Another beautifully constructed, weighty play about family secrets and lies, involving politics, idealism and conservatism, but focusing more on the mysteries of character and psychology.
Cast
- John Rosmer, of Rosmersholm, an ex-clergyman
- Rebecca West, one of his household, originally engaged as a companion to Beata, the late Mrs Rosmer
- Kroll, headmaster of the local grammar school, Rosmer’s brother-in-law i.e. brother of Beata
- Ulrik Brendel, a drunken poet
- Peter Mortensgaard, editor of the left-wing Searchlight newspaper
- Mrs Helseth, Rosmer’s housekeeper
Act 1
John Rosmer, of Rosmersholm, is the latest representative of the Rosmer family who have been pillars of the community for centuries, ‘the foremost family in the district’, providing it with clergymen, military officers and other officials.
The play opens with Miss Rebecca West, who is his companion, and the housekeepers, Mrs Helseth, looking out the window waiting for Rosmer to return from a walk. He is taking the long way home while they spy another man, Mr Kroll, headmaster of the local grammar school, walking directly to the house.
He enters and in the ensuing dialogue with Rebecca we learn a huge amount. We learn that Rosmer was married to Kroll’s sister, Beata; that it was not a happy marriage; that Beata became unwell and Rebecca was hired to be a companion for her; that she managed this despite the opposition of her father, old Captain West, her crippled foster-father, who was very unpleasant until he, too, passed away; that Rebecca became Beata’s rock and stay as she experienced mental decline and breakdown; that one day 18 months ago Beata walked down to the bridge over the millpool and threw herself in, drowning; that Rebecca has been providing companionship to the widower Rosmer ever since, and tells Kroll she will stay as long as he (Rosmer) needs her.
In passing Kroll determines that Rebecca is 29 and Rosmer is 43. If he should ever want a new wife…but Rebecca tuts and says how can he think of such a thing!
But, leaving the unhappy past, we learn that Kroll has become involved in local politics, in a conflict between the Radicals and the Conservatives which has become so bitter that Kroll refers to it as a civil war.
Rosmer enters and says how relieved he is to see Kroll. He’s always regarded Kroll as a teacher and mentor and was upset that he hasn’t visited for a year. He and Rebecca thought there was some kind of breach.
Now the talk turns to politics. The Radicals have taken power, egged on by a radical newspaper called The Searchlight and edited by one Peter Mortensgaard. Kroll is dismayed that the cleverest boys at his school now read it and that its influence has penetrated into his own family, where his children read it and even his wife blames him for raising them too strictly.
We get an insight into the authoritarian mind when Kroll states that hitherto his family had been of one mind, a place where ‘obedience and order have always ruled’. He therefore sees the rise as the Radicals as the triumph of chaos and disorder. And he sees the current times (1885 or so) as uniquely ruinous and decadent.
KROLL: You have no conception of the state of affairs that is going on all over the country. Every single idea is turned upside down, or very nearly so. It will be a hard fight to get all the errors straightened out again.
And now we get to the reason for Kroll’s visit after such a long absence. Kroll tells Rosmer they want him to join them. It’s all very well living out in the sticks and carrying on historical researches (into family trees) but the world is going to hell and they need Rosmer’s support. He and his party have just recently bought the Country Times paper and now what they need is an editor. Will Rosmer edit it for them? Rosmer says he’s got no feel for politics and is the last man for the job. Kroll reluctantly accedes but then asks if they can use his name, will he lend the renowned Rosmer name to their cause.
As the conversation progresses Rebecca has been pressing Rosmer to say something and he’s refused but the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Ulrik Brendel. The two men remember that this Brendel was a) Rosmer’s tutor when he was a boy and still has a soft spot for but b) a disreputable waster who Rosmer’s father drove from the house with a horsewhip.
Brendel is an impressive figure of a man though now down on his luck and dressed like a tramp. He speaks grandiloquently of the way he has reached a fork in the road, has many bold and exciting ideas which he has not yet committed to paper all the while experiencing the ‘mysterious bliss of creation’ and expecting the applause of the grateful masses. Presumably he’s intended to be the type of the ineffectual radical.
In a broadly comical scene he says he has no interest in material things but could they possibly loan him a dress shirt. And an overcoat. And some boots. And, say, two ten crown notes. And with much bowing and scraping he exits to continue on h is way into town.
