Happiness as End: A Reading of Rosmersholm

One of the most extraordinary things about this age is the courage to openly declare happiness as the goal in life.

Rebecca West, Rosmersholm²

Rosmersholm is a play about happiness and how to achieve it; yet only a handful of critics, notably Hjalmar Brenel, Edvard Beyer, and more recently, Errol Durbach, have given the theme of happiness due consideration ("Ibsen"). The play's gloomy reputation precedes analyses of it, frequently leaving this crucial dimension unexamined. Much is lost in the process, not least essential concepts from the lexicon of classical tragedy, happiness [eutuchia], and its opposite, unhappiness [dustuchia], the poles between which Aristotelian tragic action ranges (Aristotle, Poetics 53; ch. 7). At the semantic core of eutuchia and dustuchia is tuche [chance or luck], which has the capacity to overturn both. The Norwegian lykke [happiness] preserves this relationship as it can denote "happiness" and "success" as well as "chance" and "luck."

Ibsen consistently explored the ideas of happiness and chance over half a century of experimentation with writing tragedies structured along Aristotelian lines, ranging between the poles of happiness and unhappiness, involving reversal [peripeteia] and recognition [anagnorisis].³ In his early historical fate-tragedies, chance-lykke dominates, be it in the form of a named fate, generalized supernatural forces, or abstract deity. As Ibsen moved towards his dramas of contemporary life, chance-lykke yields ground to happiness-lykke and its cognates, and the role of contingency is considerably weakened.⁴ The concern with happiness-lykke culminates in Rosmersholm, where the happiness-unhappiness continuum is not simply integral to the conceptual scheme of the tragedy but is the play's dominant thematic preoccupation.

In the extract quoted above, Rebecca West declares that the great thing about the age she lives in is the "courage to openly declare happiness as the goal in life." What follows is a reading of Rosmersholm that argues that the kind of happiness Rebecca and Rosmer espouse is a utilitarian variant of happiness, which had a great deal of currency during the nineteenth century, and that in Rosmersholm, Ibsen dramatizes the radical incompatibility of the utilitarian and tragic views. I do not argue that Ibsen offers a critique of a strictly Benthamite utilitarianism, or of Mill's more sophisticated defence of utilitarianism, or of Sidgwick's more conservative application of it; rather, he critiques features of a broader eudaimonism that is recognizably utilitarian and is informed by several strands of thinking.

Jonathan Glover summarizes some of these strands thus:

1. 1. [It is] a morality with a single, coherent basis. Acts should be judged right or wrong according to their consequences. Happiness is the only thing that is good in itself. Unhappiness is the only thing that is bad in itself. Everything else is judged good or bad according to its tendency to produce happiness or unhappiness.

2. 2. [It offers a morality apart from religion,] a human creation serving human ends . . . [T]he myth of commands and prohibitions is to be replaced by rational calculation of the consequences of different courses of action.

3. 3. [It is a consequentialist philosophy, its] emphasis on the future rather than the past.

4. 4. [It insists on] equality . . . [E]ach person's interests are to be weighed equally: everyone is to count for one and no one for more than one. (Glover 1-3)

Utilitarianism has stimulated little interest in Ibsen research; references to it in the secondary literature are scant and Ibsen's own pronouncements were dismissive. Georg Brandes corresponded with Ibsen on the subject, following the Brandes's translations of Mill. Brandes recalls a recalcitrance on the part of the playwright to "[r]ead Mill and turn Anglo-Saxon," and Ibsen, for his part, declares it inconceivable that Brandes should waste his time on a philosopher like Mill (qtd. in Downs 155).⁵ Brian Downs, in his 1946 study, probes beneath this surface bluster, suggesting that Ibsen's contempt for Mill should be attributed in the first instance to his admiration for Hegel, and speculates that Ibsen was in basic sympathy with Mill but did not want to admit to his influence. Downs argues...