“Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (_The Lady from the Sea_), Rebecca
(_Rosmersholm_), Gina, Hedvig (_The Wild Duck_), Fru Alving (_Ghosts_),
Nora (_The Doll’s House_), Petra (_An Enemy of the People_), Selma
(_The League of Youth_), Lona (_The Pillars of Society_), Solveig (_Per
Gynt_), Agnes (_Brand_), Swanhild (_Love’s Comedy_)--here are the
women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the
analyser, the doubter.
Their first and universal characteristic is that they are all
misunderstood.
Their second and equally universal characteristic is that they are
either unmarried or else unhappily married, the result in either case
being discontent; _ergo_ we have the thinking woman, the reading woman,
the self-cultured woman, or in other words, the _bourgeoisie_ with
plenty of spare time on her hands.
Ibsen’s earliest period belongs to the traditional historical drama,
which owed its origin to Germany; the romantic, lyrical and dramatic
poems, _Brand_ and _Per Gynt_, thrust themselves between with their
contingent of angel-women who acted as deliverers of men; and all his
other productions as an author were the result of his criticisms of
society, or more correctly, his criticisms of the middle class. He was
the bourgeois who rebelled against his surroundings, who raised the
scorpion scourge against the flesh of his people and the ideals of his
world. In his writings the middle class saw themselves reflected as in
a looking-glass.
Each one of his writings contains the dissection of a bourgeois ideal,
and it is always through a woman of the bourgeois class that the result
is seen.
The first piece in which he condemned society was that bitterest of
all parodies that has ever been written on legitimate unions: _Love’s
Comedy_. Never has the institution of marriage been made to appear
more ridiculous, or the basis of bourgeois society, _i.e._ its
respectability, been more unmercifully dissected. At the same time the
Ibsen keynote of man’s relation to woman, or what is virtually the same
thing, woman’s relation to man, is already struck, and struck with no
uncertain sound. A woman cannot live with a man, with any man; Swanhild
loves Falk, but she will not yield herself to him either for to-day or
for ever, for fear lest their love should not endure. She marries an
old prig instead, and Falk goes away deeply moved and sings a song on
eternal youth.
This bourgeois piece is framed on the negation of life itself, and its
subject is the unnatural one of a solitary being who desires to stand
alone. It is a profound, psycho-physiological moment when sickness has
declared itself. Who is to blame? Bourgeois society? The author? Or
both?
The _Pillars of Society_ is the glorification of the woman who is able
to stand alone--the old maid. There are two old maids in the piece,
the one active, the other passive, and both are perfect providences
on earth. It was really very pretty of Ibsen to have raised these
much-neglected beings to the throne of honour. The principal old maid,
Lona, who is an extraordinary specimen of emancipated womanhood,
refuses to marry because she has had an unfortunate experience, and
she dares not risk her happiness in that most terrible--also most
glorious--of all games of chance, but prefers to stand on the shore
and play providence. Selma (_The League of Youth_), Petra (_An Enemy
of the People_), Gina, Hedvig (_The Wild Duck_), are four genuine
examples of the bourgeois class. Selma--an ornamental little doll,
a perfect Nora in the bud--is the poetry of a rich merchant’s home,
poetry, that is to say, in the sense that the rich merchant understands
it; she refuses to be poetry any longer and acquaints her husband
with the fact that love and marriage must terminate because he has
not “allowed her to take part” in his business troubles. Petra is the
wage-earning daughter in an impecunious bourgeois home, a poor neutral
creature who has forgotten that she is a woman, and in whom men forget
it too. Gina, in Ibsen’s deepest piece, is a young lady housekeeper
who is allowed to sit at dessert with the boarder, and the anæmic,
hysterical, romantic Hedvig is her child; both are genuine portraits
and equally genuine negations of womanhood in the heart of woman’s
being. Finally Nora and Fru Alving, the two great progenitors of the
entire race of thinking and reading women. Nora is a double being, in
whom the author’s observation and reflection grow up side by side like
two divided stems; and Fru Alving is Ibsen himself in the disguise
of a woman. These pieces one and all describe the liberation of the
housewife, the conventional table-cloth on the bourgeois table, the
obvious corruption of bourgeois marriages, noble women who would be
ruined by their contact with bad men, if it were not that they are the
strong women who shake off the weak men, but who, in consequence of
their unnatural behaviour, are changed into neutral beings in their
flight before marriage, just as Daphne, in olden time, was changed into
a laurel when on her flight before the god.
Hitherto Ibsen’s writings have had two sides which are directly opposed
to one another: the one negative, pessimistic, direct, which served as
so many leaves in the school-book of the _bourgeoisie_ as the class
of society which is the ruling class, but which is, by reason of
its moral bankruptcy, doomed to immediate destruction. The scene of
action is always an imaginary one, with a cosmopolitan colouring; it
is not Ibsen’s fault if, on the Continent, his characters are looked
upon as essentially Norwegian, he tried, to the best of his limited
power, to render them cosmopolitan. The other side of his writings is
quite positive, quite creditable as regards its starting-point and its
aim: the glorification of woman as a vessel of good, as a saviour of
society, as the conscience of man.
Then came _The Wild Duck_, which contained the most characteristic
personalities upon the most ricketty foundation. One wondered what the
old man was about.--Gregers Werle, who runs with moral precepts into
the dwellings of day-labourers; and the lies of life, which also have
their moral significance--it was Ibsen himself who held judgment upon
Ibsen. And like a visage, reflected and distorted in muddy water, the
figures of Gina and Hedvig glide past like so many poor, tormented,
guilty or guiltless people with no ideals, no moral trumpets.
A couple of years later _Rosmersholm_ appeared. It startled the whole
circle of flattering women and their flatterers. No more censuring
of society, no more glorification of woman! The bourgeois centre no
longer takes the first place, it fades into a decorative background;
the entire space is absolutely filled by two people, a man and a
woman, who are engaged in a battle against one another. The man is a
noble creature, weak but refined; the woman is a plebeian by birth and
soul, coarse-grained and selfish, one whom nature has designed for a
criminal. Here we also have a weak man and a strong woman, but the
lights and shadows fall quite differently.
There is one thing which the author throws into the balance in the
woman’s favour, and that is that the woman is brave and fit for life,
while the man is cowardly and unfitted for it.
The next to appear was _The Lady from the Sea_.
People were astonished and asked what it was.
“It is a piece in praise of true marriage,” replied Ibsen’s women
admirers, and they wept.
What of this hysterical Fru Ellida who waits expectantly for some one
else, who lives on Platonic terms with her husband and ends by sending
her--very grown-up--stepdaughter into an educational establishment?
What does Fru Ellida do? She indulges in bold fancies and exalted
dreams, and when the subject of her dreams stands before her, and
when the great happiness comes, which is always equally the great
danger--she does not recognise him, she is afraid of him, and she takes
refuge with her safe and trustworthy spouse, the patient Wangel.
Can’t we see Ibsen’s eyes twinkling behind his spectacles?