Ibsen and Yeats: the Establishment of a National Drama
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IBSEN AND YEATS: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL DRAMA A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of California State University, Hayward In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English By Kathleen A. Heininge June, 1993 IBSEN AND YEATS: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL DRAMA By Kathleen A. Heininge Approved: Date: ii Table of Contents I- Introduction - pg. 1 II - Ibsen and Norway - pg. 9 III - Yeats and Ireland - pg. 38 Works Consulted - pg. 74 iii Henrik Ibsen and William Butler Yeats would appear, on the surface, to have very little in common. Ibsen, in Norway, wrote fifty years before Yeats in Ireland. Ibsen wrote in his native tongue, rejecting the influence of the Danish language, while Yeats wrote in English, the tongue of his oppressors, rejecting the little-known Gaelic. Ibsen's style was primarily realistic, and Yeats was more fanciful and poetic. Yeats adamantly drew a distinction between their styles, on the one hand calling Ibsen "the one great master the modern stage has produced" ("Irish Dramatic Movement" 12), but also believing that "there will be a reaction after the realism of Ibsen, and romance will have its turn" (Gregory Journals 52). In fact, in his newsletter, "Irish Dramatic Movement," Yeats both praised and questioned Ibsen's influence: "Ibsen has sincerity and logic beyond any writer of our time, and we are all seeking to learn them at his hand; but is he not a good deal less than the greatest of all times, because he lacks beautiful and vivid language?" (119). Nonetheless, Ibsen and Yeats have a considerable amount in common. They were both motivated by the oppressive political forces at work within their countries to create a "national drama," a form of literature which would preserve their cultures and traditions. They both felt strongly that language and individualism were 1 2 endangered by the political situation. They reacted by turning to drama, an art form more easily accessible to the "common" people than the written word. Moreover, both were acutely aware of and opposed to the danger of propagandizing through their plays. To avoid that danger, they relied heavily on the myths and legends of their own countries as source material for their plays, thereby retaining some of the stories, characters, and symbols that were unique to their countries. They both longed to create a drama recognizable by all as peculiar to their respective countries, and so they drew heavily from myth, folklore, and legend. Ibsen chose to portray many of his characters in classically mythic struggles, although he varied between historical settings, as in The Pretenders, and more contemporary situations, as in Brand. Yeats took most of his settings from the impoverished countryside around him, but also chose to put them in mythic, often very spiritual struggles, using superstition and religion interchangeably, as in "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Dreaming of the Bones" . There are most certainly distinctions between myth, folklore and legend, distinctions that Orley Holtan has explained in Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays: The term "myth" almost immediately calls to mind a fantastic tale involving gods, heroes, or supernatural beings, a tale closely related to the ritual and to the religious and social order of a people or a culture. 3 Myth is thus distinguished from folk or fairy tales and from other narratives that serve chiefly for entertainment, and from history, which is a true account of a national or a cultural past. (6) This is a distinction that is very valuable for the purposes of studying these various types of stories as they relate to the history and traditions of a people, but it is a distinction that becomes somewhat blurred when looking at Ibsen's and Yeats's works. After all, they were not striving to record facts for posterity, to preserve the truth of an historical event or the circumstances of a folk tale, and their purposes were certainly not academic. They drew from the tales they had heard all their lives, tales that were told, with variations, throughout their countries, with little concern for which were myth, which folk, which history. They were striving for the evocative, not the factual. Certainly in our minds tales heard in childhood are mixed together, and we don't particularly care which fit into which category. Paul Revere, John Bunyan, Cinderella, the Headless Horseman, George Washington's cherry tree, Peter Pan, and Moses are all more or less jumbled in our heads so that we know the stories and recall them fondly as tales that entertained us as children, but we do not generally sift through them to categorize them, preferring instead to accept them for the memories they bring us. Ibsen and Yeats felt the same when they chose the material for their plays. There is some of myth, folklore, legend, 4 and history in each play, and it is irrelevant which is which for our purposes. The lines are blurred and one becomes the other. In addition, both Ibsen and Yeats took tremendous liberties with the tales as they were told to them, twisting the facts to make a point, either political or characteristic; neither writer can be thought of as trying to record accurate tales. Both Ibsen and Yeats chose to draw from their national folklore, shunning the contemporary political material used by those such as Strindberg or Synge. They clearly agreed, despite stylistic differences, that the material would claim the national identity far more effectively than a dramatic newspaper account. It is a like decision that is reached due, in great part, to the similar political situations of their countries, as both came from oppressed, occupied countries that were fighting for freedom. As Robert O'Driscoll points out in his book, Theatre and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland: In times of acute national consciousness the theatre is the form of literature which makes the most direct impact on the people, becoming at times a means for propaganda, but ultimately the means by which the deeper life of the people is expressed. ... At the point of renaissance, a meeting-point of the mythic and the scientific, the tribal and the commercial, a point when the past is re-evaluated and rediscovered in the light of changing values and iconoclastic discoveries, something vital and new is created. Myth and legend assume sudden significance; the antiquary and historian attempt to trace the cultural and historical beginnings of the nation, and the artist, by consciously choosing for subject the life and legends of the people, by 5 restoring to topographical sites their former heroic association, and by giving them new levels of poetic association, is inspired by an ideal similar to that which inspires the politician. (12) Ibsen and Yeats recognized, in a way that many twentieth century scholars have failed to recognize, that the folklore would not by itself create a national literature. If that were so, a national literature would have already existed in the form of the folk tales, and there would have been no need for anything to be done except to record them. It is not just the stories themselves that are national, but the archetypal significance of the symbols, the geographical significance, the mysticism, and the national characteristics that all combine to create this national literature, and both Ireland and Norway had vast amounts of material from which to draw. Brynjulf suggests in his essay, "Folklore and National Identity," "It is no accident that Finland (Scandinavia) and Ireland, two countries that had to struggle for national and linguistic independence, boast the largest folklore archives anywhere, built from systemic collecting of national traditions in the vernacular" (18-19). Traditions is probably the best, all- encompassing word for the material from which Ibsen and Yeats drew. Alver continues, "We fool ourselves if we believe that folklore alone represents national culture, whether in the nineteenth century or today, or that it can always be employed as such. But there is one area in which 6 folklore outstrips other cultural expression: as a national symbol of the folk" (19). Ibsen and Yeats both use these symbols consistently throughout their careers. Much of Ibsen's early work uses legend or folk tales for his settings, as in The Pretenders (1863), but slightly later and throughout the rest of his career he tends towards a more modern setting while maintaining the same traditions, as with Brand (1865), which buries the mythic under its setting. Geography for Ibsen is hugely mythic, as are horses and birds. James McFarlane suggests: In a country precariously balanced on the top of Europe, cut across by fjord and ravine and gorge, monstrously furrowed into mountain and valley, the tradition of living was for long centuries one of multiple isolation: national, cultural, individual. (Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature 11) Also tremendously significant are Ibsen's characterizations and the symbolic struggles they experience. There is an important difference between viewing his characters as individuals representative of a national identity and seeing them as experiencing a mythic struggle; by no means does this make the characters stereotypical in any way. On the contrary, Ibsen strove to create characters who were strongly Norwegian, strongly individual, but who were caught up in a mythic relationship with their world. Holtan observes, "His universe consists of three parts, the heights, the lowlands, and the sea, with each part acting as 7 a power and on each of which man moves precariously, never certain that a misstep will not lead him to destruction" (181). Yeats is also deeply concerned with character, especially as it relates to myth and to language.