Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

Henrik Ibsen’s works address humankind’s “unprivileged position” brought about by “the newer biology,” as he consistently probes our struggle with this demotion. More specifically, he explores evolutionary mechanisms such as artificial versus natural breeding, sexual selection, and adaptation. In his letters and speeches, his drafts and notes to his plays, as well as in the plays themselves, Ibsen reveals a sustained interest in evolutionary ideas and these are often surprisingly broad, touching on a wide range of aspects beyond the issues for which he is so well known, such as his treatment of heredity and his portrayals of women. In 1906, a New York Times obituary noted Ibsen’s awareness of both Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, “reflected in many of his works with telling power,” but until this claim was echoed in a recent biography of Ibsen, little interest was shown in the connection between Ibsen and Darwin, let alone other evolutionary thinkers.¹ This chapter explores the extent of Ibsen’s engagement with evolution through close analysis of his writings, building on recent work in a wide range of disciplines (history of science, biography, drama, eco-criticism) that has been done on this subject both in Norwegian and in English.²

Brian Downs argues that we cannot fully comprehend Ibsen’s development without a sense of the history of ideas of his time, because he was not some “sudden, causeless phenomenon . . . but stood well in the stream of the ethical, religious, political and sociological thought of his time and, besides making notable contributions to it, took a lively interest in many of its aspects,” including science. Downs is not, however, “presenting him as the mere product of” these tendencies of thought.3 As we will see with Beckett, we are dealing with an oblique and indirect engagement, not clear-cut influence, but all the more thorough for that, going far beyond the Darwinian window dressing in plays like Robert Buchanan’s The Charlatan. As Michael Meyer notes, Ibsen’s engagement with the most progressive and radical ideas compelled audiences and readers “to rethink their basic concepts of life. . . . [It was] like reading Darwin or [Karl] Marx or [Sigmund] Freud.”⁴

We are unsure of what exactly Ibsen read due to his many smokescreens and disclaimers of influence. We can confidently assume at least indirect contact with Darwin’s works through Suzannah Ibsen, who was “a great reader . . . ploughing through the year’s books and recommending to Ibsen what he should read.” The first thing the family did when they arrived in a new town was to locate the library, and Sigurd would regularly visit it with a basket to exchange books.⁵ Most scholars suggest an indirect, perhaps secondhand, reading of Darwin; this might account for the lack of precision in it.⁶ This is both frustrating and liberating: it links him firmly to Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers but not in ways that are exact, detailed, and thus constraining. Eivind Tjønneland sees Ibsen as adopting a full-scale, “totalizing” evolutionism at some point around 1879—the time of A Doll’s House and the beginning of his “social problem” plays, though as I will argue, The Pillars of Society (1877) already has strong elements of evolutionary thought in it.⁷

Ibsen’s engagement with evolution is not limited to thematic motifs, however, but extends to structure, methodology, characterization, and staging. Both Jane Goodall and Tamsen Wolff notice the sense of “deep time” in his dramaturgy—how he manages to stage the past in the present, “conveying the deep histories behind critical events in the present and . . . suggesting the atavistic elements in human personality.”8 Yet Wolff notes that in The Wild Duck (1884), Ibsen “throws the whole notion of revelation [his usual method of retrospective arrangement through present revelation of formative past events] into question since the play grants no single, unencumbered moment of clarity.”⁹ This seems consistent with Darwinian thought: the idea not only of entanglement and randomness, but also of no single causal, and therefore teleological, events leading to one particular outcome. In this play, at least, there is no determinism.

Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century Darwinism and evolution were part of the “literary tool kit” of naturalist writers.¹⁰ Yet Mathias Clasen, Stine Slot Grumsen, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard caution against reading Darwinism where none exists or seeing authors as picking up whatever “cultural debris” happens to be lying around. So the influence might be, as Inga-Stina Ewbank puts it, “almost incalculably diffusive.” Darwin might be for Ibsen similar to what Dickens became: more of a “catalyst” than a source—“a catalyst in self-directed experiments: texts to learn from and to react against.”¹¹ But for other Ibsen scholars the Darwinian connection is clear and decisive. Brian Johnston shows how Ibsen uses “supertext” to expose the “widest-ranging human drama” within local, limited events and patterns, and “this merging of the particular within the universal, this immersing of the individual within the history and discourse of the species, was Ibsen’s aesthetic response to the intellectual world he inherited, in which the Hegelian idea of our cultural evolution as a species was linked to the Darwinian account of our biological evolution.”¹² Robert Ferguson asserts that as a modern dramatist, Ibsen operated “in the philosophical space left by Darwin’s discoveries, keenly filling the space—this vacuum—with determinist theories of behaviour.”¹³ With regard to Brand (1866), for instance, Ibsen “may have lost his own faith; but the social visionary in him read the signs of a new age dawning in the sensational success of On the Origin of Species.”¹⁴ Pointedly, Ibsen drops a reference to fossils into Peer Gynt (1867) directly after—and distinctly undermining—a reference to God creating the world.¹⁵ Around the time of writing Rosmersholm (1886), “in the continuing absence of God Ibsen had been cultivating Darwin, feeling a spiritual need for that sense of biological determinism that allowed him to replace original sin with an equally implacable genetic heritage.”¹⁶

In fact, there are surprisingly many references to evolution in Ibsen’s writings. For example, in 1887, he proclaims in a speech at a literary banquet: “It is said that I have been prominent amongst those who have helped usher in a new era. On the contrary: I think the era we are currently in could just as accurately be described as a conclusion, and that something new is being born. In fact I think that natural science’s teaching about evolution is also relevant to life’s spiritual elements.”17 As Clasen and his coauthors put it, in this speech Ibsen publicly declares himself a Darwinist.¹⁸ The speech not only reveals a striking vision of a new era brought about by evolutionary theory, but also uses the English word evolution, not the Dano-Norwegian “arternes udvikling.” The speech goes on to describe a synthesis of ideas, as poetry, philosophy, and religion will “melt together,” obliterating old forms and categories to create a single new “life force” that we can as yet only dimly imagine. Although it expresses an important idea for Ibsen—that of synthesis of concepts, forms, and laws—commentators on this speech tend to emphasize the first part with its striking reference to evolution. No commentator on this speech has, however, noted its remarkable similarity to a passage in Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation that likewise foresees a time of synthesis, when all systems will melt into one: “Thinking of all the contingences of this world as to be in time melted into or lost into the greater system, to which the present is only subsidiary, let us wait the end with patience.”¹⁹ It is also important to note here Ibsen’s reference to the life force he sees dawning, resonating with the then-popular theory of vitalism.

