SYMBOLIC FORMS OF IMMORTALITY IN MADAME BOVARY, NIELS LYME, AND JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN
FRANCIS ROY CARTLIDGE B.A., University of British Columbia, 1973
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES in the Program of Comparative Literature
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Program Comparative Literature B?XH??SPft of
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January 27 1978 ABSTRACT
This thesis is a study of the ways in which the fear of death, and its
natural consequence, the desire for immortality, is manifested in the major
characters of three post-Romantic works. In each case, the fear of death
is unconscious, and has to "be interpreted from the dreams and illusions of
the characters, which may not appear to have any immediate connection with death or immortality.
In Madame Bovary, the blind man is the symbolic antithesis of Emma's dreams of finding a means of transcendence within the world itself. He is the embodiment of the horrifying vision of biological process that lies at the heart of her flight from reality. The pharmacist, Homais, is also considered to be attempting to establish a symbolic form of immortality
for himself through the glorification of his reputation and his sentimental belief in scientific progress.
In Niels Lyhne, the young hero attempts to free himself from the romantic
influences of his childhood by proclaiming a new philosophy that is based, on atheism. However, his temperamental attachment to the idea of "infinity", and his inability to accept the physical nature of human beings betray his unconscious desire for a state of being in which he will be invulnerable to the forces of aging and death.
In John Gabriel Borkman the three major characters attempt to find a means of denying the inevitability of their approaching deaths. Borkman tries to gain control over the forces of life through the exercise of power and through an identification with rocks and metal that seem to hold the
promise of conferring their immutability onto him. Borkman's wife wants
her son to devote his life to the glorification of the name of Borkman,
that her husband has dishonoured. She hopes that her idealized self-image
will live on"in the "monument" that Erhart will "erect" to the family name.
Ella Rentheim, her sister, also plans to use Erhart for the establishment
of a symbolic form of immortality, by trying to persuade him to adopt her
family name after she has died.
The method of this thesis could be applied to works from any age of
literature, but I have chosen the nineteenth century because of the particular social and intellectual influences that existed in Europe after the Enlightenment'. All the artistic movements of the nineteenth century were conditioned by the legacy of metaphysical uncertainty that the religious
skepticism of the Age of Reason had bequeathed to the future. In these three works, the characters devote the same religious fervour to the worldly objects of their desires as, formerly, man had devoted to God. The unconscious hope in all their attempts is that they will discover a means of being delivered from death. - iv -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
Abstract ii
Epigraph v
Introduction 1
Madame Bovary 7
Interchapter 1 26
Niels Lyhne 32
Interchapter 2 50
John Gabriel Borkman 54
Conclusion 79
Footnotes 83
Bibliography 85 - V •-
Nun gehort aber vor Allem zu den Wunschen des Menschen, wenigstens des Menschen, der seine Wiinsche nicht durch die Naturnothwendigkeit beschrankt, der Wunsch nicht zu sterben, ewig zu leben; ja, dieser Wunsch ist der letzte und hochste Wunsch des Menschen, der Wunsch aller Wiinsche, wie und weil das Leben der Inbegriff aller Guter ist.
Ludwig Feuerbach - 1 -
In Le Bovarysme ^ (1902), Jules Gaultier attempts to define the nature of the romantic impulses that propel the dreams and desires of
Flaubert's tragic heroine. He concludes that she is driven by the desire to become "other than she is"; that the attractiveness of her fantasies derives purely from the fact that they are unreal. He rests his case on the conviction that if Emma were ever to realize her desires, she would reject them because of the reality that they would then assume.
La haine du reel est a vrai dire si forte chez Mme Bovary, qu'elle pourrait la contraindre a repudier son propre reve, s'il venait, par impossible, a prendre lui-meme la forme d'une realite. (p. 32)
A close reading of Madame Bovary does not support this opinion, however. She is happy with Rodolphe and Leon as long as she can make herself believe that her dreams have been actualized, and it is only when the real facts of existence invade her dreams that her fantasies collapse. If she is not perfectly content with Leon, it is because she has never seen him as her ideal lover, and if she is discontent with their apartment in
Rouen, it is because her real dream is to visit a land such as the one that Rodolphe promised to take her to.
Gaultier's thesis implies a randomness in the choice of ideals and illusions. If unreality were the essential quality of the objects of metaphysical desire, then surely any object would be as effective as any other. Emma's desires are a combination of her longing for religious - 2 -
fulfillment, of her attraction to the aristocratic way of life, and of dreams of romantic and sensual experience. These dreams are far from random: her preoccupations are the preoccupations of millions of others.
What is remarkable in her is the way in which these dreams are mixed together. No one fantasy seems to dominate the others. The uniting factor
in all these fantasies is that they seem to contain the promise of transcendence away from life as it is: that love, or acceptance into the aristocracy, or religious experience, will liberate her from the normal rules of. human life.
Gaultier attempts to analyze man's desire to become "what he is not" without spending any time defining what he is. I propose that romantic, metaphysical desire has its origins in a rejection of those specific facts of human existence that define our mortality: we are born, we grow old, and we die.
Traditionally, God was the power through which man could find transcendence (escape from mortality) and his definition (immortal, all- knowing, changeless, all-powerful), is the antithesis of man's fundamental characteristics as a human being. In this sense, God can be seen to be the expression of a wish; he is what man is not, and he seems to have the power of conferring some of his essentially non-mortal attributes upon man.
Man is not attracted to the idea of God because he is essentially unreal, but because of the promise that he represents: the possibility of transcending death. - 3 -
In this thesis I shall put forward the argument that the fear of death, and its natural consequence, the desire of immortality, not only lies at the roots of religious desire, but can also be shown to explain romantic desire. The traditional qualities of God, explained out of existence by the Enlightenment, often reappear in some object that has no manifestly religious content whatsoever, nor is the person who is caught in the grip of his illusion aware that he has attributed these qualities to the object of his desire. This object may be an idealized lover, a faraway place, or a disembodied idea such as progress, "Truth", or "the
Infinite". Whatever form it may take, the object of romantic desire represents the promise of a symbolic victory over life and death: a form of immortality. For the purposes of this thesis, I shall consider any form of behaviour that has as its object a denial or evasion of the inevitability of death to be an attempt to set up a substitute form of immortality.
It may be objected that the term "immortality" is allowed too broad' a connotation here, since it departs so far from the idea of the continued existence of the soul after death. Yet the same objection could be levelled at anyone who has proposed an idea such as "social", "historical", or "cosmological" immortality. The notion that men may live on through their works, "and in the memory of future generations, has been current since the time of the Romans, and is an idea that was particularly attractive _ h -
to the artists of the Romantic period. Goethe's conviction that "the traces of our earthly days can never be erased by time" certainly differs
from the ideal of actual deathlessness that is central to Christian theology. Schiller's view of immortality, whereby the life-force of man unites with the Universal Soul or Mind after death, might justifiably be argued not to be immortality at all, since it would entail the obliteration
of the identity of the individual. For most of us, continuity of identity
is the minimum requirement for a state that we would be willing to call
immortality.
That 'Romanticism was a reaction to, rather than a rejection of, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, is particularly apparent in the pre• occupation of the romantic writers with the conflict between the finite nature of the world and the immortal aspirations of the soul. Blake may have hotly disputed the "truths" that "Reason" proposes, yet the fact that he found it necessary to construct a new cosmological mythology attests to his tacit recognition that after Voltaire, it was no longer possible to conceive of God in the traditional way. Similarly, the attraction of Goethe and Schiller to pantheism was a consequence of a skepticism towards traditional religion that they inherited from the age of Hume, Locke, Bayle, Fontenelle and Voltaire. Wordsworth hoped to find proofs for the immortality of the soul in early childhood recollections rather than in the message of the Gospels, and although Chateaubriand - 5 -
proclaimed himself to be a Christian, his works are remembered for their
evocation of an "infinite" that is far more abstract and personalized than
that contained in the teachings of the Catholic church.
The. attempt to discover a means of alleviating the anxiety that
the thought of death instils in man is common to all cultures and to
every stage of civilization, and is by no means exclusively the concern
\\ of the romantics. Yet the irreverent rationalism of the Enlightenment,
which chose as its targets some of the most enduring and comforting
fictions in our culture, instigated a crisis of metaphysical anxiety that
is probably unequalled in the history of the West. This anxiety can be
detected in every aspect of the romantic movement, and lies at the heart
of the feeling of uneasiness and desperation that typifies the romantic
character.
The three post-:Romantic works I have chosen all contain an appraisal
of romantic characters that shows their illusions to originate in a
rejection of the facts of mortality. The hatred of life may be shared, as
in the case of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, by the author and his character.
Emma is criticized, not for her desire for transcendence, but for her
attempt to satisfy it through the world, rather than through art. Niels
Lyhne seems less capable of accepting the reality, and appreciating the
beauty of the world than Jacobsen, nor does he succeed as a writer.
John Gabriel Borkman is a depiction of a man who attempts to conquer his - 6 -
unconscious fear of death through the acquisition of power, and shows the destructive consequences of the desire not to live in the world.
Ibsen, like Flaubert and Jacobsen, holds on to the idea that a form of immortality is possible to man through art. This is an important part of Ibsen's final statement on his life and work that is contained in
When We Dead Awaken.
In each of the three works, we shall discover a symbolic framework that is tied to the specific illusions of the characters that will allow us to see that their dreams are predicated on a wish for exemption from the process that carries every human being inevitably towards death: an unconscious desire for immortality. - 7 -
Flaubert's novel is primarily remembered, at least among those who have taken care to read it with the sensitivity and intelligence that it deserves, as a remarkable aesthetic achievement. Indeed, the author's long and painstaking dedication to the ideals of perfect and complex symmetry on the one hand, and precise use of heightened language on the other, resulted in his producing an almost tangible aesthetic experience in a work of literature. He felt that his duty as a writer was to evoke, to bring into being, an imaginary circumstance, not so that the reader would understand it to be a reflection of something in the real world, but in order that he would respond to it as an autonomous creation. This technique is similar to that of the Japanese water- colourist, who does not believe that he is describing a branch of cherry-blossom, but that he is creating another branch that will augment the sum total of reality.
"Ce qui me semble beau," Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet,
"ce que je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien, ... un livre ou le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut."1 Although Madame
2
Bovary .might be said to have no plot, and be all but devoid of; action, it cannot claim to be about nothing, nor does Flaubert's use of "a completely objective narrator" leave us with the feeling that the work was written by no one. Throughout the work, we are aware of an intelligent and powerful mind that controls the events and constantly involves the reader's consciousness in appreciation and evaluation. This sympathy and - 8 -
judgment does not extend merely to the language or to the beauty of the
created effect, but even as far as our identifying with the characters
whenever possible, and assessing them as human beings in accordance with
a surprisingly stringent moral framework that emerges as the novel
progresses.
Although Flaubert was forced to defend his book against the charge
of obscenity by arguing that his heroine's death was the result of her
flouting .contemporary morality, many serious critics have asserted that
the work very definitely contains a profound moral lesson. Lamartine
complained in a letter to Flaubert that he considered Emma's "punishment"
rather too severe for the "sins" she had committed , yet at the same time,
he was very effusive in his praise of the "high moral quality" of the
novel.
Certainly it has to be stressed that the work appears to be about
something other than a sequence of very ordinary events that occur in the most typical and uninteresting of settings. Baudelaire was convinced that at the heart of the work was a "psychological mystery", embodied in
Emma, which constituted its "central subject".'4 Not only is there in the book a wealth of realistic depiction of surroundings and the details of human life, but also an acute observation of human actions, and a psychologically convincing account of why these people are acting in the way they do, that is substantiated by the nature of their ambitions, their ideals and their fantasies. - 9 -
The author never directly describes the nature of the disease that
afflicts practically all of his characters, nor do any of these characters
ever reach a meaningful appraisal of their predicament. Yet through a
precise system of imagery and suggestion we are led into acknowledging
a psychological framework that lies beneath the surface, and persists
throughout the work. The symbolic poles of Madame Bovary are the actual
and physical nature of life and death on the one hand, and the
spiritualisation of life and death in the form of psychological evasion
on the other. Stated more simply, the book is about a struggle between
mortality and immortality, in which mortality appears to win the decisive
victory. Whether or not she could ever admit it, Emma is pathologically
afraid of death, and this fear drastically affects her behaviour during
her life, and is even responsible for the nature of her own end.
Emma's sentimental education began with her childhood reading of
Paul ;et Virginie which seemed to her to conjure up a world of beings whose
concerns were fundamentally different from those of other people. When
she was thirteen, she had attended a convent school and had lost herself
in the mystic richness of church symbology that transported her, in
her imagination, to a world far more beautiful than the one she knew. It was at the convent that she became enchanted by the sensuousness inherent
in Catholic mythology which taught that a woman might become the
"betrothed", the "wife" and the "celestial lover" of Christ. She was
passionately devoted to the works of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and to - 10 -
stories about the lives of beautiful and illustrious women of the past.
Yet her romantic reading did not awaken in her a love for the beauties of nature, for she had already contracted an antipathy towards the countryside as a result of her life on her father's farm:
C'etait, pendant la semaine, quelque resume d'Histoire sainte ou les Conferences de l'abbe Frayssinous, et, le dimanche, des passages du Genie du Christianisme, par recreation. Comme elle ecouta, les premieres fois, la lamentation sonore des melancolies romantiques se repetant a tous les echos de la terre et de 1'eternite! Si son enfance se fut ecoulee dans l'arriere-boutique d'un quartier marchand, elle se serait peut-etre ouverte alors aux envahissements lyriques de la nature, que, d'ordinaire., ne nous arrivent que par la traduction des ecrivains. Mais elle connaissait trop la campagne; elle savait le belement des troupeaux, les laitages, les charrues. (p. 71)
The life at les Bertaux, with its drudgery and its proximity to the eternal cycle of birth, life and death is insufferable to Emma, but we do not get any real insight into her feelings at this early stage.
