It seems hardly necessary to argue the contemporaneity of Henrik Ibsen. His long shadow, like that of his near contemporary Joyce, has extended across more than a century and remains a constant presence even in the postmodern world of the past half century and into the new millennium. Perhaps no dramatist, save Shakespeare, has been produced more persistently on the worldwide stage, exerted more influence, or provided the inspiration for more playwrights. As Rolf Fjelde writes in his 1970 foreword to this text, we merely await new actors to seize Ibsen’s “multidimensional life . . . liberate it, and make it their own.” Yet, as with any works in the established canon, Ibsen’s dramas have sometimes been diminished by critical clichés, and certain of his texts have been ignored according to the dictates of current literary theory. Furthermore, in an age of deconstruction, feminist criticism, performance theory, and various other versions of postmodern theory, Ibsen’s dramaturgy and themes have sometimes been dismissed as worn-out or passé. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. The four plays reprinted here in the superb Fjelde translations bear witness to the enduring relevance of Ibsen’s vision.
The female protagonists in Ghosts and The Lady from the Sea form part of Ibsen’s remarkable set of portraits of women on the threshold of the modern age: Dina Dorf, Nora Helmers, Helene Alving, Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West—all seek freedom from social and psychological repression in an age of heightened self-consciousness. It is no wonder that, at a time when our own awareness of women’s issues has been dramatically raised, Ibsen’s depiction of both their social and psychological lives maintains a remarkable currency, despite his claim that he never wrote any play for a social purpose. Ghosts, as many have noted, is a retelling of A Doll House from the perspective of a woman who opts to remain in a loveless marriage rather than escape her socially defined doll house. In creating Nora Helmer two years earlier, Ibsen avoided the facile view that Nora is merely the victim of the patriarchal society and suggested that she is essentially enslaved by her own willful, if largely unconscious, acceptance of conventional morality. He recognized that the most powerful chains are, in Blake’s phrase, “mind-forg’d manacles.” In Ghosts, he portrays Nora as an older woman still struggling to free herself from the code of social morality and the past. He emphasizes Helene Alving’s female nature by featuring her relationship with her symbolically diseased only child, upon whom she has placed the burden of her own redemption. Ibsen employs the “child” as a symbol in most of his plays. Though some of Ibsen’s child characters are literally illegitimate, more often than not they are psychologically and spiritually orphaned—and they are everywhere. Many are the issue of what Margot Norris calls “spiritual adultery.” Children of mismatched pairs, they haunt the plays from The Vikings at Helgeland to When We Dead Awaken. Many endure physical deformities that expose the flawed relationships of their parents—Osvald Alving’s syphilitic condition, Hedvig Ekdal’s encroaching blindness, and Eyolf Allmer’s crippled body. So also the deaths of Ulf Brand, Ellida Wangel’s sickly infant, and Aline Solness’s poisoned twins give testimony of illicit unions. In addition, such figurative progeny as Eilert Løvborg’s manuscript in Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West’s fraudulent child in Rosmersholm, and the violated statue-child in When We Dead Awaken bear witness to deficient relationships and spiritual failure. In an age of rampant child abuse such as our own, these characters speak to us with extraordinary power.
Like A Doll House, Ghosts is often reduced by a too simplistic characterization of the protagonist as victim of the external forces exposed in Ibsen’s realistic depiction of culture forces—a domineering husband, the mores of the patriarchal society, Pastor Manders’s moral absolutism and lack of courage—but Ibsen’s vision goes well beyond the dictates of the conventional problem play in its characterization of Mrs. Alving. For Ibsen understands that the real enemy of Mrs. Alving, as of Nora Helmer, is the self; by remaining in a loveless marriage, Mrs. Alving is an unwitting coconspirator in her own defeat. Rejecting the seductive appeal of victimization, Ibsen grants Mrs. Alving tragic stature by showing that she has chosen—and so must bear responsibility for the consequences of choice. As Osvald reminds her when Mrs. Alving ironically claims a mother’s right to possess him even as he regresses into childhood in the terminal stages of syphilis, she is “the obvious choice” to assume responsibility for his fate: “What more obvious choice than you?” In surely one of the most ironic lines in modern drama, she responds, “My child has his mother to nurse him.” In reclaiming her “child,” she comes face-to-face with the potential cost of “freedom” as tragically as any “new woman” on the modern stage. And the way Ibsen ends—or perhaps more accurately does not end—the play bespeaks its modernity as well. Often accused of writing melodramatic rather than meaningful endings (Nora slamming the door, Hedda Gabler shooting herself, Hedvig Ekdal sacrificing herself, Rosmer and Rebecca jumping into the mill-race, Solness falling from the tower, John Gabriel Borkman being reclaimed by “the icy hand,” Arnold Rubek leaping into the avalanche), Ibsen also brings down the curtain in Ghosts with a sensational ending as Osvald slips into childish madness; but he keeps it open-ended, nonetheless, in anticipation of so much of modern drama in its apparent lack of closure. In the play’s stunning incompletion, Ibsen makes clear that Mrs. Alving must indeed define herself as woman, as the “mother” in whose hands the choice of life and death remains. Though Kindermord occurs frequently in Ibsen, it carries extraordinary power here. Having committed the crime of innocence under Manders’ influence by accommodating the social code, Helene Alving has again become the “mother” to the diseased child she has been killing all along. Now she is at last free, however ironically, to choose independent of any external control, and it really does not matter what she chooses, only that she chooses—and she must choose. Avoiding the superficial, Ibsen gives mythic dimension to the spiritual and existential crisis in the play, portraying in Mrs. Alving’s unresolvable dilemma the contesting Apollonian and Dionysian forces doing battle in the guise of social propriety and the will to freedom.
