• 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 XII: Little Eyolf

        One should respond to Ibsen intuitively more than intellectually: to let the visual as well as the play's verbal imagery as well as its surges and recessions of emotion work upon us, worrying less what each detail 'means' than what it 'does'. Ibsen wants to address more than our intellects:s to engage and awaken our senses and our emotions also - for these may be more profound antennae than our conscious minds. His plays are symbolically resonant, and it is in the nature of symbolism to create 'presence' filled with implication.   

      The play very abruptly confronts the sophisticated modern consciousnesses of his characters: Rita, Asta, Allmers, with the absolutely elemental actions of nature and death within the setting of  huge vistas of earth, sea, sky that are agents of the action. The action is a huge violence (elemental Death) – not the smaller-scaled violence of pistol shots, murders or suicides.   It is also a mental violence, as Rita and Almers in Act II tear apart and destroy each other’s identities under the staring eyes of the dead child.  These are modern, sophisticated characters who read and write books and essays (Allmers); who are taming the physical world (engineer Borgheim); or who suffer from ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’.  Yet they will be convulsed by a primitive agent of Death - an absurd, figure of folk-tale: the Rat-Wife.(rottejomfruen)  Death comes, not in the form their minds would expect, but as incongruous, senseless, a figure deriving from a consciousness before the advent of modernity. 

     The elaborate cultural explanations of events (the signs symbols, doctrines, customs of a defunct tradition) are today emptied of their significance yet still haunt modern consciousness. After these have been divested of meaning, life processes take on hugely and mysterious significance.  Actions, like Asta’s sewing of funerary black crepe or the raising of the flag are ceremonies without deep ritual provenance.  Relationships and identities are fluid and tenuous: marriage, sibling relations, even parenthood are less fixed entities than emotional ‘attractions’ that could dissolve at any time.   All these last plays are given over more to reminiscence, contemplation and reflection than to actions of consequence.   The characters in Little Eyolf, take in, ‘absorb’the universe in themselves and the universe, the huge landscape of sea, mountains, and stars, speaks through them, as if inhabiting them.    The characters are acted upon, being transfigured as we watch and must learn to understand what has happened to them. .

  The play is scored ‘Impressionistically’ for sounds (distant cries, ships bells, inner voices) and for the ebb and flow of events and forces beyond the characters' control.   Earth, air, sea and sky collude through a landscape of elemental forces and of plants, animals, humans. One character is a road-builder, impressing human presence on this landscape. The rhythm of the play a painful movement of consciousness ‘inward’ (following the ‘Rat Wife’s’ invasion) and then a movement outward with Eyolf merging into the landscape: a contraction and then a bleak expansion.   This outward expansion is followed by Borgheim and Asta’s departures and the consciousnesses of Rita and Allmers ‘reaching out cosmically to sea depths and distant stars.  These physical and mental movements are across large natural spaces.  The play opens with two such movements: Asta’s visit across the fjord and Allmers’ return from the mountains.n  The play recalls the scenography and atmosphere of The Lady from the Sea.   

         The play is about devastation and “ renunciation, of learning to accept the process of life which is loss.   Loss is the experience  of all the main characters, including Borgheim who only escapes loss at the last moment.  

A mysterious dialectic is at work from the rise of the curtain to the fall.  The ‘trigger’ event is that of the Unexpected Visitor, the Rat Wife, emerging from the landscape and taking away Eyolf, as if the cosmos itself reaches into the stage space, grabbing the child and taking him into the huger space of the cosmos . Eyolf is one ‘emblem’ of a persistent pattern of renunciation.    The loss of Little Eyolf and Big Eyolf. is signalled by something hidden in a bag: the little dog who lures the boy to his death; and the ‘secrets’ in Asta’s bag that removes her ‘Eyolf’ identity from Allmers..  Asta must renounce Allmers because her sexual love for him, now her identity as sister has been dissolved, has drastically changed their relationship.Rita must renounce her sexual passion for Allmers which has been her whole life, because she cannot control what is happening in Allmers’ mind which is drawing him asway from her.. Allmers loses his son, little Eyolf, who is his whole ‘project for living’, his future.  His possible refuge with his supposed sister also is taken from him: big Eyolf, who had been his reason for marriage.  Eyolf himself, with his crutch and crippled body, is the visual symbol of renunciation: of all that he cannot attain in life and, if he lived, would have had to learn to renounce.   And he is the sacrificial victim of his parents projected guilt.

