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Asbjørn Aarseth
The
Glass Cabinet – a Key Concept for the
Approach to Ibsen’s Modern
Prose Plays
Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, published in December 1899, was called “A
Dramatic Epilogue in Three Acts”. Asked by an interviewer if this
meant that the play would be his last one, Ibsen said no; he had plans
for other plays. It only meant that this play was the last one in a
series which began with A Doll’s
House. Future plays by
him would be of of a different kind (cf. HU, XIX, 226).
Due to a decline in Ibsen’s
health in the following years, the epilogue came in fact to be his last
book. And yet his comment about the last 11 plays being a series of
somehow similar plays, makes us wonder about the similarity he was
referring to. Did he have some thematic aspect in mind? Or was it rather
the form of the plays he was thinking of? This is the question which I
will be dealing with in this paper. The first play of the series, The
Doll’s House, was published 20 years before the last one. What are
the common characteristics of his plays throughout these 20 years? Is it
an ongoing campaign involving the cause of women’s liberation? Is it
perhaps a theatrical demonstration of the crisis of the bourgeois
family? Is it a more technical matter, a question of a basic dramaturgy
with variations within some common frame?
I propose to make a closer inspection from this angle, to look for a
repetition in terms of formal structure, without leaving the thematic
aspects completely out of the view. If it is true that Ibsen’s eleven
last plays have some important aspect in common, it is certainly also
the case that he is trying to cover this similarity as best he can. In
order to avoid the criticism that he was merely repeating himself from
one play to the next, he would have to use all his inventiveness to
camouflage whatever basic strategy he had arrived at for his series of
plays. And on the whole he was successful. Not every reader or spectator
was pleased with the dramatic form Ibsen had developed for his modern
prose plays. In an essay on theatre in 1918 the Swedish writer Pär
Lagerkvist wrote that the typical Ibsen play could be summarized as
“silent treading on carpets during five long acts, with the uttering
of words, words, words” Lagerkvist 1956, 18). Such a caricature does
not say a lot about Ibsen’s secret method, but it does indicate
Lagerkvist’s demand for a less verbal and a more colourful and dynamic
theatre.
I believe that Ibsen’s dramatic art can best be studied not by
applying some theoretical concept developed by a drama critic or a
literary theorist, but rather by looking at the cards the playwright
himself is playing when he is composing his text for the theatre. This
can be a device to accelerate the action, as for instance the sudden
visit of a long absent friend, bringing reminiscences to mind of some
unsettled affair in the past, or it can be a metaphor describing the
present situation of the characters, or a catchword suggesting the dream
of some future happiness. The phrase I have chosen for my key concept in
this survey of Ibsen’s modern prose plays is a metaphor, “the glass
cabinet”, which Ibsen has used once, in Pillars
of Society (1877), the play immediately preceding A
Doll’s House.
Pillars
of Society was
the play which first made Ibsen famous outside of Scandinavia; it
became his breakthrough in Germany in 1878 – in February of that year
there was already three German translations of the play, and it was
played simultaneously at five different theatres in Berlin, and in the
same year it was produced by 26 additional German theatres (Friese 1976,
XI). It had taken some time before he had arrived at a formal solution
which satisfied him. He had started out with four different
scenographies, but in the end he decided to limit himself to only one
location, and this is how it is described (in Rolf Fjelde’s
translation):
A spacious garden room in Consul
Bernick’s house. Downstage left, a door opening into Bernick’s
study; farther back in the same wall, a similar door. Centered in the
opposite wall, a large entrance door. The rear wall is glass almost
entirely, with a door in it standing open on a broad flights of steps
decked by an awning. A portion of the garden below the steps can be
seen, bounded by a fence with a small entry gate. Just beyond and
parallel to the fence is a street, lined on the far side with small,
colorfully painted wooden houses (Ibsen 1978, 15).
The spectators are able to see
right through the garden room and its back wall, into the garden and the
street behind the garden. The main character, Consul Bernick, a rich
merchant and shipyard owner, has not always acted in compliance with
sound business norms or the best moral standards, and these things have
been revealed to some members of the family as well as to the audience.