Ibsen again uses the word evolution in a letter to Georg Brandes in 1888, this time applying it to himself. He writes that we can no longer be satisfied with the society in which we live: “The national consciousness is in the process of becoming extinct and will be replaced by a racial consciousness. I for one have gone through this evolution.”20 Ibsen’s letters contain several references to natural history and science, including a curious allusion to extinction. In a letter of 1883, he says that art forms, like species of animals, can become extinct, and that verse drama will meet the same fate as the dodo, “of which only a few individuals remain down on an African island.” It is worth noting the odd but also incorrect mention of the dodo; the last reported sighting of one was in 1662, so its extinction was a well-established fact by the late nineteenth century. Ibsen’s mention of the dodo is resonant; it was a cultural marker not only of extinction but also of evolution more broadly and above all of the devastating consequences of human invasion of natural habitats.²¹

Clearly, then, Ibsen is engaged with evolution, from applying it as a general term to his own artistic approach to invoking specific aspects of evolutionary thought such as extinction. However, it is through gender that Ibsen exerts the most profound impact on the subsequent treatment of evolution in drama, opening the way for so many playwrights to explore women’s roles within the “natural order.” Ibsen pins his hopes for human progress and evolution on women: “A Pastor Manders will always provoke some Mrs. Alving into rebelling. And just because she is a woman, she will, once she has begun, go to great extremes.”²² But Ibsen is quite specific about what he means by woman’s evolutionary power. It is this “extreme” capability combined with her maternal capacity: “It is up to the mothers through hard and slow work to awaken a conscious feeling of culture and discipline. This must be created in humans before we can bring the people forward. It is women who shall solve the human question. As mothers they will do so, and only as mothers. Herein lies the great task for women.”²³

What is “the human question,” and why is it linked to women and specifically to mothers? Is it solely spiritual, or could it be something similar to what Bernard Shaw insists is needed: the state should subsidize women bearing children (he suggests a salary of £10,000 per year) to make motherhood “a real profession as it ought to be”?24 And if Ibsen hails mothers in this way, why are his plays so full of thwarted mothers, abandoned or dead children, and generally distorted versions of motherhood? Paradoxically, the two qualities seem to cancel each other out—Ibsen’s plays repeatedly show women behaving in extreme ways, yet with little space for motherhood. In The Master Builder (1892), Mrs. Solness’s dolls symbolize her dead babies and her lost maternal vocation. Nora in A Doll’s House leaves her children to be brought up by their nurse. Ghosts (1881) ends with Mrs. Alving forced to choose between watching her son die and helping him end his life. Rita in Little Eyolf (1894) prefers her husband to her child, her sexual desire helping to bring about Eyolf’s disability. Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman (1986) loves only her surrogate son, and in act 2 she pointedly declares herself incapable of the maternal feeling that supposedly springs up in any woman when confronted with a needy child: “When a poor, starving child came into my kitchen, frozen and crying and begging for a bit of food, I let the serving girl look after it. Never felt any desire to take the child to my bosom, warm it by my own oven.” Far from being resolved by scientific developments, the questioning of motherliness as innate in women is exacerbated by them and is being explored by Ibsen and, as will be discussed further, dozens of other playwrights who follow suit.

Already in his draft for The Pillars of Society, Ibsen alludes to the status of women as the pressing social issue that needs to be addressed and praises women for their power, which is still frustrated and unchanneled. “Our society is a society of bachelor-souls,” says Bernick, “we do not see the woman.”²⁵ In the final version of the play, a subtle but significant shift has the proto–New Woman Lona Hessel say these lines, making them an accusation rather than an observation: “Your society is a society of bachelor-souls; you don’t see the woman.”²⁶ Bernick agrees with her. His last statement is that “it is you women who are the pillars of society,” though Lona rejects such pat claims and the enormous responsibility this places on women as she speaks the play’s final lines: “That’s a frail wisdom. . . . No, my dear; the spirit of truth and freedom—that is the pillar of society.”²⁷ Ibsen is already working out exactly in what way women are to be the key to evolution, and he is aware of the immense responsibility this places on them. How will his vision of women’s roles be different from that of his contemporaries, with the expectation that women both stand on the pedestal and raise men to their level?

The notes to his next two plays expand on his concern with women as the primary means of moral evolution, as he raises the problem of the sexual and legal double standard (A Doll’s House) and the abjection of women generally (Ghosts): “These contemporary women, mistreated as daughters, as sisters, as wives, not raised with respect to their talents, kept away from their calling, deprived of their inheritance, their souls embittered—it is these who are the mothers of the new generation. What will be the result?”28 In particular, argues Ross Shideler, Pillars and A Doll’s House ask “what will happen to male authority in a world governed by evolution? What will happen to the patriarchy when women demand to be treated as equals? . . . Ibsen will stage the questions on an international scene.”²⁹ Shideler identifies in Ibsen and August Strindberg a systematic undermining of male authority within the family and of the family itself as a stable unit and the cornerstone of society. These playwrights write Darwin into their plays through their depiction of “family conflicts between women striving for equality and men trapped in historically defined notions of masculinity. Usually, the disruption in the family comes from a woman whose ‘biocentric,’ independent, and sometimes newly discovered sexuality forces her to reject a weak or interfering husband.”³⁰

Ibsen’s plays show individuals, especially women, striving to adapt and the chosen unit of human evolution—the nuclear family—simply failing to function. It is not only individuals, or marriages, that fail, but also whole families: the Helmers, Werles, Alvings, Rosmers, Allmers, and Solnesses. And, since families are the main unit of the tribe, or the group, Ibsen seems to be saying something fairly damning about human evolution so long as it is based on this flawed unit. What does he suggest in its place? A return to natural, rather than socially constructed, forms of life? This is what Jens Peter Jacobsen, citing Haeckel, believed: “A complete and sincere reversion to nature and the natural circumstances is required,” rather than the current “barbarism” brought about by “our entire social and moral organisation.”³¹ Ibsen dramatizes this question of how the constructed social order sits in relation to the “natural order.”

This problem of how to reconcile the social with the natural as they increasingly grow apart in the modern world informs Ibsen’s engagement with evolutionary thought. He perceives a natural order to which human organization and will are subject, yet his characters often realize this too late, hence the feeling of doom, futility, and pessimism that critics often see in Ibsen’s plays. Death, the random succumbing to this order, is “so meaningless. So utterly meaningless. And yet the order of the world requires it.”³² This is an important indication of Ibsen’s Darwinian understanding of evolution: seeing the natural order as meaningless, nature as blind and random. In the draft of The Wild Duck, Ibsen has Gregers sarcastically refer to “the order of nature,” the pretense at normal family life that he thinks his father wants to present to the world to avoid Mrs. Sörby looking like a loose woman:

As these examples show, Ibsen frequently refers to natural laws, and in one case, it is linked to contemporary scientific advances. In a “notice” tentatively dated 1879 by his biographers, he begins by noting that “contemporary natural scientists have more and more come to recognize that phenomena in their areas of scientific expertise actually rest upon a very small number of natural laws which, as research and the resulting knowledge progresses, constantly diminishes; and that it is likely that we will someday be confronted with the discovery that there is actually only one such law—if there really exists any at all.”³⁵ Here again, Ibsen is invoking the notion of synthesis (all of nature’s laws will gradually synthesize into one all-encompassing law), also present in his dream of returning to an original oneness with nature (something Darwinism might lead to). He seems to go against the movement of nineteenth-century science itself from generalized natural philosophy to increasing diversification and specialization into discrete fields of knowledge. Yet, might he be alluding specifically to evolutionary theory as the “one such law”? The tentative date of 1879 would have been about the time he encountered Darwin’s writings and perhaps also Haeckel’s.³⁶

