This
year's survey of essay-length commentaries on Ibsen covers twenty-five items. The
plays receiving more than casual discussion are The Pretenders, Brand, Peer
Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The
Master Builder, Little Eyolf, and When We Dead Awaken. There
are also two items on Ibsen's life, six on Ibsen and the theater (four of which
concern the advent of Ibsenism in England), and individual items on Ibsen and
exile, Ibsen as a "major mythopoetic artist," Ibsen and tragedy,
Ibsen and the natural Wwrld, and Edvard Munch's claim that paintings of his
influenced When We Dead Awaken.
The first
six items appeared in the inaugural issue of Ibsen Studies, the successor
to Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen. Generally speaking, the
material in this issue does not suggest much of a future for the journal. Some
of the items should not have been included, others could have profited from
further attention, and only one of them, an essay concerning Ibsen's life rather
than his work, gets my enthusiastic recommendation.
Theoharis
C. Theoharis studies Brand (1) through the perspective of Kierkegaard's Fear
and Trembling, not because he considers the book a source for the play
but because it provides a "religious and philosophical context" that
helps elucidate the play's central themes. Theoharis quotes a line from
a Dylan Thomas poem in his title because the poem points to a primary link
between the book and the play, the death, or potential death, of a child (Isaac
in Kierkegaard's discussion of Abraham's response to God's command that he
sacrifice his son and Brand's son in Ibsen's play) and because the line from
the poem ("After the first death, there is no other") "crystallizes
an ambiguity" important to understanding both the book and the play: "after
death there will be no other life; after death there will be no other losses." According
to Theoharis, both Kierkegaard and Ibsen are concerned with that ambiguity,
and for both of them it "is resolved through sacrificially encountering
and enacting the absolute." This focus confronts Ibsen with the
problem of having to "present paradigmatic action," to "dramatize
an absolutely private transformation, one that cannot be said, thought, or
physically performed by the protagonist." Theoharis devotes most
of his essay to an attempt to show that and how Ibsen solves
this problem in Brand. With his 1996 book Ibsen's Drama:
Right Action and Tragic Joy Theoharis demonstrated that what he writes
on Ibsen should be read, and I think that the same is true of this essay, given
the importance of his topic to the appreciation and understanding of Brand. On
the other hand, this topic is a difficult one, and Theoharis' discussion of
it makes for very hard going. One of the glories of his book is its
highly illuminating close readings of the plays he discusses. In this
essay he tries to provide a detailed reading of Brand in a space too
small to accommodate it, and the attempt leads to a good deal of simply recounting
the action and of assertions about the text that are insufficiently clarified
and demonstrated.
Probably
the best reason for reading Hansgerd Delbrück's essay on The Master
Builder (2) is to find out just how wild it can get. Delbrück's
ostensible purpose is to "evaluate Ibsen's skills at adapting not only
the form, but also the content" of Sophocles' tragedy about King Oedipus
to his own plays, especially The Master Builder, which, according
to Delbrück, clearly manifests "the progress of those skills." Unfortunately,
the version of The Master Builder that he uses is an invention of
his own, made up from certain details of Ibsen's play, including things left
unspoken, and supposed parallels between Ibsen's play and other texts, some
of which Ibsen may have read and others of which he almost certainly would
not have read. The texts in this last category include two tragedies
by Seneca [!], from which Ibsen is said to have apparently taken "a considerable
number of ideas for his own play," and Euripides' The Phoenician Women,
from which Ibsen supposedly got an idea by mistranslating the Greek of one
of the lines in the prologue. In Delbrück's version of The Master
Builder, Solness is as familiar with Sophocles' play as Ibsen was and
uses what happens to Oedipus as a means of evaluating his own tragic situation. He
is also a child molester, who bribes his victims by promising them kingdoms
at some future date, and the killer of his two sons, for which he has come
to feel guilt. This guilt links him not to Oedipus but to his fellow
pedophile, Oedipus' father Laius, whose sexual relationship with a boy prompted
the gods to decree that if he had a child with his wife Jocasta the child would
eventually kill him. Solness' child, a substitute for the sons he killed,
is Hilde, symbolically born from his kisses in Lysanger. She is thus
Oedipus, now grown up and coming to carry out the gods' decree. Solness
allows her to destroy him because he "subconsciously wants to die." And
so on. In a later part of the essay, Solness becomes Oedipus and Hilde
takes on the role of the Sphinx, and in this clash between the two the Sphinx
wins. Oddly enough, the demonstration of Hilde's Sphinx-like nature
is interesting and well worth reading.
