[In the following essay, Franchuck explores the symbolism in Miss Julie.]

The theme of Strindberg's Miss Julie (Fröken Julie, 1888), the struggle for sexual ascendancy between a liberated young woman and an ambitious young man who is her social inferior, continues to hold fascination even in times such as our own, which purport to be sexually liberated, socially egalitarian, and feminist. Perhaps, one might speculate, fascination with the play, its characters, and its situation is especially intense in such times. Certainly awareness of an interest in sexual politics have not lessened in the century since the play appeared. Since it has been a century dominated to a large extent by the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud, this is hardly surprising.

Indeed, Freud has influenced not only the way we, as a late twentieth-century audience, see the play, but also to a considerable degree how directors and producers stage it. Alf Sjoberg's acclaimed film version (1950) perhaps laid the groundwork for a growing tradition of lading the play with as much Freudian symbolism as it can be made to bear. Who can forget the orgiastic dance around a very phallic maypole that Sjoberg substituted for the indoor peasant's dance that takes place while Jean is making physical love to Julie off-stage? More recently, the BBC version of the play, directed by Michael Simpson in 1987, used suggestively arranged phallic-shaped loaves of bread in the same scene (now transferred back indoors, as Strindberg intended) to the same purpose.

It is perhaps worth recalling, then, that The Interpretation of Dreams was not published until 1900, and that there is no evidence that Strindberg ever had any knowledge of either it or its author. It may be inevitable that we now view the play through Freud-tinted glasses; but a more useful way of viewing the play, and of staging it, might be with reference to Strindberg's own highly developed and consistent system of symbols, rather than to symbols which achieved popularity and significance only after the play had already done so.

Indeed Miss Julie, although the more naturalistic of Strindberg's plays, makes extensive use of symbolism. The problem—and the challenge—for the director is to find ways in which the play's symbols can be brought to the attention of the audience, particularly an audience which is not Scandinavian and which is not particularly familiar with either Strindberg or his times. Solutions are not always easily come by but, if successful, should permit the audience to enter more fully into the world of the play and into its meaning.

Unfortunately, some of the symbolism seems destined to remain inaccessible to the non-Scandinavian general audience: those associated with the fact that the action of Miss Julie occurs on Midsummer Eve. There are references to the dancing associated with the festival, to the custom of decorating with birch branches in leaf, to the folk belief that if unmarried girls collect nine midsummer flowers and sleep with them under their pillows they will dream of their future husbands, and to the very early sunrise, the light from which illuminates Jean in the final moments of the play. These elements, which are cultural, are perhaps best dealt with through programme notes.

Midsummer Day is the Feast of St John the Baptist (24 June), which explains the reference to the lesson to be read in church that day, concerning his beheading. The contrast between the sober respectability of the Feast and the pagan revelry of the Eve, a contrast pointed by the church-going Kristin, parallels the contrast between Julie's world of ideals and Jean's world of physical reality. The birch twigs in leaf which decorate the scene are traditional Swedish Midsummer accoutrements and symbolize all kinds of good things, such as life, joy, celebration, and the life force. At another time of year, however, birch twigs, not yet in leaf, have another significance: during Lent they symbolize penance and punishment for sin. Is there, perhaps, significance in Strindberg's placing his leafed birch twigs around Kristin's kitchen stove, another of his favourite symbols for suffering and punishment?

Strindberg admits that the Midsummer sunrise which closes the play is not a naturalistic device (it has symbolic significance: Jean has reached the place in the sun after which he strives in his recurring dream; he has exercised the power of life and death over another human being; something completely outside the scope of a mere lackey when he writes to publisher Karl Otto Bonnier (whose firm eventually refused the play) on 21 August 1888, concerning his next The Creditors (Fordringsägare):

[…] in a week I shall send you a new naturalistic tragedy, better even than Miss Julie, with three characters, a table and two chairs, and no sunrise!¹

Also in the category of symbols which cannot easily be made accessible to the theatre audience is much of the rich imagery employed by Jean, the instrument through whom Strindberg, who only two years previously had written an autobiographical novel in which he characterized himself as The Son of the Servant (Tjänstekvinnans son, 1886), avenged his feelings of inferiority towards (Baroness) Siri von Essen his first wife (to whom he was married from 1877 to 1891; it was Siri who premièred the Julie, in Copenhagen in 1889). Flower imagery forms an important part of this. Strindberg's comment in his preface to the play should be looked at in this connection:

