• 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:
Summary of 'The Dialectic of 'Rosmersholm'
Cf. The Ibsen Cycle ‘The Dialectic of Rosmersholm' (pp.237-288; **380-389)

         Rosmersholm draws its dialectic from the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘The Struggle Between Enlightenment and Superstition' that includes the conflict between Reason and Faith in the late eighteenth century.  Appropriately, the play contains themes of the theater of Friedrich Schiller and of Goethe.  The play especially calls to mind Schiller’s Don Carlos and Mary Stuart.  

         As in Schiller's Don Carlos,  similar forces oppose each other.  On the one side are the entrenched forces of reaction; on the other, the forces of liberation.  However, Ibsen’s dialectic is more complex and more ambiguous.   In Rosmersholm, the forces of reaction, oppression, 'darkness', the opponents of Eros and of intellectual and emotional freedom are also depicted as moral, civilizing, establishing social order. The opposing forces of liberation, of erotic expression, of rebellion and   'light' are also criminal, violent  and contaminated by impure origins and motivation.  The dialectic discovers positive and negative in both thesis and antithesis and looks to a cultural future that will 'synthesize' the best in both.  The quarrel between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine has been developed by Hegel into a profound dialectical analysis.

         The story of Rosmersholm is of violent actions that took place before the play begins.  Its details of sexual anarchy and murderous events are melodramatic, even ‘Gothic', describing the arrival in the past of the revolutionaries, Dr.West and Rebecca, determined radically to change the society they intrude into.  After the death of Dr. West, Rebecca took over his mission, using her attractive power to overcome the citadel of orthodoxy by means of sexual seduction and lethal persuasion.   Through Ibsen’s retrospective  method, the actual plot of the play exhibits a design of classic symmetry and restraint similar to that of Schiller's Mary Stuart  The structure's firm design reveals a careful disposition of scenes making up a significant thematic pattern..  

ACT ONE:      Evening:  Rosmer's Present  .Rosmer and Rebecca prepare to
                              challenge society.  Ulrik Brendel appears, sharing this challenge.
                            : 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 . Rosmer and Kroll break apart.  Brendel attacked
                              by his companions.  Mortensgaard is 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 himself  suspected as a 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 asscociates.  Kroll confronts Rebecca with the truth
                              of her 'origins': illegitimate, an incestuous relation to her father.  She also
                              is seen as 'seducer' of Kroll, Beata and Rosmer. Rosmer and Kroll re-unite.
                              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 re-unite in
                              a marriage and suicide.
                              Play closes with a reference to the millrace beyond the window.

         For the ‘Enlightenment-Superstition’ themes of Rosmersholm consider the following:

       The method is Greek and retrospective but the careful symmetry and the interplay of a guilty past and penitent present also recalls the symmetrical art of e.g. Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart. Both Rosmersholm and Mary Stuart are given up to the understanding of past actions and their results on the protagonists.  Both Mary and Rebecca are criminals whose journeys of atonement illuminate the cultural conflicts of their worlds. The play operates a dualism of Light and Darkness suitable to a dialectic of 'enlightenement' and 'superstition' set out in Hegel.  In this dialectic, the 'bringers of light' though liberating are also compromised and guilty.  Furthermore, the conservative powers, though oppressive, have a profounder sense than the liberators of the past's essential continuation in the present.

         The invaded scene (the priest’s house)  is Christian and traditional; the invading force is from Finnmark, the wilder north of Norway and long an outpost of paganism.  Rebecca West's actions resembles a figure from folk-lore; a witch disguised as a beautiful woman who inveigles herself into the Rosmer household and works her destructive magic upon it. 

         The action of Rosmer and Rebecca is destined to fail before it commences: that is, everything the protagonists set out to achieve in the world in Act One is inherently vitiated from the very start and the play's dialectic is the gradual discovery by Rebecca and Rosmer of the depth and power of the unatoned and implacalbe past. 

THE CREATIVE TRANSGRESSORS

       Most unusual is the manner in which Ibsen gets us to admire Rebecca while still recognizing the extent of her guilt.   Her guilt is associated with other social and sexual transgressors.  Dr. West, very likely her father, seems also to have been her lover - an incest he must have known about.   Her mother, therefore, was an adulteress.  Her allies in the cause of the Enlightenment are Peter Mortensgaard, (proprietor of ‘The Beacon’ Blinkfyret) an adulterer and Ulrik Brendel, a social transgressor who, as radical tutor to the boy, Rosmer, was chased from the Rosmer mansion with a horsewhip.  In this play enlightened progress goes along with sexual as well as political rebellion.

