Rosmersholm
A woman gets what she planned for and cannot then live inside it. Freud read Rebecca West as wrecked by success.
The characters grapple with morality, with what actually constitutes right and wrong and who judges the difference.
Johannes Rosmer, a pastor turned freethinker, lives at his family estate a year after his wife Beata has drowned herself in the mill-race below the house. Rebecca West, the companion who came to nurse Beata and then stayed, works beside him on his hopes for a reformed public life. As Rosmer edges toward marriage, the account each of them gives of the past stops matching the one the other needs, and what Rebecca did to clear her own path comes into the open.
Freud gives the closing pages of Those Wrecked by Success, in Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work (1916), to Rebecca West. He locates her collapse not in the death she engineered but in a buried earlier attachment, reactivated the instant Rosmer offers her everything she once worked toward.
For a clinician the play keeps the mechanism in view: a conscience that stays quiet through the scheming and speaks only once the prize is in hand, a confession that arrives as self-sentence rather than as relief.
About the author
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen (1828 to 1906) was a Norwegian playwright who helped shape modern prose drama. Working within ordinary middle-class settings, he wrote plays in which a buried past surfaces in the present and characters are undone by the secrets they keep. Rosmersholm turns on such a reckoning. Freud read its Rebecca West as a woman destroyed at the moment she might have won what she wanted, one of those he called wrecked by success. His dialogue and moral scrutiny reshaped the European stage.
Details
- 1886
- Norwegian