[In the following essay, Greenway explains how contemporary psychology influenced Strindberg's characters in Miss Julie.]

Listing naturalistic elements in Miss Julie and reviewing Strindberg's preface to point out the many influences on the play would be tantamount to announcing the discovery of the wheel. Such work has been done thoroughly by Madsen, Lindström and Sprinchorn. While it is not our intent to reduce Miss Julie to a gloss of the history of physiology, one aspect of the drama and, more generally, Strindberg's knowledge of men and women can be freshly understood by discussing the play in the context of hypnotic suggestion. Banned for a century from scientific respectability as Mesmerism and animal magnetism, suggestion became a new area for legitimate research in the 1870s as part of the new theories of the unseen world of energy. Strindberg not only was aware of these theories, he considered his conclusions part of them and incorporated them into his naturalistic technique, particularly in his stage directions.

Strindberg took science seriously, although the converse has not been true. In 1889, shortly after writing Miss Julie, he wrote to his friend Ola Hansson that he intended to “transfer little by little to science” and to continue to explore nature with methods superior to those of the drama (Eklund 7: 348). He performed most of his actual experiments in the 1890s and described them in the Blue Books (1907-1912); but his library had always held a considerable number of scientific texts (Lindström, “Strindberg och böckerna”). Strindberg's scientific opinions—and particularly those concerning women—have not fared well, offending feminists and amusing scientists, who consider him harmlessly mad. The physiologist Hjalmar Öhrvall calls Strindberg's science “irresponsible” (ovederhäftiga), while Theodor Svedberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1926, calls his chemical experiments “little masterpieces of plausible idiocy” (Mörner 190; Johnson 86). Steene is being charitable when she says that “our feminist indignation can easily turn into bitter amusement and ridicule” (30). Literary critics dismiss the scientific views informing Strindberg's naturalism as a combination of pseudoscience and paranoia, agreeing with Madsen that, although Strindberg had absorbed a good bit of naturalistic doctrine and had read quite a bit in psychology in the 1870s and 1880s, his “so-called naturalistic theatre exhibits the characteristic Strindbergian subjectivity” (157).

In retrospect, Strindberg perhaps warrants these dismissals, but when discussing science and naturalism one needs to recall that science does not exist apart from the scientists who define the questions separating legitimate research from mere speculation. In the late nineteenth century scientists involved with what we now call field theory had to cope with unprecedented questions about the reality of the invisible world, and Strindberg believed himself part of a legitimate attempt to understand this invisible world of energy. If we acknowledge the conceptual challenge to the scientific imagination in the 1880s and 1890s that stemmed from experiments in the unseen world of electricity, magnetism, and radiation—wireless telegraphy, radio, X-rays, to name but a few—we can begin to understand the openness of the field. James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the equations for electromagnetic fields in the 1860s, sensed the shift in scientific imagery; in 1870 he declared that it is “impossible to predict the general tone of the science of the future,” but given the “new features of natural processes” scientists are “thus compelled to search for new forms of thought appropriate to these features” (2: 227). Before dismissing Strindberg's scientific pretensions completely, then, we need to recognize that Strindberg's theories of the relationship between men and women, based as they were upon theories of neural energy, would seem far more plausible to a physician attending the 1889 première of Miss Julie at the Studentersamfund in Copenhagen than they would to us today. In a new field the distinction between legitimate science and pseudoscience is by no means immediately obvious.

Indeed, a different picture of Strindberg's scientific interests emerges if one scans the memoirs of Carl Ludwig Schleich, a respected biologist, physician, and friend of Strindberg's, who was performing experiments in 1891. His work with the anesthetic effects of subcutaneous cocaine was probably a social asset with their bohemian friends at the Berlin cafe “Zum schwarzen Ferkel.” Schleich characterizes Strindberg's science as “distorted and obscure,” but notes his “astonishing knowledge of chemistry, botany, and astronomy” (245). He describes a radical experiment by Strindberg on plant physiology, dealing with the “electrical-molecular vibration of the protoplasm,” in which he hypothesized that plants have no nerves but use the cell as a conductor. He was right, says Schleich; odd Strindberg was, but no dilettante (254-55). Schleich provides a corrective to the condescension of our later era by writing about Strindberg's alchemy that “he was not looking for gold, but for a new law of nature” and, in fact, anticipated the later discoveries of Madame Curie (247-48). While we do not suggest that Strindberg had the discipline to undertake a rigorous research program in the conventional sense, it does appear that he sensed the limitations of existing scientific theories and attempted to transform the scientific base of naturalism by incorporating current theories of neural energy.

