Will and Sacrifice: Victimary Representations in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
- Will and SacrificeVictimary Representations in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
In his short essay, “Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work,” published in 1916 in the review Imago, Freud identifies Ibsen’s drama Rosmersholm (1886) as a perfect example of an Oedipus complex in a modern setting.
The story is well known. After the suicide of his wife Beata, brought about by the impossibility of bearing children and by the misery of an existence sacrificed to social and religious duties, John Rosmer, a Protestant pastor, has lost his old faith and is desirous of founding a new morality aimed at joy and tolerance. He lives in a completely spiritual relationship with the young maid Rebecca, the expression of a daring liveliness and unrestricted femininity.
Their union, based on thoughts and desires never fully confessed and on actions always postponed, comes to the breaking point when Rosmer, tired of living in a morally ambiguous situation, proposes to Rebecca. She in turn, most surprisingly, refuses. It is this apparently incomprehensible “no” from the young woman that Freud analyzes in order to reconstruct the innermost reasons in Rebecca’s mind. His inquiry aims at establishing a genealogy to clarify the obscure features and things unsaid by Ibsen: why does Rebecca, in love with John’s purity and nobility of soul, withdraw a moment before obtaining what [End Page 167] she desires? What does her past hide, and why does this very past explode at the very moment in which the possibility of a long-awaited future is about to open up?
Freud’s psychoanalytic answer is this: “the adventuress with the fearless, free will”1 the young woman who brings the ideals of Enlightenment and of emancipation into the dark immobility of Rosmer House, is tainted by an incestuous past with her father (Doctor West, the man who raised her as his foster daughter) and by the desire to eliminate her mother. This becomes concrete in Beata’s suicide, in order to take her place next to Rosmer. The revelation of this past, hinted at by the strict and conservative headmaster Kroll, brother of Beata, paralyzes Rebecca’s will, inducing her in turn to seek death. Like Beata, Rebecca throws herself into the millstream, followed by her beloved John, under the weight of her guilt, which she suddenly acknowledges.
In fact, Rebecca is the one who reminded Beata of the nonfulfillment of her duty as a wife to bear children, which led Beata to suicide, and Rebecca is also the one who reproduced the incest with her father in her relationship with Rosmer. Like Oedipus, then, Rebecca finds herself guilty of disobeying the two fundamental taboos, and like Oedipus she avoids the sight of the world in order to atone for her crime.
Nonetheless, as Girard suggests, the story of Oedipus speaks of something more fundamental than the desire to possess one of the two parents, eliminating the other; something that goes beyond the private sphere to throw light on the darkest reasons for collective action and on that fragile construction that culture calls “identity.” And Ibsen, in Rosmersholm as in most of his dramas, leads us into a dimension very similar to the one that tragedy, according to the Girardian perspective, offers us: that is to say, a privileged viewpoint on human nature and on its complicated declination in the sphere of human interaction.
Because tragedy, as a literary genre that makes its appearance in Athens between the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. is not just an artistic invention but, more profoundly, a place where the values and virtues of the epos are discussed and questioned, a moment of fragmentation of absolute models of behavior, in which human action is not considered anymore as a stable continuation of divine will. Having abandoned the role of eternal-types, of archetypes with a rigid identity molded by the cosmos in which they live, heroes simply become men. They are plunged into an intricate network of power relationships in which the human and the divine are confused, no longer to give perfect harmony to action but, on the contrary, to redefine the origin and the legitimacy of action itself.
It...
