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Norway, Ibsen, and Art: A conversation with Dr. Emily Cox
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How do we place Ibsen - and Hedda - within the broader social and cultural worlds of nineteenth century Norway? Dr. Emily Cox, art historian and writer, tells us a little more about the artistic context of the time, and together, we speculate if this helps us make sense of Hedda, or does she become even more of a singularity? Read some excerpts from our conversation below:
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Sharvari: Let me start with a very broad question. Why is the turn of the century – the transition from the 19th to the 20th century – such an interesting moment in Norway and surrounding regions?
Emily: This moment is known in broad cultural parlance as the Nordic Breakthrough, which groups the fortunes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden all together. This is often regarded as a moment where the whole region hauls itself from the backwater provinces of Scandinavia into the forefront of the avant-garde. And that is kind of true, but kind of not true, because, these countries or territories were in competition with one another in that moment. In fact, Norway had long been under the dominion of Sweden, and Finland had long been under the dominion of Russia, so they each had different interests and competing claims to modernity and to what that kind of modern style was supposed to serve on the political landscape in this moment. That's one part of the story that I think is quite interesting. The other part of the story is that in continental Europe, especially in Paris, there was this general craze for all things Scandinavian, starting in the 1880s and through the 1890s. It kind of comes on the heels of Japonisme in Paris – a Far Eastern Orientalism, basically, that's a little earlier, around the 1860-70s into the 1880s. But in the late 1880s there’s a new fascination, especially with paintings coming from Norway that are being exhibited at the World's Fair in Paris. And a lot of this is driven by Ibsen's plays being put on at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre Symbolisme in Paris. This is something I've been trying to unpack in my own research. On the one hand, there's this sense that in places like Norway there is still kind mystical romanticism that artistic crowds in Paris have already started to disavow. And there's also, I think, this sense of Norway being an untouched natural wonder. It is basically like the logic of primitivism, but applied to a European country instead of a colonial territory.
But then it both does and doesn't square with what we actually see coming out of Norway, such as Ibsen's plays, which are open to interpretation. There's a way of reading them as realist plays are tendentious and puncturing bourgeois values. But when they're performed in Paris, they're seen as being mystical or symbolist. That's a very specific reading of what's coming out of Norway. It’s like a projection of a fantasy of what “Scandinavia” is.
Sharvari: That's so interesting! Why do you think Norway captures the imagination of continental Europe at this time?
Emily: I have some hypotheses! Norway kind of engineers this fantasy to some extent. From the mid-19th century onwards, Norway was on the path to seeking political independence from Sweden. That involved really important cultural figures – like Peter Andreas Munch (the uncle of the painter Edvard Munch). He was a very famous nationalist historian who went around and collected these ancient Norse tales and translated it into modern Norwegian. He tries to use these old myths and the history of the Vikings as the basis for a national independence movement. And somebody like Richard Wagner then takes those myths and then popularizes them in his opera The Twilight of the Gods.
But then – and this is what I haven't quite worked out yet – my hunch is that in the 1890s, you have the rise of “degeneration theory” which posits that the world is made up of like different biological races, and that each one can rise and fall. And so, you have people like Max Nordau in the 1890s saying that Europe has reached a state of decadence, while at the same time the heroic spirit of the so-called "white races" are preserved in these ancient Nordic myths, that that is the place to go for a renewal. And so, fashioning Norway as this place of like natural wonder and ancient glory is part and parcel of this mythology. And the second part of this story is that this mythology is absolutely taken up by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s-40s, when they invade Norway and choose not to destroy it for the same reason.
Which is all to say, at the turn of the century, Scandinavia stands for an ancient form of European-ness. Norway really leans into that, for its own economic and political benefit. In 1886, a bunch of artists decamp to this artist colony outside of Oslo with the idea that they were going to create a distinctive Norwegian National Style. There are all these paintings of the rural countryside town outside of Oslo. It had a small mountain and a lake. They make a lot of paintings of the twilight hour, which is distinctive in Scandinavia, because it in the summer, twilight lasts for like 10 or 12 hours! Night never comes! And it becomes this regionally distinctive motif that everyone starts painting. When they exhibit in Paris, the Parisian critics are like "oh, my God, these painters of twilight, the light is so different, the painting is so different, they have a sensibility that is strictly Norwegian."!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord (1848) by Hand Gude. This was among the most beloved paintings of the Norwegian Romantic style.
So overall, there is a lot of political and economic churn in Scandinavia in the late-19th century. But then in continental Europe, there's also this fantasy of Scandinavia that's being constructed. And those two things do not always align, but I think they mutually inform each other.
Summer Night (1886) by Kitty Kielland and Summer Night (1886) by Eilif Peterssen. Both of these paintings are emblematic representations of Norwegian National Style with their representations of the summer twilight.
Sharvari: Where would you place Ibsen and his work in all of this? Because what is interesting about him is that he didn't actually live in Norway when he was writing these eviscerating social critiques, right?
