Miss Julie: Caricatures or Characters?

This was a difficult play for me to read. This was likely partly due to the translation, which read very unnaturally to me. The characters were unrealistically long-winded, and their personalities exaggerated. Jean is extremely cruel when he says, “Do you think any servant girl would throw herself at a man that way? Have you ever seen a girl of my class asking for it like that? I haven’t. Only animals and prostitutes (p. 599).” Miss Julie is still essentially his boss, yet Jean abuses her repeatedly. I would point out that this sort of treatment during that time period – even if there was an affair between mistress and servant – would probably not be tolerated or risked, if it weren’t for Miss Julie’s overly spineless personality, which makes the whole thing possible, at least in the context of the play. While Jean is insulting her, she cries, “Help me, help me! Tell me what to do, where to go (p. 601).” She barely puts up a defense to his name-calling, but worse, she doesn’t take any responsibility for her own actions. These two are more like charactures than characters.

Miss Julie Preface & Questions

Robby asks where the Preface to Miss Julie can be found; you can locate it on page 1666 of Stages of Drama. If you're curious about the playwright's background and biography, our text's publishers have provided a few links:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/strindbe.htm ; http://www.strindbergsmuseet.se/english/life.html ; and http://www.extrapris.com/astrindberg.html.

The first passage in Strindberg's Preface provides an interesting intersection with the Lawrence Levine article:

"Like the arts in general, the theatre has for a long time seemed to me a ... picture Bible for those who cannot read, and the playwright merely a lay preacher who hawks the latest ideas in popular form, so popular that the middle classes - the bulk of the audiences - can grasp them without racking their brains too much. That explains why the theatre has always been an elementary school for youngsters and the half-educated ... who still retain a primitive capacity for deceiving themselves and for letting themselves be deceived ..." (Stages of Drama 1666).

Clearly Strindberg includes social class as an integral part in his formulation of theatre; much of the conflict in Miss Julie derives from the difference in the characters' caste and social programming. Given Strindberg's notorious misogyny, much focus tends to fall on the gender conflict (what has sometimes been dubbed "the war between the sexes") in the play, but rank and social status are absolutely inextricable from its structure.

Here are some questions to ponder for our discussion (whether you choose to meditate upon them is up to you):

Miss Julie was written for a society transforming rapidly - within the span of a single generation - from a highly demarcated, aristocratic structure, under the influence of democratization, political liberalization, and industrialization. What conflicts and tensions does the play bring to light?

How does this play appeal to different audiences? Given Strindberg's comments in the Preface, for whom has the play been built, and how? To whom does it speak, and on what levels?

Realism and Naturalism have often been touted as marking the democratization of theatre. Does Levine's argument regarding Shakespeare's removal from popular American culture cast any doubt on this narrative, or does it reinforce it?