Miss Julie and the Cinderella

Miss Julie and the Cinderella Myth

The Swedish naturalist playwright August Strindberg's play Miss Julie has been described as a kind of Cinderella story in reverse, or an inversion of typical fairytale roles (Templeton 470). Over the course of the narrative, the title character, a privileged young woman deliberately 'falls,' sexually, and loses her status, as a result of her relationship with a lower-class man. In the classic Cinderella tale of redemption, a vulnerable, lower-class woman redeems herself by her submissive posture in relationship with a more powerful male. The happy ending suggests that culturally, this situation is widely considered the 'correct' order of things, in terms of class and gender pairings. In a variation on this theme, a lower-class woman such as a servant may find herself 'propositioned' by her upper-class employer and by upholding her feminine virtue she marries him, as in the case of the 18th century novel Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (Templeton 470). However, in Miss Julie, it is the woman Julie who is of higher birth, while the man whom she 'sins' with is her father's valet, and this reversal of conventional gender norms and power results in her undoing.

Strindberg, in his "Preface" to the play says that he deliberately created a portrait of a world upside-down in terms of its class and gender relations, which is then made right again by Miss Julie's subjugation at the hands of the stronger, but lower-class Jean. Women like the "man-hating half-woman" Miss Julie, Strindberg writes, "fortunately are overcome eventually either by a hostile reality, or by the uncontrolled breaking loose of their repressed instincts, or else by their frustration in not being able to compete with the male sex" on a truly equal playing field (Templeton 268). Of course, the Cinderella story itself is also a kind of world-upside-down myth -- the 'good' girl, the true heir of the father's first mother, is forced to be a maid, while the 'bad' stepsisters are elevated to legitimate status, and the mother dominates the father. This is made right by Cinderella's escape with the prince, which restores the mother and stepsisters to their rightful, lowly places. In Miss Julie, the world is upside-down because the superior sex of the male is made subordinate by class structures to the socially but not sexually superior female. Just as in Cinderella, courtship rectifies this situation, but in a negative and deadly, rather than in a positive and life-affirming fashion.

Strindberg's evocation of the Cinderella myth is evident even at the beginning of his play, with an image of the 'drudge' Christine, Jean's conventional and pious lower-class fiancee toiling at her work. The play is set during a ball, but a 'world-upside' down kind of holiday, on Midsummer's Eve. During her seduction of Jean, Miss Julie puts upper-class clothes on the lower-class man, symbolically before literally elevating him to his rightful, superior status as a man in relation to her -- although she asks him to submissively kiss her hand. The theme of shoes and transformation are manifested even in the physical symbolism of the play for absent or silent characters: "In Miss Julie the boots waiting to be polished and the gaping speaking tube convey the spiritual presence of Julie's father. The songbird in the cage, the bird that Julie insists is her only friend and that Jean so brutally kills, underscores almost too heavily the situation in which the aristocratic girl finds herself" (Sprinchorn 124)

"Although his fear of her father, the count, and his initial servility thwarts her desire to relate on a human and physical level, "his show of cultivation renders the arbitrariness of class structure even more clear, and so encourages Julie's pursuit" (Templeton 474). Strindberg suggests that Julie knows Jean is "superior to Miss Julie in that he is a man" and although she is the aristocrat in class, "in the sexual sphere, he is the aristocrat" by virtue of his masculine birth (Templeton 469). In the author's preface, class is inextricably bound to sex, with the male superior to the female -- and Jean's mournful tale of how he used to long for Miss Julie when he was a boy, or how he grew up in a crowded household populated by pigs becomes a seduction strategy, as he places himself in the Cinderella role, but only to 'right' the power dynamic to assert his male privilege over the female body (Templeton 469; Chaudhuri 326).

