America in Pillars of Society

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Contrasting Visions: Perceptions of

America in Henrik Ibsen's Pillars of

SocietyJesper Gulddal a

aSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of

Newcastle, Australia

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Contrasting Visions: Perceptionsof America in Henrik IbsensPillarsof Society

Jesper GulddalSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia

The great conversion about America that took place in European letters throughout

the nineteenth century was characterized by a marked tendency towards polarization

and routinely cast the New World either as a dream or a nightmare (Arendt). This

polarization was due in part, especially in the first half of the century, to the relative

scarcity of reliable information about the United States. Yet the main reason wasthat writers and intellectuals tended to approach America strictly in Eurocentric

terms, perceiving this country, not in its own right, but as a foil for political and

social issues within a European setting; those with a liberal outlook, for example,

tended to extol America as a way of implicitly criticizing the prevailing conditions

in Europe, whereas conservatives, for the opposite reason, often opted for a strongly

dismissive attitude. In the absence of sustained, dispassionate enquiry, the European

image of America, not least in the context of fictional literature, remained a battle-

ground of opposing mythologies, pitting enamored accounts of American freedom

and authenticity against glum visions of moral and cultural decay.

Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen is not normally regarded as a major contribu-tor to this debate about America. Indeed, Ibsen does not seem to have concerned

himself much with the United States. His private correspondence contains only

sporadic references to this country, even though two of his younger siblings had

settled in the Midwest, and his diplomat son Sigurd was stationed at the Swedish-

Norwegian legation in Washington DC for three years in the late 1880s. His personal

library contained none of the standard contemporary accounts of America, whether

fictional or factual (Haakonsen). Most importantly, his published works tend to

avoid the topic altogether. In fact, we would be justified in speaking, not simply

of a lack of interest, but of an apparent lack ofawareness of America on the partof Ibsen the author, were it not for a handful of scattered references in his poetic

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Vol. 34, No. 4, September 2012, pp. 289304

ISSN 0890-5495 (print)/ISSN 1477-2663 (online)# 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2012.711612


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and dramatic writings as well as a fuller, yet still seemingly peripheral engagement

with the United States in Pillars of Society, the first of Ibsens great cycle of

modern plays.

In this article, I offer a new look at this pivotal drama, aimed specifically at recon-

structing its complex views on the United States. The American theme has so far onlyreceived scant attention in Ibsen scholarship. To the extent that it has been touched

upon at all, the verdict has invariably been that the play is sympathetic towards the

United States, associating it with freedom, vitality and moral decency in a manner con-

sistent with the authors liberal views (Jorgenson 314-5; Johnston 104-5; Rossel 16;

Lebowitz 67). In the following I present a different interpretation based on the hypo-

thesis thatPillars of Societyis in fact deeply entangled in the nineteenth-century debate

about the merits and value of American civilization, but that Ibsens position within

this debate is marked by a degree of complexity that far transcends the conventional

dichotomy of uncritical infatuation and relentless disparagement. As is well known,Ibsen held idiosyncratic views on a range of topics, and his attitude towards

America is no different. Rather than taking sides, the play seems to conduct a

review of different European narratives on the United States, actively employing

these narratives for the purposes of characterization and critique, while at the same

time reducing their inherent plausibility by playing them off against each other. Out

of this cacophony emerges, I suggest, an unusually multifaceted representation of

the United States, qualitatively different from the polarized mythologies that made

up the bulk of nineteenth-century European discourse on America.

By way of establishing a historical framework, the first section of this article dis-

cusses the rise of Norwegian mass emigration to the United States and the variousresponses it provoked both in Ibsens early writings and among his contemporaries.

On this background, the following sections are devoted to a detailed investigation

of the image of America in Pillars of Society, focusing in particular on the clear, yet

hitherto unacknowledged manner in which this play distinguishes between America

as a European fantasy and America as a tangible presence within the plays Norwegian

setting. A scrutiny of these contrasting visions will reveal how Ibsens threshold drama

draws on contemporary debates about the United States, yet at the same time imbues

them with new complexity.

Norwegian Emigration and the Discourse on America

An authors comparative disinterest in a foreign country is rarely a topic worthy of

detailed commentary; after all, such disinterest can often be put down simply to tem-

perament or personal preference. Yet for a writer as focused as the later Ibsen on the

key social issues of the day, the relative neglect of the United States is remarkable. Not

only did the United States undergo a rapid transformation in the second half of the

nineteenth century, which gradually made it a world leader in terms of economic

power and technological prowess; it also had a special relevance in Ibsens native

country as the new homeland for hundreds of thousands of Norwegian emigrants.As Toril Moi has argued (39), Norway in this period was a colonial and post-

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colonial society, struggling to escape the dominance of its Scandinavian neighbors.

Yet it was also very much a colonizingsociety, which yearly contributed thousands

of its population to the settlement of the American West. After modest beginnings

in 1825 (the traditional starting point being the departure of the sloop Restauratio-

nen with 52 religious dissidents (Semmingsen 10-19)), and especially after the mid-1830s, Norwegian emigration experienced its first peak period in the decades between

the mid-1860s and the mid-1890s,1 a timespan that covers almost the entire modern

phase of Ibsens career as a dramatist. During this period, Norways annual emigration

rate frequently exceeded a full one percent of the population a figure topped only by

Ireland. The vast majority of these emigrants went to the United States, and it has been

estimated that a total of more than 800,000 Norwegians settled in this country between

1836 and 1930 (Haugen 14).

