Summary
Kristin is alone. She hums to music, cleans up, lights a candle, crisps her hair, goes to the door and listens, picks up Miss Julie’s handkerchief and sniffs it, and then folds it.
Jean enters, again talking about how crazy Miss Julie is—the way she dances and how people laugh at her. Kristin shrugs that she is on her period right now and is always like that during this time of the month. Jean teases Kristin, asking if she is okay that he danced with Miss Julie. Kristin says of course she is, and she knows her place. He tells her she will make a good fiancée.
Miss Julie enters, chiding Jean for running away from her. She also asks why he is wearing livery on a holiday. He moves away to take it off, and she laughs that it is just a coat and he needn’t hide. While he is standing to the side, she asks Kristin if she and Jean are engaged. Kristin replies that they call it that. Miss Julie is confused by her wording, and Kristin says knowingly that Miss Julie was also “engaged” and it came to nothing.
Jean returns in a black tailcoat and derby hat, and Miss Julie compliments him in French. He replies in French and she asks where he learned it. He says he was a sommelier at a hotel in Lucerne.
After Miss Julie adds that he looks charming in the coat, he says she flatters him. This piques her, and he says in his modesty he cannot believe that was a true compliment so she must be flattering him. She wonders how he learned to talk as he does, and asks where he came from. He says his father was a laborer on the next estate and he used to see Miss Julie as a child. There was one time in particular, he hints at, but will say no more.
Kristin has fallen asleep. Jean gestures to her and says she will make a good wife but she talks in her sleep. Miss Julie asks how he knows that and he says he has heard her. They look at each other.
Miss Julie asks Jean to sit down but he refuses; he says he will not unless it is an order. She says it is indeed but asks for a drink first. He says there is only beer, and she says that is fine because she has simple tastes. He opens beer and serves her.
She asks him to stay and drink to her health. He exaggerates and kneels and raises his glass. Then she tells him to grab her foot and kiss it, which he does. She laughs that he should have been an actor.
Jean gets up and says someone might see them and will talk. Miss Julie is dismissive, but asks what people are saying. He alludes to what people tend to say when a woman drinks alone at night with a male servant. She says they aren’t alone, but Jean points out that Kristin is asleep.
Kristin mumbles incoherently and Miss Julie tells him to wake her. Sharply, Jean says someone standing over a stove all day has a right to rest. Miss Julie changes her tone and says that was well-put, and that he should come outside and pick her lilac.
Jean is reluctant to do so but Miss Julie urges him, and says no one will think she is in love with her servant. He says it has been known to happen and “nothing’s sacred to these people” (79). Miss Julie wonders at this, and he adds cryptically that she ought not to step down, for people will always say she fell.
Miss Julie says she has a higher opinion of people than he does, and he responds that she is strange. She sighs and says maybe, but so is he and so is everything. She has a dream from time to time where she is perched atop a pillar and cannot come down even though she wants to; she has no courage to jump and wants to fall and then bury herself in the earth. Jean says in his dreams he is lying under a tall tree and wants to climb and keeps doing so but it is slippery and he wants to make it to the first branch but cannot.
Miss Julie says they are swapping dreams, and asks him to come to the park. He says there is something in his eye and she takes him and sits him down to help remove the speck of dust. As she does so, she notes he is trembling, and compliments his arms. He warns her not to proceed.
Kristin wakes up and stumbles out of the room to bed.
Miss Julie demands Jean kiss her hand, and he gives in but says she has to blame herself. She asks for what, and he replies that she is not a child; she is twenty-five and knows it is dangerous to play with fire. She laughs and says she is insured. He says that is not true, and there is “more inflammable material around” (81).
She assumes he means himself, and she says that he is a Don Juan, but perhaps a Joseph (as in the Joseph from the Bible who will not allow himself to be seduced by Potiphar’s wife). She says she almost fears that, and he takes her around the waist. She slaps him and says to kiss her cheek. He asks if she is serious and she says yes.
Jean looks at her and says being serious is the problem, and this is a dangerous game. He plans to get back to his work, as Miss Julie’s father, the Count, needs his boots. Miss Julie is not to be deterred, and asks if he has been in love. He replies that he has fancied many girls and was once sick when he could not get the one he wanted. She is curious and says she is asking as an equal and a friend.
He admits, to her shock, that it was her, and tells a story of being a child and weeding the onion beds with his mother. He saw a beautiful building—the Turkish pavilion—and snuck in. He heard someone coming and began to run, ending up in the rose garden. There he saw “a pink dress and a pair of white stockings—it was you” (83) and began to despair that “if it’s true that a thief can enter heaven and dwell with the angels, then it’s strange that a labourer’s child here on God’s earth cannot enter the Hall park and play with the Count’s daughter” (83).
Miss Julie wonders aloud that it must be awful to be poor. Overcome with emotion, Jean says he ran into the stream and got his clothes wet and was given a thrashing, but that the next Sunday he dressed up and snuck over to the church to see her again. He was determined to see her and then go home and die beautifully. He took poison from the elder bush and prepared to die, but people found him and though he was very ill he survived. He knew he would never win her, but tells her “you stood for how hopeless it was ever to escape from the class in which I was born” (83).
