A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
by Helge Salemonsen
I. A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
To claim that Henrik Ibsen has been, to a certain degree, influenced by Hegel is not particularly controversial. Asbjørn Aarseth on several occasions (1) has emphasised what he thinks are significant references to Hegel’s philosophy of aesthetics and art in Peer Gynt.
Hegel’s interpretation of the meaning of the animal motives in the ancient Egypt’s religion and art coincides well with Ibsen’s poetic project Peer Gynt. If we generally read the piece’s scenes, dialogues and monologues in the light of Hegelian aesthetics, many things obtain an additional meaning. (Aarseth 2000:112)
In her last book, Ibsens modernisme, Torild Moi also points out the influence from Hegel’s aesthetics in many of Ibsen’s plays, “either directly or through the texts of M.J. Monrad and J.L. Heiberg.”(Moi 2006: 115) Aarseth is even clearer. He refers to an article by Arne Lidén (Edda 1940): “Especially after Lidén’s analysis it is difficult to assert that Ibsen had just a superficial or indirect knowledge of Hegel’s work.”(Aarseth 1977: 186) John C. Pearce (1962: 72-77) is of the opinion that Hegelian influence is already visible in Catiline and The Pretenders.
Many have seen that Emperor and Galilean presents a perspective on history similar to that of Hegel, even suggesting it to be directly influenced by him. Atle Kittang admits this seems indisputable”, but warns us against attaching too much importance to it, since in that case, it is only an expression of one of Ibsen’s philosophical caprices:
Most commentators have pointed out that this philosophy of history has a Hegelian character. This seems indisputable. And as said, it can also be that Ibsen himself in one of his philosophical whims may have perceived “the third empire” as his authentic contribution to the philosophy of history. But if one focuses too exclusively on this aspect of the play (and there are many who have), one runs the risk of forgetting that Emperor and Galilean is created, not by a philosophical consciousness, but by a dramatic consciousness. This entails a dramatic (if one may use that term) difference for the interpretation. (Kittang 2002: 102)
One can hardly disagree with Atle Kittang when asserting that Emperor and Galilean was created by a “dramatic consciousness”. His insistence on the “dramatic difference” between a dramatic and a philosophical consciousness”, is less convincing. Is a dramatic consciousness really by necessity an un-philosophical consciousness? In a letter to Georg Brandes, while working with Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen warns against interpreting any moral agenda, any hidden pamphlet, any kind of edifying message into the play:
I study the characters, the conflicting plans, the history, and do not concern myself with the moral of the whole –
So far we may assume that Ibsen is expressing himself in accordance with Kittang`s taste. However, Ibsen continues:
assuming that by the moral of history you do not mean its philosophy; for that this will clearly shine forth, as the final verdict on the struggle and the victory, is a matter of course. But all this can only be made intelligible by practical application. (To Brandes, September 24th 1871)
Ibsen claims this philosophy will “clearly shine forth” from his play. Now, Kittang may insist that these words are an expression of Ibsen’s caprice, implying that they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But Ibsen himself was serious. His philosophical perspective is repeatedly referred to, for example in a letter to his publisher:
This book [Emperor and Galilean] will become my main work, and it occupies all my thoughts and all my time. My positive world-view [his ‘verdensanskuelse’, his Weltanschauung, i.e. his theoretical perception of the world] that my critics for such a long time have required from me, will hereby be available. (July12th1871)
And in a letter to Ludvig Daa (February 23rd 1873): “The play evolves around a break between two irreconcilable powers in the world, which until the end of time will repeat itself, and because of this universality, I called the book “A world historical play.” His universal perspective refers to the identification of two conflicting cultural codes, infusing the development of European history: the tension between the religious, philosophical, aesthetical and ethical preferences, rooted in pre-Christian antiquity – power, strength, courage, honour, pride, prosperity, beauty, wisdom – and on the other hand the Christian imperatives – denial of the flesh, denial of self interests, humility, conscience, compassion, pity, mercy, duty, in short the Christian motif of self-sacrifice.
II. Brian Johnston
A similar, rather reluctant confession of Hegelian influence in Emperor and Galilean - like the one seen with Kittang – is expressed also by Bjørn Hemmer:
A certain degree of Hegelian influence might also have manifested itself in Ibsen’s work, not to say that one should exaggerate this influence, as some have been tempted to do. Still in Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen’s understanding of the historical development has a lot in common with Hegel’s. One can also point out certain similarities in their perception of what is characteristic for a tragic conflict, as it is manifested in dramatic form. [...] To say that Hegel was an important figure in his time’s intellectual tendencies, is beyond question, but Ibsen’s possible use of Hegel’s perspective is based on very personal reasons. (Hemmer 2003: 205)
The scholar who most visibly has used a Hegelian perspective in the reading of Ibsen is, beyond doubt, Brian Johnston in his three books The Ibsen Cycle, To the Third Empire and Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama.(2) Brian Johnston is convinced that Ibsen not only had second-hand knowledge of Hegel, for example through Monrad and Heiberg, but that he personally must have read and quite thoroughly studied Hegel’s first main work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). He is also convinced that Ibsen has made systematic use of Hegel’s work in his contemporary plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken.
Brian Johnston’s main issue is not to ascertain a general influence from Hegelian thought in Ibsen’s dramas, nor to list some corresponding details in Hegel’s text and Ibsen’s dramas. It is the very order or succession of dramatic intrigues, the sequence of actions, through Ibsen’s twelve last plays that is of interest to him. His staggering thesis claims that this sequence corresponds with the sequence of dialectic actions in the second part of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
What is new in the present study is the discovery that the realistic plays are structured directly upon Hegel’s major philosophical work, The Phenomenology of Mind (3) , and that the dramas in Hegel’s account of the evolution of human consciousness is paralleled in the sequence of dialectical dramas in Ibsen’s Cycle. This argument is capable of proof, for the reader need only compare the dialectical actions of the two sequences to be convinced that a parallel of twelve matching actions, in the same sequence, is beyond the possibility of coincidence. […] The writer is not claiming merely that there are details in Hegel’s text that can be found in Ibsen’s text; he is claiming that the sequence in which these details occur is repeated in Ibsen’s text. (Johnston 1992:1)
Brian Johnston is taken seriously as a highly qualified and interesting Ibsen researcher, especially when he does not directly connect to his Hegelian thesis. He is referenced, discussed and quoted. Yes, one may also use him as a source of fact; for instance Toril Moi, when she needs to make Ibsen’s Hegelian influence plausible: “Brian Johnston has proven [påvist] Hegel’s influence on Ibsen”, writes Moi on page 115 (Moi 2006). However, on page 428 in the same book, she emphasizes that she has “always perceived Brian Johnston’s Hegelian readings as problematic”.
Johnston himself has scarcely established any other argument in support of “Hegelian influence on Ibsen” than his insistence on the correspondent sequences. His “Hegelian readings” (cf. Moi) consist in pointing out this correspondence. So, if his Hegelian readings are problematic, then his demonstration (cf. Moi) of Hegel’s influence on Ibsen must also be problematic. In that case, he is not fit to serve as a credible source of fact for Toril Moi.
In Ibsens heroisme Atle Kittang presents several interesting reflections on Johnston’s analysis of Brand, Pillars of Society and The Master Builder, without putting any noteworthy emphasis on Johnston’s Hegelian perspective. That Kittang rejects Johnston’s thesis about continuous correspondence between Ibsen’s contemporary dramas and the Phenomenology however, is clearly expressed elsewhere, for instance on the radio program Kulturbeitet on NRK P2, where he refers to this perspective as an example of how wrong one can go in studies of Ibsen.