This massive outflow of people triggered an extensive and often animated public

debate, focused partly on the causes and consequences of emigration at home, andpartly on the United States as the emigrants destination of choice. With Ibsen as

the most notable exception, Norways major poets and writers of the period were

deeply involved in this debate, and together they turned America and American emi-

gration into a key theme in Norwegian literature of the late nineteenth century. Several

of them visited the Midwestern emigrant communities themselves, conveying their

impressions back to the Norwegian public in the form of articles, letters, and travel

books.

The literary conversation about the United States began almost simultaneously

with organized mass emigration. As early as 1843, at a time when net emigration

was still less than one thousand per year, the influential national-romantic poetHenrik Wergeland sounded the alarm, railing against what he regarded as the emi-

gration frenzy and comparing emigration to a dangerous disease that caused its

victims to lose their minds (qtd. in Blegen 155). Two years later, Wergeland followed

up this direct attack with a short anti-emigration play, Fjeldstuen (The Mountain

Cabin, 1845). Here, an unscrupulous (Norwegian) emigration agent is making his

rounds in the highlands, luring nave peasants into abandoning their native land

by means of grossly exaggerated accounts of wealth and ease of living in the

United States; expanding on the epidemiological imagery, his efforts are likened to

the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. The action revolves around a conspiracyto defraud an elderly peasant couple of their property, and at the same time separate

their son from the woman he loves, by having all three of them emigrate to America.

In the end, the scheme is thwarted. Following a European-wide literary fashion for

representing emigration as a doomed undertaking, the elderly couple return from

the New World, bitterly disillusioned and determined to tell the truth about

America to their gullible peers.2 Conversely, the conspirators are discovered and

have to flee to the United States this in itself is seen as sufficient punishment

for their crimes. While Wergeland mainly directs his anger against dishonest emigra-

tion agents, the play thereby, in a manner typical of European anti-emigration litera-

ture of this period, represents the United States as a land of bitter hardship anddisappointment (Wergeland).

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 291


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Even as he rails against emigration, Wergeland has almost nothing to say about the

United States itself, apart from it being a negative place. In the following generation,

however, when migrant numbers had risen considerably, the positions for and against

emigration invariably correlated with similarly polarized attitudes toward the United

States and American civilization. The opposing views were politically charged anddeeply rooted in domestic debates. Liberals tended to describe emigration as unavoid-

able given the political and economic situation at home, and further regarded the

freedom and the democratic ideals of the United States as a model for their own refor-

mist proclivities. Conservatives, on the other hand, tended to discourage emigration,

seeing it as a threat to the vitality of the homeland and perceiving the United States in

Eurocentric terms as a country without history and culture.

The liberal position was advocated eloquently and with integrity by 1903 Nobel

Prize laureate Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson, revered as Norways national poet and author

of its national anthem. The emigration question features very prominently in Bjrn-sons work. As a young man in the 1850s and 1860s, writing within the tradition of

national romanticism, his views on the matter were still wholly under the sway of Wer-

geland. Emphasizing the need for talented people to remain in Norway for the benefit

and improvement of the nation, early works such as the novels Arne (1858) and En

glad gut (1860) represent emigration as a selfish and damaging undertaking

(Haugen and Haugen 6-7). However, around 1870, Bjrnson like Ibsen in the

same period undergoes a political transformation that changes his outlook from

national romanticism to democratic liberalism. As a result, the emigration question

acquires a new critical potential in his writings: emigration is from now on seen as

a consequence of the backwardness of Norwegian society, while the United States isheld up as a model of political freedom and economic opportunity. A seven-month

visit to America in 1880-81, equally divided between the intellectual centers on the

Eastern Seaboard and the Norwegian emigrant communities in the Midwest, would

confirm this new outlook, and the travel letters that Bjrnson published in the Oslo

newspaperDagbladetare full of praise of both the emigrants and their new country;

at times, the author even goes to the extreme of actively encouraging young Norwegian

tradesmen to try their luck in the New World (Bjrnson, in Haugen and Haugen 254).

Upon returning home, Bjrnson continued this campaign for a more temperate and

realistic perception of the United States. Thus, a rare and insightful analysis of Euro-pean anti-Americanism, the author takes exception to what he strikingly refers to as

the endless defamation of an entire people the undifferentiated hostility toward

the United States that often served as a corollary of the conservative fears of both

democratization and emigration. However, Bjrnsons impassionate defense of

America against its detractors at times lands him in the opposite camp, as for

example when he eulogizes the United States as the miracle republic of the world

and lauds the men and women of New England as the best company in the

world (Bjrnson). Here, American ceases to be a real place and becomes instead a

means of making a point within a domestic political debate.

The conservative position had a somewhat extremist spokesperson in novelist KnutHamsun, another Norwegian Nobel Prize winner (1920), whose views on the United

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States were partly a reaction to Bjrnsons liberalism. As a young man, the destitute

Hamsun had spent a total of more than four years in the American Northwest (1882-

84, 1886-88) in a bid to gain the financial wherewithal to pursue a career as a writer

back in Norway. The bid was unsuccessful. After having worked a variety of jobs from

farmhand and cable-car conductor to itinerant lecturer, Hamsun returned to Scandi-navia and immediately set to work on a firebrand invective against America entitled

Det Moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1889).

