According to Michael Robinson in his introduction, ‘Miss Julie’ dates from Strindberg’s ‘Naturalist’ phase although, as explained in my notes to ‘The Father’, he was only ever superficially a naturalistic writer. There are only three characters – Miss Julie, a servant Jean (a man) and the cook Kristin.
Plot summary
It’s Midsummer’s eve, in Sweden the setting for traditional festivities, and we’re in the big kitchen of a mansion belonging to the Count. The Count has gone away to visit relatives leaving Miss Julie alone with the servants. (Incidentally, Robinson explains that the word used for ‘Miss’ in Swedish could also be translated as ‘Lady’ giving ‘Lady Julie’. Worth bearing this in mind to emphasise the class divide between her and Kristin and Jean.)
Jean the handsome young male servant enters to be greeted by the cook, Kristin, who’s frying something. Jean describes Miss Julie as quite crazy. There’s a dance going on in the barn and when he walked past it Miss Julie spotted him, came running over, and insisted he dance a wild waltz with her.
We learn that Julie has just broken up with her fiancé. Jean tells Kristin he saw the moment it actually happened. Julie was with her young man down at the barn and, believe it or not, was training him to jump over her riding whip. Twice he did it but the third time refused, snatched the whip out of her hand and tore it to pieces. (This little anecdote obviously introduces a pleasantly BDSM vibe of discipline and domination.)
Turns out Kristin was frying Jean’s dinner, a nice kidney. Jean gets a good bottle of wine to drink with it. As he eats, the pair agree that Miss Julie takes after her mother, fond of slumming it with the staff but the next minute insisting on punctilio and respect.
Miss Julie enters, she wants some oil or potion off Kristin but semi-flirts with Jean. She asks him to go back to the dance with her but Jean demurs saying a) he’s just promised Kristin a dance and b) tongues will wag if Miss Julie dances with him multiple times. Outraged at the thought, Miss Julie nonetheless insists and off they go.
PANTOMIME: In silence Kristin tidies up the kitchen, takes off her apron, smooths out her dress, fusses with her hair. Jean re-enters repeating his line that Miss Julie is mad, apologises to Kristin, puts his arm round her but at this moment Miss Julie re-enters and is not pleased with what she sees.
Julie and Jean talk in a fragile tone of jocularity and facetiousness which is clearly a form of flirting. Julie wants to take Jean back to the dance but insists he change out of his livery. There is a moment’s implication that he might strip there and then in front of her but he insists on going into an adjoining room, returning wearing formal evening wear. He even makes a little speech prompting her to ask where he learned to talk so well and he explains he was for a while a sommelier at a grand hotel in Switzerland which is also where he picked up his French.
Julie asks for a drink and doesn’t mind if it’s a common beer. They both notice has fallen asleep and Julie jokes that she’ll make a fine wife, she probably snores too. Jean says no, she doesn’t. Julie asks how he knows. And so on. Flirtation between young mistress of the manor and a handsome member of the staff. Where do you think this will end, then?
More flirting. Julie tells him to get a drink for himself, and then to toast her, so Jean gets on his knees and playfully toasts his lady, but then she insists that he kisses her shoe which, after a moment’s hesitation, he does.
Jean warns her that someone might come in, that tongues are already wagging back at the dance, so Julie attempts to wake Kristin up, not least by tweaking her nose, but the cook has been hard at work all day and won’t wake. So Julie now orders jean to come outside and pick her some lilac. His refusal makes her call him a natural aristocrat. He repeats that people will…but she says who cares. None of matters anyway:
JEAN: You know, you’re strange.
JULIE: Perhaps. But then, so are you – Besides everything’s strange. Life, people, everything’s a scum that drifts, drifts on across the water, until it sinks, sinks. (p.79)
They share dreams. She has a recurring dream that she’s sitting on top of a pillar and desperately wants to get down but doesn’t know how. He has a dream of movement in the contrary direction. He dreams he’s lying under a tall tree in a dark wood. He dreams of making it to the very top of the tree where there’s a fine view and he can plunder the golden eggs from their nests, all he needs is to make it to the first branch, but the trunk is thick and slippery and he can never quite reach it.
They make to go outside and pick flowers but Jean stops in the doorway. He’s got something in his eye. Julie orders him to sit in the chair so she can have a look. He quivers a bit so she slaps his hand and tells him again to sit still. Such a baby and with such big strong muscles (she says, squeezing his biceps). She gets it out with her handkerchief and then demands that he kisses her hand. He tries to say something else but she insists.