Asbjørn Aarseth is also sceptical of Brian Johnston’s main thesis in the Ibsen Cycle. He shares Johnston’s perception that Ibsen must have had more than indirect knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy, but presumes that this concerns the Aesthetics more than the Phenomenology:
Given Brian Johnston’s broadly inclined effort, one cannot help but hesitate. Is there a reasonable foundation in the twelve contemporary dramas in order to link them so closely to the text in The Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter six and seven? The reason that this question is difficult to answer with a simple yes or no, is that not only Ibsen’s work, but also Hegel’s work entails some even more excessive interpretational problems. (Aarseth 1977: 186)
Here, one can only agree with Aarseth. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a very difficult text. Johnston’s instructions, to compare the order of actions in Ibsen’s twelve plays with the corresponding course of actions in Hegel’s presentation, is easier said than done. It takes time to read Ibsen. It takes more time to read Hegel. And it takes even more time to understand what he writes. It is not enough to sit down for a social gathering – compare the texts – and then quickly decide whether you are pro or con. Aarseth has read The Phenomenology of Spirit and he has obviously spent more than one night on it:
The ones who look up in the Berlin-edition [of PhS] from 1832, the one which Ibsen would have consulted, must invest a certain good will to be able to follow Johnston’s recommendations. A sceptical reader is tempted more than once to call upon a professional Hegel interpreter. (Aarseth 1977: 186)
Aarseth cannot agree without hesitation with Johnston’s main perspective. He is sceptical, but still not blind to the value of his work:
Brian Johnston has in this book documented a wider knowledge of the historical spiritual situation of the XIX century than most Ibsen scholars of today. At the same time it is not a dry, over intellectual presentation that he gives. He writes with the enthusiasm and the strength that always resides in having an overall perspective of the object of studies. (Aarseth 1977: 188)
III. Ibsen on his contemporary dramas
Ibsen emphasises that his last eleven plays, from A Doll’s House (1879) to When We Dead Awaken (1899), have to be considered a continuous chain of stories; they create a unity and are to be seen as an entity, that is, as a cycle. He comments on the subtitle of his last play in an interview with Verdens Gang: That he had called it A dramatical epilogue, he says, did not imply that it should be read as an epilogue to the entirety of his works, but as an epilogue to a particular series of plays, beginning with A Doll’s House:
What I meant by epilogue in this context was merely that this play forms an epilogue to the series of plays, which began with A Doll’s House and now ends with When We Dead Awaken. It completes the chain of experiences I wanted to portray in this series of plays. Together they create a unity and now I am finished with it. If I write anything more it will be in another context, perhaps, too, in another form. (VG, 12. 12. 1899)
One may wonder why he did not mention Pillars of Society (1877) as a part of this chain of plays. In The Ibsen Cycle Brian Johnston provides good arguments for why we should consider it nevertheless. It would take too long to present this chain of reasoning here.
In the following, I will take Ibsen at his word, and consider A Doll’s House as the first play in the cycle, as there are reasons for doing that too. First, I will comment on the text sequences in Hegel’s work to which, according to Johnston, Ibsen gives systematic reference starting with A Doll’s House.
IV. Hegel’s perspective on history
In the sixth chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit (VI: Spirit) Hegel makes a historical journey from ancient Greece, via the Roman Empire, the breakthrough of Christianity, medieval feudalism, French absolutism and its culture of flattery and courtesy, the age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Kant’s moral philosophy, German Romanticism and his contemporary age. The point is to demonstrate patterns of historical evolution, its line of conflicts, the collective experiences that made modernity or modern European self-consciousness possible.
Along this line of development, he describes stages of consciousness in the development of ethics and law; he describes the coexisting symbiotic and conflict-filled relationship between politics and economy, between state power and wealth, to use Hegel’s terminology, or between common interests and private gain. He describes the changing moral preferences throughout history; changing ways of distinguishing between good and evil, defined by the position one has in the different sections of society (the social hierarchy, economy and government).
He describes how religion in this process, by establishing a safe haven for the sorely tried, the unhappy consciousness, that would include the majority, contributes to the legitimisation of social inequalities. He describes the Enlightenment philosophy’s critique of religion that seeks to reveal faith as a superstition, as a work of mirrors staged by priests and despots as a way to sustain a meaningless, unjust, privilege-based society. He describes the French Revolution as an attempt to overthrow once and for all the conflict between common and private interests, by diminishing outdated institutions and privileges, in short by forcing the will of the individual to recognise the enlightened general will as his own true will, freed from despotism and religious deceits. He describes how this project had to collapse in terror and barbarism.
He describes how the failed liberation project of the Revolution, the attempt to reconcile the individual will with the general will through outer, political upheaval, is changed into an interior moral project in Kant’s moral philosophy; in his description of the inner, self-imposed duty within each individual to abstain from selfish interests (sensuality, desires, inclinations) in favour of the moral law (the categorical imperative).(4) He describes how this moral hubris must decay into moral paralysis – or dissemblance, duplicity and pretence – since by definition, it can only postulate, never truly fulfil the uncompromising imperatives of pure will into action, without defiling the purity of the will.
Through this historical journey Hegel attempts, in short, to show the historical conditions for the modern self-image; the way in which we identify ourselves as individuals, as members of social community, our cultural and moral preferences, our juridical perceptions, our understanding of reality, or even more concisely put: our political, juridical, cultural and moral horizon of perception.
It is this historical presentation that Brian Johnston claims Ibsen gives systematic references to in his contemporary dramas. Or more precisely, he claims that the plays, from A Doll’s House to Hedda Gabler, refers precisely to this presentation, which is developed in the sixth chapter of the Phenomenology. This sounds undoubtedly quite odd. Yes, quite unlikely, at least at first glance, since these plays are contemporary dramas. Ibsen describes modern characters, in modern contexts, involved in modern conflicts, while Hegel describes humanity’s history of consciousness, from ancient Greece to his contemporary times. Hasn’t Ibsen with Pillars of Society once and for all put behind him the genre of historical drama?(5)
At this point, I have to remind the reader of what Ibsen says about his historical drama Emperor and Galilean. The 14th of October 1872 he writes to Edmund Gosse: “The chosen historical theme has a closer connection to the movement of our contemporary time than one would presume.” And in the letter to Ludvig Daa, quoted above, he claims that the historical conflict described in the drama “will repeat itself till the end of time”. Emperor and Galilean is his latest play before the chain of realistic contemporary dramas. In a letter to John Paulsen (20th September 1879), while working on A Doll’s House, he insists that:
An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to an author; without it he is not in a position to understand the conditions of his own age, or to judge men, their motives and actions, except in the most incomplete and superficial manner.
History is reflected in the age and society in which we live. This is quite obviously Ibsen’s point of view. Against this background it would be negligent not to look for historical references in his contemporary plays.
On Emperor and Galilean Ibsen has stated that this was his first play written under the influence of German thinking. I cannot help but agree with Brian Johnston’s commentary:
Ibsen’s statement that Emperor and Galilean was the first work written under German influence can only mean that other works, written under the influence of German thought followed this “first”. These later works were the realistic plays of the Cycle. (Johnston 1992: 4)
In a letter to Georg Brandes, from the 30th April 1873, the same year Emperor and Galilean was published, Ibsen declared that knowledge of German philosophy in general and particularly Hegel’s philosophy is a precondition for being able to say anything remotely interesting and inventive in philosophy. Ibsen has just read Brandes’ translation of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and the work had annoyed him. He has not been able to perceive anything but “sage-like philistinism” in the book, and, what’s worse, no indication that Mill had any knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy, which in Ibsen’s eyes seems to serve as a decisive criterion of dilettantism! Ibsen cannot pride himself on being an expert in philosophy, he admits. But as opposed to Mill, he apparently knows Hegel’s work:
But now as to Stuart Mill’s book! I do not know whether I ought to express my opinion on a subject in which I am not an expert. Yet, when I remember that there are authors who write on philosophy without knowing Hegel, or without even a general knowledge of German scholarship, many things seem to me permissible. I must honestly confess that I cannot in the least conceive of any advancement or any future in the Stuart Mill’s direction. I cannot understand your taking the trouble to translate this work, the sage-like philistinism of which suggests Cicero and Seneca.
Hegel’s project in The Phenomenology of Spirit is to show how the development of history gives the conditions not only for the conflicts in contemporary society, but for our cultural values, institutions of society, our perception of our selves. Contemporary society, culture and mind is in this way downright permeated with the past, as a conscious and unconscious presence in the present, comparable to Freud’s perspectives that childhood, growing-up, the total life span of experiences leave permanent marks on our psyche. These private ghosts of personal circumstances are however indebted to the more extensive cultural and society-based circumstances we are born into, pre-conditioned circumstances, fully loaded with history:
Mrs. Alving: It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother, that shows itself in us. It’s all kinds of outdated opinions and all kinds of outdated beliefs and so on. It is not alive inside of us; but it still resides in us, and we cannot get rid of it. Only by picking up a newspaper and reading it, it is as if I could see the ghosts crawling between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the country. I believe there are as many of them as there are grains of sand.
If one is to take a stand on Brian Johnston’s thesis, it would not be enough to assert that Ibsen undoubtedly appreciated Hegel, as in the letter to Brandes, nor that Hegel and Ibsen express a similar opinion, that the past is reflected in the present. This opinion is in itself not particularly unique. Johnston postulates something more, which is that one finds a systematic correspondence between the sequence of Ibsen’s contemporary dramas and the sequence of historical actions described in the previously cited chapters of The Phenomenology of Spirit. To be able to take a stand on this subject, there is no way around it: One must compare the two texts step by step, which means, one must have read or at least gained some secondary knowledge of the selection, interconnection and succession of historical motives in The Phenomenology of Spirit.
