II
“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?