Miss Julie: Strindberg's Tragic Fairy Tale

Abstract

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 play as 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.