SOURCE: Greenway, John L. “Strindberg and Suggestion in Miss Julie.” South Atlantic Review 51, no. 2 (May 1986): 21-34.

In the following essay, Greenway explains how contemporary psychology influenced Strindberg's characters in Miss Julie.

Listing naturalistic elements in Miss Julie and reviewing Strindberg's preface to point out the many influences on the play would be tantamount to announcing the discovery of the wheel. Such work has been done thoroughly by Madsen, Lindström and Sprinchorn. While it is not our intent to reduce Miss Julie to a gloss of the history of physiology, one aspect of the drama and, more generally, Strindberg's knowledge of men and women can be freshly understood by discussing the play in the context of hypnotic suggestion. Banned for a century from scientific respectability as Mesmerism and animal magnetism, suggestion became a new area for legitimate research in the 1870s as part of the new theories of...