He says the situation is dangerous but then steps forward, puts his arm round her waist and goes to kiss her. She slaps him. He asks if she’s serious and when she says yes, says she plays too seriously. He’s getting back to his duties and picks up the Count’s boots to clean them. She orders him to put them down.
JEAN: No. They’re one of my duties which don’t include being your plaything. (p.81)
Out of nowhere she asks if he’s ever been in love and this leads into an extended passage where he describes growing up as one of seven siblings in a miserable hovel and only ever seeing the great walled orchard of the Count’s mansion which seemed like paradise. And he describes how one time he went into the garden with his mother to weed the onion beds but there was a church and he’d never seen anything so magnificent. So he snuck inside but then someone came in so he flew out through a secret exist and went running through the grounds till he came to brambles and his underneath them, and that’s where he saw a pink dress and white stockings and realised it was the Count’s daughter, Julie about his own age. And he’s been in love with her ever since.
Julie isn’t particularly struck by the being in love part and wonders whether all poor children feel like that and comes out with the stunning platitude: ‘It must be a tremendous misfortune to be poor.’
Jean continues his boyhood reminiscence, describing how the next Sunday he washed and scrubbed and put on his best clothes to go to church to get a glimpse of her but then returned to his hovel and wanted to die. And he tried to, too. He stripped an elder bush and placed all its branches and leaves in an oat bin and climbed in and closed the lid, under the impression that elder was poisonous. Well, it didn’t kill him thought it did, indeed, make him ill for a while.
She asks where he learned to be such a good storyteller and Jean says he’s read a bit and been to the theatre, and from overhearing posh people talk sitting on the coachman’s box or rowing a boat. He remembers one time when Julie and a girlfriend had an explicit conversation and was shocked by the language they used. Maybe there isn’t such a difference between the classes as people make out…
She insists that ‘we’ don’t behave like ‘you’. Irritated, he asks if he may retire to bed. Julie refuses and commands him to row her out onto the lake. If this was a movie that would make a really good scene… But this is a play so we’re stuck in the same set, the kitchen.
Tired and nettled, Jean tells Julie to go to bed. Julie refuses to take the advice of a servant. They both hear the voices of the estate staff coming closer singing a song. Julie says they’re ‘her’ people and they love her, but Jean disabuses her; they may eat her food but afterwards they spit.
With the crowd approaching Jean says there’s only one thing for it, they better hide in his room. Julie hesitates but he promises to behave honourably and they both go through the door into his room.
BALLET: The peasants enter, dressed in their best clothes, with a fiddler, they produce kegs of booze, drink and then dance in a circle. Presumably this goes on for a while before they finally finish up and exit.
After a pause Julie emerges from Jean’s room. When he emerges, for some reason he is convinced that they have to leave, right now, right away. This is puzzling. Is it because the peasants saw them – but there’s no indication of this at all in the text. is that why the peasants came up to this house? Why couldn’t they assume that Jean was in bed and Julie had gone back to the big house? Or is it that they’ve had sex? There is absolutely no reference to it, their clothes aren’t disarranged, am I projecting this onto the play?
Anyway, Jean says they must leave right away and – remember how she described him as a good storyteller – paints a colourful picture of them running off to start a hotel in Switzerland or to the Italian lakes where the sun always shines, where he will run the whole business while she will sit like a queen ordering her servants about.
Quite enchanted with this vision, Julie asks him to take her in his arms and addresses him, for the first time, by the informal du. However, Jean remains standoffish and continues to use the more formal Swedish word, ni. He explains that as long as they stay in this house there will be barriers between them. And he is almost superstitiously in awe of His Lordship – he only has to hear the bell (on the wall of the kitchen) and he starts like a frightened horse.
No, they must go far away, to a country which is a republic, somewhere where he can be himself, for he wasn’t born to bow and scrape. He reminds her of his dream about the tree. All he needs is to make it to the first branch and then there’ll be no stopping him. In ten years he’ll be rich. Someday he might even be a Count!
But they must stay cool and calm, and he invites her to sit down and discuss it. But Julie is beside herself. Only a minute before he was kissing her shoe. Now she asks him to kiss her but he refuses.
