Summary
The scene is a large kitchen. To the right is a “large, arched exit with two glass doors, through which is seen a fountain decorated with a cupid, lilac bushes in bloom, and some tall Lombardy poplars” (71).
Kristin is frying something in the frying pan and is wearing a light cotton dress and an apron. Jean enters and comments that Miss Julie is crazy tonight. He had come from the station and stopped by the servants’ dance, where he saw her with the gamekeeper. When she saw Jean, she rushed over and asked him to waltz with her. Kristin shrugs that Miss Julie has been this way for two weeks, ever since her engagement ended.
Jean wonders about that, and why a young lady would want to stay home with the servants rather than visit family with her father. Kristin suggests she is embarrassed. Jean asks if Kristen knows what happened, and explains that he saw Miss Julie “training” the fiancé down by the stables. The man became frustrated and took the whip and broke it ["broke" is a difficult word to translate from the Swedish; some directors translate this to the man hitting her with the whip and leaving a mark] and left.
Kristin is surprised, but Jean changes the subject by asking what she is making for him. She rumples his hair and he begins eating. She offers him beer and he scoffs that he can do better than that on Midsummer Eve, and finds a bottle of red wine. Kristin chides him for his snobbery.
Jean says he will make her a fine fiancé, and then sips the wine and compliments it. He asks again what Kristin is making and she says it is something for Miss Julie. He asks why she is “cooking for that little cur on a holiday” (73). He gives his opinion that Miss Julie is stuck-up about some things and decidedly not about others, and that he thinks she is no lady at all. After all, she forced the gamekeeper to dance with her. He thinks that they would not behave like that, but “that’s how it is when the gentry try to act common—they become common” (73). But he cannot help but compliment her figure and the way she dances. Kristin rolls her eyes, and asks him if he will want to dance with her when she is done cooking. He says yes, and thanks her for dinner.
Miss Julie begins to enter the kitchen as Jean hides the wine. When Jean compliments the smell of violets, she laughs coquettishly and tells him he certainly knows how to dance. Jean jokes about what the ladies are cooking up—perhaps some potion for Midsummer?
Miss Julie asks Jean to dance with her, and he says he’d promised it to Kristin. Kristin tells him he can't refuse if her Ladyship requests. Jean asks Miss Julie if it is wise for her to dance twice with the same partner, as people tend to watch and jump to conclusions.
Miss Julie is offended and asks what he means. Jean is polite and replies that he will be more plainspoken—it is not right for her to prefer one person while others await.
She is annoyed and says she can dance with anyone she pleases, that is an honor for her to bestow and she will do it. Jean says he is at her service and will do as she commands.
She replies softly that it is not a command and that tonight everyone will enjoy themselves. She laughs to Kristin that she will not run off with her fiancé.
Analysis
True to Strindberg’s preface, the play appears to be decidedly naturalistic. The setting is a simple kitchen and all the action takes place there; the dialogue is informal and Strindberg has clearly allowed his characters’ “brains to work irregularly as they do in real life, where no subject is ever completely exhausted before one mind discovers by chance in another mind a cog in which to engage” (63); and the characters are clearly ossified as a result of their class station and their gender, with the concomitant desire to move between or beyond such categories forming the essential tension of the play.
We meet the three main characters, who are indeed the only substantial characters (the Count is a spectral presence, and the other servants will only wander onstage to dance and sing to indicate the passage of a small amount of time). Kristin is the cook, a decidedly straightforward and religious person. Strindberg called her a “slave” in his preface: “Standing over the stove all day has made her subservient and dull, like an animal her hypocrisy is unconscious and she overflows with morality and religion, which serve as cloaks and scapegoats for her sins whereas a stranger character would have no need of them because he could bear his guilt himself or explain it away. She goes to church to unload her household thefts onto Jesus casually and deftly, and to recharge herself with a new dose of innocence” (63). This is an accurate but extremely harsh description of Kristin, and one can certainly identify strains of misogyny in this characterization.
Jean is a handsome, young, and virile man. He enters the play declaring how crazy Miss Julie is, and never lets up with his particular cocktail of arrogance, judgment, self-aggrandizement, and criticism. He does seem to have affection for Kristin, but his own needs are always front and center. Though Jean professes disdain for Miss Julie and the gentry as a whole, he tries to adopt their behaviors. He chooses to drink wine instead of beer, bragging to Kristin that it is the best wine there is. He is familiar with the types of flowers the gentry like, leading Miss Julie to compliment him for knowing about perfumes. Later in the play, he will reveal that he speaks French and likes the theater—more trappings of the gentry.
Strindberg’s comments about Jean in the preface focus on his divided self, his “indecisive character, wavering between sympathy for those in high positions and hatred for those who occupy them” (62). He has “finely developed senses (smell, taste, and sight) and an eye for beauty” (62), but is a “stranger in his environment” (62). Ultimately, he “calls himself an aristocrat and has learnt the secrets of good society, is polished on the surface but coarse underneath, and already wears a frock coat with style, although there is no guarantee that the body beneath it is clean” (62). Alice Templeton provides more insight into the character, writing that “Jean, who in a very different play might sympathize with Julie's predicament, also feels trapped in the class system, but his response opposes hers” and that “Rather than reject the system, he seeks to beat it, to rise within it— ‘to get up, up to the very top’—and so he is dedicated to its perpetuation. Ironically, Jean is both the discontented servant who possesses an uneasy class consciousness and the play's central spokesman for social and biological determinism.”
As servants are wont to do, both Kristin and Jean judge and gossip about their employers. Jean wonders why Miss Julie did not go away to visit relatives for Midsummer, and confides in Kristin what he knows about Miss Julie’s breakup with her fiancé. He sneers that “She’s so stuck-up about some things, and not proud enough about others, just like her Ladyship when she was alive…To my mind she’s no lady” (73). He generalizes about “them” and “us,” claiming “We’d not behave like that; but that’s how it is when the gentry try to act common—they become common” (73). His only praise for Miss Julie is, unsurprisingly, for her looks— “What a splendid creature, though! Quite magnificent! Oh! What shoulders and—etcetera!” (73).
To conclude (but we will also discuss this in later analyses), in these first few pages of the play, Strindberg is showing that the imminent encounter/conflict between Jean and Miss Julie is almost inevitable because of their disparate positions in the class and gender hierarchies, and that the way they behave is a product of numerous factors acting upon their psyches.
