Miss Julie – August Strindberg, 1888 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★½

Cupid Is a Ruthless Hunter

Love is nice, but what really counts in this life is power. That cold lesson is transformed into a classic play about what happens when a servant gets too involved with the mistress of the house.

If there is an anti-Ibsen when it comes to preaching the gospels of naturalism and humanism in 19^th-century drama, it is his near-countryman August Strindberg, an ornery Swede who sneered at audiences and critics discoursing upon mankind’s hopeless condition.

Miss Julie offers a bitter valentine for hardened cynics:

JULIE: You think I’m so weak. Oh, how I should like to see your blood and your brains on a chopping-block! I’d like to see the whole of your sex swimming like that in a sea of blood. I think I could drink out of your skull, bathe my feet in your broken breast and eat your heart roasted whole. You think I’m weak. You think I love you, that my womb yearned for your seed and I want to carry your offspring under my heart and nourish it with my blood. You think I want to bear your child and take your name. By the way, what is your name?

That’s the title character of our play having what Strindberg might call a meet-cute moment with her former valet and new lover, Jean. It’s a tight little show: Only one set and three actors are needed to perform this one-act play; only two characters in it matter.

The very bare-bones setting for Miss Julie. Strindberg was very specific about the placement of the table at an angle for the purposes of establishing a naturalistic venue for his characters to interact with each other. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/504473595739117938/. 

The woman, Julie, is the daughter of a count who while Daddy’s away takes part in the local peasantry’s Midsummer celebration [Sweden’s combination Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, which happens between those American holidays]. Julie, we come to learn, was raised to have certain expectations about men, nurtured by a bitchy, proto-feminist mother.

The man, Jean, agrees with the general opinion around the estate that Julie is off her rocker. He tells his co-worker and casual lover Kristin (sometimes spelled Christine in English translations) how he once spied Julie making her fiancé jump over a whip she held before him as if he were a dog, then whacking him after every leap until the man got fed up and left her.

Jean is turned on, either by this or else a childhood crush he had while growing up on Julie’s estate. Whatever the reason, having Julie nudges his deeper lust for power:

JEAN: …I wasn’t born to bend. I’ve got guts, I’ve got character, and once I reach that first branch, you’ll watch me climb. Today I’m valet, next year I’ll be proprietor, in ten years I’ll have made a fortune, and then I’ll go to Roumania, get myself decorated and I may, I only say may, mind you, end up as a Count.

Colin Farrell as Jean and Jessica Chastain as Julie in a scene from a 2014 film adaptation of the play. Miss Julie remains Strindberg's best known and most performed work, on stage and elsewhere. Image from https://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/toronto-film-review-miss-julie-1201300373/.

Two classic battles are played out in Miss Julie, between man and woman and rich and poor. Both are predictably unbalanced, yet neither works out quite the way you expect – testament to Strindberg’s non-conformity and ability to toy with expectations. 

That Julie and Jean wind up falling into each other’s arms is a violation of social norms that would never had happened if not for those very same norms. Once innocent circumstances force the two of them into the same bedroom, it is the same for them as having sex anyway, so they might as well go through with it and see what happens.

Given it’s Strindberg, results are not happy. But how they play out is unexpected, and trigger some memorable conversation about life:

JEAN: You’re very strange, you know.

JULIE: Perhaps I am, but so are you. For that matter everything is strange. Life, human beings, everything, just scum drifting about on the water until it sinks – down and down.

A little later on:

JEAN: …Do you know what the world looks like from below? No, you don’t. No more than the hawks and falcons do whose backs one hardly ever sees because they’re always soaring up aloft. I lived in a labourer’s hovel with seven other children and a pig, out in the grey fields where there isn’t a single tree. But from the window I could see the wall round the Count’s park with apple-trees above it. That was the Garden of Eden, guarded by many terrible angels with flaming swords. All the same I and the other boys managed to get to the tree of life. Does all this make you despise me?

JULIE: Goodness, all boys steal apples!

JEAN: You say that now, but all the same you do despise me.

August Strindberg, in a 1893 portrait by Norwegian artist Christian Krohg. He was an imposing figure on canvas as on the page. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:August_Strindberg.

For both, it all comes down to power. Strindberg makes this clear in his famous Foreword to the play, in which he explains how boring and unrealistic most plays and other fiction are, how they service expectations of the “the young, the semi-educated and…women who still have a primitive capacity for deceiving themselves and letting themselves be deceived.” The cruel struggle others shrink from, he avers, is for him “the joy of life.”

