The Many Hells of August Strindberg

Abstract

Hell was a significant and recurring theme in both life and eclectic works of the bedeviled Viking, August Strindberg.1 Although many of autobiographical subjects of this playwright have been focus of critical study, this particular topic has not received much attention. That Strindberg drew heavily upon his own rich experiences for literary materials is a well-known fact; yet, whereas theatrical echoes of his continual marital chaos are familiar enough, dramatic reflections of his prolonged preoccupation with notion of hell have not been generally recognized. But Strindberg had much to say about his lifelong personal inferno, which in fact he made subject and title of one of his many autobiographical volumes, and, more important, he objectified his speculations into a series of theatrical images of hell. Since his concepts of hell, like most of his attitudes, changed radically at different stages of his life, as we look at his plays we find not one hell, but many hells. My concern here is with three discrete versions of hell in plays of August Strindberg: Swedenborgian hell of Crime and Crime; existential hell of Dance of Death; and Biblical hell of The Great Highway. Crime and Crime was written early in 1899, shortly after terrible ordeals described in Inferno. It had been preceded by a mystical play, Advent, which Strindberg had called a Swedenborgian drama, for it embodied some of ideas that he had recently discovered in philosopher's book Of Heaven and Its WTonders and Hell.3 But it is rather in boulevard play Crime and Crime that Swedish playwright fully develops Swedenborgian theory of expiation that had sustained his own troubled spirit through its crisis. It is this play which represented for its author he light of understanding after t e darkness of near insanity,' for it is in this play, puzzling though it is to readers unaware of its personal implications, that he attempts to clarify his own psychological state and to endow with moral significance his own feelings of guilt and desire for punishment. Like perverse heroine of Crime and Crime, Strindberg had dabbled in black magic during Inferno period. He believed that he had once caused t e illness of one of his children, alth ugh he did not go so far as his hero in wishing life out of child. This incident, along with other painful episodes, racked Strindberg's co science, and he tortured himself with inward condemnation. In his state of profound self-abasement he discovered in Swedenborg a satisfying formula for interpreting his destructive feelings. The mystical philosopher's strange study of heaven and hell offers a theory that allows for expiation of guilt through identification of crime with its punishment. According to Swedenborg, hell is simply existence in a state of evil, which, in turn, always coexists with its own punishment. The relationship is not sequential but simultaneous; every evil act carries in its very commitment burden of its own punishment. This equation is true only psychologically in world of living; it is also true physically in