• 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 XII: The Last FourPlays

Extended accounts of the last four plays can be found as follows:

The Master Builder, in The Ibsen Cycle, 289-352

Little Eyolf  in this Ibsen Course, Week XII

John Gabriel Borkman in Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama, 235-78

When We Dead Awaken, in The Ibsen Cycle, 171-86

         The last four plays begins with The Master Builder depicting, in the opening scene, the same condition of intolerable confinement as Hedda Gabler, the action taking place at the same time of year, the Fall (at the autumnal equinox). Unlike the earlier play, its action will be one of a progressive opening up of vistas and a liberation from confinement.  The Cycle has reached a drastically new phase:confirmed by all the plays in this final group.

          The Master Builder opens in a windowless inner room each of whose inhabitants is described as in some way enfeebled.   The first words spoken are "No, I can't go on much longer..."  In the action that follows, when masterbuilder Solness comes onto the stage, we hear of failing powers, of fear of youth, of the mind divided against itself and others almost to the point of madness.  But this play inaugurates a sequence of plays in which more and more of the landscape is opened up to the theater audience; in which, in the sequence of last acts of the four plays, we ascend higher and higher in this landscape, and from Evening, through Night, to the Dawn (cf. The Ibsen Cycle p.160.)

         Solness, as his name implies (sol = sun) is more than a middle-aged Norwegian architect of the nineteenth century.  To account for him, we have to account for his name, and how it is linked to the action and imagery of the play.  However 'far out' our investigation takes us, so long as we track down all the play's details as there in the text, our interpretation can claim credibility.  (A defective interpretation is one that finds itself having to ignore much of the textual details to make its claims).  These last four plays have in common the following characteristics:

1. Vastly expanded recollective actions.  The Past now  overwhelms the Present: it is what the Present is all about.  ‘Action’ is subordinated to thought, reflection.  Action usually is a ‘breaking free’.
2. The expansion of  temporal perspectives is accompanied by expansion of spatial perspectives - Nature.
3. In consequence, the characters of these plays take on larger than life aspects.  They are locked in direct archetypal conflict.  Such characters as Hilde Wangel; the Rat Wife; the Borkman family and its history; Irene the walking statue, belong more to a mythic than a real world.

The consciousness of these last plays speaks a visionary imagery directly evoking spiritual forces.:

         In The Master Builder: The supra-realistic elements include invisible helpers and servers, a direct challenge to God on the top of a tower; the skin torn from Solness's wounded chest, like Prometheus's torment; the dead wife chained to the living husband; Hilde as bird of prey; the complicated  architectural symbology, and the sun and light imagery throughout.

         In Little Eyolf a mysterious Rat Virgin (Rat Wife) who has drowned her lover, who lures hordes of rats to their death in the sea, comes and takes away the child Eyolf, who follows her, mesmerized.  And the imagery of the play is of Death as a travelling Companion; of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, of the sea, the stars, the great silence, and so on.  It is a play of powerful and mysterious spirits of Nature.

John Gabriel Borkman is a play about the magic power of the earth's minerals, how the miner's son, Borkman, was  lured by these minerals to commit a crime, who has suffered imprisonment and disgrace and ostracism for years, and who will die seeing his great mineral kingdom come to life as he utters a hymn of love to it.  All through the play is a metallic imagery(the play opens with the sound of metal sleigh bells) and the imagery of almost godlike characters and their conflicts.                    

       When We Dead Awaken, the 'Epilogue'’" completes the Cycle and makes an entity of it".(Ibsen)
In this play, set entirely in the open air, an old sculptor encounters what is in effect a dead woman or a walking statue, Irene: while the sculptor's new wife, Maia, encounters, and runs off with a hunter of bears, Ulfheim . The play is an Act by Act ascent, from ground level, to the mountains, ending on a peak and with an avalanche.]          

Obviously Ibsen, to paraphrase Rilke, is a quite different artist from what one hears.  Not the social reformer, the psychiatrist, the writer of riddling autobiographies, but a very audacious theater poet who is taking his medium as far as it can go.  The Master Builder,  Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken each has its own dominant imagery; tracing this imagery will help us see what the plays are doing..   We will find the dramatic structure gradually reveals another, poetic and imaginative structure.