Summary
Strindberg suggests dryly that theater has always been something for the young, the uneducated, the illiterate to enjoy because they can see the “pictures” on stage. Now it seems like theater is about to be discarded, going the way of religion.
In other countries there is an attempt to create a new drama by “filling old forms with new contents; but this approach has failed, partly because there has not been time to popularize the new ideas” (56). Strindberg claims he has not tried to create anything new, as that is impossible, but to modernize the form according to the demands of a contemporary audience.
Strindberg continues, explaining that Miss Julie derives from a real incident, an incident that deeply impressed itself upon him. He recognizes he was affected emotionally. Yet the time will come, he suggests, when people will be enlightened enough to look upon brutal and heartless drama such as this, and cast aside superfluous feelings. The heroine of the play arouses our pity because we assume we might be her.
He finds the joy of life in its cruel and powerful struggles, and in getting to know something well. He does not believe a single action has a single motivation, but rather is enmeshed in a whole series of deep-seated motives; it is only the spectator that chooses the motive that he most easily understands.
As for Miss Julie, he has given her tragedy many circumstances ranging from her period to her mother to her father to her own nature to Midsummer night. His treatment is neither too physiological nor too psychological.
He explains that his characters are mostly “character-less” for a few different reasons. The first is that “character” has different meanings, and the most common one is the bourgeoisie one which meant a person was fixed in their traits. Strindberg does not believe in simple, one-note characters and thinks naturalists ought to challenge that. His characters vacillate between old and new; they are “conglomerates of past and present stages and cultures, bits of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as the human soul is patched together” (60).
Miss Julie is a half-woman, half-man. This is not a new creation, and she is part of the age-old struggle of such women to achieve equality. This is an absurd notion, he argues, saying that the modern version of this woman sells herself for “power, decorations, honors, or diplomas as formerly she used to do for money” (60). As they are paragons of degeneration, degenerate men often choose them. She is also a “relic of the old warrior nobility that is now giving way to the new aristocracy of nerve and brain” (61).
Jean is superior to Miss Julie because he is a man, as well as the fact that he is rising in the world, but he does have a slave mentality when it comes to the Count and his religious superstitions.
Kristin is a female slave, subservient and bland like an animal. She uses morality and religion to cover her own sins. Strindberg does not care that this minor character of his is seemingly abstract, because people are abstract when they work. While they perform their task they lack individuality, and the audience does not need to see a character like this in other dimensions.
Finally, Strindberg claims he has allowed his characters’ dialogue to become more wandering, more speculative, and thus more realistic. The action is minor; as is the psychological stuff behind the action that interests people today. They want to know how something happened, not just that it happened.
Technically, Strindberg has eliminated act divisions because his play is only ninety minutes long, and division breaks push people out of the zone they are in while watching the play. He does give the audience a subtle break during the monologue, mime, and ballet. The monologue is not popular with today’s realists, he explains, but it is still a plausible strategy. It can exist in some form in real life, so he finds no problem using it. He uses mime when a monologue is improbable, and brings in music to “exert its beguiling power during the silent action” (65).
As for scenery, he has borrowed asymmetry and cropped framing from Impressionism. He avoids tiresome exits in and out of doors, has only one room, and decorates realistically.
A few final things concern him. He would like lighting from the side, not below; makeup should not be too gratuitous; they should dispense with the visible orchestra and the private proscenium boxes with their fatuous guests; and they ought to have a small stage in a small auditorium, which might allow a new drama to arise and “the theater would at least be a place where educated people might once again enjoy themselves” (68).
Analysis
The preface to Miss Julie is one of the most important statements on Naturalism in the theater. Strindberg was attempting to “position Miss Julie in the avant-garde of Emile Zola’s movement and to counter his earlier criticism of The Father as a naturalistic tragedy,” critic Goran Stockenstrom writes.
Strindberg begins the preface by stating that there is a crisis in theater today, and that the art is in decline because it no longer represents life. As a remedy, he is writing a naturalistic play, one that avoids the stale, formulaic falsity of prior dramas. The Naturalist conceives of the action as a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest situation; the characters who are the “strongest” survive. There is unity of time and place, meaning that the running time of the play usually mirrors the scenic time; the characters are indelibly shaped by their environment and their inherited traits; the dialogue is informal and “wandering;” staged events are similar to real-life ones. He explains that while readers might see Miss Julie’s fate as tragic, they shouldn’t—they only feel that way because they would not want her reversal of fortune to happen to them. Her story is sad, yes, but she is not a classically tragic character.
Stockenstrum sums up Strindberg’s main points in the preface: “[He] stressed the necessity of a natural acting style reflected in speech, gesture, mime, and improvisation, and demanded a realistic blocking of the action, natural makeup and costuming, as well as the abolishing of footlights in favor of sidelighting techniques to harmonize with the realistic style of production he envisioned. His fight against intermissions between acts, which he felt endangered the illusion, made him favor the tight structure of a single act without intervals that would be staged by a small cast on a small stage in a small house.”
Robert Brustein explains that while Strindberg conceives of himself as a Naturalist, there are aspects of the play—and others from this period—that do not fully embody the tenets of the ideology: “Almost all of these works are conceived in a Naturalistic style, which is contradicted in execution by a number of non-naturalistic elements—especially the author's undisguised partisanship of the male character and the masculine position. Strindberg's control of the Naturalistic method is further weakened by his tendency to strip away all extraneous surface details, and sometimes even to sacrifice character consistency and logical action, for the sake of his concentration on the sex war. Still, there is no doubt that Strindberg thinks of himself as a Naturalist during this period…” Alice Templeton agrees, commenting that the preface "is more extreme and rigid in its naturalistic convictions than the play.”
A final note: one of the most disturbing elements in the preface to Miss Julie is Strindberg’s blatant, unapologetic misogyny. He calls Miss Julie a “man-hating half-woman” (60), a “stunted form of human being who stands between man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, [and the child], [who believes she is] meant to be the equal of man or could ever be, [and therefore] involves herself in an absurd struggle in which she falls” (60). She is a type who “thrusts herself forward and sells herself nowadays for power, decorations, honours, or diplomas as formerly she used to do for money” (60). He is full of disdain in the preface and in the way he writes Miss Julie in the play itself; his sympathies are with Jean, who is physically strong and virile, industrious and dexterous, clever and manipulative. Brustein says Strindberg “exalts the hard masculine virtues” and that the most admirable quality for him is strength— “strength of will, strength of intellect, strength of body. Thus, his male characters are often conceived as Nietzschean Supermen, endowed with the courage to live beyond bourgeois morality. For Strindberg professes to find a grim pleasure in the tragic quality of human existence and the tough, predatory character of human nature.” Templeton notes that “the misogyny of the preface resides in the wry pleasure it takes in the demise of Julie and her misguided desire to live outside her so-called ‘natural’ gender and class stations.”