In the small town he is still considered an honorable man with a happy
family life and a booming business. In order to strike back against some
rumours to the opposite effect, some of the rich friends of Mr. Bernick
are planning a celebration in his honour in the last act. There will be
a lot of people arriving from the town, filling the street in the
background, speeches will be made, an orchestra will play, and the crowd
will cheer this honourable “pillar of society”. The preparations for
the celebration involves the lowering of the curtains for the glass
wall, and one of Bernick’s friends explains to one of the ladies how
the arrangement is intended: “When the garden is filled with a host of
faces, then the curtains will rise to reveal a surprised and delighted
family group. A citizen’s home ought to be like a glass cabinet”
(Ibsen 1978, 95).
The element of surprise will increase the joy and cheering.
The arrangement with the
curtains and the specators in the street behind the glass wall makes the
scene a kind of double theatre, with spectators on both sides of the
stage. This is a precise image of Ibsen’s device of revelation, with
its scenographic as well as its thematic function. A glass cabinet is
literally a piece of furniture, what the French and the Germans refer to
as a vitrine, a cupboard with
transparent walls where the treasures of the house, the china, the
silver cups etc. are exhibited. It is the pride of the housewife,
containing precious items which are rarely used in the household, except
on special occasions.
The glass cabinet is not
referred to in any other Ibsen play, but I will try to show that it
appears so to speak between the lines or disguised as a part of the
scenography in several of the other plays, and that some other kind of
exposition with a similar function can be identified in most of the
other plays. It is relatively easy to discover the corresponding element
in the plays immediately following Pillars of Society. The title of A Doll’s House is a
metaphor, corresponding to the glass cabinet. And it is in fact a
similar kind of furniture. It is a children’s toy in the form of a
miniature home for dolls, a cupboard with one wall removed, so the
children can look into it, and play with the miniature furniture, in the
living room of the dolls, the kitchen, the bedroom etc. In fact, if we
read the scenography, which is the same for all the three acts, we find
a glass cabinet prescribed among the furniture of the Helmer family:
“An étagère with china figures and other small art objects...”
(Ibsen 1978, 125).
There is also talk about dolls
in this play. Nora has bought some doll equipment for her children as a
Christmas present. In the first act she is playing hide and seek with
her three children, and as Krogstad enters the living room, she is under
the table. This is one of the peripeties of the play, with the sudden
change in mood from the world of childlike innocence to the serious
conversation of grown-up people. In the last part of the play Nora is
talking to Torvald about how she has been treated as a doll, a
plaything, both by her father and by him. Towards the end of the play
she has realized that she has to leave the family. She is not a doll any
more. A doll’s house is no place to stay for a grown-up
human being.
The next play, Ghosts, does not contain a miniature home, but it is not difficult
to recognize the glass cabinet in full size. The scenography bears some
resemblance to the garden room of Consul Bernick in Pillars
of Society:
A large garden room, with a door
in the left-hand wall, and two doors in the wall to the right. In the
middle of the room a round table with chairs grouped about it; on the
table lie books, magazines, and newspapers. In the left foreground, a
window, and next to it a small sofa with a sewing table in front of it.
In the background, the room is extended into a somewhat smaller
greenhouse, whose walls are great panes of glass. From the right side of
the greenhouse, a door leads into the garden. Through the glass walls a
somber fjord landscape can be glimpsed, half hidden by the steady rain
(Ibsen 1978, 203).
The extension at the back stage
is in most English translations referred to as a
conservatory; the original has
‘blomsterværelse’, litterally flower
room. I think that the American
version, greenhouse, is bold,
but it is very close to what Ibsen must have had in mind. The
‘greenhouse’ may be regarded as a metaphor, and in fact can be
interpreted as the basic metaphor in an allegory which is suggested at
only a few points in the dialogue. A greenhouse consists of glass walls
and a glass roof, a contrivance used in agriculture to create artificial
air conditions in terms of temperature, humidity, and light, for the
cultivation of plants which cannot endure the natural open air
conditions. As the play starts, Regine, Mrs. Alving’s maid, has just
been watering the plants on the inside of the glass wall, while the rain
is pouring down on the outside. Some readers may conclude that there is
no important distinction between inside and outside, since the wall is
transparent, and we can observe what is going on both inside and
outside: there are green plants on both sides of the wall, and there
seems to be plenty of water on both sides. But the distinction is
essential: on the outside there is no control of the amount of water,
whereas in the greenhouse water is portioned out in exactly measured
quantities for each plant.