Now he seems to be the one in a position of power. Having just read ‘The Father’ and Michael Robinson’s explanation of it as epitomising the kind of half-conscious struggle to subjugate and defeat the other person in a relationship – is that’s what’s going on here? Will the whole narrative take the shape of an X with Julie starting the play confidently dominating Jean but them both following opposite trajectories as Jean rises to supremacy over her and Julie sinks to subjugation?
Anyway, Jean explains that to make this hotel fantasy come off he needs a backer, someone with money. Julie says don’t look at her, she doesn’t have anything that doesn’t belong to her father. Well, replies Jean coolly lighting a cigar, it’s all off, then.
It’s here that the play first hints that they did have sex during the peasant ballet.
JULIE: Take me away from here, from the shame and dishonour!–Oh, what have I done? My God, my God!
JEAN: So that’s your tune now, is it?–What you’ve done? The same as many a one before you!
JULIE [screams convulsively]: And now you despise me!–I’m falling, I’m falling! (p.89)
The falling obviously also referring back to her dream of being in a high place, feeling dizzy and scared of falling. So they did have sex and she has placed herself in his power.
JULIE: What terrible power drew me to you? Was it the lure of the weak to the strong? Or of someone falling to someone rising? Or was it love? Was that love? Do you know what love is?
JEAN: Me? You bet I do! Do you think it was my first time?
Yes, they had sex and he has conquered her. Symbolically he gets out a bottle of wine which she recognises as belonging to her father. Well, isn’t it good enough for his son-in-law? he taunts her. Suddenly, she has become the most wretched woman in the world:
JULIE: Is there anyone anywhere as miserable as I am now?…Oh God in heaven take my miserable life! Take me away from this filth into which I’m sinking. Save me!
And Jean, also, completely changes character. Now he calls her a whore. He tells her that the sweet story about gathering the elder and lying in an oat bin, that wasn’t him, he heard that about some other kid. Was it a lie, not really: it’s just the kind of tripe you tell a girl to get her in the mood and into bed.
She tries to restore her domination over him by ordering the lackey to stand up, but he just lazily calls her a lackey’s whore, a servant’s tart and then tells her to shut up.
The metaphor of height, of her being down and him being up, is flogged for all it’s worth. He says not only has she debased herself but made her lower than any woman of his class. No woman of his class would offer herself so wantonly, you only saw that behaviour in prostitutes and animals.
The stage directions brutally say Jean is beginning to feel amorous again and so he switches his tone back to flattery and goes towards her and slips his arm round her waist again but this time she wriggles free and tells him to stop.
She demands more wine, drains the glass, and asks for more. Then declares that he’s told her all about his life; if they’re going to run away it’s only fair that she tells him all about here. Cue a long monologue.
This is really florid and dramatic. Her mother was a commoner who (improbably) was a believer in women’s equality and women’s emancipation ‘and all that’. When her father fell in love with her, she refused to marry (bondage) but consented to him becoming her lover. Then along came baby Julie and the feminist mother determined to raise her as a boy, teaching her all the boyish skills. On the whole estate women were put to men’s work and men were put to women’s work and the whole place went to rack and ruin.
Finally her father seized back control of the estate and made moved the genders back to their traditional roles, and married her mother. Then came a great fire which burned down the house, stables and barn, which happened just after their buildings insurance had expired, so they were reduced to penury. They were left penniless and had to sleep in carriages.
But then her mother suggested he borrow money from a friend, a brick merchant who insisted there be no interest. With this money they rebuilt the house. Now Julie reveals that it was her mother who burned down the house, that the brick merchant was her mother’s lover who she had given the next egg she’s inherited and this is what the merchant had ‘loaned’ the father. Frankly, I found this tangled story a bit confusing but the upshot is that her mother was embittered and taught Julie to hate all men.
Thus she fits into the misogyny and man-hating stereotype we encountered in ‘The Father’. Her mother taught her to hate men and never be a slave, rather to enslave them. That’s what she was doing to the fiancé Jean saw her making jump over her whip down at the barn that time. So she hates all men except, at moments, when this (sexual) weakness comes over her.
So what shall they do? Run away, she says. And hate each other forever? No, live together and enjoy a couple of days, a few weeks and then – die.
Not really a practical plan, more a gloomy Gothic fantasy and Jean isn’t impressed. He chucks more cold water on their fantasies. She murmurs in poetic reveries about the perpetual sunshine and flowering orange trees of Lake Como but he harshly says it often rains and the only oranges he saw were in grocer’s shops. No, the way to make money is rent out holiday cottages for 6 months and rely on the fact that after three weeks ‘loving’ couples will be climbing up the walls and quit, but be forced to pay the 6 month rental. Then rent them out again.