Given the strong connections that are emerging between Ibsen and Darwin, let us explore how Ibsen might have encountered his works and what other evolutionary thinkers he may have soaked up along the way. Ibsen was living in Dresden (1868–1875) when Darwin’s works began being translated into Danish and being discussed in the newspapers and journals of Denmark and Norway, to many of which the Scandinavian Club subscribed; Ibsen was a member and went there regularly to read the papers. The titles the club subscribed to most likely included the Danish weekly Illustreret Tidende (Illustrated Times Journal), which as early as February 1860 had published the first brief review of On the Origin of Species.37 He also interacted with the Danish writer and naturalist Jacobsen, who, along with the Norwegian naturalist and folklorist Peter C. Asbjørnsen, was one of the main conduits for Darwin’s writings in Scandinavia at the time, although Clasen and coauthors point out that Darwin was already known to Danish scientists, journalists, and members of the clergy. Jacobsen makes a striking Danish parallel to Asbjørnsen in his interdisciplinary interests and accomplishments as creative writer, journalist, and scientist. Jacobsen’s translation of Origin put Denmark ahead of Norway in producing a translation of this work: it “also became the most important one for Norwegian readers, until a Norwegian edition appeared at the end of the 1880s, some thirty years after the original English publication.”³⁸

Darwin was introduced into Norway by Asbjørnsen’s article on his theories in Budstikken (February–March 1861), though the article neglects to explain the mechanism of natural selection by which transmutation of species occurs and sets up the idea of increasing perfection.³⁹ Asbjørnsen emphasized Darwin’s idea of descent while “hardly mentioning his explanatory mechanism for the development of species through natural selection. There is no description given of the principles properly defined as Darwinian.”⁴⁰

How, then, did Ibsen become Darwinian? The answer may lie in the broader implications, rather than the scientific particulars, of Darwin’s theory. Asbjørnsen stressed the cultural sweep of his influence, affecting every genre and area of human inquiry, with the potential to shed light on human origins, deep geological time, and comparisons of previous and current organic forms. Evolution will help us understand “culture’s creations.”⁴¹ To some extent, this anticipates the idea of memetics. Mrs. Alving worries about the “ghosts” of old ideas and habits that are passed on through generations and are so hard to shake: “It’s not just what we’ve inherited from our parents that continues in us. It’s all kinds of dead opinions and dead beliefs and the like. It isn’t alive in us; but it remains nonetheless and we can’t get rid of it.”⁴² This echoes Herbert Spencer’s view of human culture as part of cosmic evolution; more important, it shows Ibsen articulating, a century before Dawkins, the idea that “we have the power to defy the . . . selfish memes of our indoctrination.”⁴³

Ibsen knew Asbjørnsen personally from their membership in the “Learned Dutchman” circle,44 which he frequented from at least 1859. Asbjørnsen was specifically interested in “questions of evolutionary history and the theory of breeding, together with the possible connection between apes and man. These themes also emerge in several of his popular science articles.”⁴⁵ These became key questions for Ibsen as well. Ibsen was still living in Norway in 1861; he might have seen the article by Asbjørnsen, followed by likely exposure (especially at a more mature stage of life, during a period of active interest in modern thought, stimulated by Brandes) to Jacobsen’s article of 1872 when he was in Dresden. Ibsen likely encountered Jacobsen’s translation of Darwin while he was writing Emperor and Galilean in the mid-1870s,⁴⁶ arguably the most revolutionary, fertile years in Ibsen’s intellectual life, when further exposure to Darwin (building on the Asbjørnsen piece of 1861), especially in the atmosphere of “the modern breakthrough” generated by Brandes, is a key part of his development and his turn from verse to prose and from nationalist romanticism to modern realism. The year 1872 was when Brandes’s work had its greatest impact on Ibsen; he writes Brandes to tell him as much.

Given his influence on Ibsen, it is important to consider how Brandes interpreted Darwin. In Det 19nde Aarhundrede, he mentions Darwin in the social Darwinist context of his chapter on Spencer. For Brandes, Darwin was an agent of transformation: “By means of the concepts of evolution and progress, [he] transformed the dead into a living universe.”⁴⁷ Brandes regarded Darwin as “the corner stone upon which the intellectual edifice of the nineteenth century rested. So axiomatic had this become to him that, in his Goethe, he follows up all the connections which lead from the poet to Darwin. . . . It is the natural law of evolution which provides the basis for his monumental work Main Currents,” which so deeply influenced contemporary writers like Ibsen.⁴⁸ In fact, Brandes cast this work as a drama: the “six acts of a great play” whose hero is the psychology of Europe as expressed through its literatures (France, Germany, and England) and that culminates in the victory of liberal thought in Young Germany. This “drama” shows that the “fittest have survived” and a “new species” can take root.⁴⁹ Certainly, Brandes’s close affinity for, and appreciation of, evolutionary theory cannot be overlooked as another likely influence on Ibsen.

Significantly, just as Asbjørnsen had done in his mediation of Darwin, Jacobsen in Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift looks beyond the scientific impact of Darwin’s theory to hail its implications for “human thought in general.”50 In light of Darwin’s theories, he says, the “‘poetry of miracles’ must cease to be”—a striking analogy to Ibsen’s declaration around this same time that he must write in prose because verse drama is dead. But Jacobsen immediately goes on to say that these new teachings suggest another kind of poetry: “the poetry of personal emotions humbly yielding to satisfy the severely beautiful law of higher spiritual necessities.”⁵¹ Thus, Jacobsen’s interpretation of Darwin is decidedly positive, and it appears repeatedly in subsequent articles in the journal. Jacobsen sought a way for Darwin’s work to serve as “the basis upon which to build a positive general philosophy of life, an ethics, even a religion.”⁵² It was to be a natural, not a supernatural, religion. Yet, like Darwin and so many others embracing evolution yet not quite stomaching the possibility of reversion (evolution going backward), Jacobsen talks of “perfectibility” and the “constant growth in human intelligence.”⁵³ The controversy aroused in Denmark by Jacobsen’s articles on Darwin was, Gustafson claims, as great as that in England, with a direct parallel to the Samuel Wilberforce–Thomas H. Huxley debate as well. Yet Kjærgaard and coauthors question the “myth” of the importance of Jacobsen’s translations of Darwin.⁵⁴ They argue that in fact it was Haeckel’s interpretation of Darwin that Jacobsen was conveying, downplaying natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolution.

It is interesting to speculate on how far Haeckel, rather than Darwin directly, could have influenced Ibsen. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory was immensely influential and extended well beyond the sciences; Freud saw in “childhood behavior a recapitulation of primitive, tribal behavior,”55 and the idea haunts several of Ibsen’s plays, as in Ellida’s longing for her evolutionary past.⁵⁶ Johnston claims that in a note to Emperor and Galilean (1873), Ibsen states: “The individual must go through the evolutionary processes of the race.” As Johnston puts it, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, culturally as well as biologically.”⁵⁷ This artistic interpretation of the recapitulation theory has more in common with Pierre Bourdieu and with Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme, though, than with its original biological context. Later in his career, Ibsen might well have encountered (perhaps with the aid of his son, Sigurd) Haeckel’s monism, which gripped the imaginations of so many playwrights, artists, and writers. Ibsen lived in Germany for many years and would have read German papers and periodicals giving accounts of Haeckel’s work, if not (though we cannot know this for certain) reading the works themselves. He also would have heard discussion of it at the Scandinavian Club. Indeed, Ferguson argues that there is more of Haeckel in Ibsen than of Darwin, and Tjønneland notes a connection with Haeckel’s progressivism: in his rendering of Darwin, Jacobsen channeled this progressive interpretation (for example, quoting the final paragraph of Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation), which then makes it into Ibsen’s speech in 1887 showing such enthusiasm for evolution.⁵⁸ Downing Cless suggests a fascinating link between Haeckel and Ibsen, first in Haeckel’s idea of the family unit as representative of how all the earth’s organisms interact (so Ibsen’s plays, usually featuring a single family and how its members live intimately together in mutual cooperation as well as conflict, are likewise a metonym for a larger-scale ecological system) and second in their shared belief in a “pantheistic spirituality” that developed throughout their careers.⁵⁹

