earticle

영어

Strindberg's Creditors, written in 1888, was presented right after his two representative plays(The Father and Miss Julie). While he was writing the play, he was interested both in psychological studies and in the social reformation against the establishment. Strindberg artfully embodied his interest through the play's plot and theme. The play intimately reflects the characters' social environment as the background for their psychological conflict. Performing Creditors on stage, there can be two productible psychoanalytic interpretations in defining the origins of the characters' psychological struggle. The first way of interpretation is to find out the origin of their psychological conflicts from their own emotional defects such as mental illness or hysteria. For this analysis, this paper examines the three characters' positions in the plot, and scrutinizes Strindberg's biographical elements which may be reflected in characterizing the three characters. The second way of interpretation is to find out from the characters' social backgrounds what deliberately distorts or perverts their psychology and constructs a state of psychological conflicts. For this analysis, this paper tries to seek the sources of the characters' mental struggling from the cultural structure of the society which can classify people's mental and physical behaviors according to their gender, class, economy. Depending upon which directorial interpretation might be taken to find the cause of the characters' psychological conflicts, the thematic message of the play will be different. The fundamental goal of this research is to examine the two producible psychoanalytic interpretations of Creditors. The play will provide two different thematic directions according to how we interpret character's psychological conflicts.