Miss Julie

Miss Julie
AUGUST STRINDBERG
Plot Overview
Miss Julie takes place in the kitchen of the Count's manor house on a Midsummer's Eve. Christine, the cook, is frying something when Jean, a valet, enters, exclaiming that Miss Julie is wild tonight. He says that he danced with Miss Julie, the Count's daughter, at the local barn. Christine observes that Miss Julie has been rambunctious in the wake of her broken engagement. According to Jean, Miss Julie's fiancé abandoned her after she attempted to train him, making him jump over her riding whip in the barnyard as she beat him. Miss Julie appears in the doorway, and Jean becomes polite and charming. Julie invites him to dance. He hesitates, warning her against the dangers of local gossip, but he goes with her to the party.
A pantomime ensues in which Christine cleans the kitchen. Jean and Julie return and flirt more. Christine falls asleep next to the stove. Under Julie's orders, Jean kneels in mock gallantry and kisses her foot. In a dream, Miss Julie declares that she is "climbing down" from her social position. Jean has dreamed the opposite, yearning to improve his status. Julie asks Jean if he has ever been in love. He tells her that as a child, he got sick with love for her. He grew up on a wasteland. The Count's lovely garden was visible from his window. One day while weeding the onion beds, Jean caught sight of a "Turkish pavilion"—that is, an outhouse. Enchanted by its beauty, Jean snuck in but soon heard someone coming. Trapped, he fled through the bottom of the outhouse until coming upon a rose terrace, where Miss Julie was walking. Lovelorn, Jean watched Julie walk among the roses. The following Sunday, he went to church, determined to see Miss Julie once more, and then attempted suicide.

Moved, Julie asks Jean to take her out to the lake. Again, Jean warns her of the injury to her reputation. Suddenly the guests are heard approaching. Jean tells her that they are singing a dirty song about them and suggests that they flee to his room. They exit. The peasants dance around the kitchen. Julie and Jean return to the kitchen. The implication is that they have had sex. Gesturing toward the rumor-mongering crowd, Jean declares it is impossible to stay at the manor. He dreams of traveling to northern Italy and setting up a hotel. Julie begs Jean to declare his love. She has fallen for him. Abruptly, Jean declares that behave coolly, as if nothing has happened. Julie points out that he needs capital to open a hotel, and she has not a penny to her name. Jean says that in that case, the plans are off. Julie becomes hysterical, wondering how she can live with everyone sneering behind her back. Jean is unsympathetic, calling her a whore and revealing that his story of the rose terrace was a lie. Crushed, Julie says she deserves his abuse.

Jean proposes anew that they flee together. Julie wants to tell him about her life first. Believing in the independence of women, Julie's mother brought the estate to ruin. When Julie's father finally took command, her mother fell ill. A mysterious fire then burned down the estate. Julie's mother suggested to Julie's father that he should borrow money from a friend of hers to rebuild the farm. Jean says that Julie's mother set the fire, and the friend was her lover. Julie took her mother's side and grew up to hate men as her mother did. Jean tires of Julie's talk, and tells her she is sick. Julie begs him to tell her what to do. Terrified of the consequences with the Count, Jean commands her to flee. She exits to prepare for her departure.

Christine enters, reminding Jean that he promised to join her at church. This morning's sermon is on the beheading of John the Baptist. Jean confesses to sleeping with Julie. Disgusted, Christine decides that she cannot remain in the house. Suddenly the two hear sounds upstairs: the Count has come back. Christine exits. The sun rises, breaking the spell of Midsummer's Eve. Dressed for travel, Julie appears with a small birdcage. She begs Jean to join her. He agrees, but insists that she leave the canary behind, offering to kill it. Jean decapitates the bird on a chopping block. "Kill me too!" screams Julie. Julie approaches the chopping block, mesmerized. She exclaims that she wants to see Jean's head on a chopping block and his entire sex swimming in blood. She pledges to stay, to wait for her father and confess everything. The Count will die of shame.

Christine enters, and Julie begs her for help. Christine refuses. Desperate, Julie has an idea: the three of them can flee together and open that hotel. Christine speaks of their redemption, saying the last shall be first. Christine leaves, promising to tell the stable boy to stop any attempted departures on their part. Utterly defeated, Julie asks Jean what he would do if in her place. She picks up Jean's shaving razor and slashes the air, saying "Like this?" The bell rings twice; it is the Count. Exhausted, Miss Julie begs Jean to help her, saying she will obey him as a dog would if he helps save her father from disgrace.


Jean is immobilized by the sound of the Count's voice. Julie tells him to pretend that he is the Count, and to hypnotize her. Jean whispers the fatal instructions in her ear. Julie asks Jean to tell her that the first will receive the gift of grace. He cannot promise grace but tells her that she is definitely among the last. The bell rings twice, and Jean commands Julie to her death. She walks out the door.


