5 Best Jean Monologues

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Miss Julie (Jean)

Category: Play Role: Jean From: Miss Julie

Jean says

You say that, but you despise me all the same. No matter! One time I entered the garden of paradise -it was to weed the onion beds with my mother! Near the orchard stood a Turkish pavilion, shaded and overgrown with jessamine and honeysuckle. I didn’t know what it was used for and I had never seen anything so beautiful. People passed in and out and one day -the door was left open. I sneaked in and beheld walls covered with pictures of kings and emperors and there were red-fringed curtains at the windows -now you understand what I mean -I – I had never been in the castle and how my thoughts leaped -and there they returned ever after. Little little the longing came over me to experience for once the pleasure of -enfin, I sneaked in and was bewildered. But then I heard someone coming -there was only one exit for the great folk, but for me there was another, and I had to choose that. Once out I started to run, scrambled through a raspberry hedge, rushed over a strawberry bed and came to a stop on the rose terrace. For there I saw a figure in a white dress and white slippers and stockings -it was you! I hid under a heap of weeds, under, you understand, where the thistles pricked me, and lay on the damp, rank earth. I gazed at you walking among the roses. And I thought if it is true that the thief on the cross could enter heaven and dwell among the angels it was strange that a pauper child on God’s earth could not go into the castle park and play with the Countess’ daughter.

His Luck (Jean)

Category: Play Role: Jean From: His Luck

Jean says

You ask it, of course. You have the right. Sometimes I ask it, too, why Paul never succeeded. While we were struggling along, the things that held him back seemed only details. Only now do I see them as a whole. In the first place, Paul never aimed directly at success. He was all-round. If it had been merely a question of exploiting his talent, sticking to the one idea day in, day out, never letting an opportunity slip of meeting the right people and getting to the right places … that would have been easy. He had tremendous energy. I used to grudge his interest in other things. I hated to see him lose the chances and let them be snapped up littler men. He seemed to waste himself, right and left, prodigally. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t waste. It was all as much a part of him as his music. He detested the stupidity of wealth and poverty, he rebelled against laws that aren’t laws, but only interests enforced authority, he fought against the sheer deadness of prejudice. How he hated all that! And why not? You see, Vera, he was sensitive to it not only as a thinker, but as a musician, too. It was all a part of the discord, and what I used to think his wasting himself was really an effort to create a larger harmony. He used to say that the beauty of music is only the image of beauty in life, and that life must come first. He couldn’t endure discords anywhere. Paul despised the musicians who scream at a flatted f but hunger for the flesh pots after the performance. No, he was never that. And people resented it. The very people who ought to have understood.

His Luck (Jean)

Category: Play Role: Jean From: His Luck

Jean says

You don’t understand, I was unhappy, in the ordinary sense, unbelievably so. But that wasn’t all. I was alive! I lived as the man lives who faints in the dark mine underground, and I lived as the aviator lives, thrilling against the sun, and as the believer in a world of infidels. That was what he did for me. And slowly, as I learned how deeply the very pain was making me live, I put my unhappiness by. It was there, but it no longer seemed important. It was the lingering complaint of my old commonplace soul standing fearfully on the brink of greater things and hating the situation that led it there. No, I am a small woman in front of a big thing. One of the biggest, genius. And the force of it, relentless as nature, made me what I am. Paul. Oh, Vera, when I think of his music, tempestuous as the sea, healing as spring…. And now where is it? He had what all the world wants most, flight, and the world stalled him in its own mud. You saw it…. That’s why I shall stay here. It’s the only place with his atmosphere. All these things are he. I face them here in silence, and I bare my breast to the arrow. Here I am, the only one who knows Paul’s music in its possibility. To the rest, it is a heap of stones the roadside. The architect is dead.

His Luck (Jean)

Category: Play Role: Jean From: His Luck

Jean says

Over in London there are half a dozen men and women who caught a glimpse of Paul as he really was. In Munich there are half a dozen more. He was at his best in a studio among friends with a congenial atmosphere. They knew… but what is that? I tell you, Vera, the only way I can explain it all is seeing two forces, two moralities; the morality of God and the morality of nature. Perhaps in some people they both work together for the same end, but they don’t always…. In the sight of heaven, Paul was an apostle of harmony. In the sight of nature, he was the seed too many on the tree, the bird wrongly colored in the forest. I sit among these things, the fast-ebbing beats of his memory, thinking of what he might have been for others as he was to me, and my heart breaks. Our unhappiness? A cloud passing before the sun -nothing more. And during this past year I have come to love him all over again, not as mate but as mother.

His Luck (Jean)

Category: Play Role: Jean From: His Luck

Jean says

Unhappy? Yes, I have been outrageously unhappy! Years of it! Sharp arrows and poisoned wine. I wanted to die…. You read a play Strindberg, and you say it’s very strong, very artistic, but all the while you believe it is only the nightmare of a diseased mind. It’s just a play& mdashyou shut the book and return to “real” life, thankfully. Well, the Strindberg play has been my real life, and real life my play, my impossible dream. You can’t imagine how terrifying it is to feel the situation develop around you. Two bodies caught naked in an endless wilderness of thorns. Every movement one makes to free the other only wounds him the more. Two souls, each innocent and aspiring, bound together serpents, like the Laocoon…. It is one of those things that are absolutely impossible … and yet true. We had the deepest respect and admiration for one another, but somehow we never walked in step. His emotion repressed mine, my emotion repressed his. Sometimes one was the slave, sometimes the other. We couldn’t both be free at the same time. There was always something to hide, to be afraid of…. Not words nor acts, but moods. It passed over from one soul to the other like invisible rays. And we couldn’t separate. That was part of it. We just went on and on….