The German naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann drew his inspirations from two main sources: Ibsen and “the conceptions of modern science.”⁶⁰ His plays of the 1890s are almost entirely derivative of Ibsen; for instance, Lonely People echoes nearly verbatim the final scene of A Doll’s House in such exchanges as “You can’t deny that you owe a certain duty to your family. . . . And you can’t deny that I owe a certain duty to myself.”⁶¹ He makes much more explicit and overt allusions to science than Ibsen does, extending beyond text to the staging when, for example, he requires “engravings of modern men of science . . . among them Haeckel and Darwin” to hang on the walls in Lonely People, while the conversation (at times rather clumsily) revolves around them (“that old Haeckel and that stupid Darwin, they do nothing but make you unhappy”).⁶² The central speech in this play is uttered “warmly, passionately” by John, the devotee of the new science, who yearns for “a nobler state of fellowship between man and woman,” a new era in which “the human will preponderate over the animal tie. Animal will no longer be united to animal, but one human being to another.”⁶³ Hauptmann is one of the most devoted dramatic exponents of Haeckel’s monism; this further underlines Haeckel’s strong appeal to dramatists of the time, particularly those like Ibsen who had German connections.

Let us take stock, then, of what we know about Ibsen’s exposure to evolutionary thought. It begins with, but moves beyond, Darwin; Ibsen engages with the full range of evolutionary thinkers at the time. He knew about Darwin not only from one source in Norway but also from another one in Denmark, a decade apart, both known to him personally. In addition, during the period of living in Germany, it would have been hard to avoid Haeckel’s ideas, and both Jacobsen and Asbjørnsen conveyed a Haeckelian version of Darwin that downplayed natural selection. This would be consistent with what Robert Brustein calls the “strong mystical overtones” of Ibsen’s Darwinism.64 Brustein maintains that in his later plays from 1890 onward, Ibsen abandons Darwin in his turn to symbolism: “The Master Builder is free from all considerations of biology, determinism, and Darwinism (even the humanistic doctor is now assigned a secondary role).”⁶⁵ This is not quite true; in a draft of the play, Solness asks, “How have you become what you are, Hilda?” as she goads him to climbing the tower despite knowing about his severe vertigo, echoing the overarching question raised by evolutionary theory: how have we become what we are?⁶⁶ Perhaps a better way of putting it is that rather than “abandoning” Darwin in the 1890s, Ibsen’s engagement with evolution develops a clear openness to the Haeckelian emphasis on the influence of the environment on the organism.

But the influence of Darwin and Haeckel varies from play to play, and certain works stand out as particularly deep and idiosyncratic in their engagement with evolution. Tjønneland is right to say that The Lady from the Sea (1888), more than any other Ibsen play, shows Darwin’s “direct influence.”67 The play brings evolutionary concerns center stage: adaptation, environment, human evolution, origins, hybridity. Although the last might seem to be its main theme, Ibsen ultimately refutes hybridity. For example, although “the lady from the sea” is often taken to mean “mermaid,” the play is not called The Mermaid, a term that would have signaled a cross-species hybrid of pure fantasy. The lady from the sea—or, more accurately but less elegantly, “the wife from the sea”—indicates instead a focus on the relationship between a mature woman and her environment, while “wife” directs attention to the institution of marriage and women’s roles within it.⁶⁸ In the course of the play, the term mermaid does come up, but Ellida’s strange affinity with the sea (which Wolff points out is thalassophilia) never renders her a freak of nature.⁶⁹ In the draft, Thora (Ellida) is suffering from some psychological condition that is “inexplicable to the understanding of our time. . . . To the science of our time.”⁷⁰ She is “the woman from the free, open ocean,” yet a liminal creature that “stands on the border-line, hesitating and doubting.”⁷¹ Wangel says that she “belongs to the sea-folk,” “the people who live out by the open sea and are like a race apart. . . . And they never bear transplantation.”⁷²

Successful transplantation depends on how well the organism adapts to its new environment, and this is one of the play’s main concerns. Martin Puchner objects to the dominant narrative of the development of modern drama that has dramatists after Darwin endlessly depicting humankind struggling against a hostile environment as an “old story” because it omits philosophy.⁷³ It may be an old story to us, but in Ibsen’s time, it was excitingly fresh and no one—not even Darwin—knew how it would end. Ibsen in The Lady from the Sea takes this idea of struggling with one’s environment to a new dimension, exploring the organism’s changing relationship to a varying (not static) environment and showing that change is indeed possible. Ellida transforms in the course of the play from ill-adapted to her current surroundings—the air is clammy and oppressive, the water of the fjord too warm, she is unable to relate to her stepdaughters—to a successfully acclimatized specimen. Yet the initial critical response to her showed a general lack of understanding for this “curious creature,” this “unnatural” woman.⁷⁴

One of the motifs of the play is a peculiar stutter on the word acclimatize every time it is said by Ballested, drawing attention to it at each utterance. This happens repeatedly, and the fact that the word appears frequently, right from the opening of the play to the end, shows its centrality, at the same time highlighting its defamiliarization through the difficulty in articulating the term. In addition, the third-person usage in the draft (“human beings really can acclam—acclimatise themselves”) becomes first person in the final version: “But I have accla—acclimatized myself.”75 In chapter 5 of Origin of Species, Darwin has a section, “Acclimatisation,” in which he explores the question of how far it is possible for organisms to adapt when introduced into significantly different climates. It is not so much the more exotic beings that interest him as those closer to home. He mentions some inconclusive examples of exotic plants transplanted to colder climates and then notes the “extraordinary capacity” of domestic animals of “not only withstanding the most different climates but of being perfectly fertile (a far severer test) under them.” Darwin concludes that “adaptation to any special climate” is “a quality readily grafted on an innate wide flexibility of constitution, which is common to most animals.”⁷⁶ He muses on how far habit, use and disuse, contrasted with the mechanism of natural selection, play a role in acclimatization. Whether Ibsen read this section of Origin or heard about it through discussions going on around him and in the newspapers and journals he constantly pored over, the same question clearly interested him enough to make it a central element of The Lady from the Sea and to pose it in human terms. Ellida may seem exotic and foreign, and she may complain about the physically as well as emotionally stifling, inhospitable climate of the fjord, but in the end, she becomes successfully acclimatized through a conscious process.