This important border line
between the artificial world inside and the natural world outside is
emphasized by the entrance through the door from the garden by the
carpenter Engstrand, and some minutes later by Pastor Manders. This is
the only time these two men enter through the garden door. The carpenter
is dripping wet, and he is not at all welcomed by the maid, in spite of
the fact that he is believed to be her father. Pastor Manders is less
wet, because of the umbrella. But by means of the dialogue we are made
aware – if we have not already noticed the pouring down of the rain
outside – of the difference: in the room water on the floor is not
acceptable. The rain is discussed in the dialogue between Regine and
both the visitors.
The potential allegory to be
inferred from the scenography and the opening scene of Ghosts
can be thought of as a system of careful protection. The chief gardener
of the property of Rosenvold (the name of the property can be translated
as ‘Rose Hill’) is of course Mrs. Alving. Her main concern is not
the plants in the literal sense, but her son Osvald. She has done much
to protect him – not from the rain outside, but from certain unhealthy
influences which have been associated with the estate of Rosenvold in
the past. These influences have been located in the character and
behaviour of her late husband, Chamberlain Alving, who developed a
decadent and unhealthy lifestyle. Leaving the responsibility of managing
the estate to his wife, he would spend his days smoking tobacco,
drinking, and womanizing, in a way which gradually affected his physical
condition. Discovering his affair with the maid Johanna, who became
Regine’s mother, Mrs, Alving took command. She decided that it would
be important to keep up appearances, and also that in order to rescue
Osvald from the unhealthy influence and gradual decay of his father, the
boy would have to be raised in a foster home.
On first seeing Osvald, who has
recently returned from Paris, Pastor Manders is struck by the likeness
to his father (Osvald is entering with his father’s pipe in his
mouth). It is as if the Pastor is seeing a ghost. As they speak, it is
quite clear that the two men disagree on most issues touched upon. On
one point they agree, however. To remove a little boy, before the age of
seven, from the home of his parents and place him in a foster home, is
not a wise thing to do. As Pastor Manders says, “A child’s rightful
place is and always will be his parental home” (Ibsen 1978, 222). And
Osvald comments: “I have to agree with Mr. Manders there.”
Mrs. Alving’s decision to send her little boy away, and the
reasons for it, is discussed more in detail after Osvald has left the
stage. Pastor Manders accuses Mrs. Alving of having been a bad mother.
She cannot have enjoyed being a mother, putting her child out with
strangers. This way of expressing it, in the original: “De satte Deres
barn ud til fremmede” (HU, IX, 79), is rather conspicuous in
Norwegian. It is repeated by Mrs. Alving a bit later: “...Osvald blev
sat ud” (83). The English version in a number of different
translations is: “...I sent Osvald away” (230), and this way of
putting it is quite natural. The Norwegian equivalent would be: ‘Jeg
sendte Osvald bort’. The words used by both Pastor Manders and Mrs
Alving, ‘sette ut’, is
more commonly used in the language of greenhouse cultivation. When the
young plants are considered fit to survive in open air conditions, they
are ‘satt ut’, placed
outside, that is, without the protection of the glass walls.
There is much talk about
protection in Ibsen’s drama about Mrs. Alving and her son. In her
letters to him, she has been careful to shelter him from the unpleasant
truths about his father, so that he has formed a completely wrong and
idealized image of him. Her decision to build an orphanage on one part
of the estate may be seen as an act of protection regarding the late
Chamberlain’s reputation; it is also of course intended as a home for
orphans, that is a protected sphere. The name of the location is Solvik,
which means ‘Sunny Bay’. Discussing the formalities concerning the
Orphanage with Mrs. Alving, Pastor Manders advices her not to have the
new building insured; it would not look good, he says, if they gave the
impression that the owner should not be confident that an institution
like this would be “...standing, so to say, under a special
protection” (Ibsen 1978, 217).
It is the sentral tragic irony
of this drama that the idea of protection, expressed in so many ways,
but concentrated particularly in Mrs. Alving’s dominating attitude
towards her son, cannot prevent
that Osvald is in many ways the inheritor of his father. He has acquired
his father’s taste for sigars and for liquor, he does not go out into
the rain even if he talks about it, and he is trying to engage Regine
– his half sister, as is revealed to him in the last act – in a
secret erotic relationship. The most fatal inheritance, of course, is
the illness, some kind of venereal disease, which has been passed on
from father to son, affecting seriously his physical condition, and
which is the real reason for his homecoming.