         The single thing that happens to all these people is this force, or power emerging out of the sea and its ‘undertow’ and taking away the figure, the little boy, who is the problematic centre - and the emblem - of all their consciousnesses: the “gnawing thing” that keeps them all locked unhappily together.  After the devastation the great spaces of the cosmos become the major consciousness of the characters. Ibsen arranges his Actiion, Scene, Characters, Dialogue and Props into poetic imagery in the service of a metaphysical idea.

         The scenic progression of the three acts from Act One’s elevation to Act Two’s descent to devastation to Act III’s bleak ascent to reconciliation at the highest level of the play after acknowledgment total loss.  includes a suggestive pattern of images and themes:: the ‘undertow’, the fatal ‘black bags’ of Asta and the Rat Wife, the evil eye; the eyes of the dead child staring up from the fjord; the eyes of the stars staring down; the eyes of the steamer taking away Asta; the fact that one group of characters, Allmers, Eyolf, Asta, the Rat Wife, Mopseman, are all described in terms of their eyes, whereas Rita and Borgheim are not. The child’s name, Eyolf is close in assonance to the Norwegian for eye – øye.  Then there are those ‘water lilies’ growing up from the fjord which Big Eyolf (Asta - star) brings from little Eyolf lying in the depths of the sea.  . There is the immense, desolate mountain lake where Allmers encountered Death as a traveling companion.  In Act II. filled with the presence of death in many forms, the setting is a fjord  leading to the boundless sea, as in The Lady from the Sea. 

         There is an emphatic set of references to the traditional cosmic elements, earth, air, fire, water. The earth references are to “gold, and green forests”, to the mountains where Allmers met Death as a companion, to the plants and flowers of every scene.  Air and sky references are to the air that carries the cry “the crutch is floating” up from the water to the house and the bells that sound in the darkness.  The play ends with Rita and Allmers looking upward and invoking  the sky and the fire of the stars and the fiery eyes of the steamer.   Water, a “dissolving’ medium, is the most pervasive image, of course: the drowning of Eyolf; the fjord scene of Act II with watery mists as if the characters descend beneath the waters; the 'undertow', both ‘out there’ in the cosmos pulling away the drowned boy; and inside the minds of the characters, pulling them away from each other.  The characters are impelled through the harrowing experiences of self-knowledge that gives them the right, finally, to speak their cosmic language. Note how Ibsen delays Allmers’ account of his mountain journey until the last act, when he now has earned the right to speak it.   The ‘inner’ devastation of Act Two was needed to prepare the way for this.

         Litte Eyolf is dramatized around one huge cosmic ‘blow’-  the action of the cosmos that comes and grabs the child and empties the other characters’ lives of meaning forcing them, after passionate conflict, into their depths, into the profoundest contemplation.  There are only two actions: the death of Eyolf and the revelation that 'big Eyolf' - Asta - is 'dead' in her former identity as Allmers sister.  The consciousnesses of the main characters, Alfred and Rita, must come to terms with these two facts and their responsibility 'around' and 'for' them, involving harrowing renunciations:  The three acts of the play are given over in turn, to the elements of 'earth', 'water' and 'sky'..

                                                                                          Act III (Sky)

                 Act I (earth)

                                                           Act II  (water)

         'Earth' seems to represent sensuality, the lure of sexuality.   It is Rita's 'realm' of gold and green forests.    Both Asta and the Rat Wife seem to represent 'Water'.  Each comes to the Allmers' home and departs by water.  Each carries a bag which involves the death of  an 'Eyolf'.  But the name ‘Asta’ also implies ‘star’ and Allmers, too, is associated with the heights - with the sky and its stars. 

