• IBSEN COURSE •
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Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
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Week X Material
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Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

WEEK XII: Little Eyolf

      The play very abruptly confronts the sophisticated modern consciousnesses of its characters, Rita, Asta, Allmers, Borgheim, with the absolutely elemental action of death.  This occurs within the setting of  huge vistas of earth, sea, sky that are agents of the action. It is a cosmic violence that occurs and it begets a mental violence as Rita and Almers in Act II tear apart and destroy each other’s identities under the staring eyes of a dead child.  The characters are modern and sophisticated who read and write books and essays; who are taming the physical world like the 'roadbuilder, Borgheim); and who suffer from ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’.  Yet they are convulsed by Death's outlandish agent - an absurd, figure of folk-tale, the Rat-Virgin.(rottejomfruen): incongruous, senseless, deriving from a primitive consciousness before the advent of modernity. 

     The signs, symbols and customs of defunct traditions - emptied of their significance, still haunt the modern consciousnesses in the play.  Beliefs like the 'evil eye' and actions like Asta’s sewing of funerary black crepe or the half-mast lowering and raising of the flag continue without deep ritual provenance.  Familial and social identities are tenuous: marriage, sibling relationships, even parenthood are less fixed entities than ‘attractions’ that could dissolve at any time.   These four last plays are given over to reminiscence, contemplation and reflection rather 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 being acted upon, being transfigured, as we watch.

  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 extending human presence on this landscape. The rhythm of the play depicts a painful movement of consciousness ‘inward’ (following the ‘Rat Wife’s’ invasion) and then afinal 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 immediate visit across the fjord and Allmers’ simultaneous return from the mountains.  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 loss.   Loss is the experience  of all the main characters, including Borgheim who escapes loss only 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 its huger space.. Eyolf is only one ‘ of a persistent pattern of renunciations.    The loss of both little and big Eyolfs. is signaled by something hidden in a bag: the little dog who lures the boy to his death; and the ‘secret documents’ in Asta’s bag that removes her ‘Eyolf’ identity from Allmers.  Asta must renounce Allmers once her identity as sister has dissolved, because her sexual love for him has drastically changed their relationship. Rita must renounce her sexual passion for Allmers, which has been her whole life, because she cannot control his mind which is drawing him away from her.. Allmers loses his son, little Eyolf, who is his whole ‘project for living’- his future.  His possible refuge with his supposed sister, big Eyolf, who had been his reason for marriage, also is taken from him:.  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 a force, or power emerging out of the sea and its ‘undertow’ and luring away the little boy who is at the problematic centre 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.

         The scenic progression of the three acts journeys from Act One’s elevation to Act Two’s descent to devastation and finally to Act III’s bleak ascent to reconciliation at the highest level of the play's terrain, after acknowledgment of total loss.  The journey includes a compelling pattern of images: 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. One group of characters, Allmers, Eyolf, Asta, the Rat Wife, Mopseman, are all described in terms of their eyes; unlike Rita and Borgheimt. 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) 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 are emphatic references to the traditional cosmic elements, earth, air, fire, water. 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 current 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 is the most pervasive image; the medium by which characters arrive and depart; the drowning of Eyolf; the fjord scene of Act II with mists as if the characters have descended 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 experiences of harrowing self-knowledge that gives them the right, finally, to speak the cosmic language of the last lines of the play. Note how Ibsen delays Allmers’ account of his mountain journey until the last act, when he now has dialectically, 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 ‘shock -  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 pitiless self-examination.  There are really only two actions: the death of Eyolf and the revelation that 'big Eyolf' - Asta - as Allmers sister, is 'dead' in her former identity.  The consciousnesses of the main characters, Alfred and Rita, must come to terms with these two facts and their consequences 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 represents sensuality, the lure of sexuality.   It is Rita's realm of gold and green forests.    Asta and the Rat Wife are associated with Water.  Each comes to the Allmers' home and departs by water.  Each carries a bag which involves the death of an 'Eyolf'.  The name ‘Asta’ in Greek and Norse, also implies ‘star’.   Allmers, too, is associated with the heights - with the sky and its stars. 

       Act One is occupied, mainly, with 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 its aftermath, the subsequent years 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, the

"luring game', is prominent.  An action of magnetism pulls the characters,:

        Asta is ‘lured’ to visit the Allmers the day after Allmers returns.                       
         Rita discovered her ‘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 lured to 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 major revelations take place - that Asta is not Allmers' sister making impossible his wish to return to her.  This death of the old Eyolf, too arrives in a black bag, the letters in Asta's 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.  Harsh examination of guilt is typical of the four last plays in the Cycle: 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 and 'Eyolf' when she was a child.  She claims she has arrived at Rita's estate to see Eyolf, though it seems she is unknowingly drawn to Allmers who has returned unexpectedly.  She is a version of Eyolf, still; in the last Act, Rita and Allmers ask her to take up that role again.  She, not Rita, acted as the child’s mother earlier on.   Asta also has affinities with the Rat Wife, bringing the black bag containing information that 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 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 though Eyolf and his cross-like crutch seem Christian extensions 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: an emotional stand-off for all the characters. 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 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 that no-one dares tell him is denied by his physical condition .  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.   She is 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.      She and her dog cannot be located’ in a plausible social reality, nor in the psychological realm of sophisticated consciousness; this prevents us from conjectures of 'motivation' in‘ in realistic terms.”  

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; make this almost a drowned world and  I believe signals a descent into the sub-conscious mind.  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 Allmers and Rita and their neglect of their child.  In this mist-filled setting human identities are fluid (only Borgheim’s identity seems firm). 

Act III (sky)

     This is the Act of renunciation and to chastened reconciiiation with this world: of learning to 'give up':  Asta renounces Allmers, Rita must learn to do the same  The imagery of this Act has pronounced Judeo-Christian overtones ("the Peace of the Sabbath")’but is devoid, totally, of Judeo-Christian assurance: the imagery is pantheist and the "eyes" that look down on the pair and to which they look up are cosmic rather than providential.  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 philosophically.  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 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 Rat Virgin and her dog; 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 'eyes' of he steamer taking Borghem and Asta.across the fjord.  These images elude precise connotation but function as rich evocations of significance.  The play is suffused with suggestive symbolism that evades confinement to any one symbol system.

         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 invades reality with ‘dimensions’ which everyday reality does not ‘see’ – - a similalrity with Impressionism.   Little Eyolf is a meditation on the human condition, seen from a 'pantheist' perspective that, I think, Ibsen shared.  

     It would be too schematic to claim Allmers represents the mind and its aspirations, Rita, the body and its desires and that both must find new terms of harmony after the huge renunciations each undergoes - but that is the imaginative '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 multiple 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, hard won from the lacerating emotions of Act II. The play offers beautiful and fascinating patterns, images, actions, extending far in range of reference, for us to assemble in a performance and make something of.  There is no obligation to stick to Ibsen’s realistic scene directions and specifications: but then we need to find equivalents for them:  being true to Ibsen's boldness while being different. It is not so much 'finding the meaning' as 'releasing the music' - the visual as well as audial and rhythmic imagery emerging from the play.