Myth and Neurosis in Ibsen’s Mature Plays

Abstract

Myth and realism are quite incompatible, we suppose. Their curious marriage in Ibsen's plays, in which mythic patterns are enacted by the Norwegian burghers and their matrons, poses problems which call the nature of modern myth criticism into question. The case is not unique, of course. Eliot praised Joyce's use of myth in Ulysses, and described its function as that of a template, imposing form on the chaos of modern life Л But Ibsen, writing earlier, depicts not a chaotic world which needs shaping, but a highly structured world in the process of unravelling. Orley Holtan's important study of mythic patterns in Ibsen's plays2 employs a method borrowed from Jung, Frye, Cassirer, and other proponents of the archetype, who classify myth semantically, according to content. 3 Holtan therefore looks for archetypal myth structures in Ibsen's work Frye's quest pattern and Campbell's monomyth, for example and for myth content, such as the inclusion of supernatural beings and improbable events. This method prompts him to conclude that only the early and the late plays of Ibsen are mythic in nature. He classifies the social dramas of the middle period in terms borrowed from Frye, as myth displaced in favor of realism: They operate in a human world in which the supernatural is absent and causes and effects are, in large part, realistically determined.4 By aligning myth with the sacred and realism with the secular, Holtan fails to avail himself of those critical tools which would allow him to overcome the dichotomy of myth and the real, and to analyze simultaneously the compelling structural principle which governs Ibsen's last twelve plays. Contemporary structuralism, particularly the myth criticism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, offers a way of looking for repetitions, similarities, differences, and other relationships