Until Charles has come to know Emma as much as he ever will, the narrative follows his consciousness and remains primarily his story.
Yet at the ball, after Charles has settled into a state of grateful worship of his wife, and Emma is already feeling dissatisfied with her husband, the memory of her life at the farm breaks rudely through her illusions of acceptance into the aristocratic world: - 11 -
Un domestique monta sur une chaise et cassa deux vitres; au bruit des eclats de verre, Mme. Bovary tourna la tete et apergut dans le jardin, contre les barreaux, des faces de paysans qui regardaient. Alors le souvenir des Bertaux lui arriva. Elle revit la ferme, la mare bourbeuse, son pere en blouse sous les v ponniers, et elle se revit elle-meme, comme autrefois, ecremant avec son doigt les terrines de lait dans la laiterie. Mais, aux fulgurations de l'heure presente, sa vie passee, si nette jusqu'alors, s'evanouissait tout entiere, et elle doutait presque de l'avois X vecue. Elle etait la; puis, autour du bai, il n'y avait plus que de 1'ombre, etalee sur tout le reste. (pp. 85 - 86)
Emma's dreams of discovering a means of cutting herself off from her past have been interrupted by the unexpected appearance of people who belong to the world that she is trying to leave behind. Her attempt to dissociate herself from her peasant background is the outward mani• festation of an unconscious desire to establish a discontinuity between herself and ordinary human beings, in order to fulfil a profound wish that her ultimate fate will not be the same as theirs.
She must not admit to herself that these memories are real, basic.
They were just a dream. But in many ways she still has very much in common with the peasants who are gaping in outside the windows. Although the Viscount invites her to the waltz, she does not know how to dance.
Her childlike and ingenuous absorption with the smallest details of her surroundings resembles the dumb awe of the country-folk from whom she wishes to dissociate herself. - 12 -
She is impressed by every gesture of these aristocratic creatures; by their nonchalance, their seeming invulnerability to the influences of ordinary life, even by their cruelty. There does not seem to be any point of resemblance between these aristocrats and ordinary human beings, and her embarassment at having to attend the ball with her husband, who is daily becoming more banal and less attractive to her, underlines her deep desire to break free from the limitations of ordinary experience
Although she insists to herself that this ball is real, her actual state of mind is betrayed by the mental torpor that seizes her when she dances with the handsome nobleman. She is so overwhelmed by the novelty of the sensations that are flooding through her that she becomes distanced from her surroundings, and totally confused and disoriented, she has to be led back to her chair.
Emma is not a true participant in the ball, for she is in the positi of someone who is seeking "proofs" in her present situation that the idealised world of her fantasies, which she has gleaned from her books, actually exists.
Une dame, pres d'elle, laissa tomber son eVentail. Un danseur passait. —Que vous seriez bon, monsieur, dit la dame, de vouloir bien ramasser mon eventail, qui est derriere ce canape'. Le monsieur s'inclina, et, pendant qu'il faisait le mouvement d'etendre son bras, Emma vit la main de la jeune dame qui jetait dans son chapeau quelquechose de blanc, plie en triangle. Le monsieur ramenant 1'eventail, l'offrit a la dame, respectueusement; elle le remercia d'un signe de tete et se mit a respirer son bouquet. (p. 86) - 13 -
She is determined that the memories of her childhood, and her daily- existence at Tostes will not be synonymous in any way with the new identity that she is struggling to claim for herself. The part of herself that she hopes to lose is closely identified with the world, and what she strives for is symbolised by objects and memories that seem to hold the promise of an existence whose very essence will be fundamentally different from anything that she has known. She is not so naive either, as to believe that the world to which she seeks entrance, which she has pieced together from her books, is synonymous with the world of high society, but she cannot help feeling that her ideal country is somehow accessible through it. So within her tedious existence she affords an almost religious significance to. the objects and memories that might provide a key to this fantastic world, a cigar box, a dance with a handsome nobleman.
... elle serra pieusement dans la commode sa belle toilette et jusqu'a ses souliers de satin, dont la semelle s'etait jaunie a la. cire glissante du parquet. Son coeur etait comme eux; au frottement de la richesse, il s'etait place dessus quelque chose qui ne s'effacerait pas. (p. 89)
We have already seen that Emma never sentimentalised the life of the countryside, for she had witnessed it every day at les Bertaux, where the crude facts of existence were too close to the surface not to disturb her heart with its dreams of ivory castles and fountains full of jewels. - 14 -
Rodolphe would come and take her to this fabulous and sensual land where music and happiness reigned forever; a fantastic world, yet possible, thanks to the fact that Emma existed always at the level of imagination, to which reason is a very infrequent visitor.
Au galop de quatre chevaux, elle etait emportee depuis huit jours vers un pays nouveau, d'ou ils ne reviendraient plus. Ils allaient, ils allaient, les bras enlaces, sans parler. Souvent, du haut d'une montagne, ils apercevaient tout a coup quelque cite splendide avec des. domes, des ponts, des navires, des forets de citronniers et des cathedrales de marbre blane, dont les clochers aigus portaient des nids de cigognes. On marchait au pas a cause des grandes dalles, et il y avait par terre des bouquets de fleurs que vous offraient des femes habillees en corset rouge. On entendait sonner des cloches, hennir des mulets, avec le murmure des guitares et le bruit des fontaines, dont la vapeur s'envolant rafraxchissait des tas de fruits, disposes en pyramides au pied des statues pales, qui souriaient sous les jets d'eau. (p. 223)
Rodolphe, who in Emma's mind has become a strange mixture of Walter
Scott hero and wealthy aristocrat lover who knows all the secrets of court-life (and hence must be familiar with the location of heaven-on- earth, the country of her dreams) fails to appear on the day of elopement.
Although Emma is shattered by this turn of events, which plunges her into a strange malady in which her life is despaired of, she is at least saved the disillusionment of discovering that no such country exists.
It is of crucial importance, I believe, that the reader understands that
Emma not only likes to believe in such a foreign land, but that she actually thinks that it does exist somewhere on the face of this earth. - 15- -
Emma is not satisfied to devote herself to a pious existence in the
service of God, with the promise of paradise and eternity at the end of
her days. She belongs to that race of people, who, as Sartre says,
"veulent exister tout a la fois et tout de suite"^, desiring everything
from . every moment.
Only when Emma reaches the climax of her strange illness, and it is
feared that she will die, does she turn her desires back to God. In her
fever, she is visited by an hallucination of celestial joy in which she
yearns to be received once more by Christ, as though by a lover she has
neglected, while God the Father, throned in majesty, sends down his messengers to carry her off to immortal bliss.
Alors elle laissa retomber sa tete, croyant entendre dans les espaces le chant des harpes seraphiques et apercevoir en un ciel d'azur, sur un trone d'or, au milieu des saints tenant des palmes vertes, Dieu le Pere tout eclatant de majeste, et qui d'un signe faisait descendre vers la terre des anges aux ailes de flamme pour l'emporter dans leurs bras. Cette vision splendide demeura dans sa memoire comme la chose la plus belle qu'il fut possible de rever. (p. 239)
It is this memory that leads her to poison herself after her final disappointment with life, in the hope that Christ will bring about the miracle that she has vainly sought in the world of reality: a state of transcendance in which she will find a reprieve from the condition of mortality. But although she tries to devote herself for a while to a - 16 -
life of religious piety after her recovery, she later repeats her attempt
to find a worldly realisation of her immortal longings in her liaison with
Leon.
Emma Bovary possesses, in almost limitless quantities, all that is
necessary to ensure that her heart will be finally, utterly shattered.
All her dreams and desires are directed towards one end only: to find a means of dissociating herself from all that is commonplace and sordid
in life, in order that she may experience herself as a being perhaps with more similarities to the fabled qualities of the gods than to ordinary mankind. This radical view of "Bovarysme" can be substantiated, I think, by a study of Flaubert's use of thematic juxtaposition within the story.
Just as Emma's longing for an earthly state of immortality is represented throughout the book by an idealised and fantastical picture of possible reality, so Flaubert symbolises the phantom of mortality in a way which characterises it as painful, ugly, decaying and obscene. This is not to say that the author's view of life is necessarily to be identified with these images from the "real world", but that through them, we are able to identify the horror of life that is the profound cause of Emma's flight into fantasy.
As Emma and Rodolphe begin their love affair, the author provides a tawdry backcloth of the agricultural fair. Rodolphe's promises of love are echoed by the empty phrases of civic officials promising a glorious future for the world. As the two lovers.move closer together, a prize for a superior quality of manure is announced in the market place. - IT -
"Ensemble de bonnes cultures! cria le president. —Tantot, par exemple, quand je suis venu chez vous ... "A "M. Bizet, de Quincampoix." —Savais-je que je vous accompagnerais? "Soixante et dix francs!" —Cent fois meme, j'ai voulu partir, et je vous ai suivie, je suis rest!. "Fumiers." (p. 178)
Emma's longing to be carried off into a magical world by a superhuman hero is accompanied by an image from the world of biological reality that not only furnishes an ironic comment on the nature of her dreams, but is an exact symbol of the hated aspects of life that makes those dreams so attractive.
The appearance of the blind man in the novel occurs at the point at which Emma is most involved in the events which will bring about her destruction. Although she is at the height of her relationship with Leon, she is already hopelessly entangled with her debts to Lheureux. The blind man is her angel of death, just as he is a living symbol of human decay and ugliness. The picture that he presents is vividly obscene, for here is a blatant expression of everything, that "decent" bourgeois society would most like to deny the existence of in the world. The effect that he has on Emma is especially profound, and the very sound of his voice carries her away to "les espaces d'une melancolie sans bornes".(p. 248).
There is something about the description of the blind man's face that somehow recalls the description of the schoolboy Charles' hat in the opening pages of the book. - 18 -
C'etait une de ces coiffeurs d'ordre composite, ou l'on retrouve les elements du "bonnet a poll, du chapska, du chapeau rond, de la casquette de loutre de du bonnet de coton, une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d'expression comme le visage d'un imbecile. (p. 38)
This hopeless object, so full of contradictions, is presented as a
symbol of ludicrous pretentiousness and chaos, and provides the perfect
symbol for the wholly fantastical manner in which Emma's dreams have
been patched together from the assorted readings of her girlhood, from
her religious education, from the theatre, and from advertisements in
women's journals. The truth that these fantasies are intended to conceal
is the subjection of all living things to the laws of biological process,
whose ultimate symbol is death. When the blind man pulls off his old beaver hat, his face is revealed as a huge, decaying, open wound. He
has revealed the disgusting secret which lies behind all pretense and
evasion.
quand il le retirait, il decouvrait a la place des paupieres, deux orbites beantes tout ensanglantees. La chair s'effiloquait par lambeaux rouges; et il en coulait des liquides qui se figeaient en gales vertes jusqu'au nez, dont les narines noires reniflaient convulsivement. Pour vous parler, il se renversait la tete avec un rire idiot;— alors ses prunelles bleuatres, roulant d'un mouvement continue, allaient se cogner, vers les tempes, sur le bord de la plaie vive. (p. 291)
Just as the trappings of aristocratic life are, in a sense, a complex device to hide from the aristocrat his basic similarity of being to that - 19 -
of the peasant, so are Emma's dreams above all threatened by the presence of the blind man. Her dreams of a state in which she will be invulnerable to the forces which afflict ordinary mortals have confronted the very phenomenon that gave them impetus. Her longing for an ideal spiritual and sensual life has at last found its own special nemesis: a brutal and depraved vision of the flesh.
Homais is, to a large extent, a parallel character to Emma within the novel. He too seeks immortality, but at least his symbol of this state is attainable in the world. He is content to seek recognition in the world of men and affairs, whereas Emma seems only to be satisfied if she can receive a form of recognition that no human being is capable of bestowing. Perhaps she seeks the recognition of the gods. The pharmacist succeeds in getting his Croix d'Honneur, but the doctor's wife will never find what she is seeking in this world. Homais shares Emma's disgust for the inescapable proofs of mortality provided by the sick and the poor, yet his reaction to the situation is fundamentally "worldly". Homais sees science as a panacea for all social ills., which will remove all ugliness and poverty from the face of the earth. He sees in science a quick and miraculous solution to everything in the world that offends his sensibilities. Emma feels that things must surely get better as time progresses, and can only imagine that things must improve with a mere change of scenery. Life, for her, is always just around the corner. - 20 -
The pharmacist shares this romantic hope, yet for him it is always
the scientific Utopia that is forever imminent, just beyond the horizon.
Homais' unconscious fear of death is the force that drives him to act as
though the human condition were an accidental malady that will one day be "cured" by the miracle of modern medicine. Yet as Emma's fantasies
result in tragedy, so do Homais' ludicrous projects meet with hopeless
failure, and added misery for. their unfortunate recipients.
The fiasco of Hippolyte's operation is the result of Homais' desire
to thrust his fantastic notion of science onto the world. His reaction
to the blind man is to suggest a preposterous cure of a "phlogiston
salve" and careful dieting. When he discovers some time later that his
cure was useless, he is forced to display his real hatred of the sick by
instigating a campaign against the blind man with the intention of having him forever hidden from his, and society's, eyes, in an asylum. The
continued presence of the blind man threatens Homais with the possibility
of admitting to himself that he is subject to the same laws of physical process that are visibly ravaging the poor beggar.
Sommes-nous encore a ces temps monstreux du moyen age, ou il etait permis aux vagabonds d'etaler par nos places publiques la lepre et les scrofules qu'ils avaient rapportees de la croisade? (p. 36l)
Flaubert makes a direct judgment on such men as Homais at this point in the narrative, when he comments that the pharmacist's action "decelait la profondeur. de son intelligence et la sceleratesse de sa vanite" (p. 36l). - 21 -
Homais is a self-styled enemy of the church, and lives in the illusion
that he is carrying the spirit of Voltaire into the nineteenth century.