I think it must be the same with love as it is with the hyacinth, which must establish roots in the dark before it can produce a strong flower. Here, it shoots up and produces flower and seed all at once, and that is why the plant dies so quickly.²

This and examples of flower symbolism in the text of the play itself (Strindberg was very interested in and made habitual use of a fin-de-siècle enthusiasm known as the ‘language of flowers’, which assigned very specific meanings to most flowers and herbs and many other plants) are interesting, and unravelling the mysteries they conceal has its own pleasures: in the ‘language of flowers’ lilacs signified the, for instance, ‘first emotions of love’.³

Other symbols, of course, are much more important and should be brought to an audience's attention theatrically. The earliest example of such symbolism in the play, and one which recurs throughout, is that of dogs. Julie has made her fiance jump over her riding crop like a trained dog before the play opens; her pedigreed lapdog, significantly named Diana (the goddess known to the Greeks as Artemis, patroness of chastity and coincidentally, associated with dogs: witness the fate of hapless Actaeon), has mated with the gatekeeper's pug, with foreseeable consequences (later Kristin will draw the parallel to Julie's indiscretion with Jean, and Julie herself speculates on the possibility of bearing children to her former servant); Julie refers to Jean as ‘you dog, who wear my collar’;⁴ and finally it is Julie who is the trained dog, jumping at Jean's command.

The choice of animal in these symbols is significant as well as appropriate: dogs were an animal Strindberg is known to have loathed. Indeed, he once observed that the only thing he despised more than dogs was people who kept dogs! This would seem to indicate that Strindberg had little sympathy for Julie, her former fiancé, or, indeed, Jean. It further indicates that at the beginning of the play it is Julie, mistress of both the performing fiancé and the unfortunate Diana, who has least sympathy, while when the tables are turned and Julie must jump over Jean's riding crop, it is he who has become the bigger villain. At any rate, there would seem to be ample suggestion here of the nature of Julie and Jean's love-making—raw unmitigated animal passion at the very least—without resorting to Freud-inspired phallic fantasies! Strindberg affords the director ample opportunity to underscore this and other symbolism in the unscripted peasant-dance interlude: to show their awareness of what is going on in Jean's bedroom, for instance, the peasants might very well howl, growl, bark, and even pantomime canine copulation (similarly, they might begin to beat each other with the Midsummer birch branches to emphasize the dual nature of this symbol: the passage from joy to sorrow).

A particularly effective example of animal symbolism, and one which has direct bearing on the nature of the relationship between Julie and Jean, occurs in a passage restored to the play only as recently as 1984.⁵ As Julie gradually realizes that her affair with Jean can lead nowhere, her class consciousness returns to her and the sexual encounter suddenly appears monstrous to her. Jean's retort to her comments, quoting the punishment for bestiality prescribed by the Swedish Criminal Code, indicates that he knows exactly what she is thinking. After exposure to the passages mentioned above, the audience has no doubt about just what kind of animal is involved here:

MISS Julie:
… I'd like to have you put to death, like an animal …
JEAN:
‘The guilty party is condemned to two years of hard labour and the animal is put to death!’ Isn't that it?
MISS Julie:
Precisely!(6)

The stark realism (not to say coarseness) of Jean's retort was too much for the original publisher of the play, Joseph Seligmann, who softened it considerably to the version which then stood for almost a century: ‘As one hastens to shoot a mad dog. Isn't that it?’ Not only is Strindberg's version much stronger, but it places the blame for what happened squarely on Julie rather than on the ambitious Jean, as the censored version does! With this piece of dialogue restored, Julie's reaction to her moment of sexual weakness is very similar to that exhibited by the hero of Strindberg's novella ‘Chandala’ (‘Tschandala’, written the same year as Miss Julie, 1888) after he has consumated his lust for the gypsy's sister. Like Miss Julie, that story also deals with a sexual liaison between social unequals, and it also makes particularly effective use of Strindberg's aversion to dogs.