Thomas Arthur
(3) discusses the involvement with Ibsen's plays in the American theater by
three well-known actresses: Minnie Maddern Fiske (who acted in Ibsen plays
from 1894 to 1927), Alla Nazimova (from 1905 to 1935), and Eva Le Gallienne
(from 1925 to 1947). For each actress Arthur provides a paragraph of
basic biographical information, a record of her Ibsen productions, with selected
quotations from reviewers, and a brief summary paragraph. The whole thing
is rather superficial. Arthur mentions that all three actresses "were
able to take over their own production arrangements and score success in a
male-dominated world," but he doesn't develop this in any way. His
quotations from reviewers provide little information about the acting of these
actresses, aside from noting some of Nazimova's excesses. In a final
summary section of the essay, Arthur notes that "all three actresses engaged
in painstaking internal preparation to best convey Ibsen," glances at
their sexual orientations, and quotes a passage from one of Le Gallienne's
prefaces to her own translations of Ibsen. Again none of this is developed. For
me the most interesting thing about the essay was discovering that when Mrs.
Fiske first acted Ibsen the reviewers sounded much like the outraged English
reviewers of the 1890s and that in the 1930s and 40s the reviewers were already
relegating Ibsen to the scrapheap for out-of-fashion writers.
Ane Hoel
(4) argues that The Pretenders features an important conflict that
has been largely ignored by those commenting on the play and eliminated by
theater people preparing it for performance: the conflict between the play's
men and its women. Her subtitle, "An Analysis of the forces of Destruction
and Healing," pretty much sums up her findings, except that there is not
much analysis. Nor does there need to be, since the abundant male lust
for power is too obvious to be ignored, and, although the women seldom have
the opportunity to take over the stage, when they do so they make clear that
their deeds "are founded on love, faithfulness and insight." As
Hoel points out in her best observation, their inability to take over the stage
more often constitutes a crucial indication of what's wrong with their world. Hoel's
claim about the originality of her interpretation doesn't hold up, since her
view of the play had already been established earlier, and far more effectively,
by Joan Templeton in Ibsen's Women. Hoel's interpretation is
also seriously flawed by her distorted view of Haakon Haakonsøn and
of Ibsen's attitude toward him, which emerges when she refers to "the
author's obviously ironical portrayal of [Haakon] as immeasurably naïve,
egocentric and foolish" and to "Haakon's pathological ideas and frightening
belief in himself"; establishing male lust for power does not necessitate
making every male pathological. Hoel also seems to misunderstand why
Skule's wife fervently prays that it should be her husband who acquires the
power in the land.
The most
satisfying item in the inaugural issue of Ibsen Studies is Per Kristian
Heggelund Dahl's account (5) of Ibsen's difficulties with the law because of
the illegitimate child born to him and Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen in
October 1846. Dahl's language is sometimes rather melodramatic, but for
the most part his essay is a well researched and carefully explicated presentation
of considerable new material concerning Ibsen's being compelled to pay child
support and his subsequent frequent failures to pay it on time. The highlight
of the initial proceedings is Ibsen's response, in which he states that the "young
lady" in question also "kept company with other young gentlemen," but
he cannot "categorically deny responsibility for the reported paternity,
as I regrettably have indulged in physical relations with the young lady, which
were facilitated equally by her being in the service of Mr. Reimann the chemist
at the same time I was, and by her tempting deportment"; he then provides
details of his extreme poverty. Ibsen's subsequent frequent failures
to pay on time at one point brought him frighteningly close to being sentenced
to hard labor, but their more important consequence for this essay is that
they have made it possible for Dahl to develop much new evidence concerning
Ibsen's dismal financial circumstances during his stays in Christiania, Bergen,
and Christiania again from 1850 to 1862. Dahl also has a second essay
in this issue of Ibsen Studies (6), which discusses newly discovered
letters in which Ibsen and his fellow student (and eventual fellow literary
figure) A. O. Vinje petition the king in 1850 for refunds of fees they had
to pay to take required University exams. This essay shows much the same
virtues as the other, but it is less important, since its ultimate pay-off
is only that of helping to confirm a somewhat earlier date than the one that
had been generally accepted for Ibsen's leaving Skien to go to Grimstad.