When he finds himself in the company of the village, priest, when Emma
is dying, he compares the clergy to ravens who are attracted by the smell
of death. Again, Flaubert breaks the silence of his professed ideal
of "impersonal narration", and gives us a hint of his own convictions
about the origins of Homais' hatred of priestsT
la vue d'un ecclesiastique lui etait personnellement desagreable, car la soutane le faisait rever au linceul, et il execrait l'une un peu par epouvante de 1'autre. (p. 3^2)
The author never passes any similar judgement on his heroine, but she,
unlike Homais, dies as a consequence of her "sins". Charles' death, and
Berthe's being sent to work in chiId-labour, are also indirectly
attributable to Emma's actions.
Apart from the importance of realising the specific nature of Emma's
fantasies, it is also important to note that Flaubert does allow her a few periods of happiness in his novel. As long as she believes that her
contradictory notions have momentarily found realisation in the world,
and that her lover is the impossible hero of her dreams, she is totally, blissfully happy, and she gives herself completely, body and soul, to
him. - 22 -
When she is in love with Rodolphe:
Jamais Mme Bovary ne fut aussi belle qu'a cette epoque; elle avait cette indefinissable beaute qui resulte de la joie, de 1'enthousiasme, du succes, et qui n'est que l'harmonie du temperament avec les circonstances. Ses convoitises, ses chagrins, 1'experience du plaisir et ses illusions toujours jeunes, comme font aux fleurs le fumier, la pluie, les vents et le soleil, l'avaient par gradation developpee, et elle s'epanouissait enfin dans la plenitude de sa nature. (p. 222)
When she is in love with Leon:
Ce furent trois jours pleins, exquis, splendides, une vraie lune de miel.
Ils etaient a 1'Hotel de Boulogne, sur le port. Et ils vivaient la, volets fermes, portes closes, avec des fleurs par terre et .des sirops a la glace, qu'on leur apportait des le matin. (p. 280)
But these periods of happiness are always short-lived. Her affections for her men cease completely the moment that she discovers that there are limits on the capabilities that she imagines that they possess. As soon as she discovers that Leon will not steal for her, she hurls him completely out of her heart. But the idea that he will steal for her is an invention of her own, completely false, yet wholly necessary to the satisfaction of her enormous desires.
Perhaps there is an unconscious connection between Emma's fear of death and,her choice of a doctor for a husband, for it is after the catastrophe of the operation on Hippolyte's leg that she loses her last - 23 -
atom of respect for him. She can no longer imagine that her husband
possesses any superhuman powers, and she feels betrayed by the revelation.
Comment done avait-elle fait (elle qui etait si intelligente.') pour se meprendre encore une fois? Du reste, par quelle deplorable manie avoir ainsi abime son existence en sacrifices continuels? Elle se rappela tous ses instincts de luxe, toutes les privations de son ame, les bassesses du mariage, du menage, ses reves tombant dans la boue comme des hirondelles blessees, tout ce qu'elle avait desire, tout ce qu'elle s'etait refuse, tout ce qu'elle aurait pu avoir.' Et pourquoi, pourquoi? (p. 213)
Elle se repentait, comme d'un crime, de sa vertu passee, et ce qui en restait encore s'ecroulait sous les coups furieux de son orgueil. (p. 213)
When she discovers that Rodolphe does not have enough ready money to
give her the three thousand francs, she feels completely betrayed, for
she needs a man with unlimited wealth in order to transport her to paradise, to save her from death. She has installed a wall of fantasy between herself and the world so that she may not see its reality, a wall which has the temporary power to soothe her, but when it is finally and inevitably destroyed, that reality overwhelms her, and carries her off into anguish and despair.
Emma never criticises herself, never attempts to analyse her desires, for to split up her composite and impossible demands into recognisable and commonplace desires would entail her simultaneously recognising herself as an ordinary human being subject to the same physical laws as - 24 -
everyone else. Love, art, religion and sex are for her mingled together
in a fantastic manner, and she makes no real distinction between them.
She wants to make a god out of Rodolphe and a lover out of Jesus. She wants to run headlong into the arms of a hero who is infinitely brave
and compassionate, able to do any deed for her, and able to weep rivers of tears when necessary; to go to him shouting, "Enleve-moi, emmene-moi, partons! A toi, a toil toutes mes ardeurs et tous mes reves!" (p.. 251)
Emma's profound fear of life demands that her lover be some kind of saviour, in whose arms she will find the miracle that her soul secretly yearns for: a reprieve from the human condition.. Although Homais finally gets his medal, Emma will never find "un etre, fort et beau, une nature valeureuse, pleine a la fois d'exaltation de de raffinements, un coeur de poete sous une forme d'ange, lyre aux cordes d'airain, sonnant vers le ciel des epithalames elegaiques ..." (p. 306)
When she finally sees no way out of the horrid web of debt and lies that she has spun, Emma decides to commit suicide. Yet her dreams about the actual nature of her dying are as far removed from the reality of death, as her dreams about paradise on earth are from the world itself.
Tout et elle-meme lui etaient insupportables. Elle aurait voulu, s'echappant comme un oiseau, aller se rajeunir quelque part, bien loin, dans les espaces immacules. (p. 271)
Similarly, the means that she chooses to provide herself with this romantic death is as unsuited to her purpose as it could possibly be. - 25 -
Her innocent choice of arsenic as the agent of a painless and dreamlike
departure is the final clash in the novel between Emma's view of the world
and the actual facts of existence. Her death is unbearably long,
horribly painful, and very ugly. All her pretences have flown away, and
she is transformed into the incarnation of the spectre of hideous mortality,
that she had spent her life trying to escape. As she lies dying, she
hears the blind man's song drift in through the window.
II souffla bien fort ce jour-la, Et le jupon court s'envola.' (p. 303)
The song is a profane reference to the fleshly realities that pretty young girls' clothing is intended to conceal. At the moment of her death,
Emma has recognized the blind man as the symbolic menace to her illusions of immortality. - 26 -
In the novel we have just studied, the fear of death that propels the main character is not made explicit in the narrative, but has to be
inferred from the nature of her dreams, ideals, and illusions. Emma's
fear of death is wholly unconscious, and there is very little evidence, within the book or elsewhere, that Flaubert intended us to conclude that his heroine's fate is the result of anything more than a naive attempt to break away from the suffocating tedium of her bourgeois existence.
The "psychologically convincing account" that I claim to be contained in the work is revealed through an interpretation of surface signs that point toward a concealed structure in the text. I do not think it presumptuous to assert that Flaubert was hardly more aware of the profound causes of his heroine's fate than she was herself, and it seems that the only hypothesis that we can justifiably derive from the surface narrative is the one that Gaultier offers in Le_ Bovarysme:
II semble en effet parfois que la fausse conception qu'elle prend d'elle-meme et des choses suffise a causer son aversion pour toute realite.^-
Yet in Madame Bovary, Flaubert at least offers us a portrait of the .
"reality" that Gaultier fails to describe in his account of the work, and it is in the manner of vits~'depictiomthat we are able to find the clue to the unconscious causes of Emma's actions, and perhaps, to
Flaubert's own antipathy towards everyday reality.
In order to clarify my claim that Flaubert provides us with the means - 27 -
to arrive at the origins of Emma's fantasies without being aware that he
is doing so, I find it helpful to refer the reader to a distinction
employed by the literary theorist, Rene Girard.
In his brilliant analysis of metaphysical desire, Mensonge Romantique
et Verite Romanesque , Girard divides the authors whose works demonstrate the "mechanics" of desire into two categories: the romantique (romantic), and the romanesque (novelistic). The romantique authors are those whose works show the mechanism of desire and illusion, yet who remain unaware of this, since their identification with their characters' desires is too close. From this point of view, Chateaubriand's Rene can be said to be romantique, since although we are able to deduce the genesis and development of the hero's dreams and desires from information that is inherent in the text, his dreams, for the most part, seem to be synonymous with those of the author. In contrast to Rene, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir is clearly romanesque, since the author demonstrates the laws governing the formation of his hero's ambitions in accordance with a scheme that differs markedly from Julien's way of thinking about himself. Insofar as Flaubert's novel has led me to a view of his characters' actions that seems to be more psychologically revealing than his own, I think I can include him among the authors who, for the purposes of this thesis, I shall call romantique.
Flaubert's novel can be considered an example of psychological realism in the sense that he observes his heroine's thoughts with the same - 28 -
painstaking care that he devotes to her actions. Yet he is not a
"psychologist" in the same way as Stendhal or Dostoievsky, nor does he
seem to care to discover the underlying forces in human behaviour. Gaultier is himself aware of the seeming contradiction in discovering a "psychological law" in the work of an artist like Flaubert, and claims to have based his own ideas on what he called an "artistic intuition" that he locates in
Madame Bovary.
Flaubert fut, dans toute la force du terme, un artiste. II faut done se garder de penser qu'il ait ecrit ses livres dans le but de demontrer 1'exactitude d'une loi psychologique et de la formuler. II faut garder de croire qu'on lui prete ici cette intention. Aucun souci sans doute ne fut plus eloigne de son esprit et son parti pris d'art pur, excluant, comme
subalterne, toute preoccupation morale ou; , scientifique, .est une garantie de son indifference a cet egard.3
Like Gaultier, I owe Flaubert a tribute of thanks for the fact that his novel seems to have been, almost against his wishes, "about" something.
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert's vision of mortality is communicated to us by a recurrent pattern of imagery that has provided me with the key to an understanding of the deeper causes of his characters' actions.
In Niels Lyhne (l880), the preoccupation with death is manifested in an explicit form in the narrative, and is linked by the author to the formation of the hero's dreams and ambitions. The novel occupies a middle position, both thematically and chronologically, between the other - 29 -
two works studied in this thesis, and Jacobsen's treatment of Niels'
character balances perfectly between Flaubert's-romantique portrayal of
Madame Bovary and Ibsen's wholly romanesque handling of John Gabriel Borkman.
Like his hero, Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-85) was a writer dedicated to the ideal of atheism. Unlike Niels, however, Jacobsen was successful as an author, and consistent in his atheistic beliefs. His decision to devote himself entirely to art came comparatively late in his short life, and his first novella, Mogens. (l872), was followed by his translation of
Darwin's Origin of the Species into Danish. While he was a student of philosophy and botany he was involved, for a while, with the liberal and radical movements in Copenhagen, and it is probable that he at that time became acquainted with the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach.
Feuerbach was foremost among the few thinkers in the history of the
West who have insisted on a causal link between man's fear of death and his desire for immortality. Indeed, Feuerbach's whole philosophy is founded on the belief that the "invention" of the Christian God was a direct consequence of the fear of death.
in der Religion sucht der Mensch zugleich die Mittel gegen das, wovon er sich abhangig fiihlt. So ist das Mittel gegen den Tod der Unsterblichkeitsglaube ^
(in religion man looks for defenses against what he feels dependent on. Thus his defense against death is the belief in immortality.)5 - 30 -
In Das Wesen des Christenthums (l84l), Feuerbach argues that God is
a wholly anthropological concept; that for centuries man has projected
his best qualities, love, charity, understanding, creativity, onto an
illusory external being in the vain hope that this being will confer on
him his most cherished hope: freedom from the condition of mortality.
The result of this, Feuerbach claims, is that man's conception of himself
has become impoverished. He devotes much of his book to proofs of the
non-existence of God, and concludes that since man's desire for immortality
can never be fulfilled, he must turn to a new "religion" which celebrates the finite nature of all things in nature:
der Religion, in wiefern sie nichts Anderes ausdruckt, als das Gefuhl der Endlichkeit und Abhangigkeit des Menschen von der Natur.^
(the religion that expresses nothing other than man's feeling of finiteness and dependency on nature.)T
Feuerbach's enthusiasm is definitely echoed by Niels Lyhne's claims
for the future of atheism in Jacobsen's novel, yet the strain that is
consistently missing from Niels' apostrophes is the emphasis that
Feuerbach places on the idea of finiteness.
We shall see in the following chapter that Niels consistently dreams that a sort of infinite expansion of the spirit will result from man's freeing himself from romantic and religious influences; that the new doctrine of "realism" will confer "boundless" possibilities on those who - 31 -
believe in it. Like Emma Bovary, Niels' dreams of becoming, to use
Gaultier's phrase, "other than he is", are founded on the desire to transcend the limits of human existence.
Jacobsen portrays his hero as a young man torn between his romantic temperament, that has its roots in the past, and his atheistic and artistic convictions that have as their object the moulding of a new world for the future. The part of Niels that unconsciously yearns for immortality - the Romantic "infinite" - is symbolized by his allegiance to his mother, Bartholine Blid, a woman who so closely resembles Emma
Bovary that we cannot avoid the thought that Jacobsen intentionally based her on Flaubert's heroine.
Niels' temperamental allegiance to the past stands as an obstacle between himself and his ideal of the future in the same way that his unconscious desires frustrate the realization of his conscious ambitions.
If the natural outcome of the fear of death is the desire for immortality, then the natural consequence of an unconscious fear of death is that the individual will struggle, again unconsciously, to find an object to fulfill his desire for immortality. Feuerbach seems to have believed that it would be sufficient for men to reject the idea of God for them to be forever freed from the illusion that he might escape death. He did not suspect that this desire might be so firmly rooted in a part of our consciousness of which we are not aware that the quest for immortality might still be symbolically enacted in the life of a man who fervently bell himself to be an atheist. Niels Lyhne is the story of such a man. - 32 -
Jacobsen's novel ends with his youthful hero's dying "the difficult
death" after being wounded in battle in the service of his country. He
graciously refuses Dr. Hjerrild's offer to bring him a priest, choosing
to meet his end defiantly, without the illusory comforts afforded by the
rites of the church. He has died according to his own vision of an
atheistic ideal, the ideal that he had only falteringly obeyed during his
life.
After the death of his mother, Niels had met Hjerrild in a cafe in
Copenhagen on Christmas Eve. Neither Hjerrild nor Niels have any
remaining relatives, no link with the past that can give the yearly
ritual any personal meaning. In a sudden fit of enthusiasm, perhaps
born of desperation, Niels relates to his friend his dream of a shining
future for mankind, a new age in which humanity will be at last freed from
the tyranny of religion. In his fantasy Niels imagines that ultimate meaning will revert to the human race itself, and that this Earth will
be seen to be the Heaven that men have believed to exist beyond life.
