Seduction and Betrayal (10 page)

The play has Ibsen's usual atmosphere of petty social constriction, the sort of suffocating, entangling environment that unites the despair of place with the despair of feeling. Coldness and the bitterest heats of survival fight miserably with each other. In the background there are dirty politics and cowardly conventionality, but the essential action, the backward and forward movement of the plot, lies in the characters and the competitive struggle between the two women.

When the play opens, the wife, Beata Rosmer, is dead by suicide, and Rosmer is left with the agent of the suicide, Rebecca West. The lovers are now free to take up life in the same spot, Rosmersholm, where all is the same, except that the wife has been removed like a touching but obsolescent piece of furniture. The wife's memory hovers about them, but her lingering is not of the sentimental kind, although the rather cozily set-up mourners at first try to pretend that such is the case. In truth, the dead wife had been the peculiar center of a harsh and demeaning power struggle. “It was like a fight to the death between Beata and me,” Rebecca finally confesses. The play, beginning on the suicide of the wife, proceeds by way of revelations, compromises, and threats to the gradual circumstantial, psychological strangulation of the survivors. Rebecca and Rosmer are free, but they are led by the turns of their escape to seek death, to clasp hands and go the way of the wife, into the rushing waters of the millstream.

The resolution is not quite satisfactory on the plane of probability. The circle is closed too neatly. The lovers' suicide, “imitative,” as it were, is an extreme and unnecessarily corporeal finishing of a drama that is moral and psychological. Also, gross experience tells us that Rosmer and Rebecca will find a way to do as they please. The dead are gone. Whatever advantages the empty space may provide are likely to be swiftly occupied by the living. And yet the triangular struggle between the two women has been so fierce and primitive, the rewards of it finally so futile and empty, that we follow Ibsen right up to the mill bridge, even if we cannot easily concede the plunge into the waters.

Perhaps Parson Rosmer, the object of the two women's struggle, could wish the symbolic cleansing and expiation. He is one of those finicky, unsteady Ibsen men who need, above all, to like themselves. Rebecca West, the complicated heroine, is a different matter. She has been formed by the forces of necessity and will, traits that do not psychologically lend themselves to the suicidal resolution. Still, Rebecca has unusual self-understanding and it is this that ruins her victory over the dead woman. When she, too, goes the way of suicide, the housekeeper speaks the last line: “The dead wife has taken them.”

Yes, the dead wife has taken the living, but only in an oblique sense. Disgust, futility, the final inadequacy of Rosmer are the devastating powers. The psychology of the play is at every point original and disturbing. The relationships are so complicated by guilt and evasiveness, by idealism in the service of personal, hidden gratifications of the ego that the play puzzles. Smoothness and violence mingle strangely. The turns and shifts of consequence are black, unexpected, but true to feeling.

It is Ibsen's genius to place the ruthlessness of women beside the vanity and self-love of men. In a love triangle, brutality on one side and vanity on the other must be present; both are necessary as the conditions, the grounds upon which the battle will be fought. Without the heightened sense of importance a man naturally acquires when he is the object of the possessive determinations of two women, nothing interesting could happen. If he were quickly, carefully to choose one over the other, the dramatic reverberations would be slight, even rather indolent. The triangle demands the cooperation of two in the humiliation of one, along with some period of pretense, suffering, insincerity, or self-delusion. In
Rosmersholm
the husband is unusually dense and mild. He courteously refuses to understand the drama that has exploded around him, to take in the violent sweeps of feeling in himself and in the two women. Rosmer leans as long as he can on the stick of “friendship” and “innocence” to protect himself from his love for Rebecca and his complicity in his wife's suicide.