The next
two items appeared in a volume of essays in honor of Birgitta Steene (7). The
essay by the late Inga-Stina Ewbank explores the relationship of Ibsen and
Strindberg to "exile" (8) as both a lived experience and a theme
in their works, with "the notion of exile" seeming for both of them
to have stretched over the years "across a range of sometimes contradictory
meanings and associations: exile as release into freedom and as a vantage site
for cultural criticism; exile as deprivation and feelings of nostalgia; exile
as an existential condition.” Ewbank draws on the two writers'
letters and other extra-literary utterances as well as their literary works,
and her essay is replete with her characteristic insights. Here are some
that pertain to Ibsen: "The Norwegian language provides Ibsen with
a pair of rhyme words—hjemmet (home) and fremmed (strange,
or foreign) to ram home the idea of being other, a foreigner in and
to one's home," and the second of these words recurs frequently in the
plays he wrote after moving back to Norway. The ending of Ghosts is
a negative version of the ending of Peer Gynt because while Peer "finds
his home in Solveig's lap, and in her 'faith, . . .hope and . . . love,'" "Mrs.
Alving is left with her broken-down son [also a returned exile] in her lap,
'in speechless horror.'" When We Dead Awaken is "Ibsen's
most pronounced exile play [. . .] because its central action is a homecoming
of individuals—Rubek and Irene—who have no home except in the lost
paradise of the past." When We Dead Awaken is the play
that Ibsen wrote instead of the autobiography he had promised, and also—very
likely—after reading the first two parts of Strindberg's To Damascus,
the drama that marked the end of Strindberg's second exile."
Harry G.
Carlson (9) calls Ibsen a "major mythopoetic artist" of the stature
of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine, and to support and illustrate his claim
he focuses on a "cluster of avian images" that "appears again
and again in Ibsen's work, as if he had been compelled to return to it as if
to an itch that continued to demand scratching." The cluster takes
shape in a passage about the statue of Memnon in a prologue that Ibsen wrote
in 1855 and in the song he assigns to this statue in Act Four of Peer Gynt. The "elements
of the cluster" in the song "include: dawn, birds, a mother grieving
over a child in a pietà scene, and the promise of resurrection," while
the passage in the prologue provides the further elements of "the challenge
of freedom and the demands of the spirit." With his eye on what
this cluster suggests about the characters associated with it, Carlson surveys
recurrences and seeming recurrences of it in the final scenes of Peer Gynt and
in A Doll House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, The
Lady from the Sea, and The Master Builder, which marks, according
to Carlson, "the high point of [Ibsen's] experiment with the avian image
cluster." Some of Carlson's examples of the cluster's recurrence
seem strained to me, because identification of them relies in part on features
other than the explicit elements of the cluster, such as themes dramatized
by the play, and I would like to have seen more about how the cluster may have
taken shape and why it itched at Ibsen so demandingly. But it is good
to be able to read a discussion of the presence in Ibsen's work of a characteristic
that has so often erroneously been deemed absent in it.
Christopher
Innes devotes about a third of his sourcebook on "naturalist theater" to
Ibsen (10). The nature and purpose of the book are amply indicated in
the introduction: "Since all artistic or literary movements are defined
by individual works that incorporate their principles, key plays by three of
the most important and influential writers have been selected to exemplify
naturalist drama [the other two are Chekhov and Shaw]. To give a sense
of development, two plays have been chosen from each writer's work: his first
major naturalistic play, and one from later in his career. This enables
us to see the parameters of the movement, as well as exploring specific theatrical
events in depth. The documentation focuses on the dramatist's aims with
respect to each play, its first staging, and the public reception—as
well as illustrating the background, the theoretical basis, and (where relevant)
the work of directors or theatre companies closely identified with each." Ibsen's
two plays are A Doll House and Hedda Gabler. Background
for Ibsen consists of some general remarks on his life, work, and historical
situation and excerpts from accounts written by Norwegians of "Cultural
Nationalism in Norway" and "The Position of Women in Scandinavia." His "theoretical
basis" is indicated by excerpts from Georg Brandes' 1871 Inaugural Lecture
and a few brief passages from Ibsen's letters. The material assembled
for each of the plays includes Ibsen's preliminary notes and jottings (in adequate
translations by Evert Sprinchorn and A. G. Chater); information on and accounts
of early productions (the accounts mainly pertain to productions in England
and are written by people like William Archer and Elizabeth Robins who were
involved in them, but Innes also includes such tidbits as the revised ending
of A Doll House that Ibsen had to supply for a German production);
and something on the receptions of the plays (mainly written by Archer and
Edmund Gosse). The "Sourcebook" would probably be useful for
teaching purposes, but "Naturalist Theatre" strikes me as a misnomer,
especially given the three dramatists who here represent it. And I wonder
why a book of this kind does not include anything written after the events
it covers by critics who have been able to view these events in a broader perspective. It
is disconcerting for me, in this context, to be told that Gosse's review of Hedda
Gabler when it came out in English translation is "one of the best
commentaries" on the play. If a good commentary on the play is desirable—there
is, by the way, nothing else in the Ibsen section to suggest that it is—there
have been plenty of them since Gosse's that are superior to his.