Strindberg seems to have been aware that something unusual was going on in the scientific community. In the preface to Miss Julie he describes his characters as “modern,” living in a “period of transition” (övergangstid). In “Psychic Murder” (“Själamord”), one of his “Vivisections” written in 1887, he notes that each age has “its binding pattern of thinking. … So it is dangerous to call anything crazy offhand, particularly in our time, when everything changes so quickly …” (SS 22: 188-201). While it is tempting to read this as self-justification, Strindberg was correct and used this thesis to modernize naturalism's scientific pretensions. “In these times of hypnotism and suggestibility,” he continues in the essay, “new theses” for drama become plausible. He then began to write Miss Julie.

Let us dwell for a moment upon Strindberg's interest in hypnotism and suggestion that he demonstrates in the above-mentioned essay, “Psychic Murder.” He developed his theories in another “Vivisection,” “The Battle of the Brains” (“Hjärnornas kamp”) (SS 22: 123-57).² In “The Battle of the Brains,” Strindberg describes a battle of wills between his narrator and a “Herr Schilf.” Initially, the protagonist feels himself hypnotized by the light reflecting from Schilf's glasses and crosses himself as a “hysteric” would. Later, he dominates Schilf mentally, destroying his opponent's neural energy, his “nervkraft.” After the narrator has demolished Schilf by pounding his thoughts into Schilf's weakened brain, he recalls “magnetizers” and wonders if a transfer of “nervkraft” might be possible (151).

Bizarre as this hypothesis sounds, scientists had known that nervous tissue conducted electricity since the experiments of Galvani and Volta in the 1790s, and some had suspected that living tissue exerted a magnetic field and could itself then be magnetized (Walker 4). Scientists generally discredited “animal magnetism” in the eighteenth century, but Schopenhauer and Hartmann had reasserted its legitimacy. Strindberg greatly admired Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious; he also had a copy of Broberg's 1866 survey of animal magnetism in his library. If rightly understood, he believed, there was a sound basis for the theory of animal magnetism: “nothing other than the neural impulse that gives a reading on a galvanometer” (SS 54:91). Many physicians would have agreed. For example, Joseph Ennemoser, in his Anleitung zur mesmerischen Praxis (Tübingen: Cotta, 1852), saw the process as demystified and completely intelligible.

Strindberg believed he had learned from Balzac and from Max Nordau (to be discussed below) that the will is itself a form of energy, so the idea of a magnetic “battle of the brains,” that came to dominate Strindberg's perception of the relationships between people, appeared as an objective principle of biophysics. In a draft to the preface for Miss Julie, Strindberg described the battle of the brains as a form of Mesmerism, but his publisher Seligmann deleted the term (Lindström, Hjärnornas kamp 271). As peculiar as Strindberg's idea may appear today, its examination in the context of legitimate science reveals that he understood thought-transference as part of the clinical objectivity claimed by naturalism.

Mesmerism had fallen into disrepute as lascivious chicanery by the eighteenth century, but its sometimes startling successes in treating illness still could not be explained. By 1843, James Braid, whose book, Neurypnology, or The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Strindberg also had in his library, had renamed it “hypnotism,” and Jean-Martin Charcot turned hypnotism into an accepted research program in his experiments at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the 1870s (Hillman 170). Charcot assumed, however, that the hypnotic state was a form of neurosis, with suggestion only possible when the subject was asleep: precisely the view Jean advances toward the end of Miss Julie. Such a restricted view of suggestion as a premise for realistic drama limited the applicability of the concept, but Strindberg drew upon the additional, more current research of Hyppolyte Bernheim.

Bernheim finally stripped hypnotism of Mesmerism's occult trappings in the 1870s, although the technique remained controversial. His work De la suggestion et de ses applications à la therapeutique (1886) was in Strindberg's library by 1892, along with many other works on psychology. Strindberg read many theories of psychology and suggestion during this time, but the view of suggestion he employs in Miss Julie seems closest to that of Bernheim. While Bernheim explicitly rejects the Mesmerists' view of conduction through a magnetic fluid, ascribing the hypnotic state to suggestion alone (26), his discovery in Chapter 5 that suggestion can be achieved in a waking state opened new dramatic possibilities for Strindberg's naturalism Furthermore, as Charcot had stated, hypnotism was not abnormal behavior that was brought about by mechanical manipulation. Bernheim notes that the states of lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism that Charcot had observed could all be induced by suggestion rather than by touching or other manipulation. Furthermore, “hypnotized naturally, we are all susceptible to suggestions and hallucinations by our own impressions or by impressions coming from others” (184).

