values of “culture, tradition, and civilization,” which are here distinguished from “the social values as represented by Kroll and Mortensgaard.”     
            In Ingard Hauge’s essay (15, in Norwegian), the section on J. S. Welhaven, a Norwegian poet who probably provided the major influence on Ibsen’s lyric poems, demonstrates by much quotation from Welhaven’s poems that he was a utopian poet—that is, that no matter how dark a picture he might create of present circumstances he usually included a glance forward to a much better time to come—and that he believed a poet must stand on the right side in the ceaseless battle between the powers of chaos and the forces of creation.  The somewhat shorter section on Ibsen is much more interesting.  Here Hauge glances at Ibsen’s similarity to Welhaven in some of his early occasional poems, points out that Welhaven could never have wanted to “torpedo the ark,” and then turns to two plays containing important echoes of Welhaven, The Wild Duck and Little Eyolf, in order to show how the Welhaven material affects an understanding of them.  To The Wild Duck Welhaven contributed the wild duck motif, the phrase “depths of the sea” (“havsens bund”), and a Hedvig-like figure.  The whole discussion should be read, but I can’t resist reporting the most striking points, which concern Hedvig: Welhaven’s poem “The Sea Bird,” which contributes the wild duck motif, was first published as a conclusion to his prose description of la Morgue in Paris and serves as a poetic commentary on “the last corpse” in the row of suicide victims; this is a young girl who has one hand “knitted tautly,” a phrase echoed by Ibsen in the stage direction when Hedvig resolves to sacrifice the wild duck.  In his discussion of Little Eyolf, Hauge uses the Welhaven contributions to strengthen the believability of the ending.
           Erik Bjerck Hagen (16, in Norwegian) views Rosmersholm as a work in which it is extremely difficult “to separate lies from truth” since it is full of dissimulation, strategic behavior, and visible self-delusion and its characters consist of “a daydreamer, two politicians, an artist of sorts (halvkunstner), a notorious liar, and a mythomaniacal housekeeper.”  He dismisses the claims of critics who see this quality of the text as necessitating the use of a psychoanalytical approach as well as those who perceive it as being part of the play’s “metafictionality.”  For Hagen, the proper approach for understanding the play is to try to determine its genre, and to accomplish this he accepts what he takes to be the play’s open invitation to see through the surface pretense and get   to  what   is  really  going  on. His  reading

focuses on Kroll,whom he sees as a  kind of  Lt. Columbo in the first act, using the mask of a comic caricature in order to lure Rosmer and Rebecca  into revealing the exact nature of their situation.  From there Hagen moves to finding Kroll more like Iago in that the narrative of  Rosmer’s and Rebecca’s “platonic adultery” has been fabricated by him in order to punish and destroy the woman he has become attracted to and the man she has chosen instead of him.  This means that Rebecca’s confession in Act Three is false, and her making it is an ultimately futile attempt to counter Kroll and regain control of the situation.  The two main characters of the realistic drama perish while Kroll and Mortensgaard triumph.  They do so because as comic characters they, unlike Rosmer, can act, can bring an idea to fulfillment, and through them, especially through their being so much alike, Ibsen is able to further his own political program, which is the same as the one Rosmer spells out in the play.  Thus the genre of the play is political comedy.  There were times when I felt Hagen goes too far—I who was once accused of going too far in interpreting Rosmersholm—times when I couldn’t keep up with the twists in the argument, and times when I wanted to object strongly.  But this is perhaps the most intellectually stimulating essay in this year’s batch, and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to deal with the play.
             Vigdis Ystad (17) traces Ibsen’s relationship with the emotionally unstable Danish poet and sea painter Holger Drachmann, which came to an end in 1885 when Ibsen refused to accept a tribute from the Norwegian Students Association because of the extreme conservatism of its leader, and Drachmann sent the Association a letter of support with a sharp attack on Ibsen.  Ystad argues that Ibsen, who made no direct reply to Drachmann, replied indirectly in writing The Lady from the Sea three years later.  One indication of this, she thinks, is the similarity between Drachmann and Ballested, the play’s Danish character, but a far more important indication for her is that the play “can be read partly as an encoded comment on Drachmann’s view of life, and a suggestion that this philosophy could perhaps lead to dangers of which the Danish poet was not aware.”  In his seascapes and poems, Drachmann celebrated the sea as a powerful, untamable, irresistible force and depicted an “insoluble conflict with clearly tragic overtones” between the boundlessness and formlessness of nature and the limits imposed by human society.  Ellida is drawn almost irresistibly to the force of the sea but she is ultimately able to free herself from it and accept society’s limits.