Rather than analyzing the major social and political problems of the contemporary

United States, this book concerns itself almost exclusively with the cultural ramifica-

tions of Americas commercial, industrial, and technological modernity. The con-

clusion is always the same and always in keeping with that of conservative

romanticism: culture in the European sense is impossible in a young republic

devoted to business and material prosperity, and for this reason Americans are con-

demned to a life of utter spiritual emptiness. Disturbingly, Hamsun shores up thisline of reasoning, not only with blatantly misogynistic attacks on the (relative) inde-

pendence of American women, but also with references to the contemporary dis-

course of biological racism and its warnings against racial miscegenation. Blood

contamination is seen here as an important reason for Americas cultural incapacity:

Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud-

farm (Hamsun 144).

The two most significant accounts of the United States in nineteenth-century Nor-

wegian literature, Bjrnsons travel letters and Hamsuns anti-American diatribe

demarcate the extremes of a cultural environment within which America had taken

on diametrically opposite meanings as a land of either freedom or decadence.Even though less than five years separate the publication ofPillars of Society, Ibsens

main statement on the United States, from Bjrnsons and Hamsuns first experiences

in this country, it should be emphasized that Ibsens various utterances on America for

the most part belong to an earlier period, namely the 1860s and 1870s rather than the

1880s. Yet, even though they are not direct responses to either of these authors, they are

nevertheless products of the same extensive and often self-contradictory discourse on

America that had evolved in Norway with the onset of mass emigration. Familiar with

this discourse from its earliest beginnings, Ibsen would later, as a long-time exile, have

seen it reflected in the wider European debate over the United States in this period, notleast in his main country of residence, Germany. When Ibsen commented on America,

however idiosyncratically, this discourse with its well-established conservative and

liberal poles formed an inescapable point of reference.

Before presenting a discussion ofPillars of Societyin the light of its position within

the contemporary Norwegian and European debates about the United States as a

country of emigration, it is worth calling attention to two earlier texts in which

Ibsen touches upon the American theme. The purpose is not to unpack the full com-

plexity of these texts, which in any case retain a European focus and only deal with

America very cursorily. Rather, I simply want to point out that they offer only negative

observations regarding the United States, consistently associating this country withviolence, greed, injustice and immorality. In this sense, Ibsens early literary reactions



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to the United States seem to belong to the negative, anti-American viewpoint linked to

political conservatism and hostility towards emigration even if the author does not

explicitly endorse these views.

The first textual reference to America is the poem Abraham Lincolns Mord (The

Murder of Abraham Lincoln, 1865). In this curiously overdetermined text Ibsensreaction to the United States and the assassination of its president is intertwined

with a bitter invective against the European powers that failed to support Denmark

in its disastrous war with Prussia in 1864. These unrelated historical events are

brought together by means of a horticultural metaphor claiming that the murder of

Lincoln is the joint product of Europes grafting twig and the rich soil of the

New World. This complex metaphor can be broken down into three elements.

Firstly, Europe is seen to have imparted its moral corruption and perennial treacher-

ousness on the United States and is therefore partly responsible for Lincolns death.

Secondly, the United States itself, by providing ideal conditions for these evils, re-presents the extreme version of this aspect of European civilization. Thirdly,

however, the open violence and injustice of American society is seen as somehow

more honest than the hidden machinations of the Great Powers of Europe; and

since its despicable qualities are in this way obvious for everyone to see, the United

States is closer to the victory of dawn, that is, an eschatological moment of full

enlightenment and liberation. This line of reasoning shows that Ibsen, in marked con-

trast to a long-standing tradition of European anti-Americanism (Gulddal 6-9), never

casts America simply as the negative counterpoint to a positively conceived Europe. Yet

this does not alter the fact that this poem represents the United States in disparaging

terms as a place of violence and corruption where the law sits on the edge of the knife/And justice lives at the top of the gallows, and where the present age has inverteditself to its own caricature (Abraham Lincolns Mord 398-401).

The second example of the early Ibsens attitude towards the United States, to be

found in the satirical playPeer Gynt(1867), expands on these views while explicitly

linking them to the emigration issue. In Act IV of this play we meet the protagonist

again after ten years as an emigrant in America. Here, Peer Gynt has acquired a

fortune through a combination of gold-digging, slaveholding and colonial trade,

and his emigrant experiences is what transforms him from a small-time rascal in

the mountains of Norway to a global capitalist supervillain stripped of moral scruples an exemplar of the Yankee rabbles worst progeny, in the characterization of one of

his (less than authoritative) acquaintances (Peer Gynt391). Once again, the point is

not that Ibsen is anti-American, nor that he is harder on America than on other

countries. My claim is simply that the United States, although at best a peripheral

theme in this play, is associated throughout with an array of negative qualities: oppor-

tunism, excessive individualism, greed, moral corruption, and rootlessness. As we will

see, this vision of America prefigures an important, yet overlooked strand of hostility

towards the United States and the Americans in Pillars of Society.