V. The Human and the Divine Law; Man and Woman
The sixth chapter of the Phenomenology is divided into a sequence of subsections that have their own headlines. The first three are connected to the history of Greek-Roman antiquity. In the following paragraphs . I will briefly present what they describe while giving reasons why Ibsen’s three sequent plays – A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882) – might have something to do with each of these first three subsections.
Hegel’s starting point is a type of society before the constitutional state, a custom-based society, without written laws, regulated through a system of rules, commands, obligations, taboos – an ethos – mediated through the line of generations. It is a code system that each member of society identifies with spontaneously, that is, not through reflection or contemplation, but unreflectively absorbed as the sacrosanct, god-given order of life. The individual is socialised into this custom-based order through the family. The family recruits players of society, prepares the youth to take part in the polis, join in warfare and fulfil the duties of society; while society’s power, usually personified by a king, is in organising the whole, protecting the family, guarding and preparing for the order of society.
A potential conflict is latently present in this mutuality between the family and the public society of citizens and king, that sooner or later must be brought to the surface. Before we take a closer look at this, we will note the title of the first subsection:
a. The ethical world; Human and Divine Law; Man and Woman. A factual, tradition-based relationship between the sexes underlies this potential source of conflict, as described by Hegel. He uses Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone as an illustrative model.
Within this custom-based order there is a certain division of labour: woman takes care of the oikos (the household)nd administrates the family’s daily life; while man works for the polis – the extended society of citizens – takes part in production, in the exchanging of goods, in citizen counsels, in duties of warfare and peace. This division of labour has consequences also for the more specific systems of norms, that connect themselves distinctively either to oikos or to polis – i.e. to the family (woman’s domain) or to the public society (man’s domain).
The family is the core of society. It is the family that communicates the community’s norms and customs from generation to generation, as if they followed the bloodline. That is why burial rites are so important in ancient societies. If the dead is injured (dishonored), this will have consequences not only for the family but for the life and destiny of the community as a whole. The dead and the keepers of the dead, the gods of the underworld will take revenge.
This specific ethos, the set of customs and norms that tie themselves specifically to the family, to the living and the dead, has traditionally and preferably been woman’s responsibility. This means it was also her responsibility to ensure that a deceased relative received what was his due: a proper burial, prayers, blessings, regular grave offerings. The Divine Law is Hegel’s definition of this ethos, while the ruling system that has been traditionally a male domain, the law of the fellowship, is defined as The Human Law. Hegel’s point is that these two aspects or normative systems, though being dependent on each other, sooner or later in certain situations must come into conflict with each other.
In Antigone it is King Creon who enforces The Human Law (the law of society, the law of man). He postulates a decree: Antigone’s recently slain brother, Polynices, was to be denied a funeral. The one who broke this injunction was to be punished by death. It is important to notice that this was not a random decision on Creon’s behalf. It was consistent with the customary code of the times. Polynices has allied himself with the enemies of Thebes, and made a plot against his own polis. He had violated and betrayed the people who had raised him.
To let the dead lay uncovered as prey for wild beasts and scavengers was a punishment traditionally subscribed for one who had betrayed his people. Polynices was not only guilty of betrayal; through this betrayal he had committed a sacrilege. For this reason, Creon was obligated to act as he did. Simply to trace this decision back to the king’s despotic whim, wrath and personal need for revenge, would be to oversimplify the problem. Creon did not only feel justified; he felt obligated.
Antigone on her side was obligated by the ethos that was related to the family. Of course, Antigone’s love for her brother is a part of this picture, as also with Creon’s wrath. But this love and this wrath takes shape and is given direction by the normative codes that rule this world. As a woman, as a sister, Antigone is obligated to bury her brother, something she alsohe king’s injunction, or The Human Law. Creon executes with full right The Human Law, but through this he violates The Divine Law. If Antigone on the other hand had submitted to Creon’s decree, then she would have made herself guilty according to The Divine Law. If Creon had acknowledged Antigone’s right to bury her brother, he would have violated the norms which stated how betrayal is to be dealt with; and thus he would have made himself guilty according to The Human Law. This means they are both doomed to guilt, whatever they do, whatever they avoid to do. Both are being reproached: Antigone by the chorus leader, the spokesman of the people, Creon by the soothsayer Tiresias, he who has insight into The Divine Law:
Chorus (to Antigone):
The respect you showed [to Polynices] is a noble kind of respect, but power in the hands of him to whom it belongs [Creon] is in no way to be flouted. And you were destroyed by your self-willed passion. (Sophocles 1994: 872-875)Tiresias (to Creon):
On account of this the Erinys of Hades and the gods lie in wait for you, doer of outrage, so that you will be caught up in the same evils. (Sophocles 1994: 1074-1076)
Both are right, both wrong, both are innocent, both guilty. And neither of the two are able to see the right of the other, or the guilt of their own. They identify themselves completely with their own – gender specific – aspect of the superior norm system, respectively with the female (divine) law of the family and the male (human) law of society. Both are in their right, but incur at the same time guilt in their right. And guilt calls for compensation, punishment and revenge: Antigone is buried alive, condemned under the king’s law, the law of man, The Human Law, while Creon is condemned under the female law, The Divine Law, the law of the family, which he has violated, strikes back from the underworld at his own family: Creon’s son, Haemon, takes his life in despair over Antigone’s death, Creon’s wife Eurydice kills herself in despair over her son’s death.
VI. A Doll’s House
In a note for A Doll’s House Ibsen writes:
There are two kinds of spiritual laws, two kinds of conscience, one in a man and a completely different one in a woman. They do not understand each other; but in reality women are judged by the law of men, as if she wasn’t a woman but a man. (HU VIII: 368)
With these words Ibsen could just as fittingly have been describing Sophocles’ Antigone. Had I not known better, I could have believed that this was Hegel’s note to the first subsection of the sixth chapter in the Phenomenology: a. The ethical world; Human and Divine Law; Man and Woman. But it is not. It is Ibsen’s commentary on A Doll’s House.
Nora Helmer has committed forgery, signed a debt certificate in her father’s name, as a security guarantee for a loan. The forgery is revealed. Lawyer Krogstad is fairly sure he can recognise her handwriting, and awkwardly enough Nora has dated the document October 2nd which is three days after her father’s death.
Nora has undoubtedly broken society’s law. And now Krogstad wants to use this information as blackmail to keep his position in the bank, since Torvald Helmer has given out that Krogstad will be dismissed as soon as Helmer enters the office as the new bank manager. Krogstad threatens to reveal the fraud if Nora does not make sure that her husband withdraws the decision about dismissal. But Helmer does not waver, despite Nora’s persistent attempts. The fraud is revealed, and Helmer becomes furious, offended not only on his own, but on society’s behalf: Nora is an offender, a lawbreaker, a criminal:
a hypocrite, a liar, - even worse, a criminal! There’s so much ugliness at the bottom of all this – indescribable ugliness! Uccch!
Take note of Helmer’s career. Before he married he worked as a government representative in a ministry, says Nora. As he is an educated lawyer, we will assume that since then he has had his own private practice. Now he is to assume the position as a bank manager. In the different stages of his life, Helmer has taken part in the political, administrative, and juridical system, and now in a powerful financial institution. He is an explicit expression of what Hegel defined as The Human Law, society’s law, the male law.
I will briefly go into the reasons for Nora’s little crime. The family’s economical situation had been difficult during the first years after the wedding. At the same time Helmer got seriously ill and the doctor stated that only an extended vacation in a warmer climate could save him. This was the reason for Nora’s taking the loan, financing a health-saving journey to Italy. Helmer knows nothing about this, since Nora had given the impression that it was for her sake that they were making this journey, and that it was Nora’s father who had financed the stay. Helmer got well and in the following years, Nora secretly used her housekeeping money and incomes from copying work to pay back the loan in instalments with interest.
Everything pointed to the fact that her father would have gladly given his signature, stating that he owed the debt. But the father was dying, and Nora did not want to bother him with financial problems on his deathbed: “If I were to have asked him for his signature than I would also have to tell him what the money was for. I couldn’t tell him, him being so ill, that my husband’s life was in danger. That was impossible.”
