Marriage, Metaphysics and The Lady from the Sea Problem

Marriage, Metaphysics and The Lady from the Sea Problem ELINOR FUCHS In other words, only by denying sexual difference (and gender) as components of subjectivity in real women ... can the philosophers see in "women" the privileged repository of "the future of mankind. "I Teresa de Lauretis. Technologies of Gender There has always been a Lady from the Sea problem: for a drama of the immaterial, it is too material. Allegorical/realistic, philosophical/psychological : to critics, it has always been too much of the one to be enough of the other. The task of the more recent Ibsen scholars has been to redeem the play by finding a reading that accounts for the two tones of the play, the two water levels (open sea and carp pond) of Ibsen's dramaturgical landscape. But that continues to be difficult, for no matter what reading over the past one hundred years, one thing has always bothered critics. As Henry James grumbled, and Francis Fergusson agreed nearly seventy-five years later, "one winces considerably" when faced with those dratted "pert daughters." (Fergusson staged it, and had first-hand experience that the daughters don't play.)' The most recent effort to rationalize the play's structure comes in a brilliant and deeply argued analysis by the Hegelian Brian Johnston. As he sees it, all strands of the play serve to explicate a central philosophical dilemma, which may be stated: the highest yearning of the human spirit for freedom are in tragic conflict with the demands of organized society.3 The ballet among the three central characters - Ellida, Wangel and the Stranger - becomes an allegory dialectically working out this problematic. But what, oh what, to do with the "pert daughters"? In Johnston, they are also allegorized. Thus: The community depicted in the play is one animated by yearning, by longing for release from confinement and finitude. It is restless, discontented (Boletta), unhappily malicious (Hilde), or, like Ellida, subject to extreme disorder.4 The Lady from the Sea 435 In the end, the "community" cannot stand too much freedom. Thus, " Humanity chooses to remain earthbound, to reject the lure of absolute freedom, and to remain lhis side of the third empire of spirit." 5 In this resolution, as readers may notice, something gets lost on the way to the universal signifier. The gender of the female characters of the play degendered here as "community," " it," "humanity" - has become invisible. Johnston is not alone. Perhaps falling into a pathetic fallacy, critics doing "supertextual" readings of the play treat Ibsen's dramaturgy here in much the same way the men in the play treat the women.6 That is, the women are invisible as autonomous individuals, but flourish as idea, force, symbol, embodiment of desire. In these allegorical readings, Ellida Wangel is caught in a philosophical contest between two opposing forces. These are sometimes figured absolute freedom v. contingency, the Erotic v. Love, the Infinite v. the Bounded: all imaged as an opposition of Sea and Land. However it is figured, this central conflict is seen as being embodied in the two men contending for E1lida's allegiance. The central interpretative quarrels about the play concern the opposed values we attach to these men, and the valuation of those values. In such readings, critics discuss the playas if it concerned ''The Being from the Sea," the "Species from the Sea," " Modem Western Man from the Sea," and so forth. Ellida Wangel becomes interesting primarily as the instrument through which certain values triumph and others are crushed. But there is another, devastating, battle of opposing forces below the surface of the action. In this battle the men assert authority and the women struggle for autonomy. The Lady from the Sea may be Ibsen's most painful play about the fate of women in male society. It is not only a play about freedom in the metaphysical sense, but about freedom within marriage, and about the way our philosophical ideals must be shaken when confronted with the bondage of half the race. Without negating the philosophical debate at the loftier reaches of the play, I would like to restore its concrete social dimension, its gendered specificity. A gendered reading of The...