Indeed, along with his remarkable notes to Ghosts, Ibsen’s notes to The Lady from the Sea indicate a direct engagement with evolution during this phase of his career in the early 1880s. Take, for instance, his use of the sea. Ellida’s thalassophilia is tied directly to larger questions of human origins and descent. Ibsen muses on “the sea’s power of attraction” and our “longing for the sea” and says that “human beings [are] akin to the sea. Bound by the sea. Dependent on the sea. Compelled to return to it. A fish species forms a primitive link in the chain of evolution. Are rudiments thereof still present in the human mind? In the minds of certain individuals?”⁷⁷ An element of this can already be found in A Doll’s House; Nora knows her children will have a surrogate mother in their nurse, who was Nora’s wet-nurse, and she leaves them because it is the only means of breaking the hereditary cycle whereby children inherit their parents’ (and their culture’s) old ideas—the ghosts Mrs. Alving talks about or the “rudiments” of our evolutionary past. Our social institutions are the most destructive of these “rudiments,” especially marriage; Ibsen’s plays are one long, continuous assault on it. In these notes Ibsen further alludes to “pictures of the teeming life of the sea and of that which is ‘lost for ever.’ The sea possesses a power over one’s moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotise. Nature in general can do so. The great mystery is the dependence of the human will on that which is ‘will-less.’”⁷⁸ This conceptualization of the will is often seen in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. But could Ibsen also be engaging with Lamarck here?

Lamarckism was still popular, and for Ibsen to refute it, to contest the notion that there could be an element of will in evolution and to embrace instead the Darwinian sense of a “will-less” transmutation, would have been utterly characteristic of a dramatist whose approach to the main intellectual currents of his age was questioning and contrarian. “Tværtimot!” (“To the contrary!”) is what Ibsen is supposed to have uttered when the nurse attending him on his deathbed told those gathered around that he had taken a turn for the worse. The watershed speech of 1887 quoted earlier exemplifies his frequent use of the phrase on the contrary. Ibsen was a welter of contradictions; Ferguson claims he wore a mask of liberal humanism that “obscures several paradoxes” because his position changed so that he was “a sometime republican” who was also “an abject monarchist,” “distinctly a feminist, yet strongly anti-democratic,” and opposed to party politics.79 This contrariness marks his entire career, his whole approach to playwriting: going against the grain of received opinion, being unafraid to question, being skeptical and hostile. Ibsen could even seem to go against his previous contrariness, flouting whoever was attempting to label him something or other, as in his notorious “I am not a feminist” speech in 1898. Contrarianism also marks his response to evolutionary thought. For example, where Darwin hails domestication as positive because it yields greater variety in species, Ibsen equates domestication with degeneration and as therefore negative. This “creative misprision”—the misunderstanding of domestication as weakening the organism—becomes a brilliant dramatic stroke in plays like The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, and When We Dead Awaken (1899), whose very title goes against “science” in the first place.⁸⁰ Yet, as in most other things, Ibsen is not predictable or dogmatic; as Tjønneland points out, he reverses this idea in An Enemy of the People in the comparison Stockmann makes between poodles and mutts.⁸¹ He simply cannot be pinned down to any single dogmatic idea or program.

This contrarian tendency colors Ibsen’s overall sense of how evolution works—whether it is progressive or degenerative, whether (as he puts it in his notes to Ghosts) “the whole of mankind [has] gone astray.”82 Ibsen does not seem to see human evolution as progressive. Not only are we going “astray,” but we are on a downward evolutionary trajectory, possibly heading for extinction. This is the common equation of evolution with degeneration and regression—a conflation that runs through so much literature of the period and culminates in Max Nordau’s attacks on Émile Zola, Ibsen, and their contemporaries.⁸³ As late as 1897, Ibsen writes: “The development of the human race took the wrong turn from the start. Our dear fellow-men ought to have evolved themselves into maritime creatures,” an idea Downs suggests Ibsen got from Haeckel’s demonstration that fish “stand in the direct evolutionary line instead of leading down to man.”⁸⁴ Over a decade earlier, in the draft notes to The Lady from the Sea, in almost exactly the same language, Ibsen muses: “Has the line of human development gone astray? Why have we come to belong to the dry land? Why not to the air? Why not to the sea? . . . We ought to possess ourselves of the sea.”⁸⁵ In the final version of the play this becomes Ellida’s theory—stated in act 3, right in the middle of the play—that human beings do not belong on the land, and that if only we had learned to live our lives on the sea, “or perhaps even in the sea,” our development would have been markedly different, “both better and happier.” Arnholm’s response is half joking: “Well, what’s done is done. We’ve once and for all ended up on the wrong track and have become land creatures instead of sea creatures.”⁸⁶

Closely allied to the concern with evolution having gone “astray” is the idea of racial senility or worn-out genes. The paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt’s work (1866, 1884, 1889) with fossil cephalopods, such as ammonites, led him to suggest the possibility of “the senility and death of whole invertebrate groups,” the larger implications of which included the individual’s loss of growth energy and the decline toward old age and death—the idea that “the group will eventually use up all of its evolutionary energy . . . declining in parallel through stages of increasing simplicity toward racial senility and extinction.”⁸⁷ This is not the same thing as degeneration, however. In a draft of Little Eyolf, Allmers reveals his theory that “every family—that has breeding, be it observed—has its ascending series of generations: it rises from father to son, until it reaches the highest point the family is capable of attaining. And then it goes down again.”⁸⁸ A few moments later, he refers to his weakling son as “the summit and crown of the Skioldheim stock.”⁸⁹

Two further examples illustrate this concern running throughout Ibsen’s works and show that it is frequently tied to the idea of extinction. In John Gabriel Borkman, the terminally ill Ella is obsessed with the fact that her name will die out: “This thought strangles me. To be erased from existence—even down to the name.”90 As in François de Curel’s Les Fossiles, she wants to ensure the perpetuation of the name by transferring it to a surrogate child. Wolff notes that several critics have pointed out how “children in Ibsen’s drama . . . often appear to be physically marked, or even cursed, by the actions of the previous generation,” and she attributes this exclusively to Ibsen’s “interest in heredity.”⁹¹ It is not only that they are maimed or cursed; often, they die or they simply do not appear at all, which is not related to heredity as much as to the idea of extinction. In Hedda Gabler (1890), Hedda tells Brack: “I am the child of an old man—and a worn-out man too—or past his prime at any rate—Perhaps that has left its mark.”⁹² This may also account for Ibsen’s emphasis on hair in Hedda Gabler (and elsewhere).⁹³ His contrast between Hedda’s thin hair and Thea’s “luxuriant” mane was not thought of until later, in subsequent or final drafts, as William Archer points out.⁹⁴ It indicates that Ibsen is focused on not only heredity but also extinction; Hedda is the last of her line, and she seems determined to kill it off. She commits suicide despite (or because of) probably being pregnant, thus deliberately truncating her family tree.⁹⁵ Perhaps the “thin hair” symbolizes this sense she has of her genes having become exhausted. But it also relates to her state of mind. Darwin sees women’s hair as a marker of their sanity, saying in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that those with “destructive impulses” exhibit “bristling” hair.⁹⁶ He also reports several cases of women’s hair signaling their emotional state. In fact, Ibsen links hair directly to three aspects of evolution: sexual selection (Thea’s ability to win Løvborg as her partner is signified through her fuller head of hair), heredity (Hedda’s sense that she is a child of worn-out stock is signified through her thinner head of hair), and our close evolutionary kinship with animals as demonstrated by our shared emotional expressions.