Hjerrild admires Niels' enthusiasm for his ideal, yet he cannot
help remarking the irony in the spectacle of a young man's near-religious
fanaticism brought to the service of atheism:
Og hvor i al Verden skal han blive fanatisk for noget Negativt? Fanatisk for den Ide, at der ingen Gud er til! - og uden Fanatisme, ingen Sejr,.. Troen paa en styrende, dSmmende Gud det er Mennesliehedens sidste store Illusion, og hvad saa, naar den har tabt den? Saa er den bleven klogere; men rigere, lykkeligere? Jeg ser det ikke. (pp. 149-150) - 33 -
(And how in the world can he get fanatic about a negation? Fanatic for the idea that there is no God.1 - But without fanaticism there is no victory ... The belief in a God who rules everything is humanity's last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can't see it.) [pp. 144-1451
Niels replies by sketching out the anticipated progress of his ideal.
He imagines a great battle of faith lasting through many generations, and himself to be one of the spiritual ancestors of the atheistic legions of tomorrow. His fervour is religious., yet it aims for the overthrow of religion. His ideal is a romantic one, yet it is to be fought for in the name of "life as it is". Considering these contradictions in Niels' behaviour, Hjerrild very shrewdly dubs his young friend's cause,
"pietistical atheism".
Georg Brandes called Niels Lyhne "a strange anachronism" (en underlig
Anachronisme)\ and Niels is himself haunted by the feeling that he was born out of this time:
Undertiden syntes det ham, han var fodt et halvt Aarhundrede for sent, sommetider igen ogsaa, at han var kommet alt for tidligt. Talentet nos ham stod med sin Rod i noget Forbigangent og havde kun Liv i det, kunde ikke drage Naering af hans Meninger, hans Overbevisning, hans Sympatier, kunde ikke tage det pp i sig og give det Form. (pp. 236 - 237)
(Sometimes it seemed to him that he had been born half a century too late, sometimes that he had come altogether too early. His talent was rooted in some• thing of the past; it could not draw nourishment from his opinions, his convictions, and his sympathies, could not absorb them and give them form.) Cp. 2191 - 34 -
Niels' mother had thoroughly indoctrinated her son into her romanti notion of life, yet it was also she who had first communicated to him the hopelessness of seeking the objects of fancy in this world. Like
Emma Bovary, Bartholine Blid had first believed the magical reality of the romantic writers to exist somewhere on the face of this Earth, and when the facts of experience contradict her longings, she feels cheated and betrayed. Even when Niels takes her to Clarens in Switzerland, to the actual location described by her "beloved Rousseau, she does not recognize the beauty of the setting as having any relationship to the poetic evocations of her books. Everything is too definite, too specifi to match the ethereal texture of her dreams. Her profound desire for a state of being in which she will find a reprieve from the condition of mortality is frustrated by the fact that the trees and water and rocks of Switzerland are fundamentally the same as those she ha.d known in
Denmark. Her deepest need is to cross a magical threshold into a world that is wholly discontinuous with the world of reality. Nor is she satisfied with dreaming, for she demands the impossible: the direct apprehension of the world of unreality existing in the real world. Only for a few fleeting minutes does she glimpse a reflection of her longings
Da var det, naar gult belyste Aftentaager skjulte de fjaerne Jurabjerge, og Soen, rod som et Kobberspejl, med gyldne Flammer tunget ind i Solrodtsgloden, syntes gaa sammen med Himmelskaeret til et stort, lysende Uendelighedshav, da var det en enkelt Gang imellem, som om Laengslen forstummed og Sjaelen havde fundet Landet, som den sogte. (p. 119) - 35 -
(Then, when the bright yellow mists of evening veiled the distant Jura Mountains, and the lake, like a copper mirror from which tongues of golden flame shot into the red sunset glow, seemed to melt with the sky into one vast, shining infinity, - then it would seem, once in a great while, as though the longing were silenced, and the soul had found the land it sought.) Cpp. 118 - 1193
When she is unable, finally, to find her miraculous heaven-on-earth, she begins to look forward to death in the hope that she will find the land she is seeking beyond the grave. Like Werther, she is the possessor of a soul that cannot endure the idea of limitation, and she sees death as the instrument that will release her from the world of finite reality. Yet death is the very condition that defines the limited nature of human existence, and her unconscious fear of death, whose outward manifestation is her desire for transcendence, is the. force that lies at the heart of her profound fear of life.
Like his mother, Niels has tried to turn his back on his dreams, yet he can never rid himself of the constant fascination with fantasies that have nothing to do with the world as he actually perceives it. His secret longing for transcendence cannot be satisfied by the obstinate particularity of the things of the world, which refuse to mould them• selves according to his desires. Like Emma Bovary, like Homais, like his mother, he feels that the realization of his dreams is forever imminent; that "life" is always "just around the corner". He is often filled with exultation at the thought of some vaguely-conceived artistic - 36 -
project, but his purely emotional convictions rarely come to anything, and soon he finds himself immersed once more in his reveries:
Niels Lyhne var traet; disse idelige Tillob til et Spring, der aldrig blev sprunget, havde mattet ham, Alting blev hult og vaerdlost for ham, forvraenget og forvirret, og saa smaat desuden; det syntes ham naturligt at stoppe sine Oren og stoppe sin Mund, og saa saenke sig ned i Studier, der ikke havde noget med Verdenskvalmet at gore, men var som et stille Havdyb for sig selv, med fredelige Tangskove og kuriose Dyr. (p. 179)
(Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped wearied him. Every• thing seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and oh, so petty.' He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the everyday world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals.) Cp. IJll
Niels further resembles his mother in that his dissatisfaction with religion, like her attempt to trample on her dreams, stems not from a reasoned appraisal of his belief, but from the feeling of betrayal he experienced when his demands upon the God he had imagined were not fulfilled. When Edele Lyhne dies, he spurns God in his heart for not producing the miracle he had prayed for. His atheism then, is not authentic, but rather a position of defiance. Jacobsen comments that
Niels has merely chosen to change allegiances, like a "vassal who takes up arms against his liege-lord; for he still believed, and could not drive out his faith by defiance." Cp. 621 - 37 -
The death of his beautiful cousin is the decisive, though not the only,-factor in the formation of Niels' inauthentic atheism. When he hears Edele reproving Bigum with the words "there isn't a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world" Cp. 531, something within the young
Niels recoils as he grasps the meaning of her words.
Han havde for forste Gang folt Frygt for Livet, for forste Gang virkelig begrebet, at naar det havde domt En til at lide, saa var denne Dom hverken digtet eller truet, men saa blev man slaebt til Pinebaenken og saa blev man pint, og der kom i det sidste Ojeblik ingen aeventyrlig Befrielse, ingen pludselig Opvaagnen som fra en ond Drom. Det var det, han forstod i anelsesfuld Angst. (p. 46)
(For the first time he was afraid of life. For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror. ) Cp. 5^-3
Although Niels is appalled by the sight of his tutor, Mr. Bigum, debasing himself and his beliefs in a hopeless attempt to win Edele's love, this scene that has such a profound impression on his young mind is destined to be repeated, to a certain measure, in his own life. When his child is dying, Niels breaks the defiant silence that he has kept up against God, and offers to sacrifice his whole being in return for the - 38 -
thing that he loves more than anything in the world. Yet just as Bigum's pleas are rejected by Edele Lyhne, so are Niels' pleas to God unanswered for the second time. Like Bigum, he has betrayed his ideal, sacrificed his integrity, and has received nothing in return. After this, Niels
Lyhne is spiritually dead; his dreams have failed him, he has lost his faith "in the ability of human beings to bear the life they had to live"
Cp. 2401, and the world of reality in which he had hoped to find the antidote to the sickness of his soul now seems to be the bitterest pill of all:
thi det Nye, Atheismen, Sandhedens hellige Sag, hvad Maal havde det Altsammen, hvad var det Altsammen andet end Flitterguldsnavne for det ene Simple: at baere Livet, som det var! baere Livet, som det var, og lade Livet forme sig om Livets egne Love! Det kom ham for, som om hans Liv var sluttet af hin kvalfulde Nat; det, der kom efter, kunde aldrig blive Andet end interesselose Scener, der var haeftet bag til femte Akt, efter at Handlingen var spilt til Ende. (p. 262)
(for after all, the new ideal, atheism, the sacred cause of truth - what did it all mean, what was it all but tinsel names for the one simple thing: to bear life as it was! To bear life as it was and allow life to shape itself according to its own laws.' It seemed to him as though his life had ended in that night of agony. What came after was no more than meaningless scenes tacked on after the fifth act when the action was already finished.) Cp. 2411 - 39 -
In his despair, Niels has enunciated his actual feelings about the world: it is a thing to be borne rather than accepted. He is incapable of surrendering himself to the reality of existence because he considers that there is a basic discrepancy between what the soul yearns for, and what the world has to offer. Although he has adopted a creed that flatly rejects any form of transcendence, his instinctive desire is for a state
in which he will be invulnerable to the process of life and death. Like his mother, he is torn between the finite and definite aspect of exterior reality whose symbol is death, and the longing of the spirit towards some undifferentiated infinity that seems to include the promise of immortality.
As a proof of what he feels to be the irrevocably solitary status of the human individual, he reflects that he has never, in his life, managed to merge himself with another:
Nej, det var ikke det. Det var det store Triste, at en Sjael er altid ene. Det var en Logn, hver Tro paa Sammensmeltning mellem Sjael og Sjael. Ikke den Moder, der tog En paa sit Skod, ikke en Ven, ikke den Hustru,. der hvilede ved Ens Hjaerte ... (p. 265)
(No, it was not that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone. Every belief in the fusing of the soul was a lie. Not your mother who took you on her lap, nor your, friend,.nor yet the wife who slept on your heart ...) Cp. 2433
So, in terms of his uncompromising demands for total identification with aaiother, he even considers his marriage to Gerda to have been a - 40 -
failure. Yet he had known the greatest happiness of his life with his young wife, but although she shared in his beliefs and dreams, she could not bring herself to die with only the consolation of his love, and in her last hours she turns away from him and back to her God. She tells
Niels that she could bear to die if he were to die with her, but that she dares not face it alone. Niels sees his wife's death as the betrayal of the illusion of an inseparable bond between a man and a woman, and perhaps she sees the fact of his continued existence as a similar betrayal.
Unless Niels has unwittingly fancied that love has the power to forge a necessary link between two individuals, that will in some mysterious way deliver them from the contingencies of existence, it is difficult to imagine why he is so led to despair by the thought that he is, and has always been, "alone".
In "Les Hommes de la Percee Moderne", Frederic Durand traces the atheism expressed by Jacobsen to the writings of Feuerbach. In Das
Wesen des Christenthums^, Feuerbach develops the idea of the immense profit that mankind may reap from reconverting the energy that has traditionally been wasted on religion, into the perfection of human civilization. Durand sees Niels Lyhne's own brand of atheism to be an expression of the same basic hope: "ramener a terre toutes.ces valeurs spirituelles que l'homme dispense par crainte de la mort a la face d'un ciel invariablement vide depuis toujours, pour les amenager au benefice de l'homme et de la societe"^.' Niels may believe that the fear of death - 41 -
is the motive for man's having invented a God who will provide a heavenly
home for the faithful, yet his theory does not explain the connection between the fear of death and all romantic illusions, including his own.
Niels' life has consisted largely of a succession of attempts to find a reprieve from existence through an intimate attachment to a woman.
The language that he uses to describe his ideal of feminine "purity" betrays the religious motives that lie behind his search for a woman with whom he can share his life. Although he is an atheist, he retains the Christian prejudice that the flesh is the corrupter of the ideal, and that authentic love is incompatible with sensual desire. Niels' prudishness is a manifestation of his need to discover a magical being who seems to have transcended the ordinary, physical processes of human life, and who will, presumably, confer its "divine" essence on him.
As with all the characters studied in this thesis, Niels' romanticism consists in his acting religiously towards an object in the real world in the unconscious hope that this object will confer on him the benefits that formerly only a god could bestow.
Although he complains about the difficulty of "fusing" himself with another, he has done much to frustrate the attainment of real communication between himself and those he loves. In his friendship with Erik, their discussions never went so far as to penetrate into the "bedrooms, bathrooms, and other private places in the mansions of their souls" Cp. 106l. Mrs.
Boye tells Niels that she is tired of having men place her on an - 42 -
imaginary pedestal, that she longs to be loved for what she really is,
not as the reflection of some "bloodless ideal". Niels can only reply
lamely that he believes in.the ideal of "feminine purity".
men han fik da svaret, at han syntes, det var det storste Bevis paa, hvor stor Mandens Kaerlighed var, at han, for at forsvare det over for sig selv at elske et Menneske saa usigeligt hojt, maatte omgive dette Menneske med et Skaer af Guddommelighed. "Ja, det er netop det, der er det Fornaermelige," sagde Fruen, "vi er jo guddommelige nok, som vi er." (p. 90)
(but he managed to answer that he thought that a man could not give a finer proof of his love than this - that he had to Justify himself to himself for loving a human being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her with a nimbus of divinity. "But that is just what I find so insulting," said Mrs. Boye, "as if we were not divine enough in ourselves.") Cp. 931
His affair with Fennimore begins with their living together in an invented dream-world, in which every tree and stone has a name, and its decline is marked by a "sinister frankness" in which "they called things by their right names" Cp. 2051. Again and again in the novel, Jacobsen underlines his character's willful blindness to the reality that is actually present by presenting us with scores of descriptive passages that overflow with a joyous reaction to-.the beauty of the..natural world, while emphasising its particular and physical nature. - k3 -
og hvad laa og sad der ikke rundt omkring af sirligt Fro og farverige Baer, brune Nodder, blanke Agern og nydelige Agernkopper, Duske af Koral paa Beberissen, blanksorte Vrietornsbaer og Hybenrosens skarlagensrode Urner. De bladlose Boge var Prik ved Prik af piggede Boghuse, og Ronnen luded tung af rode Klaser, syrlige af Duft som Most af Aebler. (pp. 210 - 211)
(What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black berries on the buckthorn, and scarlet urns on the dogrose. The bare beeches were finely dotted with prickly beechnuts, and the roan bent under the weight of its red clusters, acid in fragrance like apple cider.) Cpp. 196 - 1973
Yet Niels cannot respond to the particular and physical nature of things and of people, since the proofs of natural process that are ever-present in the world threaten his secret desire to escape the limits of reality.