         The world Rebecca West sought to conquer in the cause of enlightenment is traditional, conservative and Christian.  To defeat this world Rebecca began to work what seems a kind of magic spell on its inhabitants: she 'bewitched' Kroll, the autocratic schoolmaster; then his sister, who became infatuated with her; then, while dispatching the sister - virtually murdering her - she set to work on the husband until he, too, is in her power.  Like a witch from folklore, she calls up her rather louche colleagues, Brendel,  Mortensgaard and the ghost of Dr. West, to lead the attack on the citadel of orthodoxy.  This violent subject matter, however, is acted out with neo-classical decorum.  There is a dignity, self-restraint and reticence about the characters so that that the play needs the lurid figure of Ulrik Brendel to get its two main actions going: Rosmer's declaration of his apostasy in Act One, starting off the battle: and, in Act Five, his demand that Rebecca sacriifice herself to prove the depth of her devotion to Rosmer's cause..  Brendel might be seen as a suppressed aspect of Rosmer himself.

         A melodramatist would have chosen to show the sensational actions of the past taking place on stage: the seductions of Kroll and his sister; the virtual murder of Beata; the passion Rebecca began to feel for Rosmer.  Ibsen is interested in these past events only as they become subjects of present consciousness, of adequate self-knowledge. It is not the events themselves that are important but how the characters and the audience come to understand the nature and consequences of their actions in the world. The events are made to travel through every layer of the 'cultural psyche', pushing both outward and inward at the same time - outward, to the furthest layers of metaphysical meaning, and inward to the very origins of our psychic impulses. (cf.diagram, The Ibsen Cycle p. 249)

          The play sets in opposition two aspects of human civilization which frequently are in violent conflict.   On the one side is the conservative, conscientious, constraining forces of civilization - the reservoir of our spiritual history and our cherished values.  But this also can be a system of oppression, preventing change, setting itself against life.  In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud proclaimed that this civilizing force, by opposing our instinctual life, repressing the life-instincts, creates thepsychopathologies that utlimately will destroy us. . (cf. The Ibsen Cycle pp. 380-389)

    In fact, Ibsen described the dialectic of the play in Freudian terms: 

        ...the different spiritual functions do  not develop evenly and abreast of each other in any

        one human being.  The acquistive instinct hurries from conquest to conquest. The moral

        consciousness - what we call the conscience - is, on the other hand, very conservative.  It

       has its roots deep in traditions and in the past generally. Hence the conflict within the

       individual. (cf. The Ibsen Cycle, 238-39)

      In opposition to t civilizing repression are the forces of instinctual life, especially the sexual, which wish to throw off all constraints.  It is unsurprising this play held particular interest for Freud who published a notable analysis of it heroine, Rebecca West.

     In Hegel's analysis there exists a historical/cultural parallel to this conflict within the individual: the collision between the civilizing and represssive Roman world order and the peoples of invading tribes from the north violently descending and devastating it.  However, these forces from the north became in turn assimilated, transformed and civilized by those they conquered.   In the personal histories in the play, this recreates Rebecca's history at Rosmersholm.   And Ibsen has given Rosmersholm many of the characteristics of the traditional historical accounts of Rome. The long gallery of portraits of ancestors, military, civic, religious, whose portraits look down upon the action of the play, evoke the patristic Roman tradition of Europe.  In the earlier draft of the  play Rosmer was named Boldt-Römer (Römer = Roman).  The portraits invoke the potent dead that Edmund Burke honored and Thomas Paine derided'; or, in Don Carlos  the stultifying traditional order behind the monarchy and priesthood of Philip's Spain opposed by the forces of Posa's enlightenment.

        The dialectic is ambiguous. Rosmersholm creates nobility, but at the price of happiness, human joy, without which life can't be lived.  Rebecca's 'pagan' and 'northern' orientation is determined to grasp happiness and to overcome whatever stands in its way but it is in danger of destroying the fabric of society that helps preserve our humanity as Schiller warned. ( The Aesthetic Education of Mankind). .As always Ibsen's subject is a big one but, as always, Ibsen locates this huge subject within a minutely and delicately realised world of modern realism. 