And now Brendel is out of the way Rosmer can get back to what he was about to say which is that he has joined the other party. Well, not joined exactly, but he has thought long and hard and come out on the side of independence and freedom. He aspires to bring all sides in the dispute together in a spirit of democracy.
Kroll is appalled, saying his old friend is a renegade, lending his hand to the corrupting and perverting of this unhappy country. Rosmer calls it a work of liberation, of liberating the minds and purifying the wills of the people. Kroll calls it ‘poisoning our whole social life’ and dragging everyone down into the mud.
This is why, after much thought, he left the church and ceased to be a clergyman and now a ‘great world of truth and freedom’ has been revealed to him. In fact Kroll helped crystallise his decision. Rosmer has read the bitter, sarcastic, sneering articles Kroll has written and this made him realise the country is descending into civil war and anger. Rosmer sees it as his job to restore peace via democracy.
Kroll is disgusted and says he can’t remain in the house a moment longer. He predicts that Rosmer will come round, after all it is hard for a man to hold out by himself. But Rosmer replies he is not alone, there are two of them, just as Rebecca returns to the stage after seeing Brendel off.
Kroll notes this and makes some muttered remarks along the lines of ‘hah! Just as Beata said’ implying that Rosmer’s dead wife, Kroll’s sister, predicted Rosmer and Rebecca were becoming an item … And with that he sweeps out.
So Rosmer confirms that he has finally spilt the beans and taken his stand and gotten it off his chest and thanks Rebecca before saying he’ll turn in for the night. All of which he does in a brotherly way i.e. no declarations of love or kisses or anything. It’s clear that he regards them only as friends, something which will become important later on.
Act 2
This act, as a whole, depicts the wonderful, intricate and appalling entrapment of Rosmer in a number of webs and nets he never imagined. The sense of liberation and release he felt after telling Kroll about his new-found liberation is comprehensively trashed and turned into its opposite, angst-ridden guilt and apprehension.
So: Next morning Rosmer tells Rebecca he feels a huge relief getting the secret of his new allegiance off his chest, he slept like a baby and feels wonderfully light and optimistic. Rebecca disconcerts him by saying she sent Brendel on his way with a short hand-written message for him to give to Mortensgaard. Hmmm. It was done with the best intentions but links his name with both Brendel and Mortensgaard which he didn’t want to do…
To their surprise Kroll is paying them a visit bright and early. In an important detail, he is surprised to discover ‘Miss West’ walking round in her dressing gown and takes this for precisely the kind of disorderly overturning of conventions which is ruining society, in fact he will take it as an indication that Rosmer and Rebecca are living in a state of free love.
Next he informs Rosmer what Brendel got up to the night before, namely he pawned the greatcoat Rosmer lent him and spent all the money Rosmer gave him on booze, getting drunk and then rounding on his low drinking pals as a bunch of lowlife losers at which he was physically thrown out of the tavern. What this is really doing is showing how the Real World turns our best intentions astray. To put it another way, demonstrates how, no matter how pure your intentions, the world always twists and compromises them.
Next Kroll informs Rosmer that Miss West has been corresponding with the editor of The Searchlight. Rosmer knows about this because Rebecca just told him, but still Kroll makes it sound sinister. Also it hugely offends him because – key fact – Mortenson uses the pages of his paper, The Searchlight, to ceaselessly pillory and mock Kroll.
When Rosmer says Rebecca is a free woman and they both cherish their freedom, Kroll makes his next attack. This is the suggestion that Rebecca is deceiving him and he is the innocent dupe of her schemes.
To do this he backtracks a bit to discuss the mental state of the wife who committed suicide, Beata. Rosmer repeats that his wife had mental issues and cites two aspects: one was that she repeatedly had fits when she made sensual advances to him which he quite rightly rebuffed (reminding us that Rosmer is not a romantic revolutionary but a clergyman), second that they discovered she couldn’t bear children and she beat herself up about this, and the two factors helped undermine her reason and led her to suicide while mentally unbalanced.
