myself his superior." To this her husband meekly responds, "One day you may meet your master--and you'll never forget it" (28).
There is no sign in the play that the Captain is referring to himself in some stronger state. In any case, Laura responds, "That will be fascinating" (28). This is an odd statement, for nowhere else in the play does Laura show any interest for anything aside from destroying her husband and gaining (or maintaining) control over her daughter. It is likely that Strindberg is suggesting that Laura would be "fascinated" if she did meet a man superior to herself, but she does not expect such an event to occur.
The fact that their daughter is essentially a cipher in the play shows that Strindberg is far more interested in the philosophy of marriage than in the philosophy of parenthood. The war of the sexes is his concern, specifically the marital battleground.
The significance of the child in this scenario is simply that she serves as a prize over which the husband and wife struggle. The specifics of the struggle over the girl's fate are quickly dealt with and discarded. We are told that the women in the house and family want her to pursue a "patchwork" (15) of destinies, while Adolf wants to get her away from the women in the household so that she can be a teacher and self-reliant (15). However, these specifics are not mentioned again, and the play settles into the war between husband and wife.
The significance and meaning of this theme for the audience of Strindberg's time (late 19th century) are inevitably different than they are for an audience today, over a century later. Strindberg's play was seen as both dark and groundbreaking in his time, for the gloomy ending and for the harsh light he shone on his two main characters' flaws and their nightmarish marriage. His time was not awash in psychological analysis as our time is, so that views of the play then were not as focused on that aspect of the pl...