“Homes for Human Beings” — a Spatial Reading of Ibsen’S the Master Builder

“Homes for human beings” — A spatial reading of Ibsen’s The Master Builder By Marinette Grimbeek Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MPhil in Ibsen Studies Senter for Ibsen-studier Universitetet i Oslo Mai 2007 Acknowledgements First and foremost, my two years of study at the Centre for Ibsen Studies would not have been possible without the scholarship I received from Statens Lånekassen under the auspices of the Quota Scheme. Secondly, I want to thank all the staff at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, not only the various lecturers, but also the administrative personnel and the librarians. A special word of gratitude should also go to Frode Helland, my supervisor, who has shown immense patience with my somewhat haphazard working methods. Lastly, I would like to thank my family, especially my sister and parents, for many reasons, which I will not even attempt to list. Naming friends who have been there for me in various ways will be lengthy, and possibly unfair, as I am bound to overlook someone. However, a small exception would have to be made for two people – thanks for everything, Martin and Jens. Oslo, May 2007 Contents Preface............................................................................................................................i Chapter 1: Introduction ..............................................................................................1 1.1 “Space”: Definition, theory and literature ...............................................................2 1.1.1 Towards a definition of space...........................................................................2 1.1.2 Theoretical overview and literature review ......................................................4 1.1.3 Delimitation of the thesis................................................................................15 1.2 Space, time and modernity.....................................................................................16 1.2.1 Defining “modernity” .....................................................................................16 1.2.2 Space and time in modernity...........................................................................18 1.2.3 Solness caught between two worlds?..............................................................22 Chapter 2: The setting and performance space of The Master Builder ................27 2.1 Undermining realism .............................................................................................28 2.1.1 The house on stage..........................................................................................28 2.1.2 The (un)importance of words..........................................................................32 2.2 The performance space in the text of The Master Builder.....................................37 2.2.1 Text vs. performance ......................................................................................37 2.2.2 The first act .....................................................................................................45 2.2.3 The second act.................................................................................................70 2.2.4 The third act ....................................................................................................78 2.2.5 The progressive nature of the settings of the three acts..................................86 Chapter 3: The uncanny imagery of The Master Builder.......................................91 3.1 The uncanny nature of repetition ...........................................................................92 3.2 Repetition in The Master Builder ..........................................................................94 3.3 “Houses for people” vs. “Homes for human beings” ............................................98 Chapter 4: Castles in the air: Memories, dreams and utopia in The Master Builder ...................................................................................................108 4.1 The changing promise..........................................................................................108 4.2 Memories .............................................................................................................111 4.3 Heterotopia?.........................................................................................................114 Conclusion ................................................................................................................119 Bibliography .............................................................................................................123 Appendix A...............................................................................................................129 Appendix B ...............................................................................................................130 Preface “Tja, det er jo bare mitt eget fag.” — Henrik Ibsen1 In this thesis I attempt a close reading of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play The Master Builder, especially in the light of its spatial aspects. In my view there are persuasive arguments to be made for the importance of spatial imagery in several of Ibsen’s plays, either as regards the use of stage space or in connection with imagery. There are the plays in which outdoor space plays an important role (think for example of the sweeping scenery of Peer Gynt) or presents a (potentially fatal) physical threat to the characters as, for example, in Brand, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken. In The Lady from the Sea the contrast between confinement and freedom is expressed in spatial terms with the juxtaposition between the fjord and the open sea. Then there are the sometimes unsettling indoor spaces which appear in some of the modern prose plays; for instance, the loft and studio of the Ekdal home, or the upstairs room to which John Gabriel Borkman has kept himself confined. Furthermore, there are plays which refer in their titles to homes or architectural elements, such as Rosmersholm, A Doll’s House, Pillars of Society, and, of course, The Master Builder, which I am discussing here, where the protagonist and title character is by profession concerned with spatial matters, and has dedicated much of his working life to building “homes for human beings” (p. 810).2 One may indeed go so far as to say that Ibsen 1 Erik Werenskiold told an anecdote about asking Ibsen in Kristiania in the 1890s if he liked architecture, which was recounted by Kolskegg (the pseudonym of Gunnar Larsen), “Erik Werenskiold og Henrik Isen”, Dagbladet, no 68, Tuesday the 20th of March 1928, Oslo, p. 4; citation from Erik Henning Edvardsen, Ibsens Christiania (Oslo: N.W. Damm & Søn, 2003), p. 103. Throughout, full biographical details are only given in the footnotes if the work concerned does not appear in the core bibliography. 2 Unless otherwise specified, all English citations are from Rolf Fjelde’s translations as found in The Complete Major Prose Plays and all Norwegian ones are from the Hundreårsutgave, (in which case the page number is preceded by the volume number in roman numerals). i shows a predilection for presenting and interpreting the bourgeois house of his time, and its frequent failure to be a real home.3 This is not only an issue in The Master Builder, but also in When We Dead Awaken, and even more famously so, in A Doll House. In fact, the moment arguably most readily associated with Ibsen’s prose plays is Nora’s slamming of the door behind her when she leaves her husband and children behind after realising that she is first and foremost a human being, not a doll, wife or mother. The view that spatial concerns dominate Ibsen’s corpus is also expressed in the (perhaps apocryphal) anecdote with which this preface opened. Even though I consistently shy away from the temptation to involve Ibsen’s biography in my reading of the play, it is interesting to know, in the light of the persistent spatial concerns in his work, that he might have likened his art to architecture so unequivocally. In my view, the ultimately spatial nature of The Master Builder does not only pertain to its literal setting and the ubiquity of images related to building (and, by extension, to spatiality), but also sheds light on the characters and their strained relationships with each other and to “reality” or “truth”, as I try to show in my reading of the play. When one proposes discussing “space”, the term immediately begs some clarification, despite (or perhaps as a result of) its relative prevalence in recent cultural and literary discourse. The question of definition is one I discuss more comprehensively in the introduction, and perhaps a short indication of the organisation of the thesis is now in order. In the rest of the introduction I give an overview of the most important theoretical perspectives and terminology I use in my discussion, combined with a literature review, a delimitation of the thesis and a short introduction to the question of the changing perception and rendering of space in modernity. Here I focus on the 3 This argument is the starting point of Mark Sandberg’s article “Ibsen and the Mimetic Home of Modernity” in which he asserts that “Ibsen visualizes the pressures on the individual in architectural terms” (2001:33-4). ii changing relationship between space and time in modernity, a subject to which I often return throughout the remaining chapters. The main section concentrates on the text of The Master Builder and the functions and implications of its spatiality. Although

Load more