Miss Julie

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is considered a naturalist play. Naturalism was a literary movement in European drama during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most important naturalist authors include Strindberg and the French writer Émile Zola. It was characterized by the goal of representing the complexities of human behavior and psychology in a realistic way, grounding the motivations of the characters in their heredity and environment.

Since realism was central to naturalist drama, the settings of naturalist plays were typically ordinary and simple rather than exotic (Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for instance, takes place entirely in the kitchen of a count’s estate). Naturalism was also interested in dramatizing meaningful emotional or social issues that marked transformations in the lives of the play’s characters—naturalist drama did not revolve around petty or trivial matters. Finally, naturalist plays were usually simple, eschewing complex subplots and favoring basic plots with only a few characters (again, Strindberg’s Miss Julie is exemplary, having only three characters).

Contemporary ideas and intellectual trends had a significant impact on naturalism. One important idea that is central to many naturalist plays is social Darwinism, the theory that a person’s heredity and social environment determined their character. Naturalist plays therefore portray a broad range of characters, including aristocrats as well as bourgeois and working-class individuals. The broader movement of literary realism, represented by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Alexander Pushkin, also had an important influence on naturalism, with its goal of representing life in a truthful and realistic way.

Naturalist drama, emerging just as literary realism was becoming widespread, can be understood as an offshoot of realism. While realism was interested primarily in representing their subjects as they were, naturalism was more interested in shedding light on why subjects were as they were.