• 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

Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

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)

      Life is apparently a happy, easy and lively thing up there in the shadow of the mountains and in the monotony of

        this seclusion.  Then the suggestion is thrown up that this kind of life is a life of shadows.  No initiative, no fight for

        liberty. Only longings and desires.  This is how life is lived in the brief summer.  And afterwards - into the darkness.

        ...A man or woman who has reached the top, desires the secrets of the future, a share in the life of the future , and

       communication with distant planets.  Everywhere limitation.  From this comes a melancholy like a subdued song

       of mourning over the whole of human existence and all the activities of men.   One bright summer day with a great

      darkness thereafter - that is all. (Ibsen: Note to The Lady from the Sea)

    The Wild Duck was a play about an interior world, about the mystery and secrets hidden within a retreat from the alienated world.  The depths of the sea” were confined within an attic and within the mind of a young girl. The ultimate moment of decision, Hedvig's suicide, is something we don’t see; we know it's precise moment but its precise motive remains a mystery. All the action takes place indoors -  from Act II on, entirely within one division of the loft.  The play depicts the life of the humble, the insulted and injured and their delicate rituals of mutual adjustment when faced with adversity.   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 fjord and sky. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, as if from another planet. But also from another play!  He is Hedvig Ekdal's ‘Flying Dutchman’ now claiming another sacrifice.  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 round the world in a ghostly ship .  In Richard Wagner's version, he is a mysterious Stranger who suddenly appeared at a coastal town demanding a Norwegian girl - Senta - sacrifice herself - out of love for him - in "the depths of the sea".  He is saved only when Senta unites with him in the sea in a form of death-marriage .   In The Lady from the Sea, it is strongly suggested he already drowned and returns to the land to confront his faithless wife, Ellida.  He forces a decision upon her and (unlike Hedvig?) Ellida does not leave with the Stranger.  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. 

    In both plays an Intruder arrives at a household with a demand that threatens the life of a central character, Hedvig/Ellida.   In the loft of The Wild Duck  resided, invisibly, the "flying Dutchman".   Was the flying Dutchman an occult presence beckoning Hedvig to her final act?  Is he released from the loft to travel the world as the Stranger?  The parallels between the two plays are intriguing .  Is the Ekdals' hidden little world of trees, water trough and animals - and the Flying Dutchman's chest of treasures - a seed that miraculously expands into the huge natural - and supernatural - vistas of the later play?  These journeys from one play to another in the Cycle (Hilde Wangel, in this play, will descend from the mountains to knock on the door of masterbuilder Solness) imply stratagems and intentions in the Cycle we have yet to explore.

       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 also a 'turning point' in the sequence.  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 - a feature he passed on to Ellida's child by another man.  In his notes to the play Ibsen not only speculates on humanity's returning to the sea: he says that at a present stage of cultural evolution 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 that has harbored there.   She reluctantly falls in love with him.  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 ship's captain. Before he goes, he conducts a form 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, she claims, possesses the eyes of her strange lover.  The child dies and the terrified Ellida, refuses to live as a wife with her husband.

       One day a young artist (Lyngstrand) visits her with a lurid story of serving on a ship when a strange sailor on board 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 but 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 deliberately recalls Romantic literature and theatre. Romantic thought, art and poetry notably expressed themes of longing to escape the finite world for the infinite, using the images of grand Nature.   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, never seen, lies beyond the fjord and is talked and dreamt about as if it were some ultimate attainment, standing for the infinite as against the finite little community; for freedom, but also for terror, and for the horrifying (grufulle).  This word, grufulle, is repeated an astonishing number of times in the play, especially in Act IV where it is recurs eleven times in one duologue. 

       The most obviously Romantic figure in the play is the ambiguous sea creature, the Stranger.  Does he offer 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. His appearances are sudden arrivals, his ship coming all at once into sight without warning. In Richard Wagner’s opera he and his ship appear in the same uncanny way.

                The Lady from the Sea also develops themes and images we find in Rosmersholm.   Rebecca West is called a "mermaid' by Ulrik Brendel.  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 Lady from the Sea also links onto Hedda Gabler..  In both The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler, the heroine is married to a respectable and 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 some cost to the free human spirit.  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 linking all four plays from The Wild Duck through to Hedda Gabler.

         The female characters in the play convey the Romantic emotion of yearning, of longing for a larger or different life.  All  the female characters, Bolette, Hilde and, above all, Ellida, are discontented with the world they live in.  Ellida is just the extreme case of this alienation.  Bolette ardently longs to escape her situation.  Hilde is growing restive and malicious.  Ellida carries within her the greatest discontent and the deepest secret life.    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 ways to cure the women's ‘condition’. 

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.  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 we had no basis of certain knowledge: that we understood the world only from experience, that, e.g. 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 do 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 appearances in these predictable ways. 

   Now for the bad news.  But our experience of appearances did not supply knowledge 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 things in themselves because 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 for Romantics, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lament at the loss of his "shaping Power of Imagination."  At 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 the image of the Stranger with "a new image in you now, shaped out of reality." instead of one made up of "sick fantasies."  (This is only his version, and in this play, the good doctor is so often wrong).   Lyngstrand, anticipating leaving, wishes to carry away an image of Bolette carrying his image.    Hilde's creates a mental image of herself as a young bride in black.   Arnholm carried 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 establish itself.    

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?  Wagner's Flying Dutchman’s ghostly ship appears with equal suddeness.  He seems one of Romanticism's frequent 'demon lovers', like Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; characters who come from outside the categories of normal human society.  

      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 he arrives and she responds, "Oh my love, you've come at last!" which part of her mind is speaking to which of her 'loves'? Remembering the Ibsen quotation that opens this essay, we have to ask if the Stranger is an invitation to transcend our human identity and evolve towards the superhuman, like Nietzsche's concept of the ‘Superman.’

Revolutionary implications

        The corresponding section of Hegel's Pheknomenology of Spirit 'Absolute Freedom and Terror' describes the French Revolution and the Kantian revolution in philosophy.   Killing the Captain can be read as a metonymy for regicide ( 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 larger 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 by indicating 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, might 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, in this interpretation, is a comedy and Ellida is saved from self-destruction and is 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.”