Miss Julie

Strindberg wrote Miss Julie as the premier offering of the theater he was opening. This would be a theater to feature Naturalist plays exploring the social themes and psychological realism that Strindberg favored in his work. In the “Author’s Preface” to Miss Julie, Strindberg explains many of the premises and beliefs that inform his approach to the theater.

Though Strindberg saw himself as an innovator, he does not completely do away with conventional ideas about the theater and its social role. In fact, the first pages of his Preface strongly echo classical Greek definitions of the theater and the playwright. For instance, Strindberg’s comparison of the playwright to “a lay preacher hawking the ideas of the day in popular form” and his definition of the theater as “a public school” (63) reflect the classical notion that theater was supposed to teach something to its audience (in ancient Athens, the word meaning “to produce or direct a play” was the same as the word meaning “to teach”).

Likewise, when Strindberg comments on the way certain theatergoers possess a “primitive capacity for deceiving themselves or letting themselves be deceived” (63), he is virtually quoting Gorgias, an important Greek thinker of the 5th century BCE who said of theatrical performance that “he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived” (Gorgias fr. B 23 DK, as quoted in Plutarch’s De gloria Atheniensium, translated by F. C. Babbitt).

What is new about Strindberg’s approach to theater is his interest in portraying realistic, believable characters in realistic, believable situations. Strindberg highlights the fact that there are always multiple points of view and that this is why he has motivated the action in multiple ways, gesturing towards the importance of The Complexity and Contradictory Nature of People in the play. This overdetermination (a holdover from classical drama) is emphasized by giving the play an extremely ordinary and realistic setting (a sharp departure from classical drama): Strindberg does not seek to represent supernatural beings or outlandish situations. The story of Miss Julie—the story of a social climber who takes advantage of a naïve young woman—has nothing extraordinary about it.

At the same time, the story—at least in Strindberg’s view—is meaningful precisely because it allows for a realistic exploration of the complex psychological and physiological phenomena that drive ordinary people. This interest in the motives behind people’s actions is one of the defining elements of the Naturalism that Strindberg represents. For Strindberg, indeed, the complex “multiplicity of motives” (66) exhibited by his characters come together to become “the equivalent of the concept of Destiny, or Universal Law, of antiquity” (68). Such remote abstractions, like religion, are rendered superfluous in a naturalist play.

It is important to take note that Strindberg expresses certain clear biases and outdated beliefs, especially regarding Gender Roles and Power Dynamics. Strindberg’s misogyny is obvious and outstated. He describes the character of his own Miss Julie in extremely harsh terms, calling her a “man-hating half-woman” (68). He labels Julie’s attempt to get ahead of the men in her life as “a desperate struggle against Nature” which is tragic precisely because, as he asserts, “happiness belongs only to the strong and skillful species” (68)—he says that Jean is “superior to Miss Julie because he is a man” (70).

Beyond his views on gender, many of Strindberg’s social views are problematic by modern standards. The theme of social Darwinism that is so central to Strindberg’s Naturalism arises from a way of thinking about society that has been largely discredited. He thus describes the “half-woman” represented by Miss Julie, in the language of Darwinism, as “a retrogressive step in evolution, an inferior species who cannot endure” (68), going on to explain how they “breed” to produce “an indeterminate sex for whom life is a torture” and who finally “go under either because they are out of harmony with reality or because their repressed instincts break out uncontrollably or because their hopes of achieving equality with men are crushed” (68).

Conversely, Strindberg views Jean’s tragedy as arising from the tension between his servile position and his awareness of his own innate superiority to the others of his class, foreshadowing the role of Class Conflict and Social Hierarchy in the play. Behind these descriptions is the notion that society (and the battle of the sexes) can be understood much like Darwin’s concept of natural selection. This notion, of course, has passed out of favor. Despite this and other shortcomings, however, most critics today agree that Strindberg’s play represents a successful and important contribution to modern drama.