Nora is obviously proud of what she has accomplished. She has acted out of obligation and love for her husband and her father. It never occurred to her that her little forgery could mean breaking the law. She had done what she did out of care for her loved ones, a care that at all times has been seen as a woman’s responsibility and obligation, as it was also Antigone’s responsibility and obligation to give her brother a worthy funeral, to ease his journey to the underworld. Helmer, who identifies himself with the society’s law, and who identifies morality with law-abidingness, reproaches Nora for lack of morals:
Nora: Well, Torvald, it’s not easy to answer that. I really don’t know. I’m actually quite confused about these things. I only know that my ideas are totally different from yours. I find out that the law is not what I thought it was – but I can’t get it into my head that the law is right. A woman has no right to spare her dying father’s feelings, or save her husband’s life! I just can’t believe these things.
Helmer is outraged over Nora’s naiveté:
Helmer: You’re talking like a child. You don’t understand the society that you live in.
Nora: No, I don’t. But now I’m going to find out for myself. I’ve got to figure out who’s right – the society or me.
As with Antigone we see her in conflict between two ethical expectations, which are justified by tradition, and that are connected to the sexes’ different foundation in the ethical world, the woman as the family’s servant, the man as an active member of society. Nora identifies her moral sense with care for her family’s well-being. For Helmer, morality is identical with obedience, obedience to the institutions of society, church and state: “Have you not in these questions an unflinching tutor? Have you not religion.” And when something wrong has been done, the criteria for his self-respect are based only on public opinion. When Krogstad withdraws the threat of a public scandal, Helmer is willing to continue the marriage as if nothing had happened. But it is too late. It has been proven that public opinion is more important to him than concern for the woman who was willing to sacrifice everything, her life and her honour:
Helmer: I’d work for you night and day, Nora – gladly – suffer and sacrifice for your sake. But no one gives up his honour even for the one he loves.
Nora: That’s exactly what millions of women have done.
It is worth noticing that when Nora leaves to find out about herself and the society, it is to her childhood home she goes first, to her deceased father’s house. Why? Because she has gained insight into the ghostly dimension that Mrs Alving talks about; what we inherit from our father and mother, “all kinds of dead, outdated opinions and all kinds of dead beliefs and so on and so forth, all of which transcends and repeats itself from generation to generation. This is what she has to sort out. What is it that constitutes our self-image, our identity as a child, as a woman, as a man, or as a human being in the times we live? The traditional roles of women and men are identities which are inherited, which we have to work on and develop sovereignty over:
Nora: It’s a fact, Torvald. When I was home with Papa, he told me all his opinions; so of course I had the same opinions. And if I had any others, I kept them hidden, because he wouldn’t have liked that. Then I came to your house. Helmer: What kind of way is that to describe our marriage? Nora (Undisturbed.):I mean, I went from Papa’s hands into yours. You set up everything according to your taste; so of course I had the same taste.
When Nora leaves her husband and children, she is of course no less aware than the outstanding Mr Willoch(6) that the choice entails loss. She knows that what she does has consequences, especially for her children. This, her conscience will remind her of. On the other hand, it would also entail consequences and loss if she stayed. Her guilt would have reminded her of this as well:
Helmer: It’s grotesque! You’re turning your back on your most sacred duties! Nora: What do you think those are – my most sacred duties? Helmer: I have to tell you? Aren’t they to your husband and children? Nora: I have other duties, equally sacred. Helmer: No, you don’t! Like what? Nora: Duties to myself.
Every action violates something, is painful for someone, even the noblest deed. Human beings are doomed to bring guilt upon themselves. “Not even a child, no, but only a stone is innocent”, Hegel points out.
VII. The Living and the Dead; Guilt and Destiny
The next subsection in Hegel’s presentation has the following headline: b. Ethical action; Human and Divine Knowledge; Guilt and Destiny. A keyword is ‘knowledge’. The issue is already hinted at in the previous sectrion. Both Antigone and Creon know themselves to be in the right. From their point of view their actions are in accordance with the ethos, they are ethical actions. But though capable of justifying their own right, the antagonists are incapable of seeing the right of the other. Therein lies their guilt. They are blinded through their unilateral attachment to one of the gender specific aspects of the whole system of norms.
They know they are right. But a dark-side of non-knowledge is attached to this knowledge, Hegel says. The law of the other, the law to which they are negligent, takes revenge. Guilt attracts vengeance. Only when tragedy falls upon Creon, through the death of his son and wife, does he awaken to the knowledge of his own guilt. He sees the right in the law of the other. “Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred”, Hegel comments, with reference to Creon’s tragedy:
Creon: Woe for the errors of my mistaken mind, obstinate and fraught with death! You look on kindred that have done and suffered murder! Alas for the disaster caused by my decisions! Ah, my son, young and newly dead, alas, alas, you died, you were cut off, through my folly, not through your own! (Sophocles 1994: 1261 – 1269)
Through the guilt of the living the dead take revenge, a principle that spreads itself through the generations as endless blood feuds:
The dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of vengeance, which are equally effective and powerful as the power which has injured it. (Hegel 1977: 287)
Antigone becomes the instrument for dead Polynices. But also Haemon and Eurydice become tools for revenge. By their suicides dead Antigone is avenged, thus striking Creon.
The myth tells that Thebes was sacked and left in ruins as a consequence of the vengeance of the dead. For not only Polynices, but all those proud leaders that fell with him, were left to the same fate, to be denied a proper burial “as prey for dogs and scavengers”. Their mothers could not live with this; they left for Athens to persuade king Theseus to set things right. They succeeded. The bodies were released. But ten years later a new host of warriors threatened the city, an army of the sons of the dead, hungry for revenge. The citizens fled and Thebes was left in ruins. The common ethos, this formerly beautiful interaction between family and community is replaced by private interest and family feuds. The women send their sons to secure, not the common interest, not Thebes’, Corinth’s or Mycenae’s interest, but to secure the family’s honour:
The brave youth in whom woman finds her pleasure, […], now has his day and his worth is openly acknowledged. Now it is physical strength and what appears as a matter of luck that decides on the existence of ethical life and spiritual necessity. Because the existence of ethical life rests on strength and luck, the decision is already made that its downfall has to come. (Hegel 1977: 289)
It is to the prelude to the downfall of the autonomous Greek polis in general Hegel that hints with this description, implying it is the result of the growing collision between family and community interests within the polis; between competing families, aiming for power, within the polis; and between competing city states struggling for dominance, enforced by family ambitions. All his references to classical Greek drama are meant to reveal some underlying dialectical patterns in this historical process, clearly reflected in dramas like Antigone and King Oedipus.
VIII. The Divine and the Human Knowledge
The series of fatalities that follow the generations, the conflicts between the living and the dead, the never-ending chain where revenge follows revenge from generation to generation as a consequence of an original blood guilt and offence, is interpreted by the characters as destiny, as a curse from the gods that rests upon the family. A curse like this, a fate like this is what continues to pursue the Labdacus family of which Antigone is a part. Laïus, the son of Labdacus has committed a crime for which the gods are punishing him and his descendants through generations to come.
Apollo’s oracle in Delphi predicted that Laïus’ son Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. Even though all involved do everything in their power to escape their destiny, their actions directly contribute to making Apollo’s prediction come true.
In the conflict between Antigone and Creon we saw a distinctive dialectic between knowledge and non-knowledge. It is rooted in their one-sided foundation in one of the two laws (the law of woman and the law of man, the divine and the human law). Both know they are right, but both are blind to the other’s right and therefore ignorant of their own guilt.
Sophocles’ drama King Oedipus also concerns the relationship between guilt and destiny, and between knowledge and non-knowledge, but from a slightly different perspective. The guilt that man brings upon himself, in his ignorance, has its root in an original crime (Laïus’ crime) that has consequences through future generations.
Oedipus’ destiny appears so tragic since it was already sealed before his birth. Compelled through the inherited guilt of his father, he was condemned to perform the two most horrific acts a Greek could imagine – killing his father and fornicating with his mother. Not only was he condemned and destined to fulfil these horrors; he was also completely unaware that the man he happened to kill was his father, that the woman he married was his mother. There is a dark aspect of non-knowledge attached to human knowledge, Hegel comments:
Actuality therefore holds concealed within it the other aspect which is alien to this knowledge, and does not reveal the whole truth about itself to consciousness: The son does not recognize his father in the man who has wronged him and whom he slays, nor his mother in the queen who he makes his wife. In this way, a power which shuns the light of day ensnares the ethical self-consciousness, a power which breaks forth only after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act. (Hegel 1977: 283)
Within a modern justice system the perpetrator can claim the lack of consciousness at the moment of the crime. If this claim is recognised, he will – not only legally but also morally – be considered innocent. Two close relatives (for example brother and sister) that get married not knowing of the close relationship, because they have been raised in two different families (adoption), will not be persecuted for their illegal relationship, even though it is revealed.
