• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK X:
Condensed Summary of 'The Turning Point in The Lady from the Sea'
Cf. Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama:  'The Turning Point in The Lady from the Sea'
(pp.193-233)

     The Wild Duck  was a play about the secrets of the interior world, the enclosed mystery within an enclosure in retreat from the alienated world.  The huge “depths of the sea” were contained within an attic of an apartment and within the mind of a young girl. The ultimate moment of decision, Hedvig's suicide, is something we don’t see, and its motives remain a mystery to everyone in the play and to the audience.  All the action takes place indoors -  from Act 2 on, entirely within one division of the loft.  The play shows the life of the humble, the insulted and injured and their little rituals of mutual adjustment.   The habitation of this fallen world is cramped and confined compensating for a lost natural freedom.

       The Lady from the Sea  on the other hand is a play about the mystery of the immense exterior world - the ‘depths of the sea’ now is an area of an expansive scenography: of mountain ranges, of sea and sky. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, as if from another planet.  He is Hedvig Ekdal's ‘Flying Dutchman’ now claiming another sacrifice.   It is strongly suggested he already has been drowned in the depths of the sea and returns to life and to the land in order to confront his faithless wife, Ellida, the heroine of the play.  He forces a decision upon her which we are able to observe - unlike Hedvig's secret and mysterious decision to commit suicide.  Ellida does not go away with the Stranger - which would be a form of suicide, perhaps.  She explains the reason for her decision, makes an open choice, and the play ends as comedy.  All the action except Act IV takes place outdoors, with immense vistas of landscape, fjord and sky.  No two plays could seem more different.

    Yet, in both plays, an Intruder comes to an unhappy group, with a demand which threatens the life of the central consciousness, Hedvig-Ellida.   Inside the loft of The Wild Duck  resided, invisibly, the "flying Dutchman", who, in Richard Wagner's opera, was a mysterious Stranger who suddenly appeared at a coastal town demanding a Norwegian girl sacrifice herself in love to him, in "the depths of the sea"?  Was the flying Dutchman an occult presence beckoning Hedvig to her final act?  Was he then released from the loft to travel the world as the Stranger to make a final claim upon us?  How ‘occult’ can we allow a Realist drama to be?

       The Lady from the Sea is situated in what one of the characters calls "a turning point of the world", just as the cold and darkness are approaching.  It is the central play in Ibsen's cycle and therefore, perhaps also a 'turning point' in the Cycle.  It is, in a sense, a science-fiction whose central mysterious character, the Stranger, takes on many identities and names but, as in good science-fiction, has one tell-tale feature, his eyes - which he passed on to Ellida's child by another man.  In his notes to this play Ibsen not only speculates on humanity's returning to the sea: he says that now we wish to be in communication with other planets.   The Lady from the Sea tells a very strange story which,  baldly stated, is this:

     A young woman lives in a lighthouse by the sea.  One day she is visited by a young sailor, the first mate of a ship,

with whom she falls in love.  They share a fascination with the sea and, in Ellida's account, the stranger even seems to be part of the sea, its creatures somehow belonging to him. His eyes have the non-human quality of changing color like the sea.  Then he abruptly has to leave because he has murdered his captain. Before he goes, he conducts a kind of pagan wedding ceremony with Ellida   Years pass; she makes a marriage of convenience with a widower and settles down in a household with two daughters of her husband's previous marriage.  She has a child by the marriage and this child, frighteningly, she claims, possesses the eyes of her strange lover.  The child dies and the wife, Ellida, refuses to live as a wife with her husband.

       One day a young artist (Lyngstrand) visits her with a lurid story of how he was on a ship when a strange sailor vowed to revenge himself on his faithless wife.  He declared that even if he was drowned, he would come back and fetch her.   Ellida, is greatly disturbed by this, intuiting that this is her previous lover.  At the time of the telling, the Stranger is making his way to her house.  The rest of the play is a contest within her to choose between her past lover, who arrives to fetch her, and her present husband.     This is not realism as we expect it to be.  It is more like wild Romanticism.  Its huge co-incidences are the result of forces now operating conjointly: Lynstrand’s arrival, the Stranger’s approach, Ellida’s restlessness.  No-one would worry about this in Romantic verse drama: it is the Realist method which makes this so unsettling

     And, in fact, the play is deliberately recalling Romantic literature and Romantic theatre.  Just as the plays of the first group recollected Greek drama and theatre, so the plays of the second group recollect the theatres of post-Christian Europe: renascence and Shakespearean for The Wild Duck, Enlightenment Schillerian theatre for Rosmersholm,  Romantic for The Lady from the Sea, and the well-made-play of Ibsen's own time for Hedda Gabler.  [The recollection of past theaters, by the way, is a 'Hegelian' procedure that is not found in The Phenomenology.]  Each play in this sequence is a 'world' and its theatre..  Each dramatised world is populated by characters and imagery unique to it.  We cannot transpose characters from one play to another because each character in a play is a part of the total Concept (world-picture) of that play .  So the best way of experiencing an Ibsen play is to inhabit it in our imaginations: and to inhabit all of it.  Whatever the play 'means' must take account of all its imagery.   Experiencing the play adequately, on all its dimension, is far more important that extracing a 'meaning' from it.