Several of Ibsen’s plays show a particular interest in animals, and these shed further light on his engagement with evolution. The rapidly expanding field of animal studies is yielding new insights in relation to Ibsen scholarship, most prominently with regard to The Wild Duck, which H. A. E. Zwart claims is the first instance in world literature of an animal becoming a subject of experimentation. But, apart from this play, relatively little has been said about the presence of animals in his works generally and what this might mean in the broader context of ethology and evolution. Unlike naturalists like Zola, who conflate the human and the animal to make a negative comment on the human condition, Ibsen keeps them decidedly separate. For example, Little Eyolf features a little black dog throughout one scene. The draft of the play shows that Ibsen was already at this early stage planning to have a live dog on the stage, something that is retained in the final version of the script. “A little dog with a broad black snout pokes its head out of the bag” (belonging to the Rat Wife), and it at first terrifies but then mysteriously attracts Eyolf.97 The dog figures a lot in this scene and—as with babies in so many of James A. Herne’s plays—it could not have been fake as that would have completely undermined the realistic tone. If anything, the final version of the play draws even more attention to the dog as something mysterious, threatening yet attractive to Eyolf, a symbol of death in its little black bag.

Let us look more closely at what Ibsen is asking for theatrically here. Once the dog, with its disarmingly sweet name of Mopsemand, has made its appearance by poking its nose out of the bag, things really become interesting, as the Rat Wife beckons Eyolf to come nearer, saying the dog will not bite. Eyolf cowers next to Asta—notice it is not his mother he seeks protection and comfort from—but the Rat Wife persists, asking: “Doesn’t the young man think the dog has a mild and lovable face?” Again, it is hard to see how a fake dog could convincingly be used at such a key moment when we are all being invited, along with Eyolf, to study the dog’s face. Eyolf is at first surprised but then intrigued; he stares at the dog and says: “I think he has the most awful—face I have seen.” The Rat Wife closes the bag and says, “Oh, it will surely come” while Eyolf continues to be drawn to the dog; he “lightly passes his hands over the bag” and says “Lovely—he’s lovely after all.” The Rat Wife warns him that the dog is quite tired out now from his arduous work as her helper in luring rats to their death. He does not bite them to death—they just lead the rats down to the water, the rats follow the boat and Mopsemand swims behind it, leading them out to the deep where they drown. This little black dog with its innocuous name is not just a symbol but an active agent of death. Its presence on stage dramatizes several associations with the workings of nature: death, breeding practices, and domestication, all key means of the human manipulation of evolution.

Although we are not invited to study the animal or its face, The Wild Duck similarly foregrounds animality: it not only takes an animal as its title, but also shows an extraordinary theatrical innovation in having a bifurcated stage with one half the ordinary domestic family interior of realistic drama and the other half a mysterious, darkened loft inhabited by a menagerie straight out of Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Darwin gives several examples of wild duck behavior in The Descent of Man. However, Meyer suggests that Ibsen got the image of the wild duck from a poem by Johan S. Welhaven called “The Sea-Bird,” which tells about a wild duck being wounded and diving down to die on the seabed. Whatever the approach, it is common to interpret the wild duck as a symbol of Ibsen’s own anxiety at this stage in his career about getting too domesticated, too far from the wild: “One who has forgotten what it means to live wild, and has grown plump and tame and content with his basket, as unlike the author of Brand as the duck is unlike the hawk of the earlier play.”98 At the end of his career, Ibsen is still concerned with this concept of wildness as necessary, a key condition of artistic integrity and creativity: in a speech to the Swedish Society of Authors in Stockholm in 1898, he says he eschews membership of any organization because writers have to “go their own wild ways,—yes, as wild as they could possibly wish, if they are to fulfil their life’s work.”⁹⁹ Ibsen’s plays consistently suggest that the artist seems to evolve differently from other humans and has difficulty adapting to his environment, perhaps possessing more of animality than humanity.

The theme of wildness versus domestication underpins many of Ibsen’s plays and has usually been looked at as a metaphor for human behavior. Torvald’s “pet names” for Nora (his little lark and his squirrel) refer to animals that share their environments with humans and whose wildness is constantly threatened by human intervention. What is most striking is that, with regard to animals, Ibsen often had his facts intriguingly wrong, whether on the issue of wildness versus domesticity (Ibsen mistakenly thought that the animal and thus the entire species deteriorated under domestication) or on the issue of extinction (his suggestion that some dodos still existed), further instances of his characteristic contrarianism.

Hjalmar and Old Ekdal are experimenting on the duck to test the concept of adaptation.¹⁰⁰ The loft is a kind of laboratory: the animals and their artificially constructed environment constitute

Ibsen’s ecological concoction of fantastic and real wilderness, a displaced place for both animals and humans. It is a bizarre yet functional “complex web” in which only the severely wounded wild duck thrives, while the rest of the menagerie is fed and reproduces only to be shot for food by Old Ekdal, the once-great hunter who killed nine bears. As such, it is his new ecological niche. . . . Yet, it is ironically or tragically an unsustainable niche, a web that is doomed to unravel and collapse.¹⁰¹

Ibsen stages nature not only as backdrop but also as agent—as both character and action. Nature becomes completely integral to the themes of the plays, such as rebirth, adaptation, and the destruction of self. This is consistent with Darwin’s metaphor of nature as presenting acts in one long geological drama (referred to in the introduction). Ibsen constantly invokes, as well as depicts, the awesome power of nature; in the draft to Little Eyolf, for example, there is a reference to the “spellbound fascination” of “nature among the glaciers and the wide open spaces” that holds a kind of “magic.” Further in this draft, the “wide open spaces” are invoked again.¹⁰³ If we accept Brustein’s theory that Ibsen stopped being Darwinist with The Master Builder, we need to pay particular attention to Little Eyolf; this play contains a fascinating insight into how Ibsen’s ideas about evolution were developing and finding expression in his staging requirements as well as in his themes. Borkman and When We Dead Awaken (and earlier epic dramas like Peer Gynt [1867] and Brand) require an avalanche on stage, a woman engulfed by the snow and literally snowballing before our eyes, and at least the suggestion of vistas of snow to traverse on skis. His extreme landscapes and the demands they place on directors and designers are a continuation and modification of the nineteenth-century melodramatic spectacle that was discussed in chapter 1, now placed within a specifically Darwinian context that theatricalizes the organism’s situation within its dynamic environment.

In fact, Cless notes that the scenic requirements of these final plays place exceptional challenges and burdens on the director or producer and designer. The elaborate staging Ibsen asks for in When We Dead Awaken—with its fjord “stretching right out to sea,” its “small islets” visible in the distance, its “vast treeless plateau” leading to “a long mountain lake,” and the towering mountain range with snow-filled crevices—recalls not only the landscapes of Peer Gynt but also the settings of Victorian melodrama, spectacle, and equestrian drama (the breathtaking scale of a piece like The Cataract of the Ganges). Critics do not seem to have drawn this parallel, perhaps because we are so set in thinking about Ibsen as a pioneer who moved drama away from melodrama and spectacle. But these spectacular natural landscapes are a consistent feature of Ibsen’s plays: Ghosts with its endlessly rainy fjord setting, Brand with its avalanche, and Peer Gynt with its desert sands, storm at sea, and mountainous terrain. To see the play as it is sometimes seen as a closet drama, not meant for the stage, is to miss entirely its organic connection to the theatrical conventions of its time. In modern revivals, such extensive scenic requirements are usually scaled back or ignored due to budget constraints and perhaps also our undervaluing their literalness, reading these settings as reflecting something psychological rather than ecological.