Within the context that Sophocles describes, not to know or to have an undeserved lack of knowledge makes no difference to the guilt that a crime inflicts on the perpetrator, neither in the eyes of men nor in the eyes of gods. One may feel pity for the unfortunate, feel empathy towards his misery, but the guilt that follows the deed cannot be erased; it must be punished and atoned for. If not, it will have deadly consequences for the whole community. The wrath of the gods awaits them. This is why Thebes is struck by the plague (cf. Sophocles: King Oedipus). This is why Oedipus is exiled from Thebes (cf. Sophocles: Oedipus in Colonus). “The doer cannot deny the crime or his guilt: the significance of the deed is that what was unmoved has been set in motion, and that what was locked up in mere possibility has been brought out into the open(7).” (Hegel 1977: 283)
This is why Oedipus punishes himself; why he blinds himself. His blindness corresponds to his non-knowledge – the lack of knowledge which now is transformed into horrible knowledge – or “brought out into the open”.
Sophocles’ King Oedipus concerns guilt and destiny, knowledge and non-knowledge, or non-knowledge as the dark-side of knowledge, or non-knowledge concealed in human knowledge, or the gap between divine and human knowledge. Apollo’s divine knowledge sees and knows everything. When mediated into the world of men (through the oracle) this universal knowledge falls into the realm of fragments, perceptions, perspectives and limitations. Totality gets lost. Human knowledge produces a hidden side of non-knowledge: “Actuality therefore holds concealed within it the other aspect which is alien to this knowledge, and does not reveal the whole truth about itself to consciousness.” (cf. Hegel)
Apollo’s prediction is an expression of divine knowledge. Transferred to the world of Laïus, Jocasta and Oedipus it becomes human. It develops a hidden side: Like a piece of rock on the ground. When the parties involved try to escape their destiny – Laïus and Jocasta by putting their newborn son into the wilderness, Oedipus by escaping from his foster parents in Corinth, whom he believes to be his biological father and mother – they unconsciously fulfil the destiny they consciously tried to escape. Only later the hidden circumstances are revealed to them in all their horror. The rock is turned; the hidden side revealed. It is human fate that reality only shows one side of its surface at a time, the other side – the one which will shake us – lies in the dark. For now. This is what Mrs Alving experiences.
IX. ‘That’s why I sent him away’
In the scenario Ibsen describes in Ghosts there are no oracles, no Apollo, no divine knowledge that predicts human destiny. The characters are placed in a modern context, in a completely different historical frame of consciousness than that of Antigone, Creon, Jocasta and Oedipus. Several scholars have none the less observed striking resemblances between this particular play and traditional Greek drama. Already Ibsen’s contemporary P.O. Schjøtt, professor in Greek literature in Kristiania, pointed this out: “Ghosts is closer to Greek drama than any other modern dramatic literature we have read.” And Bjørn Hemmer, also referring to Ghosts, gives Ibsen the credit for having “given domestic drama an artistic form and dimension of modern destiny, which European theatre for such a long time had been in lack of”. (Hemmer 2003: 273)
It’s easy to consent to that; Ghosts deals indisputably with the question of destiny. In fact I shall suggest it deals with all the main dialectical figures developed by Hegel in the second subsection of the sixth chapter of the Phenomenology: the strife between the living and the dead, guilt and destiny, the aspect of non-knowledge concealed in human knowledge, like “a power that shuns the light of day,”on which Hegel declares it “breaks forth only after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act”.
From the moment Helene Alving bore a son (Osvald) her life was devoted to an all-encompassing project; to release her son from the destiny that threatened him through being born into his depraved father’s house. For this project she has taken on several contradictory obligations. First and foremost, she had to protect her son from his father’s destructive influence. Then, to gloss over and disguise the misery of her husband, to hide it from Osvald but also from the public; not for her own sake and certainly not for her husband’s sake, but to prevent shameful rumours from defiling and ruining the name and reputation of her son.
Mrs. Alving: So then I had to redouble my efforts, fight with a vengeance so no one would know what kind of man my child’s father was.
Chamberlain Alving’s true character was not only to be covered up; it was to be replaced by a constructed illusion, a forgery: the image of the admirable pillar of society that Osvald could be affiliated with. To achieve this goal she had worked for years to make the manor into a model household. She succeeded and gave her husband the honour of it in spite of the fact that he scarcely did anything but “sprawl all day on the sofa, reading old government journals.”
After some time, the conditions in the house became such that she could no longer take the responsibility for letting the boy stay. Osvald was abandoned to strangers. Of all her sacrifices this was the most difficult; to give up the one thing that gave significance to her life, since Osvald was the one thing she lived for:
Mrs. Alving: He was going on seven and starting to notice things and ask questions, the way children do. All that was too much for me, Manders. I thought that the child would be poisoned by breathing this polluted air. That’s why I sent him away [Derfor var det jeg satte ham ut] And now you can understand, too, why he never set foot in this house as long as his father lived. No one will know what that cost me.
“That’s why I sent him away”, it says in Rolf Fjelde’s translation. Then, however, an important shade of meaning is lost, compared with the original Norwegian version. Where Fjelde uses the expression “to send (him) away”, Ibsen has chosen the very unexpected expression “å sette (ham) ut(8) which in Norwegian gives distinctive connotations to the pagan practice of leaving unwanted infants in the wilderness, like Laïos and Jocasta, who let the newborn Oedipus be brought out onto the desolate Mount Cithaeron to die in order to escape the destiny Apollo had prescribed.
The normal expression in this context would have been “å sette (ham) bort”, which means to leave the child to somebody else’s care, which is what Mrs. Alving actually did. The fact that Ibsen in spite of this has chosen the expression “å sette (Osvald) ut”, with all its connotations of leaving children in the wilderness to die must have been a very conscious choice from his side, with the obvious intention of awakening associations – for instance, to Sophocles’ King Oedipus.
For Osvald too, a quite predictable destiny awaited, as Mrs. Alving saw it, if he were to grow up in his father’s house. He would deteriorate, he would inevitably“be poisoned by breathing that polluted air” and “that is why I “satte ham ut”. Notice however the difference: She “sent him away”, not like Jocasta and Laios, to let the son die, but in the best intentions to save him, to prepare a worthy life for him. But the underlying motive is the same: the motive of escaping an anticipated destiny.
Mrs. Alving was looking forward to two things during all these years: 1. the death of the chamberlain (her husband), and 2. the son’s return. At the beginning of the play both these components are in place. Her husband is dead and Osvald has returned. This bliss, this moment of grace was carefully prepared. Before her son returned all traces of the chamberlain were to be cleaned away. Even the fortune he had brought with him into the marriage, he had to take with him, if not to the grave, then into the monument she had erected for him – Captain Alving’s Memorial – a care home for neglected and orphaned children. Not the slightest remnant should be left as inheritance from his father. That was her intention. The whole of Alving’s fortune, every pound and penny was spent on building the orphanage:
I didn’t want Osvald, my own son, to inherit the least little thing from his father. […]
The sums I’ve contributed year after year to the orphanage add up to just the amount –
I’ve figured it out exactly – just the amount that made Lieutenant Alving such a good catch at the time.
Now, at last, Mrs. Alving was to enjoy the fruits of all her sacrifices. Finally her son was home. Finally she could be a mother to her child. Life could begin. She had exorcised the demons, the house was clean. She had fought against destiny. And won! She thought. But as we have seen, there is a dark side of non-knowledge on the other side of knowledge, or to use Hegel’s words: “Actuality holds concealed within it another aspect, which is alien to this knowledge”. Soon this insidious “power which shuns the light of day” (Hegel’s expression), which dwells behind our knowledge, in the realm of non-knowledge, will break forth, seize and ensnare Mrs. Alving. For when Osvald comes home, he doesn’t come purified and free, or in every possible way released from his father’s “legacy”, as she has prepared for. He is carrying his father’s disease. Osvald was stigmatised by death.
This is certainly to be depicted as an irony of destiny: that the son she had tried in every possible way to release from the legacy of his father already had received it, though in a quite different shape than she could have imagined: with the inheritance of his father’s syphilis.