It should be noted that during the era when Strindberg wrote, in historical reality: "The actual class situation prevailing in Sweden at the time the play was written was, of course, a good deal more complex than such generic terms as 'aristocratic' and 'valet' can capture. Miss Julie, for instance, belongs to the nobility and can thus claim the title 'Froken,' but it is clear that her family is not without its economic and social vulnerabilities and that the upper-class privilege they enjoy is in the process of unraveling" (Chaudhuri 317). Strindberg simplifies this, however, and makes the class system seem much simpler and more schematic to 'prove' his point about what constitutes an eternal 'woman' and 'her' essential vulnerability. For Strindberg, gender transcends all class and social constructions, hence his vagueness about the class structure of his own specific point in historical time.

Strindberg says that Julie is a "victim of a superstition . . . that woman that stunted form of human being, standing with man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, is meant to be the equal of man or could ever possibly be" (Templeton 468). When she realizes this terrible fact, her only refuge is vulnerability, as Jean says, in one translation: "You can't fight them; you can only run away" (Templeton 476). Another translation of his phrase is: "Run away? Where? There's no way out of here" (Chaudhuri 318). By the end of the play, Strindberg's vision of the natural order is restored -- the woman begs the man for his willpower, for his command. In this case, Julie's desired command is for Jean to condemn her to death. "Strindberg believed he had learned from…that the will is itself a form of energy, so the idea of a magnetic 'battle of the brains,'" and the strongest should win -- and the strongest was, or at least, should always be the male partner (Greenway 24).

The tenor of Strindberg's preface to his work has had an inevitable impact upon critics who see the play as misogynist. "Strindberg's forceful theorization of his experiment has produced a sort of permanent transgressive structure around the play, a confusion of outside and inside that characterizes many other features of the play as well, including its physical space and its theoretics" (Chaudhuri 319). Strindberg's control over interpretations of his play has been extraordinary, in a way replicated in the treatment of few other dramatists. But this raises the question. Could Miss Julie be interpreted as a feminist play, even if this is not the intended impression of the author? When Jean, the character says, for example, that there is no way for their escape, must the viewer believe him, as does Julie, that there is no way to escape social judgments, like the kind of can't expressed by Christine? Can the reader see these commands as a failure of Jean and Christine's imagination, rather than how things 'must be,' although Strindberg believed that gender constructions were the result of a natural order, and could not be denied?

In his prefatory remarks, Strindberg is quick to stereotype his characters and especially eager to condemn Julie. "According to the preface Julie is the victim of a hideous power struggle between her father and mother, and she represents a degenerating aristocracy crumbling in the face of a rising middle class. Above all, she is modern Woman…the 'Victim of a superstition'…that woman, that stunted form of human being, standing with man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, is meant to be the equal of man or could ever possibly be'" (Templeton 468). But is the culturally constructed power struggle that results between Julie and Jean, and which also existed between Miss Julie's father and mother natural, or is there the possibility of interpreting it as a social construction even within the text? "Does the fatal struggle between Jean and Julie dramatize given, naturalistic facts of social and sexual difference? Or does the play present for our analysis an ideological power struggle, a confrontation for which Julie is sadly unprepared, equipped only to be complicitous in her own destruction" (Templeton 479). After all, Christine is a powerful character in her condemnation of vice, even though Christine can only conceive of power in a way that supports rather then thwarts social and religious norms.

" The misogyny of the preface resides in the wry pleasure it takes in the demise of Julie and her misguided desire to live outside her so-called 'natural' gender and class stations" (Templeton 468). But it is also possible to read 'against' the preface, and, especially as this is a drama, to construct a new interpretation through stagecraft. Julie's failed rebellion is the result of a "revolution that is unable to construe power in a new way. It dramatizes the sometimes pitiable, sometimes contemptible, vulnerability of one whose changing consciousness cannot create commensurate expression and one whose desires are easily twisted against her own interests. Read against the preface, as well as against Jean's judgments of Julie, the play conveys not a degenerate falling woman, but a woman who is beginning to move toward social and gender consciousness. Her recklessness attests both to her ignorance of self and world, and to her desperation. Her determination to satisfy her desires, which are more likely satisfied through social and personal change, leave Julie vulnerable to Jean's deterministic reduction of desire to vulgarized sexual need. Although her determination to fall is translated by the preface as determinism" it can also be seen as a challenge articulated through a radical reinterpretation of woman's role (Templeton 480).