Rosmerholm by Henrik Ibsen (#Norway)

MRS. HELSETH: But children don't cry at Rosmersholm, Miss.

REBEKKA  (Looks at her): Don't cry?

MRS. HELSETH: No. As long as people can remember, children have never been known to cry in this house.

REBEKKA: How very strange.

MRS. HELSETH: Yes, isn't it? It runs in the family. And then there's another strange thing. When they grow up, they never laugh. Never--as long as they live.

REBEKKA: Why, how queer--

MRS. HELSETH: Do you ever remember hearing or seeing Pastor Rosmer laugh, Miss?

REBEKKA: No, I don't believe I ever have,...

Rosmersholm is Henrik Ibsen's play of 1886. Rosmersholm is the ancestral family home of the well-to-do Rosmer family, whose current head is Johannes Rosmer, a pastor 45 years old. But he's a pastor who has lost his faith and has just given up his pastoral role, not least because his wife committed suicide and he's still in grief. Was her death the result of mental illness, or was he in some way responsible? He can't decide.

In addition to Johannes Rosmer, living in the house are Rebekka West, who'd arrived as a companion for Beata Rosmer, but stayed on after Beata's death, and Mrs. Hesketh, the long-standing family maid. Over the course of the play three visitors come, each more than once. Andreas Kroll, Rosmer's brother-in-law, is the first; there are also Peder Mortensgaard, publisher of a left-wing newspaper who has a history with Rosmer, and Ulrik Brendel, Rosmer's former tutor, but now a drunk.

His three visitors all want something from Rosmer. Kroll hadn't visited since his sister's suicide; the grief he and Rosmer share meant they couldn't bring themselves to talk to each other. (The inability to express emotion is a theme.) But now the left has won the last election in Norway and Kroll, a staunch conservative, expects Rosmer to stand up for the forces of good, as he sees them, church and crown and all that. Kroll is organizing a new newspaper advocating conservatism and wants Rosmer to be the editor. But Rosmer thinks the left might have some arguments on its side.

Mortensgaard wants Rosmer to stand up for the left in his paper, but only if he's still a proper Christian: he's got plenty of atheists already in his stable. But when Rosmer's unwilling to lie about his new (lack of) faith, Mortensgaard says he has no use for him, and will be forced to consider him an enemy.

Brendel wants a clean shirt, a jacket--and money--so he can throw it away at a local bar. He's a bit the comic relief, but we also learn some of Johannes Rosmer's back story from their conversations.

Why did Beata Rosmer commit suicide? Though modern diagnoses are perhaps suspect, everyone does assume she was depressed, without quite using the word. But also she had learned she was not able to bear children; so, unless she died, she would mark the end of the Rosmer line and Rosmersholm would no longer have a Rosmer. And, before she dies, she sends a letter to Mortensgaard claiming her husband is in love with Rebekka West.

Was he? Maybe a little. It was in conversation with Rebekka West that Rosmer moved to the left politically; now, during the course of the play, do we see their interactions as perhaps a bit too friendly for an unmarried man and woman? Certainly Kroll does. Can a man and a woman just be friends? It's not always an easy question now, and it was much more loaded in 1886. Kroll at first assumes there's nothing between them, but then begins to wonder; he's the first to suggest that maybe the two of them should get married. He also rather rudely (and inaccurately) suggests to Rebekka West she's a gold-digger.

 

The idea really hadn't occurred to Rosmer before (did I mention repressed?) but once it's suggested, he decides it's a good one and proposes to Rebekka; she turns him down. 

How does all of this get resolved? Ibsen did write one or two comedies, it seems; I've never read or seen any of them, and this isn't one either...

A local troupe (Crow's Theatre) did the play in October and we went to see it. I hadn't read or seen the play before, and I decided to be surprised. (Other than my general sense that Ibsen's prose plays are mostly tragedies.) Then I read it afterwards in a different translation. The stage version said it was an adaptation, by Duncan Macmillan; the translation I just read (quoted above) was by Eva La Gallienne. There was one bit in particular I wondered if it was in the original.

Rebekka West won't marry Rosmer because she says she can't bring the purity to the marriage he deserves. That almost certainly implied she was not a virgin and was being fastidious. For a play set in Victorian times that's not improbable and I think that's clearly Ibsen's implication. Rebekka West believed herself an orphan with a father she'd never met; she was raised by her foster father, Dr. West, after her mother died; it's from Dr. West she gets her education and intellectual interests. She clearly worshipped him. Kroll believes, and goes on to 'prove', though his evidence is mostly circumstantial, that Dr. West was actually Rebekka West's father. She's shocked by the implication, says it can't be true, she's not illegitimate, but begins to believe it.

In the production I saw, the actress curled up in a corner of the stage and half-whimpered her lines; it was a very powerful moment, and the clear implication was that the person she'd lost her 'purity' with was, in fact, Dr. West, her foster father, and she hadn't known he was her biological father. And that's what I wondered about. Ibsen was famously frank about sex for his time, but was he really willing to put even a mention of father-daughter incest on stage in 1886? The Macmillan version did say it was an adaptation.

But as far as I can tell without both texts in front of me, the 'adaptation' was pretty close to a translation, and La Gallienne in the introduction to her translation (from the 1950s; her father, a journalist, had interviewed Ibsen at one time) thinks the incest is implied. So maybe the answer may be yes, Ibsen was willing. But I do think the text sufficiently ambiguous the play could be staged without suggesting incest, if the director wanted to.

 

Rebecca West, the writer, author of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, was born Cecily Isabel Fairfield, and took her name from the character in this play. That was a bit shocking. Rebekka West was a pretty admirable figure in the play, but I might prefer a pen name from somebody who had more luck in life myself...