The destiny she feared, but felt she had escaped – that Osvald was to be “poisoned in this polluted home” – was then to come true anyway – beyond what she had foreseen. The deeds of the father haunt the son. And as if that was not enough: the son repeats the deeds of his father. Mrs. Alving hears voices from the neighbouring room, Osvald and the housekeeper Regina:
(Regina’s voice in a sharp whisper.) Regina: Osvald! Are you crazy? Let me go! Mrs. Alving: Ah-! (She stares directly at the half-open door. Osvald is heard to cough within and start humming. A bottle is uncorked.) Manders (shaken): But what happened, Mrs. Alving? What was that? Mrs. Alving: Ghosts. Those two from the greenhouse – have come back.
What Mrs. Alving knows – what Osvald, Regina and Pastor Manders do not know – is that Regina is Osvald’s half-sister, the secret fruit of the chamberlain’s adventure with the former housekeeper, Joanne.
The picture that Mrs. Alving presents of herself in the first act is quite unequivocally white against black. But we have no reason to doubt the reality of it. She had renounced all personal comfort, needs and joy, from duty and love for her son; even sending him away for his sake. She had struggled and toiled, covered up and glossed over rumours about her husband, endured all his extravagances, his drunken rambling, his affairs, all with one goal, to keep her son from harm's way. One single hope and goal had kept her going through these miseries: that she was to outlive her husband, that her son would return, that she at last also could have a life, enjoy the fruits of her sacrifices. At the same time her bitter self-renunciations had left traces in the house. When the sacrifice was completed and the son “resurrected” to her, still no joyful Easter Sunday awaited, only rain, disease and death. And if that was not enough: Osvald could not endure living in his mother’s house:
Osvald: Mother, have you noticed how everything I’ve painted is involved with this joy of life? Always and invariably, the joy of life. With light and sun and holiday scenes – and faces radiant with human content. That’s why I’m afraid to stay on at home with you. Mrs. Alving: Afraid? What are you afraid of here with me? Osvald: I’m afraid that everything that’s most alive in me will degenerate into ugliness here.
The unforeseen effects of our deeds – the hidden dark-side we cannot survey – the light-shunning power – that seizes and ensnares us as soon as our goals are in reach – has now come to haunt Mrs. Alving, as it had haunted Jocasta and Oedipus.
X. The Instruments of the Dead
In the second drama of The Oresteia (The Libation-Bearers) Aeschylus lets Clytaemnestra be haunted by ominous dreams. Actually, it is Agamemnon who haunts her, her husband whom she has murdered. That is why she sends her daughter Electra to bear libations to his tomb, to placate his angry ghost, to calm his wrath, to keep him in his grave and to leave her house in peace. Electra pours out the libations and invokes the dead. But instead of praying for reconciliation for her mother, she curses her and implores revenge:
But for our foes I implore that there appear one who will avenge thee, father, and that thy slayer may be slain in just retribution. (Aeschylus 1999: 142 -144)
Hiding by the grave stands Orestes, Electra’s brother. When Orestes was still a child, Clytaemnestra sent him away to the king of Phocis, to secure an ampler scope for herself and her lover Aegisthus. Now the hunger for revenge had brought Orestes home. “The dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of vengeance,” Hegel writes, “which are equally effective and powerful as the power which injured it.”
Like Orestes, Osvald is also a son who has returned to his mother’s house, and like Orestes he casts misfortune over his mother when he comes. But here all parallels end? Since one scarcely can maintain that Osvald has returned to be his father’s avenger? No, at least not to his knowledge, we must admit. What was there for him to revenge? But still, the dead Alving might have “found an instrument” in Osvald. The dead strike back.
In the first act we are being presented with a quite one-sided picture of Osvald’s father, the picture of the depraved chamberlain. But all of a sudden another image of her husband awakens in Mrs. Alving, not of the dissolute chamberlain, but of the young lieutenant Alving whom she had married. Osvald’s deep sigh, his description of the sombreness, the lack of happiness in her house, the heavy burden of obligations that rested upon her home, had awakened the memory of a different Mr.Alving, the image of the healthy, strapping, free-spirited, life-seeking young lieutenant Alving, that had gradually withered as the depraved chamberlain grew:
Mrs. Alving: You were speaking earlier about the joy of life; and as you said those words, it was as if a new light had been shed over the whole of my life. Osvald: I don’t understand this. Mrs. Alving: You should have known your father when he was just a young lieutenant. He had the joy of life, he did! Osvald: Yes, I know. Mrs. Alving: It was like holiday just to look at him. All the energy, the unquenchable power that was in him!
We are witnessing a quite surprising anagnorisis, a sudden acknowledgement of guilt by Mrs. Alving concerning her husband. She had contributed to his fall, empowered by the claustrophobic, gloomy and suffocating moralism that permeated herself, her home and the very culture and society she lived in. Moralism dries out the source of motivation – the vigour, the candour, the courage, the joy of life:
Mrs. Alving: You said yourself, earlier this evening, what would happen to you if you stayed at home. Osvald: You’re saying that Father-? Mrs. Alving: Your father never found any outlet for the overpowering joy of life that he had. And I’m afraid I couldn’t make his home very festive, either. Osvald: You, too? Mrs. Alving: They’d drilled me so much in duty and things of that kind that I went on here all too long putting my faith in them. Everything resolved into duties – my duties, and his duties, an – I’m afraid I made this home unbearable for your poor father.
Mrs. Alving’s sudden recognition of guilt, her self-reproach, her rehabilitation of the husband, has provoked many readers. But who is she rehabilitating? The miserable chamberlain? No, he remains what he was: responsible for his own misery. It is the young lieutenant Alving she has qualms about: “I only saw the one thing: that your father was a ravaged man before you were born.” In fact Mrs. Alving acknowledges a murder – not in the physical sense of course, but in a spiritual one. She sees herself as an accomplice in suffocating her young lieutenant’s joy of life. One may feel that Mrs. Alving is unjust towards herself. In any case, this is her newly won self-understanding.
Pastor Manders has arrived to the manor to inaugurate the new building, the orphanage that would carry Alving’s name – Captain Alving’s Memorial. The initiative has three functions 1: The charity institution shall once and for all confirm the impression of Osvald’s father as a noble an admirable man, and 2: All remaining ties between Osvald and his father shall finally be broken. His paternal inheritance, all the chamberlain’s money had been put into the building of this orphanage, and 3. The building is to have a kind of exorcising function, to cleanse her house from the ghost of her husband – figuratively speaking: Remain in your grave! Bother us no more! Which, as Brian Johnston points out gives interesting references to The Libation-Bearers:
Mrs. Alving: After tomorrow [the scheduled date for the inauguration], it will really seem as if the dead had never lived in this house. There’ll be no one else here but my son and me
Her exorcising project did not succeed. The building burns down before the inauguration. And her house is haunted like never before by the ghosts of her husband – incarnated both in Osvald, Regina and herself. As we know Clytaimnestra did not succeed either – to placate the angry ghost. Dead Agamemnon found his “instruments of vengeance” [Electra and Orestes], equally effective and powerful as the power [Clytaemnestra] which injured him”. Brian Johnston comments:
In The Libation Bearers […] Clytaemnestra attempts to appease the shade of the husband she has wronged by a ceremony at his grave, at the same moment that Agamemnon’s son returns home to avenge him, and Ghosts shows us Helene [Mrs. Alving] preparing the memorial ceremony that will finally dispose of Mr. Alving, at the same moment that Alving’s son returns carrying the disease that is the terrible vengeance of Alving's repressed joy of life or sexuality against his wife. To be sure, Osvald’s avenging of his father (in which, like Orestes, he will also be a victim) is more unconscious and unintentional than that of his Greek prototype, but it will, similarly, destroy his mother and bring upon himself the furies of his spiritual collapse. (Johnston 1992: 198)
XI. Knowledge and Non-knowledge
Notice that Alving is addressed in three different ways throughout the play: 1. as Lieutenant Alving, 2. as Captain Alving and 3. as Chamberlain Alving. That the orphanage was to be named The Captain Alving Memorial Orphan’s Home, was something that Pastor Manders had made sure of: “I chose “Captain” for the title, rather than “Court Chamberlain”. “Captain” seems less ostentatious.”
In Ibsen’s universe the title Chamberlain is associated with decadence. We meet a whole host of them in The Wild Duck – the flabby, the thin-haired, the near-sighted and other specimens of the species. The thin-haired has asserted that the Tokays need sunshine. Mrs. Sørby comments ironically: “But then it’s the same as with the chamberlains; they are also in great need of sunshine, as one says.” The title Lieutenant is on the contrary associated with straightforwardness, vitality, courage, strength and joy, as with the now scandalised, faint-hearted, pitiable old Mr. Ekdahl in The Wild Duck, who in his youth, before the disaster, was known as the tanned, cheeky, outdoorsman and bear hunter Lieutenant Ekdahl.
