Gender and Melodrama in Ibsen's Lady Inger

Gender and Melodrama in Ibsen's Lady Inger LYNN R. WILKINSON In Ibsen's early history play Lady Inger, the protagonist appropriates to her own ends one of the cliches of nineteenth-century melodrama. Early on during the night that brings three mysterious visitors to her castle, Inger gives two of them goblets of wine. The stakes are high - the fate of Norway and Scandinavia hangs in the balance - and at least one of the visitors is probably hostile. The knowing reader or spectator expects a violation of the laws of hospitality. At the very least, one of the visitors will soon begin to feel faint from the effects of the substance slipped into one of the goblets. Possibly both, or the wrong individual, will fall victim to the hostess's treachery. Instead, Inger calls attention to the function of the device she uses: Men nu maa I vide, det ene Breger indeholdt en Velkomsthilsen for min Forbundsnelle , del aodel D~den for min Uyeno(164; Act Two, scene seven) [But now I must teU you that one goblet contained a welcome formy ally, the'other death for my enemy! (300; Act Two, scene seven)]1 And the ruse works. Both men throw down their drinks in horror, and Inger comments that she now knows whom to trust. In this scene, the hackneyed device of the poisoned goblet points not to yet another tired attempt to inject a note of suspense into a predictable forroulaic plot but, rather, to problems of knowledge and interpretation. This self-conscious scene suggests that Ibsen is using melodrama against itself, to point beyond the limits of the genre and the cliches it implies. Such explicitness, however, is rare in this early and uneven play. Indeed, a cursory reading of the whole suggests an almost obsessive, and certainly excessive, devotion to the conventions of the genre that appears in sharp contrast to the self-consciousness of the goblet scene. The play opens in a small Modern Drama, 42:2 (2001) 155 LYNN R. WILKINSON reom just off the gloomy great hall of Lady Inger's castle as two old retainers lament the lack of men to take up the Norwegian cause. Both the setting and their dialogue suggest the stark contrasts, the manicheanism, that critics since Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination have seen as one of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century melodrama. This impression is only strengthened when Inger herself walks ghostlike through the gallery. The ending of the play, in which Inger stands over the dead body of the son she has unwittingly had murdered in her own quest for power, seems to confirm the opening scene's binary logic, which pits masculine against feminine, good against evil, in its dramatization of the fall of Norway to Denmark. The intermittent scenes, moreover, suggest a veritable catalogue of melodramatic themes: an aging matriarch longs for power, regrets her youth, and attempts to thwart the happiness of her young daughters; a power-hungry mother murders her own child; an aristocratic Don Juan threatens the virtue of a young woman who has never left home; a young boy, raised by humble folk, discovers that he is the scion of a noble family and looks forward to a reunion with his next of kin; and an outlaw leads a band of rebels in a fight for justice outside the law. What to make of such apparent excess? Such elements occur in a wide variety of popular theatrical perfonnances in early nineteenth-century Europe, usually in much less complicated arrangements . Ibsen's elaborate plot may appear especially puzzling because his subject matter, the fall of a Norwegian noblewoman who might have led a successful campaign for the country's independence, seems inherently powerful and even inappropriate for melodrama. It may well be that the melodramatic excesses of Lady Inger reflect the playwright's immaturity, his lack of control over his subject matter. They may also stem from his desire to pander to the bad taste of mid-nineteenth-century Norwegian theatre audiences. But like the business with the goblets, the play's plot also uses melodramatic cliches against themselves, inviting the very skepticism that has characterized so many...