When the Orphanage is destroyed
by the fire, and the vain efforts by Osvald to save it have exhausted
him and accelerated the deterioration of his health, the scene of
reckoning takes place in Mrs Alving’s garden room. The night is
followed by sunrise, but it is not a cheerful beginning of a promising
new day. Osvald has locked the doors, turning the garden room with the
greenhouse into a prison. Nobody can get out, and nothing can get in,
except the sunlight from the snowcapped mountains across the fjord. It
is the moment of truth for Mrs. Alving. Her project of protection has
been in vain; possibly it has merely accelerated the inevitable
catasthrophe. She is also made aware of her own guilt through her
disposition of making the marriage to the cheerful young lieutenant
Alving less happy than it should have been.
In the next play, An Enemy of the People, there is no apparent glass cabinet referred
to in the scenography, and this time Ibsen has not attempted to have the
entire action, all the five acts, presented on the same location. In
this play as in the earlier ones we notice the essential distinction
between the inner area of a more or less protected and artificial life,
and the outdoor existence where conditions are according to nature. Out
in the open life can be merciless in its hardships and the individual is
exposed to the various kinds of truth. The distinction is not always
indicated by scenographic elements, and so it depends on metaphors and
allegorical interpretation.
In An
Enemy of the People we may find that Doctor Stockmann is an
ambiguous figure, a hero and a clown at the same time, so to speak.
He makes discoveries, and his scientific investigation into the sanitary
conditions of the water at the baths, which are the pride and the
attraction of the small town, is no laughing matter, but he is slow to
understand that his insisting on measures to prevent the pollution does
not make him a popular man in the community. The public is eventually
persuaded by the clever politician, the Doctor’s brother, the Mayor
Peter Stockmann, that the Doctor is much too impatient about removing
the sources of pollution. The Doctor calls for a public meeting, but his
speech is so provocative that his listeners unite in voting for a
resolution stating that he is an enemy of the people. Seeing that their
income from the tourism in connection with the baths will be
substantially reduced for a number of years, the townspeople are angry.
The target of their anger is Dr. Stockmann. The heated discussion leads
to riots, and the mob throw stones at the house where he lives.
The final act is located in Dr.
Stockmann’s study. The room is in disorder, and the two windows at the
right have all the panes shattered. It is early morning after the
riotous night, and the Doctor “...is bent down, raking under one of
the cabinets with an umbrella; after some effort, he sweeps out a
stone” (Ibsen 1978, 366). He is “in a dressing gown, slippers, and a
smoking cap”, and there is nothing heroic about his appearance. This
is the only scene in the play where glass intended for separation
between inside and outside is referred to, and in this case it is the
absence of the glass which is brought to attention: All the window panes
are broken. This means the intrusion of the outside into the home of the
Stockmann family: fresh morning air, and the stones thrown into the
room, which are being collected by the Doctor to form a pile on the
table. A normal reaction would probably be to get rid of the stones as
soon as possible, by carrying them out where they came from, but this is
not what Dr. Stockmann wants to do: “I’m going to preserve these
stones as holy relics. Eilif and Morten have got to see them every day;
and when they’re grown, they’ll inherit them from me” (366).
The significance of this is that
the Doctor is proud of the stones his study has been exposed to. They
are pieces of the hard reality belonging to the outer world, and he
wants them to be preserved as evidence. The glass cabinet is shattered
as the final act opens, and at last the Doctor can see clearly what he
is up against. He announces his final, great discovery, in a sentence
which has been much debated: “...the essence of it, you see, is that
the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone”
(Ibsen 1978, 386). Of course he is not completely alone: his family is
there with him, but he is more alone than any other member of the small
town community. He has lost his job as the doctor of the baths, the
owner of the house the family lives in has given them notice, his
daughter Petra has been fired from her job as a teacher, and his two
sons have been sent home from school because of the fighting they have
been involved in. Is he “the strongest man”? Not in a political
sense, obviously. The rest of the townspeople are against him. In a
trivial sense, as well as socially, he is the loser. But in an Ibsen
play this is not the important side of human life. In this play more
than in any other we see the playwright as a Romantic anarchist.