By the end of Miss Julie, the heroine's fate is linked to that of another animal: the pet bird which is killed by Jean. Although its death fore-shadows Julie's own, making it clear that while her death is technically a suicide, it is Jean who wields the knife in both cases, it also symbolizes her fall from grace and innocence in the act of union with Jean. ‘There is blood between us!’ Julie exclaims after the bird has been killed, ‘I curse the moment I saw you … !’⁸ Symbolically, the blood is that of her virginity, which Jean has just taken as coldly and matter-of-factly as he has taken the bird's life!

Another symbolic pattern is central to the meaning of the play and runs through all of Strindberg's works, particularly those concerned with the struggle between the sexes or between classes, or as in the present instance, both)⁹: rising and falling. As Jean's star rises, Julie's falls. The pattern is first brought out in the recurring dreams Julie and Jean relate to each other. Julie's is:

I've climbed a pillar and am sitting on top of it and I see no way of getting down. I get dizzy when I look down, and I must get down, but don't have the courage to throw myself down, but I can't stay where I am and I yearn to fall, but don't fall; and still I will have no peace until I come down! no rest until I come down, down to the ground, and were I to come down to the ground, I'd want to go down into the earth …¹⁰

and Jean's:

I'm lying under a tall tree in a dark forest. I want to climb up, up to the top, to look out over the bright landscape where the sun shines, to rob the bird's nest up there, where the golden eggs lie. And I climb and climb, but the trunk is so thick and so smooth, and it's such a long way to the first branch! But I know that if only I reach the first branch I'll get to the top, as if on a ladder. I haven't reached it yet, but I will reach it …¹¹

As she falls under the spell of Jean, Julie has a sensation of physically falling¹² (having first let the lilac she holds fall to the table):

MISS Julie:
… I'm, falling, I'm falling!
JEAN:
Fall down to me, and I'll lift you up again!
MISS Julie:
What dreadful power drew me to you? the attraction of the weak to the strong? Of the falling to the rising!(13)

This pattern is a variation on the mediaeval Wheel of Fortune motif: we are all situated on the rim of a huge wheel, and as it spins, the fortunes of those on one side rise while the fortunes of those on the other fall: there is no gain except at another's cost, there is no defeat except to the profit of another (this is one reason Strindberg opposed the women's emancipation movement: he believed that woman could raise herself only at the cost of man). The earliest appearance of the symbol in Strindberg's work is in the form of an illustration¹⁴ to his popular history, The Swedish People (Svenska folket, 1881-2), in a chapter dealing with mediaeval art, which shows an allegorical wall painting. Although the text does not comment on the content of this painting, it is nevertheless a splendid illustration of the Wheel of Fortune (Lyckans hjul), a symbol which Strindberg was to use frequently and effectively in his subsequent works. The illustration shows four figures on the rim of a wooden wheel, which is apparently spinning in a clockwise direction. Straddling the top of the wheel is a wealthy and successful man; lying at the bottom is a corpse. Hanging on to the rim are two men, the one on the left rising and the one on the right falling headlong. Behind the rising man is the figure of a fool, who blows his noise-maker in his ear; beside the falling figure and pulling him downwards is a devil, preparing to dig his grave. The Wheel of Fortune symbol, and the associated symbolism of rising and falling, is significant as early as Herr Bengt's Wife (Herr Bengts hustru, written the same year as Svenska folket was completed) and remains important throughout Strindberg's career. The pattern, which is central to Miss Julie, might be reinforced by having this or a similar painting reproduced on one of the walls of the set: it would not be out of place even in the kitchen of the kind of dwelling which Julie may be imagined to inhabit. Alternately, a framed reproduction of the painting, which might be a possession of the pious Kristin, might Hang in a prominent position. The rising-and-falling/Wheel of fortune symbolism might be further emphasized through the judicious use of a multi-level stage with appropriate blocking.

Curiously, a recent production of the play for French television in an adaption by Boris Vian,¹⁵ omits not only the peasant's dance, but also the two rising-and-falling dreams. The production, which is remarkable in many respects, is the worse for these omissions, apparently made to tailor the play to a one and one half hour time slot (the BBC version runs one hour and forty minutes).