In his clinic Bernheim observed that the subject was hypnotized through fixation—a method Herr Schilf employs in “The Battle of the Brains.” All one had to say was “Wake up!” to revive the subject. Bernheim seemed aware of a new problem for the scientific imagination here, for “no interpretation exists in the present condition of science” as to how suggestion works. He was particularly concerned that “the experimental study of hypnotic phenomena could throw some light on the field of moral responsibility, still so obscure” (181, 185). Strindberg must have found this idea interesting while working on the play.³

We tend to think of hypnotism in Miss Julie in relation to the passage toward the end of the play when she says to Jean, “Haven't you ever been to the theatre and seen a magnetizer?” (SS 23: 186).⁴ Her trance at the end seems a consequence of suggestion. A physician familiar with Bernheim's radically new work, however, would understand the dialogue and stage actions almost from the beginning as a series of suggestions and responses between the two characters that subtly underscore the play's more easily recognized actions and symbols.

First, while it is technically necessary for Strindberg to take the cook Kristin offstage, he does so in a peculiar manner. Both characters notice that she stumbles off in a quasi-somnambulistic state. While Kristin has not been subject to suggestion, Bernheim would observe that both characters now have the idea in their minds. He might also note that the early consumption of alcohol is not just symbolic: it could induce lethargy, the first stage of hypnosis. Strindberg uses the Swedish translation of Bernheim's term when Julie “fixes [ruvar] him with her eyes” after commanding “Come!” (132). Jean here could well be in a state of light hypnosis. His tone does change suddenly in the next lines when he says to her, “Do you know, you're strange” (“underlig” has a secondary, older, sense of “wonderful), and when he recalls his dream of being in a high tree. Next, telling him to “obey,” she gives him a series of commands—“Kiss my hands!” but when he does try to kiss her, she slaps him. Bernheim used this technique to awaken patients: Jean immediately turns to polish the Count's boots (126).

Now Julie begins to respond to Jean's suggestions. To fix Julie's attention, Strindberg states in a stage direction that he “breaks a flower from the lilac and holds it under her nose” (138), while Jean tells her of his childhood encounter with her. The speech has an effect upon Julie, for she “lets the branch fall on the table,” speaking “elegiacally” (elegisk) (138). Just prior to the Interlude, Julie shows her vulnerability to suggestion, and Jean (whose gaze is described as “fixating”) obliges by first suggesting that she is vulnerable, then by giving her a command:

JULIE:
Am I to obey you?
JEAN:
For once. For your own sake, I beg you! It's late, drowsiness makes one drunk, one's head grows dizzy. Go to bed.

(142)

After the Interlude, Julie takes two more drinks, which would certainly induce a lethargic state, and again asks for commands: “Just tell me what to do. Where shall I go? … I can't go. I can't stay. Help me! I'm so tired, so dreadfully tired. Order me! Make me do something! I can't think, can't act …” (166). Zola might interpret this as physical fatigue, but not Bernheim: she is exhibiting symptoms of acute susceptibility to suggestion and, ultimately, to somnambulism. Jean then tells her: “Go up to the house, get dressed, get some money for the journey and come back here.” She obeys.

Scientifically speaking, could suggestion lead to a suicide such as Julie's? Bernheim considers the ethical aspects of suggestion crucial, and in Chapter 9 recounts case histories where suggestion resulted in immoral acts. He calls these apparently intelligent persons “instinctive imbeciles”:

They are mentally-clear imbeciles; they talk well, reason correctly, are sensible, and sometimes brilliant in conversation; they can use finesse and intelligence in accomplishing projects they have conceived; but the instinctive sentimental part of the moral being which directs the every-day acts is as if atrophied. They have no moral spontaneity; they do not know how to behave, and, like somnambulists from a psychical point of view, obey all suggestions, submitting readily to all outside influences. This psychical condition exists in variable degrees, from simple instinctive weakness to absolute instictive idiocy. Under good guidance, these beings, deprived of moral sense, may fulfil a happy and useful career. Others are stranded in the mud, or before tribunals.

(180)

As we will see, 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.

