View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives SANDRA COLELLA TARANTISM AND TARANTELLA IN A DOLL’S HOUSE MASTER THESIS IBSEN STUDIES 2007 INDEX INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………pg 3 CHAPTER 1 TARANTELLA IN A DOLL’S HOUSE . IBSENIAN SCHOLARS’ VIEWS..........………………………………………………...…...pg 15 CHAPTER 2 TARANTISM AND TARANTELLA. BERGSØE’S TREATISE AND THE SCANDINAVIAN STUDIES…………………………………………………….pg 31 CHAPTER 3 THE ITALIAN FOLK DANCE TARANTELLA………………………………………..….pg 45 CHAPTER 4 THE PHENOMENON OF TARANTISM. DE MARTINO’S WORKS AND THE OTHER STUDIES……………………………………………………………..…pg 55 CHAPTER 5 TARANTISM AND TARANTELLA IN A DOLL’S HOUSE . A NEW HYPOTHESIS OF INTERPRETATION……………………………………….…pg 85 CONCLUSION...………………………………………………………………………………pg 99 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………....…pg 101 2 INTRODUCTION Echoes of the controversies about the meaning of the drama A Doll’s House and Nora’s character continue to reach us from 1879, the year in which Ibsen completed his probably most famous work in Amalfi. Up till now, the complexity of the characters and the wise webbing of the drama, scattered of symbolic moments, widening its study, are the cause of divergent interpretations by the scholars. An example, exemplifying for all the discussions, could be the famous problem of Ibsen’s “feminism”. In the chapter “The poetry of feminism” in her book Ibsen’s women the American scholar Joan Templeton (2001) tries to say a definitive word about the sense to attribute to the drama. She quotes an impressive series of evidences with great accuracy, coming not only from works, but also from specific events and stands of which Ibsen was protagonist, to be opposed to only one point in favour of the detractors of the feminist vision about A Doll’s House . The reference is to the famous Banquet in honour of Ibsen seventieth birthday on May 26 th , 1898. On that occasion, Ibsen, thanksgiving the militant feminsts for their toast, had asserted that, thinking also desirable to resolve women’s problems, he had had the single scope to describe humanity. Joan Templeton concludes asking herself and asking to us: can one single declaration, made very 20 years after the composition of the work, refute one enormous amount of affirmations, also violent, made by the Norwegian Master, which attest the exact contrary, and that is that Ibsen had fought with passion in favour of woman’s liberation, also, but not only, with A Doll’s House ? And, as a matter of fact, her reasonings are tightening a lot, much more if Errol Durbach (1991), whose interpretation is founded on Nora’s transformation in an aware and thinking human being, 10 years before, in A Doll’s House: Ibsen’s Myth of Transformation , is believed to have supplied one anticipated explanation, also substantially in “feminist” sense, of the dissonance marked by Joan Templeton. According to Durbach Ibsen would have answered in that way, during the banquet, in order to contrast the tendency to reduce the complex analysis on the freedom in his works about 3 women to the political of feminine liberation and therefore the “feminist” sense of the works would not have been contradicted by that declaration. (1991: 91) All absolutely convincing. Therefore, subject closed. Not at all. On the opposite side, in fact, of the interpretation of A Doll’s House as a work that uses the feminine issue, but just as a metaphor of one more general and complex reflection on the problematic of the freedom of the human being, we find a lot of authors and it is worth quoting among the many, a reasoning of Roberto Alonge since it is totally opposite to all that the scholars previously asserted. In his introduction to A Doll’s House (Alonge 2005), being also inspired by the sharp observations of Georg Groddeck (1985), in a meaningfully entitled paragraph “Nora, that selfnamed feminist” 1, he asserts that Nora “/…/ goes away not because Torvald is a husband too much father-master, but on the contrary, because too much little father-owner.” 2 (Alonge 2005: 33) According to Alonge, in fact, it is problematic to consider feminist a character who waits for the “miracle” that will save her: the husband who takes on himself his wife’s faults. In other words, Nora leaves because Torvald has not protected her as a true knight in the moment of greater difficulty. And also in this case, all absolutely convincing. How to exit from the enpasse ? Which road to take? Alonge himself warns, with so much shrewdness, that Ibsen: “/…/ it is indeed an unexplored continent, in spite of the appearances.” 