Miss Julie

In addition to the power imbalance between the aristocracy and the commoners and the weak and the strong, the play also explores the power dynamics that arise from gender roles. Strindberg himself makes no secret about his misogynistic tendencies (these become particularly apparent in the Author’s Preface): For him, the battle between men and women is a battle between the strong sex and the weak sex, respectively. Thus, while Julie may be superior to Jean in terms of class (she is an aristocrat while he is a servant), Jean is—in Strindberg’s view—superior to Jean in terms of sex and gender (he is a man while she is a woman).

The sexual tension between Julie and Jean makes for a complex power dynamic. By the end of the play, Jean achieves virtually complete power over Julie, even though he himself recognizes how totally subservient he himself is to Julie’s father the count—Jean’s notion that he “wasn’t born to cringe” (91) becomes no more than an idle fancy. Even as Jean tells Julie that the only way for her to preserve her honor is to die by suicide, he admits with horror, “if the Count came down here now—and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot” (111). Thus, while Jean can dominate Julie—despite her higher social class—because she is a woman, he is soon forced to recognize that he in turn can be easily dominated by another man of higher standing (the Count).

Love and sex play a key role in the power dynamics between men and women, as well as in the specific power dynamic that develops between Julie and Jean. After they have sex, Julie requires constant reassurance of Jean’s affection, begging him, in a moment of desperation, “[s]how me you love me, otherwise—otherwise, what am I?” (91) To Julie, her attraction to Jean—and to any man—represents a kind of weakness that she cannot overcome, a weakness that casts her—and women in general—as the weaker subordinates of men: “What terrible power drew me to you? The attraction of the weak to the strong? The falling to the rising? Or was it love? Was this love? Do you know what love is?” (93) For Jean, on the other hand, love is little more than a game, and he admits that his seduction of Julie was not entirely honest. The story he told her about his childhood infatuation with her, for instance, he characterizes simply as “the kind of story women always go for” (94). At the same time, he insists that he “could never arouse real love” in Julie while he, on the other hand, “could fall in love with [Julie], no doubt about it” (95): Love may be a game, and Julie cannot really love Jean, as far as Jean is concerned—but he could love her, if only because she is a beautiful and useful tool to help him achieve his goals.

Shame also plays a part in the battle of the genders. In a woman’s life in particular, shame is represented as a terrible thing with significant ramifications. Jean tells Julie a few times that she is no better than “a whore” (93), and indeed her relationship with him reduces her social station even below his own: For if Jean is a mere “menial” or a “lackey,” then Julie becomes a “[m]enial’s strumpet, [a] lackey’s whore” (94), which degrades her even further socially.

In Strindberg’s world, feminism is merely an illusion: Jean is naturally superior to Julie just as all men are naturally superior to all women because—in Strindberg’s view—they are stronger. Strindberg presents Julie’s mother as an illustration of the failure of feminism: Julie’s mother ruined her husband’s estate because she saw to it that “men were put on women’s jobs and women on men’s jobs” (97). It was from her mother that Julie learned to hate men, to long to see all men “swimming in a sea of blood” (106)—another futile struggle (as Strindberg presents it) against nature.