlooked by the scholars with the few exceptions. As a rule, focal attention in the studies of Strindberg’s work is given to the way the roles of the sexes and conjugal tensions function in his drama and prose. However, such problems as child upbringing, parental responsibility and ‘fathers and sons’ conflicts concerned Strindberg throughout his entire life, following his own evolution as writer and playwright. The development of child imagery in Strindberg’s work aligns him with the great authors of the nineteenth century, primarily with Dickens, Hugo, Zola, Ibsen, and Dostoyevsky. This study shows that several types of child images can be distinguished in Strindberg’s writing both during the pre-Inferno and the post-Inferno periods. These are ‘Child as Victim’, ‘Perfect Child,’ ‘Child as Angelic Creature,’ ‘Child as Savior’, as well as ‘Evil Children’ and ‘enfants terribles’ of various kinds. The imagery of children in Strindberg’s writings of the 1900s are of special interest, because they represent the most mature stage of his life and literary activity, and were created after he had lived through significant psychological, philosophical, and spiritual crises, including his religious conversion to Christianity. The latter part of the article is devoted to a motif, which proved to be productive in Strindberg’s later oeuvre, namely ‘the return of the long lost son’, which form a natural juxtaposition to the evangelic parable of the prodigal son. Apart from the above it was found interesting to point out to some evident typological similarities between Strindberg’s Black Banners (1904) and Dostoyevsky’s Demons (1872) echoing each other in their treatment of ‘fathers and sons’ theme and in the sharp critique of the nineteenth century liberalism.