Performative Characters in Early Modern Drama : A Doll's House and Miss Julie (Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Michio Fujisawa)

This paper is an examination of how the free will of an individual is represented in two of the most outstanding plays of early modern drama: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, and August Strindberg's Miss Julie. The approach taken is similar to that of Ervin Goffman in his well-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It is different from Goffman's, however, in that the object of the ovservation and analysis is fictive characters in drama instead of real humans in everyday life. The main objective of this paper lies in revealing and confirming, through the analysis of the performance observed in the main characters, that the modern drama at the start of its history was far from discerning the possibility of the existence of an individual with free will. The performance done by Nora in A Doll's House is after all nothing but the existential disguise enforced by the cultural artifice of the patriarchal society of the day, while those done by Miss Julie and Jean in Miss Julie, though they are also expressed as an outcome of naturalistic influence, do not go beyond a kind of temporal haven out of the deterministic influence of the older days. There is no other space promised for Nora to breathe after going out of the house, putting an end to her performance. Also for Julie, after committing a sin during her brief performance, there is no alternative left to her except to leave this world pushed by the old sense of honor. There is also no alternative for Jean, who has totally lost the ability to act at the footsteps of the count returned home, than bringing himself back to the old way of life as a servant. Although the performances are different, depending on their roles in the two works, they do nonetheless provide us with sufficient evidence to support the above proposition.9KJ00004274634論文Articledepartmental bulletin pape