Miss Julie

The second part of the play is marked by a sharp shift in tone from the first part of the play. As soon as Julie and Jean emerge from hiding in Jean’s room, it is clear that they have had sex, despite Jean’s earlier reticence and despite his promise to respect Julie’s social position. Only now do Jean’s true ambitions become clear: Whereas Jean had earlier couched his desire to climb the social ladder in thinly-veiled symbolism (for example, his dream of climbing a tree to raid a nest of golden eggs), he now tells Julie explicitly that he plans to travel, become a businessman, and eventually enter the nobility.

In a series of increasingly impassioned monologues and dialogues, Jean reveals just how unhappy he is with his current social position. He tells Julie, for instance, “I wasn’t born to cringe! I’ve got stuff in me, I’ve got character, and if I can only grab onto the first branch, you watch me climb!” (91). Jean understands that social classes and hierarchies are ultimately just social constructs: As he reminds Julie, the founder of her family was hardly illustrious himself—he was just “a miller who let the king sleep with his wife one night during the Danish War” (100). In Jean’s view there is therefore nothing to prevent him from also rising to the ranks of the aristocracy. He is intelligent, well-traveled, well-read, and hard-working, and he has already sketched out a plan for his future, telling Julie, “I’m a servant today, but next year I’ll own my own hotel. In ten years I’ll have enough to retire. Then I’ll go to Rumania and be decorated. I could—mind you I said I could—end up a count!” (91). Later, alluding to the humble origins of Julie’s own family, he observes, “I don’t have any noble ancestors at all, but I could become one myself” (100).

At other points, Jean takes his ideas about Class Conflict and Social Hierarchy even further, spitefully arguing that he is, if anything, superior to Julie and her family. He repeatedly calls Julie and her mother “crazy”; He tells Kristine that their aristocratic employers “aren’t any better than us” (103). He even declares that he comes from “better stock” (99) than Julie because he does not have any arsonist in his family. At other times Jean’s confidence in his inherent superiority is even simpler: He is a man and Julie is a woman, and men (in his view, and certainly in Strindberg’s view as well) were always superior to women.

Indeed, the theme of Gender Roles and Power Dynamics becomes very pronounced in the second part of the play, with Julie telling Jean in detail about her mother’s fraught relationship with her father. The tragedy of Julie’s mother, at least within the world of the play, is her indelible belief in “social equality, women’s rights, and all that” (96)—beliefs that she passed on to her daughter. Julie was thus raised like a man and as a man-hater, as she herself confesses. In the context of Strindberg’s self-professed misogyny, such behavior is against nature, and thus both Julie and her mother are doomed from the start. As Jean tells Julie: “Your mother was crazy, and her ideas have poisoned your life” (100). Julie blames her father too, who she says “brought [her] up to despise [her] own sex, making [her] half woman, half man” (110). Thus, there is plenty of blame to go around: Julie’s parents both contributed to her nature, but she recognizes that she is complicit too. It is, however, only towards the end of the play that Julie begins contemplating her responsibility in her tragedy—and by then it is too late.

Strindberg sets out to present a highly Darwinist picture of reality, in which life becomes a struggle for supremacy and in which the strong dominate the weak. Part of what makes Strindberg’s characters so naturalistic, however, is that their strengths and weaknesses do not necessarily correspond to what they view as their strengths and weaknesses, which speaks to The Complexity and Contradictory Nature of People. Jean, for example, presents himself as highly self-assured and repeatedly insists that he is no worse than Julie and her aristocratic family. Nevertheless, he continues to address Julie formally as “Miss,” admitting, “[t]here’ll always be barriers between us as long as we stay in this house,” and even confessing that the very sight of the count’s things makes him “feel small” (91).

At the end of the play, when the count returns and summons Jean, Jean finds that he cannot disobey, observing with horror, “if the Count came down here now—and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot” (111). Julie herself realizes that Jean was only playing a part before, that all his self-assurance was just “a good performance” (111). Julie is similarly full of contradictions, claiming that she hates men and will never be subordinate to a man but ultimately begging Jean, as a man, “[o]rder me, and I’ll obey like a dog!” (111). In these instances, what both characters believe themselves to want or deserve and what they are actually capable of achieving are two very different things: Strindberg suggests that both of them have deceived themselves, each in their own way.

The religious motif of the play is also taken up and strengthened in the second part of the play (See: Symbols & Motifs). Whereas religion was construed very romantically in the first part of the play (with Jean comparing the count’s manor garden to the Garden of Eden and Julie comparing Jean to Joseph), religion takes on a more punitive guise in the second part of the play. In particular, it is Kristine who tells Julie that her only hope is to turn to God for forgiveness and grace, and that the truth about social classes and hierarchies is that “God is no respecter of persons, for the last shall be the first” (109)—an idea that Julie embraces at the very end of the play when she declares to Jean that she is no longer among the aristocratic “first” but is now “among the very last” (112).

The end of the play sees Strindberg’s Darwinism degenerate, appropriately, into a lawless world where animal instincts prevail, where the stronger gobbles up the weaker, where Jean and Julie both become animals (they compare each other and themselves repeatedly to swine, dogs, and so on) and their relationship even turns into a kind of “bestiality” (98). They are finally both destroyed with just as much savagery as Jean showed when he killed Julie’s greenfinch.