Miss Julie
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 loudest complaint follows Strindberg straight out of his own preface, nearly as long as the play itself, where readers find lines comparing women to witches and blaming Julie's collapse partly on her menstrual cycle. One reader calls him “an arrogant little cockroach disguised as a man,” and a second writes flatly that “the foreword was even worse than the play itself.” On the page, Julie's seduction of Jean happens almost by accident, with too little groundwork laid, so her fall reads as imposed rather than earned; a critic reviewing a recent revival goes further, calling her “more a collection of ideas and mannerisms than a person” next to Jean's fuller motives. A few readers reject the whole thing outright, one calling Strindberg “a man without any understanding of the reality of humanity.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
