Strindberg's MISS JULIE and Chekhov's CHERRY ORCHARD

Gender conflict has been around ever since the beginning of time. Although many other conflicts emerged in human history--such as religion, class, and race--gender has always found its way through and prevailed like an unresolved issue that persists even if other conflicts are resolved. In the modern period, many personal and social defects prevent gender from receding as a contentious issue. Women persist in attempting to prove their personal and social worth, perhaps to themselves, perhaps to men, trying to reach men's status of power, control, and responsibility. Such efforts have become the basis for the work of philosophers, historians, poets, and artists, either explicitly or implicitly in their works. Two examples are Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and August Strindberg's Miss Julie. In these plays, the main characters are women who are on the brink of the modern era, a period when women started receiving access to social goods, including limited political and social power. But there were false starts along the way, and Chekhov and Strindberg portray their content. In the course of this paper and relying on the ideas of the plays, this essay will prove how women have less control and fail to achieve responsibility over their lives and futures than men.

In the decades of transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the social position of middle-class women was shifting owing to a host of forces--from increased education to the pressures of urbanizat

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ble the argument for social egalitarianism put forth by her mother and the discarded fianc�. Having thrown away her responsibility to her class, she is hypnotized by Jean into suicide. It is a suicide socially convenient for him. He fully intends to cross social class. He has managed to rise to the top of his profession and has a certain worldliness, including facility with multiple languages. He is ready enough to exploit Julie's money, though he is fully conscious that a scandal--"Miss Julie elopes with valet" (107)--would fatally embarrass her family and possibly threaten his ambition. He may dream unrealistically of having enough money to buy a noble title in Rumania, but he is practical enough to accumulate the capital needed to move up to the middle class and needs to fear no social criticism for doing so. In one respect he is limited: his fear of the servant's bell. He cannot escape the compulsion to respond immediately when the master rings for him, and that conditioned reflex limits his ability to escape his social position. But he is not hampered by the antique code of honor that hampers aristocrats, and he recognizes that female rather than male aristocrats are more likely to actually act on their sense of hono

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