Fantastic Scenes in Peer Gynt

FANTASTIC SCENES IN PEER GYNT MANY OF THE PROBLEMS involved in the interpretation of Peer Gynt center around the fantastic scenes of the play. Their symbolism often seems obscure and it is sometimes difficult to see the relationship of their tone to the realistic tone of the other scenes. These difficulties may be at least partially resolved by analyzing the thematic development of the play through both fantastic and realistic scenes. Such an analysis suggests that the fantastic scenes serve to underscore and reinforce subjectively material already developed realistically and objectively. The principal fantastic scenes in the play are the troll scenes in Acts II and III (lI.v and vi, and HI.iii), the Boyg scene (ILvii), and the scenes in Act V in which the Strange Passenger, the Thin Person, the Button Moulder, and the Threadballs and Withered Leaves appear,l Even these scenes, however, may be interpreted realistically, in a certain sense. Ibsen always provides the possibility of a rational interpretation of each supernatural incident; the reader may think of the fantastic scenes as merely Peer's hallucinations.2 Before the Green Woman enters in Act II, this stage direction appears: "He leaps forward , but runs his nose against a rock, falls and remains lying on the ground."3 And when, after the encounters with the trolls and the Boyg, Peer awakens, yearning for a pickled herring (II.viii), Ibsen allows the reader to decide whether Peer was made unconscious by collision with the rock and now awakens, or whether he awakens after having sunk down at the end of the preceding scene, the Boyg scene. Moreover, it should be noticed that never does anyone but Peer see any of the supernatural characters. Peer is alone when the Green Woman first appears (II.v), and when she reappears (IILiii), she does so only after Ibsen has had Solveig go into the hut. Likewise, Peer is standing alone when the Strange Passenger appears, and indeed when Peer asks a sailor about him, the sailor has seen only the ship's dog. The Thin Person and the Button Moulder are never on stage with anyone but Peer, and it is significant that in the last lines when the Button Moulder's final threat to Peer is heard breaking into Solveig's song the Button Moulder does not appear on stage, evidently because Solveig is there. His "voice is heard from beyond the hut." 1. The extravagant and grotesque scenes in Act IV are somewhat different; Ibsen evidently meant us to take these scenes literally as the middle years of Peer's life. See, on this point, Brian W. Downs, A Study of Six Plays by Ibsen (Cambridge, 1950), p. 77. 2. See Downs, p. 79, 3. Henrik Ibsen, Eleven Plays (New York, n.d.), p. 431. References below are all to this edition which I have selected as being the most generally available. The translation, which is unidentified by the Modem Library editors, is by R, Farquarson Sharp. 37 38 MODERN DRAMA May It is also worth observing that there is a careful preparation for the introduction of each supernatural figure. Most of the material in the fantastic scenes is based upon suggestions planted in Peer's mind in preceding scenes. As early as Act I, scene ii, trolls are mentioned; Aslak asks Peer, "Have the troll-folk been at you?" In Act I, scene iii, the tipsy Peer himself picks up the hint and threatens Solveig by describing how he can turn himself into a troll. Trolls figure, too, in Aase's description (ILii) of how she and Peer turned to romancing instead of to brandy. Though she is amazed that such stories linger in Peer's mind, a few lines later she says, ironically, that the searchers must ring church bells in case the trolls have got Peer. And finally, of course, only one soliloquy separates the scene with the three Cowherd Girls (II.iii) from the first appearance of the Green Woman. In this scene, in which the girls summon trolls to take the place of their faithless human lovers and in which Peer proposes to lie with all three, Peer says, ''I'm a three...