Bernheim agreed with Charcot that the cataleptic state could be brought on by a nervous shock, usually triggered by light and noise. Bernheim would have found some details of the ending a bit dated, since Julie, startled by the sunrise (“Oh—the sun's rising!”), is shocked by Jean's bringing down the ax on her little bird (174). As incipient somnambulism can be “primarily induced by fixation or other methods,” Bernheim would have noticed with approval the stage direction that “she goes toward the chopping block, as though drawn against her will” (175). While she listens to the carriage outside, she “keeps her eyes fixed all the while on the chopping block and the ax.”

Jean's views also appear a little dated at the end; that is, he echoes Charcot when he replies to Julie's comment about the “magnetizer” that “the subject has to be asleep.” Strindberg has Julie describe her state in a manner that Bernheim would have found more subtle. Strindberg has her exclaim “ecstatically” that “I'm already asleep, the whole room is hazy before me” (186). Strindberg emphasized this distinction between current and obsolete theories several times. In a letter to Edvard Brandes (4 October 1888), he described the play as “completely modern, with waking hypnotism (battle of the brains)” (Eklund 7: 130). In his novel Shortcuts (Schleichwege; 1887), his protagonist is aware of the difference between Charcot and Bernheim as his following statement reveals: “[when] the hypnotist says ‘sleep,’ and the person sleeps, … it's no more remarkable than when the recruit salutes when the corporal orders” (SS 54: 92).

Julie delivers her last lines in a “dull” voice, so Strindberg seems to prepare her for the final suggestion. Details of the last scene hint at hypnotic techniques. Audible cues such as the “two sharp rings on the bell” when the Count returns could induce a trance in somebody as vulnerable as Julie. In a deeper trance, according to Bernheim, “the subject is capable of manifesting the phenomena of catalepsy or somnambulism without the necessity of subjecting him to any manipulation” (89).

Bernheim states that all hypnotic states come from suggestion; as long as the idea is put in the brain, anything is possible. The idea of suicide comes to her with the sight of the razor. Julie initially says about the suicide: “I want to do it, but I can't”; when she is in her somnambulistic state, the state in which she is most susceptible to suggestion, and Jean, recently illuminated by the rising sun, “whispers in her ear,” she can act. She “wakes” and exits to carry out what Bernheim called “post-hypnotic suggestion,” a phenomenon he treated at length in his chapter on the ethical aspects of hypnotism.

Bernheim offered no hypotheses about the mechanism of suggestion; he stated only that “[t]he degree of hypnotic suggestibility has always seemed to us to depend upon individual temperament and the psychical influence exercised; not in the least upon the manipulation employed” (90). But Strindberg thought he had the answer, and here his science became pseudoscience. While the data constituting the explanation of suggestion were empirical, it is obvious from a later point of view that the explanations were regulated by social theory—to which Strindberg was susceptible. These explanations are curious indeed, and it is here that Strindberg's alleged misogyny had its ostensibly scientific base.

When Jean says that Julie should commit suicide but that he would not be able to do it if he were in her place, he notes that “there's a difference between us.” Julie responds, “Because you're a man and I a woman? What difference does that make?” Jean replies, “The same difference between a man and a woman.” This statement does not just reflect Jean's sexist arrogance (or that of Strindberg), but also a genuine program of research in the biology of the 1880s (Mosedale). It would appear as a quite lucid statement to a physician of the time, and would explain why Jean has the “stronger brain” at the end of the play.

Julie's “temperament” is important. Strindberg gives a stage direction that she is “extremely nervous” (ytterligt nervöst) at the end (172). Although this description says little today, it would have been of great significance to a physician in the 1880s. “Nervousness” had been an accepted research program in biology for several years. Letourneau, whose Physiologie des Passions (1868) was in Strindberg's library, typifies the medical interest in nervous energy when he asserts that “we have seen that man … is only an aggregate of histological elements, fibers and cells … governed … by … the nervous system” (219).

In his essay, “Psychic Murder,” Strindberg describes all moderns as “neuropaths,” and in his preface characterizes his age as “hysterical.” While suggestion was an excitingly new area of research for the scientific community, “nervousness” had been a respectable disease for years. As had been the case with Mesmerism, neural disorders, known as “the vapors,” had been on the fringes of medical science. Renamed “Neurasthenia” by G. M. Beard in 1871, the disease became part of medicine. Neurasthenia was essentially nervous exhaustion, brought on, Beard says, by our peculiar age, one facet of which is “the mental activity of women” (96).⁵ Neurasthenia may result from any causes that exhaust the nervous system, “dephosphorizing” it, such as sexual excesses and abuse of stimulants. Through Jean, Strindberg emphasizes Julie's consumption of alcohol, which could partially explain her nervousness at the end.