           The plot uncovers the concealed truth of the story.   By fully acknowledging and understanding their histories Rebecca and Rosmer understand themselves and their actions.  Plot and story merge in their final act of comprehension.  The plot, in search of the truth of the story, does not ‘know itself’ until it is critically relived    The play is a probing psychoanalysis of its own action which, as it progresses, 'lights up' more and more of the world the characters inherit and inhabit. Therefore the events of the past are not just recollected and re-examined but simultaneously re-enacted by the newly evolved consciousness impelled through the plot. The plot’s evolution of a consciousness that will experience past events from a devastating new perspective is accompanied by a replay of the events. Marvin Carlson has drawn attention to the plot’s extraordinary parallels whereby Rosmer and Rebecca fatally re-enact, in the same sequence, the past histories from which they futilely endeavor to break free.    In one such re-enactment: “ 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".” [1]  

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

1. Beate revealed to Kroll that Rosmer is falling into apostasy. Rebecca urges Rosmer to do this in Act One.
2. Beate wrote a letter to Mortensgaard to protect Rosmer. Rebecca repeats this action in Act Two
3. Beate hinted to Kroll at a relationship between Rosmer and Rebecca. Rebecca confesses this to Kroll in Act III.
4. Beate threw herself into the millstream. Rebecca and Rosmer do this in Act Four.

         Ex-priest Rosmer is the sensitive representative of the Christian‘traditional’ side of the conflict; its most civilizing force.    Rebecca, embodying the 'pagan' aspect of the Enlightenment: possesses its boldness of will.   The lovers, therefore, derive from opposite ideas of the cultural dialectic. Rosmersholm is a site subdued by an outside power; a process by which it is infiltrated, subverted and gradually taken possession of.  Rosmersholm is manorial, W.B. Yeats' great good place' of tradition, order, ceremony, from which the surrounding district takes its tone.    Huge old trees can be seen outside, forming an avenue onto the old estate.  We notice those ancestral portraits on the wall.  The living room where most of the action takes place, would be furnished with traditional elegance.

         But an invasion 'ivisually' has taken place: those "fresh birch twigs" by the stove and the abundance of flowers in the room.  We hear these are new to Rosmersholm (Beata could not tolerate them) and they are associated with the world of wild nature - and with Rebecca.  It is her personality and its power that these natural things are expressing, in league with the forces of liberation.. Outside the windows, until the housekeeper closes them, can be heard the millrace.   Scenically, this is a space with an old history but with new forces at work upon it - the theme of the play.  And we will find out that in the world outside, a struggle for the allegiance of Rosmersholm will take place- to try to wrest it from Rebeca and her enlightenment group who have taken temporary possession.

         When the play opens, Rebecca seems victorious and we, as audience, have no reason to feel there is anything sinister in this.  In the first act the characters congratulate themselves on how easily they get along with the past: there is only one small hint that something might be wrong:  when Rosmer says that they talk of the dead wife every day "and think of her as still belonging to the house" Rebecca "lights the lamp" in the darkening room.   At the end of the act we suspect something is not so innocent when, in response to Kroll's exclamation about Beata, Rebecca seems unnerved.

         By Act Two the dialectic has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.  The play has much the nature of a detective fiction: once the investigation has been launched the pieces gradually will fall into place.  A battle takes place for control of the ideological world of the play.  Kroll goes on the offensive, declares war upon Rosmer.  Peter Mortensgaard becomes Rosmer's ally in the cause of enlightenment.  Yet both Kroll and Mortensgaard are dragging the battle into the dirt.  Kroll t will attack from the Righ with unscrupulous political weapons; Mortensgaard, from the Left, will print only that truth which is convenient for the cause;  Rebecca is discovered hiding in Rosmeer’s bedroom, listening in on the debates of Rosmer with his opponent and his ally.  And the ghost of Beata becomes more menacing, as we hear of her accusations against both Rosmer and Rebecca.  By the end of Act Two the atmosphere of the play has become squalid and violent: the very opposite of Rosmer’s mission in the world.  High-minded ideology is being dragged down into sleaze.