In all these instances, the actual truths of life are a threat to
Niels' dreams of purity. Mrs. Boye and Edele and Fennimore are far more aware than Niels of the dissimilarity between their real natures and the fashionable ideal of womankind.
It is difficult to assess the distance between Jacobsen's own convictions in Niels Lyhne and those of his hero. His style of narration is perhaps more impersonal than that of Flaubert in that he treats all his characters with equal sympathy, and never passes a direct judgment on any of them. We might easily be led into assuming that Niels' opinions - hh -
are identical to those of the author, if we were to overlook the fact
that Niels' conception of life and art could never have produced a novel
such, .as the one we have read. It is in the discrepancy "between Jacobsen's
sensual descriptions of nature and women and Niels' ideals of purity that we are able to perceive the ironic distance that exists between the
author and his hero.
Often, in the book, Jacobsen relates Niels' inner reflections on an occurence without providing us with any authorial comment whatsoever.
When Fennimore pours out her dissatisfaction over her marriage to Erik,
Niels can only imagine that her insistence on her physical nature must be the result of her being disappointed in an ideal that she has not been able to realize.
hvorfor skal I saa med den ene Haand kaste os op imod Stjaernerne, naar I dog med den anden maa traekke os ned. Kan I ikke lade os gaa paa Jorden ved Siden af Jer, Menneske ved Menneske, og ikke det mindste mer. Det er jo umuligt for os at traede sikkert til paa Prosaen, naar I gor os blinde med jeres Lygtemaend af Poesi. Lad os vaere, lad os for Guds Skyld vaere! Hun satte sig ned og graed. Niels forstod meget, Fennimore vilde have vaeret ulykkelig ved at vide hvor meget. (p. 199)
(Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other.' Can't you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o'-the-wisps. Let us alone! For God's sake, let us alone! - ^5 -
She sat down and wept. Niels understood much. Fenimore would have been miserable had she known how much.) Cp. 1873
Niels Lyhne understood very little of what Fennimore had been trying to tell him. His reflections, if they have any truth at all, refer to himself, for he has missed the point that the ideal of feminine purity has been invented by men and thrust upon women.
Knowledge of her own "true nature" does not help Fennimore not to feel guilty about her sensuality, nor do Mrs. Boye's liberal ideals prevent her from being attracted into respectable bourgeois life. Yet the women in Jacobsen's novel provide a far more realistic portrait of human beings as they actually are, and seem to possess greater insights into the true nature of dreams and reality, than any of the male characters.
Above all, Niels is afraid of the sexuality of women, which he cannot detach, in his mind, from crudeness, degradation, and perhaps, base animality. All points of similarity between human beings and other
"lower" forms of life are carefully selected out of his fantasies about love and the "glorious future" of society. His ideal, ultimately, is a non-human one; it is as if he will only be satisfied when men attain the mode.of being that has traditionally been attributed to the Gods. His conscious ideal does not include the illusion that men might become immortal in the sense that they will never die, for he is only too aware of the inevitability of death. Unconsciously, however, his dreams are -In•
formed upon a shrinking-away from the proofs of human mortality, from pain, imperfection, corruption, procreation and death. The "noble" heroes of the future will, presumably, live their lives in the same exaggerated elation, and feel themselves to be as divinely limitless as Niels when he falls in love with Fennimore:
hver af dem var en Aabenbarelse, thi paa hver af dem fandt han sig selv storre og staerkere og mere stor i Stilen. Han havde aldrig kendt en saadan Folelsens Inderlighed og Vaelde, og der var Ojeblikke, hvor han syntes sig selv titanisk, langt mer end Menneske, saadan en Uudtommelighed fornam han i sit Indre, saa vingebred en Omhed svulmed fra hans Hjaerte, saa vidt var hans Syn, saa Kaempemilde var hans Domme. (p. 217)
(With each day that passed, he felt stronger, greater, and nobler. He had never known such strength and fullness of feeling; there were moments when he seemed to himself titanic, much more than man, so inexhaustible was the well spring of his soul, so broad-winged the tenderness that swelled his heart, so wondrous the sweep of his vision, so infinite the gentleness of his judgments.) Cp. 2021
Niels claims to love humanity, yet he is happiest when he feels himself to be "more than a man", indeed, he seems to be more content the less he feels himself to be human, the more like a God. The language that
Jacobsen uses to describe his hero in this passage evokes the tone of a hymn to the glory of God, for secretly, Niels can only find satisfaction for his longings in the illusion that he has taken onto himself the qualities of the God that he has denied. - 47 -
Hjerrild tells Niels that he must have a great faith in human nature if he believes that his visionary future of mankind will ever come to pass.
On his death-bed, however, Niels contrasts the beauty of Nature unfavourably with his feelings about human beings:
Der havde dog vaeret meget Skont i Livet, taenkte han, naar han mindedes det friske Pust ved Stranden hjemme, det svale Sus i Sjaellands Bogeskove, den rene Bjaergluft i Clarnes og Gardasoens blode Aftenbrise. Men taenkte han paa Menneskene, blev han saa syg igen i Sindet. Han kaldte dem for sig en for en, og Allesammen gik de ham forbi og lod ham ene, og ikke en blev der tilbage. (pp. 264-265)
(After all, there had been so much in life that was beautiful, he thought, as he remembered the fresh breeze along the shores at home, the cool soughing of the wind in the beech forests of Sjaelland, ( ) But when he thought of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned . them in review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone, and not one stayed with him.) [pp. 242-243H
In his last few hours on Earth, Niels Lyhne looks back with bitterness on the failed illusions of his life. He recalls that he never managed to forge a lasting relationship with anyone, that no-one else accepted what he thought to be his humanistic vision. But Niels refuses to see that his life was filled with opportunities to surrender himself up to life as it really is, and to people as they really are. It is his dream of life as it ought to be, which springs from his fear of life, which in turn springs from his fear of death, that has placed the gulf between - 48 -
himself and others, between his "soul" and the exterior world. Alone,
and feeling himself misunderstood by mankind, and cheated by fate, Niels
Lyhne steels himself against the death that he has anticipated for so long.
All his life he has been incapable of imagining a mode of life that
could be founded upon a realistic acceptance of the actual phenomena of
existence. The great dreamer, the man who spoke so fervently about the need for heroic action to bring about the great brotherhood of man,
spent the greater part of his days in "lame reflectiveness". Spiritually unwilling to live in the immediate world, and torn between the romantic
ideas of the past that he tries consciously to reject, and the new age of realism that he is temperamentally incapable of accepting, Niels Lyhne is a true representative of the transition between the two great movements in the Art of the nineteenth century.
Nye var de, forbitret nye, nye indtil Overdrivelse, og det maaske ikke mindst, fordi der inderst inde var en saelsom instinktstaerk Laengselj der skulde overdoves, en Laengsel, det Nye ikke kunde stille, verdensstort som det Nye var, Alt omfattende, Alting maegtigt, Alt oplysende. (p. 76)
(They were modern, belligerently modern, modern to excess, and perhaps not the least because in their inmost hearts there was a strange, instinctive longing which had to be stifled, a longing which the new spirit could not satisfy - world-wide, all-embracing, all- powerful, and all-enlightening though it was.) Cp. 8lH - h9 -
The "strange, instinctive longing" that Niels can neither satisfy
in his dreams, nor in "life as it is", is the timeless conflict between the immortal yearnings of the soul and the finite reality of human life. - 50 -
The plays of Henrik Ibsen are filled with characters who, like
Niels Lyhne, believe that they have a great mission in life. They range from Brand, the fanatical idealist who refuses to compromise his vision, to the wholly ineffectual Hjalmar Ekdal, whose "invention" does not even exist. The ideals of these characters are never realized within the plays, and if we are left with any hope for their projects "after the play has ended", it is usually because the original plan has been abandoned, and a new, more realistic plan has taken its place.
Allmers and Stockmann will perhaps succeed in educating the children of the poor, yet the fate of...most of Ibsen's idealistic characters is sealed by the end of the play. They either die, like Rosmers, or continue pathetically in their delusions, like Gregers Werle. To a very great extent, Ibsen's plays are concerned with the failure of ideals that do not match the reality of experience.
We might be tempted to see an analogy between Gregers Werle and Niels
Lyhne, yet Gregers' idealism is founded on far less realistic premises than that of Jacobsen{s hero, and whereas Niels, for the most part, only brings unhappiness to himself, Gregers causes misery to the people that he attempts to change. Rosmers is perhaps more like Niels insofar as he is temperamentally unsuited to carry out the ideals he has adopted, and also because his ideals are the manifestation of an unconscious internal crisis. - 51 -
These characters are all true romantic types in that they cling to an idealized self-image that is designed to shield them from the truth about themselves as human beings. Only when Nora forsakes her dream of a permanent identification with her husband, is she capable of discovering her true self. Hedda Gabler.dies as a result of her refusal to compromise her aristocratics ideals with the mediocrity of bourgeois life.
There are many points of comparison that could be drawn between Emma
Bovary and Hedda, and several critics have already noted the similarities in their ideals and their eventual suicides. Yet the plays of Ibsen's middle period are not thematically concerned with death and the fear of death as an underlying force in the formation of human illusions.
In Little Eyolf (1894) Ibsen picks up a theme that he had not touched on since Peer Gynt, his last great dramatic poem that he wrote in 1867.
Lost in the mountains, Alfred Allmers feels the presence of another who is walking beside him. This "reisekamarat" - travelling companion - is death itself, and Allmers realizes that his long devotion to his book on "human responsibility" has kept him away from his responsibility to his own son.
For years he has been spiritually dead, and tragically, when he returns home to turn his attention to Eyolf, the child dies shortly after. Allmers,
Borkman and Rubek, the principal characters of Ibsen's last three plays have all suffered the deadening effects of focussing their energies onto an ideal that they claim is for the benefit of mankind, yet divorces them from life, and turns them into "dead men". - 52 -
In John Gabriel Borkman (1896), Ibsen shows that the fear of death
not only explains the actions of his aging hero, but also lies at the
heart of the dreams that he formed as a young man, and which he spent
his entire life trying to realize. Borkman is a tremendous dramatic
creation, and reflects the energetic fanaticism of Brand, and to a lesser
degree, of Stockmann. Yet although we:.jare tempted to agree with his
own assessment of himself as a Napoleon, he has much in common with the ludicrous pharmacist Homais.
In Madame Bovary, Homais represents the attempt to set up a substitute
form of immortality through the glorification of his name and reputation, which he hopes will "live on" after he has died. Borkman and Homais both bring technological progress to the service of the monument that they hope to erect to their own self-image. When Homais fears that he may not receive the croix d'honneur for his contributions to the science of medicine, he creates a floral rockery in his back garden in the shape of the cross that he feels he deserves. Both men seek for the establishment of a permanent mark on the world that seems to have the power of transcending the finiteness of their existence, and both men are totally ruthless with the human beings that they need to help them bring about their dreams.
Whereas Emma's and Niels' dreams are "religious" in that they are unconsciously directed towards an ideal of spiritual transcendence, Homais and Borkman strive for a "secular" version of immortality that is to be attained through the acquisition of power and fame. - 53 -
In this play, Ibsen not only reveals the mechanism of metaphysical desire, but demonstrates the powerful force that propels it. The fear of death is shown to explain the ideals of the three major characters, which all contain the illusion that they will somehow continue to exist after they have died. The framework of imagery in the play is so carefully built around the ever-present spectre of death, and the dreams of the characters are so exactly centred on discovering a means of denying it, that I have to conclude that Ibsen's assessment of his characters' actions is the same as the one I am proposing in this thesis.
John Gabriel Borkman is a totally romanesque treatment of the theme of romantic illusion in the form of a great work of theatre. The connection between the fear of death, and the attempt to create a symbolic form of immortality, that we are able to deduce from Flaubert's novel, and whose outlines are substantially sketched out in Niels Lyhne, is consciously demonstrated in John Gabriel Borkman. - 54 -
In John Gabriel Borkman , which was published in Ibsen's sixty-fourth year, the theme of an earthly vision of immortality in conflict with the present realities of old age and the prospect of death, is treated even more directly than in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last play. Both plays move from stark realism, through symbolism, into utter abstraction, to a scene in which the main character is overtaken by death in the snow and among the mountains, strongly recalling the fate of Brand, the hero of
Ibsen's most intensely poetical, play, which appeared thirty years earlier.
But whereas Brand and Professor Rubek meet their deaths experiencing a partial rejuvenation that flows from a final act of self-knowledge,
Borkman dies wholly gripped by the delusion that has ruined his life, and the lives of hundreds of others.
The play begins with Fru Borkman crocheting on a sofa, awaiting the arrival of Erhart, her son. Every detail.in the playwright's stage- directions serves to focus the attention of the audience onto the portrait of this woman who is rigidly bracing herself against the cold touch of death that she feels all around her. Outside, through the window, "a' snow storm is driving in the dusk" Cp. 2873. The decorations in the room are "faded", whatever liveliness they may have had has left them. Ibsen tells us that Fru Borkman herself is "cold", that age has firmly laid its hand upon her; her hair is "strongly marked with grey", her hands are
"transparent", as though she were already a ghost; the handsomeness of her clothes, like that of the furnishings, has obviously passed away. - 55 -
The metallic chime of sleigh-bells outside announces that a visitor has arrived, and she is momentarily enlivened.by the hope that it is her son, through whom she desperately seeks a symbolic form of victory over the oblivion that death threatens her with. In her fantasy, Erhart will immortalize and raise up the fallen name of Borkman, that she carries, and obliterate the shame connected with it, for ever.