Both biographically and historically it would make sense if the negative, albeit rela-

tively rudimentary, representations of America in The Murder of Abraham LincolnandPeer Gyntwere transplanted by more positive views in the dramatists decalogue of

294 J. Gulddal


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modern prose plays that is, if Ibsens perception of America evolved in the same

direction as that of Bjrnson and in parallel with the evolution of the authors

social and political views in general. This preconception seems to inform the standard

interpretation ofPillars of Society. According to this view, Ibsen uses America primarily

as a foil for bourgeois Europe, letting it stand for freedom and honesty as opposed toemotional repression and hypocrisy (Jorgenson 314-5; Johnston 104-5; Rossel 16;

Lebowitz 67). Yet, the image of the United States in this play is much more

complex and much less immediately positive. Unusually for literature of this

period, Ibsen resists the temptation to reduce America to a neat, homogeneous

idea, whether positive or negative, and stages instead a multilayered confrontation

between incongruous positions. A closer investigation, based on the brief historical

reconstruction offered above, will reveal how Ibsens modern breakthrough play

offers a dynamic mise-en-scene of the contemporary debates about the United

States that explodes the classic dichotomy of American dreams and nightmares.This dismantling of the traditional discursive order of things hinges, I propose, on a

strict separation within Ibsens play between American fictions and American realities.

American Fictions

Like Ibsens later works in general, Pillars of Society levels an all-out attack on the

hypocrisy and repressiveness of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Adhering

to the dramatic ideals of the Aristotelian-Sophoclean tradition, the modern plays

are typically structured around a process of gradual revelation that brings to light

the moral corruption (although rarely outright criminality, as Franco Moretti hasrecently argued)3 lurking under the surface of bourgeois respectability. In this particu-

lar case the unwelcome revelations come crashing down on Consul Karsten Bernick,

the owner of a shipyard in a small town on the Norwegian Atlantic coast. As its fore-

most citizen (Pillars95),4 Bernick is involved in all aspects of the towns commercial

life and further holds up a moral ideal to his fellow citizens by virtue of his seemingly

perfect family life. However, this standing is based on a body of lies that is dragged into

the light when Bernicks two in-laws, half-siblings Johan Tnnesen and Lona Hessel,

suddenly return home after having lived for many years as emigrants in the United

States. The absence of these family members has long allowed Bernick to use themas scapegoats for his own wrongdoings, which include an affair with a married

actress as well as some shady financial dealings designed to save the family business.

Representing the repressed side, or the guilty conscience, of bourgeois life, Johan

and Lona are the only persons other than Bernick himself who know the truth. At

first, they have no intention of exposing the Consuls secrets, yet a series of unexpected

events ultimately makes it impossible for them to hold their peace any longer.

Even though its two main positive characters have spent fifteen years in the United

States, Pillars of Societyonly touches upon the American theme peripherally: it has

little to say about the emigrant experience, it has no named American characters

with speaking parts, and everything said about the United States is surrounded by con-spicuous vagueness. Yet this country is nevertheless a permanent presence in the play,



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not least because the characters, positive as well as negative, repeatedly compare life in

small-town Norway to the very different conditions on the other side of the Atlantic

Ocean. In doing so, they implicitly reference the contemporary Norwegian and Euro-

pean debate on America with its two polarized attitudes of conservative resentment

and liberal admiration.Superficially considered, the rule applies that the plays positive characters have a

positive attitude toward the United States, while negative characters generally

express anti-American sentiments. Thus, the mainly female victims of bourgeois

hypocrisy all seem to fantasize of a more authentic and less repressive existence in

the New World. Lona Hessel, whom Bernick deserted many years earlier in favor of

her half-sister, the shipyard heiress, articulates this pro-American longing in exemp-

lary form when she juxtaposes the air of the prairies with the stench of burial

shroud in her native town, thereby associating the United States with life and bour-

geois society in Norway with death (Pillars45). The young orphan Dina Dorf, who isactually the daughter of Bernicks former actress lover, yet has been accepted into his

household for reasons of charity, similarly imagines Americans to be more natural

rather than so very decent and moral the latter being the key attribute of the local

bourgeois hypocrites and imagines the United States to be the scene of many great

deeds (Pillars57-8, 25). Finally, the Consuls unmarried sister, Martha, in a like vein

associates America with freedom, sunlight, strength and youth, once again drawing a

clear distinction between the vitality of the New World and the corruption of the Old

(Pillars101, 103).

The opposite view prevails among the respectable male citizens, the main benefi-

ciaries of the reigning social and ideological order. Here, we encounter the firm beliefthat their own society is built on a sound moral foundation, as Bernick puts it (Pillars

39), and for this reason they are markedly skeptical towards everything foreign,

whether it be technological innovation, changing mores, or social reforms. The

main representative of this brand of conservative provincialism is the deeply self-right-

eous and intolerant Dr. Rrlund. Exposed as a reactionary hypocrite as early as in the

plays opening scene, Rrlund warns against more frequent contact with the depraved

world outside (Pillars 39) and repeatedly rants against the great modern commu-

nities, first and foremost the United States, whose glittering facades he describes,

with unintended irony, as a cover for hollowness and corruption (Pillars 25). Thesickly and effeminate Hilmar Tnnesen, a cousin of Bernicks wife, provides corro-

boration for this view from a very different angle. Compensating for his poor physical

constitution, he regularly indulges in fantasies of masculinity involving buffalo

hunting and fights with redskins in the American West. Yet, whenever he ventures

beyond these fictions, which seem to originate in contemporary popular literature

for boys, he is in reality strongly dismissive of the United States, characteristically

greeting a performance of Yankee Doodle with a cry habitual, yet tripled for

this specific occasion of Ugh, ugh, ugh! (Pillars42).5

As it is clear from these various attitudes, Ibsens characters use America as a vehicle

for either attacking or defending their own society. In this context, the United States isnot so much a real place that the characters are genuinely in interested in

