78
PARTISAN REVIEW
The idea of guilt for some sin of the past, a sin, even, of
th~
fathers,
plays a great part in Ibsen. Like many of his characters, he has a secret
in his early life-a poor girl whom he got in trouble and left to fend
for h erself. Hereditary disease, illegitimacy, the death of children haunt
the Ibsen world; they are all in
The Wild Duck .
In the early p lays, the
guilt or the sin is localized ; we know what the protagonist has done, in
the past, which will spring the trap on him. But in the later plays, start–
ing with
R osmersholm,
the guilt has become diffuse, and it is no longer
clear what is the matter. A kind of corny symbolism replaces the specific
fact in the mechanism of the plot-white horses, steeples, trolls, a sailor,
a mermaid, and the sea and a ring. And these symbols, which are only
vague portents, correspond to a vague ache or yearning in the breasts
of the principal characters, who talk about themselves distractedly, as
though they were relating their symptoms in a session of group analysis.
H edda Gabler
is an exception; next to
The Wild Duck,
it is Ibsen's most
successful play. H edda does not discuss herself; the General's daughter is
too haughty for that. Instead, she behaves, and the subject of the play
is visibly present, as it was in
The Doll's House,
as
it
stilI is in
The Wild
Duck.
Her suicide at the end is less convincing than her burning of
the manuscript, and her burning of the manuscript is less convincing
than the transfixing moment in the first act when she pretends to
think that the aunt's new hat, lying on the sofa, is the servant's old
bonnet. But Ibsen is not very good at making big events happen; he is
better at the small shocking event, the psychopathology of everyday life:
H edda and her husband's aunt's hat, Nora, when she nonchalantly
pushes off the sewing on her poor widowed friend, Christine, Hjalmar,
when he talks himself into letting H edwig with her half-blind eyes do
his retouching for him so that he can go off and play hunter with his
father
in
the attic, Hjalmar cutting his father at the Werle soiree,
Hjalmar eating butter obliviously while his hungry daughter watches
him. These are the things one knows oneself to be capable of.
If
the
larger gestures are less credible in Ibsen, this is possibly because of his very
success
in
the realistic convention, which implies a norm of behavior on
the part of its guilty citizens within their box-like living rooms. The
realistic convention requires credibility, that is, a statistical norm; the
audience must believe that the people on the stage are more or less like
themselves, no worse and no better, in short, that they are ordinary,
restrained by cowardice or public opinion from stooping too low or rising
too high. The sense of credibility becomes more and more highly de–
veloped-a sensitized measuring instrument-as a society becomes more
homogeneous and parochial and less stratified in terms of class.