There can be no doubt that in a
moral sense the Doctor is the strongest. He is completely independent.
He is not a member of any political party, he is not a member of the
house owners’ association, and he does not have to pay attention to
the readers of the newspaper or avoid offending them in any way. He can
act according to his own conviction, as a free individual. Dr. Stockmann
may be regarded as a living paradox at the end of the play: He is a
spokesman for a triumphant and heroic individualism. His wife may be
somewhat sceptical about his final discovery, but her reaction is
good-natured: “MRS. STOCKMANN (smiling
and shaking her head). Oh, Thomas, Thomas –!” His daughter Petra
reacts with the positive idealism of the young generation, uttering the
final word of the play, and with it confirming her belief in his
position and strength, in spite of all adversity: “PETRA (buoyantly,
gripping his hands). Father!” (Ibsen 1978, 386).
When we come to The Wild Duck we do not see anything like a glass cabinet, but the
thematic aspects associated with it are not far away. We see here a
focus on the small and confined world where human beings live under an
artificial protection. On the surface this play may seem to be divided
in two rather different parts, with the first act presenting the
conversation of some guests at a dinner given by the rich and powerful
grocer Haakon Werle, while the following four acts are dealing with the
modest situation at the home of the photographer Hjalmar Ekdal.
In order to see the fundamental
unity of the play as a whole, it is not sufficient to notice that some
of the characters appearing in the first act also come onto the stage
during the remaining part, such as both Hjalmar and his old father, as
well as the members of the Werle family, Gregers and his father,
and Mrs Sørby, the lady friend of old Werle whom he intends to
marry. How can the idea of the small artificial world manifest itself in
the comfortable living quarters of the rich merchant? That the dinner
guests for the most part are well-to-do people does not make them
positive or healthy or openminded in any way. A number of them are
presented by the title of Chamberlain, or ‘Kammerherre’ in
Norwegian, which corresponds to the German title of ‘Kammerherr’.
This title could be used to indicate a certain social level – they are
upper class, what we may think of as modest aristocrats. We remember
Chamberlain Alving, the late husband of Mrs. Alving in Ghosts.
The title ‘Kammerherre’ is significant also on a symbolic level.
Literally it means the master of the chamber, – that is, the bedroom. It was a
position at the medieval courts; the King or the Prince would appoint a
young member of the nobility, to have as a servant who had access to the
private rooms, and to assist the King or the nobleman when he was to get
up, to wash, to dress, etc. Later on the title was merely used as an
honorary royal appointment, a way of rewarding some capable and loyal
subject, without any duties connected with it. The title was still used
in this way in 19th-century Denmark and Norway.
In The
Wild Duck (as in Ghosts)
the chamberlains are characters connected with the inner rooms, and
accordingly living a rather unhealthy kind of life. The appearances of
three of them are indicated in the list of characters: A fat man, A
bald-headed man, A nearsighted man. In the dialogue after the dinner
their favorite topics are the question of why cigar smoking is no longer
permitted at dinners given by Mr. Werle, and the quality of the Tokay
wine, and they enjoy flirting with Mrs. Sørby. She is answering back,
and on the issue of the wine being dependent on much sunshine for the
grapes, her comment is that the same applies to the chamberlains, they
too are in need of sunshine. This is a hint at their shadowy lifestyle,
as they seem to prefer going to parties instead of living a natural life
in the open air. When it comes to their interest in women, old Werle
himself is a particular case in point. He is in the opening conversation
between the servant of the house and the man who is hired for the
occasion, referred to as “a real goat in his day” (Ibsen 1978, 393).
In fact the original has the word “buk”, which means a he-goat, or a
buck, indicating his merits as a womanizer.
The final observation of the
first act, in the conversation between father and son Werle, Gregers
points to the inner room, where the door is ajar and music is heard, and
says to his father: “Look – your gentleman friends are playing
blindman’s buff with Mrs. Sørby” (Ibsen 1978, 410). This is a point
where the translation cannot easily correspond to the sense hidden in
the original. In Norwegian
the game is called‘blindebukk’
– literally ‘the blind buck’.
Ibsen has not indicated how the game is played in this case, but it is
obvious that it is a hidden reference to the old man, who was a ‘real
buck’ in his younger days, and who in his old age has growing problems
with his eye-sight.