Now Kroll delivers a killer blow: what if Beata wasn’t unhinged at all but had long suspected Rebecca and Rosmer were having a relationship, saw that she made him happy, knew that she could probably bear him children, and so did away with herself in complete lucidity of mind for Rosmer’s sake, to clear the way for him and Rebecca to marry, to make him happy!
And now Kroll drops his bombshell evidence: Before she killed herself, Beata came to see him – twice. First time Beata told Kroll that Rosmer was losing his faith, something Kroll found so fantastic that he didn’t believe her. Second time she told him to expect White Horses (the local legend associated with death) at Rosmershal and said: ‘I haven’t much time left because now Johannes must marry Rebecca.’ That was on the Thursday and on the Saturday she killed herself.
Kroll is implying Rosmer was having an affair with Rebecca, that Beata realised this and did away with herself to let them be together. Rosmer insists he and Rebecca are nothing but close friends.
Kroll moves on to make the point that, setting aside his own distaste for whatever setup Rosmer’s got going with Rebecca, he’s advising him not to publicise it: not to publicise that he’s apostasised from his faith. Rosmer replies that he wants to tell The Truth but Kroll warns it will have dire consequences for him.
KROLL: You have no idea of the fury of the storm which will break over your head.
Mortensgaard
To both of their surprise, the editor of the Searchlight newspaper, Peter Mortensgaard arrives. Kroll is incensed and says this confirms all his worst fears about Rosmer conspiring with the enemy, pauses just long enough to exchange insults with Mortensgaard, then storms out slamming the door.
Mortensgaard has come to confirm the rumour that Rosmer has joined the progressive party. If so this is big news, a man of his standing, and he’ll publish an article about it next day. Rosmer confirms that he has come down on the side of the radicals and has also abandoned, or been liberated from, his faith.
But Mortensgaard is not pleased to hear this. Rosmer’s entire value to the movement would be that he is Pastor Rosmer. If he’s also abandoned his faith he becomes just one more freethinker, in fact they have too many freethinkers in the movement, plus people will be upset about his apostasy. All things considered, he must hush it up.
Rosmer is, of course, appalled, because his whole idea was to live in truth. He criticises Mortensgaard for being cynical but Mortensgaard replies he has no choice. he is a ‘marked man’ and who marked him? It was Rosmer, back in his fully believing days, who excoriated Mortensgaard for his lapse and was instrumental in having him sacked from his position at the local school. Now Mortensgaard says the tables are turned – it may be Rosmer who becomes the marked man.
Does he understand how Kroll and his pals at Country Times will be after his blood. They will sniff out anything, any black mark, even the slightest transgression in order to drag his name into the mud.
Then Mortensgaard reveals that Rosmer’s wife, Beata, sent him a letter. In it she begged Mortensgaard to be forgiving of her husband, stating there were many people who wished him ill, saying that he was struggling with his faith, and ending by insisting that there was no impropriety going on at Rosmersholm, none at all.
To recap, Mortensgaard tells Rosmer to be very careful. If rumours do spread about his apostasy and his free love with Rebecca it will not only do Rosmer harm, of more concern to Mortensgaard is that it will damage the radical cause. And with that, he exits.
Rebecca
It transpires that Rebecca was hiding in the bedroom off the main room where these two dialogues (with Kroll and Mortensgaard) took place. She heard everything. Rosmer laments that their ‘pure and beautiful friendship’ which he thought he took so much care to hide is turning out to cause so much trouble.
Also he’s beginning to doubt whether Beata was indeed insane. Kroll and Mortensgaard’s accounts suggest she was very much in command of her wits. Rosmer now starts to pace up and down in an agony of guilt. Did Beata think they were having an affair? Did she notice how much they liked to be together, talking about the same books and so on? She must have gone about sick with jealousy and humiliation but bottling it all up.
This morning he felt so happy but now he feels like he is stifling under a crushing weight. He will never again know joy etc. He will always be nagged by this doubt that his wife knew everything and, in her wretchedness, killed herself.
Rebecca tries to cheer him up, reminds him he is a free man who wants to live the free life, his visions of going door to door spreading joy and enlightenment. At which he picks up the idea and says there is one way to blot out the past, by creating a bright present. Which is why he asks her to marry him. He thinks it will help him throw off the nightmare of the past and live ‘in freedom, in joy, in passion’.