296 J. Gulddal


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understanding, but an imagined alternative to small town Norway, represented as

positive or negative depending on the speakers gender and social position. Here,

America serves first and foremost as a medium of cultural self-interpretation, and it

is important to note that the opposing viewpoints are equally disconnected from

reality they are nothing other than dreams and nightmares, articulated with refer-ence to the local Norwegian context rather than to the United States. Yet given the

fact that the negative views are consistently attributed to negative characters and uti-

lized to expose and ridicule them, it seems logical to conclude that the overall image of

America inPillars of Societytends toward the positive pole, and that this play conse-

quently has little to do with the discourse of contemporary European anti-American-

ism. Further, the rejection of the United States by the plays bourgeois hypocrites leads

us to believe that Ibsen is politically in agreement with Bjrnson, accepting emigration

as inevitable and endorsing the values of what Bernick calls an agitated society like

that of America (Pillars62).

American Facts

According to Joan Templeton, the United States features in Pillars of Societyas one of

Ibsens alternate, offstage geographies, designed as a challenge to the hegemony of

the bourgeois home (Templeton 601). Although this is undoubtedly true, a critical

appraisal of the plays representation of America is incomplete without the realization

that the United States does not just feature as a faraway mirage, but also has a concrete

presence within the coastal community in the form of the dilapidated American

steamship Indian Girl and its rowdy crew. When the United States is transformedin this way from fantasy to tangible reality, the Norwegian characters all of sudden

forget their otherwise irreconcilable differences and take to condemning the Ameri-

cans in one voice. Thus, the American sailors are represented by all parties in strongly

negative, even dehumanizing terms. It is not surprising that Hilmar Tnnesen and Dr.

Rrlund, both representatives of the towns intense narrow-mindedness, are revolted

by these unwanted visitors. True to his delicate disposition, the former anxiously

reports that the ships captain was formerly a pirate, or a slave-trader (Pillars 78),

while the latter uses the sailors as an opportunity to bluster once more against a

great modern community like the United States: I would rather not sully yourears by speaking of such human refuse. But even in respectable circles, what do we

see? Doubt and unrest fermenting on every side; spiritual dissension and universal

uncertainty. Out there, family life is everywhere undermined. An impudent spirit of

subversion challenges our most sacred principles (Pillars 25). Unexpectedly,

however, these disparaging views of the Americans are shared by the plays positive

characters. Thus, when Bernick complains to his foreman, Shipwright Aune, that

the sailor are an unprincipled horde, instigating riots and committing unmention-

able indecencies, this honest working man agrees wholeheartedly, describing the

Americans as a depraved lot and later taking up the dehumanizing rhetoric by

affirming that there arent any human beings in the Indian Girl only beasts(Pillars 49, 76). Even Johan Tnnesen and Lona Hessel, the dramas benchmarks of



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moral integrity, seem to be in agreement with this highly negative perception even

though they are evidently on friendly terms with the American captain and are them-

selves routinely referred to as the Americans by the other characters. This becomes

apparent towards the end of the play when Lona reveals that Johan made a last-minute

decision to sail with the locally owned Palm Tree rather than the Indian Girl. Thereason she quotes him as giving, no doubt with her approving of it, is not the poor

condition of the American ship, but the moral depravity of its crew, which he sees

as too great a danger to Dina Dorf: He didnt dare to entrust so precious a cargo

to that gang of ruffians (Pillars105-6).6

Thus, when confronted with real Americans, appearing in flesh and blood in the

streets of their home town, the main characters, positive as well as negative, come

together in condemning them as beasts, human refuse, ruffians, or as depraved

and unprincipled rabble truly a rare ecumenical moment in Ibsens modern

dramas.

7

Importantly, this comprehensive stigmatization of the sailors is gratuitousin the sense that it serves no genuine narrative purpose. While the plot evidently

requires the presence in the town of a derelict merchant ship (although not necessarily

one bound directly for United States; the Palm Tree, with Johan onboard, is destined

for England), there is strictly speaking little reason why the ship and its crew have to be

American; why the American crewmen should be seen as less human than sailors of

other nationalities; and why their depravity should be commented on so generally

by such a wide range of characters. The only plausible explanation seems to be that

Ibsen is taking this opportunity to lash out against the Americans, as he had done a

decade earlier, although much less forcefully, in The Murder of Abraham Lincoln

andPeer Gynt.Further to this question of Americas tangible presence in the town, the American

steamship itself fulfills a crucial narrative role in the play. Indian Girl is old and

rotten; it has suffered major damage on its latest crossing, and at the beginning of

the play it is undergoing extensive repairs at Bernicks shipyard. However, the Amer-

ican owners inform Bernick by telegram that the ship must be readied without delay:

Execute minimum repairs. DespatchIndian Girlas soon as in floating condition. Safe

season. At worst, cargo will keep her afloat (Pillars41). This telegram is of key signifi-

cance, being the only non-perspectival testimony about the United States in the entire

play. While the surprising agreement among the cast regarding the American sailorsalready produces an illusion of objectivity, the telegram is the only piece of evidence

that is not mediated through the particular ideological biases and interests of the char-

acters. As such, it is of paramount importance to the plays representation of America.