In other words all the fine poetic visions which jean articulate in the first half of the play he spends the second half pouring cold water on and revealing the crude hucksterism behind his so-called ‘business plans’.
He throws in more insults for good measure. When she says he owes him something he tosses her coin, as to a cheap whore. Then he says he’s not willing to enter into a mésalliance, meaning marriage with an unsuitable person, because now, thanks to her half drunken confession, he’s able to say that at least nobody in his family is an arsonist!
He’s starting to find the whole situation tiresome and just wants to go to bed, but she insists there must be some way out. She could stay but…he points out the chances are they’d do it (have sex) again and sooner or later be caught.
She must run away by herself then write to His Lordship and explain she was seduced (though not by him). But she pleads she isn’t strong enough. She doesn’t know what to do. She can neither stay nor go and begs him to tell her what to do. The reversal is complete. The super confident Count’s daughter has not just been brought low but so low that she no longer has any will power. She has been abolished as a person. This is very reminiscent of the condition Captain Adolf is brought to at the end of ‘The Father’ when his wife so comprehensively destroys him (mentally and psychologically) that he says he doesn’t even exist any more.
So Jean orders her to go upstairs, get dressed in her travelling things, get money, then come back. She exits and Jean spends a while doing sums in a notebook. Then Kristin enters. She is dressed in white ready for church.
She starts to dress him for church too but notices the mess the place is in (he explains about the peasants coming and dancing there), notices he’s tired (he says he was up all night talking to Miss Julie), notices the two glasses of wine (yes, he says they drank a bit). And then, with that woman’s intuition, she guesses that they had sex, and he admits it.
Inevitably this triggers a telling-off in which Kristin tells him how vulgar and disgusting he’s been, how disappointed in Miss Julie she is, and vows she won’t stay in this house a minute longer. In fact she means at the next quarter day, in October. Not being English the situation doesn’t blow her mind and she still insists that they, Jean and Kristin, are going to be married. But if they’re going to leave the estate she says, he’ll have to think about getting another job and runs through a list of very low class demeaning jobs like being a doorman. Obviously we’re meant to compare this with all the big poetic ambitions he described to Julie, running a hotel on Lake Como and all.
The sun has now risen on Sunday morning. They hear walking about upstairs and Jean plants the idea that it might be the Count returned without telling anyone. Kristin hurries back to her room and Jean signals Julie to come in. She enters the kitchen, dressed in travelling clothes with a birdcage.
She begs him to run away with her now, says she can’t face sitting on the station platform or in a railway carriage by herself, thinking everyone is watching her. But worst of all followed by all the memories of the happy midsummer day celebrations of her girlhood, oh it’s the memories which will haunt her.
He says Yes, OK, let’s leave right now with what we’re standing in. But she insists they take along the cage with her pet bird (a siskin), the only thing she loves any more, while he, of course, absolutely refuses. She can’t leave the bird to languish behind her and so in a hysterical few seconds she finds herself agreeing to it being killed. Jean seizes the bird out of her hand, takes it to the kitchen chopping block, raises the axe and decapitates it.
Julie shrieks and runs over to stare at the blood, transfixed. This leads to a really intense, half-demented, page-long speech in which she not only declares that she now hates Jean but wishes to see his brains on the chopping block, wishes to see his penis cut off and floating in his blood, to drink from his skull, to roast his heart and eat it whole!
She declares she’s changed her mind. She’s not going to run away. In a surge of self-destructive fury she wants her father the Count to find out everything, for her father to find his desk broken open and all his money stolen, to call the police and for her to confess everything, everything! And then he’ll have a stroke and die and it’ll be the end of the line and their coat of arms will be broken on the coffin and he, Jean, will end his days in gaol!
Amazing speech! I bet actresses love playing it!
Jean mock applauds but at that moment Kristin re-enters. As I say none of them are English so there’s no weeping and wailing over sexual morality. Instead Julie runs over to Kristin and optimistically calls her the only friend she has left in the world and begs her to save her from that monster (Jean). (Jean calmly goes over into his room to have a shave.)
Kristin regards her coldly, so Julie has a brainwave. What if all three of them ran away to Italy. They could all three set up a hotel with Julie funding it, Jean managing it and Kristin supervising the food?
