Ibsen's Bathtub
(Reflections following visits, made on the same afternoon, to the Ibsen Museum and Vigeland Installation, Oslo)
I
Henrik Ibsen’s bathtub was plumbed in for running water. His kitchen sink was not. Take the guided tour of Ibsen’s apartments – his last home – in Oslo, and you will be told that the writer was among the first persons in Norway to have access to running water. You will be told this as you look at his bathtub, the very one in which he washed himself, you will be told, twice daily.
Ibsen, it is said, was a man of contrasts and contradictions: a believer in Scandinavianism, but critical of – and often bitter towards – Norway, on which he turned his back for twenty-seven years; a dramatist of radical importance, who emerges with and shapes the course of literary modernism, and whose work – literarily, thematically, dramaturgically – is of critical interest to feminist literary history (whether or not one wishes to call Ibsen a feminist, there is surely a case for counting his work écriture féminine); a man who, insisting that freedom entailed responsibility, mandated that the individual strive for personal freedom as he envisioned it (where does Ibsen leave those who wish to exercise the freedom to fall in, to join the Them rather than beat it; where does he leave the capital-P politically engaged?); a man who excoriated convention, and who yet led an increasingly conventional bourgeois life; a man whose most memorable characters are women who cast off the yoke of societal expectation and who scream I am, but whose relationships with several young women – to whom he liked to address himself as “Your master builder” – appears to have been spiritually crippling for them. A man of contrasts and contradictions, we are told, who had a bathtub with running water at a time when such things were hard come by. Surely, some will be tempted to map the mythic, paradoxical Ibsen onto his plumbed-in running-water bathtub, to turn it from modern artefact into modernist symbol. Is it not diverting and worthy of exegesis that the grandfather of kitchen-sink drama ran water not to the sink but the tub?
Perhaps. But perhaps, some will say, things are as they should be. After all, the bathroom is surely the domestic space par excellence in which all persons will stand exposed and vulnerable. Here, some may offer, the trappings of class and custom are dropped around the ankles, and our sags, bags, folds, protuberances are put on display, but for few if any others to witness (our parents when we are children, our lovers when we are young, middle-aged, and even old adults; perhaps eventually our own children, when such a time comes...). The bathroom and bathtub are spaces in which unadorned, raw truth – things as they just are – is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Here, in the bathroom, we are all soft. If the bathtub is the point, in Ibsen’s apartments, where modernity is most concentrated, then it is fitting, some might wish to say, because it is where this middle-class progressive twice daily washed and scrubbed at the crust of convention that tried to carapace him as it does us all. No, some may counter; rather, this is where the powers of modernity are harnessed in service of bourgeois comfort: this most modern of bathtubs is where the theoretical progressive and artistic radical was most truly himself – when washing, cleansing, moisturizing, beautifying; when being nakedly the bourgeois liberal he really was.
We look, some of us, for such metaphorical echoes and metonymic compressions, neat as we can (sometimes) make them. But Ibsen did alright for himself; he was famous; he and his wife employed a maid. Buck-Rogers-bathtub or no, the Master Builder could have bathed as often as he wished.
II
It is strange going from the Vigeland sculptures in Frogner Park, in the west end of Oslo, to Ibsen’s apartments, the main attraction of Oslo’s Ibsen Museum. The museum is sombre, quiet (almost, it seems, a little forgotten); its permanent exhibition is informative but underwhelming and repetitive, the most interesting notes – on the non-western reach of Ibsen – tucked away in the margins, an intersticial nook between the two main rooms; meanwhile, its temporary exhibition – on, at time of writing, Ibsen’s possible influence on The Beatles – is thinly stretched (Lennon’s glasses and sideburns are adduced to the case for). One end of the main exhibition has been turned into a cinema that plays a brief Ibsen documentary on a loop, the narration alternating between Norwegian and English (the latter voiced by Simon Callow), through which, it seems, always a lone man is sitting.
The Vigeland installation and its setting, by contrast, are grand, impressive; in the summer months the installation is inundated with tourists, and at any moment one can find oneself drowning in the tidal movements of a guided posse. But Vigeland’s sculptures are striking. There is heft and dynamism to them, these entwined, writhing bodies; one feels that the movements of living as striving have been – not captured, but set in motion; and one sees concentrated in these pared down, beautifully stylized, dense figures, the impresses of life as they etch themselves onto the body: constellations of vitality and tiredness, contraction and relaxation, harmony and discord, strength and frailty, tautness of the body and, in the pleats and folds of the skin, the exceeding of its elastic limits. Vigeland brings us up short against the corporeality – the baseline fleshiness – of life; reminds us that problems of the spirit cannot not be problems of the body also. In Vigeland, the variegated movements of life are enacted by the whole figure; here is a body of work, in the richest possible sense. Unsurprising that so many visitors want simply to touch the figures surrounding the great Monolith.
