August Strindberg – Miss Julie

• Theme: Class struggle, sexual transgression, and identity collapse in a post-Christian world.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is not merely a tale of seduction and class conflict—it is a crucible of the modern self, a violent stripping-away of inherited codes of nobility, purity, and hierarchy. Through Foucault’s lens, the play appears as a brutal ritual of subjectivation gone awry, where neither Julie nor Jean escapes the psychic scars of disciplinary modernity.

The noblewoman Miss Julie, in rebellion against her aristocratic identity, longs to experience the forbidden—to debase herself, to taste the other side of power. Her desire is not spontaneous: it is produced, as Foucault suggests, by the very moral architectures meant to suppress it. The noble’s repression gives birth to the noble’s obsession with transgression. She is a figure constructed by regimes of sexual discipline, one who seeks escape not in liberation but in collapse.

Jean, the servant, embodies a counterpoint: aspirational, cunning, but still chained to class inferiority. Yet he too is disciplined, not only by economic hierarchy but by the internalized scripts of mastery and masculine control. His dream of owning a hotel with Julie is a fantasy of bourgeois normalization—a new kind of domination, cloaked in romantic capitalism.

In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault distinguishes between ancient ethics, in which individuals shaped the self like a work of art, and modern moralities that externalize ethical conduct through coercive institutions. In Miss Julie, neither character practices the "care of the self"—they are victims of inherited scripts: Julie of nobility and gendered chastity, Jean of servitude and resentment. Their night together is not an erotic rupture, but a descent into mutual annihilation.

The rooster beheading, the shifting power dynamics, the razor-sharp class commentary—all are dramatizations of what happens when ethical agency is denied, when identity is only performative and no longer creative. Julie’s final act of self-destruction—commanding Jean to give her the razor—echoes Foucault’s insight that in a society of control, death becomes the final assertion of autonomy. But in truth, it is a false freedom: one borne from failure to reconstitute the self.

Thus, Miss Julie presents an ethical vacuum—a place where the care of the self has failed, and all that remains is submission to structural scripts. Foucault would see this not as individual failure, but as a warning: when subjectivity is governed by external moralities, one becomes not a self—but a battlefield.