3 (2005: 13) Evidently, to explore ex novo a continent demands a technique of observation differing from the one which would be employed in the study of an already totally almost known atmosphere, as it could be, as an example, the drawing-room of a middle-class dwelling. We must collect meticulous observations, at the moment also apparently insignificant, resisting to the temptation to harmonize them from the start, even with an unconscious job of filing and correction, but having the patience of recording them, waiting for the concordance among them to happen, when possible, almost naturally in the respect of the text and its author. 1 Alonge’s original: “Nora, quella sedicente femminista” 2 Alonge’s original: “/…/se ne va non già perché Torvald sia un marito troppo padre padrone bensì, all’opposto, perché troppo poco padre padrone .” 3 Alonge’s original: “/…/è davvero un continente ancora inesplorato, nonostante le apparenze.” 4 If we read Ibsen from this point of view we have a perception of a wide complexity, such and many are the arguments and the symbols that emerge from his works, and at the same time of new stimulant awareness. It often happens, in the course of study meetings or in the course of article reading, to hear or read affirmations such as : “Ibsen already more than one hundred years ago speaks to us, prerunning the times”, with the indication of a problem that today is in the center of scientific, psychological, social or political debate, as if Our Author had previewed all with amazing advance. And it is so, not already in literal terms, but because the careful description of the problematic and human dynamics made by Ibsen turns out to be receptive, so to say, also of those future or only sketched out ones at the age in which the dramas were written. And however, the specific main themes are always the occasion in order to speak about something else which is higher. If Dr Stokmann, in order to give another example, in the Enemy of the people lets us catch a glimpse of the problem of pollution, of the intrigue of interests of small and great politics, nevertheless Ibsen uses these present arguments in order to tell us about something else, but with no denying the importance of such arguments! Well then, Ibsen had fore seen, but because he had already seen! Ibsen, as we know, had a direct and very bitter experience of the upsettings of his world, dued to the advancing of the new times, and he learned, with his extraordinary human and poetic sensitivity, to “read” his fellow creatures and their behaviours. Moreover, he had the capacity to create, through a process of poetic synthesis of opposite direction, meaningful and multifaceted signs and symbols to be used in the wise construction of his plays. In this way he shaped human dynamics that were not only able to photograph the painful historical and social contemporary context but also to contain the germs of the griefs, the conflicts and the hopes of the future. In this sense Ibsen had already seen. Not only, then, the past, that oppresses us with its weight and shadows, but also the future, that hangs over us with the consequences of the human and contradictory pushes of the present. 5 The present of every human experience that Ibsen has told us, contains the both, sometimes dividing them with difficulty, but more often presenting them in an inextricable web that has the signs of the past and the inklings of the future. His careful ability to catch every shading of human psychology and to recreate it in his characters and dramas make him therefore a forerunner. All this wealth and complexity, on the other hand, evidently risks to confuse us and to make us uncertain also on the most consolidated meaning of any of his work. In order to avoid this danger we do not have to forget to have a “new continent” to explore and must be equipped with a patient and wider vision, so to say. The vision of a higher and complex Ibsen, far from being banally all-inclusive, gives him back to us extraordinarily fresh and unpredictable, free from the hoary controversies cited previously. We have said that in the opinion of some authoritative scholars A Doll’s House substantially remains a feminist drama; others, equally authoritative, reject this interpretation judging it reductive of the widest thematic of human being freedom. At first sight the approach that I try to give to my reading would seem to be included in the second one. It is not so. Or at least, not only. In fact, it is also true that the thematic of freedom does include the one of women’s freedom, but of sure it does not cancel it. The thematic of women’s freedom, it seems to me nearly weird to have to underline it once again, is the main theme in A Doll' s House , and it’s for sure the cue for further general reflections on individual freedom, but, I repeat it, it’s one of the central cores of the drama.