Rebecca is ecstatic for about 30 seconds and then masters herself and says, no, she can never be his wife, never. And he must never ask her why! If he proposes again she will be forced to leave and will never come back! And she exits leaving Rosmer utterly confused.
Act 3
Morning of the next day. Mrs Helseth and Rebecca are chatting. We learn that Mortensgaard was dismissed from his post at the school because he made pregnant a married woman who was separated from her husband.
One thing leads to another and Mrs Helseth reveals it was she who took the letter Beata wrote to Mortensgaard. We witness, I think, Rebecca gently coercing Mrs Helseth to agree to the proposition that Beata was mad. She suggests it began when they learned she couldn’t have children. Rebecca comments it’s probably just as well the pastor didn’t have children what with all that crying, and Mrs Helseth points out the spooky fact that children at Rosmersholm never cry and, when they grow up, never laugh.
Enter Rosmer. He asks why Rebecca didn’t come into his bedroom to see him this morning nor brought the paper. This is unusual. She is being friendly but distant.
When he opens the Country Times it is to discover a torrent of abuse aimed at him and Rebecca. He puts it down in disgust and says this kind of thing will ruin mankind; it must be countered with a spirit of love and forgiveness.
But his thoughts now don’t roam far from guilt about Beata. He tells Rebecca that all their fine words about a pure and noble friendship between them, maybe they were fooling themselves, maybe they always were in love and Beata saw it more clearly than them and was so distraught she killed herself. Oh the guilt the guilt! When she reminds him he has a noble cause to fulfil, bringing love and forgiveness etc, he says no cause ever flourished if led by a guilty man. Tiring of this self-pity Rebecca gets his hat and stick and tells him to go for a big walk.
Once Rosmer is out of the way, Rebecca gets Mrs Helseth to let Kroll in. He has been waiting all this time to see her. There is another great revelation which rearranges our understanding of the play. Kroll reveals that he once had feelings for Rebecca, she once bewitched him – and he believes she led him on, she fooled him because all she wanted was an introduction to Rosmer, he was just a stepping stone to her getting the place there.
Rebecca counters that it was Beata who begged for Rebecca to come and be her companion, but Kroll says that’s because she (Rebecca) bewitched her, too, resulting in a kind of desperate infatuation. In a remarkably frank exchange she sits and listens while he accuses her of seeking her ends with cold calculation.
Kroll launches a new attack. He says all her (immoral calculating) behaviour can be traced to her background. And in particular the fact that she is a bastard born out of wedlock. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was taken into the household of Dr West but Kroll is at pains to explain that this is because she was West’s love child with her mother. She counters that Dr West didn’t come to town till after she was born but Kroll has been doing research and has discovered that West made a visit about the time Rebecca was conceived. She was his love child.
Kroll develops his attack. Why is she, an ’emancipated’ woman, so upset about the possibility of her illegitimacy? It just goes to prove one of his premises which is that emancipated ‘freethinkers’ just read fancy books full of big ideas but don’t really absorb them, don’t really change their values.
Kroll is saying all this because he can’t really believe the pastor has abandoned his faith. He can’t believe the scion of such a distinguished family has betrayed his values and his legacy. He thinks it is all book learning and Rosmer will revert.
Above all, Kroll tells Rebecca he must get Rosmer to legalise the relationship. They must be married or a world of fury will fall on Rosmer’s head: he will be hunted and exposed to ruthless attack.
At that moment she sees Rosmer returning from his walk. Kroll wants to skip out the back to avoid seeing his old friend but Rebecca begs and insists he stay. And when Rosmer walks in he is amazed to see Kroll here, especially after the vicious insults he read in that morning’s Country Times (Kroll says he had no part in writing them).
But Rebecca calmly takes control and tells the two men to sit down then she makes a dramatic confession. It was she who drove Beata to commit suicide. When she came down from the North of the country it felt like she was entering a new world of opportunities. She learned from Brendel that his old pupil the famous Johannes Rosmer was struggling with his faith, with new ideas, with intellectual emancipation. She was inspired to cleave to this man and go on a great journey of exploration together. She inveigled her way into the household by bewitching Beata, a weak personality, making the sickly woman utterly dependent on her. And she persuaded Johannes they were soul partners, intellectual mates. Then – and this is the bit that makes both men gasp – she slowly worked on Beata, step by step, using different arguments: the two main ones seem to have been that she was childless and therefore depriving the pastor of heirs; and the most shameful/intense one that Rebecca and Johannes’s relationship was becoming so intense that soon they… and she doesn’t even say it but I think the implication is that risked becoming lovers i.e. having sex.