Emily: It was really common for Norwegian artistic figures at this moment to have spent a lot of time on the continent. Because even though Norway is on the upswing economically by the 1890s, there's not a lot of money there. So, there's not a ton of money to put on plays. There's not a lot of money to buy art. So in the 1880s, if you want to be an artist, you can do a little bit of local training in Oslo, but really, you have to go to Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen; to these big art academies that have the institutional structure, of academic training, and also an existing art market where you can sell your works. A lot of that training happens either in Germany or Italy, and those are both the places in Ibsen’s play Ghosts. In that way, I see him as being part of a very established tradition of Scandinavians going to these two places and receiving a certain kind of training. What's interesting about Ibsen is he goes to these places, and then he ends up writing these skewering realist plays. He's not really aligned with the project of national romanticism. A lot of people in his cohort are doing these crazy romantic scenes of Norwegian landscapes with a beautiful little stave church in the distance. And the light is gorgeous and everyone is in folk costume. I can't picture anything further away from what Ibsen is writing!
Sharvari: Yeah, at the same time, as you were describing it, I was thinking, that does seem to be the required background for his plays to work, right? His plays tend to set up that kind of beautiful landscape of contentment. In Hedda Gabler, we have this picturesque house on top the hill, the yellowing leaves in the background. But the play totally rips apart that Romantic façade. In a sense, he uses tropes that feel familiar, only to have them break down.
Emily: I think you're absolutely right. There's a utility to these conventions, and part of that has to do with what the audience is like expecting. I wonder if it does give a different meaning to “breakthrough” where it makes us think of breakthrough not just as a rupture, but as something which is carrying traces.
Sharvari: That is a beautiful way to put it. How do you think the character of Hedda Gabler fits into this? She seems to be a kind of person carries that old way of inhabiting these sublime landscapes. She has this thirst for things to be beautiful. She does want to stay in 12-hour twilight! But she finds herself at the cusp of a different world order…
Emily: Exactly, where her desires seem old-fashioned almost. The thing she wants most in life is for things to be unified andbeautiful which feels old-fashioned? It does strike me that she's interesting in relationship to her husband, who is someone who studies, interprets and dissects these fragments that he's collecting from archives. And she seems less of an interpreter and more of a creator.
And the gender angle is interesting too. Because by the 1890s, many women in Norway are artists. Many are part of the artists’ colony I mentioned earlier. People like Kitty Kielland and Harriet Baker become incredibly famous painters, successful both in Paris and at home, and are truly valued members of this Norwegian national vanguard. Some of them are queer women, involved in the suffragette movement. This is what a woman could be in 1880s-1890s Norway. And so, it's interesting to create a character like Hedda Gabler, who, on the one hand, she seems almost like a closet creative or something like that. She has all these aesthetic impulses, and there's nowhere for her to put them; even though there were a lot of places for women to put them at this moment in Norway. I know that two artists is not a robust sample size, but it's, like, bigger than it would have been in other countries at that moment for sure.
I think one of the things that frustrated me about reading Hedda Gabler is I almost felt like she chose to be powerless. I want to unpack that, because there's this sense that she's an incredibly powerful figure who could, if she wanted, manipulate everything to her advantage, including her husband's career. And it almost seems like, why didn't she just manipulate herself into the kind of role that she actually wants?! I almost wonder if she's a creator without desire. What’s actually lacking is a desire that could be funneled into something.
Sharvari: As you were speaking, it also strikes me that one of the reasons why this is such a compelling character is because she's also not totally a product of her time. There's something so hedonistic about her, stemming from a very distinct personality. And you can identify all the social factors that contributed to making her this way, but it never quite explains the whole story
Emily: I wonder, too, how she fits in with the Femme Fatale trope. you see it in Munch’s painting all the time…the women with flaming red hair who tempt, allure (mostly by doing nothing) and are then held responsible for the destruction of whatever man encounters them. It's a total cliche and a very long one! But in the 1890s you have tons of paintings of women as Medusa, as sirens. On the surface you could say Hedda is like this femme fatale figure, she's sort of without desire yet leads to other people's destruction. But I don't think that that seems totally right to me.
A red-haired femme fatale in Edvard Munch's Vampire (1895)
Sharvari: Yes, because she also has so much interiority, it is hard to see her as a trope.
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Emily: My sense with Hedda is a kind of belatedness, of being a person who exists kind of too late. Is that compounded by the fact that she's a woman who's existing too late? I think so. I almost read her as a romantic man!
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Sharvari: Why do you think Ibsen's work still has so much sway over us today? Why might contemporary audiences want to watch Hedda Gabler?
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Emily: I think we're in the midst of another "Nordic Breakthrough" — it's in the ubiquity of japandi style, the popularity of movies by Trier and Östlund, and all the Scandinavian writers have are being translated right now — not just Fosse and Knausgaard, but Solvej Balle, Vigdis Hjorth, etc. Just as Scandinavia served became an exotic imaginary for late 19th century continental Europe, it now seems like a place where Americans living in a period of political and economic uncertainty can locate their fantasies of material security, healthcare, and a society whose seeming homogeneity promises a lack of internal conflict. As is the case with all cultural imaginaries, these are all projected desires — which is to say, myths that don't always have their basis in reality and which say more about our own anxieties and preoccupations than about the culture on which they are fixated.