Adaptation, Fidelity, and the “Reek” of Aesthetic Ideology: Susan Sontag’s Lady from the Sea

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article considers Susan Sontag’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888). Both Ibsen and Sontag break faith with older traditions in order to keep faith with amended and contemporary versions of aesthetic truth. Sontag considered Ibsen’s play to be deeply flawed, but I argue that the flaws Sontag perceived arose, instead, from the conflict between her romantic-modernist ideology and Ibsen’s counter-romantic and realist drama. By pairing down Ibsen’s dense world in favour of symbolism, her play expresses a starker critique of bourgeois marriage; her mermaid is a symbol for a poetics of sexual difference that resists the possibility of woman’s happy adjustment to a patriarchal world. Ibsen, on the other hand, uses his mermaid to acknowledge the simultaneous power and hollowness of romantic symbols, indicating how they can overshadow other aesthetic interests – including the complex and neurotic, late-nineteenth-century bourgeois housewife.