‘Ibsen the Romantic’: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays

221 Pages·1982·19.252 MB·English

by  Errol Durbach (auth.)

'IBSEN THE ROMANTIC'
Edited by Errol Durbach
IBSEN AND THE THEATRE
'IBSEN THE ROMANTIC'
Analogues of Paradise in the Later
Plays
Errol Durbach
© Errol Durbach 1982
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-28426-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1982 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-05302-5 ISBN 978-1-349-05300-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05300-1
Contents
Acknowledgements
VI
Note on Translation and Quotation Vll
1 Introduction: 'Ibsen the Romantic' 1
2 'The Land without Paradise' 9
3 'Paradise Within': Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel
Borkman as Types of the Romantic 'Self 34
4 'Children of Paradise': Alf, Hedvig and Eyolf as
'Conceptions of Immortality' 71
5 'Cosmologies of Two': Romantic Eroticism in Little
Eyolf, The Master Builder, and When We Dead
Awaken 104
6 'High Romantic Words': Responsible Freedom and
Tragic Joy in The Lady from the Sea and Rosmersholm 152
7 Conclusion: 'All of Paradise that We Shall Know' 198
Select Bibliography 206
Index 210
v
Acknowledgements
I am particularly indebted to the lbsenite scholars and editors of
the past fifteen years whose studies have shaped and guided our
critical responses to Ibsen. Where my indebtedness to them is not
manifest, I hope it may nevertheless be taken for granted.
I should also like to thank Mr R. Cartlidge, and my colleagues
at the University of British Columbia, Dr J. L. Wisenthal and Dr
Patricia Merivale, who have generously shared their ideas with
me; Mr R. F. Hill of King's College, London, for his helpful
comments on the initial stages of this study; and especially my
wife, an invaluable common reader.
I am grateful to the editors of Scandinavian Studies, Mosaic
and Educational Theatre journal for permitting me to incor
porate into this study some material which originally appeared in
journal articles: 'The Apotheosis of Hedda Gabler', Scandinavian
Studies, XLIII (1971) 143-59; 'Sacrifice and Absurdity in The Wild
Duck', Mosaic, VII (1974) 99-107; 'Temptation to Err: The
Denouement of Rosmersholm', Educational Theatre journal,
XXIX (1977) 477-85; 'The Geschwister-Komplex: Romantic At
titudes to Brother-Sister Incest in Ibsen, Byron, and Emily
Bronte', Mosaic, XII (1979) 61-73.
The author and publishers wish to thank the following who
have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:
Oxford University Press, for the extracts from The Oxford Ibsen,
translated and edited by James Walter McFarlane et al.; and
A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of Anne Yeats and Michael Yeats, for
the verse from 'The Choice' in the Collected Poems of W. B.
Yeats.
VI
Note on Translation and
Quotation
I intend this book primarily for English readers of Ibsen or for
those, like myself, with a rudimentary working knowledge of the
original texts. Because part of my argument depends upon a close
reading of Ibsen's language, I have, wherever necessary, quoted
the original Dana-Norwegian. This will also provide the non
Norwegian reader with a sense of Ibsen's Romantic terminology
and its affinities with other traditions of Romanticism. The
edition I have used is lbsens Samlede Verker in the Fakkel-Bok
edition (Oslo, 1962-8) in three volumes. Quotations from Brand
and Peer Gynt are taken from volume II, and those from the later
plays from volume III. Page references are given in parentheses
after the quoted passages.
The English quotations are taken from The Oxford Ibsen
(London, 1960-77) in eight volumes, edited by James Walter
McFarlane and translated by Professor McFarlane and others.
Again, page references are given in parentheses after the quoted
passages.
Occasionally I have offered my own translation of lines or
passages of dialogue when it seemed to me that a more literal and
less elegant reading was necessary to make a point, or where I
wanted to stress the etymology of a particular word, or where it
seemed necessary (as in the section on Rosmersholm) to distin·
guish between Ibsen's synonyms. I am unable to provide re
ferences for my own translated passages, but I hope the reader
will be able to locate their contexts without difficulty. (In most
instances, when I have translated a line or passage I have also
provided the original.)
VII
1 Introduction: 'Ibsen the
