Two Tragic Characters in August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”
& Leoncio Deriada’s “Dog-Eaters”
Unsolvable.
This is what August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” and Leoncio Deriada’s “The Dog Eaters” make clear about the woman problem. In both works, the woman is portrayed as the modern tragic hero, powerless and insignificant character, who is not able to achieve her full person and make the best use of her existence, for it is largely hinged on her being smothered, silenced, suppressed, and considered insignificant.
In the two plays, women are depicted in a desperate state—not being able to do what their hearts desire or when they do, rather suffer their consequences in the most dismal forms. The powerlessness of a woman is highlighted by her futile attempts in antagonizing the male ego and is suppressed, regardless of her status in any society—aristocratic or urban poor. The patriarchal society constituting the male order presses too hard on their lives, and pushes them to despair and eventually, downfall.
One dismal reality is common in both plays. Both works bring to light the battle of the sexes—for domination—in an effort to create an order in a given society. When, at the end of the day, the question is asked—who survives? Certainly, it is not the woman. And more interestingly enough, both have naturalistic treatments of the same subject: the suppressed female sensibility never—if at all—triumphs over the otherwise impersonal male order. Her fate is largely determined by her enclosed, cloistered and restrained status in any given social setting where the male reigns supreme, intact, unmoved.
In the Strindberg classic, Miss Julie, a count’s daughter in the turn-of-the-century Sweden, seduces her father’s footman Jean, but succumbs to the dire consequences of her action that leads to her own ruin. In Deriada’s social realist piece written in the late 1960s, one cloistered wife Mariana realizes the stark poverty she consciously drew herself into, where her husband Victor lives the dog-like existence with his dog-eating friends. Desperate and resigned, her existence disintegrates within the filth of the slums.
Both dramatic tragedies spell the inevitability of the protagonist’s disintegration and ruin. In each of these works, the protagonist’s fate is inexorable, something that no one can escape. When we see the woman as the victim of a superior force, it arouses our pity. When we realize that the action demonstrates universal truths and that we feel that the victim could just as easily be ourselves—it arouses our fear. In the tragic hero’s death, we feel a sense of loss, but only because she has demonstrated his great worth. It is said that in tragedy, the forces of life being what they are, and human nature what it is, the protagonist wrestles with these forces, but he can never hope to win over them, and ultimately he is defeated.
“Miss Julie” delineates a series of unfortunate events for its protagonist, Countess Julie. We come to know that Miss Julie is the daughter of a count and that this affords her the blessings of a good life. We also get to know that Miss Julie has been brought up by her mother to hate men. When she—to express her contempt for them—forced her fiancé to jump over a horsewhip at her command, the man broke the engagement. Then, Miss Julie joins in a servants’ party and flirts with Jean, a footman. Through the entire unfolding of events, the countess seduces him and, unable to live with the conflicts this act creates in her, commits suicide.
In “The Dog Eaters”, Mariana laments the fact that hers is not a good life and scorns her husband Victor for not having a permanent job. She nags him for their poor life, and blames him for their sorry living conditions. Like a mad dog, she is hysterical at her husband: “I am mad because I want my husband to have a steady job… I want my husband to make a man of himself.” Mariana is cloistered within dismal poor circumstances which virtually dictate her sense of values. When she finally resorts to aborting her second child, it is because despair and resignation spell her entire character. She becomes irresponsible in her acts—hardly recognizing its consequences.
While making a problematic of the woman’s issue, Julie’s character emphasizes the dilemma that men and women are different—they want different things; and each is determined to dominate. In Miss Julie,” the battle of sexes is depicted very intensely ravishing (Krutch, 1953). Countess Julie, who belongs to the highly privileged class “plays with fire with the working-class constituent Jean who rather appears refined and even schooled. Bit by bit, through the play, we see how their respective roles are reversed on grounds of the more dominant sex. The male gradually dominates the female sex—regardless of where he is situated in the society, or economically determined.
Ruled by her instincts, on a frenzied mardi gras, Julie gets attracted to his father’s valet Jean—composed but virile and ambitious—but later fails to recognize the consequences of her wild act. She starts to engage him in a verbal war, and later an intimate affair—
Julie: Kiss my hand first!
Jean: Don’t you realize that playing with fire is dangerous?
Julie: Not for me. I’m insured.
Jean: No, you’re not! And even if you are, there’s combustible material nearby.
Julie: Meaning you?
