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  • Miss Julie via Manda Björling, 1906–1912Embodiment, Conceptual Blending, and Reception
  • Lawrence D. Smith (bio)

At the time of its premiere in Stockholm, Sweden's capital city, in 1906, August Strindberg's Miss Julie had been in print for over eighteen years and was familiar to Swedish audiences almost exclusively as a published text rather than through performance.1 Journalistic responses to the 1906 production particularly emphasize the issue of the performer's body in relation to the text, and especially the actor's physicality compared to the fictive body of the title character. This paper applies theories of embodied cognitive processes, in particular conceptual blending, to an analysis of primary sources detailing audience responses to Manda Linderoth-Björling (1876–1960) in the title role. The framing question for this analysis is: How did fundamental cognitive processes, which are largely unconscious, inform the critical reception of Manda Björling as Miss Julie for spectators more familiar with their own embodied "blends" of the character?

"Embodiment" is used here to identify a number of neurocognitive processes from which consciousness and conceptual thinking arise. Some of the embodied processes considered here include our attunement to faces, voices, and intentional gestures; how language and meaning-making are embodied; and how emotions are embodied experiences that dispose one toward taking action (or "concern-based construals").2 These everyday processes (evolutionary, biological endowments, shaped by cultural practices) when engaged in hypothetical play, such as a drama, shape a spectator's perception of an actor/character. They are what make aesthetic, mimetic performance possible for us, and they are a means of understanding, at least in part, the responses of historical audiences. [End Page 53]

Theoretically, one such process, "conceptual blending," is essential to playwriting, acting, and audience engagement.3 For example, the composition of Miss Julie occurred within a very tight timeframe of about six weeks between July 1 and August 10, 1888, and within very turbulent lived circumstances for the playwright.4 This composition process may best be understood by applying the theory of "conceptual blending" and the related idea of "input spaces" developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. "Inputs" (or "mental spaces") are a key component in the model of conceptual blending. Described as discrete "conceptual packets" that are constructed during thought and speech (or writing) "for the purposes of local understanding and action," several inputs may serve to provide concepts (in the case of a play, dramatis personae and actions) that can be combined in a "blended" or "fourth space" (a hypothetical scenario).5 Constructing a blend is selective but also occurs largely on a preconscious (or intuitive) level. In the case of Miss Julie, some of the real-life people and events that Strindberg knew and seems to have drawn upon in creating the title character, such as Siri von Essen (1850–1912), his estranged spouse; the Danish author Victoria Benedictsson (1850–1888) and her multiple suicide attempts; and the Countess Anna Louisa Frankenau (1848–?), in whose dilapidated villa Strindberg and his family lived before and during the writing of the play, each provided "input spaces" resulting in a conceptual blend ("Miss Julie"), without Miss Julie being any of those three persons. Somewhat presciently, Strindberg describes his "characterless characters" in an analogous manner as "conglomerates of past and present stages of culture, bits out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as the human soul is patched together."6 Considering such elements as "inputs" illustrates how selective information from discrete experiences were combined, reassembled, and reconfigured in Miss Julie without reducing the text to an autobiographical document. The process of "conceptual blending" extends to the experiences of reading, performing, and watching a play.7

Miss Julie, along with the author's preface, was published in Sweden in the fall of 1888 and acquired an enthusiastic readership. But due to official censorship and the restrictions of social convention, production of the play was sporadic and far-flung. The inauspicious "world" premiere was by Strindberg's own short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in March 1889, and featured von Essen in the title role. This bilingual production (Julie...

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