In other words it was Rebecca’s constant chipping away at Beata’s confidence and morale which eventually pointed her the way to walk down to the millstream and throw herself in. Both the men are horrified. Kroll says, See Johannes? See the kind of woman you’re sharing your home and life with.
Horrified beyond any kind of response Rosmer simply asks whether Kroll is going into town and whether he may accompany him, then both men get up and exit without even looking at her. Rebecca stares out the window for a while and then asks Mrs Helseth to fetch the big trunk. She’s leaving and she will never return.
Act 4
It is the evening and all Rebecca’s bags are packed to go away. Rosmer is still in town. Act 4 opens with a brief dialogue between Rebecca and Mrs Helseth in which the latter declares she thinks it mean of the pastor to get Rebecca in the family way and force her to leave like this. On further questioning Mrs Helseth says she’s prepared to believe this of the pastor, who she’s known for years, ever since the accusations were printed about him in the Country Times. And what can you expect of a man who goes over to Mortensgaard’s side. In other words, she epitomises how easily swayed uneducated population is.
But then Rosmer returns. He is surprised to find Rebecca with her bags packed. She explains that she feels quite broken, all her hopes are crushed. Then Rosmer confesses that he met all his old friends at Kroll’s house and they persuaded him to give up his evangelising about freedom and whatnot. It’s not really him.
And he now thinks Rebecca used him. He was wax in her hands. She agrees that coming to Rosmersholm was part of a plan but then says something new. What wasn’t part of her plan was to find herself swept up in an overwhelming lust for Johannes, something she couldn’t control (obviously she doesn’t use the word ‘lust’, she says ‘wild uncontrollable passion’). It took control of her and it was this which drove her rivalry with Beata, which became ‘a fight to the death’.
What Rosmer doesn’t understand is why she’s leaving at precisely the moment when she has everything she wanted: her rival is out of the way and last night he proposed to her – why the devil did she turn him down?
Because once she was living with him as brother and sister or as very good friends, once he started confiding his thoughts and feelings in her, she found ‘that horrible, sensual passion’ fading away. But what followed was complicated. Because on the one hand she felt a great ennobling love, while at the other…a sense of powerlessness and helplessness which overcame her, weakened her, infected her. Suddenly she feels her compromised past as a barrier she can’t penetrate.
But then it’s Rosmer’s turn to tell her he just doesn’t believe a word she says any more. If only she could prove to him she loves him. Instead he is stricken with doubt and not just about her, about himself. If he gives up his dream of evangelising men for happiness, what does he have left? What is there worth living for?
At which point there’s a knock at the door. Surprisingly, it’s the rambling poet Brendel. He announces that he’s leaving town. he stood up to give a lecture and finally put into words the grand ideas he’s been harbouring for 25 years only to discover that…he had nothing to say, the cupboard was bare.
He asks Rosmer for a loan but then surprises him by saying a loan of any ideals he can spare a man now bereft of ideals or hope. As to Rosmer, he warns him against building any hope on Rebecca, this ‘enchanting little mermaid’, unless – and he goes into weird visionary mode – she chops off her little finger at the joint and then cuts off her ear! And with that he walks out into the night.
Rebecca is still determined to leave. Rosmer calls her to sit by him and explains that he has provided for her future. If he dies she is the legatee of his will. But, she says, you won’t die for a long time. Well, Rosmer hints at taking his own life. After all he has proved a complete failure, abandoning the traditions of his forebears, failing to have any heirs, and then abandoning the brave fight for freedom he crapped on about without even starting to take part in the battle. What a failure!
She rejects this, saying he has made at least one convert, her; he has raised and ennobled her above her sensual passion to a selfless love. He refuses to believe it. She says is there nothing, nothing I can do to convince you?
And this leads to the climax of the play when Rosmer says, If she really believes it, if she has the courage of her convictions, if she truly loves him, then… she will go the same way as Beata!