Jean: Yes! Not because I am who I am, but just because I’m a young man…
Here, the male character very well recognizes the male-female chemistry is highly combustible; the woman hardly knows the male hormones are highly excitable, fact which never has been familiar to an otherwise naïve Julie who subconsciously desires to subdue the male sex. She has done so to her former fiancée who later broke off engagement with her on grounds of her wild domineering act—making him jump on a horsewhip.
Jean: And so you got engaged to the country commissioner!
Julie: Exactly—so that he should become my slave.
Jean: And he wasn’t willing?
Julie: He was willing enough, but he didn’t get the chance. I grew tired of him.
Early on, Julie, the count’s daughter utterly declares her domination of the other sex to her father’s footman, Jean, who patronizes such seduction until Julie furthers on to flirt with him:
Julie: What incredible conceit! A Don Juan, perhaps? Or a Joseph? I’m prepared to believe you’re a Joseph!
Jean: You think so?
Julie: I almost fear so.
[Jean makes a bold move to embrace and kiss her.]
Julie: [Slaps him] Insolence!
Jean: Serious or joking?
Julie: Serious.
In this part, Julie does not the consequences of her actions until the time Jean plays his part to poke fun at her, being lured in turn by her “statutory” seduction—one imposed to the male servant by her female master.
Julie: Have you ever been in love?
Jean: That’s not the word we’d use. But I have run after plenty of girls. And once, when I couldn’t have the one girl I wanted, I became sick. Really sick, I tell you, like those princes in the Arabian nights who could neither eat nor drink for love.
Julie: Who was she? [Jean is silent.] Who was she?
Jean: You can’t make me answer that.
Julie: If I ask you as an equal? As a—friend? Who was she?
Jean: You.
Julie: [Sits] Priceless!
An ambitious member of the working-class serving the aristocrats Julie and her father count, Jean is now compelled to make use of his being male to obtain what he desires—to become himself the powerful though anonymous Count who has control on everything in the household. And after several instances of seduction by his female master, the male servant becomes the male usurper who affords himself the chance to use his sex and sexuality and prey on her female sensitive character to conquer her.
When footman Jean becomes the abuser, he delineates a potent character of the patriarchal order. He represents the virile but unfeeling phallus, seeking its own pleasure and self-preservation. He serves the entire purpose of the masculine sensibility—sheer sex and bodily satisfaction—attaining for the male order its clout and control.
After the seduction results in consummation, whether compelled or otherwise, Julie realizes what she has drawn herself into. The subservient Jean is now someone who says much about the real story about parents of the countess herself. He then makes her realize that like her mother who hated men, she is also crazy. She is definitely crazy—
Jean: It’s what comes of getting mixed up with women. Miss Julie, I know you’re suffering but I cannot understand you. I think you’re sick. Yes, you’re definitely sick.
Julie: Please be kind to me. Speak to me like a human being.
And when they both realize that their action is shameful before the whole household, the woman character has something clear in mind—she’d run away with the footman to escape disgrace.
Jean: So what do we do then?
Julie: Go away together!
Jean: To torment each other to death?
Julie: No—to enjoy ourselves for two days, or a week, or for as long as it’s possible to enjoy oneself. And then—die.
Here is proven that the man-woman disparity is perennial as that of life and death. Though Julie foresees harmony in their coexistence, Jean does not share this idea, especially with Julie, who he considers not his equal, but now someone lower than him—after committing such an act. Jean very well knows how it works for the aristocrat—a member of the aristocrat cannot simply commit what Julie has brought for herself. Now he considers himself “higher” than Julie herself—not only because he is a male, but because the act has—as if—reversed their status. Truth now dawns upon Julie that with such an act, she could never regain her purity—or even honor—again. The male character’s rhetoric is working so much against the female’s sensitivity whose worth and sensibility is as though hinged on what the patriarchal order declares.
And when Julie summons him to join her in her plans to flee the Count’s household to establish their lives some place else, the male stands his ground to make her see—he has only fooled her as much as she did him prior to the consummation of the sexual act.
Julie: Come up with me!
Jean: To your room? Now you’ve lost your mind again! Go, at once!
Julie: Speak kindly to me, Jean.
Now disillusioned and given to disgrace and later death, Julie’s character is transformed as it is disintegrated. Here she appears to be the sorriest character after the swift turn of events. Jean only made her believe that he desired her—after patronizing her own seduction of him. The woman becomes the unwanted sex—the pathetic sex that pulled to itself its own ruin.
Julie: What would you do in my place?
Jean: In your place? Let me think. As a Count’s daughter, as a woman, after this kind of mistake. I don’t know. Yes, now I do know.