Chamberlain Alving, Captain Alving’s Orphanage and Lieutenant Alving represent three aspects of Mrs. Alving’s unconscious-conscious scope of perception. Three levels of knowledge and non-knowledge: 1. Her bitter knowledge, 2: Her consciously falsified knowledge and 3: Her suppressed knowledge.
- The memory of her chamberlain depicts Mrs. Alving’s bitter knowledge: her burden in life, the awareness of all her self-imposed duties and renunciations, which she at the same time was so proud to have endured. The hidden side of this moral heroism, the non-knowledge concealed behind it, is revealed when Oswald declares that he no longer can endure living in his mother’s house. Her bitter self-renunciations have left a stigma upon the house, affecting everything around her. “Mrs. Alving: Afraid? What are you afraid of when you are with me? Osvald: I am afraid that everything that is surfacing within me will manifest itself as ugliness here.” The lack of joy, the absence of “light and sun and holiday scenes” appear as a variety of the light-shunning power that Hegel talks about. This insidious power, hidden in the realm of our non-knowledge, “seizes and ensnares” us when we least expect it, that is, when our intended plans, our conscious deeds are completed.
- “Captains Alving’s orphanage” appears as Mrs. Alving’s consciously forged knowledge, or as the public’s non-knowledge. In her attempt to free Osvald from the shame associated with the chamberlain, she has constructed a manipulated image of Alving as the admirable pillar of society. As a part of what she has perceived as a moral project for Osvald’s sake, she has misled both Osvald and the public, inflicting them with this non-knowledge. The purposelessness of this project is illustrated by the fact that Captain Alving’s orphanage burns to the ground before it is even inaugurated. An ironic counter-picture to this forged image is Jacob Engstrand’s planned brothel, that he has lured Pastor Manders into believing will be a rehabilitation facility for sailors. The brothel will carry the very ironic name “Chamberlain Alving’s Home”.
- Lieutenant Alving represents Mrs. Alving’s suppressed knowledge, or her fatal non-knowledge. When this suppressed knowledge, this self-produced non-knowledge surfaces, she realises her own contribution to the family’s misery. She finds herself guilty of having sucked out the very zest for life, the undefiled vigour and joy of life – not only in her husband, but also in her: “Everything became an obligation, - my duties and his. I am afraid that I made home an unbearable place for your poor father, Osvald.” Life-denying moralism has two possible consequences: 1 Gloomy, self-righteous heroism (Mrs. Alving) and: 2 Compensation (Mr. Alving’s indulgences).
It is this guilt that haunts Mrs. Alving as an unexpected fate. With all her efforts she has struggled to escape the destiny that seemed to be prescribed for her son by being born into his depraved father’s house. Through all the deeds invested in the project of avoiding it, she has behind her own knowledge produced a realm of non-knowledge, wherein her own light-shunning power has been nurtured. Now this power has surfaced, seized and ensnared her: She has unconsciously created a home for her son, in which he cannot bear to live. And now he’s dying. As with Oedipus and Jocasta there is no comfort in the fact that she did not know any better:
from the aspect of knowing, the one character like the other is split up into a conscious and an unconscious part; and since each [character] itself calls forth this opposition and since its [the character’s] not-knowing, through the deed, is its own affair, each is responsible for the guilt which destroys it. (Hegel 1977: 285)
XII. Might and Right
Instigated by Brian Johnston’s thesis in The Ibsen Cycle I have compared the dialectical structures in Hegel’s analysis of the downfall of the autonomous Greek city state in the sixth chapter of the Phenomenology and the dialectical actions described in A Doll’s House and in Ghosts. I cannot but confirm that the parallels are striking, that is: 1. between the conflicting laws of family and society, of woman and man, described by Hegel, and the corresponding conflict described by Ibsen in A Doll’s House – and likewise: 2. between Hegel’s analysis of human action, knowledge and non-knowledge, guilt and destiny, the strife between the living and the dead, and the tragic plot described by Ibsen in Ghosts.
We have considered the two first subsections of the chapter. Now we will present the third: c. Legal status. The question is if a similar connection between this subsection and Ibsen’s following play, The Enemy of the People (1882) can be found:
a.The ethical world. Human and Divine Law. Man and Woman.
[Antigone, A Doll’s House]
b.The ethical action. Human and Divine knowledge. Guilt and Destiny.
[Antigone, King Oedipus, The Libation-Bearers, Ghosts
c. Legal status.
It is the legal status of Imperial Rome Hegel describes in this third subsection, the relation between the abstract universalism of Roman Law on one hand, recognising the individual as a legal entity, as a legal person, granted legal protection under the law, and on the other hand the above the law residing power of the Emperor, which by virtue of its overriding sovereignty confirms or suspends the law at its own discretion, or at its own capricious will.
The recognition of the citizen as a legal person through the Law reveals itself as abstract formalism, without actual significance. The concept of a legal person in this context is not founded in the recognition of the unique worth of each individual; it only states that each and every entity has an equal legal validity, which in practice means that they are perceived as indifferent, faceless atoms (Hegel’s expression) in a solid mass. “To describe an individual as a ‘person’ is an expression of contempt”, says Hegel. The formally recognized legal atoms, entities or persons:
belongs therefore to an autonomous power [The Emperor], which is something different from the formal universal [The Roman Law], to a power which is arbitrary and capricious. The consciousness of right, therefore, in the very fact of being recognized as having validity, experiences rather the loss of its reality and its complete inessentiality; and to describe an individual as a ‘person’ is an expression of contempt. (Hegel 1977: 292)
This subsection discusses, beyond its historical Roman frame, a still persistent, still intrusive question, the relationship between might and right, power and justice. This question is, as I see it, the very main theme in An Enemy of the People.
Dr. Stockmann: Call me an enemy of the society. So help me God, I’m not going to swallow that!
Mrs. Stockmann: But Thomas dear, your brother does have the power –
Dr. Stockmann: Yes, but I’m in the right!
Mrs. Stockmann: The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don’t have any power.
The legal protection which in principle is guaranteed to every citizen through Roman Law by virtue of it’s recognition of the individuals as legal persons, as possessors of rights, is challenged by the sovereign power of the Emperor, abandoned as they are, to his will, whims and impulses. The juridical subject is at the mercy of the arbitrariness of power, formally recognized, but in practice without validation:
The lord of the world becomes conscious of what he is, viz. the universal power of the actual world, in the destructive power he exercises against the self of his subjects, the self which he stands over and against. For his power is not the union and harmony of Spirit in which the persons would recognize their own self-consciousness. (Hegel 1977: 293)
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel elaborates on the dichotomy between abstract rights and arbitrary power in Imperial Rome:
In this way the individuals [as legal persons] are seen as atoms. At the same time they are submitted to the One’s [the Emperor’s] absolute authority, as monas monandum, as a power that stands above the legal persons. One can therefore likewise say that this state of justice implies the very absence of the legal person, the very absence of recognition, as a status of complete rightlessness. This contradiction expresses the misery of the Roman world. (Hegel 1970: 387)
The scenario described in An Enemy of the People is very different from the historical context constituting the foundation for Hegel’s presentation of the relationship between power and justice in Imperial Rome. The small town magistrate, Dr. Stockmann’s brother Peter Stockmann, is no Emperor; the structures of power, the political institutions, the legal principles, the legal status, the character of human self-image, the manner in which we identify ourselves as human individuals, has been through some radical transformations from imperial Rome to the 1880s in Norway. But in the very basic premise of Roman Law lies the very foundation for European legal thinking. And the contradiction between power and justice still has concrete relevance.
To knowingly expose unsuspecting spa bathers to typhus and cholera was considered a breach of law also in Ibsen’s day. When Dr. Stockmann tries to expose and rectify the errors, he has both from a legal and moral standpoint the right on his side – but not the power. To stand up for one’s right, while opposing the power, probably had far more drastic consequences in Imperial Rome than in Ibsen’s small town. But it was bad enough for Dr. Stockmann: his wife being deprived of her inheritance, his daughter being dismissed as a teacher, his sons sent home from school, his friend Captain Horster refused to berth, his home being attacked by the mob, the tenancy agreement for the house being cancelled, he himself being dismissed as the Doctor at the baths.