Miss Julie tells him he is a charming storyteller and asks if he went to school. He replies that he did a little, but he also went to the theater and listened to people talking. Once, he admits, he heard Miss Julie and a girlfriend talking, and was shocked by the language they were using. She tells him shame on him and says that when she was engaged she did not talk like that.
Jean asks if he has permission to go to bed now, and that he is not interested in dancing with the other servants. She tells him to take her out on the lake and show her the sunrise. He does not want to, saying he refuses to be a laughingstock or “be dismissed without reference” (85) or neglect his duty to Kristin. He tells her to take his advice and go to bed.
Voices sound; the revelers are coming and Jean says they are coming to search for him and cannot find them together. Miss Julie insists she knows these people and she loves them and they love her. Jean urges her to realize that they do not love her, and are currently singing an obscene song about her and Jean.
Jean says they better run away, and his room is right there. He insists that “Necessity knows no law; and you can trust me, I’m your true, loyal, and respectful friend” (86). He says he will bolt the door so they cannot break it down. Giving him a knowing look, Miss Julie asks if he promises. He says he swears, and they exit.
Analysis
At the end of this section Jean and Miss Julie finally come together, their sexual encounter seemingly fated. Miss Julie is clearly attracted to the roguishness of Jean and how he provides a glimpse of a different life, and Jean sees Miss Julie as a sexual and class conquest. The two of them have no real feelings for each other as human beings, and are merely using the other to fulfill some sort of fantasy. We already know there is no way that this can end well for them.
Both characters are types, a core tenet of naturalism. Miss Julie is bound and shaped by her circumstances and her situation. She is an unhappy aristocrat, desperate to prove that she has something in common with the lower-class people in her orbit. She claims she prefers beer because she has “simple tastes” (77), joins the servants’ dances because she claims Midsummer erases differences of rank, and tells of her frequent dream that she is atop a pillar and wishes to get down because she knows “I’ll get no peace until I come down, no rest until I come down, down to the ground, and were I to reach the ground I’d want to bury myself in the earth” (79). She feels a profound sense of ennui, deeming everything to be strange, and thinking “Life, people, everything’s a scum that drifts, drifts on across the water, until it sinks, sinks” (79). Even more simply, she is a woman on her period, which Kristin notes always makes Miss Julie a little off; every element of Miss Julie’s life works to render her almost passive.
Critic Alice Templeton provides an analysis of Miss Julie, explaining that she is a romantic bound by naturalistic forces: “Julie's ‘desperate fight against nature’ is of course embodied in her struggle with Jean, the spokesman in the play for naturalism. Her romanticism is primarily a profound discontent with the sexual and class conventions of her day and an accompanying desire to abandon those socially-defined differences, at least for the holiday night during which the play takes place. According to Strindberg, Julie's tragedy is that she is caught in the middle of indifferent life-forces that doom her to weakness and death. But also in large part her tragedy is that she is not a naturalist: in the first half of the play she does not or cannot give in to a deterministic worldview, and she will not accept her ‘natural’ destiny as woman and as aristocrat. As a result, she appears to pursue her own destruction.”
Jean is also a type—the lower-class man, torn between respecting the class structure because he desperately wants to be in its next echelon, and decrying that it even exists at all because he does not quite fit in anywhere. He is the son of a laborer, but speaks French and likes the theater and grasps at the trappings of the aristocracy. He is ambitious and intelligent, willing to do what it takes to get ahead but, as Strindberg writes, still has a “slave mentality” that “expresses itself in his respect for the Count (the boot) and his religious superstition” (62).
Strindberg indicates that Jean changes his opinions based on expediency, writing that what he says is important but only “when [emphasis added] he speaks the truth—that is, which he often does not do, for he tends to say what is to his advantage rather than what is true” (62). This can be glimpsed in the story Jean tells Miss Julie of being in love with her as a child. It is perhaps true in some parts, but it is also overblown. Miss Julie tells him he is a “charming storyteller” (83) and he admits he has “read lots of novels and been to theatre” and has “heard posh people talk” (84). Strindberg finds him superior because he is a man, but his sympathies are more with the aristocracy (see next analysis). Templeton points out that there are actually some similarities between the characters, and concludes that Strindberg is an astute observer of the way class isn’t really fixed but seems like it is: “The characters, despite their sexual and class differences, are interchangeable in many ways: Julie drinks beer while Jean drinks wine, both are equally capable of manipulating and abusing others, and their sexual mores are not significantly different, as is seen in the mistreatment of their fiancés. These shared qualities suggest that sexual and class differences are not natural and therefore determined, but are social and therefore, to some extent, changeable. The play, however, finally suggests that while gender and class may be social rather than natural constructions, they are so deeply internalized in the language and behavior of both characters as to seem determined and fixed by nature.”
