Animals Intentional Literary Effects In Miss Julie

Animals Intentional Literary Effects In Miss Julie In Miss Julie, Julie’s dog, Diana, serves as an embodiment of Julie’s fate. Diana gets into an affair with a pug of lower standing, the â€Å"gatekeeper’s pug†. Through the use of antitheses- purebred bitch and gatekeeper’s pug it foreshadows the future dualism- aristocrat and commoner where Julie transcends her social boundary by having a sexual affair with Jean. This parallelism follows that just as Diana faces severe consequences for her actions â€Å"that Miss Julie won’t allow†Ã‚   [ 2 ]   , Julie’s sexual folly has dire consequences. Julie in demanding Christine prepares â€Å"some filthy muck†Ã‚   [ 3 ]   for an immediate abortion conjures ideas of death, termination and annihilation engendering in readers an ominous, apocalyptic mood which foreshadows Julie’s termination of her own life. Coupled with the sensual engagement with the use of an olfactory imagery in â€Å"the [abortion potion] smellâ€⠄¢s infernal†Ã‚   [ 4 ]   , it has overtones of fiendish punishment creating an image of hell, invoking in audience the wrathful punishment for follies such as these, heightening the foreboding sinister horizon ahead. After Julie’s sexual folly later on in the play, audiences are once again reminded â€Å"She, who all but had poor Diana shot for running after the gatekeeper’s pug!†Ã‚   [ 5 ]   , provoking heightened apprehension of Julie’s punishment as has been prescribed to Diana. Miss Julie then â€Å"enters in travelling clothes with a small birdcage.†Ã‚   [ 6 ]   By engaging audience with a visual image, it explicitly shows Julie is trapped just like the bird in a small birdcage. The bird’s confinement in this tiny cage is symbolic of Miss Julie being trapped by the consequences of her action for which there is no absolving. This parallels Julie’s anguish at recognizing her actions are unforgivable and would not be pa rdoned. Eventually, Jean snatches the bird from Julie, â€Å"takes it to the chopping block and picks up the kitchen axe†Ã‚   [ 7 ]   . This act of snatching the bird from Julie is symbolic of Jean taking control of Julie and Julie losing control over her own being. The killing of the greenfinch foreshadows Julie’s eventual suicide. Like the Finch who dies at the hands of Jean, Julie’s eventual suicide death is dictated by Jean and is emblematic of patriarchal society. Preceding this, arising from her aristocracy, Julie asserts dominance over Jean who belongs to the working-class. Contrastingly, this very act of snatching the bird and Jean â€Å"bringing down the axe† signifies the reversal of roles on grounds of the more dominant sex regardless of economic position.   [ 8 ]   Jean’s act, true to social Darwinism, clearly show that it is the male that defines the female, it is he on whom she will hinge her existence into, her existence is lar gely defined by how he allows [or not] it to be.   [ 9 ]   Like the Greenfinch, Julie succumbs to her own ruin, analogous to female sensibility succumbing to the male, phallic, patriarchal order, reaffirming man’s control over human affairs.   [ 10 ]    Similarly, like the death of the greenfinch which cannot survive outside, and who is saved through Jean’s brutality, Julie’s death is an escape. Julie’s eventual suicide dictated by Jean is the fulfillment of the sado-masochistic ritual where the victim desires her fatal end, the consummation of her masochistic fantasy.   [ 11 ]