Sally Ledger's
first of two essays on Ibsen (11) focuses on his "profound" impact
on "Victorian cultural modernity in the 1880s and '90s." The
Ibsen she discusses is not that of Archer, Gosse, and Robins but that of Shaw,
Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, and all the "Marxists, socialists, Fabians
and feminists, who jointly hailed Ibsen as spokesman for their various causes." Ledger's
basic argument is that in spite of his appeal to these groups "it is striking
that those liberatory individuals in his dramas who seek to shake off the shackles
of tradition in order to develop a 'modern' self-consciousness and identity,
are so often doomed to failure." This aspect of his plays prompts
her to discuss Ibsen in relation to the "social darwinism and affiliated
theories of heredity and degeneration" that were popular in the late nineteenth
century and to "the astonishing convergence of ideas" between Ibsen
and Freud. Her discussions of A Doll House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, Hedda
Gabler, and Little Eyolf are interesting and perceptive. This
is especially true for Little Eyolf, in which she finds "a harsh
eugenics."
Ledger's
second essay, which slightly overlaps the first, is an interesting discussion
of Eleanor Marx's involvement with Ibsen's plays (12). Marx, who told
Havelock Ellis in 1885, "I feel I must do something to make
people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do" arranged a private
reading that year of a translation of A Doll House, an event that,
according to Ledger, "heralded the emergence of 'Ibsenism'" in England. Marx
subsequently quoted the play in a political pamphlet that she wrote with a
collaborator and with another collaborator wrote a satirical "sequel" to
the play. Marx learned Norwegian in order to translate Ibsen's plays
but only managed to translate An Enemy of the People—which she
seems to have despised, probably because of Stockmann's elitism and contempt
for the masses—and The Lady from the Sea. She also "greatly
admired Hedda Gabler." The essay is essentially about Marx
and the ways in which these four Ibsen plays resonate ironically with the circumstances
of her life, and so there is little here that is concerned with Ibsen's works
as such. But Ledger does argue that "the commitment to women's
emancipation" dramatized in A Doll House "appears to apply
only to the women of the middle class." And the passages quoted
from the satirical sequel to A Doll House are certainly of interest.
Felicity
Rosslyn argues in her introduction to Tragic Plots (13) that tragedies
are important to us because they deal with our basic life experiences; they
are most "often centered on families, the one social configuration on
which we are all experts, and circle endlessly round the problems that, because
of the trajectory of human life, no one entirely escapes." One of
these problems is our being "torn between the irreconcilable demands" of
knowing and being, reason and passion. Others arise from our striving
to achieve some kind of individuated maturity in a new familial relationship
while still being entangled in a past constructed by a perhaps absent but nonetheless
influential father and a mother who may be all too present. In her first
two chapters Rosslyn traces these themes in several examples of Greek and English-Renaissance
tragedy. In the "Ibsen and Strindberg" chapter, which is mainly
about Ibsen, she provides detailed discussions of A Doll House, Ghosts,
and Little Eyolf and briefer accounts of The Master Builder and John
Gabriel Borkman that place these dramas in the tradition of tragedy she
has established. Rosslyn's discussion of A Doll House probably
gives too much emphasis to its satiric aspects, but she is excellent on Ghosts,
and what she has to say about Little Eyolf is an eye-opener that should
be read by anyone who takes that play lightly.
Kirsten
Shepherd-Barr (14) is concerned with the role of theater in the development
of modernism, since the charting of this development has tended to "rely
overwhelmingly on evidence from the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture),
music, dance, and literature (including dramatic texts but rarely productions)
while theatre art and performance tend to be either ignored or marginalized." She
mentions Ibsen a few times in her essay, but her basic focus is the contributions
to the theater of Edvard Munch, especially his collaborations with Max Reinhardt
for productions of Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, and she includes
an argument of sorts that performance of a drama text must be considered as
itself a text. Shepherd-Barr's essay is interesting and informative without
being particularly original or conclusive. By the way—and this
is not meant as a criticism of Shepherd-Barr but rather as a follow-up to the
now thoroughly established theorizing of the performance of a play as itself
a text—her inclusion of Ibsen's name in her title raises a couple of
questions for me. Can all texts constituted by performances
of Ibsen plays—or for that matter, texts constituted by adaptations of
Ibsen plays—legitimately be attributed to Ibsen? And if the answer
is no, under what circumstances does one of these texts no longer merit being
attributed to Ibsen?
