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Miss Julie and Its Preface: The Foundation of a Critical Conflict

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From its first publication and performance, August Strindberg's play "Miss Julie" has been the source of critical controversy and debate. Written in the span of little more than one month in the summer of 1888, the play was banned or censored throughout Europe in the late Nineteenth Century. Because it dealt with situations and attitudes deemed morally or socially offensive (the daughter of an aristocrat seduces her father's valet, and he, in turn, coerces her to commit suicide) the initial negative reaction to the play was rooted in generalized, fanatical, self righteous outrage and did not seek to deal with or engage the text in any specific manner. Instead, "Miss Julie" was a convenient target, symptomatic of all that was …show more content…

As critic and creator, Strindberg has effectively dictated the direction of discourse surrounding his play. To determine Strindberg's impact on the continuous generation of this controversy, we must examine and assess his preface in conjunction with the primary interpretive concerns of several critics of "Miss Julie" both early and modern.

Though Strindberg's dramatic method is characterized by a compulsion to experiment, the innovations he sought to develop were designed with a specific moral and social agenda in mind. In this manner, the "Preface to Miss Julie" represents an ideological and artistic manifesto.

Strindberg envisions the "dramatist as lay preacher hawking contemporary ideas in a popular form", while simultaneously insisting that "I have not tried to do anything new- for that one can never do- but merely to modernize the form so as to meet the demands which I supposed that the new man and woman of today would make of this art"(Strindberg 91-2). He is painfully aware of what he calls "our declining capacity for illusion" and wants to prevent the theatre from "being discarded as a dying form which we lack the necessary conditions to enjoy" (Strindberg 99,92). "Miss Julie" is thus orchestrated to aid in or anticipate the arrival of a "hyper-sensitive spectator" (Strindberg 92). Strindberg is fundamentally concerned with the ethical/intellectual response his work evokes in an audience. He yearns for

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