FRU BORKMAN: Ja, Erhart, - min herlige gutt! Han skal nok vite a oppreise slekten, huset, navnet. Alt det som kan oppreises. - Og kanskje mer til. (p. 523)
(MRS. BORKMAN: Yes, Erhart, - my splendid son.'. He will be able to raise up the family., the house, the name. Everything that can be raised up. And perhaps more besides.) Cp. 2923
But it is not Erhart that has come to visit her. It is her twin sister, Ella Rentheim. Ella is another whose life has been profoundly affected by the fanatical ambitions of John Gabriel Borkman. Many years ago, she had loved him, and as far as it was possible for such a man, he had loved her too. Yet Borkman had chosen to surrender his "love" for Ella to the man who had the power to help him with his schemes to convert the money he had embezzled from the bank into the "new society" of his obsessive dream.
When Ella and Gunhild confront each other in the first act of the play, it is the first time that the two sisters have been together for eight years, and the bitterness of their old rivalry for the love for - 56 -
John Gabriel Borkman still stands between them. Gunhild is also resentful towards Ella for having had to rely on her charity for so long, and also because Ella took her son "away from her". The most chilling fact of all that the audience learns about this unnatural household, is that
Fru Borkman has not set eyes on her husband since the day of his sentence,
she has only heard the sound of his footsteps above her, as he "prowled", endlessly about, "like a sick wolf" Cp. 296H.
Besides very rare visits from Erhart, Borkman only ever sees Vilhelm
Foldal, an aged clerk who still nourishes- hopeless dreams of becoming a
successful poet, and his fifteen-year old daughter, Frida who sometimes plays to him on the piano.
Erhart lives in the town, "because of his studies", and comes to visit his mother every day. He has recently cultivated a friendship with Fanny
Wilton, a lady seven years older than himself, who is separated from her husband, and she has visited the house once or twice. Apart from the
"company" of a maid, this has been the sum of the commerce between the
Borkman household and the rest of humanity for thirteen years.
The house is not only a place of shame, but a kind of suffocating tomb whose inhabitants go about a grim death-in-life existence in which they plot to gain control over a reality which has long since been turned remorselessly against. them. However much they may want to claim that they desire to live, they are solely concerned with gaining power over life, as a weapon against the deathly forces that move within them and around them. - 57 -
Again and again in the play, Ibsen.stresses the fact that both Borkman
and his wife are not concerned with living iri the world, but that they merely have certain uses for it. Their common aim- appears to be the
establishment of some outward symbol of immortality, that will have the magic property of insulating them from the truth of their own lives and their profound fear of death. Ella sees clearly that Gunhild's "plans" for Erhart do not include any consideration of what the young man may want for himself:
FRU BORKMAN: Ingen vinning, det a beholde en mors makt over Erhart! ELLA RENTHEIM: Nei; for det er bare makten over ham du vii ha. FRU BORKMAN: Og du da! ELLA RENTHEIM .Cvarmt.3: Jeg vii ha hans kjaerlige sinn, - hans sjel, - hans hele hjerte -! FRU BORKMAN Cutbryterll: Det far. du aldri mer i denne verden! (p. 528)
(MRS. BORKMAN: Not win anything, by keeping a mother's control over Erhart! ELLA RENTHEIM: No, because it'Ts' only control over him that you want. MRS. BORKMAN: And you, then? ELLA RENTHEIM [warmly:: I want his affection - his soul - his whole heart -! MRS. BORKMAN [passionately]: You won't ever get that again in this world!) Cp. 301H
When Ella is talking to Borkman in his room, the man glides effortlessly in his discourse, from riding roughshod over the feelings of the woman who still loves him, in total disregard for her as a human being, to talking lovingly of taking control over the dead riches of - 58 -
the earth. With the power that he dreams of gaining from his mastery of the material world, he hopes to found a miraculous kingdom in which he will contribute to the "well-being" of thousands of grateful, but faceless, subjects.
BORKMAN: Men du far huske pa at jeg er en mann. Som kvinne var du meg det dyreste i verden. Men nar. endelig sa ma vaere, sa kan dog en kvinne erstattes av en annen - ELLA RENTHEIM Dser pa ham med et smilll: Gjorde du den erfaring da du hadde Gunhild til hustru? BORKMAN: Nei. Men mine oppgaver i livet hjalp meg til a baere det ogsa. Alle maktens kilder i dette land ville jeg gjore meg underdanige. Alt hva jord og fjell og skog og hav rommet av rikdomme - det ville jeg underlegge meg og skape herredomme for meg selv og derigjennem velvaere for de mange, mange tusen andre. (p. 544)
.(BORKMAN: But you must remember that I'm a man. As a woman, you were the dearest thing in the world to me. But if it has to come to that, then one woman can be replaced by another. ELLA RENTHEIM Elooking at him with a smile 3: Was that your experience, when you had taken Gunhild as your wife? BORKMAN: No. But. the tasks of my life helped me to bear that too.. All the sources of power in this land - I wanted to make them subject to me. Every• thing that earth and fell and wood and sea contained and all their riches, - I wanted to subdue it all and create a kingdom for myself and through it the well- being of many, many thousands of others.) [p.3323
Borkman effectively puts the lie to his claim that he only seeks power "to create human happiness far and wide about me", when he reveals to Foldal the scorn that he actually feels for the human race: - 59 -
BORKMAN Cmork, ser hen for seg og trommer pa bordet3: Det er saken. Det er forbannelsen som vi enkelte, vi utvalgte mennesker har a baere pa.. Massen og mengden, - alle de gjennomsnittlige, - de forstar oss ikke, Vilhelm. (p. 536)
(BORKMAN E.looking gloomily ahead and drumming on the table'!: No, that's the trouble. That's the curse that we outstanding people, we men of destiny have to endure. The common herd, all those average people — they don't, understand us, Vilhelm.) Cp. 318:
It might be argued that he genuinely feels some sort of affection
for "humanity", conceived of in the most abstract sense, yet his later remarks to Foldal prove that one half of humankind, present or absent,
inspires no feelings of warmth in him:
BORKMAN Gharmfulll: l,.de kvinner! De forderver og forvansker livet for oss! Forvakler hele var skjebne, - hele var seiersgang. FOLDAL: Ikke alle, du! BORKMAN: Sa?. Nevn meg noen eneste en som duer da! (p. 539)
(BORKMAN t indignantly j: Oh, these women! They pervert and corrupt life for us! Ruin the whole of our destiny, our march to victory! FOLDAL: Not all of them, you know! BORKMAN: No?, Name me a single one who's worth anything!) Cp. 323:
The truth about John Gabriel Borkman is that he cannot experience love for another human being because to do so would entail his stripping away the armour that shields him from his greatest enemy: life itself. All - 6o -
that arouses his strongest, emotions, the metal that lies buried in the
ground, steamships, factories, whirling.wheels and flashing cylinders, is
cold, hard, and intrinsically lifeless. His insistence that he feels a
life within these forms that.only needs his hand to bring it out, is a mere act of self-delusion through which he hopes to shield his real motive
from himself. That motive may be seen to.be the total dissociation of
himself, as a human being, from the rest of humanity.
Borkman's love for "hard" things underlines an unspoken, yet equally
important theme in the play: his avoidance and near-hatred of everything that might be characterized as "soft". His dislike for Foldal's
sentimentality, which he dismisses as "poetic nonsense", is mirrored in himself by a blind affection..for the "iron-hard reality" of his dream. If we understand sentimentality to mean an unreasonable trait that seeks to reduce the reality of total experience to exclusively emotional terms, then we may fairly consider Borkman's view of the world as tyrannized by a sort of "black sentimentality'!'. He constantly dismisses the reality that presently confronts him by calling attention to an illusory world of the past or the future., in which his infatuation with power has the ability to shape the world to his satisfaction.
O O O Nar. oppreisningens time slar.for meg-. War. de innser at de ikke kan unnvaere meg-. Nar.de kommer her opp til meg pa salen og kryper til korset og trygler meg om a ta bankens toyler igjen- I Den nye bank, som de har grunnet - og ikke kan makte - [stiller seg ved skrivebordet liksom for og slar,seg for brystetD -Her vii jeg sta og ta imot dem! Og det skal hores og sporres viden om i landet hva betingelser John Gabriel Borkman stiller ... (p. 537) - 61 -
(When the hour of rehabilitation strikes for me - when they realize that they cannot do without me - when they come up here to me in this room and humble themselves and beseech me to take the reins of the bank again-! The new bank that they have founded - and can't manage-. CHe stands by the writing-table as he did before and strikes his breast.1 Here I will stand and confront them! And it shall be known all over the land what conditions John Gabriel Borkman lays down for ...) Cp. 3l8l
Is not this speech every bit as sentimental as Foldal's pathetic
conviction that "somewhere or other around us, far away - there the true woman is to be found" Cp. 232H' The only difference is in the nature of the emotion that forms it. Borkman's particular, brand of sentimentality is, however, the more dangerous of the two, for at some time in the past his delusion had been partially translated into reality, and the effects of that period persist as a poisonous influence on himself and all those around him.
The "friendship" that, he has with Foldal is founded on a mutual desire for self-deception. Both men have silently agreed not to reveal the obvious truths about each other's delusions of genius as long as the
same is done for>them. It is small wonder that. Borkman considers the greatest crime to be the betrayal, by a friend, of a secret that has been entrusted to him. What Hinkel disclosed to the world, was, essentially, the truth about Borkman's deception, that his great plans for the world depended on money that he had embezzled from those who had put their trust in him. - 62 -
BORKMAN.Ei kvalt raseriH: Og sa kom forraederiet over meg.' Nettop like midt i avgjorelsens dage! [ser pa ham.1 Vet du hva jeg holder for den infameste forbry- telse et menneske kan bega?. FOLDAL: Nei, si meg det. BORKMAN: Det er ikke mord.. Ikke roveri eller nattlig innbrudd. Ikke falsk ed engang. For alt slikt noe, det oves jo mest imot folk som en hater, eller som er en. likegyldige og ikke kommer en ved. FOLDAL: Men det infameste, da, John Gabriel? BORKMAN Cmed eftertrykkD: Det infameste er venns misbruk av venns tillit. (p. 538)
(BORKMAN [with suppressed rageD: And then the betrayal came upon me! At the very moment of achievement. Do you know what I regard as the most infamous crime a man can commit? FOLDAL: No, tell me. BORKMAN: It's not murder. Not robbery or housebreaking. Not even perjury. For' those sorts of things they're done as a rule to people one hates or is indifferent to and who don't count.' FOLDAL: But the most infamous thing, John Gabriel? BORKMAN [with emphasis]: The most infamous is a friend's abuse of a friend's trust.) [p. 320D
This last remark of Borkman's is directed to Foldal as a kind of warning, and underlines the one-sidedness of their relationship. Borkman is in no way sensitive to Foldal's feelings, yet the clerk is constantly phrasing his words in the most delicate manner'so as not to injure his friend's pride.
The old poet is assured that his tragedy is "good", but Borkman is not interested in hearing it read to him. Yet Foldal is expected to listen to
John Gabriel's endless apostrophes on the subject of his imaginary greatness, hardly daring to speak for fear of saying "the wrong thing". This - 63 -
sensitivity to his feelings that Foldal displays is, however, not appreciat by Borkman, and he takes it as a kind of "softness",.,to be despised.
Borkman deals with his only friend as he has done with everyone in the past: He tries to exert a ruthless control over them. To react to anyone other than through the exercise of power would be analogous to surrendering himself to forces greater than the individual that he fears will crush him. Those forces are the forces of life, the same forces that
Fanny Wilton talks of to an 'uncomprehending Fru Borkman:
FRU BORKMAN: Har de ikke gjort det, sier De! FRU WILTON: Nei. Jeg har hverken daret eller forlokket ham. Frivillig er Erhart kommet imot meg. Og frivillig har jeg mott ham pa halweien. FRU BORKMAN Cser hanlig nedad henneD : Ja De_, ja! Det tror jeg sa gjerne. FRU WILTON CbehersketH: Fru Borkman, - der gis makter i mennesklivet som De_ ikke synes a. kjenne synderlig til. FRU BORKMAN: Hvilke makter, om jeg tor sporre? FRU WILTON: De makter. som byder to mennesker a knytte sin livsgang uloselig - og hensynslost sammen. (p. 554)
(MRS. BORKMAN: You've done that, you say! MRS. WILTON: No, I've neither bewitched nor infatuated him. Erhart has come to me of his own free will. And of my own free will I've met him half-way. MRS. BORKMAN [looking her scornfully up and down:: Yes, you indeed! I can well believe it! MRS. WILTON [controlling herself:: Mrs. Borkman, there are forces in human life that you seem not to know very well. MRS. BORKMAN: What forces, may I ask? MRS. WILTON: The forces that call two people to bind themselves together for. life, inseparably - and without fear.) [p. 352: - 64 -
Neither Borkman nor his wife have any trust in the possibility of meeting anyone "half-way", yet both.of them are outraged when their notion of someone else's duty to them is betrayed. Fru Borkman totally rejects her son when she sees that she no longer has him in her power, and her husband tells Foldal that he has no more "use" for him when he realizes that the clerk entertains doubts about his ability to rise again in the world.
Borkman's anger against Foldal begins to rise whenever the smallest degree of skepticism is introduced, into their discourse. True;" introspection is totally alien to Borkman's nature, and for him there is no distinction between honest self-appraisal and loss of belief in one's self. Intro• spection in another is equally as threatening, for Borkman hears everywhere the voices of his own guilt,, which he. attempts to convince himself are the conscious insinuations of others.
