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Rosmersholm
In Rosmersholm,
the heroine, the illegitimate Rebecca West, sees herself as an agent
of enlightenment in combat with a world, she believes, of entrenched
traditions, superstitions and social repression. Yet she also is associated
with social and sexual transgression. Her teacher and probably her father,
Dr. West seems to have been her lover - an incest he must have known
about. Her mother, therefore, was an adultress. Her allies in the cause
of the Enlightenment are Peter Mortensgaard, (proprietor of The Beacon)
also is an adulterer; and Ulrik Brendel is a social transgressor who
once had to be chased away from the Rosmer mansion with a horsewhip.
In this play, therefore, enlightenment progress is strongly associated
with sexual rebellion.
The world Rebecca West sought to combat and to conquer in the cause
of enlightenment is a traditional, conservative and Christian one. To
defeat this world Rebecca began to work what seems a kind of pagan 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 pagan witch, she seems to call
up her distinctly louche colleagues, Brendel and Mortensgaard, to lead
the attack on the citadel of orthodoxy, Rosmersholm.
The play sets in opposition two aspects of human civilization mostly
in violent conflict. On the one side is the conservative, conscientious,
civilizing, constraining forces of our civilization - the reservoir
of our spiritual history and our cherished values. But this can also
be a system of oppression, of what Mrs.Alving called 'gengangere' or
ghosts, shutting out the light, preventing change, and repressive of
life impulses. In opposition to this civilizing repression are the forces
of life, the instincts, especially the sexual, which wish to throw off
all constraints. But these contsin forces and energies that could the
traditional fabric of society.
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