The telegram evidently places the American ship-owners in a negative light, yet it is

not in itself an expression of anti-Americanism: American businessmen can be unscru-

pulous, just like businessmen of any other country. The question is, however, whether

the ships American nationality is simply incidental. Ibsen-scholars such as Halvdan

Koht (305) and Michael Meyer (Introduction, 54-5), among many others, seem to

make this assumption when pointing toward a European context for the Indian

Girl episode, namely the debate initiated in the United Kingdom by Member of Par-liament Samuel Plimsoll concerning the poor standards of repair and safety in the

298 J. Gulddal


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British merchant navy. Historically, this contextualization makes perfect sense: Plim-

solls crusade against the infamous floating coffins peaked in the mid-1870s and led

to the passing of the Merchant Shipping Act in 1876, a year before the first perform-

ance ofPillars of Society; moreover, it had a profound resonance in the seafaring nation

of Norway, where a very similar debate raged around the time of Ibsens homecomingvisit in 1874 (Meyer, Ibsen435).

Yet, in terms of narrative logic the identification of the Plimsoll campaign as a major

source fails to satisfy on its own and not just because Ibsen is flogging a rather dead

horse (Gray 33) when referencing a debate that had ceased to be controversial and

had already led to significant reform. Had Ibsen simply wanted to contribute to the

contemporary British and Norwegian debates over safety at sea, or make a point

about bourgeois business ethics, he could have let the battered ship fly British or Nor-

wegian colors, or could at the very least have made less of its American nationality. As

it is, all information provided about the Indian Girl its crew, its captain, itsowners, and even its name serves to underline in no subtle manner that it is in

fact American. In other words, Pillars of Society seems to Americanize the issue,

effectively making it a question, not of maritime safety standards, but of American

business practices: like the characterizations of the American sailors, the Indian

Girl episode seems designed first and foremost to highlight the morally objectionably

nature of the Americans.

For this reason, the reference to Samuel Plimsoll, while highly pertinent, needs to be

supplemented with an equally pertinent reference to the long-standing anti-American

idea that profit in the United States always takes precedence over moral considerations,

including matters of health and safety. This view, which Ibsen had already endorsed inPeer Gynt, was firmly entrenched in Western European culture of the nineteenth

century. It received an early, theoretical formulation in Hegels lectures on the philo-

sophy of history; writing around 1830, Hegel states that the essential character of the

American republic consists in the private persons striving for acquisition and profit;

and since the legal institutions in the United States lack genuine integrity, American

businessmen are famous for cheating with the protection of the law (Hegel 88-9).

Fifteen years later, in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Charles Dickens went one step

further by repeatedly pointing toward the deadly consequences of American fraudu-

lence; in fact, the novels protagonist almost succumbs to it himself, having beentricked into buying a lot of land in a pestilent swap with the alluring name of

Eden.8 Yet it is Austrian writer Ferdinand Kurnberger who provides the closest

match-up with Pillars of Society. Kurnbergers novel Der Amerikamude (1855) a

classic example of radical anti-Americanism contains a detailed account of a

lethal ship collision on the Lake Erie, caused by the greed and recklessness of American

captains who care only about delivering their cargoes as fast as possible and have no

regard for passenger safety (Kurnberger 514-15).

Ibsens Consul Bernick subscribes to exactly the same anti-American view when

interpreting the telegram, not as being comparable to the scandalous practices of

British or Norwegian ship-owners, but rather as an example of a specifically Americanbrand of immorality: Oh no, really, this is typically American! How absolutely



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disgraceful! [. . .] Eighteen human lives at stake! And those gentlemen dont turn a

hair (Pillars40-41). This reaction effectively invalidates the hypothesis that Ibsen is

simply thinking of Plimsoll and the notorious coffin ships. The phrase Typically

American not only implies that the practice in question is widespread in the

United States, but also, more importantly, that it brings to light something quintessen-tially American, namely the reckless pursuit of profit and the cynical disregard for

human life. While Plimsolls reform campaign is clearly relevant to this drama, the

arrival of the telegram shows that Ibsen is reinterpreting this campaign with reference

to the tradition of European anti-Americanism.

Bernicks indignant condemnation of the American ship-owners is of course highly

ironical: after initially ignoring the request to halt the repair work, he is later tempted

in an altogether similar way to sacrifice human lives for the sake of personal gain.

