Miss Julie E-Book

August Strindberg

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Bored with her sheltered existence, Miss Julie attempts to seduce the footman, but gets far more than she bargained for... August Strindberg's classic naturalistic play Miss Julie was written in 1888, and first performed at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1889, despite being banned by the censor. This English version, translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish, is published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series. The volume also includes Strindberg's Preface.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

MISS JULIE

byAugust Strindberg

translated and introduced byKenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading and Note on the Text

Strindberg: Key Dates

Strindberg’s Preface

Characters

Miss Julie

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Johan August Strindberg (1849-1912)

As well as a writer, Strindberg was a linguist, musician, photographer and painter. He earned his living first as librarian and schoolmaster, then – from 1879 onwards, and precariously – by journalism and literature. In his lifetime, his greatest successes were novels, notably the autobiographical The Red Room and the lyrical Hemsö Folk. Throughout his life his plays were controversial: critics and public alike refused to warm to his revisionist historical dramas, his savage Naturalistic tragedies (such as The Father and Miss Julie) and his late, Expressionist allegories.

Part of the reason for public hostility was Strindberg’s own character. He was a man of strong opinions, assertive, quarrel some and woundingly witty both in person and in print. He claimed to see visions, and to have occult experiences. He said, often, that nothing was more important in human character than intellect, but thrashed around in a desperate search for emotional fulfilment which expressed itself in baby-talk and a longing for ‘cuddles’ and was rarely satisfied for long because of his violent mood-swings and acid temper. He was married three times, to Siri von Essen (1877-91), Frida Uhl (1893-94) and Harriet Bosse (1901-04), and railed at his first two wives, and the institution of marriage generally, in private and in public to the point where committal to a mental hospital was seriously contemplated. These marriages – or at least Strindberg’s own heightened view of them – provided the source-material for his most notorious dramatic work, half a dozen plays about the battle of the sexes and the viciousness of women which found no parallels until the wasted emotional landscapes of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill.

Like many 19th-century Scandinavian intellectuals, Strindberg had a love-hate relationship with his fellow-countrymen. He sought critical approval at home, and when he failed to get it he savaged his readers and rivals in newspaper articles, letters and literary works. He spent much time abroad, notably in Switzerland, Austria and Paris (where his friends included painters and music-hall artistes as well as writers and actors). He returned to his native Stockholm in the 1890s, and began at last to make some headway as a dramatist. This period coincided with his third marriage, to a woman thirty years his junior. It was an idyll which lasted only a few months, and when it ended, instead of leading to recrimination as his other marriages had done, it produced in him a kind of bleak, exhausted resignation which, combined with bizarre symbolism and sardonic wit, is very much the mood of his last – and some say greatest – plays.

Miss Julie: What Happens in the Play

The play is in a single span, interrupted only by the appearance of a group of peasants singing and dancing to celebrate Midsummer Night (a time of national rejoicing in Sweden, a 24-hour Saturnalia when social barriers were swept aside and everyone enjoyed a holiday). Apart from three short scenes involving the cook Kristin, it is a two-hander between Miss Julie (literally Lady Julie), daughter of the house, and Jean, the personal servant of his Lordship, her father. Miss Julie, always ‘wild’, has been even more so recently because she has broken off her engagement to a ‘suitable’ but boring fiancé. She now throws herself at Jean, flirting with him, trying to dominate him sexually as she outranks him socially. For his part, he plays games of his own: servant who knows his place, dominant male, wooer, cynic. He is cruel and ambitious, and uses Miss Julie (as he later tells her) as the first branch which will let him climb the tree of success in life. She is torn between head (a mass of ill-digested notions of equality and value inherited from her bluestocking, insane mother) and heart (the longing to be loved for herself, to ‘find peace’ as one half of a true and equal relationship).

The play proceeds rather like Albee’s much later Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Miss Julie and Jean tease each other. They flirt; they row. They plan to elope to Switzerland or Italy and open a hotel – plans which swerve from romantic idealism to desperation and back again. They tell each other (what they claim to be) their life histories and fantasies. They go to Jean’s room for sex, while the peasants dance onstage. Their relationship veers before our eyes between tenderness and savagery, seduction and bullying, truth and lies, radiance and ugliness, emotional support and destruction – and it ends as the play ends, with Miss Julie’s realisation that by what she has done this Midsummer Night she has destroyed herself. She pleads with Jean to license her to end the situation in the only way possible for her: suicide. At first he hesitates, but his character and ambition – and, possibly, tenderness and understanding of her desperation – conquer any other feelings and as the curtain falls he gives her the permission she craves and she leaves the stage. (Some critics see this ending as a kind of reversal of all that has preceded it. Miss Julie’s suicide reverses her downward journey and restores her true status as a ‘high’ character; Jean returns to his ‘low’ status as domestic. Strindberg wrote a stage direction in which the Sun, moving across the floor, irradiates Jean just before he makes his decision – an effect he later deplored as sentimental.)

Naturalism

Naturalism was a literary movement begun in France in the 1860s and in full flood by the time Strindberg lived in Paris two decades later. Its leading practitioners were writers of prose fiction, notably the Goncourt brothers and Zola. Their aim was to describe human nature and behaviour (especially the ‘soul-world’, that is the emotions and the effects on personality of inherited traits and ideas and of relationships) with the same kind of objective scientific thoroughness as was currently being applied to phenomena of the natural world – hence the name Naturalism. This purpose was different from that of the earlier Realists (for example Balzac and Stendhal), who attempted to give prose-portraits of life by accumulating descriptions of detail, and from Romantics such as Dickens and Victor Hugo (who sought emotional and intellectual truth not in detail but in broad-brush assertion, reducing character and social comment to a few confident and eye-catching strokes).