Joan Templeton's
examination of the claim by Edvard Munch and others that Ibsen was influenced
in writing When We Dead Awaken by Munch's paintings in his Life
Frieze series, especially the painting Women in Three Stages (15)
is unquestionably the definitive account of what she rightly calls "a
critical myth," and it is to be hoped that her essay has already occasioned
the long overdue demise of the myth. After providing the full text of
Munch's claim (in a pamphlet about the Life Frieze that he published
more than twenty years after Ibsen's death), Templeton traces in detail how
the claim was accepted as gospel by "authorities" who ought to have
known better and spawned the further claim, never made by Munch, "that
his works influenced Ibsen generally"; ultimately, she shows, the second
claim became a commonplace asserted even by those who knew nothing about either
Ibsen or Munch. The best part of the essay is the demolishing of Munch's
claim by demonstrating that "not only do the women of When We Dead
Awaken bear no resemblance to those of Woman in Three Stages,
but the significance of Ibsen's drama lies precisely in its opposition to the
kind of thinking about women that could produce such a painting." But
my favorite part—because of its weirdness—is the account at the
end of Munch's "establishing his own presence" in When We Dead
Awaken by apparently pasting two of his drawings inspired by the play
into his copy of it.
Michael
Robinson's 2000 Popperwell Memorial Lecture (16) is a thoroughly researched
and well written account of what he calls "England's Ibsen," the
version of Ibsen that has largely prevailed on the English stage from the time
of the first appearance there of an Ibsen play up to our own day. Robinson
provides a good deal of information about the creation of "England's Ibsen," but
the heart of his essay is a condemnation of the result, which makes Ibsen sometimes
seem "either a very parochial, even marginal figure or [. . .] hopelessly
outmoded or both." While academic criticism of Ibsen in England "can
celebrate some remarkable achievements" and several English-language writers
have "found inspiration in his dramaturgy," theatrical productions
of Ibsen's plays "have continued to be staged amidst a clutter of circumstantial
detail," and thus "England's Ibsen" has for the most part continued
to be "the dramatist as the careful photographer of society." The
problem with this, Robinson states, is that "the greater the emphasis
we place on realism, the more we are compelled to see Ibsen's characters as
figures immersed in the minutiae and felt-experience of their, not our, moment
in history." Hence it becomes necessary to "pare away the circumstantial
surface detail and uncover the inner landscape underlying the play's realistic
superstructure." And a good way to do this, Robinson maintains,
is to place emphasis on the "inherent theatricality" of Ibsen's plays,
a feature of them that has already been called attention to by the best recent
academic criticism. To render more fully what he has in mind, Robinson
refers to recent productions of Ibsen by Ingmar Bergman, the role-playing of
characters like Nora in A Doll House, and late nineteenth-century
accounts of hysteria.
Marie Wells
(17) juxtaposes two interpretations of Brand: Bjørn Hemmer's
reading of it as a religious drama in which the protagonist suffers an existential
defeat but at the same time wins a victory in the realm of essential values
and Vigdis Ystad's reading of the play as a tragedy centered upon a conflict
between rigidity of the will and "openness to life and its diversity." Wells'
aim is to demonstrate by a systematic reading of the play's "persuasive
rhetoric" that Hemmer is correct and Ystad mistaken. What Wells
means by "persuasive rhetoric" is that the play undermines those
who differ with Brand and that those it does not undermine—essentially
Agnes and the doctor—escape being undermined by agreeing with Brand. Wells'
characteristic response to points made by Ystad and others who do not go along
with the Hemmer-Wells reading is some variation of "it ignores the evidence
of the text and the considerable persuasive rhetoric which Ibsen employed to
lead us to a very different reading." Wells ultimately reveals why
she finds the rhetoric so persuasive when she declares that "the whole
of Ibsen's play, Brand, presupposes a spiritual dimension and man
as created in the image of God." It does no such thing for me—nor,
I would venture to say, for most readers. The basic interest in Brand arises
from its focusing on a protagonist who performs acts that from a human point
of view seem extremely inhumane and who performs them because he believes without
reservation that he is following the will of a higher authority whose reality
or lack thereof neither he nor we can be sure of with any real certainty. The
complexity of the play is not served by making assumptions about what it presupposes. Given
the terms of the essay, I suppose that my response indicates that I favor Ystad's
reading over Hemmer's; but the terms of the essay are arbitrary; I would most
prefer a reading of the play considerably more responsive to its complexities
than either of the two that Wells has brought together. Additional note:
Wells' essay poses a special problem for those who cannot read Norwegian, since
she provides no English translations either for what she quotes from Hemmer
and Ystad or for the numerous passages that she discusses from Brand.