          It is through the women characters that the play conveys the Romantic feeling of yearning, of longing for a larger or different life.  And this atmosphere of Romantic longing is conveyed through the scenography: the huge vistas of landscape: mountains and fjord, surrounding the little, enclosed community. The sea is never seen: it lies beyond the fjord and is talked about and dreamt about, as if it were some ultimate attainment.  The sea stands for the infinite as against the finite little community; for freedom, but also for terror, for the horrifying (grufulle).  This word, grufulle, is repeated an astonishing number of times in the play, especially in Act Four where it is repeated eleven times in one duologue..  The sea creature, the Stranger, is ambiguous.  Is he offering freedom, or death?.  Or both? The play ends in gathering darkness and the approaching cold of a long northern winter.  These ideas hint at the death of the species, humanity, we see on stage. 

                It is Ibsen's most Romantic play, in scenography, mood, characterization, action, and dialogue.  And it was in Romantic thought, art and poetry that these themes of longing to escape the finite world into an infinite one, using the images of grand Nature, were first expressed.  The most obviously Romantic figure in the play is the Stranger.  The way he uncannily appears suggests he derives from Hedvig Ekdal's imaginative companion, the Flying Dutchman, who, in Wagner’s opera, appears in the same uncanny way. In the Flying Dutchman legend, Vanderdecken cursed God when sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and in punishment was doomed to sail for ever in a ghostly ship round the world.  In Richard Wagner's version, he is saved only when a Norwegian girl, Senta, out of love, unites with him in a form of death-marriage.  Ellida, we will see, refuses, and there seems an implication that she and her community are lost as the darkness and cold close in at the end of the play. 

                The Lady from the Sea develops themes and images we find in Rosmersholm.   Rebecca West is called a "mermaid' by Ulrik Brendel, while Ellida's whole identity resembles that of a mermaid, a creature of the sea, stranded on land.  Ellida's ‘wild lover’, the Stranger, like Rebecca, comes from the pagan north, from Finnmark.  Ellida, like Rebecca,  is called a 'pagan' by an 'old priest'.  The Christian-pagan conflict is once again fought out in the play, ending with a victory for the Christian values.

     The Lady from the Sea also links onto Hedda Gabler, because the dialectic in the Cycle is a continuous sequence..  In both The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler, the heroine is married to a respectable and rather staid husband, but has a 'wild' and ‘pagan’ lover from the past who returns into the present.  In both plays, the Christian values triumph, but perhaps at great cost to the free human spirit.  So, though Hedda Gabler, as the closing play in the group has closest resemblances to the opening play, The Wild Duck, the second group reveals a progressive dialectic from The Wild Duck through to Hedda Gabler.

         It is the female characters, Bolette, Hilde and, above all, Ellida, who are discontented with the world they live in.  Ellida is just the extreme case of this alienation, of their sense of lack of self-fulfillment..  Bolette ardently longs to escape her situation.  Hilde is growing restive and malicious.  However, Ellida carries within her the greatest discontent, the deepest secret life, the greatest sense of alienation.    The males, Wangel, Arnholm, even Lyngstrand, believe themselves to be more in control of their worlds.  They are variously sympathetic to the situation of the women but stand outside it and, in the case of Wangel and Arnholm, seek out ways to cure the women's ‘condition’. 

           It is through the women, therefore, that the play conveys the feeling of yearning, of longing for a larger or different life. The extensive vistas of landscape mountains and of the fjord both confine the the little community while at the same time offering unattainable vistas . The sea lies beyond the fjord, unseen but talked about and dreamt about, as if it tempting to ultimate possibilities.  It stands for the infinite as against the finite little community; for freedom but also for terror, for the horrifying (grufulle).  The sea creature, the Stranger, therefore is ambiguous.  Is he offering freedom, or death.  Or both?

The Kantian Romantic aspect of the play

     After the philosopher, Hume, argued that we had no basis of certain knowledge: that we understood the world only from experience, that we could not prove or demonstrate the 'glue' of cause and effect (we could not prove the sun would rise tomorrow: that the world as we knew it would be the same the next day) Kant set out to show that indisputable knowledge was available.  In a classic "first the good news and then the bad " ploy, he demonstrated we could always count on experiencing reality in terms of time and space, even though time and space did not exist 'in themselves'.  Furthermore.we would always know the world in terms of certain categories of understanding, like cause, effect, reciprocity, plurality, unity, totality, and so on.  This was because, as humans, we are inevitably constituted to perceive, experience the world in these predictable ways. 

