Reading Order
Miss Julie Reading Order
Miss Julie (1888) by August Strindberg is the most radical play of the late nineteenth century and the founding work of expressionistic theater — the count's daughter Julie's seduction by (or of) the valet Jean on Midsummer's Eve, in an aristocratic kitchen, told without an intermission in the purest naturalistic technique of the period. Strindberg wrote a lengthy preface arguing that the play's technique was revolutionary: no intermission (to prevent the artificial breaking of the illusion), a kitchen as the only set (to make the class conflict spatially concrete), pantomimes and dances (to create a theatrical rhythm that prose dialogue cannot sustain). He also argued that Julie and Jean were the characters of the future: the degenerate aristocrat (too much feeling, not enough will) and the rising proletarian (too much will, not enough feeling). The play is terrifying and funny, and its ending — Julie walking out to her death at Jean's direction — is one of the most devastating in all theater.
Where to start
Miss Julie (1888) — the complete play, ideally with Strindberg's preface (essential for understanding his intentions). Best translations: Michael Meyer (Methuen), Howard Brenton (Nick Hern Books), or Frank McGuinness (Faber). Best reading order for Strindberg: The Father → Miss Julie → The Dance of Death → A Dream Play → The Ghost Sonata
Complete Miss Julie Book List
- 1Buy
Miss Julie
August Strindberg·1888·The masterwork — Julie, Jean, and Christine in the count's kitchen on Midsummer's Eve. Strindberg's most performed play and the most concentrated expression of his obsessive concern with the battle between the sexes, class, and the will to dominate - 2Buy
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen·1891·The Norwegian contemporary companion — the most important Scandinavian play of the same period. Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler are the two great Scandinavian plays of the 1880s-90s about women trapped by gender and class: Strindberg's Julie is destroyed by her class and desire; Ibsen's Hedda is destroyed by her intelligence and her refusal to be contained. Strindberg hated Ibsen and wrote partly in response to him; reading them together illuminates both - 3Buy
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen·1879·The feminist companion and the explicit target of Strindberg's hostility — Strindberg thought A Doll's House was sentimental about women and that Ibsen's sympathy for Nora was a failure of nerve. Miss Julie is partly Strindberg's answer to A Doll's House: a play about a woman's desire that refuses all sympathy and all excuse, that shows the battle of the sexes as a battle that one person must lose - 4Buy
The Father
August Strindberg·1887·The companion Strindberg play — the Captain's destruction by his wife's manipulation of his uncertainty about his daughter's paternity. The Father and Miss Julie are the two poles of Strindberg's theater of sexual combat: The Father shows the destruction of a man by a woman; Miss Julie shows the destruction of a woman (and possibly a man) in the same combat. Together they constitute the most brutal investigation of gender in nineteenth-century theater - 5Buy
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov·1901·The Russian contemporary companion in the tradition of naturalistic theater about women's unfreedom — but the contrast illuminates both plays: where Strindberg's theater is brutal, direct, and organized around combat, Chekhov's is oblique, tender, and organized around endurance. Miss Julie and Three Sisters are the two poles of the naturalist tradition's treatment of women: Strindberg's women are destroyed; Chekhov's women endure - 6Buy
A Dream Play
August Strindberg·1902·The later Strindberg companion — the dream logic play in which Agnes, daughter of the god Indra, descends to earth to experience human suffering. A Dream Play shows Strindberg's development from the brutal naturalism of Miss Julie to the expressionistic dream theater that would influence Artaud, O'Neill, and twentieth-century experimental drama. Reading Miss Julie and A Dream Play together shows the full range of Strindberg's theatrical invention - 7Buy
The Awakening
Kate Chopin·1899·The American contemporary companion — Edna Pontellier's gradual awakening to her own desires and to the impossibility of living them. The Awakening and Miss Julie are the two great fin-de-siècle works about a woman's desire and the destruction it causes: Strindberg's Julie is destroyed in a single night; Chopin's Edna is destroyed over a summer. Both works were received as scandalous, and both have become central texts in the study of women and desire in the nineteenth century - 8Buy
The Ghost Sonata
August Strindberg·1907·Strindberg's late masterwork and the most direct influence on the Theater of the Absurd — the Student's encounter with the Colonel, the ghost of Hummel, and the Girl in the hyacinth room. The Ghost Sonata takes the brutal naturalism of Miss Julie and transforms it into a dream of guilt, debt, and liberation: the same Strindbergian concern with the damage that people inflict on each other, but now rendered in a purely expressionistic and symbolic mode
Miss Julie — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is to blame in Miss Julie — Jean or Julie?
Strindberg's preface explicitly addresses this question and deliberately refuses to assign blame — which is one of the play's most radical aspects. Julie is to blame, he argues, because she belongs to a degenerate aristocratic class, because she has been raised by a feminist mother who taught her to dominate men, and because she initiates the seduction (or the class of seductions that lead to the night's events). Jean is to blame because he is a rising proletarian who seizes on Julie's vulnerability as an opportunity for social advancement. But Strindberg also gives the play a naturalistic determinism — the blame, in the end, lies with the class structure that created both Julie and Jean, and with the Midsummer night that intoxicates them both. Most contemporary productions resist Strindberg's explicit analysis and find a more complex and more sympathetic portrait of both characters than his preface suggests.
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