When leaving Norway fifteen years earlier, Johan Tnnesen had willingly assumed

responsibility for his brother-in-laws affair with the married actress. However, afterhis departure, Bernick, in a ploy to disguise his own financial problems, also

accused him of having stolen money from the family business. When discovering

this act of defamation, Johan swears to clear his name by showing everyone two old

letters from Bernick that clearly expose the Consuls lies. Yet, rather than producing

these letters immediately, Johan decides to wait, intending to settle permanently in

Norway only after having returned one last time to the United States to sell his

farm; the crossing is to be made on the Indian Girl. This turn of events spells disaster

for Bernick. So as to be rid of the troublesome relative as well as the telltale letters, he

orders the American ship to be readied for immediate departure, well aware that it will

almost certainly go under without further repairs. Although the Consul later regretsthis decision, he has nevertheless revealed himself to be as cynical and calculating as

the ships American owners. However, rather than discrediting Bernicks previous

anti-American outbursts, this ironic twist actually increases their weight. The point

is not that murderous behavior of this type knows no nationality, but that Bernick,

desperate to protect his status as the towns foremost citizen, is willing to act as

unconscionably as an American. Here, Ibsens drama makes Americans the measure

of moral depravity.

Thresholds

As we have seen, the representation of the United States in Pillars of Society is split

between two different, even contradictory modalities.

On the one hand, a range of central characters repeatedly invoke a fictionalAmerica,

derived from the transatlantic myth-making of European romanticism, and use these

fictions as means of understanding their own community. This process of cultural self-

interpretation exists in both affirmative and critical versions, being employed variously

as a means of defending and attacking the local bourgeoisie and its values. Inasmuch as

the positive characters harbor positive ideas about the United States, while the negative

characters find America to be despicable, the play as a whole seems to advocate a favor-able stance, rejecting the anti-American sentiments of the likes of Rrlund and Bernick

300 J. Gulddal


14/17

as the mark of a retrograde outlook. Read in this way, Ibsens attitude toward America

is close to that of Bjrnson in the same period.

On the other hand, we also encounter the real America in the form of the Indian

Girl and its depraved crew. Here, the play seems instead to adopt an anti-American

attitude, branding the Americans as immoral in their business dealings and beastly intheir social comportment. Far from being incidental, as was perhaps the case in Peer

Gynt, this anti-American dimension is highlighted by the structure of the play. Not

only is the all-out attack on the American sailors gratuitous from the point of view

of narrative motivation (Ibsen is going out of his way to represent them negatively);

it is also voiced in unison by a broad selection of both positive and negative characters,

and it receives further corroboration in the form of the telegram, which, importantly,

is an objective element in the play, in the sense of existing independently of the

specific viewpoints of the characters. As a result, the anti-Americanism directed

against the real America is imbued with the illusion of being an objective fact.Read in this light,Pillars of Societyis closer to the romantic tradition of anti-American-

ism, of which Knut Hamsuns vitriolic rants are a late and characteristically extreme

product.

Complex or even contradictory attitudes toward the United States are not uncom-

mon in nineteenth-century European literature, even though a certain polarization

around positive and negative extremes is the more usual situation. Thus, for

example, praising the pristine landscape while at the same time deprecating the pol-

itical institutions and social mores is a common strategy in romantic commentary

on the United States, featuring perhaps most prominently in Chateaubriands Amer-

ican novels and later making up the ideological core of Gustave Aimard and Karl MaysIndian romances. In Ibsens play, this type of ambivalence is represented with particu-

lar clarity in the figure of Hilmar Tnnesen who, as we have seen, harbors masculine

fantasies of the Wild West, yet retains a deep-seated hostility towards American society

and values. However, it also manifests itself at a more structural level. Thus, when fan-

tasizing about America, the female characters generally refer to natural attributes

(open spaces, fresh air, sunlight, health, youth), whereas the undercurrent of anti-

Americanism is focused predominantly on what is seen as the moral failings of Amer-

icansociety.

Yet the representation of America in Pillars of Society differs markedly from theestablished patterns. Rather than simply juxtaposing different mythologies about

the United States, Ibsen employs both the positive and negative myths as part of his

critique of bourgeois society, while at the same time exposing the fictitious character

of these myths by contrasting them with what is seen as American reality. Here, the

commonplace distinction between American dreams and nightmares is undercut

by a more fundamental distinction between American fictions and American facts.

In order to understand this complex structure, we need to take into account both

Ibsens development as a dramatist and the general evolution of the European

image of America toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Pillars of Societyis a threshold piece within Ibsens writings, marking a break withhis earlier, national romantic or idealistic phase and the beginning of the more



15/17

important, modern phase encompassing the great cycle of realist dramas of the 1870s

to 1890s. Highly fertile in terms of its thematic and formal innovations, Ibsens turn

toward modern drama also had profound political implications and inevitably affected

the authors standpoint within the contemporary debates concerning America and

American emigration. As we have seen, the early Ibsen had been closer to Wergelandsnationalistic critique of emigration than to Bjrnsons liberal fascination with the

freedom and opportunities of the United States; indeed, he had gone further than Wer-

geland by attacking America itself, associating it with greed, violence, lawlessness, and

moral corruption. However, in the context of a progressive agenda in both literature

and politics, the New World acquires a new meaning, uneasily located between the

positive and negative poles of late nineteenth-century European discourse on

America, andbetweenthe conservative and liberal views on emigration.