She launches into another page-long monologue, a rehash of all the images Jean used in his fantasy of running a hotel earlier on, speeding up, faster and faster, the images tumbling out of her mouth in truncated phrases until something snaps and she starts to slow down and admits about the rain and the hard work and hesitates and then finally breaks off.
Phlegmatic Kristin has listened to this hysterical rhodomontade and simply asks Julie if she actually believes anything she’s just said. Crushed, Julie slumps into a chair and puts her head in her hands and says she doesn’t believe in anything any more!
Jean comes in from his room, razor in hand. Kristin turns to him and says, So you were thinking of running away with that, indicating the pathetic weeping wretch who was Julie. Jean suggests she a bit more respectful of her superior. Superior!
Jean and Kristin have a fight in which she points out how lowly he really is, selling oats at the estate gates while he accuses her of creaming money off the household budget and taking bribes from the butcher. Still coming to church? No, he thinks he’ll stay here now.
Kristin says she’s going to church and she’s going to pray the Lord for forgiveness, for herself and for some she knows, pointing at the other two. Julie asks, wonderingly, if she believes all that. Yes Kristin does, simply and uncomplicatedly, believe in the religion of her childhood. God saves sinners, and she exits, with the parting shot that she’s going to tell the groom not to let any of the horses out…in case certain people should be thinking about leaving before the Count gets home.
For the umpteenth time Julie asks Jean what she should do, can he see any way out? For someone of her class who has so degraded herself…he hesitates.
Julie has picked the cut-throat razor Jean had been shaving with up off the table. Aha. After all this talk of no way out and being trapped and total despair, what do you think she’s going to do with a razor? Should she…and she makes a gesture as if cutting her throat. Jean says he couldn’t do it because he’s a man, which triggers Julie into delivering a last great soliloquy summarising her personality and plight:
JEAN: Have you never loved your father, Miss Julie?
JULIE: Yes, very much. But I’ve hated him too. I must have done so without realising it. It was he who brought me up to feel contempt for my own sex, as a half-woman and half-man. Who’s to blame for all this? My father? My mother? Myself? But I have no self of my own. I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother and this last idea, that everyone’s equal – I got from him, my fiancé – which is why I called him a swine. How can it be my own fault, then? Shift all the blame onto Jesus as Kristin did? — No, I’m too proud for that, and too intelligent — thanks to my father’s teachings — and all that about a rich man not getting into heaven, that’s a lie — Kristin’s got money in the savings bank, she won’t get in at any rate! Whose fault is it? — What’s it matter to us whose fault it is; I’m still the one who’ll have to bear the blame, suffer the consequences. (p.108)
Suddenly things really speed up when there’s suddenly two rings on the bell which has been sitting silent on the wall all this time. Jean jumps up as if stung and goes to the speaking tube. We hear him saying yes sir, no sire, at once sir, and he is obviously talking to the Count who has obviously returned.
Julie is on tenterhooks because she thinks he’ll have discovered his broken-into desk and her burglary but instead he just wanted his coffee and boots. Julie is relieved but only temporarily. What can she do? She cannot leave and cannot stay, can’t live, can’t die. She begs Jean to order her what to do, to order her ‘like a dog’. (Her journey of abasement has now taken her down below the level of human.)
But the Count’s return has weirdly disempowered Jean too. he says he is incapable of giving orders. So Julie kinkily suggests they role play, better, that he practices hypnosis on her. Yes, he feels like she’s being hypnotised, the room feels like it’s full of smoke, his eyes are burning like red coals, yes, she is falling under his influence, yes it’s so warm and light (she says as the dawn sunlight falls full on her face) and peaceful…
Jean picks up the razor and hands it to her and tells her it’s…a broom. She must go now, out to the barn and…he whispers something in her ear…Thank you, she says, but the play actually ends with Jean still agonising and wailing that he, too, lacks strength, is a slave to the bell, if only he could mute the bell with wads of paper, but it isn’t the bell, it’s the commanding will behind it and…now…while there’s still time…quick…before it’s too late…before the truth comes out…before the police are called…
All this time he had been cringing but now he masters himself and straightens up, telling them both there is no other way. And then, as she had begged, he gives her a firm unambiguous order: Go!
And she exists towards the barn where she will cut her throat.