Strindberg has given a fairly extensive commentary on the play, the characters, and their motivations in his preface. In 1908 he added to these comments in a note to Manda Björling, who was playing Julie on the stage of Strindberg's own Intimate Theatre (Intima teatern).¹⁶ There he brought another of his symbols to bear on the character: the sleepwalker, whose world of dream and illusion prevents him from seeing the realities of the world around him and who often dies of shock, so the story goes, when suddenly awakened:

Make the exit in the final scene like a sleepwalker: slowly, with your arms stretched out in front of you, inching out, as if searching the air for support in order to avoid tripping over stones and so forth; irresistibly out towards the last great darkness.¹⁷

Certainly staging the scene in this way provides a dramatic reason for Jean's earlier warnings, when Julie is about to arouse the sleeping Kristin: ‘Don't disturb a person who is sleeping!’ and ‘… sleep should be respected …’¹⁸

The off-stage suicide with which the play ends is, like the death of the hero of The Father (Fadren, 1887) an example of the power of suggestion, whereby an inferior individual can gain ascendancy over a superior one (in this case a member of the lower classes over an aristocrat; in Fadren a woman over a man), a theme which always had great fascination for Strindberg. Julie's exit to embrance her fate, thus has two aspects: that of sleepwalking (the world of illusion from which it is disastrous to awaken) and that of the hypnotic trance (submission to the will of another).

It is, of course, possible to go more deeply into symbolism in Miss Julie. What have been examined here are the main streams of symbolism in the play, however, and those which might, perhaps, most readily and /or most profitably be given emphasis in production.

Notes

1. Quoted i Samlade verk, XXVII, 323: ‘Om åtta dagar sänder jag Er ett nytt naturalistiskt sorgespel, bättre ändå än Fröken Julie, med tre personer, ett bord och två stolar, och utan soluppgång! Gunnar Ollén suggests that Strindberg is here referring not only to the sunrise at the end of Miss Julie, but also to that at the end of Ibsen's Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881). All translations are my own.

2. Ibid., 108: ‘Jag tänker det är väl med kärleken som med hyacinten, som skall slå rötter i mörkret innan den kan skjuta en stark blomma. Här ränner den upp och går i blom och frö med en gång, och därför dör växten så fort.’

3. The Language of Flowers.

4. Samlade verk, XXVII, 178: ‘… du hund som bär mitt halsband.’

5. With the publication of Samlade verk XXVII.

6. Samlade verk, XXVII, 164: ‘FRÖKEN: … Jag skulle vilja låta döda er som ett djur … / JEAN: “Den brottslige dömes till två års straffarbete och djuret dödas!” Inte så? / FRÖKEN: Just så!’

7. Samlade skrifter, XXIII, 161: ‘Som man skyndar sig att skjuta en galen hund. Inte så?’

8. Samlade verk XXVII, 178: ‘… det är blod emellan oss! Jag förbannar den stund jag såg er … !’

9. Another particularly potent example of this pattern is found in Herr Bengt's Wife (Herr Bengts hustru, 1882).

10. Samlade verk, XXVII, 135: …

11. Ibid., 135: …

12. Freud, who can always help us to interpret a symbol, even if he should perhaps not always be allowed to suggest one, assures us (The Interpretation of Dreams, 235) that ‘if a woman dreams of falling, it almost invariably has a sexual sense: she is imagining herself as a “fallen woman”’.

13. Samlade verk, XXVII, 153: ‘FRÖKEN: … jag faller, jag faller! / JEAN: Fall ner till mig, så skall jag lyfta er sedan! / FRÖKEN: Vilken förfärlig makt drog mig till er? Den svages till den starke? Den fallandes till den stigandes!’

14. Illustration 65 in Samlade skrifter, VII (294).

15. This version was seen in Canada on Radio France Internationale in (I think) 1992. There is no mention in the credits of the distributor's name, nor of the year in which the version was made.

16. The performance in question was rather special. The audience was to consist of only four people: Mr and Mrs George Bernhard Shaw, the Swedish artist Anders Zorn, and Strindberg. Shaw is reported to have been so moved that he wept copiously, despite the fact that he understood not a word of Swedish (Ollén, 135)!

17. Brev, 241 (July 16, 1908): ‘Gör slutscenens sortie som en sömngångerska, långsamt, med armarne sträckta framför Er, skridande ut, liksom sökande stöd i luften att icke falla på stenar eller så; ut oemotståndligt mot det sista stora mörkret.’

18. Samlade verk, XXVII, 133: ‘Inte störa den som sovert!’ and ‘… sömnen skall man respektera …’