‘Cosmologies of Two’: Romantic Eroticism in Little Eyolf, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken

Abstract

‘Incest’, wrote Shelley, ‘is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance.’1 And, if Little Eyolf is any indication of Ibsen’s treatment of ‘incorrect things’ in general and incest in particular, then it clearly has its place in a tradition fired by the erotic imagination of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the varieties of illicit love which constitute its peculiar poetry. One year before the publication of Little Eyolf there appeared that monumental study of sexual disorders, the Psychopathia Sexualis — but it is unlikely, as Brian Downs laconically remarks, that Krafft-Ebing had much to teach Ibsen.2 As Freud must surely have observed in his analysis of Rebekka West,3 Ibsen’s plays exist as corroborative evidence in contemporary literature of the forms of sexual behaviour that medical science was struggling to understand — from Torvald’s fantasies of defloration to the incest fantasies that govern Alfred Allmers’s conduct. But Freud and Otto Rank notwithstanding, modern psychiatry has very little to add to Krafft-Ebing’s bafflement in the face of incest behaviour4 and even less to Ibsen’s ‘poetical’ understanding of a syndrome which, of course, finds no analogies in the standard textbooks on the subject.