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Scene Three. Ibsen's Small Stage of Fools
- University of Iowa Press
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Scene Three ibsen’s small stage of fools There is no playwright in the drama more notorious for exposing self-delusion than Ibsen, whose assaults upon bourgeois pieties combine a strategy of ruthless comic exposure with a full sense of the human cost exacted when the call of the sincere ideal clashes with the lies that make life possible. And Ibsen most frequently characterizes the dilemma by means of the theatrical tropes of being miscast, of finding oneself in a script or play that is in the wrong genre. Nora’s famous decision to leave Torvald at the end of A Doll’s House stems from her discovery that the rules of well-made drama—in which Torvald would nobly sacrifice himself for her as she has, she imagines, done for him — do not apply in this play’s world. The Wild Duck introduces itself to its audience, through its first act set and exposition, as a play concerned with the world of the Werles and then goes on, in the remaining four acts set in the Ekdal attic, to show how grotesquely misplaced are Gregers Werle’s claims of purgation. “The moment he came, he got his room in beautiful shape,” Gina Ekdal points out of Gregers. “He wanted to do everything himself, he said. So he starts building a fire in the stove, and the next thing he’s closed down the damper so the whole room is full of smoke. . . . But that’s not the best part! So then he wants to put it out, so he empties his whole water pitcher into the stove and now the floor’s swimming in the worst muck.”29 Mired in self-contradiction , neither Gregers with his claim of the ideal nor Dr. Relling with his embrace of the life-lies that uphold the status quo understands quite what has gone wrong at the end of the play. Hedvig’s literal misreading of the metaphor of the duck brings into the Ekdal attic the “muck” and weeds of entrapment in both social and theatrical intrigue. The mixture of social and theatrical entrapment is most intensely dialectical in Hedda Gabler. Hedda is like Hamlet in being a character imprisoned in a world of hypocritical double-talk and corruption; she is like Tartuffe in the skill with which she manipulates her dupes and in the way she is brought up short in her audacity. Like Molière’s Alceste, she misanthropically despises the social set in which she finds herself; and like Rousseau’s Alceste, she holds society to a higher standard of authenticity and insists upon fidelity to the claims of her own self. Protean , changeable, theatrical in the extreme, she is like Rousseau’s vision of his feminized self in Le persifleur. In the character of Hedda, Ibsen dramatizes the modern, self-alienating claims of sincerity. Metatheatrically, in the play that bears Hedda’s name, Ibsen dramatizes the way the normal conventions of nineteenth-century drama betray the self-contradictory nature of these claims. Hedda Gabler looks like, and has frequently been mistaken for, a problem-play typical of its period—an exploration of a social problem troubling and disturbing to the complacency of its bourgeois audience. Its mode is realistic; its action takes place within a drawing room; costumes—like Auntie Julie’s hat—perform the necessary function of providing us with social distinctions. A woman of aristocratic background has married into the distinctly middle-class, middle-brow family of a pedantic professor. Her resistance to assimilation is reflected in her refusal to take the name of Mrs. Tesman, in her decision to ridicule her aunt-in-law’s new hat, and in her violent rejection of the fact of her own pregnancy. Described in these terms, Ibsen’s play becomes a specimen of nineteenth-century realistic social drama, a play like his rival Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s The Newlyweds (1865), in which such resistance to marriage arises from the woman’s awareness of a double standard and awakening to feminist consciousness. As Joan Templeton has pointed out, critics from the earliest to the most recent have had trouble reconciling the character of Hedda with this formula.30 But there is no proposal in Ibsen’s play of a way to solve the problem , no obligatory discussion-scene (unless we count the curious discussion of the railway carriage between Hedda and Judge Brack). Hedda simply assumes that the audience understands her grievance. Like Hamlet, she...