One of the most interesting tensions or contradictions within Ibsen’s work is the geographical binary between the subterranean and the mountaintop. In an early poem, Ibsen figured himself as “bergmanden,” the miner (literally, “mountain man”) chipping away at the underground rock face—the subconscious, dark tunnels of our souls. Hammering at a rock face is a common motif for nineteenth-century writers; for example, Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols was provisionally referred to as “philosophizing with a hammer.”104 The metaphor figures writing as hard physical labor, struggling to uncover buried truths that are difficult to confront, to bring into the light. Ralph O’Connor’s study The Earth on Show illuminates the cultural resonance of the “geological hammer” and its associations with a new kind of scientific heroism. In this context, it is significant that Ibsen continued to identify with this motif throughout his career (even his tombstone has a hammer engraved on it), indeed building it into his penultimate play John Gabriel Borkman.¹⁰⁵

A complementary metaphor to the hammering of art is one of nature as a series of wedges, each representing a species, and each wedge subject to displacement by the hammer of natural selection. Darwin’s early notes on species change use the metaphor of the wedge to describe what he would eventually call natural selection. Jessica H. Whiteside writes that “in an 1856 manuscript, Darwin compared nature ‘to a surface covered with ten thousand sharp wedges . . . representing different species, all packed closely together and all driven in by incessant blows.’ Sometimes a wedge, a new species, driven deeply into this imaginary surface, would force out others, affecting species across ‘many lines of direction.’”106 In the first edition of Origin, Darwin describes “the face of Nature” as “a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.”¹⁰⁷ Stephen Jay Gould especially liked this metaphor of the wedge, which Darwin removed from all subsequent editions of Origin; consequently, most people are unaware of it. Whiteside calls this wedge metaphor “prescient” for its ability to depict “both the interconnectivity of species and the importance of external impacts.”¹⁰⁸ She notes the “subtle point embedded in Darwin’s abstract metaphor of the wedge: that life evolves not with a monolithic tendency toward perfection but continuously, adventitiously, but without direction, and in intimate interconnectedness to its fellows.”¹⁰⁹ In giving up this wedge metaphor, Darwin succumbed to the pressure to see evolution as optimistic and directed toward improvement. Although there is no overt link between Ibsen’s hammer and Darwin’s wedge, Ibsen’s plays show a tension between his call to hammer beneath the earth, in the subterranean darkness, and his longing for the “face of Nature” and the light of day, the wide open spaces and high mountaintops. Both writers conceptualize the workings of art and nature through powerful forces.

So far, we have seen in Ibsen’s and Darwin’s writing similar, often awe-struck, conceptions of nature and the natural. They share a sense of wonder at natural forces, the vastness of time and space, and natural beauty, but also nature’s random, blind, and ultimately death-bringing mechanisms. But Ibsen does not share Darwin’s positive view of the effects of experimentation with breeding. What Darwin wrote in the beginning of Origin regarding variation under domestication (and leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Ibsen might have actually read Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, or at least known about it, and that this rather than a perusal of Origin sparked him to put these issues into dramatic form in The Wild Duck) is as follows: he aims to correct a misconception put about by some naturalists that “our domestic varieties, when run wild, gradually but certainly revert in character to their aboriginal stocks. Hence it has been argued that no deductions can be drawn from domestic races to species in a state of nature.” Darwin puzzles over why this assertion is made when “we may safely conclude that very many of the most strongly-marked domestic varieties could not possibly live in a wild state. . . . If it could be shown that our domestic varieties manifested a strong tendency to reversion,—that is, to lose their acquired characters, whilst kept under unchanged conditions,” then he might concede—but “there is not a shadow of evidence in favour of this view.”110 We can breed plants and animals infinitely.

In his remarkable notes to Ghosts, Ibsen dwells on the idea of artificial breeding and the fear of the deterioration of the human race: “The complete, finished person is no longer a product of nature, he is artificially produced like grain, and fruit-trees, and the Creole race and thoroughbred horses and dogs, the grapevine, etc.”¹¹¹ This theme will preoccupy him in the next few plays, developing ideas that have much in common with Francis Galton’s work Hereditary Genius (1869); in fact, dogs and horses feature in the very first lines of Galton’s book:

Man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.¹¹²

Quite apart from the dogs and horses, what is significant is the shared idea of selective breeding applied to humans. Galton had been publishing his views for many years, though he first used his term eugenics in 1883. People were shocked at Ibsen’s portrayal of syphilis and near-incest in Ghosts, but Downs sees this in the context of discussions of breeding at the time; the “calm manner in which Mrs. Alving . . . contemplated the possibility, even the desirability, of an incestuous union between Oswald and Regina—which no one would have condemned in the case of domestic animals—betrays the distance by which Ibsen had outstripped most of his co-evals in the acceptance of the new science. He not only drew his own conclusions from it, but interested himself in some of its details.”¹¹³

In 1874, Georg Brandes complained of Ibsen having preposterous eugenic views: “Fancy—he seriously believes in a time when ‘the intelligent minority’ in these countries [Norway and Denmark] ‘will be forced to enlist the aid of chemistry and medicine in poisoning the proletariat’ to save themselves from being politically overwhelmed by the majority. And this universal poisoning is what he wants.”114

Wolff identifies two main ways in which eugenics figures in Ibsen’s dramatic vision: “the potentially utopian question of breeding for an improved human being, a possibility demonstrated by horticulturalists and stock breeders through experiments in biological restructuring, and the question of responsibility for unborn children.”¹¹⁵ Eugenics is already part of Ibsen’s dramatic vision as early as A Doll’s House and as late as Little Eyolf, with its killing of the deformed child by a mysterious, symbolic force (the Rat Wife).

In one draft of A Doll’s House, Dr. Rank refers to suffering for another’s sin. “Where’s the justice of it?” he asks. “And yet you can trace in every family an inexorable retribution. It is my father’s wild oats that my poor spine must do penance for.”¹¹⁶ This was a popular notion in Europe in the mid- to late nineteenth century, due in large part to the work of French scientist Benedict A. Morel and his theory of degeneracy presented in 1857, which included the idea that physical weaknesses or degenerate traits could be produced by a debauched lifestyle and carried on genetically.¹¹⁷ In the full draft of the play, Dr. Rank has much more to say about degeneracy, referring to the feeble-minded, “unfit” specimens of humanity who are drunk or dishonest.¹¹⁸ Rank has no sympathy with such people, who he says merely exploit the good will of others; when Mrs. Linde points out that in fact they are the ones who most need sympathy, he replies: “But we don’t need the depleted examples of the race; we can do without them.” He explains: “The stronger tree draws life from the weaker ones and directs them toward its own use. The same thing happens among the animals; the bad individuals in the group must yield to the better ones. And in this way nature progresses. It is just we people who with violence and power prevent progress by looking after the bad individuals.”¹¹⁹ Ibsen links evolution with progress here, and Tjønneland identifies this as marked social Darwinism and sees it again in Hedda Gabler.¹²⁰ In fact, in the first act of the first draft of Hedda Gabler, Hedda mocks Tesman’s “survival-of-the-fittest” mentality: “You are so fond of saying that the strongest always wins,” and the act ends with his uneasy echo of this as he begins to doubt this idea: “The strongest, yes—.”¹²¹