The triangle in
The Master Builder
is more straightforward than the hesitations and longing of
Rosmersholm
. The aging builder finds himself surrounded by the willful, destructive young Hilda. The girl has attached herself to the distinguished man for a bit of sadistic teasing. Solness, the architect, is tormented, failing, and yet too vain to suspect the dangers of the young girl. He has, up to her entrance, been busy trying to emasculate his younger competitors, and this in itself is always a large, emotional drama for an artist. Solness is, as Shaw says, “a very fascinating man whom nobody, himself least of all, could suspect of having shot his bolt and being already dead.” The architect's wife, Mrs. Solness, is dejection and depression itself, immobilized gloom, supposedly somehow sacrificed to the Moloch ambition. This we are not quite obliged to agree to because Ibsen has not made her appealing enough, not been able to imagine just what an artist's wife, or the wife of a man of great ambition, can do except be jealous, suspicious, and ill.

The victim grows, as a plant grows leaves, the foliage of dejection. Depression is boring, suspicion is deforming, ill health is repetitive. Our sympathies fall away and we can scarcely blame the husband who will naturally, in the gloom, want light. It is interesting that in Ibsen's plays the wives are as likely as the husbands to want the diversion of the young woman who comes into the house. Two is not a perfect number, and the childless, miserable wife fascinated Ibsen. Hilda, in
The Master Builder
, actually occupies the empty nursery on her visit of darkness. It is her role to inspire the declining builder. “Higher and higher!” calls the awful young girl. She waves her white shawl at the giddy architect who has scaled the rafters and he falls to his death.

In
Rosmersholm
, Rebecca has come down from the North. This freezing land of harshness and deprivation leaves its mark on the spirit. There one learns the lessons of life, the fears of poverty and isolation. (In
An Enemy of the People
, Dr. Stockman remembers his span of service in the North with a sense of oppressiveness of life under the conditions there. It is only the strength of moral conviction that allows him to put his present, more hopeful circumstances in jeopardy and perhaps face a return to the cold, soul-shrinking region.) Rebecca is thirty. She is intelligent, emancipated, idealistic. Her youth has both tarnished and hardened her. She is probably the illegitimate daughter of the Dr. West who adopted her but did not offer her any special kindness.

(Freud, in an analysis of
Rosmersholm
, believes that Rebecca West had been the mistress of Dr. West, whom she discovers during the play was her actual father, not merely her adopted one. Therefore she has committed incest with her own father, and her renunciation and suicide are an expiation of this guilt as well as the guilt of her complicity in driving Beata to suicide. Michael Meyer's imposing, thoroughly achieved biography of Ibsen quotes the Freud essay with appreciation. Still, I cannot find critics other than Freud who thought Rebecca West had been the mistress of Dr. West. If this astonishing breach is indeed present in one's mind it will tend to overwhelm all other problems of the play.)

When Rebecca comes to Rosmersholm she is in a dangerous state. She is free — or, rather, adrift. She is immensely needy, looking desperately for some place to land, to live. And what can it mean for her, with her high-mindedness and her threatening need? It means she must have a husband, and soon. What else can she hope for? Again the narrow possibilities for poor, intelligent women in the nineteenth century define most of their choices, stage their drama. They are always looking for a way out, but something worthy, with content either social or artistic, is their hope.

Heaven is not likely to send a desperate, strong-willed woman of thirty an interesting, unmarried man. No, it will send her someone's husband and tell her to dispose of the wife as best she can. Wives accommodate because they invariably have their faults and their glaring lacks. These are transformed into moral issues and the defeat of deficiency becomes something of a crusade. Thus in righteousness is the hurdle vaulted.

The Rosmer family is a solid one, and somehow Rebecca attaches herself to it. Mrs. Rosmer, Beata, becomes fond of her and invites her to settle on the estate. Mrs. Solness, in
The Master Builder
, does not quite rise from gloom to joy at the sight of Hilda with her knapsack and alpenstock, but even she agrees to find a place for her. The torpid life at Rosmersholm and at the villa of the Solness family is such that these additions, naturally electrifying to the husband, are eventful puzzles and renewals to the wives as well. For change, vitality, everyone is willing to take the risk. This, once more, is a measure of the closeness of life in Ibsen's plays, the repetitive frustration of it, the oppressiveness of provincial attitude and society.