In the main part of the drama,
the four acts taking place in the photographer Hjalmar Ekdal’s studio,
we find a rather special version of the glass cabinet indicated in the
scenography, not easily recognized as such:
The room, which is fairly
spacious, appears to be a loft. To the right is a sloping roof with
great panes of glass, half hidden by a blue curtain. In the far right
corner is the entrance; nearer on the same side, a door to the living
room. Similarly, at the left there are two doors, and between these an
iron stove. At the back is a wide double door, designed to slide back to
the sides. The studio is simply but comfortably furnished and decorated.
(etc.) (Ibsen 1978, 411).
The sloping roof with great
panes of glass is at first sight the obvious parallel to the large
windows at the rear wall in Pillars
of Society and Ghosts. The
purpose of this element in The
Wild Duck is to indicate that the stage is a photographer’s
studio, where good access to daylight is required. The panes of glass
are not playing any part in the action. Thus we should look further for
the equivalent of the glass cabinet. It is not difficult to find –
indeed it is the most conspicuous part of the stage: the double door,
hiding something which most members of the Ekdal family find
particularly precious.
As Gregers Werle makes his visit in the second act, and in the course of
conversation suggests that the present conditions of old Ekdal are
nothing like the free life he enjoyed in his prime in the forest at Høidal,
the former hunter protests.
He insists that the sliding doors be pushed aside, so that Gregers can
see what is behind them: “The doorway opens on an extensive, irregular
loft room with many nooks and corners, and two separate chimney shafts
ascending through it” (Ibsen 1978, 425). This is the attic, the loft
room where the Ekdals keep their animals. And they are not merely common
domestic animals. Apart from hens, the family keeps rabbits, pigeons and
one duck.
The focus in this part of the
play, as in the first act, is on the small world, the limited indoors
existence, where the characters live under protection, in artificial
conditions, one might say. The animals, at least some of the species,
are said to be wild, but it is quite clear from what we hear about them,
particularly the duck, that they are not really wild any more. The title
of the play is ironic. The animals are domesticated. The duck has got a
trough of water to splash around in, and as Hjalmar explains, the trough
is filled with fresh water every other day (cf. 426). And Hjalmar is
convinced that the duck is thriving in the loft room: “She’s gotten
fat. I think she’s been in there so long, too, that she’s forgotten
her old wild life, and that’s what it all comes down to” (427).
Having lost the ability to fly,
the duck could not have survived in open air. It is not a long step to
switch from the domesticated animals in the loft room to the people
living under the same roof. They too are in need of protection; a life
under natural conditions, in full freedom, is not for them. In a
metaphorical sense they are chamberlains, both the people and the
animals connected with the Ekdal family. They are not fit to walk out
into the hard reality of life. Old Lieutenant Ekdal, the hunter and
forester who once roamed in the real forests, now must be content to go
shooting an occasional rabbit in the fake forest of the loft. Hjalmar
does not realize the truth regarding his own marriage, about who the
father of Hedvig is, and when Gregers – inviting his friend on a
walking tour in the open air – informs him of his suspicions, Hjalmar
is not able to handle it in a sensible way. His violent reactions make
Hedvig very upset, and this is a condition which can explain the suicide
of the young, vulnerable girl.
In the same way as the plants in
the greenhouse of Mrs. Alving indicate the artificiality and frailty of
the existence led by some of the members of the Alving family, we may
say that the inauthentic life of the animals kept in menagerie-like
conditions in the loft room of the Ekdal family flat serves to emphasize
the protection and artificial terms of existence – ‘the life lie’,
as it is expressed by Doctor Relling – offered to the miserable human
beings of and around the Ekdal family.
The essential difference between
indoors and outdoors existence is hinted at, both in the scenography and
in the dialogue of all the twelve contemporary prose plays by Ibsen.
Here a short reference to some of the remaining ones will have to do.
In Rosmersholm there is the
very special atmosphere in the living room of Johannes Rosmer, so
clearly influencing the characters living there. There is no glass
cabinet, but the stern portraits of the retired clergyman’s ancestors,
clergymen, officers and civil servants in uniform, from the walls
looking down on the present generation, do have a very special effect,
as if the dead ones are present and determine the conditions of the
living. Under this roof Rosmer has developed a grand idea of ennobling
his fellow human beings, but when he walks out of the building and takes
steps to start his moral campaign, it very soon becomes clear to him and
to others that he is not able to realize his idealist programme.