The ‘scientific’ origins of Naturalism show themselves in the idea, put forward by Zola, that readers or spectators should be in the position of students who examine reality through a microscope, observing with detachment what is laid out on the slide before them. In prose fiction readers keep this somewhat godlike role, but the slide is replaced by a presentation not of assembled details (as with Realism) but of scenes ‘as they happen’. Zola originated the phrase ‘a slice of life’, meaning the equivalent of a slice of organic or inorganic material prepared for a slide. In the theatre Ibsen and others talked of removing one wall of a room and letting the audience eavesdrop on the people inside as one might ‘look in on’ the inhabitants of a doll’s house. (The title of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, 1879, owes its origin to this theory, and it is possible that he thought of the title first and elaborated the plot later, as an extension of the same metaphor.)

Another legacy from science to Naturalism in the arts was the view that all phenomena were of equal interest: none was more ‘important’ than any other. In particular, in a way quite different from all previous 19th-century art, ‘lower-class’ characters were regarded, and treated, as if their feelings, desires and emotions, however different in kind they might be from those of upper-class characters, were identical in nature. Van Gogh painted the human condition in farmworkers, drunks and prostitutes. Zola wrote about miners, shop-workers and the ‘ordinary’ criminals whose deeds had previously been subjects mainly for lurid newspaper reports or ballads, as remote from reality as the Moon. In drama, the notion of previous centuries, that ‘tragedy’ and ‘epic’ demanded characters who were larger than life-size, mythical or aristocratic beings, began to be replaced by the idea that ‘small’ lives can be just as powerful if they reveal true human feelings and striving. Strindberg’s Preface to Miss Julie (see page xxv) shows him still struggling with this point of view. He claims that Miss Julie’s position, and that of her father, are what make the tragedy; but it is clear that their dilemma (because it is ‘closed’, ‘moving down’, and has potential only for disaster) interests him less than Jean’s unpredictable, energetic and ‘modern’ outlook, which is ‘moving up’.

In the 1870s and 1880s French Naturalism moved definitively from prose fiction to drama. Zola and others began adapting their works for the stage, Henri Becque produced, in Les Corbeaux (1882) and La Parisienne (1885), two of the most influential of all Naturalist dramas, and in 1887 André Antoine opened the Théâtre Libre, with avowedly Naturalist intentions. At the same time, in Scandinavia, Björnson (with plays such as A Bankruptcy, 1875, and A Gauntlet, 1883) and Ibsen (with his series of powerful prose dramas, beginning with Pillars of Society, 1877) showed how Naturalist ideas about society could be combined with older-fashioned theatrical forms, making plays whose structure flattered audiences because it was familiar and whose content challenged them because it dealt with matters (such as female sexuality or the justness of society) which had hitherto been the province of newspaper editorials rather than ‘entertainment’. By the mid 1880s, the result of all this was that the kind of ‘problem play’ pioneered by Ibsen and others had swept first Europe and then the world – and Strindberg (who felt that he had got there first, and that his experimental style was a more suitable vehicle for ‘new’ thinking than Ibsen’s adherence to older traditions) was left feeling both sidelined and more than a little jealous.

The French Naturalists – and Strindberg their disciple – made great claims for the objectivity of their approach. They said that, like scientists, they were uninterested in artifice, that an author was not involved in his or her material but was a spectator like all the other spectators. The Goncourt brothers claimed to write ‘documentary’ novels: that is, documenting scenes and events as they happened, without streamlining or angling them. Becque said that he incorporated in his dialogue ideas and habits of speech overheard in everyday life. Zola tried never to use metaphor, on the grounds that it was a sly way for an author to manipulate a reader – unlike the simile, which made a direct, ‘scientific’ comparison of one phenomenon with another. Strindberg denied himself the rigid scene-structure and dialogue-patterns of the ‘well-made’ plays current at the time, replacing them with the sprawl and abrupt changes of direction found in real conversation. He also experimented with making elapsed stage time the same as real time.

From the standpoint of a century and more later, all these theories and experiments may seem more half-baked than the Naturalists’ actual achievements. The attempt to do without artifice was itself a form of artifice: the personality of each creator is present in and determines every moment of the work created. Without exception, all the formal experiments of Naturalistic drama were taken up and improved by later playwrights, and the ideals underlying them led to experiments which far outstripped anything the Naturalists imagined. Inventions such as film and television drove all the arts, not just drama, down a road which led to completely new views of what Naturalism was and how it could be achieved. Reading or seeing Strindberg’s plays today, one is struck by how far his ideas were of our time rather than of his own, and yet by how much he was shackled both by contemporary attitudes (including those he despised) and by the fact that he was inventing a ‘language’ of styles and effects as he went along.

In some ways, this division is characteristic of Naturalism as a whole. As an artistic movement, it stands on the threshold of far more interesting and fruitful exploration. Expressionism and Impressionism were its immediate followers, and Freudianism, Existentialism, Absurdism and a dozen other isms lay not far down the same road. In their light, and despite the existence of a couple of dozen masterpieces (among them Miss Julie