Romantic'
The quotation marks around the title of this book and of this
Introduction indicate an idea for investigation rather than a
position confidently asserted - but they also acknowledge the fact
that the topic is already over fifty years old. E. M. Forster's essay
'Ibsen the Romantic' first appeared in 1928, with its image of the
dramatist as a 'boy bewitched' (side-whiskers, irritability and all)
by a primeval romanticism lurking in the 'strange gnarled region
of his heart'. The later plays, writes Forster,
have a romantic intensity which not only rivals the romantic
expansion of their predecessors, but is absolutely unique in
literature .... his stage throbs with a mysteriousness for which
no obvious preparation has been made, with beckonings,
tremblings, sudden compressions of the air, and his characters
as they wrangle among the oval tables and stoves are watched
by an unseen power which slips between their words.1
Trolls mutter, white horses charge, ghosts glide, the sea lures,
and the dead and damaged objects of our civilisation are re
fashioned (like those in the Ekdal loft) into a land of romance.
And, even if Ibsen's romanticism lacks a source that Forster can
easily identify, its primary vehicle, he suggests, must surely have
been the mountain scenery of Norway, where Ibsen would have
experienced a 'passionate intensity ... comparable to the early
experiences of Wordsworth in the English lakes'.2
'Romanticism', as Forster's essay ultimately defines it, is an
idea vaguely synonymous with 'poetry', and closely associated
(although, admittedly, in a manner difficult to apply to Ibsen)
with beautiful human relationships. ('Though he had the
romantic temperament', says Forster, 'he found personal inter
course sordid. '3) It also includes that familiar world of marvellous
1
2 Ibsen the Romantic
'romantic' Gothicism, of faery-lands forlorn, permeated by the
powerful natural forces of fire, water, and avalanche. But what
Forster takes no account of in his definition is Ibsen's habitually
ironic attitude towards these elements of Romanticism: his sense
that faery·lands forlorn may be destructive and regressive myths
(as the Ekdal loft surely turns out to be), and that mountain
experiences may as frequently prove epiphanies of horror as
Wordsworthian revelations of infinitude. As for Norway's land
scape, there is more mountain gloom than mountain glory in the
frozen glare of the ice-peaks and glaciers that tower behind the
final agonies of Ghosts; and the scenery of sentimental National
Romanticism - that geography of mystical purity and spiritual
refreshment - is demolished as early as Brand, where, as James
McFarlane puts it, 'the repudiation of Romanticism's Nature is
abrupt and vehement'. 4 Even in the last plays, where the prota
gonists once more struggle magnificently up the peaks of promise
towards transfiguration, the region they finally inhabit is the Ice
Church of inhuman aspiration, where death is the only revela·
tion. On the same evidence that Forster adduces for his image of
Ibsen the Romantic one could argue for its antithesis.
The problem is obvious: there are as many conceptions of
Romanticism as there are critics of Romantic literature, and as
many Romantic lbsens. When Maurice Valency, for example,
describes the confessional element in Ibsen's drama as the 'special
sort of masochism we call romantic', or the 'romantic impulse' of
Hedda Gabler as 'a disease', 5 it is clear that we are intended to
understand Romanticism as that peculiar form of decadence so
defined by Goethe and detailed by Mario Praz in The Romantic
Agony. It would be possible, if not very instructive, to compile an
entire lexicon of 'Romantic' Ibsens to demonstrate the semantic
confusion and the multiplicity of romanticisms, which make any
discussion of the topic perilous. One remains grateful, never
theless, to those critics who have worked through the tangle of
specifically Norwegian forms of Romanticism to locate Ibsen's
indigenous or local affinities: Nasjonalromantikken or National
Romanticism of the early historical drama, which Ibsen was later
to despise as pernicious fictions; Huldreromantikken or 'Faery'
Romanticism offolkloric tradition, which Ibsen satirised in julian
Poulsen, that Bunthorne of sham Romanticism in StJohn's
Night; and Nyromantikken or Nee-Romanticism of the 1890s,
typified in Hamsun's article 'Fra det ubevidste Sj~leliv' ('From