By Elijah Field

            As The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten in the original Swedish)by August Strindberg comes to a close, the audience is greeted by a very specific sight: A fully realized tapestry of Arnold Böcklin’s painting, Isle of the Dead. It is a striking sight, depicting a small, rocky isle surrounded by murky waters. Ahead of the island, a small boat can be seen, with three important figures atop. A figure that appears to be rowing the boat, a white figure standing on the boat, and what appears to be a white coffin in front of the others. Atop the island, tall cypress trees are seen reaching above the rocky outcroppings of the island. In the rocks themselves, what looks to be doors, or even portals can be seen. To those without the proper context, this painting’s inclusion at the end of The Ghost Sonata may seem confusing. However, this piece served as a great inspiration for the entirety of the story in The Ghost Sonata. Most notably, it is mainly the atmosphere that this painting provided inspiration for.

The appearance of this painting also symbolizes the end of the journey for the characters in The Ghost Sonata, and most notably, the Young Lady. As she breathes her last breath, the painting comes into focus. This moment may be interpreted as the end of the young lady’s journey across the River Styx, finally arriving in the afterlife. As such, the boatman rowing the boat may be interpreted as Charon, a figure of Greek myth that ushers lost souls into the underworld. However, neither August Strindberg nor Arnold Böcklin ever gave direct explanations of either of these works, so it is left to the audience to decide how they’d like to interpret what is shown here.

The painting itself was inspired by the real-life burial site of Böcklin’s daughter (Cavina, 2013) and was painted several different times. There are, in total, six versions that Böcklin ended up painting. On top of this, there is a companion piece to this that Böcklin painted, called Isle of Life (Sometimes called Island of the Living). This piece is important to understand Isle of the Dead completely. It is, in effect, the opposite of Isle of the Dead. It depicts yet another island, however this one is defined by the flourishing of life surrounding it. Geese surround it, people are dancing in the water, and trees of multiple different species thrive, contrasting the empty, hollow atmosphere of Isle of the Dead. In a poem about the painting, Michael Loveday wrote, “No cypress grove, no bleak morse-code tapping at the mind's ear, no sheer-stop cliff, God's secret temples nowhere in the rock, only fields that seem to unfurl quite willingly, ragwort and daisy insisting themselves out of soil…” (Loveday 2017). Loveday’s words give an idea of how different Isle of Life is compared to Isle of the Dead. The action of the play can perhaps be interpreted as the journey from the Isle of Life to the Isle of the Dead. 

It is important to note that audiences of 2026 don’t exactly have the same perception of these paintings that the audiences of 1908, when the play premiered, would have had. The original audiences were familiar with Böcklin’s paintings, as Catherine C. Fraser wrote about in her piece about The Ghost Sonata and the Isle of the Dead. Specifically, she writes, “The painting would have been familiar to those who saw the first performances of the play at the Intimate Theater in 1908. In addition to the fact that Strindberg had arranged for Carl Kylberg's copies of it and the companion piece, Die Lebensinsel (Island of the Living), 1888, to be hung on either side of the stage of the theater, the painting enjoyed a general popularity in Scandinavia at the time” (Fraser 281). This gives a bit of a clue as to the way Strindberg himself viewed the painting, as he gives very little of his reasoning for the inclusion of the painting in the text. What is known about Strindberg is just how fascinated he was by this painting. In fact, he attempted to write another chamber play, using the same painting. Fraser continues with this, saying, “The dramatic fragment ‘Toten-Insel,’ written in the same year as Spöksonaten, opens with the Bocklin painting from which the figures emerge, one of them bearing the name Hummel, the vampire character from Spöksonaten” (Fraser, 285). The fact that Strindberg even considered writing another play inspired by this painting further shows how important it is to The Ghost Sonata, and how important it was to Strindberg personally.

Below are all the versions of Isle of the Dead in the order in which they were painted. Version four is a black and white photo of the painting. At the bottom is Isle of Life.

Works Cited

"1000 Artworks to see before you die: Arnold Bocklin Isle of the Dead (1880)." Guardian [London, England], 25 Oct. 2008, p. 3. Gale In Context: College, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A187767438/CSIC?u=colosprings&sid=summon&xid=9fc836d1

Cavina, A. O. (2013). “The landscape of the Macchiaioli. A path towards the modern.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18(2), 225–231. https://doi-org.uccs.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.753004

Fraser, Catherine C. “Visual Clues to Interpreting Strindberg’s ‘Spöksonaten.’” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 63, no. 3, 1991, pp. 281–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40919287.

Loveday, Michael. "Isle of the Living (after Arnold Bocklin, 'Isle of the Dead')." Spectator, vol. 335, no. 9868, 14 Oct. 2017, p. 30. Gale In Context: College, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524611705/CSIC?u=colosprings&sid=summon&xid=fdbdc383