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Reimagining Strindberg: Class and Gender Politics in Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2020, 33(1), pp.89-117
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : March 13, 2020
  • Accepted : April 14, 2020
  • Published : April 30, 2020

Heebon Park-Finch 1

1충북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie (2003), a dramatic reimagining of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) that relocates the classic naturalist tragedy to a post-WWII British setting, recontextualizing and providing contemporary resonance to the class-driven gender politics of Strindberg’s play. This study first investigates Strindberg’s text and its Preface, in order to clarify his stance on late nineteenth century class differences and gender roles. This is followed by a discussion of Marber’s relocation of these issues into mid-twentieth century Britain in After Miss Julie, adding intensity and dramatic tension to the psychological drama. This process of proximation is set in the kitchen of a Labour peer’s large country house outside London on the night of his Party’s ‘landslide’ election victory in 1945. The inevitably pyrrhic euphoria of this event, which appears to herald a hopeful future for an undeniably class-bound society, offers ironic comment on New Labour’s victory and decline in 2003, when the play was premiered. Marber’s reinterpretation is also significant for its reevaluation of the female characters, including a more humanized portrayal of Miss Julie and an augmented role for the working-class Christine, who appeared as a marginalized ‘female slave’ in the original, and who now subverts the original power-politics by quietly taking ownership of the situation near the end of the play. In conclusion, After Miss Julie not only succeeds (comes ‘after’) the original play, but causes an independent cultural product to emerge, based on (‘after’) but not faithful to its precursor text. This creative infidelity enables Marber’s transcultural adaptation to provide new insights regarding Strindberg’s play, while exploring its contemporary resonance through a two-way adaptive process that gives ‘afterlife’ to the original author’s vision.

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