Miss Julie: Analysis of Setting
"Miss Julie" is a play by August Strindberg that examines complex themes of class, gender, and power dynamics set against the backdrop of a Swedish country estate. The narrative unfolds in a manor house kitchen, symbolizing both the oppressive authority of Julie's father, the unseen count, and the limitations of Julie's societal role. The setting, during Midsummer Eve, highlights the tension between social hierarchies and the allure of transgression, as the rural community celebrates with revelry that allows for temporary social mobility.
Julie, a young woman grappling with her identity after a broken engagement, interacts with Jean, her father's servant, navigating the precarious boundaries of their respective social classes. The kitchen acts as a microcosm of Julie’s internal struggles and societal expectations, becoming a crucible for personal conflict and transformation. Meanwhile, dreams and aspirations—such as Jean's desire to ascend socially and Julie's conflicting wishes for power and vulnerability—underscore the verticality of their ambitions within the rigid social structure.
Ultimately, the setting of "Miss Julie" is not just a physical space; it encapsulates the characters' psychological entrapment and their inability to escape the consequences of their actions within a constraining societal framework. The kitchen, while an ordinary domestic space, becomes a site of significant emotional turmoil, wherein the characters' attempts at connection and autonomy can only lead to ultimately tragic outcomes.
Miss Julie: Analysis of Setting
First published:Fröken Julie, 1888 (English translation, 1912)
First produced: 1889
Type of work: Drama
Type of plot: Naturalism
Time of work: Nineteenth century
Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Places Discussed
Country estate
Country estate. Grand home of an unnamed Swedish count. A silent but prominent symbol of the unseen count’s authority in his manor house’s kitchen is a pair of his riding boots. Julie is his unmarried daughter of twenty-five, whose engagement has recently been broken off. With its community of tenant farmers, the estate could well lie near Stockholm, a region Strindberg knew well.
It is Midsummer Eve, an occasion for carousing by the rural population. In traditional Scandinavian culture, the shortest night of the year was an interstice in normal time, when social lines might be crossed. The farmers sing off-color songs to satirize their “betters,” and the aristocratic Julie invites, even commands, her father’s servant to dance on the village green that is only hinted at by lilacs in bloom beyond the kitchen door.
As Julie explains her mixed aversion and attraction to men, she reveals her family past. Her mother was not well born, and Jean knows that even the count’s supposed aristocratic background has little historical depth. The manor house itself had been destroyed by arson, then rebuilt under questionable financial circumstances dictated by the likely arsonist, Julie’s mother. Until the count restored patriarchal order to the chaos of the estate, Julie’s mother had raised her as a tomboy. She learned to ride and shoot but not manage a house. As an adult in this house of dubious origin, she is helplessly stranded between age and gender roles, and the conflicting demands of awakening sexuality and constraining social order.
Jean’s tree
Jean’s tree. Image in a recurrent dream of the count’s valet, who is Julie’s lover. Kristin’s kitchen is set in ordinary space, although the scene has an intentionally skewed quality explicitly stated in the dramatist’s stage directions that suggests the areas beyond it. Vertical space is also important as the dimension of social hierarchy, the medium of personal rise and fall. Jean had a childhood experience and a recurrent dream, both articulated vertically. As a boy he had been called to help his mother weed onion beds near the count’s manor house. Attracted to a decorated pavilion, he explored it, only to discover that it was an outhouse (privy), and his only means of escape was through the hole and out the back. Filthy after this “descent to Hades,” he saw the young Julie and was struck with her beauty, as well as by her higher social station and its privileges. His more mature dream is of climbing a great tree that would lead him up to the clouds among the birds of prey, if only he could reach the first branch.
Julie’s column
Julie’s column. Miss Julie’s corresponding dream is of being trapped at the top of a pillar and then of inevitable downward motion, both feared and desired: subjecting men to her will but being personally degraded as well. After alienating her fiancé, this movement continues with her yielding to sexual urges on Midsummer Eve, an occasion already culturally identified for this purpose.
Kitchen and side-rooms
Kitchen and side-rooms. When commoners from the rustic celebration approach the manor house, Julie and Jean wish to avoid being seen together and leave the kitchen. The revelers enter, drink, sing, and dance. This lightly scornful pantomime provides enough time for Julie and Jean to make love off stage. When they return to the stage, everything has changed—except the time and place. In Julie’s mind, no future is possible on the estate: She and Jean cannot marry because of class distinctions, and she is unwilling to continue as Jean’s casual mistress.
The play has only one scene. The seemingly cozy farm kitchen, invaded by the intoxicating smell of summer flowers, is a place where a woman of Julie’s rank and age would normally enter only to give orders. It is too constraining a place for positive change to occur. Instead, it becomes a crucible where social qualities and character attributes are broken down but do not fuse into a stronger new alloy. Rigid as the setting is, the significant acts of sexual union and self-destruction can only occur beyond it.
*Ticino
*Ticino. Resort town in southern Switzerland where Julie and Jean fantasize about going to open a hotel. This utopian fantasy is alternately scorned and promoted by Julie, who at one point even tries to rope in the reluctant cook, Kristin. However, the cook immediately senses the social shift taking place around her: Jean’s transgression—which she forgives as the act of an ambitious male—and Julie’s defloration—which she judges willful self-abasement and cannot excuse. In her eyes, the manor house has again been brought low.
Bibliography
Gilman, Richard. “Strindberg.” In The Making of Modern Drama. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Posits that Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen restored the presence of personal existence to the drama. In Miss Julie, Jean and Julie become the agencies for each other’s discovery of their divided selves.
Johnson, Walter. “Master Dramatist.” In August Strindberg. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Discusses the plays Strindberg wrote from 1882 to 1894. Asserts that in Miss Julie, Strindberg achieves the goals of naturalistic drama that he had outlined in the play’s preface.
Sprinchorn, Evert. Strindberg as Dramatist. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982. Puts Strindberg’s drama in context of the dramaturgy of the time and of Strindberg’s life and psychology. Argues that Miss Julie and The Father (1887) move beyond naturalism into tragedy; compares Miss Julie with Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947).
Törnqvist, Egil. “Speech Situations in Fröken Julie/Miss Julie.” In Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982. Analyzes the dialogue in the play, dividing it into duologues, triologues, and monologues, and pointing out the significance of each.
Valency, Maurice. “Strindberg.” In The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama. 1963. Reprint. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. Valency sees in Strindberg’s works a continuous spiritual autobiography styled in the art of the unbalanced and exces-sive. In Miss Julie, the dramatist identifies himself with Jean and characterizes Julie as an iconic femme fatale.