Ibsen cleverly undermines Dr. Rank’s eugenic speech, though, by having the doctor suddenly remember a critically ill patient he is supposed to be seeing (a miner whom he refers to as “that beast”), at which Fru Linde says: “Is that also a bad example of humankind, Doctor?” The doctor says that the man, in a drunken episode, has managed to shoot his right hand, so he will be useless if he survives, and Fru Linde says ironically: “But then it’s surely best to get him exterminated.” The doctor—voicing sentiments we will hear again in Dr. Stockmann—agrees, saying that this is a thought doctors often have, especially when tending to the poor, but who is going to take on this responsibility? “No, Madam, we haven’t evolved far enough yet.”122 Quite apart from the direct reference to evolution, this is a fascinating insight into how Ibsen’s engagement with contemporary thought on heredity was developing and could take on so many modes, from strident eugenicism to satire. Ibsen’s notes to Ghosts continue this borderline eugenic concern with heredity and breeding: what is natural and what is artificially produced, and why do “we allow lepers to marry; but their offspring—? The unborn?—.”¹²³

Eugenics permeates An Enemy of the People, full of Spencerian ideas about survival of the fittest, lower and higher orders, and so on. According to Zwart, in this play Ibsen “staged the emergence of the modern scientific outlook.”124 I would argue that the play expresses this through its eugenics as well as its environmentalism. Doctor Stockmann looks forward to the day when there will be an aristocracy of the liberated; he talks about the “vermin” and the “curs” up north (i.e., the uneducated and impoverished) whom he was forced to treat as a doctor but whom he would be perfectly happy to see eliminated; he invokes the “minority” who is always right, the man who stands alone versus the might of the unenlightened masses. It certainly seems that Stockmann bears greater affinities with Galton’s ideas than with Nietzsche’s due to the specific allusions to breeding and heredity. Wolff sees Stockmann as shaping raw materials, and this is evident especially in the ending of the play, when he will nurture the “mongrels” in his new school, sowing the seeds of new thinking for new generations—an important about-face (similar to the undercutting of Dr. Rank by Mrs. Linde mentioned previously) after the eugenically tinged speeches of act 4.¹²⁵ This ending also connects with that of his next play, Little Eyolf, in demonstrating the need to recognize “human responsibility” (the subject of Allmers’s planned book) and suggesting that human evolution proceeds by cooperation, not competition.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to be sanguine about the eugenic overtones of Stockmann’s central speeches. I would like to probe the connection with Brandes a little more here. We know that Ibsen was greatly influenced by Brandes. But Brandes began to think twice about his fiery radicalism of the 1870s that had made such an impact on Ibsen and on Scandinavian literature generally. In 1884, he denied being a democrat in his political beliefs; in 1886, he discovered Nietzsche, and the conception of the Superman became for him “the final end of cultural values.”¹²⁶ Brandes focused on Nietzsche in a lecture series published in 1889 as Aristocratic Radicalism, in which he “rejects categorically most of the ideas characteristic of his earlier criticism,” including as he himself put it “certain theories of heredity, with a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of women . . . a little free thought.”¹²⁷ One critic argues that Brandes “never had been a democrat in spirit.”¹²⁸

Just as with William Shakespeare, we want to have it both ways: Ibsen must be both unique—the lone genius, the exception—and deeply of his age.¹²⁹ We have danced gingerly about his eugenic views for too long, uncomfortable with them yet reluctant to confront them. It may well be that he hopped off the eugenic bandwagon after a few years. But we need to accept his temporary embrace of eugenics as part of his response to the intellectual package of evolution as it was then understood, to accept that he was in this respect a man of his age, just as Darwin disappointingly rehearses the dominant Victorian views on the inferiority of women in the final section of The Descent of Man. In both cases, these views are thoroughly undermined by the inherent radicalism of the works themselves.

A more salutary aspect of the “modern scientific outlook” of Enemy is its prescient environmentalism—specifically its exposure of eco-hubris. Cless, Zwart, David S. Caudill, and Greg Garrard have explored this aspect of the play, which, astonishingly, has often been dismissed as merely allegorical—the pollution of the baths as simply a metaphor for the corruption of the spirit. But what has polluted the baths in the first place? Just as the “infusoria” Stockmann has discovered in the baths are invisible, so are the physical sources of them kept from the audience’s sight—the tanneries and polluted swamp referred to in the play. The scenes of the play are set indoors, allowing both the characters and the audience too readily to “shut out awareness of the sources of the problem, thereby losing track of the environmental stakes as the play reaches its peak in the town meeting.”130

Not only do we not see these sources, but the intensity of the human conflicts in the play (Stockmann versus his brother, then the newspaper editors, then the entire town) further obscures them from our observation. Yet ultimately the play enacts one of Ibsen’s abiding concerns: how to live harmoniously with nature even while exploiting it. As he puts it in a draft of The Lady from the Sea, we must “learn to harness the storms and the weather. Some such felicity will come.”¹³¹ In the draft to Rosmersholm, Hetman (later called Brendel) proposes to liaise with some local businessmen-entrepreneurs to manufacture some as-yet-undiscovered product that will require

Is this just a ham-fisted swipe at capitalism, or is it a satirical comment on our use of precious natural resources? Brendel/Hetman goes on to say that while this scenario of course sounds preposterous, “I have only been trying to emphasise the fact that we all agree that the air and water of our planet are common property to everybody. But when the solid earth is in question—the ground under our feet, that no one can do without, well, das ist was Anderes! Nobody breathes a word against the solid earth of the globe being in the hands of a comparatively small band of robbers, who have made use of it for centuries, who are making use of it to-day, and who propose to make use of it for all futurity.”¹³³

Henry Arthur Jones hailed Ibsen’s influence in a lecture at Harvard in 1906 in terms of natural history, using vast, catastrophic imagery from nature: Ibsen “looms darkly through a blizzard, in a wilderness made still more bleak and desolate by the gray lava streams of corrosive irony that have poured from his crater. Yet by this very fact he becomes all the more representative of his age.”134 It is striking how often writers characterize Ibsen’s impact in terms of vast geographical events or movements (such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s idea of Ibsen as “subterranean”).¹³⁵ It is as if his impact on drama is on an evolutionary scale, transforming the very landscape, foundations, and elements of drama, but especially important is that this impact is not Spencerian (allied with progress and improvement) but Darwinian. By the 1890s, Ibsen is a declared pessimist, rather like Thomas Hardy. He has turned from the consolations of teleology, redemption, and progress. He seems to embrace the Darwinian concepts of blindness, randomness, chance, and even ultimate obliteration.

This is perhaps one of the ways in which he seems “so evolved,” in Henry James’s words. James once wrote of the contrast between Ibsen’s form, “so difficult to have reached, so civilized, so ‘evolved,’—and the bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy.”¹³⁶ He puts quotation marks around the term evolved, drawing attention to it, using it self-consciously. The very qualities critics like James and Shaw praise in Ibsen’s plays, such as their “cold fixed light” and “hard frugal charm” (terms in this same Borkman review), evoke Darwinian nature with its seeming indifference to suffering. In the same review, James begins his discussion of the play by saying that, for many people in London, Ibsen is “a kind of pictorial monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show,” because of what he does with form.¹³⁷ James calls Ibsen “an extraordinary curiosity.”¹³⁸ This is deft as well as thoroughly evocative of contemporary evolutionary language: on the one hand seeming to concede that Ibsen seems an oddity, a human freak, yet on the other hand praising him as highly “evolved”—the quintessence, perhaps, of contrarianism.