Michael Robinson’s introduction
Robinson is a leading Strindberg scholar having, among other achievements, edited Strindberg’s selected letters and selected essay, and it shows. His introduction and notes are extremely focused, erudite and illuminating. It’s worth buying this edition for the clarity and range of his analysis. From his introduction to ‘Miss Julie’ I took the following points:
In media res
‘Miss Julie’ throws the audience straight into the action. There’s no introduction to the leading characters, no build-up to the party in the barn, it’s already half-way through when Jean staggers back from it. It’s obviously conscious artifice but may also reflect the fact that he wrote the play in just two weeks, July to early August 1888.
It represents Strindberg’s major achievement as a naturalist writer for the theatre… (Introduction, p.xiii)
Unpublishable
The language is so ‘naturalistically’ coarse that his usual publisher refused to publish it and the play had to wait 18 years for its first performance.
The Preface
Strindberg’s extended Preface to it ‘remains the single most important manifesto of naturalism in the theatre. This is partly because it is a study of individual behaviour under the pressure of heredity, history and environment, all elements which Jean and Julie describe at length about themselves.
Zola
To some extent this was to please the French novelist and leader of the school of Naturalism, Émile Zola. Strindberg had sent Zola a copy of his previous play, ‘The Father’, but Zola replied that he found the characters too abstract and ahistorical, lacking a properly realised social setting. So ‘Miss Julie’ set out to remedy this shortcoming. And which is why in the Preface Strindberg lists no fewer than 13 hereditary and environmental factors which drive Julie’s behaviour.
True story
Strindberg claimed the plot of ‘Miss Julie’ was based on a true-life event but never specified what it was allowing scholars ever since to speculate. Robinson gives details of three notorious incidents and characters from the period, before going on to say that the play in fact, as with all Strindberg’s works, mostly reflected his interests at the time.
Siri von Essen
In particular it drew on the class dynamics of his own affair with Siri von Essen. While Strindberg was the son of a serving girl (as described in the first volume of his recent autobiography, ‘The Son of a Servant’, 1886), Siri von Essen came from an old Finnish-Swedish family of landed gentry and was married to a baron when Strindberg first met her. In his autobiographical novel, ‘A Madman’s Defence’ (1895) Strindberg was to describe the seduction of the aristocrat by the servant in ways which echo ‘Miss Julie’.
Theory of the mind
Above and beyond the naturalism he was at such pains to emphasise, Strindberg’s conception of Miss Julie reflects his developing theory of psychology. From his studies in contemporary psychology and philosophy (he had just been introduced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche), Strindberg had developed the notion of ‘characterless characters’, that humans don’t have one fixed and recognisable character, but instead:
‘an ensemble of reflexes , a complex of urges, drives and instincts [which are] alternately suppressed and unleashed’ (quoted p.xvii)
In the Preface Strindberg has another go at expressing the notion of the self as:
‘conglomerates of past and present stages of culture, bits out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once very fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as a human soul is patched together’ (quoted p.xvii)
Elsewhere he was to describe it as the bricolage (‘something constructed or from a diverse range of things’) of the modern self. You can see how this points towards what we think of the distinctly early twentieth century, Modernist conception of the self, broken into fragments in everything from cubism to Joyce’s Ulysses, but already present here in Strindberg’s thinking as early as 1888.
Symbols
Lastly, Robinson notes the use of fairly obvious literary references throughout the play to provide depths and resonances. Thus the love affair of the servant and the high-born lady echoes the swineherd and princess of the fairy tale. It invokes the Greek myth of (the hunter) Actaeon and (the goddess) Diana, a direct reference because Julie’s thoroughbred bitch which mates with the gamekeeper’s mongrel is named Diana. In their dialogue the pair invoke the example of the high-born Pharaoh’s wife who falls for the lowly slave Joseph.
More profoundly the fall of Julie from her position of confident command re-enacts The Fall of Man, a context created by Jean’s extended description of how, as a boy, he broke into the Count’s walled garden which he regarded as Paradise. And it was full of apple trees. And he stole an apple. So a burst of Biblical underpinning right there.
Absent God
Lastly, you could argue that the God who is absent from the drama of The Fall (played out by Adam, Eve and the serpent alone) is represented by the Count, who never appears, or is even heard, in the entire play, and yet whose presence looms over it, invoked repeatedly throughout the dialogue, reducing Jean to quaking fear at the thought of his commands and incapacitating Julie with terror.
Credit
I read ‘Miss Julie‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’ translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.
Related link
Strindberg reviews
- The Father (1887)
- Miss Julie (1888)
- Dance of Death (1900)
- The Ghost Sonata (1907)
- Play reviews
Books & Boots 