Summary
Miss Julie enters dressed in traveling clothes.
Jean tells her that she is a sight and her face is dirty, so she wipes it off. The sun is rising. She tells him she has money now so he can come with her; there is no way she wants to travel alone on Midsummer day. He agrees, but says they can take no luggage. She is dismayed not to be able to take her birdcage and siskin because it is her one memory of this home. She says she’d rather it be dead than left with someone else, so Jean takes it and lops its head off.
Miss Julie screams that he might as well kill her if he can kill an innocent creature without a second thought. She hates and despises him, and curses him violently.
He tells her to get going, but she pauses. She hears a carriage outside, and says furiously that she is not afraid of blood. She’d like to see his blood, brains, and genitals on the chopping block. She disparages his name and says she is staying now and she does not care if the storm breaks when her father comes home. This will be the real end, as his Lordship will have a stroke and die of shock; the line of their family will be broken. Jean tells her to quiet down the “blue blood” talk.
Kristin enters, and Miss Julie rushes to her, imploring her as a woman to help out another woman. Jean slips out to shave. Miss Julie suggests the three of them go to Switzerland, and tries to convince Kristin it would be a good idea. She waxes poetic about the place, talking about how Kristin would be like a queen in her kitchen and would get a rich English husband and they’d all be rich and live at Lake Como.
Kristin listens, then asks if she really believes that. Defeated, Miss Julie replies that she does not believe in anything anymore.
Jean comes in, and Kristin starts to criticize Miss Julie. Jean rebukes Kristin but she says at least she has never fallen below her station. She speaks of going to church and how Jesus can take one’s sins if a person is penitent enough. Intrigued, Miss Julie asks to whom grace is given. Kristin tells her the last can be first in God’s eyes, then leaves for church.
Miss Julie asks Jean dully if there is a way out of this. He does not know. She asks what he'd do in her place, taking his shaving razor and miming moving it across her throat. He says he would not do that. She says she wants to but cannot, and that she thinks her father should have. Jean replies that he had to be revenged first.
When he asks if Miss Julie ever loved her father, she says yes, but she also hated him. He raised her to feel contempt for herself as a “half-woman and half-man” (108). It is like she has never had a self of her own, never had a thought of her own she did not get from her father or an emotion she did not get from her mother.
A bell rings signaling his Lordship is home. Jean jumps up and answers, reporting that his lordship wants his coffee and boots in half an hour. Miss Julie sighs that she is too tired to do anything—she cannot repent, run away, stay, live, or die. She asks Jean to order her to do what she ought to do. He is uncomfortable now, and says he cannot. He feels his Lordship’s power pressing down on him.
Miss Julie excitedly says they ought to pretend his Lordship is ordering Jean to tell her what to do. Jean comes to her with the razor and whispers in her ear. She thanks him and asks him to tell her one thing—that the first can receive the gift of grace. He responds that she is actually among the last.
Jean is distressed now, hearing the bell again and wishing it would stop. He cringes, and tells her there is no other way and she has to go.
She walks resolutely through the door.
Analysis
The play comes to a close with Miss Julie’s putative suicide after she realizes there is no other way out for her. She also comes to this decision at the urging and guidance of Jean, whom she asks to tell her what to do. After equivocating and obsessing over the sound of the bell, which signifies the Count’s need of him, he bursts out, “It’s horrible! But there is no other way!—Go!” (110). Alice Templeton offers a cogent analysis of the end of the play and its message, which, although long, deserves to be quoted at length: “If Julie's suicide can be seen as motivated by an upper-class code of honor, it is not a code that personally or inwardly moves her but rather one that she feels she ‘ought’ to act on. It is made clear at the end of the play, through the characters' desperation, Jean's fear of the Count, and Julie's hypnotic fantasy, that neither character is particularly controlled, willful, or committed: they are equally exhausted and powerless. The naturalistic worldview that Jean so readily endorses as he seduces and then condemns Julie has reached a fatal conclusion, and the characters are left with no choice but to see the logic through to its ‘horrible’ end. Rather than being triumphant over Jean because of her finer sense of honor—rather than destroying herself in opposition to Jean—Julie destroys herself within the logic of the naturalistic worldview that Jean so effectively imposes on them both throughout the play. She is, therefore, a victim, but paradoxically it is only by Julie's destroying herself within the logic of a naturalistic worldview that the play, understood as a whole, can symbolically censor that reductive, finally fatal vision. The play's critique of naturalism is thus larger than any one character's representation of it.”
