The Subversion of Gender, the Immensity of Desire: ——A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Abstract

The Swedish playwright August Strindberg has been deemed highly as one of the founders of the modern theater. He established his reputation as an outstanding modern dramatist with Miss Julie, which demonstrates his preoccupation with what he considered to be the elemental and inevitable conflict between men and women—all the psychological, social, intellectual battles of the late nineteenth century. The secret of his marvelous appeal is his psychological participation in the destinies of his dramatic characters, and both Julie and Jean suffer from the most contradictory emotions. While Julie—a dishonored aristocrat—might seem to belong to an earlier tradition of tragic heroine, Strindberg is at pains to explain why she represents a new tragic type: she is a half-woman, suffering from neurosis and hysteria, locked in a desperate struggle with her repressed id—her sexual nature; she belongs to a class that no longer has a meaningful role to play in society; she is the victim of a mother’s crime, of muddled modern thinking, of her own frail ego constitution, and, finally, of circumstances all of which constitute the modern equivalent of the time-honored concept of the superego. Julie’s constant vacillation between opposed points of view reflects Strindberg’s own ambivalent feelings about the issues of class struggle and the battle of the sexes, while Jean embodies Strindberg’s divided class loyalties. Therefore, to some extent, both of them can be seen as the projections of Strindberg’s own psychological dualism.