Ibsen's Little Eyolf: Family Tragedy and Human Responsibility

Abstract

In the late autumn of 1894 Ibsen's British publisher, William Heinemann, permitted Henry James to read the English version of Little Eyolfact by act, as it became available from the translator. On November 22, after reading the fIrst two acts, James wrote an ecstatic letter to the great actress Elizabeth Robins about Ibsen's "ineffable Play" that, he claimed, distinctly promised to stand "at the tiptop of his achievement." After having read the third act, however, he wrote her again to say that the play had now become "a subject of depressed reflection" for him. Many subsequent readers — and critics — have shared James's disappointment in the last act of this play. For example, Ronald Gray, who finds a great lack of dramatic incident in the play as a whole, sees nothing in the final dialogue but orotund inflation. A few critics, on the other hand, see this playas one of Ibsen's subtlest masterpieces; chief among them, John Northam feels that because it presents "an action whose real source is never defined," but is instead "recreated through a range of imagery itself ambiguous and obscure," it "succeeds in expressing the inexpressible." The fact that responsible critical evaluations of this play differ so widely stems from the very ambiguities Northam lauds, especially those in the final scene, in which Alfred and Rita Allmers move abruptly from despair to something like serenity as they respond to the (literally) crying needs of the poor children in the village below and look upward — for solace — toward "the peaks," "the stars," and "the great silence." Does Ibsen expect us to believe in this abrupt double conversion, or is this another of his contrapuntal, ironic endings? We can only begin to answer this question by making a careful assessment of the leading characters.