Douglas
Abel (18) states that the "clash of belief systems" in Emperor
and Galilean is not "simply intellectual" but is also "felt
deeply in human souls and is expressed dramatically in the spiritual agonies
of Julian." But he also states that the work "is fundamentally
a play of ideas," and his basic aim is to help make clear "the general
patterns [that Ibsen] perceives in the advancement of civilization." Abel
by no means provides the last word on the play's thought, but what he has to
say is worth consulting, especially the material on Ibsen's "intertwining
the idea of 'Messiah' with that of 'free labourer under necessity.'"
Alan Swanson's
topic (19) is Ibsen's use of "the natural world" as an important
adjunct to the action in the twelve dramas of contemporary life, two of which
take place entirely outdoors while the rest provide either some kind of glimpse
or a more sustained view of the outside world. Swanson describes the
changes in staging during the nineteenth century that made Ibsen's settings
possible and then indicates the specific ways in which the presence of the
natural world is established in each of the twelve plays. Swanson's consideration
of the effect of this presence takes the form of general conclusions rather
than analyses of individual plays. One of his general conclusions is
that "natural references in Ibsen's plays tend to be easily related to
the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water," which prompts him
to add, "Ibsen shows that he understood that there was plenty of power
still in [the four elements] to carry metaphorical resonance, to suggest, indeed,
something 'elemental' about the moment in which they are called to our attention." I
find this conclusion problematic, because all natural references pertain to
one or another of the four elements, and because I doubt that Ibsen's spectators,
either in his own time or since, would tend to process natural references in
relation to a no longer current topos. Swanson's attempt to support
his conclusion by stating that there is "little talk" in the plays "of
the other parts of which Nature consists, such as trees, wild-flowers, birds,
beasts, or vistas," increases the difficulty, since significant instances
of references in the plays to "the other parts of which Nature consists" readily
come to mind. Swanson is on much surer ground when he perceives the natural
references as constituting an alternative world that "the characters
inside usually cannot reach" and when he describes the various ways in
which that alternative world contrasts with the world of "the characters
inside."
Elinor Fuchs's
discussion of When We Dead Awaken (20) is must reading for anyone
interested in the play—or, for that matter, in Ibsen. Recent criticism
of the play has begun to establish the great extent to which it is saturated
with Biblical allusions and echoes. Fuchs focuses on the echoes of Daniel and Revelation,
casts a glance at Maximus' talk of the three empires in Emperor and Galilean,
and draws on the Christian apocalyptic tradition, especially the interpretation
of Revelation by the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore, to place When
We Dead Awaken squarely in the tradition of apocalyptic, "or perhaps
more properly, millennialist" literature. Fuchs's illuminating reading
of the play in this perspective greatly enhances understanding and appreciation
of it while by no means implying that it is merely an apocalyptic
work. Fuchs also enhances understanding and appreciation of Ibsen by
placing him squarely in the major artistic and intellectual currents of the
era ushered in by his final play: "When We Dead Awaken is not
only a 'Dramatic Epilogue,' as Ibsen subtitled it, to his twelve-play prose
cycle. It might also be seen as a prologue to the twentieth century's
proliferation of apocalyptic literary imagery." Among the works
she discusses in developing this aspect of her essay is H. G. Wells's The
Island of Dr. Moreau, Alfred Jarry's Caesar-Antichrist (which
marks the first appearance of Ubu), and Strindberg's A Dream Play.
The remaining
items in this year's survey are in Norwegian. The first four of them,
all on Peer Gynt, appeared in volume 18 of the journal Agora. Frode
Helland's topic is irony (21). He examines the various types of irony
in the play, including Peer's being an ironist who is also "an object
for irony's criticism," and uses his findings to develop a discussion
about irony as a concept. The result is an enjoyable and valuable essay. Typically
of Helland, the passages of close reading are so good that one wants more of
them. His establishing the problematic nature of the various definitions
of irony is also a highlight. But the best thing in the essay is his
demonstrating the irony involved in the usual interpretation of the play's
irony, which is that it exposes Peer's failure to have developed a more serious,
responsible, and committed relationship to his self and to life. The
condemnation of Peer resulting from this way of reading the text, Helland points
out, tends to "deny the text and the quality of boisterous excess, vitality,
abundance, and ambiguity that still makes it such refreshing reading."