The
Lady from the Sea is a five act play with
all settings but one in the open air. And yet in this play, similar to
the interior ones there is a consistent opposition between the narrow
and the open space. In one corner of Dr. Wangel’s garden there is an
old carp pond, and the fishes living there in complete isolation from
the fjord waters as well as the wide ocean, are explicitly used by one
of the daughters of the Doctor to indicate the nature of the stagnant
existence of the people belonging in the small town, virtually cut off
from the larger world beyond the ocean.
In Hedda
Gabler Ibsen is returning to an indoor scenography. The equivalent
of the glass cabinet in this play is the inner room behind the curtains,
Hedda’s special retreat, with the portrait of her father, General
Gabler, on the wall. The glass is indicated in the form of a glass door
on the left wall, with the curtains drawn back. “Through the panes one
can see part of an overhanging veranda and trees in autumn colors”
(Ibsen 1978, 695). As in The
Doll’s House there are also “étagères
with terra-cotta and majolica ornaments”. Hedda’s situation is soon
revealed to us; although recently married and pregnant, directly from
the honeymoon moving into the house she has expressed a liking for, she
is not happy. On the contrary she is feeling trapped, a condition which
is gradually deteriorating as her actions aiming at gaining control over
other people, only lead to increasing frustration. In the end there is
only the negative way to freedom left for her; she shoots herself with
her father’s pistol, under his portrait.
In the following two plays, The
Master Builder and Little
Eyolf, there seems to be less emphasis on the contrast –
scenographically or thematically – between protection and exposure.
While inside versus outside can be regarded mainly as a horizontal
relation, the structural properties of the two plays can be said to have
more to do with vertical movements. This leaves fewer possibilities to
work with a dramaturgy of the glass cabinet as the basic model. With the
two final plays, John Gabriel
Borkman and When We Dead
Awaken, the scenographic approach is again basically the same as in
the earlier period, except that the “epilogue” in addition is
clearly composed according to a gradual ascent towards the heights, that
is, with the main characters following a vertical direction.
The dramatic consequences of the
confrontation between characters who have been residing in a protected
inner sphere and the harsh and sometimes fatal terms offered by the
outer world of reality, are what Ibsen is unfolding on the stage of his
prose plays. If there is something like a common theme in this corpus of
plays, whether they are classified as comedies, tragicomedies or
tragedies, it is freedom. The twelve plays are representations of human
beings who find themselves trapped in some version of a glass cabinet
existence, dreaming about freedom. In some of the plays they manage to
achieve freedom, but not without expense. Freedom in an Ibsen play is
challenging. One needs the ability to adjust, to acclimatise, as
Ballested says in The Lady from
the Sea. This means a compromise has to be found. Absolute freedom
is not compatible with life. Those who have the highest claims on
existence, experience a tragic fall. They have been living in narrow
rooms and have developed artificial and untenable conceptions about life
outside, which signifies real life.
The playwright has chosen to
represent their situation at the point where they are just about to test
their ideals and bring them out into the open, whether they are called
“the most wonderfull thing”, “the claim of the ideal”, “wine
leaves in the hair”, or “castles in the air with solid
foundations”. The dramas Ibsen presents to us take place at the moment
when the small world of the glass cabinet has to yield, and is invaded
by the forces of the world outside. The outcome is very often a tragic
one, but not always. What fascinates us is the dramatic effect of the
confrontation, as well as the creativity and the inventiveness of the
playwright, his ability to vary his devices in such a way that each play
is experienced as a completely new and unpredictable drama.
References
Friese, Wilhelm (Hrsg.) 1976. Ibsen
auf der deutschen Bühne : Texte zur Rezeption,
Tübingen.
Ibsen, Henrik 1978 [1965]. The
Complete Major Prose Plays. Translated and Introduced
by Rolf Fjelde. New York and Scarborough, Ontario, New
American
Library.
Lagerkvist, Pär 1956. Dramatik. Stockholm, Bonnier.
Noreng, Harald 1969. “En
folkefiende – helt eller klovn”. In Noreng (ed.): Ibsen
på
festspillscenen. Bergen, J.W. Eide forlag, 15–27.
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