       Act One is occupied, mainly, Rita's demand for sexual fulfillment, her claim on her husband, her reproaches and demands.  In the past her  'luring' of Allmers causing the crippling of the child, and thus  the history of their guilty marriage.  The crippled boy, Eyolf, nine years old, is the constant reminder of their guilt, the 'gnawing thing' that the Rat Wife will lure away.  The theme of luring, like the action of gravitation and magnetic pulls on the characters, is prominent:

       Asta is ‘lured’ to visit the Allmers the day after Allmers returns.                       
         Rita discovered her magnetic ‘allure’ for Allmers is over
         The Rat Wife is lured to places with “gnawing” things, to lure them in turn
         Eyolf is lured to follow the Rat Wife,
         Borgheim is lured, unhappily, to Asta
         Asta is sexually yearning for Allmers,
         Rita’s imagination is ‘lured’ to the idea of Eyolf’s death
         In Act II Allmers is lured to the fjord depths and its ‘undertow’

         Allmers, especially is lured to heights and desolate spaces.  There is a continual magnetic attraction-repulsion between characters and ‘forces’ in this play.  We learn in Act Two that Eyolf was crippled during an ‘entrancingly’ beautiful hour when, it seems, Allmers was lured to Rita and  also called out the name of Eyolf, meaning his sister, Asta, during the love-making.  In the ‘champagne speech’  of Act One Rita re-enacts the luring pose, lying back on the couch, of  the night before when she offered herself to Allmers.

       Act Two follows Eyolf to the fjord where he drowned, to the submerged area of the psyche, where Asta dare not confess her sexual attraction for Allmers and where Allmers and Rita explore to the humiliating depths of their psyches.  In this Act imajor revelations take place - that Asta is not Allmers' sister making impossible his wish to return to her.  This death of the old Eyolf, too lies in a black bag, the letters in a portfolio.  Allmers and Rita undergo the harshest revelation as they mutually destroy any covering over their selfish, guilty lack of love for the dead boy.  The harsh examination of guilt is typical of the four last plays in the Cycle that each include confessional, self-flagellation and devastation before beginning a movement 'upward' of spiritual, psychic renewal.

 ‘    Eyolf, though he disappears from the play in the first Act, is in many ways the central character. Rita, Allmers and Asta all projected aspects of themselves upon him.  Asta once played the role of Eyolf when she was a child.  She claims she has arrived at the estate to see Eyolf though it seems she is unconsciously drawn to Allmers who has returned unexpectedly.  She is a version of Eyolf, still; in the last Act, Rita and Allmers will ask her to take up that role again.  She, not Rita acted as the child’s mother earlier on.  But Asta also has affinities with the Rat Wife, bringing the black bag containing information thatl causes the ‘death’ of ‘big’ Eyolf. .  In the last act she wishes Allmers “a thousand, thousand goodbyes"” - the phrase used by the Rat Wife as she leaves.

        Though she neglected Eyolf when he was alive Rita is most haunted by him and his staring eyes after his death. She was jealous of Allmers' love for him and‘lured’ Allmers away from Eyolf on the day of the ’crippling accident. This big Eyolf presumably was an 'ideal' project that the crippled boy could never be.  Asta signals the death of both when she brings the droowned Eyolf’s with the gift of water lilies at the end of Act II.   The imagery is predominantly pantheist but Eyolf and his cross-like crutch seem a Christian extension of the pantheist imagery. 

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         Allmers describes Eyolf in messianic terms as "one who will come after" him.  He ‘uses’ Eyolf to substitute for his own lack of a purpose in life.  In this sense, Eyolf is Allmers own extension into the future.  Allmers lacks any religious faith, and has taken the same faith away from Rita, so that both of them see themselves as creatures of the earth, of “earth-life”.  They practically embody the landscape that speaks through them as pantheism - that the cosmos is all there is and is filled with divinity.  Neither Rita nor Allmers have confidence in an afterlife: their last words invoke 'spirits' that seem to have merged into the cosmos, to have been absorbed into it.   The play suggests the earth-transcending aspirations of Christian humanity are unsuited to our earthbound species; that we must learn to accept Death as final and the earth as our only sphere of operation . 

ACT I (EARTH)
      The play opens in a condition of irresolution and suspension:  Allmers has given up his intellectual project, the treatise on Human Responsibility and has withdrawn from his sexual relation with Rita.  He has determined to project his future onto his son who will be the “one who comes after"” to carry on the intellectual mission   Rita who lives for emotional fulfillment and who hates Allmers’ intellectual interests, is indignant at being rejected and threatens to retaliate.  Asta shared in Allmers intellectual life and cannot tear herself away from him and join Borgheim.  Eyolf is full of aspirations his physical condition denies him but that no-one dares tell him.  The crippled boy is the “gnawing thing” that Rita and Allmers cannot confront, being guilty for his disability.   