Rosmer (or Ibsen) twists it into a real challenge: If she kills herself she will prove herself as worthy as Beata, prove that she loves him, prove that such love exists and so reinspire him with the faith to re-undertake his mission, to bring nobility to the minds of men, faith in man’s power etc.
Then Rosmer falters and wonders what he’s said, but Rebecca is calm and focused. Yes, she will do it. She just asks that they drag the stream and bring up her body quickly.
Ibsen loads Rebecca with reasons to do it: to make amends for Beata, to atone for her crime; to prove she is as brave as Beata; to prove to Rosmer she loves him; to restore his faith in nobility; to save what is best in him; otherwise she will be like an anchor weighing him down; and a slave dragging behind herself a crippled existence.
He lays his hand on her head and says they are man and wife. There is no God, no institution has rights over them. They make their own rules and if they choose to be married, they are. He will go with her. He will go as far as her.
I thought he was probably going to watch her from the window walk down the path to the bridge etc but in fact Rosmer intones a lot of pious bunkum – ‘the husband shall go with his wife, as the wife with her husband…We go together, Rebecca, I go with you, you with me…For now we too are one’ – and they exit hand in hand.
Of course someone has to tell us what happens to Mrs Helseth, the housekeeper, conveniently enters at this point, looks around for them both, goes to the window, sees them in the middle of the bridge, leaning against the railing, and throwing themselves in, and screams.
And, interestingly enough, after all this tortuous talk about nobility and freedom and emancipation and so on, she sees events in a completely different light. In a more folk, uneducated way, she sees their double suicide as the revenge of Beata, ‘The dead woman has taken them’!
I don’t know if Ibsen intended it, but I love the idea that the previous four acts of fancy talk and high-falutin’ ideals all have the rug pulled from under them with the revelation that it has been a ghost story all along, and Beata is the unseen ghost who works via the foibles and frailties of the humans who let her die in order to get her macabre revenge!
James McFarlane’s introduction
In his introduction to the World’s Classics edition of the play James McFarlane makes interesting points. He says one of the sources of the play was the deep disappointment Ibsen felt on returning to Norway in 1885 after eleven years in exile. He wanted to settle in h is native land but was sickened and nauseated by what he found. Above all he loathed politicians and journalists of all stripes. Apparently in the notes for ‘The Wild Duck’ he said politicians and journalists would make excellent subjects for vivisectionists i.e. to be cut open while alive.
Hence the portrait of Kroll, a type of the tyrannical and sneering right-wing politician; but the equally negative portrait of Mortensgaard, willing to sacrifice principle for expediency. Hence his contempt for a figure like Brendel, a would-be poet, overflowing with fine sentiments who finds it impossible to put anything down on paper.
He gave a speech to a workers’ meeting in which he said democracy is only as good as the people in it; what was needed was a transformation of character, an ennobling of individuals, very much Rosmer’s prospectus.
The play shows how characters are changed and not for the better. Rosmer represents intellect, the academic personality, conservative by family and tradition, of great personal integrity; Rebecca represents sensual passion, advanced thinking, action and energy and ambition. To some extent they awaken or exchange these qualities in each other, Rosmer becoming roused for action to change society, while Rebecca finds her sensual drive being burned away by a more selfless love.
However, this doesn’t ennoble them as you might expect, but has a wholly negative effect. Rebecca comes to feel paralysed, infected with loss of willpower, while Rosmer’s dreams of social transformation collapse as he realises he’s really not the man for the job. Having abandoned their origins for new lives and then discovered their new lives simply don’t work for them, there’s only one way out.
Rosmersholm is a place which drains everyone of life, where the children never cry and the adults never laugh, where first the wife and then the husband and his lover are driven to suicide, a place where all ideals are drained and stifled and in this way, McFarlane suggests, it is a metaphor for the Norway which Ibsen so hated and despised.
Credit
I read ‘Rosmersholm’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘An Enemy of the People’, into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.
Related links
Ibsen reviews
- The Doll’s House (1879)
- Ghosts (1881)
- An Enemy of the People (1882)
- The Wild Duck (1884)
- Rosmersholm (1886)
- Hedda Gabler (1890)
- The Master Builder (1892)
Drama reviews
- Play reviews
Books & Boots 