Espen Hammer
argues (22) that Peer's reflections about and experience of his self set up
three conflicting models for the modern self. The first, deriving from
Peer's efforts "to be himself enough" is "a skeptical narcissism
(understood as freedom) that, seen classically, has been best articulated by
Kant as abstract autonomy." The second, represented by his final
involvement with Solveig, is a construction of the self through recognitions
that create a dialectical development (in the Hegelian tradition). The third,
evident in Solveig's taking on the role of Peer's mother while Peer must regress
to being a child again, is "a trauma-oriented model" in which the
subject is "handed over to an original and uncontrollable alterity";
the philosophical authority for this model is Freud. Hammer makes some
observations about the text—for example that Peer's rediscovery of life
is of a lost life with no prospect of a future—but for the most part
the essay is too replete with heavy doses of philosophical, psychological,
and theoretical vocabularies to allow for readily comprehensible literary insights.
Asbjørn
Aarseth's topic, as indicated by his title (23), is allegorical figures who
reflect various aspects of Peer's nature. These include the Bøyg,
the monkey swarm, Anitra, the statue of Memnon, the Sphinx, various denizens
of the Mad House, and Solveig, who "can be understood as Peer's higher
self, his spiritual component." Aarseth does not always stick to
his topic, however—classifying the play as allegorical prompts him to
discuss the medieval morality play, for example—and one of his off-the-topic
passages (on the possibility of Ibsen's having learned a good deal of Norwegian
folklore from Paul Botten Hansen during Ibsen's first years in Christiania)
may well be the most interesting aspect of the essay.
Erik Østerud
discusses two aspects of Peer Gynt (24). The first is its genre,
which he identifies as secularized allegory, an identification he supports
by showing the many ways the play adheres to the characteristics of allegory
as formulated in several major accounts of the form. Østerud's
second topic is the play's most important intertextual relations, which he
identifies as two key Kierkegaardian concepts, Angst and Irony; which are respectively
allegorically represented in the play by the Strange Passenger and the Bøyg. Østerud
analyzes the passages containing these two figures and also analyzes Peer's
account of his buck ride and the final scene in Solveig's hut. With regard
to these scenes he states that Ibsen has undermined the harmonious reading
of the ending by establishing a Peer Gynt incapable of making a Kierkegaardian
leap of faith.
Erik Bjerck
Hagen (25) discusses Hedda Gabler in relation to the readings of her by Harold
Bloom, G. Wilson Knight, and Else Høst and considers how her play looks
in relation to Northrop Frye's romantic, ironic, tragic, and comic categories—the
latter, Hagen says, because both people and literary texts consist of distinctive
combinations of the four. Hagen ultimately concludes that the play best
coincides with the romantic category and even more emphatically states that
the most important thing about Hedda is her freedom and her determination to
hold on to it. I don't necessarily agree with Hagen's conclusions, but
I strongly recommend the essay for its method of procedure and especially for
its fine and illuminating close readings of particular scenes.
Erik Østerud
begins his lengthy discussion of Hedda Gabler (26) by arguing that
the story of Actaeon, who was pursued and killed by his own hounds for watching
the goddess Artemis/Diana bathe in the nude, is at the core of the play. This
makes Hedda a Diana-figure, and her being so is clearly indicated by two "tableaux":
one in the first act when Tesman and Aunt Julle apply their gaze to Hedda's
body in "a kind of goddess worship," the other in the third act as
Hedda burns Løvborg's manuscript, an action that "can be seen as
a black mass, a satanic ritual, in which it is Death that is being celebrated." The "child" that
Hedda destroys in the second "tableau" is the "child" that
was adulated in the first. Østerud next borrows Foucault's panopticon
to explore the play's spatial architecture—an opposition between visibility
and non-visibility—and follows that up by drawing on Georg Simmel to
locate the play's "three contrasting intimacy-cultures": Aunt Julle's
circle, the red-haired singer's circle, and Brack's circle, the last of which
features a discussion of Brack's having perhaps been able to see Hedda-Diana
less than fully clothed if he had come sooner. Østerud concludes
with a more direct reading of the play's action, which ends with a dismissal
as naive of the view that her suicide is an act of triumph making up for Løvborg's
failure to restore beauty and nobility through his own suicide. Instead,
according to Østerud, Hedda's "past catches up with her and punishes
her for her hamartia. This is brought about through the occupying of
her space by the world of reality, which makes her theatrical character devoid
of a home." Neither the close reading of the action nor this conclusion
have much to do with the elaborate apparatus that Østerud has set up
in the first two-thirds of the essay.
