Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism

by Toril Moi
416pp, Oxford University Press, 25
Ibsen is, as Toril Moi claims, arguably the most important playwright writing
after Shakespeare. She also points out that he has received surprisingly little
critical attention from the analysts of modernism and postmodernism. He is
seen, perhaps, as the last representative of an uncritical "realism", using
ordinary language and "characters" on stages with real furniture. Moi has
written a subtle and brilliant analysis of the plays - both poetic and realist but she has done much more than that. She has redrawn the parameters of the
distinction between realist and "modern", in a surprising and exciting way.
The opposite of "realism", she says, is "idealism", a concept pervasive in 19thcentury thought and feeling, now so alien to our modern minds that we don't
discuss it. She finds it in Schiller's belief in the perfectibility of human nature
and society, in the ultimate unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Idealism is both religious and utopian. It entails the idea of self-sacrifice for a
cause or a true love. It suffuses human art and human behaviour. In
particular, it affects the relations between the sexes. Women are either pure,
loving, virtuous and self-sacrificing, or they are whores, demons and
vampires. Moi looks hard at these slippery platitudes and makes them seem
strange and full of energy.
She shows Ibsen moving steadily from an acceptance of the force of these
ideas to an intricate criticism of their dangers. His uncompromising idealist
hero, Brand, prophet and moralist, sacrifices wife, son, father-in-law and
ultimately himself in his search for a radical new vision of humanity. Brand's
ending is ambiguous - is Brand a saint or a monster? Moi argues that Ibsen in
this play "put idealism on trial", "exploring (but never affirming) the idea that
idealism might be destructive and demoralising". Ibsen did indeed say that
Brand was "myself in my better moments". Peer Gynt, the hero of Ibsen's
other long poetic drama, is a fantasist with no ideals, and proves to be an
onion with nothing at the centre, a button to be remoulded.

The unexpected centre of Moi's book is an analysis of what Ibsen himself saw
as his central work - not his greatest, but the one that explained the others.
This is Emperor and Galilean, a long play that took nine years to write, about
Julian the Apostate, who reverted from Christianity to paganism and tried to
revive the worship of the ancient gods in the Roman empire after Constantine.
It is a play about "war, terrorism, religious fanaticism and religious
persecution". It was written during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian
war. Ibsen wrote in a letter: "The old illusory France has been smashed to
pieces, when finally the new factual Prussia has been smashed to pieces too
then, in one leap, we shall be in an age of becoming [sic]. How the ideas will
then collapse around us ... The concepts need a new content and a new
explanation. Freedom, equality and fraternity are no longer the same things
they were in the days of the blessed guillotine."
Emperor and Galilean is about the death of God, and the death of gods, about
an individual unable to sort out what to believe or to do in an age of violence
and conflicting world-views. Moi says that critics have read Julian's defeat as
the inevitable triumph of Christianity, and claims herself that this is not so this is a play in which scepticism and doubt are central, and in which the
playwright himself has no view. She makes an illuminating comparison with
Nietzsche's strong pessimism in Beyond Good and Evil, and suggests
(convincingly) that Ibsen must have read Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, also
written at this time, with its nihilistic vision of Dionysiac destruction and
Apollonian order. Ibsen's Julian is given to dramatising his changing belief
structures with rites and ceremonies. Another subtle distinction in Moi's book
is between the theatre, which is a closed world an audience may see, but not
enter or change, and "theatricality", which is the characters' capacity for selfpresentation, self-dramatisation, connected in all sorts of ways to the
recurring theme of the "life-lie" people live by, connected in turn to the ideals
they uphold.
"A Doll's House is the first full-blown example of Ibsen's modernism." Moi has
selected a series of plays to illustrate the development of Ibsen's thought and
his theatre. (There are later discussions of The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm,
followed by The Lady from the Sea and brief chapters on When We Dead
Awaken and Hedda Gabler.) She describes contemporary reactions to the

unreconciled ending of A Doll's House, which sets Nora's need to be "first and
foremost a human being" against her roles as "doll" or as "wife and mother",
and offends "society's need for divine ideality, for faith in the idea of the divine
and the beautiful to survive", to quote a Danish review of the first staging. Moi
describes and analyses the scene in which Nora dances the tarantella, which
she says is the woman's self-theatricalisation as a way of avoiding and yet
admitting her guilt towards her husband. The dance is, and should be,
maenadic. The doll becomes a wild woman, with the loose hair of a fallen
woman. In this context Moi quotes Wittgenstein: "The human body is the best
picture of the human soul", and suggests that Nora has appropriated her own
body, which was trained to be a pretty doll for her husband to delight in, to
display the torment of her soul. The watching men do not understand this they applaud as they would a marionette.
Nora is one of a wonderfully varied string of trapped and angry women, driven
to oddity or malice or violence by the imposition of an idealistic strait-jacket
on their bodies and minds. Nora, Hedda, Rebecca West, Hedvig in The Wild
Duck. The men too are trapped in their beliefs, in structures that contain them
as the walls of the stage contain them.
Moi's description of the relations between theatre and theatricality
acknowledges a debt to Stanley Cavell's writings on drama. Both write about
the non-reciprocal relationship between an audience and the actors in a
drama. The audience may see and feel, but is powerless to act or
communicate. The actors are enclosed in the action they are in. This is why
attempts to include the audience in the space of a play are so peculiarly
embarrassing and irritating. In Ibsen's theatre, according to Moi, the
characters endure the drama, which may or may not include "theatrical" selfdramatisation. In A Doll's House, the stage is a house precisely for
dolls and puppets, which is changed by the violence of the
tarantella and Nora's performance-in-a-performance into
something more resembling the dionysiac rite which Nietzsche said
was at the root of all theatre.
Moi is also very good on Ibsen's sets, and how their careful design is part of
the essential form of the whole play. The canvas roof in The Wild Duck, which

divides the attic of imagination from the daily world of poverty and
malfunctioning stoves, is a solid object which needs to be seen. I have always
known instinctively that it is a mistake to play Ibsen's realist-modernist plays
on bare or symbolist stages - chairs and windows and curtains are part of the
physical and mental furniture of the plays as much as hair and skirts and
hands and eyes. Moi indeed argues that Ibsen sets the everyday as a power for
good or evil equal to moral ideals or political hopes. The stage sets are the
imagined form of the everyday, real and unreal, like all realist art.
In When We Dead Awaken, the idealist painter takes his lost model, who was
to be "the noblest, purest and most ideal woman on earth" up a real and
symbolic mountain, where they are swept away, like Brand, the original
implacable idealist, by an avalanche. As Moi says, this closes the circle of
Ibsen's study of idealism. But to call even this play symbolist allegory is
reductive. Ibsen said he had no political or social message, he declined the
honour to have worked "consciously for the cause of women. I am not even
quite clear what the cause of women really is. For me it has appeared to be the
cause of human beings ... My task has been to portray human beings."
There are all sorts of good things in this book. There are illuminating
comparisons with the lost world of dramatic and idealising paintings in the
19th century. There is an appendix that gives us a genuine insight into Ibsen's
singing, knotty, allusive Norwegian, and begins to explain why our heavy,
always somehow ponderous translations, betray him. Most of all, which
cannot be excerpted in a review, there is a steady, nuanced, precise attention
to what is going on in these complicated dramas. It alters our idea both of
Ibsen and of the world of ideas he worked in.
AS Byatt's The Little Black Book of Stories is published by Chatto.