The metaphors used in scientific inquiry to some degree regulate the kinds of research attempted and condition the results obtained (Kuhn 409-19). Theories of neural energy were governed largely by the metaphor of the battery; Strindberg described himself as an “overcharged Leyden jar.”⁶ As Beard (a friend of Edison) put it, “Men, like batteries, need a reserve force, and men, like batteries, need to be measured by the amount of the reserve, and not by what they are compelled to expend in ordinary daily life” (11). Lesions of the nerves come from “unusual drains,” continued Beard, and cause “overload” (22). Doctors described patients as “run down.”⁷

Neurasthenia, then, resulted from an excess expenditure of nervous energy. When combined with extensions of the battery metaphor it came to be of considerable importance in regulating gynecological theory. Strindberg's view of women and the phenomenon of the “semiwoman” (halvkvinnan), of which Julie is described as being typical, stemmed from this direction of research. The argument went as follows:

Physicians believed women to be particularly vulnerable to neurasthenia, sometimes called “hysteria,” in that their frames were smaller than those of the male, and their neural reserves consequently less. Margaret Cleaves, M.D., in her Autobiography of a Neurasthene (1910), describes herself as just such a “halvkvinnan”; as a “mannish maiden” she was brought up to aspire to a man's role and ended up with a “sprained brain.” Such aspirations are scientifically impossible, she writes, in that women do not have the quantity of nervous energy that a man has; hence, the drain on the nervous system when the woman is active is proportionally greater than upon that of the man. Cleaves mentions that for women “neurotic wires are down and the higher vibrations fail to reach us” through “a fundamental nutritive lack of the nerve centres” (109, 208).

The history of science has been kind to Charcot and Bernheim, seeing their research as forerunners to legitimate psychotherapy. On the frontier of science, however, the borderline between sound research and pseudoscientific speculation is easily traced only in retrospect. Such was the case with Strindberg, who thought he found a plausible electrical explanation for the phenomenon of suggestion in the works of Max Nordau. In Paradoxes (1885), translated into Swedish the same year, Nordau in an article on suggestion employs the battery metaphor to explain that suggestion consists of a transference of one brain's molecular motion to another. The activity of the will is then simply a neural current, which is Strindberg's reason for accepting animal magnetism. The molecular activity of a person in a hypnotic state, Nordau continues, is minimal, so that the person becomes more susceptible to suggestion (185-87). Strindberg explicitly employed this theory in his character's battle with “Herr Schilf,” and does so more subtly with Julie and Jean.

If will is a form of energy, Jean's domination of Julie at the end of the play becomes more plausible yet. As a “nervous person,” Strindberg's character in “Above the Clouds” (Över molnen) senses magnetic currents in the presence of a stronger person (SS 15: 156). In “Newlyminted” (Nybyggnad), the emancipated physician Blanche Chappuis is warned that hysterics (övernervösa) become so through the sensing of others' electricity (SS 15: 80).

As proof of the neural peril awaiting the “new woman,” a physician could cite statistics, such as those of comparative cranial capacities. Alexander Sutherland, for instance, found that the male has. 73 ounces of brain per inch of height, while the woman has but 70.⁸ As Otto Juettner put it in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Medicine (1908), “We, therefore, conclude that woman must degenerate structurally and functionally in proportion to her deviation from her fixed psychological standard” or “she becomes a sexless substitute for man” (351), that is, Strindberg's “semiwoman.”

Now we can reconsider the effect of Juliet's unnatural upbringing: she could not escape the legacy of her feminist mother, who insisted on reversing gender roles and, plausibly enough, went insane. Juettner says that the man-woman “descends from a higher to a lower physiological level and soon shows the evidence of biologic regression” (351). Thus the effects of Julie's mother's training were not just behavioral, as Zola would argue, but physiological.

