Miss Julie
August Strindberg · 1889
On Midsummer Eve, an aristocratic woman seduces her father's valet, and by dawn she has destroyed herself. Strindberg compressed a class war into ninety minutes and one room. He called it a naturalistic tragedy, but the sexual power dynamics feel uncomfortably modern. The play was banned in Sweden until 1906.
The case against
Strindberg's preface diagnoses Julie as a degenerate 'half-woman,' and the play obeys the diagnosis: her destruction is engineered by an author who plainly relishes it. The naturalist science he leaned on (heredity, hysteria, degeneration) was junk within a generation. What survives is the dramatic engine; the misogyny powering it is original equipment.
Drama · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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