It is really some essay, like something Nietzsche might have written after a day of reading Origin Of The Species and snorting cocaine:

My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul. And I have added a little evolutionary history by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger, and by making the characters borrow ideas or “suggestions” from one another.

Miss Julie works very well once you accept this unpleasant attitude as law. Though it doesn’t come over nearly as strong as in the Foreword, this is a mean little play that holds your attention.

Early on, Julie commands and Jean obeys. He speaks to her with duty and affection, even warning her when she asks him to kiss her hand: “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to play with fire?”

Vassar undergraduate Meryl Streep as Julie bonds with her pet greenfinch in a 1969 college performance of Miss Julie. According to her Wikipedia bio, the role decided Streep on acting as a profession. Perhaps the wisest choice anyone ever made as Julie? Image from https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2012/03/07/strindbergs-bathtub-author-article-by-sue-prideaux/.

But as events unfold, it is Jean who gets the upper hand, and he uses it to demonstrate a willingness to break Julie on his climb to the top. She, both come to realize, is just a branch on that journey. The more he sneers, the more she begs. It is quite a sharp change in status.

The play may sound from this synopsis like a Marxist satire; Strindberg was in fact popular in the former Soviet Union. Yet Miss Julie is not quite People’s Theater, offering surprising moments of humor and ambiguity. In his Foreword Strindberg sneers at other playwrights who operate as “a lay preacher;” he had observations to impart, not morals.

The play does strain at the end as it tries to deliver a wow finish, something playwrights then did more often than they should have. [See Ibsen’s The Ghosts.] The confined nature of the theatrical work, with just the two main characters and an amusing rustic to break up their dialogues, gets a bit cloying.

I read Miss Julie after seeing a 1951 film adaptation directed by Alf Sjöberg, one of those times when the movie really is better than the book. Sjöberg was an early collaborator of Ingmar Bergman, but his Miss Julie is more suggestive of David Lean, with delirious cutting and clever segues. More characters, too; Sjöberg builds out the story Strindberg reveals only through dialogue with mostly mute but effective visual sequences showcasing Julie’s parents and another female servant who desires Jean. Combined with the glory of Swedish summer in black-and-white, and comic relief from Max von Sydow of all people, and it’s a film worth seeing even if European cinema is not your thing.

Julie (Anita Björk) flirts with Jean (Ulf Palme) early in Alf Sjöberg's 1951 adaptation of Miss Julie. Kristin (Marta Dörff) looks on with what proves prescient skepticism. The film won the grand prize at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and helped to establish the potency of Swedish cinema to world audiences. Image from https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2015/08/26/miss-julie-film-review/.

Unfair or not, I felt I was getting a lesser version of Miss Julie reading it on the page. That’s on me, of course, but I do think the play needed more action and pace than Strindberg gives it. You feel him strain at times with the creaky confines of the stage, trying to communicate his characters’ backstories while obeying 19^th-century theater’s dictates for a linear narrative. He even grouses about this a bit in his Foreword.

Would I have responded less positively to the play if I hadn’t seen the film first? I think the elements that make the film great are all in the play, just not as immediately apparent.

The class divisions are perhaps not as sharp as you might expect; Julie does mingle easily enough with her valet and cook even before the real drama begins. She’s a daughter of a count, but not quite noble herself, since as a woman she can’t confer nobility on her offspring. The charge of the situation involves her coming down in status.

Poster art from the 1951 film adaptation. Image from 

https://www.blu-ray.com/Miss-Julie/383829/.

It even informs the comedy. Kristin the cook is bitterly angry when she learns about Julie and Jean’s affair, not because she is sleeping with Jean herself, but because it’s so common of her mistress:

KRISTIN: Oh, you’re all right in your own way, but when all’s said and done there is a difference between one class and another. No, this is something I’ll never be able to stomach. That our young lady who was so proud and so down on men you’d never believe she’d let one come near her should go and give herself to one like you.

Strindberg was a playwright with issues – misogynistic from a young age, he became more strange, even paranoid, as he got older. Yet his oddness offers a perspective on the human condition that is less stale and more probing than those of many great writers, and his ability to tease out the quirkiness and humanity of his characters in what amount to the textual equivalent of a few brushstrokes is a pleasure to behold. There may not be much to like about Miss Julie, but there is plenty to admire.