1. Theoharis C. Theoharis, "'After the First Death, There
is No Other': Ibsen's Brand and Kierkegaard's Fear and
Trembling," Ibsen Studies 1, 9-29.
2. Hansgerd Delbrück, "Falling for the Sphinx: The
Heritage of the Oedipus Myth in Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder," Ibsen
Studies 1, 30-53.
3. Thomas Arthur, "Female Interpreters of Ibsen on Broadway,
1896-1947: Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alla Nazimova & Eva Le Gallienne," Ibsen
Studies 1, 54-65.
4. Ane Hoel, "The Role of Women in Henrik Ibsen's The
Pretenders: An Analysis of the Forces of Destruction and Healing," Ibsen
Studies 1, 68-80.
5. Per Kristian Heggelund Dahl, "Maintenance Proceedings
Against Henrik Ibsen, 1846-1862," Ibsen Studies 1, 81-96.
6. _______________________, "On a Letter from Ibsen and One from
Vinje," Ibsen Studies l, 97-103.
7. Stage and Screen: Studies in Scandinavian Drama and Film;
Essays in Honor of Birgitta Steene, ed. Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams
and Terje I. Leiren (Seattle: DreamPlay Press, 2000).
8. Inga-Stina Ewbank, "'Where do I Find My Homeland?':
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Exile," in item 7, 9-29.
9. Harry G. Carlson, "Ibsen's Mythic Ornithology: Poetic
Image as Clue to Character," in item 7, 31-44.
10. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, ed. and introduced
by Christopher Innes (London: Routledge, 2000), "Henrik Ibsen,
1828-1906," 65-122.
11. Sally Ledger, "Ibsen and Gender at the Fin de Siècle," in The
Crossroads of Gender and Century Endings (University of Lisbon
Centre for English Studies, 2000) 51-60.
12. ___________, "Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen," in Eleanor
Marx (1855-1898): Life – Work – Contacts, ed. John
Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 53-67.
13. Felicity Rosslyn, Tragic Plots: A New Reading from Aeschylus
to Lorca (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2000), "Ibsen and Strindberg," 173-95.
14. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, "Ibsen, Munch and the Relationship
between Modernist Theatre and Art," Nordic Theatre Studies 12
(1999) 43-53.
15. Joan Templeton, "The Munch-Ibsen Connection: Exposing
a Critical Myth," Scandinavian Studies 72 (2000) 445-62.
16. Michael Robinson, "England's Ibsen, or Performing Ibsen's
Dramas of Contemporary Life Today," Scandinavica 39
(2000) 171-90.
17. Marie Wells, "The Persuasive Rhetoric of Ibsen's Brand," Northern
Studies 35 (2000) 113-132.
18. Douglas Abel, "Wisdom! Light! Beauty! A
Thematic Analysis of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean," Modern
Drama 43 (2000) 78-86.
19. Alan Swanson, "Ibsen Inside and Out: The Natural World
in the Twelve Major Prose Plays," Scandinavica 32 (2000)
191-205.
20. Elinor Fuchs, "The Apocalyptic Ibsen: When We Dead
Awaken," Twentieth-Century Literature 46 (2000)
396-404.
21. Frode Helland, "Om Peer Gynt, med stadig henblikk
på begrepet dramatisk ironi," Agora 18 (2000) 7-44.
22. Espen Hammer, "Fornektelse, trauma og subjektdannelse
i Peer Gynt," see item 21, 45-59.
23. Asbjørn Aarseth, "Det egne i det andre: Speilfunksjonen
i noen figurer i Peer Gynt, see item 21, 60-70.
24. Erik Østerud, "Peer Gynts 'overganger,'" see
item 21, 71-95.
25. Erik Bjerck Hagen, Litteratur og Handling: Pragmatiske
tanker om Ibsen, Hamsun, Solstad, Emerson og andre (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,
2000), "Om Hedda Gablers romantiske nihilisme," 231-54.
26. Erik Østerud, "Aktaion-komplekset: Blikk, kropp
og 'rites of passage' i Hedda Gabler," Edda 4
(2000) 299-319.
Thomas Van Laan
Rutgers University, Emeritus