XIII. The Emperor and the Solid Majority
The decisive difference between the modern and the Roman legal system consists in their completely different power structures. Imperial Rome's power is centred in the One, in monas monandum, while powerlessness is equally shared by the many: the faceless, the masks, the persons, the atoms as Hegel refers to them. The Roman state of justice, “this universal being thus split up into a mere multiplicity of atoms, this lifeless Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as persons.” (Hegel 1977: 290) “To describe an individual as a ‘person’ is an expression of contempt.” (Hegel 1977: 293)
In Ibsen’s small town we find no Emperor, only a group of “chieftains” – the small town magistrate, the editor, the chairman of The House-Owner’s Association – hungry for power and cash, but still at the mercy of the multitude: the prosperous, the less prosperous, the conservatives, the liberals, the subscribers, the house-owners, the scheming, the greedy, the stingy petit bourgeois – the multitude in power – not women and workers at that time, but the voters – the political majority – shouting in one voice whenever the money flow is threatened. And then it is always irrelevant who is in the right. Or what is right:
Dr. Stockmann: The most insidious enemy of truth and freedom among us is the solid majority. Yes, the damned, solid, liberal majority – that’s it! Now you know.
Aslaksen: As chairman, I urge the speaker to withdraw his irresponsible comments.
Dr. Stockmann: Not a chance, Mr. Aslaksen. It’s that same majority in our community that’s stripping away my freedom and trying to keep me from speaking the truth.
Hovstad: The majority is always right. […]
Dr. Stockmann: Oh, yes you can shout me down well enough, but you can’t refute me. The majority has the might – unhappily – but it lacks the right.
Power suspends right – ruthlessly and blindly – be it with the one, the Emperor, or with the many, the masses. “Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don’t have any power?”
XIV. The Solitary Self and the Outbreak of Caesarean Madness
Doctor Stockmann has no power. He is as far from a Roman Emperor as you can possibly get. His expanding self-image though, is threatening to take on Caesarean dimensions. In Stockmann’s view the society has shown itself to be a democratic madhouse:
Dr. Stockmann: You saw yourself last night that half the population are raging maniacs, and if the other half haven’t lost their reason, it’s because they’re such muttonheads they haven’t any reason to lose.
The fools have the power. And contained in this society of idiots and lunatics as alone liberated and distinguished in the flock of plebeians and wolfs, he crowns himself, if not as a Roman Emperor though at least – if I may associate to Peer Gynt – as The Emperor of the Self, the strongest in his solitariness, the true monas monandum, who, when the time has come will “drive the wolves over to the Far West.”
Mrs. Stockmann: Ah, just so those wolves aren’t hunting you, Thomas.
Dr. Stockmann: Are you utterly mad, Katherine! Hunt me down! Now, when I’m the strongest man in the whole world.
Morten: You mean it?
Dr. Stockmann (lowering his voice). Shh, don’t talk about it yet – but I’ve made a great discovery. Mrs. Stockmann: Yes, why not!
Dr. Stockmann(Gathers them around him and speaks confidentially.) And the essence of it, you see, is that the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.
It is time to call upon Hegel again:
This lord and master of the world holds himself in this way to be the absolute person, at the same time embracing within himself the whole existence, the person for whom there exists no superior Spirit. He is a person, but the solitary person who stands over and against all the rest. (Hegel 1977: 292)
That the Roman concept of a person according to Hegel “is an expression of contempt” is explained by its abstract character. Ibsen has on several occasions expressed his sympathy with Dr. Stockmann, but he does not hesitate to point out his limitations. For a long time, the family had a “simple maiden of the people” working in their household. Probably she lives in the house as well. For Stockmann she remains nevertheless a completely abstract, anonymous figure, whose name he cannot even remember. This characteristic is repeated so often that it is obviously there to be noticed:
Dr. Stockmann: [Act one]: Good, that’s it. Give it to- to- (stamps his foot.) – what the hell’s her name? The maid! Well, give it to her and tell her to take it straight to the mayor. [Act five]: Hasn’t – what the hell’s her name – the maid – hasn’t she gone to the glazier yet? [Act five]: Have her come in with a pail – the girl – whozzis, damn it – the one with the smudgy nose – [Act five]: Here, Petra, tell Smudgy-face to run over to the Badger’s [Morten Kiil] with this, quick as she can. Hurry!
Dr. Stockmann has initially a highly democratic attitude. But when concerning “the people” he has exactly the same abstract concept as Hovstad and Aslaksen. When he still considers to have peoples’ consent, before their opinion turns, he speaks with a naïve excitement of “the solid majority” as a noteworthy mass, a good-natured, friendly, cuddly pet. The solid majority still has an elating meaning for him. But the “brotherly union of citizens”that he imagined them to be is in the end nothing but an overwrought fiction: Tiny little sunshine-heads in beautiful, synchronised motion, stylised masks that smile, a notion of faceless, nameless figures in a host, or a solid mass of unidentifiable atoms:
Dr Stockmann: They’ll all support me, if things get rough. Katherine – do you know what I have backing me up?
Mrs. Stockmann: Backing you up? No, what do you have?
Dr. Stockmann: The solid majority.
Mrs. Stockmann: Really. And that’s a good thing for you, is it, Thomas?
Dr. Stockmann: Well, I should hope it’s a good thing! (Paces up and down, rubbing his hands together.) My Lord, how gratifying it is to stand like this, joined together in brotherhood with your fellow citizens.
Dr. Stockmann is a victim of a corresponding romanticising of “the masses” that we recognize from totalitarian movements – the voice of the nation, the will of the people, the working class heroes – abstractions that have positive values as long as they do not collide with reality. The abstract expectations of these lovers of the masses change nonetheless with astonishing speed into contempt, as soon as reality disappoints their fantasies – a simple mechanism of fury, which naught “mass-atoms” have had to experience both in the East and in the West. – And now “the public, the mob, the mass” has also disappointed Dr. Stockmann:
Dr. Stockmann: That being the doctrine inherited from your ancestors, which you mindlessly disseminate far and wide – the doctrine that the public, the mob, the masses are the vital core of the people – in fact, that they are the people – and that the common man, the inert, unformed component of society, has the same right to admonish and approve, to prescribe and to govern as the few spiritually accomplished personalities.
Stockmann has kept intact his abstract concept of the masses. But the image of this once so blessed solid majority has changed. Now, it no longer contains a “brotherhood of citizens” but a multitude of rodents and scavengers – abstract persons, atoms with no identity. Scavengers and rodents can still nonetheless be both internalised and extinguished, if they violate the expectations of the self-appointed avant-garde. We know this mechanism. A significant touch of caesarean madness has struck our hero:
Dr. Stockmann (with mounting indignation): What’s the difference if a lying community gets destroyed! It ought to be razed to the ground, I say! Stamp them out like vermin, everyone who lives by lies! You’ll contaminate this entire nation in the end, till the land itself deserves to be destroyed. And if it comes to that even, then I say with all my heart: let this whole land be destroyed, let its people all be stamped out!
*
Brian Johnston has pointed out another feature of An Enemy of the People – all the allusions to the character of Socrates and to Plato’s philosophy that can be found in the play. This article is already too long. To go into this would require another equally long article.
XV. Bibliography
Aeschylus 1999: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments, Cambridge.
Collin, Josef 1910: Henrik Ibsen. Sein Werk, seine Weltanschauung, sein Leben, Heidelberg.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977: Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1970: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Frankfurt/M.
Hemmer, Bjørn 2003: Ibsen. Kunstnerens vei, Bergen
Ibsen, Henrik 1978: Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, in The Complete Major Prose Plays, New York.
Ibsen, Henrik 2004: A Doll House, in Ibsen’s Selected Plays, New York.
Johnston, Brian 1992: The Ibsen Cycle. The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When we Dead Awaken (revised edition), Pennsylvania.
Johnston, Brian 1980: To the Third Empire: Ibsen’s Early Drama, Minneapolis.
Johnston, Brian 1989: Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama, Pennsylvania.
Kittang, Atle 2002: Ibsens heroisme. Fra Brand til Når vi døde vågner, Oslo.
Lidén, Arne 1940: Peer Gynt i Egypten, i Edda.
Moi, Toril 2006, Ibsens modernisme, Oslo.
Pearce, John C. 1962: Hegelian Ideas in Three Tragedies by Ibsen. Catilina, Kongsemnerne, Kejser og Galilaeer, Scandinavian Studies 34.
Sophocles 1994: Antigone etc., Cambridge.
Sophocles 1947: King Oedipus etc, The Theban Plays, Hamondsworth.
Aarseth, Asbjørn 1975: Dyret i mennesket. Et bidrag til tolkning av Henrik Ibsens Peer Gynt, Oslo.
Aarseth, Asbjørn 2000: Gåtene i Ibsens Peer Gynt, P2-akademiet Q, Oslo.
Aarseth, Asbjørn 1977: Brian Johnston: The Ibsen Cycle, Edda 3.
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