Generally, physicians advised passivity in sexual relations to avoid draining “vital energies” (Acton 135; Haller and Haller 96-102). Our physician would note that the sexual act during the interlude of Miss Julie would have two effects. First, there would be an enormous drain on the male's neural reserves that explained Jean's lethargy after the interlude; second, the effect on Julie would be more complicated. According to William Acton, the leading physician in sexuality of the 1870s, “the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” (163)—hence there is not much danger of neural drain for the normal woman. But Julie is different. Strindberg makes a point of her being aroused; so from a medical point of view if she were neurally involved in coitus, the drain on her system in the interlude must have been cataclysmic. In addition to the abnormal aspects of her psychology, she had fewer ganglia and reserves relative to Jean in the first place. Her sensuality would certainly appear unnatural to our physician-spectator, perhaps perverse, but physiologically it explains her acute nervousness in the last act and her vulnerability to suggestion at the end. One should remember, too, that Julie's natural womanhood had already been thrown out of balance by her mother.

In the preface Strindberg mentions her “time of the month” as a reason for her peculiar behavior. Medically, insofar as Victorian scientists talked about menstruation (and they did not do so very often), 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 (Showalter and Showalter 83-89). James MacGrigor Allan declared to the Anthropological Society of London in 1869 that women are, during this “crisis,” temporarily insane and “unfit for any great mental or physical labor” (cxcviii-cxix)—a point that went unchallenged. Strindberg and Jean describe Julie as “crazy” twice; as Madsen notes, “galen” in this context refers to the behavior of an animal in heat (79). While Strindberg balances the action in the play to create the possibility for a plausible struggle on stage, a nineteenth-century spectator would have seen that Julie has little chance in the “battle of the brains.”

We have not attempted here to outline an interpretation of the play but merely to suggest how Strindberg's knowledge of contemporary science gave a subtle structure to his dialogue and stage directions consistent with then-current physiological theories. In a more general sense, we have suggested that some of the extreme extrapolations Strindberg drew from these theories stemmed from the social assumptions of the biology of his time, not just his own psychological quirks.

In “Misogyny and Gynecolatry” (Kvinnohat och Kvinnodyrkan) Strindberg states that he does not hate women at all, but hates their “intrusion into the male working-place”; in view of the above observations his opinions should not be dismissed as mere “subjectivity.” Such intrusion creates, Strindberg claims, a class of “androgynes” (SS 27: 642). Although the theories of evolution and Social Darwinism were of great importance to Strindberg, it is not necessary to refer to them since the theories of neurology offer sufficient evidence for his notion that a woman would be incapable of achieving a man's mental output and would destroy herself in departing from her evolutionary niche. Hence Strindberg was not just feeling paranoid or even misogynistic when he criticized aggressive women; his arguments were, considering the state of research at the time, well-founded: as a naturalist he outlined what he conceived of as an unnatural, potentially catastrophic biological aberration. Physicians watching Miss Julie would have seen the “realistic” details not as physical, but as clinical and quite subtle: they would have agreed that Julie was typical of the deviant, modern, nervous woman, with a high vulnerability to suggestion.

Notes

1. The research for this article has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities program in Humanities, Science and Technology.

2. Words such as “experiment,” “nervous,” and “vivisection” had a special meaning in the medical literature of the time, “vivisection” implying Claude Bernard's radical anatomical and surgical methodology. While Mill used the term to mean “hygiene” in the 1860s, by Strindberg's time the term had a controversial connotation of “hard hearted” (Stevenson 17-31). Strindberg's insistence in the preface that we should feel no emotion at Julie's fate sounds peculiar, but Emmanuel Klein scandalized the Vivisection Committee in 1875 by testifying that the experimenter does not take the suffering of his subject into account (Klein 2677-79; 3534-49).

3. The question of moral responsibility for acts under hypnosis attracted much attention in legal and medical journals, but opinion was divided, according to Hillman. According to Swedish law, if Julie submitted to the trance at the end voluntarily, she would be responsible for the consequences. According to Björnström, however, Head Physician of the Stockholm Hospital in the 1880s, Jean would bear the guilt, in that “it is fully decided that the one most to blame for the suggested crime is the hypnotizer, or the one who has given the suggestion” (113).

4. The text of Miss Julie appears in SS 23: 97-187; in translating, I have been particularly concerned with Strindberg's use of medical terms in his stage directions.

5. On neurasthenia as a cultural phenomenon, see Gosling and Haller and Haller, Ch. 1: “The Nervous Century.” Erb outlines the international nature of the malady, calling neurasthenia “the fashionable neurosis of the present time” (290). The scientific status of “nervousness” exerted an appeal to the literary as well as to the scientific imagination (Drinka).