A product of Ibsen’s later career, The Lady from the Sea explores the dark recesses of the psyche even more deeply and, like the plays to follow, presents a penetrating study of an individual suffering from the disease of modern life. A combination of powerful mythical and psychological impulses, Ellida Wangel is among the playwright’s most complex and enigmatic figures. Trapped, like Nora, Mrs. Alving, and Hedda, in an enclosed social and psychic world (represented by the confines of the summerhouse), Ellida tells her husband, Wangel, “The plain, simple truth is that you came out there and—and bought me.” What Nora discovers and Hedda already painfully realizes, Ellida confesses: “I met your offer—and sold myself to you.” Ibsen again exposes the corrupt bourgeois capitalism in which women are barter; but he moves from the meticulously furnished middle-class rooms in A Doll House and the pretentious mausoleum where Hedda Gabler is entombed to a richly primal setting on the edge of the water, where land and sea assume archetypal meaning as projections of the elemental counterforces operating in Ellida.
Called “The Heathen” ten years earlier when the then-youthful Arnholm proposed to her, Ellida was “married” to a mysterious seaman in a ritual ceremony when they exchanged rings and threw them into the water, vowing to “marry themselves to the sea”—“just as binding as a marriage license” (an interesting echo of Rebecca and Rosmer’s ritual marriage at the end of Rosmersholm). Now seemingly resurrected from the sea, the universal symbol of the unconscious, the supposedly dead seaman returns to lay claim to his “Lady from the Sea.” As in other plays of Ibsen’s later period, the action depends on extremely taut dialogue with very limited action (one thinks of Little Eyolf in which the only real action occurs at the end of act one, and the two acts following constitute a lengthy and compelling denouement).
Reflections of earlier plays surface as well. Another orphan figure like Peer Gynt’s “ugly brat,” Nora, Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Dina Dorf, Rebecca West, Hilda Wangel, and Asta Allmers, Ellida is spiritually disenfranchised. Even the theme of incest resurfaces here as it does spectacularly in Ghosts and Rosmersholm. Ellida lived alone with her father at his lighthouse, an obvious phallic symbol like General Gabler’s pistols. Ibsen also again addresses the role of women as wives and mothers in distinctly modern terms. Ellida and Wangel’s only child died at age two-and-a-half, five months before the play opens, another illegitimate child victimized by his mother’s guilt. Nor can Ellida serve as stepmother to Wangel’s daughters, who are approximately her own age. Unfulfilled as wife or mother, she sees her guilt as an “unfaithful wife” in her dead infant’s eyes that “changed with the sea,” a mirror of her spiritual husband associated with the sea, and a voice rising from her own unconscious like the judgmental eyes of Little Eyolf that stare up from the sea and penetrate the soul of Rita Allmers.
Another play of retribution, of the persistence of the past, The Lady from the Sea juxtaposes Apollonian and Dionysian powers vying in Ellida Wangel’s psyche. Here, however, Ibsen offers a resolution. With the resurrection of the seaman and his claim on her, Ellida confronts the psychic forces that bind her. By allowing Ellida to choose, Wangel places the full weight of choice onto her, dissolving “the contract” that legally binds them—and as in all Ibsen’s plays, “freedom . . . transforms everything!” Ellida can now choose to be wife and mother. And even though we are perhaps no more certain what the future holds here than we are at the end of Little Eyolf when Rita welcomes her supposed stepsister Asta, Ellida embraces her stepdaughter Hilda at the end of the play, symbolically attesting, at least momentarily, to her motherhood and her new sense of self.