     Into this household with all its unsolved conflicts in suspension, enters the Rat Wife, a folk tale figure, whose job is to clear houses of whatever is gnawing away at people’s lives.  With her red umbrella and floral dress and her manner of speaking, she signals straightaway that she is an ‘archetypal’ rather than a realistic figure.  Ibsen wants us to pick up the correspondence with the Pied Piper of Hamelin: an agent, from the world of Nature, associated with animals: (the dog, the rats) vegetation (floral dress) and the sea, who can lure a child-mind.      The very fact that she (and her dog) cannot be located’ in plausible social reality, nor in the psychological realm of sophisticated consciousness prevents us from the conjectures that would arise if she were ‘explicable in realistic terms.”  (e.g. "what’s her motive")” 

ACT II (SEA) 

     This act is given over to the process of devastation: of bleak self-knowledge, the emptying out of self delusion and even self-respect on the part of Rita and Allmers and, to a lesser extent, of Asta..  The characters descend to this setting: the fjord, obscured by wet overhanging trees, the brook running into the fjord; it is almost a drowned world.  I believe signals a descent into the sub-conscious mind and the visual details suggest this.  We learn of the strange relationship of Asta who dressed as a boy for Allmers: a sister dressed as a brother who turns out not to be a sister: and of the guilty sexuality of Allmersd and Rita and their neglect of their child.  In this mist-filled setting human identities are fluid (only Borgheim’s identity seeming firm). 

Act III (sky)

     This is the Act of renunciation and redirection to this world: of learning to 'give up':  Asta renounces Allmers, Rita must learn to do the same for her husband.  The imagery of this Act has pronounced Judeo-Christian overtones ("the Peace of the Sabbath")’but is totally Judeo-Christian assurance: the imagery is pantheist and the "eyes" that look down on the pair and to which they look up are cosmic ratheer than divine.  The idea of an afterlife is explicitly renounced. In this Act we hear of Allmers' trip to the heights, his encounter with and acceptance of Death .  Only in these last moments do we hear of this earlier experience: I think because Ibsen wants to show first the painful and immediate experience of Death before Allmer’s tries to ‘place’ it philsophically.  There is a painful difference, he admits, between Death as a good traveling companion and the sudden, unprepared for impact of death. in Act One.

         Ibsen retains and redirects religious metaphors..  Rita’s future with Allmers is directed to work on this earth.  This highest elevation of the play includes the raising of the flag and the invocation of the 'spirits' and the stars: all skyward, vertical allusions . The imagery is among the most suggestive Ibsen has created: the crutch floating on the surface of the fjord as Eyolf lies on his back staring upward, eyes below looking up, and eyes, above, looking down, the Eden like quarrel in the garden of the guilty pair. 

         The Symbolist movement in drama which followed Ibsen with Strindberg (A Dream Play) and Maeterlinck tended to detach the symbol’from the realistic context.  Ibsen's method is to show spirit working upon and transforming reality.  This makes his method accessible to us as possible experience.  His method is to invade reality with ‘dimensions’ which everyday life does not ‘see’ – another similalrity with Impressionism.   Little Eyolf is a meditation on the human condition, seen from the 'pantheist' perspective that, I think, Ibsen shared.  

     It would be over schematic to say that Allmers represents the mind and its aspirations, while Rita represents the body and its desires (it was Allmers who made Rita renounce religion) and that both must find new terms of harmony after the huge renunciations each undergoes - but that is the right 'area' to be responding to, I think.   The ending of the play has to be handled carefully, to show it is only tentative (Rita reaches out to Allmers but their hands do not touch).  It is a turning from limited, personal desire to caring for the poor children who are a kind of multiplied unclaimed Eyolf; but the play, typically, ends on a note of uncertainty.   The last lines about the peaks and the stars will have to be shown to have been earned, qhard won, from the lacerating emotions of Act II. The play offers us beautiful and fascinating patterns, images, actions, extending far in range of reference for us to assemble in a performance to make something of.  There is no obligation to stick to Ibsen’s realistic scene directions and specifications: but to find equivalents for them: being true to Ibsen's boldness by being different. It is not so much 'finding the meaning' as 'releasing the music' - the visual as well as an audial and rhythmic imagery ermerging from the mimesis.