Julie: [makes a gesture] Like this?
Jean: Yes. But I wouldn’t do it—be clear about that! There’s a difference between us.
Julie: Because you’re a man and I’m a woman? What difference does that make?
Jean: Same difference as between—a man and a woman!
Close to her suicide, the naïve Julie does not recognize the difference of the two sexes insinuated and illustrated by the footman—that in her parent’s marriage, it is the Count, her father himself who ruled after all—not her mother. It is the man who has dominated.
These final exchanges of rhetoric between the male and the female highlight the failure of the woman to attempt at changing her own destiny. It is the male that still defines the female. It is he on whom she will hinge her existence into. Her existence is largely defined by how he allows [or not] it to be. Rendered immobile by everything surrounding her, Julie succumbs to her own ruin, and the male dominates in the end—
Julie: I’m unable to do anything any longer! Unable to feel remorse, unable to run, unable to stay, unable to live—unable to die! Help me! Order me, and I’ll obey you like a dog. Do me this last service, save my honor, save my name! You know what I should do, but can’t—will me to do it. Order me to do it!
Jean: I don’t know why—but now I can’t, either—I don’t understand it. It’s as though this jacket here actually kept me—from being able to order you—and now, since the Count spoke to me—now—how can I explain it—ah—it’s this damned servant boy sitting on my back! I think if the Count were to come down here right now—and he ordered me to cut my throat—I’d do it on the spot.
Here, Julie realizes that her existence cannot at all be given meaning beyond this thing she’s “ordered to do.” Everything has dawned on her, thus—
Julie: Then make believe you’re my father, and I’m you. You were such a good actor before, when you got down on your knees—you were the gentleman then—or haven’t you ever been to the theater and watched a hypnotist? He says to the subject, take the broom! And the subject takes it. He says, sweep! And the subject sweeps—
Jean: But the other one has to be asleep.
Julie: I’m already asleep.
The woman is given to accepting her destined place in the world where man reigns powerful and prevails. We come to realize that the woman problem is perennially unsolvable—irresolvable, or fixed in a number of ways. It declares that the woman is a predictable social character whose ill destiny in the patriarchal society can never be less than tragic or devastating.
We can infer a number of things about the predictable plight of the woman in an otherwise irregular reality put forth by the existing patriarchy. The fact that Julie approaches derangement, prior to her self-murder, tells us that a woman is doomed for life. When Julie approaches derangement, Julie both desires and rejects the male ego. She both abhors and adores Jean, the male culture constituent, the phallus that lures an otherwise reluctant female crevice into its traps. When Julie sets out to kill herself as per hypnotism by the animal, brusque Jean, the female sensibility succumbs to the male, phallic, patriarchal order—and reaffirms its control over human affairs.
Because “Miss Julie” illustrates a love-hate relationship between a noblewoman and one of her servants, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this presupposes that the woman character is hinged on the male’s animal nature. Nothing much more can be said about this work but about its author’s strong aversion against women. The stark reality unfolds in this brazen work that depicts one gruesome male ego that stalks and preys on the female sensibility as it seeks to elevate itself by way if raping the female—physically and subconsciously.
In Leoncio Deriada’s “The Dog Eaters”, we see the tragic fate of Mariana, the wife of a jobless Victor who prefers drinking with his dog-eating friends to finding a stable job that could support his family. When Mariana recalls her expectations when she eloped with Victor, she is frustrated when she realizes that her dreams of having things she didn’t possess did not materialize after her elopement.
Mariana: Do we have to be like this all the time? Why don’t you get a steady job like any other decent husband?
Victor: You don’t have to complain, Mariana. True, my job is not permanent but I think we have enough. We are not starving, are we?
Mariana (with a flourish): You call this enough? You call this rat’s nest of a house, this hell of a neighborhood—enough? You call these tin plates and cheap curtains enough? (Bitterly.) This is not the kind of life I expected…
Mariana becomes the pathetic icon of irony when she pastes pictures on the walls so their house could get some sense of cheerfulness of the rather gloomy living conditions. Of course, the pasted pictures and plastic fixtures in the house all the more emphasized their destitution.
Mariana is the morally upright, goal-oriented, perhaps sensible modern woman who becomes a misfit—she has to indeed fall into despair—for she doesn’t belong to the slime of the slums. She despises the dog-like existence inasmuch as she abhors her husband’s affinity with their dog-eating neighbors. She prefers a better life. But she is living with the likes of Aling Elpidia, the vegetable vendor who sells her a concoction that can abort her unborn. Along with these characters, Mariana fails to realize that the worst that can happen to them is to become human refuse—yielding to their animal nature.