Some critics have focused on this issue of hypnotism, suggesting Miss Julie was under a sort of spell and was thus doing Jean’s bidding in a way she would not have if she were of sound mind. Goran Stockenstrum suggests that “The intense absorption of Julie in this state of trance creates the psychological motivation for her acceptance of suicide as the only possible solution.” John L. Greenway says that “Julie's warped childhood (her feminist mother reversed gender roles on the estate and reared her as a male) would physiologically render her particularly susceptible to suggestion such as Jean's ‘guidance’ at the end of the play when he gives her the razor” and that her mother, who went insane because of the pressures of being a “half-woman,” passed on these traits and tendency toward insanity. Greenway calls attention to Strindberg’s repeated inclusion of the fact that Miss Julie is on her period and explains that Victorian scientists “accepted that women were unnaturally susceptible to shocks and incapacitation because of the drain upon their reproductive energy at this time and, of course, their already limited neural resources.” Ultimately, he claims that Strindberg depicted Miss Julie as “typical of the deviant, modern, nervous woman, with a high vulnerability to suggestion,” which makes her suicide-as-a-result-of-suggestion a likely possibility.
There is also the theory that Jean too is under some state of hypnosis—in his case, by the Count. He merely hears the bell ring that signifies the Count needs him, and becomes deeply disturbed and refuses to tell Miss Julie what to do: “I don’t know why—but now I can’t either—I don’t understand—it’s just as if this coat made me—I can’t order you—and now, since his Lordship spoke to me—then—I can’t explain it properly—but—oh, it’s this damned lackey sitting on my back!—I do believe if his lordship came down and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot” (109). He chides himself for being “afraid of a bell” (110) but cannot escape his ingrained sense of servility. Critic Una Chaudhuri writes that at the end of the play, “Jean’s class transgression is so decisively quelled” and that “significantly, this rout of Jean's (and indeed all modernity's) attempt to de-essentialize class is played out as yet another transfer of hypnotic power, this time from Jean to the now-present (but still diegetic) Count. The Count's peculiar contribution to the play's completion is unmistakably linked to the figure of hypnosis, a relation that had been explicitly anticipated earlier…In the play's final moments, Jean has what amounts to a hypnotic epiphany, a recognition of the ‘truth’ of the trance, (but from within the trance, making it more demonstration than recognition)...While the overall effect of this passage is to enact, one last time, Jean's inbred servility, its oddly theoretical content—its assertion of a signal truth—draws attention to the figure of the Count, and specifically to his functioning in a way that reminds us of the preface's ‘author-hypnotist.’”
A final note: Templeton also looks at the character of Kristin (she spells it “Christine,” having used a different translation) and suggests that “Both Christine and Jean condemn Miss Julie for breaking the conventional sexual and class rules, and both in their own ways reduce Julie's desire to one-dimensional need. Christine's Christian vision denies the fullness of Julie's human predicament as completely as Jean's naturalism warps Julie's desire into a scenario of sexual desperation, an ironic reversal of Julie's belittlement of Christine earlier in the play.” Kristin/Christine gives Miss Julie a way to take herself out of the world and still save face, which Kristin knows is important to the aristocratic, fragile woman. Some critics suggest Kristin is deliberately saying this so that Miss Julie will kill herself, though that is far from being obvious. Regardless of why she says it, Kristin’s religious advice is problematic and certainly has an impact to some degree on what Miss Julie chooses to do (or should we say “what happens to her?”).
