Captain Adolf Lassen is in conflict with his wife Laura regarding the upbringing and education of their daughter Bertha. The Captain believes that it is not enough to have given his child life; he must also give her his soul. This is perhaps his only faith in life after death. However, obstacles to this, aside from his wife, include other people close to him, along with a bunch of rusty ideas, outdated perceptions, and religious beliefs that make the Captain's desire unfulfilled.
The situation takes a serious turn when Laura submits to her husband that he may not be the biological father of their daughter. Besides being a soldier, Adolf Lassen is also an excellent scientist-researcher, a deeply educated man with a superior spirit and a poetic soul. Laura hinders his scientific research by secretly withholding his correspondence, while at the same time spreading rumors everywhere about the Captain's mental imbalance.
Caught in the whirlpool of passion and doubt, the sensitive Adolf is driven to madness. Wearing the straitjacket they put on him to lead him to the asylum, he dies from suffocation in the arms of his nurse. In 1886, shortly before writing Father, Strindberg seems to have been deeply impressed by an article by Paul Lafargue in a contemporary magazine.
Lafargue proposed the theory that the family was originally matriarchal and only became patriarchal after a long and violent war between the two sexes. A return to matriarchy – Lafargue argued – would mean an equally long and bloody war. Around the same time he was working on Father, Strindberg wrote an article expressing his fears that this battle would ultimately mean the defeat of man and that, if this happens, it would lead to an era of barbarism.
Lafargue frequently refers in his article to Aeschylus's ORESTEIA, and this likely influenced Strindberg to write Father closer to classical standards compared to all his previous works. It is known that at the time Strindberg was writing his works, the thoughts and spirit of his contemporaries were grappling with a problem-riddle, the solution to which seemed very difficult: How does a human being manage to impose their will over the soul of another and make them behave – not against their will – but according to their own repressed tendencies and desires.