Miss Julie

Miss Julie is the play's twenty-five-year-old heroine. Fresh from a broken engagement—an engagement ruined because of her attempt literally to train her fiancé like a dog—Miss Julie has become "wild", making shameless advances to her valet, Jean, on Midsummer Eve. In his preface to the play, Strindberg discusses what motivates Miss Julie: "her mother's primary instincts, her father raising her incorrectly, her own nature, and the influence of her fiancé on her weak and degenerate brain." He also cites as influences the absence of her father, the fact that she has her period, the sensual dancing and flowers, and, finally, the man. Strindberg is interested in psychology, and this list is his diagnosis of what he considers Miss Julie's sickness. This symptoms of this sickness are similar to contemporaneous symptoms of the hysteric. Traditionally considered a female disease, hysteria in Strindberg's day was increasingly used to refer to a disturbance in female sexuality—namely, a woman's failure or refusal to accept her sexual desires.
drawn to men, horrified by sex and ready to play the lascivious coquette. Her hatred of men leads her to attempt to enslave them sadistically. Ultimately, however, the play is more invested in her masochism above all else. Julie desires her own fall. Strindberg partially blames her for her fate. Julie submits to Jean, who is partly a father figure, imploring him both to abuse and to save her. Julie slips into a "hypnoid state", a trance-like condition that people associated with hysterics. It can be argued that Miss Julie's profile and ultimate fate reveal Strindberg's notoriously misogynistic fantasies.


Jean

Jean is the manor's thirty-year old valet, chosen as Miss Julie's lover on Midsummer's Eve, and the second major character in the play. He grew up working in the district and, although Miss Julie does not know this, he has known Miss Julie since she was a child. Initially Jean talks coarsely and disparagingly about Miss Jean with his fiancé, Christine. Later he plays the gallant while seducing of Miss Julie, honorably hesitating before her advances, telling a heart-rending tale of his childhood love for his mistress, recounting his longtime ambitions, and generally making her believe in his gentleness. Upon the consummation of their romance, when Jean finds that Miss Julie is penniless, he rejects her and confesses that he has deceived her, cruelly leaving her to her disgrace.

Jean dreams of grandeur, vaguely imagining someday opening a hotel in northern Italy and becoming a count like Miss Jean's father. However, he remains subjected to authority throughout the play. Indeed, the reminders of the Count—his boots, the speaking tube, Jean's livery, and, most importantly, the ringing bell—automatically reduce Jean to a lackey. Jean's relationship to Miss Julie is complicated by his class envy and misogyny. Jean at once elevates and scorns the object of his desire. This relationship is neatly summarized by a story in which young Jean had to flee an outhouse through the bottom and, emerging from his master's waste, came upon Julie strolling a terrace and fell in love at first sight. This story shows how Jean is mired in filth at the hands of his social betters. It also shows the simultaneous adulation and hatred Jean feels for Miss Julie. He worships her from afar, but then he sees her underside from the bottom of the outhouse.

Imagining Julie in increasingly degrading fantasies, Jean stops being a cowed, reluctantly seduced servant to a sadist reveling in Julie's ruin. Despite the many power reversals between them, however, the end of the play joins them in their submission to the Count's authority, the authority of the father and master. Julie's hypnosis is paralleled by Jean's automatic response at the ringing of the Count's bell, and in the end Jean will only be able to command Julie by imagining that he is the Count commanding himself. The class and gender battles end with Julie's and Jean's submission to their absent sovereign.


Christine

A relatively minor character, Christine is the manor's thirty-five-year-old cook and Jean's fiancé. Sharing in Jean's gossip over Miss Julie's "wild" nature, she seems to be a pious and petty hypocrite. She clings fiercely to a sense of social hierarchy. Upon discovering that Julie and Jean have had sex, Christine decides to leave the house. Late in the play, she denies Miss Julie's plea for help. The fact that Jean did not live up to her social position trumps Christine's sense of human compassion.

Themes

The Degenerate Woman

In his preface to the play, Strindberg describes his heroine, Miss Julie, as a woman with a "weak and degenerate brain." In the play, Jean comments on Julie's crazy behavior. Miss Julie, one of the first major exercises in naturalism and the naturalist character, becomes a case study of a woman who is supposedly, as Jean says, "sick." This sickness condemns her to ruin in one of the more misogynistic classic works of modern theater. Strindberg was interested in psychology, and the play spends time detailing Julie's pathologies. Two concepts from the psychology of Strindberg's day are relevant: hysteria and feminine masochism. Hysteria was historically considered a female disease, and in the late-nineteenth century was defined as an illness brought on when a woman failed or refused to accept her sexual desires and did not become a sexual object, as the psychologists put it. Strindberg probably meant for us to read Julie as a hysteric, for she is simultaneously disgusted and drawn to men, both nonsexual and seductive. Strindberg, in his fear of early European feminism, attributes Julie's problems to a mother who believes in the equality of the sexes and, indeed, hates men. He also blames an initially absent, ineffectual father. Julie inherits her mother's hatred of men, attempting to train her fiancé with a riding whip and fantasizing about the annihilation of the male sex.


