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Sophocles, Hegel and Ibsen
A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
by Helge Salemonsen
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.
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8 - In Norwegian, literally,
'" to put him out"”.
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