The earlier and more polemical An Enemy of the People exceeds as well the limitations of a simple protest play, though it too is often reductively misread. When Arthur Miller early in his career adapted Ibsen’s text for a 1950 restaging in the shadow of the McCarthy hearings, he followed the error of many by transforming it into “a teaching play.” Although he rightly claimed in his essay “Ibsen’s Warning” that An Enemy of the People “is far more applicable to our nature-despoiling societies than to even turn-of-the-century capitalism, untrammelled and raw as Ibsen knew it to be,” he largely ignored Ibsen’s irony and the comic incongruity with which Ibsen often undercuts his idealistic protagonist Dr. Stockmann. Contrary to Ibsen, Miller makes Stockmann into what David Bronson calls “a mouthpiece” and “a package of virtue.” In fact Stockmann assumes the guise of a modern antihero as much as the pose of a hero in Ibsen’s hands, even though Stanislavsky considered Stockmann his favorite role. As Professor Fjelde notes, Ibsen complicates the nature of the play, showing that the liberals are every bit as dangerous and hypocritical as the conservatives who target Stockmann, neither possessing the vision to bring about the “Third Kingdom.” Professor Fjelde aptly identifies Stockmann as one of the new revolutionaries, “the prime agent of revolt against the tyranny of fixed abstractions . . . and of constricting naturalistic circumstances.” But Ibsen intentionally mutes his protagonist’s heroism, exposing him as driven as much by egotism as by principle. The self-absorbed doctor seeks his twelve disciples at the end and never questions his own motives. Neither a ninny nor a true idealist, he emerges as an ambiguous modern figure. Far from being the pat hero projected in superficial readings of the text, the naive, proud, and often petty Stockmann remains ignorant of himself and suspect as a moral figure even though, as Professor Fjelde proposes, he seems “the bearer of the new conception of revolution.” Ibsen invites a far more cynical, postmodern evaluation of him than the view afforded by those seeking a full-blooded, conventional hero.
The other male protagonist included here provides one of the first full portraits of the modern capitalist financier, a sort of bourgeois Faust driven by the counterimperatives of acquiring wealth and power and benefiting humanity. On one hand a visionary like Brand and Julian (in Emperor and Galilean), John Gabriel Borkman is also as ruthless as any tycoon of the Gilded Age or current Wall Street investor. In this late play, Ibsen probes his protagonist far more deeply than he does his earlier, much more polemical “enemy of the people.” As he generally does, Ibsen constructs a triangular relationship to characterize his central character and develop his themes. The two sisters, Ella and Gunhild, establish the internal dialectic that propels Borkman. Here Ibsen brings to bear the themes and dramatic strategies that are his signature. Merging myth and realism, he portrays his capitalist overreacher as sacrificing love for power, just as Rubek denies love for art in Ibsen’s last great play, When We Dead Awaken. Another orphaned child, Erhart is alienated from his parents. Gunhild welcomes him only as the instrument of revenge, and Borkman sees him as the agent of his dream of unparalleled economic might. Gunhild’s sister, Ella, his true spiritual mother, claims him as a substitute for her failed life. In consequence of these specious claims, Erhart is utterly deprived of will.
Interestingly, almost alone among Ibsen’s orphaned children, Erhart is rescued. Irene declares that she should have killed her and Rubek’s spurious child-statue, and Aline remorselessly recalls in The Master Builder how she poisoned her infants even as she mourns the loss of her nine dolls—“Just like unborn children”; but Erhart is spared by Fanny Wilton’s determination to take him away, even if their love proves temporary. Gunhild’s last word as Fanny and Erhart depart defines the cost of all their freedom—“Childless.” Typically Ibsen retains a certain ambiguity at the ends of his plays, and here too we are left to wonder if Fanny has merely seduced the naive Erhart like the troll-like Hilda Wangel tempts Solness to climb the tower. Regardless, as Professor Fjelde concludes, “it is now up to the new generation to revise and improve or to reject the sum of their parents’ lives.”
All these plays illustrate the sustaining vision of Ibsen’s art. In his aligning of the mythic with the psychological—of “retribution” with the inexorable presentness of the past—in his portrayal of the conflicting imperatives of self and society in the emerging culture, in his conception of tragedy in a world with neither God nor a moral center in which determinism and free will do constant battle, in his compelling use of symbolism, in his Freudian sensitivity to the counterforces of Eros and Thanatos, and in his profound awareness of spiritual alienation and ambiguity in a world peopled by orphans, Ibsen provides an enduring portrait of the human condition in the modern age.
—Terry Otten
Wittenberg University