Metaphor and Community in The Lady from the Sea: Remitting Impediments through the Marriage of Skewed Minds

Abstract

Though he sometimes seems an enemy of society, Henrik Ibsen may well be its best friend among the early modernists. Throughout his career he maintains a profoundly social conception of the self and many of his stylistic and thematic innovations stem directly from developments in his understanding of the ways society and selfhood can, and must, be reconciled. Indeed, even his best known and most rebellious individualists advance the reconciliation process, though their contributions are not always clear. or even conscious, and Ibsen is thus sometimes misunderstood as an antisocial sociologist who rejects communal life and embraces solitude as the only forum for self-realization.' While a Nora or Stockmann may espouse radical individualism, their strident speeches are always qualified by ironies which present isolation as a means, not an end. Humans may indeed need to "stand alone" to escape a sterile society, but they will be left standing if they do not then pursue more fertile social forums. For as the plays repeatedly stress, self-realization requires social cures for social ills. Limiting institutions must be replaced by liberating alternatives, disabling social bondage must give way to enabling communal bonds because, in Ibsen's penetratingly paradoxical view, solitary selfhood is ultimately a contradiction in terms.