         In Act Three, Kroll and his allies launch their violent counter-attack.  The County Times sets about defaming Rosmer’s character and hinting at the ex-priest's immoral relations with Rebecca  This is only the prelude to the full attack upon Rebecca that Kroll will launch.  In this Act that we see Rebecca in the most lurid light.  In Rosmer's absence, under Kroll's merciless cross examination, Rebecca is forced to acknowledge her actions: of seducing Kroll, then Beata, his sister, in order to gain power over Rosmer.  This, however, is not the full extent of her sexual transgression.  She was most likely illegitimately conceived and, as the stage directions make apparent, this probably led to her incestuous affair with her father, Dr. West.  Rebecca’s whole nature, therefore, is revealing itself as the absolute opposite of the Christian priest, Rosmer whom she set about bending to her will.  At this point, Rosmer returns from his walk and Rebecca, astonishingly, decides to make the case against herself even more damning by her confession. She now admits to arriving at Rosmersholm with the purpose of taking control: of working upon Rosmer’s wife, Beata until she drove her to her death.    By this confession, Rebecca seems to have severed herself from Rosmer absolutely and to have revealed her own diametrically opposite, even evil, nature. Horrified, Rosmer takes leave of her.

         But Rebeccas's confession has shown the exact opposite: how close she has come to Rosmer's view of life, for the need to confess her crime comes from his tradition, not from her's.  Just as he has journeyed towards her emancipated view of life, which he does not give up, so she has met him half-way and accepted his tradition: of the need to atone for transgression.

         Act Four is set in the evening, with the darkness closing in and it is given to exploring the depth and authenticity of the 'marriage' between the pair.  Rosmer can never be convinced by Rebecca's 'conversion' because her own past actions make her the worst witness to the spiritual change she claims has taken place inside her.  The only real proof of the conversion is something he is afraid to ask her - to show she is capable of Beata's sacrifice of her life.  While he hovers fearfully over this idea, unable to express it, there is a "loud knock at the door" and Ulrik Brendel arrives, as if out of Rosmer’s own unconscious, to give this unspoken idea its melodramatic expression.  It is a brilliant dramatic effect on Ibsen's part, for it takes the situation out of its somewhat refined and abstract context.  His demand that Rebecca sever her finger and ear for Rosmer’s sake gives Rosmer’s unspoken requirement sinister dramatic life. [For the parallel with Emperor and Galilean, cf. The IbsenCycle, p. 284]

         After Brendel leaves, Rosmer can focus on Rebecca’s state of mind.  What emerges is the spiritual marriage between them that really has taken place.  He at last has the 'pagan' resolve to overcome his past and join her in suicide; she has attained the Christian 'grace' to join him in atonement.  Rosmer accepts Rebecca’s emancipated view that there is no judge over them: no power higher than themselves; she accepts his view that they must pass judgment upon themselves and join in a death-marriage.   This is a rarified idea of human tragedy but I think Ibsen succeeds in getting us to accept it and be satisfied by it - though it is a difficult conclusion to bring off.  Rosmer and Rebecca stand for two alternative and seemingly mutually exclusive human tendencies, the collision between what Herbert Marcuse has called Eros and Civilization.   (Cf. The Ibsen Cycle 388-389:)  Rosmersholm depended on the suppression of instinctual forces, (where adults never laugh and children never cry) whereas Rebecca represented their free and fierce expression.

         What are we, as audiences, to get from the play so that it dialectically engages with us?  It takes us beyond the uncompromising opposition of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine: between Burke’s idea of the revolution as a savage clown show where everything noble and valuable in life, inherited from tradition, is trampled underfoot by a savage spirit of rebellion; and Thomas Paine’s idea that civilized tradition and order are nothing but a false show put on by a tyrannous system of injustice; and by the dead hand of the Past “governing beyond the grave'”and stifling the living. There is truth in both those mutually exclusive extreme views but, separately, only half the truth.  What Rosmer and Rebecca come mutually to admire and love in each other are seemingly utterly opposing qualities that each can acknowledge as their own.

         In the conflict between Burke and Paine the enemies could never be reconciled.  But in Rosmersholm the dialectic goes deeper; and the further it goes, the more the drama of good vs. evil dissolves as the opposing forces discover they include in themselves the things they most feared.  It is as if Burke and Paine, or the Inquisitor and Posa, discovered they share the same vision of the world.  The dialectic Ibsen takes us along is to a surprising synthesis where the forces of reaction and those of revolution unite. The play ends with the marriage of the pair of guilt-ridden lovers proclaiming they are one.    It dramatizes the process of an extraordinary 'marriage' between the respected priest and the incestuous murderess. Beyond that particular union, the play discovers larger, historical and universal perspectives.