BORKMAN [tier littD: Du gjorde visst et darlig valg da du giftet deg. FOLDAL: Der var jo omtrent intet valg for meg. Og dessuten, - gifte seg vii en jo gjerne nar. en begynner a trekkepa arene. Og sa redusert, sa . dypt pa knaerne som jeg dengang var - BORKMAN Cspringer opp i. vredeH: Skal dette her vaere en siktelse til meg? En bebreidelse -.' FOLDAL Cengs.teligH:. Nei, for guds skyld, John Gabriel -.' BORKMAN:. Jo, du sitter og tenker pa all den ulykke som brot inn over banken -.' (p. 536)
(BORKMAN Cafter a moment's silenceH: I'm afraid you made a bad choice when you married. FOLDAL: There practically wasn't any choice for me. And besides - one does want to marry, when one begins to get on in years. And I was so low, so down on my luck at that time - - 65 -
BORKMAN [springing up in angerD: Is this a reference to me? A reproach? FOLDAL CnervouslyH: No, for heaven's sake, John Gabriel! BORKMAN: Yes it is; you're thinking about all that misfortune that fell on the bank -I) Cp. 3173
Like Brand, John Gabriel Borkman refuses to. consider any compromise with the world. Yet Borkman is not concerned with the idea of doing what
is "right", only with the desperate necessity of preserving an idealized vision of himself. Whenever Borkman talks about "himself", he is referring not to a human being, but to the rock-hard symbol of power over life and death that he so earnestly wishes to become.
Stone, metal, these are the symbols of invulnerability that Borkman has chosen to identify with his whole being. To become like them would be to fulfil a profound desire to rid himself of his humanity, to become, as it were, immortal. It is thus that Borkman's personality does not allow for the notion of "spiritual growth", of developing his identity
in continual intercourse with the world and with humanity. In his own imagination, he has always been John Gabriel Borkman, the man who had to do as he did because he was "who he was". Borkman dare not see himself as a man in the process of defining' his personality in relationship to the world, for that world is his bitterest enemy. He can only defy the world in proclaiming thatihe exists, totally, and independently of any other reality. - 66 -
FRU BORKMAN Cdrar et bittert sukk:: Ja, det er et sant ord. All verden kjenner det. BORKMAN: Men den kjenner ikke hvorfor jeg har forgatt meg. Hvorfor jeg matte forga meg. Menneskene skjonner ikke at jeg matte det fordi jeg var meg selv, - fordi jeg var John Gabriel Borkman, - og ikke noen annen. Og det er det jeg vii prove pa . a gi deg en forklaring over. Tp- 549)
(MRS. BORKMAN [with a bitter sigh:: Yes, that's true enough. All the world knows it. BORKMAN: But it doesn't know why I did it. Why I had to do it. People don't realize that I had to do that because I was myself - because I was John Gabriel Borkman - and no one else. And it's that I want to try and .explain to you.) Cp. 342:
So' it is that Borkman exonerates.himself from any blame. For thirt
years, in his cell, and "up there in the gallery", the great dreamer has
constructed an immense edifice of self-deception. He has been his own
judge, his own jury, his own defence, his own world. His conclusion,
"that the only person I have sinned against is myself" Cp. 342:, is a willful negation of the concept of responsibility. Those others whom
he has sinned against "don't count"; he has obliterated them from his world, and he does not consider that he can be brought to account for people who do not, so to speak, exist.
Part of Borkman's strategy in escaping the consequences of his
actions, is to wage a pseudo-philosophical war against the reality of experience. Borkman's credo, almost his last line of defence, rests on a kind of solipsism through which he argues that the acts of men can be changed by a superior form of perception. This device, the resort of a - 67 -
moral coward, Borkman exalts as an almost sacred tenet. Faced with the
onslaught of his wife's cruel, yet substantially accurate appraisal of
him as "a man who has never loved anything outside of himself" Cp. 3441,
as "a dead man" Cp. 345], he has no alternative but to acquit himself in
his own sight by positing that his view of reality is so fundamentally
different from anyone else's that no other person can understand his motives.
BORKMAN Cryster pa hodet og ser belaerrende pa°henne3: Der skjer ingenting nytt. Men det som er_ skjedd, - det gjentar seg heller ikke. Det er oyet som forvandler handlingen. Det gjenfodte oyet forvandler den gamle hangling. Cavbryter.3 Na,.det forstar du ikke. FRU BORKMAN Ckortl: Nei, jeg forstar det ikke. BORKMAN: Nei, det er just forbannelsen at jeg aldri har funnet forstaelse hos noen eneste menneskesjel. (p. 550)
(BORKMAN Cshaking his head and looking at her, as though instructing her3: Nothing new happens. But the thing that has happened, - it doesn't repeat itself either. It's the eye that changes the deed. The new-made eye changes the old deed. CBreaking off.3 But you don't understand that. MRS. BORKMAN Cshortly3: No, I don't understand that. BORKMAN: No, that is just the curse, that I never have found understanding in a single human soul.) Cp..3433
Borkman complains that he is "cursed" with never having found understanding, yet his whole existence has been carefully constructed so as to make himself inaccessible to. understanding. By "understanding", he surely means the blind worship of his own self-image, the same idolatry with which Fru Borkman is suffocating her son. - 68 -
Fru Borkman, like Ella Rentheim, is a broken woman, because she
dreamed of having her life's dream fulfilled through being married to
John Gabriel. Through carrying the name of-a great and famous man, she
had hoped to achieve happiness in the reflected glory of that name.
Although Borkman has. ruined his reputation for ever., Gunhild still clings
to her original fantasy, and endeavours to transform her son into a monument to an idealized image of herself that has no relationship to the truth of her own character. Erhart's "pure and lofty and radiant" life, that exists only in her imagination, is the antithesis of her mean
and debased existence.
BORKMAN Chest og skjaerendel: Og det kjaerlighetsverk vii du ove? FRU BORKMAN: Ikke ved egne krefter. Det tor jeg ikke tenke pa.. Men jeg hag oppdratt en hjelper til a .
sette sitt liv inn pa dette enev Han skal leve livet i renhet og hoyet og lys, saledes at ditt eget grubeliv blir som utslettet her oppe pa jorden! (p. 551)
(BORKMAN Choarsely and cuttingly!: And this work of love - you will perform it? MRS. BORKMAN: Not in my own strength. I wouldn't dream of thinking that. But I've bred up a helper to dedicate his life to this one aim. He_ shall live a life so lofty and pure and radiant, that your own life under-ground shall be obliterated up here on earth.) Cp. 3453
To acknowledge the truth about, ourselves as human beings is equated, by both Borkman and his wife, with an act of self-annihilation. To be deprived of their fantasies is to be deprived of the means of conquering - 69 -
an unbearable life, and of negating the finality of death:
Erhart! Erhart!, - vaer tro.imot meg! A" kom hjem og hjelp din mor! For jeg baerer ikke dette liv lenger! (p. 533)
(Erhart! Erhart be true to me! 0, come home and help your mother! I can't bear this life any longer!) Cp. 311H
BORKMAN Csetter seg igjen i sofaenH: Jeg tror det sa fast. Vet det sa uryggelig visst - at de kommer. - Hadde jeg ikke hatt den visshet, - sa hadde jeg for lenge siden skutt meg en kule gjennem hodet. (p. 537)
(BORKMAN Csitting down again on the sofaD: I firmly believe it. I know it - with unshakeable conviction - that they'll come. If I hadn't had that conviction, I should have put a bullet through my head long ago.) Cp. 3193
Ibsen shows quite clearly in the play that it is the fear of death
that lies at the bottom of the tortured'actions of the three major
characters. Although Fru Borkman. talks of her life as being "unbearable",
and her husband claims that he has contemplated suicide, neither of them
can bear to face the prospect of death'squarely and realistically. Fru
Borkman does not react with the least trace of sympathy when she learns
that her own sister only has a few months, left to live, in fact, she
seems to have no reaction to the news at all, as if the words had never been uttered. Psychological denial, selective amnesia, these are the methods that the "maimed Napoleon" and his wife resort to when every -TO-
other subterfuge has failed. Both Borkman and his wife try to belittle
Ella's illness, and try to ward off the phantom of their own mortality that is concealed in the death of another human being,, by either stopping their ears, or contradicting the evidence of their eyes.
When Ella goes to visit John Gabriel in. his room, he first of all seems not to recognize her, then tries, to deny that her age and her illness have altered her very much. Finally, when Ella's emphasis on the facts confronting him becomes so insistent that even he_ cannot find a means of denying them, he snatches at his only possible means of escape, and promptly changes the topic of conversation:
ELLA RENTHEIM: Kan du kjenne meg igjen? BORKMAN: Ja, nu. begynner jeg a - ELLA RENTHEIM: Irene har tatt hardt og hostlig pa . meg, Borkman. Synes du ikke det? BORKMAN [tvungentH: Du er blitt noe forandret. Sann i forste oyeblikk - ELLA RENTHEIM: Jeg har ikke de morke krollene nedover o o nakken nu. De som du en gang holdt sa av a sno om dine fingre. BORKMAN ChurtigD: Riktig! Nu'ser jeg det, Ella. Du har forandret frisyren. ELLA RENTHEIM [med et trist. smill: Akkurat. Det. er frisyren som gjor det. BORKMAN [avledendel: Jeg visste ellers ikke av at du var her pa disse kanter av landet. (p. 5kl)
(ELLA RENTHEIM: Do you know me again? BORKMAN: Yes, now I begin to - ELLA RENTHEIM: Yes, and the years have been hard on me, John Gabriel, and it's autumn now. Don't you think so? BORKMAN [with constraint!: You are a little changed. At least, at first glance - ELLA RENTHEIM: I have no dark curls hanging down my back now. Those curls you used to love to twist around your fingers. -71-
BORKMAN [quickly]: That's it! I see it now Ella. You've done your hair differently. ELLA RENTHEIM [with a sad smile!: Quite right. It's the hair that makes the difference. BORKMAN [changing the subject]: I'd no idea that you were in this part of the country.) [p. 326]
Ella's "sad smile" underlines the preposterous, near-comic character•
istics of Borkman's desperate flight from truth. The man who dreamed of becoming a new Napoleon has been reduced to a Harpagon, a pathetic miser of his own life.
One of Borkman's methods of denying the imminence of his own death, and that of his sister-in-law, is to exaggerate, in his imagination, the duration of time that remains for them. In his. conversation with Foldal,
Borkman seeks comfort for himself by envisioning an illusory future in which he will have more than enough time to bring about his plans. Yet even the contemplation of an unreal future leads him, against his will, to the logical conclusion that one day, even'he will have to die. Borkman handles this troublesome thought in the crudest possible way: he struggles to obliterate it from his memory:
BORKMAN Choverendel: Men de kommer! De kommer nok! Pass pa!. Hver dag, hver time kan jeg venter dem her. Og du ser jeg holder meg parat til a ta imot dem. FOLDAL Cmed et sukk]: Bare de vii komme riktig snart. BORKMAN Curolig]: Ja du, tiden gar; arene gar; livet,- uh nei - det tor jeg ikke tenke pa! (p. 537)
(BORKMAN [exultantly]: But they'll come! They'll come all right! You watch! Any day, any moment, I can expect them here. And you see I hold myself prepared to confront them. FOLDAL [with a sigh]: If only they'd come quickly. BORKMAN [uneasily]: Yes, my friend, time passes; the years pass; life - ah no - I daren't think of that!) [p. 3193 - 72 -
Borkman again tries to combat the spectre of death when Ella confronts
him with the news of her:.incurable illness. His first response is to
deny that it can be. real, his second, after being forced to admit that
it may be true, is callously to exaggerate, for his own peace of mind, the
amount of time that Ella has left to live:
BORKMAN: A, men det kan vare lenge ennu, - tro du meg. ELLA RENTHEIM: Det kan muligens vare vinterens over, ble der sagt meg. BORKMAN Cut en a tenke ved det3: Na ja, - vinteren er jo lang, den. (p. 546)
(BORKMAN: Oh, but it may take a long time yet, believe me. ELLA RENTHEIM: It may possibly take the rest of the winter, they told me. BORKMAN [.without thinkingll: Oh well, the winter's pretty long.) Hp. 3363
Ella, whose fatal disease may have been caused by the emotional
distress that she experienced when Borkman rejected her, manages to face up to the prospect of her own death with more courage and dignity than the others. Yet she can hardly bear to leave this world without leaving a symbol of her continued existence behind her. Because she never carried
Borkman's name herself, she dreams of having his son carry her own name through the world. Like Borkman, the two women have chosen to identify the whole of their being with a name, a pathetic reduction of human possibility, yet one that seems to possess the power of transcending the limits of our existence. - 73 -
ELLA RENTHEIM Cser bedende pa ham]: Erhart, jeg har ikke rad til a. miste deg. For du skal vite at jeg er ensomt, - doende menneske. ERHART: Doende - ? ELLA RENTHEIM: Ja, doende. Vii du vaere hos meg til det siste? Knytte deg helt til meg? Vaere for meg som du var mitt eget barn - (p. 552)
(ELLA RENTHEIM [looking at him with entreaty]: Erhart, I can't bear to lose you. For I'll tell you, I am solitary - and dying. ERHART: Dying -? ELLA RENTHEIM: Yes, dying.. Will you be with me till the end? Join yourself to me entirely? Be for me as if you were my own child -?) Cp. 3^7]
Both Ella and Gunhild are tied irrevocably to the past, to the dreams
that they had in their youth. Ella wanted to win Borkman',s "whole heart,
his soul", and Gunhild wanted to win the glory that comes from being the wife of a great man. Like Borkman, Ella has committed the sin that she herself considers to be the gravest sin of all.
