A Dialectical Reading of Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Abstract

A dialectical reading of Miss Julie offers an explicit depiction of history’s change and progress; it shows how society changes by the growing needs of the subjects and how void relations are negated into new ones. In this play, the transition of feudalist and patriarchal relations have been depicted through a new type of woman who does not believe in the supremacy of her father and husband as owners of the family; the subjects’ desire to escape from restrictive relations, breaking the hierarchal relation, and the decline of nobility as well as loyalty. In Miss Julie, Strindberg shows that the subjects cannot be liberated under the class relation of the coming capitalist mode and profit-oriented relation of the subjects ends only in destruction. He represents the problem of women becoming worse under capitalism and the new bourgeois ideology of bourgeois feminism not only fails to liberate women but also provokes a battle of the sexes as well as chaos.

Keywords

• Dialectical materialism
• demise of feudalism
• ransition to capitalism
• bourgeois feminism