   Now for the bad news.  But our experience of the world had nothing to do with knowlledge of "the thing in itself" - reality as it actually is in itself behind the ‘phenomena’ our faculties constructed.  We would for ever be cut off from that, simply because we are limited by our human way of knowing.   Just as a cat could never see and know our world, we cannot know the world that, e.g. a non-human godike mind not confined by our catergories, would know. 

        It means that, as we construct the world we live in from our categories of understanding, we are all artists, in a way.  Kant gave a great importance to the power of the Imagination, which became a key word of Romanticism, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lament at the loss of his "shaping Power of Imagination."  Notice how many times, in the play, the characters talk about carrying an image within themselves (as Ellida carries an image of the Stranger, but cannot 'see' her husband when he's absent).  Wangel claims to have replaced this image with "a new image in you now, shaped out of reality." instead of one made up of "sick fantasies."  But this is only his version, and in this play, the good doctor is so often wrong.   Or Lyngstrand, carrying away with him an image of Bolette carrying his image.  Or Hilde's image of herself as a young bride in black.   Arnholm carries inside himself an image of Bolette longing for him and it has brought him to this place.   Only in this play do characters feel and talk like this.  The play seems to be about competing imaginations - which one will come out victorious. And the biggest competition is between the Stranger and the world represented by Wangel.

Close Encounters of the Ibsen Kind

                Does the Stranger exist outside our categories of knowing?  His many names, appearances, origins imply this.  Is he human?  Paranormal features are associated with him: the faculties of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, bodily materialization, psychic possession.  How did Ellida happen to give birth to the Stranger's child?  How does he arrive with such uncanny swiftness.  This was true of Wagner's Flying Dutchman’s ghostly ship. We hear Johnston's vessel appears just as swiftly.  He seems one of Romanticism's frequent 'demon lovers', like Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Byron's Stranger-lovers - or Wagner's the Flying Dutchman - characters who come from outside the categories of normal human society.   Sometimes they trail shades of the monstrous, like Frankenstein.   We still are haunted by these Romantic ideas of the more than human: even by the more debased idea of the Vampire who also is not bound by human limitations. Ideas of the gods may derive from a similar impulse to imagine forces beyond human power yet with human attributes; like  Kant's 'intellectus archetypus' with powers of apprehension not bound by human limitations of Space and Time, etc. 

      The Stranger also seems an embodiment of Will, demanding an act of will, in full freedom, from Ellida. Why is Ellida, in Act III, mentally agitated and hysterical minutes before his appearance?  She seems telepathically 'aware of him' before he arrives.  When she says, "Oh my love, you've come at last!" which part of her mind is speaking to which of her "loves"? Remembering the Ibsen quote, Text and Supertext p.204, we have to ask if the Stranger is an invitation to transcend our human identity towards the superhuman, likeNietzsche's concept of the ‘Superman.’

Revolutionary implications

         Killing the Captain can be read as a metonymy for regicide (the unjust Captain = an unjust ruler.)  One of the Stranger's names is Friman (Freeman) . The ship as 'ship of state' is a long tradition in Western literature..  The same revolutionary implications inhere in such sea stories as Melville’s Billy Budd, the hero of which has to leave a ship called ‘The Rights of Man. It is not that details in the play "stand for" details in the largeer world, but that both the total metaphor of the play and the many metaphors within it, as in Melville, are part of a supertext that evokes these parallels, just as e.g. in the Elizabethan supertext, the killing of the king, as in in Macbeth evokes the satanic revolt against God..  The play locates its actions in a familiar human community of nationality (the raised flag of the opening scene) of family and of society, placed agaainst the backdrop of an extensive natural world. This social world is limited and its female inhabitants are notably discontented, restless, yearning for greater vistas; their confinement contrasting with the summer tourists sailing off for the midnight sun.  At the centre of this society one character seems to have made contact, in her past, with something like a superhuman reality; a force represented by the Stranger. 

                The Stranger challenges commitment to a wholly other way of life, terrifying yet magnetically attractive.  Ellida, at first attracted by the challenge, finally falls back when allowed to make a free choice by her husband.  She chooses responsibility, just as, according to Hegel in his chapter ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’, post-revolutionary Europe settled down to a prosaic bourgeois or middle class culture, rejecting revolution.   This bourgeois culture now will lethally close around Hedda Gabler.    If the play is showing our species at an end of its cultural as well as biological evolution then the metaphor of the approaching cold and darkness is that of our extinction. The Stranger, then, would stand for a way out we lacked the Will to choose; the road not taken. The play, in this reading, is a tragedy. Another reading, offered by more positive interpreters, is that the Stranger represents a recidivism to something that threatens our sanity and social life. The play, therefore, is a comedy and Ellida is saved from self-destruction and returned to normalcy,  happiness and bourgeois decency.  The conclusion is at least, ambiguous: as the critic, Sandra Saari wrote, it is “a troll comedy and a creative human tragedy.”