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Play It Again: Re-enacted  Story as Tragic

Plot                               
by Brian Johnston

VIII. Arbitrary Story vs. Logical Plot.

The histories, both given and implied, behind the plot of Rosmersholm, range too widely over time and space to be summarized. [10] They establish the totally disparate pasts of Rosmer and Rebecca which the plot then organizes into a clear dialectic confrontation. Rosmer's long established heritage of law, order, tradition and repression of the instincts - 'Civilization' - is made to confront Rebecca's past of lawlessness in origins, personal history and motives, involving the instinctual anarchy of incest, adultery, and concealed violence to gain her ends. Ibsen himself described the dialectic of the play as a collision between the 'acquisitive instinct' that "hurries from conquest to conquest": and "the moral consciousness" that "has its roots deep in traditions and in the past generally." It is for this thematic dialectic - the plot - that all the characters of the play are created and assembled.

The histories of the major and minor characters of Rosmersholm are selected not because they actually occurred in 'real life' and are taken from 'interesting individuals' Ibsen encountered, but because they contribute to a structure of metaphoric identities, events, perspectives that build up a richly enlightening dialectic. The plot gathers all the elements of the characters' life-histories and the fictive world in which these are stated to have been acted out, and condenses them into the judgment-day of the play's performed action. Rosmer and Rebecca are ambushed by their pasts and led inexorably to renounce an anticipated future advocating liberation in the political world to subject themselves to the demands of an ancient, evaded, punitive justice. In Rebecca's words as she prepares to end her life, "I am bound by the Rosmer view of life. If I have transgressed, I must atone."  The plot that has rendered this outcome of the story inevitable. The gradual evolution of a consciousness that will view the past events from a devastating new perspective is accompanied at the same time by a grimly ironic, undetected replay of the guilty events. Marvin Carlson has drawn attention to the plot's extraordinary symmetries where both Rosmer and Rebecca fatally re-enact, in sequence, the past histories from which they futilely endeavor to break free. For example, in one re-enactment: "The four specific actions taken by the dead wife are precisely repeated and in order, by Rebecca - indeed, they serve as one basis for the four-act arrangement of the play." [11]

The four actions performed in the past by the dead wife are:

(i) Beate revealed to Kroll that Rosmer is falling into apostasy. Rebecca urges Rosmer to do this in Act One.

(ii) Beate wrote a letter to Mortensgaard to protect Rosmer. Rebecca repeats this action in Act Two;

(iii) Beate hinted to Kroll at a relationship between Rosmer and Rebecca. Rebecca confesses this to Kroll in Act Three.

(iv) Beate threw herself into the millstream as do Rebecca and Rosmer in Act Four.

The plot of the play restructures the elements of the story into a tragic agon of re-enactment whereby these elements now take on clearer dialectical and archetypal identity. The characters, as Carlson notes, are set out in terms of clear ideological opposition:

This opposition extends, metaphorically, into deeper and broader cultural, historical and archetypal dimensions. The individual stories of Rosmer, Rebecca, Kroll, Kroll's wife and children, Mortensgaard, Brendel, Mrs. Helseth, Beate, Dr. West, Rebecca's mother, Rosmer's father, etc., etc., can be extended and speculated upon indefinitely and ultimately to formless infinity by those disposed to this sort of thing; but the plot of the play by its form and compression, prevents this dispersion bynimposing unity and coherence upon the subject matter. This becomes evident, also, in the a:b:b:a symmetry of the plot's act by act progression:

ACT ONE: Evening:
Rosmer's Present.
Rosmer and Rebecca prepare to challenge society.
Ulrik Brendel appears, sharing this challenge Rosmer and Kroll break apart: Rosmer and Rebecca are united.
First suggestion of the dead wife's accusation
Play opens with a reference to the millrace beyond the window.

