Ibsen's Endgame: A Reconsideration of When We Dead Awaken

Ibsen's Endgame: A Reconsideration of When We Dead A waken M. S. BARRANGER WHEN WE DEAD A WAKEN, IBSEN'S FINAL PLAY written seven years before his death, has been treated by critics as an epilogue to his previous work, as a personal confession, and as a forerunner of the symbolist movement in European drama. In two respects this last play, subtitled "A Dramatic Epilogue," is the conclusion to a series of four plays: The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolt (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), When We Dead Awaken (1899). In When We Dead Awaken are to be found such characteristic themes of the latterday Ibsen as the conflicting claims of artistic vocation and personal life as well as the incompatibility of the desire for success and the need for happiness. In addition, the opening out of the physical environment of the play sets the geography of When We Dead Awaken apart from the works of Ibsen's middle period. The open terraces and mountainous heights, which comprise the varied settings of his last plays, are suggestive of the retooling of the lives of his artist-heroes: Halvard Solness, Alfred Allmers, John Gabriel Borkman, Arnold Rubek. Ibsen's geography in these late plays suggests symbolically that in order to redress the spiritual imbalance of his past years, the Ibsen hero must allow the natural to take precedence over the artificial, life over art, the ethical over the aesthetic. Foreshadowed in Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady From the Sea (1888), this pattern of development is accompanied by an expansion of the dramatic setting which, in turn, complements the hero's effort to come to terms with the stifling and injurious pattern of his existence. For instance, When We Dead Awaken opens outside a watering place on the Norwegian coast and moves into the mountains where Rubek and Irene, awakened to the wrongful pattern of their lives, die in a purifying avalanche. They are the resurrected of the play's title along with Maja, Rubek's young wife, and Ulfhejm, a country 289 290 M. S. BARRANGER squire, who likewise are reawakened to the potential of their lives. Despite new spatial patterns in these last plays, modem critics continue to make Ibsen's last works the subject of extensive thematic-biographical criticism. His four consecutive studies between 1892 and 1899 of the creative personality in conflict with the demands of his art upon his personal life lend themselves to this critical approach. In effect, these final plays are continually reviewed as rooted in the "facts of Ibsen's last years"l and treated as "mystical, symbolic, and autobiographical.,,2 Ibsen's final play, When We Dead Awaken, suggests a new dimension in the dramatist's work other than concern for biography and symbol; for Ibsen introduces in his last play the device of the sequential pastime and game in order to structure and give definition to the lives of his characters whose histories and motives are, at best, vague and contradictory.3 He, therefore, achieves in 1899 a remarkable modernism. This unique thematic dimension which emerges in When We Dead Awaken has been peripherally explored under traditional approaches to motives of reality and illusion. Whereas these themes are without question at work in such plays as Ghosts and The Wild Duck, Ibsen devises the game in When We Dead Awaken not so much to comment on the role of illusion in the lives of his characters as to project the past in the present dramatic time in order to illustrate, in retrospect, the manner in which Irene and Rubek have sought to structure time, ward off guilt and despair, and, in Rubek's case, exploit the two women in his life for ulterior gains, i.e., artistic success and existential well-being.4 The introduction of the game device in his final play suggests not so much a variation on the reality-illusion motive as a significant new approach to the problem of overcoming the limitations of the representational theatre. Ronald Gaskell suggests that as early as Rosmersholm the "subtlety of Ibsen's material has rebelled against the limits of the representational theatre."s When We Dead Awaken, moreover, suggests that...