6. Kärnell traces the pervasiveness of electrical metaphors in Strindberg's conception of character (193-200).

7. For more on the battery metaphor, see Haller and Haller 9-24. In the 1900 Sears catalog one could buy an electric belt to recharge one's neural supply. Sears describes the device as able to cure any form of debility, including “female weakness,” the male pouch evidently being detachable. As an index of this metaphor's coming obsolescence, by 1909 Sears no longer carried the Heidelberg belt.

8. On the role of measurement in sex-differences, see Haller and Haller 47-87, and Gould 103-107.

Works Cited

Acton, William. The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life Considered in Their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1871.

Allan, James McGrigor. “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women.” Anthropological Review 7 (1869): cxcv-ccxix.

Beard, George Miller. American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences, A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). New York: Putnam's, 1881.

Bernheim, Hyppolyte. Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism. Trans. Chr. Herter. New York: Brole, 1947.

Björnström, Frederik. Hypnotism: Its History and Development. Trans. Baron Nils Posse. 2nd ed. Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature, Vol. 11. New York: Humboldt, [1889].

Cleaves, Margaret. The Autobiography of a Neurasthene as Told by One of Them and Recorded by Margaret Cleaves, MD. Boston: Badger, 1910.

Eklund, Torsten. August Strindbergs brev. 7 vols. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1948-.

Drinka, George Frederick. The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Ennemoser, Joseph. Anleitung zur mesmerischen Praxis. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1852.

Erb, Wilhelm. Handbook of Electro-Therapeutics. Trans. L. Putzel. Wood's Library of Standard Medical Authors. New York: Wm. Wood, 1883.

Gosling, Francis G. American Nervousness: A Study in Medicine and Social Values in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900. Norman, OK: Oklahoma Medical College, 1976.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981.

Haller, John S. and Robin M. The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America. New York: Norton, 1977.

Hillman, Robert. “A Scientific Study of Mystery: The Role of Medical and Popular Press in the Nancy-Salpêtrière Controversy on Hypnotism.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39 (1965): 163-82.

Juettner, Otto. “The Place of Women in the Modern Business World as Affecting the Future of the Race.” Bulletin, American Academy of Medicine 9 (1908): 20-34.

Kärnell, Karl-Åke “Strindbergs bildkretsar.” Synpunkter på Strindberg. Ed. Gunnar Brandell. Stockholm: Aldus/Bonniers, 1964. 182-208.

Klein, Emmanuel. Testimony. Report of the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes. London, 1876. Sects. 2677-79, 3534-49.

Kahn, Thomas S. “Metaphor in Science.” Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 409-19.

Letourneau, Charles. Physiologie des passions. Paris: Baillière, 1868.

Lindström, Hans. Hjärnornas kamp: psykologiska idéer och motiv i Strindbergs åttiotalsdiktning. Uppsala: Appelberg, 1952.

———. “Strindberg och böckerna. 1. Bibliotecken 1883, 1892 och 1912. Företeckningar och kommentarer.” Skrifter utg. av Svenska Litteratursällskapet, 36. Stockholm: Almkvist and Wiksell, 1977.

Madsen, Börge Gedso. Strindberg's Naturalistic Theatre: Its Relationship to French Naturalism. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962.

Maxwell, James Clerk. Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell. Ed. W. D. Niven. 1890. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1952.

Mörner, Birger. Den Strindberg jag känt. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1924.

Mosedale, Susan Sleeth. “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider ‘The Woman Question.’” Journal of the History of Biology 11 (1978): 1-55.

Nordau, Max. Paradoxe. Leipzig: Elischer, 1885.

Rosenberg, Charles E. “The Place of George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962): 245-59.

Schleich, Carl Ludwig. “Strindberg-Erinnerungen.” Besonnte Vergangenheit. Berline Rowohlt, 1924. 239-65.

Showalter, Elaine and English. “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” Victorian Studies 14 (1970): 83-89.

Sprinchorn, Evert. Strindberg as Dramatist. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Steene, Birgitta. “The Ambiguous Feminist.” Scandinavian Review 64.3 (1970): 27-31.

Stevenson, Lloyd G. “Physiology, General Education and the Antivivisection Movement.” Clio Medica 12 (1977): 17-31.

Strindberg, August. Samlade Skrifter. Ed. John Landquist. 55 Vols. in 35. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1912-1921. Abbreviated as SS.

Walker, W. C. “Animal Electricity before Galvani.” Annals of Science 2 (1937): 84-113.