Besides this sadism (pleasure in another's pain), the play is interested in Julie's masochism (pleasure in one's own pain), a masochism explicitly identified as feminine. When Julie proposes suicide, Jean declares that he could never follow through with a plan to kill himself, and says that the difference between the sexes is that men are not masochistic, as women are. Julie confesses her desire to fall, and her brazenly flirtatious behavior with Jean supposedly makes her ruin her own fault. She ends up submitting herself wholeheartedly to Jean's will—Jean standing in, as we discover in the final scene, for Julie's father, the Count—.

Class and Gender Conflict

Miss Julie has two subordinates—a daughter and a servant—who are subject to each other's authority. Julie is Jean's superior in terms of class; Jean is Julie's superior in terms of morality, because Jean is a man and Julie is a "degenerate" woman. These differences structure most of the play's action. The play is conservative in sentiment. It keeps these superior and inferior positions in place, and ultimately submits both characters to the total authority of the Count, who is father and master. An uncountable number of power reversals occur along class and gender lines throughout the play. The difference between Jean and Julie is central to their attraction. Whereas Julie expresses a desire to fall from her social position, Jean expresses an idle desire to climb up from his social position. Jean hopes to better his social status by sleeping with Julie. When he discovers that she is penniless, however, he abandons his plans. By sleeping with Jean, Julie degrades herself and places herself beneath Jean's level. The power shifts again, however, when Julie reasserts her superior class, mocking Jean's name and family line.

As explained in the preface to the play, these battles reflect Strindberg's social Darwinist notions of evolutionary history and hierarchy. He writes, "I have added a little evolutionary history by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger." Jean and Julie borrow from each other when they talk about the vision of the hotel or the sheriff. The most explicit instance of mimicry, however, occurs in the final moments of the play, when Julie asks Jean to imitate her father, commanding him to send her to her suicide. The conflicts between Jean and Julie throughout the play recreate Julie's fundamental submission to the Count. Julie has authority over Jean partly because she is her father's daughter, and Jean has authority over Julie because he has the Count's power as a man.

Idealization and Degradation

Strindberg's notorious misogyny is characterized by the simultaneous idealization and degradation of woman. To him, these opposite impulses are two sides of the same coin. Jean at once worships and scorns Miss Julie. Early in the play, he describes her as both crude and beautiful. In the story of the Turkish pavilion, young Jean must flee an outhouse through the bottom and, emerging from his master's waste, sees Julie. He falls in love with her on the spot, but then she raises her skirt to use the outhouse, and he sees her in a compromising position. On top of Jean's initial love comes revulsion. The image of Julie strolling amidst the roses is degraded by the image of her going to the bathroom.

Hypnotism

The famous scene of hypnosis at the end of Miss Julie emerges from Strindberg's longtime interest in psychology and occult phenomena. Here, hypnotism stands for the absolute authority of the Count, the master and father, whose power feels all the more absolute for his absence. The play shows us the effects of his power—the ringing of the bell, the animation of the speaking tube, and, most importantly, the direction of the characters' action. Miss Julie asks Jean to hypnotize her, because she lacks the will to commit suicide. Jean lacks the will to command her, so he is to pretend that he is the Count giving himself an order. The magical power of Julie's father, sends Julie to her death. Though Julie is hypnotized, the Count's power exerts a hypnotic effect on Jean as well. The trappings of the Count's authority (his boots, the bell, etc.) reduce Jean to paralysis.

Animal Doubles


Two pets appear in Miss Julie. Both function as doubles for the heroine. The first pet is Diana, Julie's dog, who is pregnant by the gatekeeper's mongrel. Diana's name is a joke, for the goddess Diana is the goddess of virgins. Her resemblance to her owner implies that Miss Julie is not good looking. The second pet is Serena the canary, who Jean decapitates on a chopping block after deciding that Miss Julie cannot take the bird with them on their journey. The decapitation of the bird is linked to the story of Saint John the Baptist, who was decapitated. Saint John's story can be read as an allegory of a castration staged by a conspiracy of women. Here the terms of the allegory are reversed: Serena (or Miss Julie, who Serena symbolizes) is submitted to the chopping block. The execution of Serena sends Julie into a rage. She restores the biblical story in her fantasy, imagining Jean (French for "John") and his "entire sex" swimming in blood.

The pantomime and ballet

The play's numerous pantomimes function as pauses in action, interrupting the otherwise unbroken episode with slow, highly realistic interludes. Christine cleans the kitchen, curls her hair, and hums a tune; Jean scribbles a few calculations. Such injections of the banal are typical of the naturalistic theater. Also a sort of pantomime, the dance of the peasants operates differently, laying waste to the kitchen and disrupting a largely two-person play with a rowdy crowd. Many critics have identified this pagan festivity of the rumor-mongering crowd as symbolic of Miss Julie's ruin and prefigurative of German expressionism.
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Some objects symbolize the Count, suggesting him in his absence: his boots, Jean's livery, the speaking tube, and, most importantly, the ringing bell. Together, these objects symbolize the workings of the master's authority. Their effect on Jean in particular reveals the magical and irresistible nature of the Count's power. They also reduce Jean to a spineless, yes-man.

http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/missjulie/summary.html