The Lady From The Sea: Ibsen In Transition

The Lady From The Sea: Ibsen In Transition M.S. BARRANGER IN HIS MEMOIR Run-Through, John Houseman records with some reluctance his direction of a 1934 Broadway production of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea.! Houseman's embarrassment over the production is indicative of a general attitude toward the play reflected in theatrical and critical circles. Because of the magnitude and technical difficulties of the leading role, among other reasons, The Lady from the Sea has not been as popular a vehicle in the theatre as A Dol/'s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. Nor has it inspired scholarly interest, except for perfunctory chapters in studies dealing largely with Ibsen's dramas of prose realism. The exceptions to this prevailing attitude are to be found in Francis Fergusson's seminal essay on The Lady from the Sea and in more recent studies of the last Ibsen plays.' The Lady from the Sea stands in a peculiar relationship to Ibsen's last five plays. Written in 1888, two years before Hedda Gabler, it is separated by four years from the publication of The Master Builder, the first of the final plays which comprise the "epilogue" to Ibsen's work. It can be argued that The Lady from the Sea is significant as a preparatory effort to the last Ibsen plays- The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Barkman (1896), When We Dead Awaken (1899)-which introduce new directions in Ibsen's work. Rather than dismissing The Lady from the Sea as a preliminary study for Hedda Gabler, as a close link with Rosmersholm, or as an inexplicable minor effort on the part of a major European dramatist at the 393 394 M. S. BARRANGER height of his creative powers, the critic should regard the playas a new departure in Ibsen's late work which introduces, though not fully developing, new patterns of form and statement] These new approaches to the use of theatrical space, structure, and language in the last plays are essentially the latter-day Ibsen's "new armor" to do battle against the naturalistic conventions of the nineteenth -century European theatre' The Lady from the Sea serves as preamble to Ibsen's final experiments with theatrical form and meaning . First, The Lady from the Sea marks a departure from Ibsen's habitual pattern of beginning a new play in the late summer and completing it in ample time for his publisher to make copies available to bookshops for Christmas sales. Ibsen apparently wrote the play between June 5, 1888, when the earliest surviving notes are dated, and July 31.' He revised the manuscript and sent it to his publisher by late September. Second, it is not only the pattern of composition which is altered in the writing of this play, but aJso Ibsen's perspective. That he was aware of this change is indicated in a letter to Jacob Hegel, the publisher, in which Ibsen wrote: "I am confident that this play will seize the attention of the public. In many respects it marks a new direction I have taken.'" On another occasion Ibsen was to remark that he intended to introduce new methods in his work. After the completion of When We Dead Awaken in 1899, he wrote that if his health permitted him to work again, he wouJd continue to write, but with new weapons and in new armor.' The ambiguity of these statements in regard to the aging writer's thoughts about new dimensions in his last works has never been satisfactorily accounted for in studies of his late plays. The new directions suggested by The Lady from the Sea can best be seen by studying the playas a transitional work, foreshadowing the structuraJ, narrative, and spatial techniques which characterize the rmaJ plays. First, Ibsen's famous retrospective or analytic technique is altered appreciably in the last plays by the use of the anecdotal device to dramatize intuitive experience. Second, the structural pattern of the late plays is one of extensive action within a limited context of the exercise of human will and existential choice. To underscore the Jessening isolation of the Ibsen hero as he comes to terms with life, others...