Aling Elpidia: (one hand still flat on Mariana’s belly) Are you sure you do not want another child?
Mariana: I don’t want another child. (She moves away and holds the bottle like a trophy.)
Aling Elpidia: Well, it’s your decision. The bottle is yours.
Mariana: How shall I take this?
As for the woman’s act or attempt to kill her unborn—moralists would immediately retort—the end does not justify the means—and perhaps make comments to the same effect. Mariana will never be judged by her intention—but primarily by the act. In the play, the act of abortion was never executed but Mariana’s attempt to do so has already propelled the worse circumstances and consequences for her. Though Mariana initially posed as a catalyst for change in that desperate part of the world, her being a wife to a macho Filipino husband more clearly draws her real fate—helplessness and despair altogether cause her downfall.
Mariana: One spoonful in the morning and one spoonful in the evening. It’s bitter, Victor, but I can bear it. I will be safe.
Victor: What’s that? (Then the truth dawning upon him) What? What? My baby! You? You!
Mariana: Yes! And I’m not afraid!
Victor: You won’t do it.
Mariana: No!
Victor: What kind of woman are you?
Mariana: And what kind of man are you?
Victor: It’s my baby!
Mariana: It’s mine. I have the right to dispose of it. I don’t want another child.
Victor: Why, Mariana, why?
Mariana: Because you cannot afford it! What would you feed another child, ha, Victor? Tuba for milk? Dog meat for rice?
Though Mariana appears to be a good woman, she is the quintessential woman whose morals are sacrificed—falling prey to an unrelenting male ego-dictated society, one that is hostile and aloof, cruel and impersonal, unkind and stern. Like the countess Julie—and like Ramir whom she butchers—Mariana succumbs to the slavering tongues of the dog-eat-dog society where she finds herself in.
When Victor tells Mariana, “Behave, you woman,” he articulates a macho rhetoric that attempts or obviously, starkly impose silence or seek to silence the woman and her possibilities. But to Mariana, Victor’s macho image is not in fact masculinity, but otherwise. She tells him she’s a coward because he hardly could provide for his growing family. For her, the measure of manhood is not something between his pants, it is his being able to provide and provide well and enough for his family.
The man-woman clash is caused by the male’s skewed sense of himself, his virility that makes not a sensible sense to the other sex. Mariana has a husband who has no ambitions, who never makes efforts to alleviate them from their stark poverty. Her natural circumstances largely determine her character, thus her story, thus her destiny.
Mariana: You men can talk because you don’t have to bear children. You cowards!
Victor: Shut up!
Mariana: Go away from me! Go away from me! Get out! Get out! Leave me alone!
(Victor goes out…She goes to the kitchen and comes back with the basket of vegetables and throws everything out of the window. Ramir barks.)
Mariana: Shut up, you miserable dog! (Pauses) Ramir—ah yes, Ramir. Now I know what to do.
(She goes to the kitchen and returns with a huge kitchen knife. Kicking the scattered tin plates on her way, she crosses to the room to the right exit.)
Enclosed in a strongly patriarchal structure, Mariana cannot just achieve her full potential as a person, much more a moral agent who strives to do what is right, or morally upright. Though she consciously takes chances and risks to change her husband’s disposition, she fails. In the process she loses herself. And in the end, she loses her self.
Mariana: here, Ramir. Come, come, Ramir. Come. Victor loves you very much. Perhaps more than he loves me. Come, Ramir. Do you see this knife? (The dog growls.) I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, Ramir. I’ll slit your throat and drink your blood and cut you to pieces and stew you and eat you. Damn you, Victor. Damn this child. Damn everything. I’ll kill you, Ramir. (Final yelp.) I’ll cook you and eat you and eat you and eat you! Uhu! Uhu! Uhu! (And for the first time, Mariana cries.)
Very well, both texts highlight that the woman problem can never be solved because the unrelenting male sensibility will perennially make ways—consciously or otherwise—to suppress it, and make it realize its own insignificance, its unimportance.