ACT TWO: Morning:
Rosmer's Past.
Kroll counterattacks.
Brendel also attacked by his companions.
Mortensgaard enlisted on the side of Rosmer.
Rosmer now associated with pagan and sexual transgressors.
The dead wife's accusation now openly articulated - by Kroll and Mortensgaard.
Rosmer as himself sexual transgressor.
Rosmer and Rebecca begin to separate.

ACT THREE: Morning:
Rebecca's Past.
Full scale attack upon Rosmer and Rebecca by Kroll and his associates.
Kroll confronts Rebecca with the truth of her 'origins': illegitimate, incestuous relation to her father.
She also is seen as 'seducer' of Kroll, Beate and Rosmer.
Rosmer and Rebecca now seem poles apart.

ACT FOUR: Evening:
Rebecca's Present.

Rosmer and Rebecca give up their challenge to society, contemplating their defeat and separation.
Ulrik Brendel re-appears, sharing their defeat.
Rosmer and Rebecca now re-unite in a marriage and suicide.
Play closes with a reference to the millrace beyond the window.

     No realistic mimesis of everyday modern life would reveal such parallels and symmetries. The histories, inevitably, are inconclusive and incomplete. By containing only those details that will prove serviceable to the plot, they contain very evident lacunae of the kind described by L.C. Knights in 'How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?'. We know nothing of Rosmer's mother, nor precisely why Brendel was horsewhipped from Rosmersholm by Rosmer's father; little of how Mortensgaard's adulterous affair evolved or why Mrs. Helseth so detests Kroll's wife. The plots do not require more details from the story than Ibsen has provided. To search for more is to look outside the play and to abandon critical interpretation for daydreaming.

The dialogue of Rosmersholm's concluding moments closes off one vista after another of previous consciousness as it narrows down to a search for a new precision of motive and moral condition:

ROSMER: Husband and wife must go together.
REBECCA: Just to the footbridge, John.
ROSMER: And onto it as well. As far as you go - I'll go that far with you.
For now I dare to.
REBECCA: Are you sure beyond all doubt - this is the best way for you?
ROSMER: I know it's the only one.
REBECCA: What if you're deceiving yourself. If this is only a fantasy? One
of those white horses of Rosmersholm.
ROSMER: It could well be. We can never escape them - we of this house.
REBECCA: Then stay, John!
ROSMER: The husband shall go with his wife as the wife with her husband.
REBECCA: Yes, but tell me first: Is it you who follow me? Or is it I who follow you?
ROSMER: We can never get to the bottom of that.
REBECCA: I want so much to know.
ROSMER: We follow each other, Rebecca. I, you and you, me.
REBECCA: I believe that could be true.
ROSMER: For now we two are one.
REBECCA: Yes. Now we're one! Let's go gladly!

        The movement of the whole play began by opening up broad vistas of liberating action within the political world and now contracts to this impasse. The audience's attention focuses closely on each mental move by the protagonists. The wide world of opposing political factions, of a cultural war between extremists and their followers on both left and right, and of an envisaged new order transforming the world, has contracted to this couple's final anguished, mutual interrogation which is the quintessence of the play's whole wide-ranging dialectic. The pair of lover-reformers who wished to unite to transform the world is driven to isolation from the other within his and her brooding, ever-more-narrowly circling obsessions. The darkness of the abyss within each is reflected in the darkness outside; the sparsely lit room and beyond, the night with its relentlessly awaiting millstream. These theatrical notations are as precise as in music and are meant to be appreciated as art, as aesthetic control. The pair's plunge into the millstream signals the closing off of the world they envisaged entering and transforming. The plot has manipulated dialogue and scene to this imploding spiritual condition of the protagonists' chosen liberation from a past that, from the beginning, has been closing in on them inexorably.

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10. A much more detailed account of both Rosmersholm and The Master Builder can be found in The Ibsen Cycle.
11. Marvin Carlson: 'Patterns of Structure and Character in Ibsen's Rosmersholm' in Modernism in Modern Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998) p. 25