Miss Julie: Strindberg's Tragic Fairy Tale

Miss Julie: Strindberg's Tragic Fairy Tale EDMUND A. NAPIERALSKI In a letter to Karl Otto Bonnier on IO August 1888, Strindberg hailed Miss Julie as "the first Naturalistic tragedy in Swedish drama.'" Since its first production, critics and audiences have understood Strindberg's indebtedness to the French naturalistic tradition as well as his own prefatory explanation of the play's naturalistic elements: its tight and simple form, its definition of elemental, hereditary, and environmental forces that appear to motivate the characters, its verisimilitude, and the testimony it seems to give to the law of nature that says the fittest shall survive. While few would contest the distinctive contribution Strindberg made to theatrical naturalism in this playas well as in others like The Father (1887) and Creditors (1888), the entire Strindberg canon clearly defines another strain in the art of this complex genius: antinaturalistic, romantic, expressionistic, even mystical. What is commonly thought, however, is that this strain evolved after or at least outside his naturalistic period and came to full bloom in later works like A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). But even in Miss Julie, Strindberg shows through his use of fairy-tale motifs that naturalism could not satisfy him and that its narrow definitions could never contain his vision of tragic human experience. Strindberg's interest in fairy tales, legends, and folk tales runs throughout his career. In the 1870'S, for example, he helped to translate the tales of one of his favorite authors, Hans Christian Andersen; in 1882 he wrote a fairy-tale play, Lucky Peter's Travels; in the 1890'S he started to collect Swedish folk ballads and melodies;' in the early 1900'S he composedSwanwhite (1901),3The Crown Bride (1901), and Abu Casem' sSlippers (1908), all using legends and fairy-tale elements; and in 1903 he published his own collection of original tales, Sagor. Strindberg's interest in legends and fairy tales, then, was not something casual, accidental, or temporary, nor was it limited to a specific period in his life. It should come as no real surprise, then, that fairy-tale elements should appear elsewhere in Strindberg's work,- even in Miss Julie. In a recent article, Philip Miss Julie: Strindberg's Tragic Fairy Tale Dodd notes allusions in the play to a magic brew, to dreams, to a Garden of Paradise. He also mentions Jean's depiction of himself as a swineherd, and the possibility of the lovers' flight to Lake Como, "redolent of the lived-happilyever -after conclusion of many fairy tales.'" Dodd's purpose, however, is to explore Strindberg's indebtedness to Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and to Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy ofthe Unconscious (1884), and he claims that the fairy-tale motifs in Miss Julie "do not saturate the texture ofthe play.". The fairy-tale elements in Miss Julie are present, however, as more than mere allUSIons or ornaments and, in fact, function as structural components to intensify the power of the playas tragedy. Allusions to fairy tales and legends as such run throughout the drama. While Julie and Christine are mixing a potion for Julie's sick dog, Diana, Jean asks, "Is this some magic brew you ladies are preparing on midsummer eve, which will reveal the future and show whom fate has in store for you?"? After they have shared their dreams with each other, Jean suggests, "We must sleep with nine midsummer flowers under our pillow tonight, Miss Julie, and our dreams will come true!" (127).8 Before the ballet, Jean describes himself as one of "those princes in the Arabian Nights, who couldn't eat or drink because oflove" (129). At the end of the play, with the coming of sunrise, Jean claims that now the Devil must surrender his power (152). Trying to persuade Christine to accompany them to Switzerland, Julie promises that they will see King Ludwig's palaces, "just like in the fairy tales" (156). In addition to these allusions, other fairy-tale elements so pervade Miss Julie that they invite the audience to examine the possibility that they define the structure of the playas tragedy. First, there is the romantic setting of the play in...