Man [read: man and woman] is said to be the victim of conflicting desires, and the strongest of them, like his desire for a member of the opposite sex, are irrational and yet stronger than reason. He despises himself for not being able to cease desiring what he also hates (Krutch, 1953). Such generalization rings true in these two characters. Miss Julie obviously cannot do away with her desire for her father’s footman. So she desires him incessantly, while she also abhors his sex because she has been taught by her mother to hate men. This puts her in an irrevocable dilemma from which she could hardly get out one piece. Mariana, meanwhile, is a female sensibility which unconsciously or unknowingly brings upon herself her own ruin. The moment she decided to elope with a good looking animal named Victor instead of finishing her college course, she already degraded herself inasmuch as she belonged to a society where poverty defines the majority of its constituent. When she yielded to Victor’s virility and sex, she also stole from herself the right to a better status in an even more male-dictated society.
The essence of man’s tragic dilemma is that there is no rational—only an irrational solution of this dilemma (Krutch, 1953). Highlighted by the two tragic women characters and their sorry plights, the two works pursue a naturalistic tragedy that highlights pity, fear, and catharsis. Pity is aroused in us by the women’s inherent weaknesses and the social class structures they inhabit. Fear is evoked when we realize that the same fate could overcome any of us.
Both plays highlight the weak woman spirit. The plays enunciate that the woman indeed is a weak species—cloistered in the midst of the male-dominated society. Women are rendered to have tragic lives. Their fate—determined by the egoistic male society where they are situated—or where they are rather placed—is highly predictable. But the fact that these women characters defy such destiny is what makes their lives worth telling. The fact that they defied the boundaries of the oppressive, brusque, virile, and unfeeling patriarchal order—altogether redefines the character of a woman.
In the bigger picture, it is the woman who is put in bad light—or is she? Mariana rebels against the stifling patriarchal structure—antagonizing Victor when she resorts to aborting the second child and hurting his male ego when she kills his pet dog Ramir. Mariana resorts to abortion to spite Victor and perhaps make him aware of his responsibility. By wanting to kill her second child, for they cannot practically feed them well, she would rather redeem him from earthly suffering and damnation. Here the modern woman is one admirable character for she seeks to challenge an otherwise dismal structure that oppresses more her inane existence, and transforms her very sensibilities.
“I told you I didn’t want another child. You broke that bottle but I will look for other means. I’ll starve myself. I’ll jump out of the window. I’ll fall down the stairs,” runs the litany of despair, of Mariana’s exasperated existence as well defined by the male world of Victor’s. This makes clear the nature of woman to liberate herself from the restrictions of the male structure that encloses her—or rather defines her—one that subjects her as a wife or that subjugates her as a woman [secondary or insignificant to man]. Only by rebelling against such dismal structure can the woman afford herself her liberty, her individuality, her self.
In Mike Figgis’s rendition of Strindberg’s masterpiece, Saffron Burrows’ Julie is one unforgettable tragedy in literary and cinema consciousness. Her sexually hungry, angst-ridden female countenance spells the female nature—”vessel and damsel” but defiant and irreverent. She delineates one discontented and disturbing female character, a bored individual whose hollow existence is not compelled or desired but naturally determined. She has been taught by her mother to hold grudges against men; she is a man-hater gone haywire.
Both Julie and Mariana do not recognize the futility of their actions to free themselves from these patriarchal enclosures until they actually succumb to it. In both works, there’s an attempt to define a helpless, ill-fated woman whose existence is hinged on the brusque and indifferent male feeling, the two characters clarify that the patriarchal setups such as family largely determines their very sensibilities. Neither of them triumphs in their attempt to resist the patriarchal vacuum. It sucks up their persons, influences their consciousness, and determines their destinies.
Works Cited and Sources Consulted
Deriada, Leoncio P.
The Dog Eaters and Other Plays. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1986.
Dickinson, Leo T.
A Guide to Literary Study. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1987.
Jurilla, Jonathan P. “Socio-Cultural Conflict Depicted in Selected Short Stories of Leoncio Deriada.” Iloilo City: University of the Philippines in the Visayas, 1996. Undergraduate thesis.
Krutch, Joseph W.
Modernism in Modern Drama. New York: Cornell University Press, 1953.
Nato Eligio, Generosa. “Some Recent Writers and The Times: A Socio-Critical Study of Selected Short Stories in English Anthologized in the 1980’s.” Manila: University of Santo Tomas, 1991. Doctoral dissertation.
Picart, Roland M. “Social Commentary in Leoncio P. Deriada’s
The Road to Mawab and Other Stories.” Baguio City: Baguio Colleges Foundation, 1986. Graduate thesis.
Rose, Phyllis.
Writing of Women: Essays in a Renaissance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.
Szondi, Peter.
Theory of the Modern Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
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