At Rosmersholm there is stagnation, but Rebecca soon sees little corners and cracks where inspiration might creep in. She sets about overthrowing what she decides to be, in Shaw's words, “the extinguishing effect” of Mrs. Rosmer. During her residence she calmly works at altering and liberalizing the views of Rosmer, who had previously been a parson and is now struggling with unorthodoxy. Rebecca does not try to brighten the conventional attitudes of Mrs. Rosmer, although there seems every possibility that, with a certain amount of effort, the sun of idealism might have been welcomed there also. The intellectual excitement — a genuine part of Rebecca's nature — has the most stimulating and happy effect on Parson Rosmer. But he is still prudish and needs the blanket of high intentions to cover their growing love, to make it appear to himself “good” rather than “bad.”

Beata Rosmer is sensitive and high-strung. She is well aware of the way things are going, and where they will inevitably end. When the play opens Beata has already committed suicide. She has jumped into the churning waters under the mill bridge. Rosmer and Rebecca have had a year of quiet mourning, and if Rosmer still can't bring himself to walk over the bridge, there is no doubt that he is quite well, very much alive, and not inclined to vex himself with blame for his wife's suicide.

We learn about Beata's life and death gradually, as the play unfolds. In a tangled, small-town tussle over ideas, religion, and politics, the state of mind that led to Beata's self-destruction is gradually revealed. Her suffering had been immensely complicated, made up of jealousy, genuine love for her husband, and an early, numbing sense of defeat and helplessness in the contest with Rebecca. Beata had become so nervous and distraught that the lovers decided her mind had failed and this had been the more or less accepted view of her suicide, although there were those in town who had what everywhere are known as “their own ideas.”

A year has passed since the death and things might have gone along well, except that in a political and theological dispute in the town points are scored against Rosmer by the revealing of a secret suicide letter in which Beata had absolved Rosmer and Rebecca of all blame for her self-destruction. Naturally, you cannot be absolved of something you are not accused or suspected of. Rosmer is forced by the absolution to connect Beata's sufferings with actions of his own. It is at this point that the psychological depth of the play is most moving. In brilliant shifts of feeling, the sadness and waste of the triangle begin to rot the relationship between Rosmer and Rebecca. Rebecca makes an astonishing confession. She acknowledges her ruthless humiliation of the wife. “I wanted to get rid of Beata, one way or another. But I never really imagined it would happen. Every little step I risked, every faltering advance, I seemed to hear something call out within me: ‘No further. Not a step further!'... And yet I could not stop!”

This is the dead center of the play. Rebecca's self-knowledge lifts her far above the selfish teasing of Hilda, but it is worse also because she is older, better, more valuable in every way. She has committed one of Strindberg's “psychic murders,” a horrible one with a real body washed up on the shore. What else could she do? She did it to live. Rebecca's will and necessity crushed Beata. Rosmer, and the possession of him, had become the possession of an important, life-enhancing commodity. The ethic of the struggle had been the business ethic — no ethic at all, except the advantage of profit. The parson is willed to change hands like a corporation, with the old, outmoded group being cast aside and the new liberal management quietly installed. At the opening of the play, we see Rebecca placing flowers about the drawing room, a nicety Beata never cared much for. Rosmer is shifting from the conservative to the liberal side of local issues. Those newly in charge are making changes.

When Beata was still alive she had ceased to be a person for the lovers and had become a mere negative. Things couldn't go forward when she was about, and what a wonderful force the parson might be if it were not for the drag of the past... But this is not at all true. It is self-interest that drives Rebecca and darting, smug self-satisfaction that allows Rosmer to pretend nothing is happening.

As the facts unfold, the rightness and sureness of Ibsen's sense of the contest never falter. First, the lovers deny Beata any participation in their interests and ideas. She is excluded on the grounds of her past dampening effect upon the advance of skeptical thinking within the household. We can imagine they would change the subject when Beata joined them and begin to talk of trivial, tiresome things or fall into bored silence. We are not sure that Beata was unworthy to help along the new day. She was fearful, but then she had sized up the importance of fresh ideas to Rebecca. Rosmer's sexual timidity, his need for innocence did not leave any other path open. Secondly, Rosmer took as proof of his wife's insanity the fact that she had hysterical fits of passion for him, threw herself at him.