ELLA. RENTHEIM: Du hardrept kjaerlighetslivet i meg. [naermere mot ham] Forstar du hva det vii si? Der tales i bibelen om en gatefull synd som der ingen tilgivelse er for. Jeg har'aldri for kunnet begriper hva det hva for noe. Nu begriper jeg det. Den store nadelose synd, det er den synd a myrde kjaerlighets - livet i et menneske. (pp. 5^+3-4)
(ELLA RENTHEIM: You have killed the power to love in me. [Coming nearer to him.] Do you understand what that means? It speaks in the Bible of a mysterious sin that there's no forgiveness for. I've never been able to see what it could be. Now I do see. The great, unpardonable sin -it's the sin of killing love in a human creature.) [p. 331] - lh -
It is not Borkman who has.killed the power to love within her, "but
herself. Because she has founded her whole being upon the premise of being
loved by one particular man, she can no. longer love anyone, except perhaps
that man's son. In her imagination, Erhart has become her own son, and
through him she expresses her love for the husband she never had.
ELLA RENTHEIM: Jeg er domt til a ga bort. Svar meg, Erhart. ERHART Cvarmt, bevegetD: Tante Ella, - du har vaert meg sa usigelig god. Hos deg har jeg fatt lov til a . voske opp i all den sorglose lykkefolelse som jeg tror der kan vaere over noe barns liv - FRU BORKMAN: Erhart, Erhart' ELLA RENTHEIM: A, hvor velsignet at du kan se det sa ennu! ERHART: - men jeg kan ikke ofre meg fog deg nu. (p. 552)
(ELLA RENTHEIM: I am doomed to.die. Answer me, Erhart. ERHART [affectionately and moved1: Aunt Ella, - you've been so wonderfully good to me. With you I was able to grow up without any troubles, as happy as I think any child could be in its life - MRS. BORKMAN: Erhart, Erhart! ELLA RENTHEIM: Oh, what a blessing that you can still see it like that! ERHART: - but I can't sacrifice myself to you now.) [p. 347:
Although Ella wants Erhart to come to her "of his own free will", she is just as astonished as Gunhild when she discovers that his "will" could possibly choose anyone other than one of the figures that have formed the deathly triangle of her existence for so many years,.. Although she genuinely wants his love, she has never imagined that he could love anyone more than his mother or herself. Ella and her sister are both guilty of - 75 -
seeing Erhart's world as being necessarily bounded by the close limits
of their obsession.
Fanny Wilton refuses to have her existence defined by a bond with
the past, yet Gunhild reproaches her with her separation from her husband,
as though it were a proof of the shallowness of her desire for Erhart.
Mrs. Wilton and Erhart are determined to experience life through sharing
happiness with another person, and they are neither of them so naive as
to believe that sincere love for another is necessarily connected with a
devotion that will last "for ever".
FRU WILTON: Jeg har aldri for visst hva lykke var i livet. Og jeg kan da umulig vise lykken fra meg fordi om den kommer sa sent. FRU BORKMAN: Og hvor lenge tror De den lykken til vaere? ERHART CavbrytendeH: Kort eller lenge, mor, - det far. vaere det damme! FRU BORKMAN Li vredeD: Forblindede menneske, som du er! Ser du da ikke hvor alt. dette her baerer hen? (p. 555)
(MRS. WILTON:. I've never known before what happiness was in life. And I can't bring myself to turn away my happiness just because it comes so late. MRS. BORKMAN: And how long do you think that happiness will last? ERHART [breaking inl: Short or long, mother, - it doesn't matter! MRS. BORKMAF Cin wrath:: You blind creature! Don't you see where all this is taking you!) Cp. 3533
What Fru Borkman blindly refuses to see is that Erhart is being led away from her deadening influence, and into life itself. Because she has wished for a stone-like permanence in her relationship with her husband, - 76 -
the betrayal of her fantasy has transformed her life into a ghostly monument
to the shattered illusions of her youth. She has forsaken the man, but
cannot rid herself of the dream of a magical permanent attachment. Gunhild,
Borkman, and Ella have all fallen victim to the grim consequences of
their respective dreams of an earthly form of immortality. Because their
lives have been centered around a profound wish for permanence and
invulnerability, not daring to enter into the flow of reality for fear
that they will be consumed'by it, they have reached the end of their days
without ever having really lived.
In the final act, Borkman goes out into the snow vowing never again
to enter the house that has been his refuge from life for eight long years.
But Borkman no longer has any refuge left in the real world, for in that
house that night he has been, confronted with the blunt truth of his wife's
accusation that he is a."dead man". He fears if he were to go back into
the house, that the ceilings and walls would crush him like an insect.
He believes that he is going out into the world, of his own free will; what he cannot bring himself to admit is that he is forced to leave, for
it is the truth that has been uttered, and not the house itself, that threatens to crush him.
His plan is no longer to build up the empire that he feels he could have founded, the dream of an•industrial utopia, for he is frantically seeking for an even more potent antidote to the chill of death, the very
source of the forces with which he has striven to defend himself from life. - 77 -
He tells Ella that his real kingdom lies in the very heart of the mountains
themselves, that the world above, ground'only constituted "the outworks of
the kingdom" Cp. 3673- The miner's son who became the director of a bank,
has at last forsaken his dream of converting the life-force within him
into money and power over everything on the face of the earth. His last
and most desperate wish is to bring "all the buried treasures of the
earth" to life, just as he feels that the metals in the ground have the
ability to infuse him with a kind of vital force.
The pathetic truth beneath this final crazed ambition is that Borkman
has gone out into the world to prove that he is alive, to deny his wife's
judgment on him as one who is already dead. Yet he attempts, ironically,
to find rebirth through the very illusions that killed the human impulse
in him many years ago. He seeks rejuvenation through dead things, and he wants to pour his own life into, them, for it is not in ;the softness of
human feelings that he sees any salvation, but in the obstinate permanence of the insensate world of metal and rock, and these things alone stir up his long-buried emotions:
Cmed framrakte hender.H Men jeg vii hviske det til jer her i nattestillheten. Jeg elsker eder, der I ligger skinndode i dyppet og morket! Jeg elsker eder, I livkrevende verdier - med alt eders lysende folge av makt og aere. Jeg elsker, elsker, elsker eder! (p. 562)
(Cwith outstretched hands] But I will whisper it to you here in the stillness of the. night. I love you, where you lie as though dead in the depth and in the dark! I love you, you treasures that crave for life - with all the shining gifts of power and glory that you bring. I love, love, love you!) Cp. 3681 - 78 -
Out in the snow, pursuing the tantalizing delusion that he hoped would deliver him from the fate of other mortals, John Gabriel Borkman dies, his heart "clutched by a freezing metal hand". He has been killed by the freezing winter air from the mountains that seemed to promise him the hope of a new life.
For Ella and Gunhild, there is nothing left that will give any purpose to their continued existence, for the man who divided them is no longer alive, and they will perhaps never see Erhart again. Yet they manage to perceive that there is no longer any reason for them to be parted from each other. At last they are able to appreciate clearly what they have sacrificed by choosing to identify themselves wholly with a lifeless symbol of victory over life. As the curtain is falling, the two sisters join hands over the dead man, each speaking the truths that formerly, only the other could bear to utter;
FRU BORKMAN: Vi to tvillingsostre - over ham vi begge har elsket. ELLA RENTHEIM: Vi to skygger - over den dode mann. (p. 563)
(MRS. BORKMAN: We two twin sisters - over the man we both loved. ELLA RENTHEIM: We two shadows - over the dead man.) Cp. 370: - 79 -
Each of the three post-Romantic works that I have studied in this
thesis contains a depiction of a romantic character whose life is spent
in an attempt to discover a symbolic object that will, satisfy an inner
longing for immortality. I have tried to show that their respective
illusions are not merely based on a desire to conceive of themselves
"other than they are", but that they are formed with the aim of negating
the specific facts of human existence that define our mortality.
For Emma Bovary, this object is to be found in a magical country
that she naively believes to exist somewhere in this world. Her search
for a valorous and aristocratic lover is secondary to her greatest hope:
to find a means of existence that will liberate her from';the limitations
of ordinary experience. The lover is necessary only insofar as he will
take her off to the land in which her dreams will be realized. Always,
in Madame Bovary, Emma clings to the dream that her situation is the
result of her being born in the wrong location: that sooner or later she
will find a way of escaping the facts of human life, which to her, seem
only to apply to the particular people and places she has known. That her
illusions are founded on a rejection of the facts of mortality is shown
in the antithetical relationship that exists between her dreams of sensual and religious fulfilment and the images of biological process that exist throughout the novel, of which the blind mad is, so to speak, the incarnation.
Niels Lyhne's ambition to become a writer is subordinate to, and is thwarted by, an unconscious quest to discover an object that will insulate him from his profound fear of death. This object is a romantic attachment - 80 -
to a woman which seems to have the power of freeing him from the contingencies
of normal experience. His ideal of feminine purity, in which the physical,
sexual aspect of womanhood is ignored, or reduced to a minor role, is in
sharp contrast with the sensuality of the women with whom he attempts to
"merge" himself. His atheism cannot help but increase his anguished
conviction that he is utterly alone in the world and under the face of
heaven, and he strives to forge a necessary link between himself and
another being to whom he has attributed powers that resemble those of the
God he has denied. Although Niels consciously rejects any idea of transcendence, his desires, like Emma's are truly metaphysical in that they
are aimed at the attainment of a mode of being that transcends the firiiteness of physical existence.
John Gabriel Borkman does not seek immortality through an object that
seems to contain the promise of transcendence or escape from the world.
On the contrary, he despises all ethereal ideals, and turns his attention to the hard reality of forms in this world that seem to be invulnerable to time and biological process. His desire for power over other human beings is the outward manifestation of his desire to command the forces that are taking him inevitably towards death. He hates everything that would serve to remind him of the dynamic processes that define our
subjugation to biological laws. He hates "softness" in any form, and hopes to "freeze" time itself by becoming like the rocks and metal that he claims to love so much. John Gabriel Borkman exemplifies in many ways the - 81 -
clearest and most primitive expression of the wish that lies at the heart of the desire for immortality: he wants to live forever, not in some abstract heaven, but in this world. Yet the fear of death that forces
Borkman into his desperate search for invulnerability to life is so severe that he can never allow it to become conscious, and his life becomes a. futile enactment of a search for an impossible object.
It will be evident to the reader that the approach I have used in this thesis is psychological, even psychoanalytic. Yet although the conscious/unconscious relationship I employ owes much to the Freudian model, it will be seen that I have replaced the sexual complex with the fear of death as the most important factor in the evolution of the personalities of the characters I have studied. 1 Several critics who have studied the theme of death in western culture 2 have utilised the idea of the Freudian "death wish" and have associated death with sensuality as an unconscious desire that strives for fulfilment.
This thesis flatly rejects the notion of the death impulse as a basic component of the human psyche, and even views the Freudian concept of the death wish as a psychological evasion of the negation that death truly is.
By imagining'death to be a fulfilment of an inner need, Freud attempted to defuse the horror of death by turning a "nothing" into a "something" . This attempt is not dissimilar to the traditional religious formulas which merely consider death as a passing into a higher state of being. Freud claimed that there was no more horrifying prospect for the individual than to bring - 82 -
to consciousness the hidden thought that he desired to kill his father and marry his mother. Death, Freud thought, would he preferable to having to
make, such an admission. Again, by imagining something more terrible than
the annihilation of ourselves, Freud managed to.diminish the fear of death
as a formative influence in human personality.
The characters in the three works we have examined are not driven by
a desire to fulfil an inherent "death impulse", but are seeking a form
of liberation from mortality that is conditioned by an unconscious fear
of death. Emma's suicide and John Gabriel Borkman's death are the results
of attempts to deny the finality of human existence. Emma never loses
the idea that she may attain the heavenly paradise after her dreams of
finding a heaven-on-earth have collapsed, and Borkman dies as a direct
consequence of his trying to demonstrate that he is invulnerable to natural
forces.
The Romantic nostalgia for the infinite is not an expression of a
Freudian death wish, but is a manifestation of a hatred of the conditions
of temporality, specificity and biological process that define the human
condition. The underlying cause of this antipathy towards the facts of
human life is the fear of death. Not only do these characters not want to
die, but they direct all of their energies towards the attainment of an
object which seems to have the power of conferring the gift of immortality upon them. - 83 -
FOOTNOTES
Introduction
1 Jules de Gaultier, Le bovarysme (Paris: Societe du Mercure de France, 1902).
2 Ibid., p. 32.
Madame Bovary
1 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondances vol. 2 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1926), p. 145. 2 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966). •3 Correspondances, p. 162.
^ Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 196l), p. 654.
^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions sur la question juive (Paris: P. Morihien, 1.9U7), P- 34.
Interchapter 1
1 Gaultier, p. 23.
Rene Girard, Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1967). 3 Gaultier, p. 53. 4 .. ' . Ludwig Feurbach, Vorlesungen Uber das Wesen der Religion, m Samtliche Werke in 13 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstat: Gunther Holzboog, i960 - 4), vol. 8 Fiinfte. 'Voreslag, p. 43. ^ Ludwig Feurbach', Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper and Row, I967), p. 3^+T
^ Vdrlesuhgen, p. 43. •7 Lectures, p. 34. - 84 -
Niels Lyhne
1 Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, in Samlede Skrifter av J.P. Jacobsen (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1888) vol. 2 pp. 1 - 268 (all subsequent page numbers referring to this book are included in parentheses aft er t he quot at i on). 2 Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, trans. Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1967), p. 245. 3 Ibid., p. 144 (all subsequent page numbers referring to this translation are included in square brackets in the text). 4 Georg Boandes, Brewekslmg med Nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabmaend (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1940) vol. 3, p. 117- ^ Frederic Durand, Histoire de la litterature Danoise, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, I967), p. 245.
John Gabriel Borkman
1 Henrik Ibsen., John Gabriel Borkman in Ibsen: Nutidsdramaer 1887-99 (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1968) (all page numbers referring to this book are included in parentheses after the quotation.)
Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman in. Ibsen: The Master Builder and Other Plays, trans. Una Ellis-Fermor (London: Penguin Books, 1965). (All page numbers referring to this book are included in square brackets after the quotation.)
Conclusion
1 notably: Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death (New York: Vintage Press, 1959) Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality (New York: Walker, I962) 2 see: Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle trans, and ed. James Strachey (New York: Liveright Publishers, 1961). 3 cf. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan, 1973). - 85 -
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