Seen in this light, the anti-American position that Pillars of Societydevelops in

relation to the real American must be regarded as a late version of Ibsensearlier stance, which focused on the United States as a culturally and morally

noxious environment for European emigrants. However, in a complimentary and

distinctly pro-American maneuver Ibsen reappropriates the discourse of romantic

anti-Americanism as a critique of the European bourgeoisie. The shrill rejection of

America by the towns leading citizens becomes a new way of exposing their pro-

vincialism, while the enthusiasm for the United States on the part of the positive

characters is used as a way of gesturing toward an alternative to the mendacious,

claustrophobic life in the small costal community. However, these opposing atti-

tudes are clearly nothing other than imaginations: they are not serious descriptions

of the United States, but ideological markers used to distinguish stubborn conser-vatives from progressive reformers in a very European setting. Ibsen takes great care

to separate this imagined America, which serves as a screen for European projec-

tions, from the real America, present in the play in the guise of the Indian

Girl and the American sailors. Whilst allowing the imagined America to take on

both negative and positive meanings, Pillars of Society represents this real

America as morally and culturally corrupt. In this way Ibsen performs a remarkable

tightrope act characteristic of his later views on the United States: he uses America

critically without abandoning the rudimentary anti-Americanism of his earlier

career.

9

The attitude toward the United States, then, constitutes a major fault line within

Ibsens first modern play, vividly testifying to the ideological struggle the author

went through in the transitional period of the late 1870s. Yet, apart from being signifi-

cant in terms of Ibsens political development, the representation of America in this

play is also indicative of a more general shift within the European perception of the

United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The discourse on

America in the early part of the century had been dominated by the opposite romantic

fictions of America as a land of either freedom or cultural and moral corruption. These

fictions had been kept alive by incessant recycling as well as by a lack of full and trust-

worthy information. Increased traffic, greatly boosted by the introduction of steam-ships on the transatlantic shipping routes, gradually altered this situation and paved

302 J. Gulddal


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the way, if only temporarily, for more nuanced perceptions. Ibsens multidimensional

representation of the United States in Pillars of Societyis a remarkably clear manifes-

tation of this new realism. In using the conflicting fictions about America as a way of

attacking the European bourgeoisie, these fictions are precisely exposed as fictions.

Even if Ibsen fails to extract himself fully from the prejudices of European anti-Amer-icanism, this in itself is a major achievement: to have demonstrated in dramatic form

the inherently imaginary character of Europes images of America.

Notes

[1] For full details about emigration numbers, cf. Statistics Norway, Inn- og utvandring, over-

sjisk utvandring og utvandring til USA. 1821-1948, http://www.ssb.no/histstat/aarbok/ht-

020220-051.html. Accessed March 17th 2012.

[2] The narrative of the disillusioned emigrant is a significant but neglected subgenre in European

literature of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Notable examples include: Gustave de Beau-

mont, Marie, ou Lesclavage aux Etats-Unis (1835); Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit

(1843-44); Ferdinand Kurnberger Der Amerikamude (1855); and Victorien Sardous LOncle

Sam(1872). For a discussion of this genre, cf. Gulddal 45-53.

[3] Morettis contention meets its limitations in this particular drama in which the male protago-

nist, Karsten Bernick, is clearly guilty of criminal irresponsibility and attempted murder.

[4] Quotations from this edition have occasionally been modified with reference to the Norwegian

original (Samfundets Sttter).

[5] The sound is expressive both of a sickly disposition and, more pertinently in this context, of

moral and aesthetic dismay.

[6] Michael Meyers translation obscures the telling fact that Lona uses almost exactly the same

phrase as Bernick: den ryggeslse bande (i.e. the depraved gang, the gang of ruffians)instead of dette ryggeslse pak (i.e. this depraved rabble, this unprincipled horde). Here,

the shared negative outlook on the Americans is mirrored and emphasized at the linguistic

level. Aune uses the expression slemme folk (i.e. bad people, or in Michael Meyers trans-

lation, a depraved lot).

[7] The only real exception to this broad agreement among the cast is Bernicks son Olaf, who in

Act I cries excitedly at the sight of the circus-like procession of passengers and crewmen from

the Indian Girl (Pillars 42). However, this childish outburst, which precedes any direct

encounter with this group of people, seems motivated above all by the novelty of the situation

and should not be regarded as real support of the Americans.

[8] Cf. Dickenss description of American businessman Major Pawkins: In commercial affairs he

was a bold speculator. In plainer words he had a most distinguished genius for swindling, andcould start a bank, or negotiate a loan, or form a land-jobbing company (entailing ruin, pes-

tilence, and death, on hundreds of families), with any gifted creature in the Union. This made

him an admirable man of business (Dickens 261).

[9] This basic structure is also apparent in the later playAn Enemy of the People albeit in a form

that is much more condensed as well as friendlier towards the Americans. When briefly con-

sidering going into exile in the United States, the much-reviled Dr. Stockmann muses:

Mind you, theyre probably not much better in America. The majoritys rampant there too,

and liberal public opinion and all the rest of the rubbish. But the context is larger there, you

see. They may kill you, but they wont torture you slowly; they dont pin a free man in a

vice like they do here. And if you want to, you can stay independent outside it all ( Enemy

204-5). Here, too, Ibsen uses the United States as a way of criticizing the conditions athome, yet this critical use does not exempt this country from being criticized as well.

http://www.ssb.no/histstat/aarbok/ht-020220-051.htmlhttp://www.ssb.no/histstat/aarbok/ht-020220-051.htmlhttp://www.ssb.no/histstat/aarbok/ht-020220-051.htmlhttp://www.ssb.no/histstat/aarbok/ht-020220-051.html


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Documents

America in Pillars of Society