Vital lie in Strindberg’s Miss Julie: Illusion versus reality

Abstract

Lying is an act of distortion of reality by pretending what is communicated is true. Then, what if people tell lies to themselves to manage to carry on their lives and bear the unpleasant facts of the world surrounding them? We all tell lies to ourselves to be content with our lives, and these lies are well-constructed and long-lasting. People try to create an alternative to reality, i.e. an unreal life. These lies are commonly regarded as vital lies, life lies, and illusions. Illusion and reality have been a significant concern and theme of literature, most particularly in modern drama since the Renaissance. Many scholars, philosophers, and writers have dealt with the dichotomy between reality and illusion in their works since ancient times. The study explores how the vital lies adopted by the characters in Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888). It also aims to exhibit the characters’ motivations and worldviews in their social context and question why they lie to themselves. Furthermore, it reveals if any loss of vital lie causes harms to the characters. The reason why I have chosen this play for my analysis is that the plot of Miss Julie is mainly based on lies, deceptions, dreams, and illusions. The play features the characters from nobility and lower class with a dialectic of class conflict. The paper also attempts to deal with how this dialectic of class conflict operates between Julie and Jean in terms of their vital lies. The extracts taken from the play exhibiting the life lies are good opportunity for the readers/audiences to be conscious of the vital lies embedded in real life. This study employs a qualitative descriptive approach.