Miss Julie ("Fröken Julie") is a bitter, naturalistic play by Swedish author August Strindberg about the struggle between the sexes, exacerbated by the class struggle. Miss Julie is the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family. When her father is away, during the Midsummer Night's Festival, she has a brief affair with the misanthropic Jean, her father's valet, but her passion for him is mixed with hostility, and the same can be said of the valet's feelings, so that the results of this poisonous mixture are rather disastrous. Heredity has determined their lives: as an aristocrat, Julie's time has passed, while the future is open to the aggressive social climber Jean. The setting of the play is rather claustrophobic, taking place only in the kitchen of Miss Julie's father's manor.
[Miss Julie, with Inga Tidblad and Ulf Palme (c. 1950]
Miss Julie is heavily influenced by Naturalism, a literary movement based on the theory of Social Darwinism. Human beings, while largely determined by heredity, environment, and chance, are seen as locked in a struggle with one another in which only the fittest survive. This theme is explicitly stated in the play's preface, where Strindberg describes his two main characters as pitted against each other in an evolutionary "life and death" struggle for the survival of the fittest.
There are only three characters in the play. Miss Julie is the strong-willed daughter of the count who owns the estate. Raised by her late mother to "think and act like a man," she has ambivalent feelings about men. She has inherited her mother's primitive, intense passion and her father's neurotic, aristocratic tendencies. Julie resents the restrictions placed upon her as a woman and as a member of the upper class. She alternates between being above the servants and flirting with Jean, her father's valet. She is a confused and self-destructive individual, and her character will lead to her downfall and suicide - unlike Nora in A Doll's House, she has no control over herself.
Jean is the Count's valet. He says he remembers seeing Miss Julie many times as a child and loving her even then, but later denies the truth of this statement. He has traveled widely and worked at many different jobs before returning to work for the count. He has aspirations to rise above his station in life, and Miss Julie is part of that plan. Jean is better equipped to succeed than Miss Julie because he is more adaptable to the roles in life that he can take on. He is concerned about his reputation, while she is careless and reckless. But despite his ambitions, the mere sight of the Count's gloves and boots makes him submissive.
Christine (or Kristine) is the cook in the Count's household. She is devoutly religious and apparently betrothed to Jean, although they refer to this fact almost in jest.
Finally, the Count, Miss Julie's father, is conspicuous by his absence. His gloves and boots are on stage as a reminder of his power.
Miss Julie is a drama about the breakdown of the 19th century social order. The people of Julie's father's estate are celebrating Midsummer's Eve with dancing, singing and revelry. The Count is absent, and Julie graciously mingles with the servants. But once she has tasted the simple abandon of the people, once she has thrown off the artifice and superficiality of her aristocratic decorum, her repressed passions burst into full flame, and Julie throws herself into the arms of her father's valet, Jean-not out of love for the man, but as people of her station may do when carried away by the moment. The woman in Julie pursues the man, follows him into the kitchen, plays with him as with a pet dog, and then feigns indignation when Jean, aroused, makes advances. How dare he, the servant, the lackey, even suggest that she wants him!
But what follows is indeed an offstage act of intimacy. When Kristin, Jean's fiancée, discovers that her mistress, Julie, has given herself to him, she is not so much angry at her fiancé as she is outraged that her mistress should have forgotten her station so much as to stoop to her father's valet!
Afterwards, Julie feels socially and morally degraded, while Jean tries to take advantage of the situation to elope with her to Switzerland, where he can climb the social ladder by running his own hotel. In the end, Jean returns to his submissive ways when the Count returns home. Meanwhile, Julie goes offstage with a razor to commit suicide.
[August Strindberg, c. 1900]
Strindberg wrote more than 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, and non-fiction during a career that spanned four decades. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature, and his The Red Room (1879) is considered the first modern Swedish novel.
Among the many adaptations of Miss Julie - including a ballet and two operas - one stands out: director Alf Sjöberg's innovative and Cannes Prize-winning 1951 feature film. Sjöberg took elements of misogyny from the play and exaggerated them to the point of irony. Anita Björk, an excellent actress who has made a career mostly on the stage, plays Miss Julie in a fiercely emotional way - in the movie's first iconic shot, we see her with a straw hat on her head, watching her pet bird. Ulf Palme is excellent as the valet Jean. But it is perhaps Alf Sjöberg's unique direction that makes this film so special: the Strindberg drama, which takes place in a single room, is "opened up" not only by the inclusion of scenes outside, in the park of the castle, but also by flashbacks that begin in the same frame in which, for example, Miss Julie is recounting an incident from her past: we see her younger self reenacting the incident in the scene behind her. This is a film that has firmly established itself in the forefront of world cinema classics and is an important turning point in Scandinavian cinema (which is more than Bergman!).
I have read Miss Julie in the translation by Michael Robinson in Oxford World's Classics.
Photos from Wikipedia.
Greatest Plays of All Time