The Lady from the Sea: Ibsen's Positive World-View in a Topographic Figure

The Lady from the Sea: Ibsen's Positive World-View in a Topographic Figure * ROLF FJELOE ARE IBSEN'S PRINCIPAL WORKS to be interpreted primarily as a sum of destructions aimed at scourging the lies and idolatries of an errant civilization, or do they in fact embody a positive philosophy at their core? The question has frequently been raised in various guises; and whenever it is, at the least, two dramas should inevitably come to mind. The first of these is Emperor and Galilean, whereof Ibsen stated with confident authority: "This work will be my masterpiece.... The positive Weltanschauung which the critics have long demanded of me will be found here." Contrary to the playwright's directive, however, critical attention in this regard has tended to focus elsewhere-on, for example, the comedic Pillars oj SOCiety or An Enemy oj (he People, but most problematically on The Lady Jrom (he Sea. The fact that the action of the latter play concludes on a strongly positive note expressed in a Cestive tableau has opened it to charges of artistic deficiency, of being somehow not ech( Ibsen, revealing either a transient fatigue with rigor of conception, or, in certain counterarguments. a network of hidden ironies in the text that partially redeem it for serious consideration. IC we are ever to discover the truth of this, or any other of the final major plays, either in reading or performance, it seems to me • This article was first presented as a paper during the Ibsen Sesquicentennial Symposium held in New York at Pratt Institute, May 9-13, 1978. 379 380 ROLF FJELDE imperative, as a first step, to adopt a willing suspension of knowledgeability , a refusal to be imprisoned by received opinion, striving rather to see each work afresh as still largely uncharted country, herrlich wie am ersten Tag. Therefore, I would propose here to examine some aspects of The Lady from the Sea not ordinarily stressed and then to relate these briefly to one curious link with Emperor and Galilean. A single enigmatic phrase - Tegn imod tegn (Sign against sign) - spoken four times at the crucial ending of Act 3, Part I of the earlier drama, recurs, word for word, somewhat surprisingly from the lips of the schoolmaster Amholm in the later play. But this slender connection may also serve to illuminate the positive world-view informing these two, apparently so different, creations. In a brief, penetrating essay appearing in the first volume of Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen (Oslo, Bergen, Tromso, 1966), pp. 51-59, Francis Fergusson writes warmly of learning to know, love and admire The Lady from the Sea during an intensive three-to-four month period spent preparing it for production at Bennington College. His experience led him to uncover richer and richer patterns in the play, revealing it to be, in his words, "beautifully composed in every detail." His observations, as a result, are as provocative and useful to theater professionals as they are enlightening to scholars of dramatic literature . Their premise is Stanislavskian- meaning that, after the prescription of the great Russian actor-director, the tactical assumption is that the play incorporates a central psychological or spiritual action that unifies all the incidents of the plot, one which is capable of being expressed in a single infinitive phrase. The most vital impulses of all the characters can thus be related in one way or another to the arc of that common dramatic spine- or superobjective, as Stanislavsky terms it. In the particular instance of Ibsen's play, Fergusson indicates that it can be formulated as: to end separation from life and love before it is too late. Ellida Wangel, with all her obsessive yearning for the sea and for that man, the Stranger, who personifies its mystery and its claim, is only the most conspicuous example of this motive. The nubile Bolette, with her books on geography and plant life and her dreams of travel in far countries, conveys the same longing conversely turned landward. In the lesser figure of rebellious adolescence, her younger sister Hilda secretly covets and outwardly scorns the love of her stepmother, Ellida. Dr. Wangel, who has not shared his wife's bed in...