So it is strange to go from Vigeland to Ibsen: strange, because one wishes to keep a little distance from bland incantations about the universality and humanity of Art, and of this or that artist. And yet. Ibsen’s bathtub – or rather, any attempts to make it speak the “truth” (truth as the face behind the mask, the contents of the suitcase with the fake bottom) about Ibsen and his social-historical milieu – is far less interesting than the fact that a man used to sit at a desk and write plays that would stir things up then and now, the world over.* The two sites are complimentary and seemed, when we moved between them, complementary: they seemed to excite something in common – perhaps the urge to ponder self-involved and -involving questions of the sort one only can because one is washed, housed, overstuffed, and over-privileged – and yet one still wishes to avoid the threadbare appeal to the universal.
III
Towards the end of A Doll’s House, Nora proclaims that one’s “duties” to oneself are every bit as “sacred” as the culturally styled obligations of wifedom and motherhood. “I believe,” she tells her husband, “that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are – or, at all events, that I must try and become one. [...] I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.” Here, in 1879, is a Kierkegaardian movement of faith, a blind leap towards the sanctified ground of the self, understood as a work in progress, and one in need of hermeneutic teasing-out. Speaking of the universality of art is bland, to be sure; lazy, too, for it is said so often it is not clear any longer what such pronouncements mean. But perhaps we have not yet worked through Ibsen, and reached a point where his work is uninteresting because unimportant. His problems remain problems, and his questions continue to ask. Existential anxieties like those rendered and echoed and provoked by Vigeland and Ibsen are not universal; it became possible to articulate them as such – as so many questions and quests – by historical accident. But the search for the self that takes on renewed urgency and sharpness at the advent of modernism has yet to be laid to rest; we are still reckoning with the legacy of modernist subjectivity, and so it is possible to see and hear it, not as reflections or copies but as modulations, in Vigeland and Ibsen, as you move from the first to the second while holding hands and passing the time of day, with the someone you love, while the sun shines and while the rain spits.
* See the documentary Immortal Ibsen for a brief and selective history of adaptations of A Doll’s House.
Henrik Ibsen’s bathtub was plumbed in for running water. His kitchen sink was not. Take the guided tour of Ibsen’s apartments – his last home – in Oslo, and you will be told that the writer was among the first persons in Norway to have access to running water. You will be told this as you look at his bathtub, the very one in which he washed himself, you will be told, twice daily.
Ibsen, it is said, was a man of contrasts and contradictions: a believer in Scandinavianism, but critical of – and often bitter towards – Norway, on which he turned his back for twenty-seven years; a dramatist of radical importance, who emerges with and shapes the course of literary modernism, and whose work – literarily, thematically, dramaturgically – is of critical interest to feminist literary history (whether or not one wishes to call Ibsen a feminist, there is surely a case for counting his work écriture féminine); a man who, insisting that freedom entailed responsibility, mandated that the individual strive for personal freedom as he envisioned it (where does Ibsen leave those who wish to exercise the freedom to fall in, to join the Them rather than beat it; where does he leave the capital-P politically engaged?); a man who excoriated convention, and who yet led an increasingly conventional bourgeois life; a man whose most memorable characters are women who cast off the yoke of societal expectation and who scream I am, but whose relationships with several young women – to whom he liked to address himself as “Your master builder” – appears to have been spiritually crippling for them. A man of contrasts and contradictions, we are told, who had a bathtub with running water at a time when such things were hard come by. Surely, some will be tempted to map the mythic, paradoxical Ibsen onto his plumbed-in running-water bathtub, to turn it from modern artefact into modernist symbol. Is it not diverting and worthy of exegesis that the grandfather of kitchen-sink drama ran water not to the sink but the tub?
Perhaps. But perhaps, some will say, things are as they should be. After all, the bathroom is surely the domestic space par excellence in which all persons will stand exposed and vulnerable. Here, some may offer, the trappings of class and custom are dropped around the ankles, and our sags, bags, folds, protuberances are put on display, but for few if any others to witness (our parents when we are children, our lovers when we are young, middle-aged, and even old adults; perhaps eventually our own children, when such a time comes...). The bathroom and bathtub are spaces in which unadorned, raw truth – things as they just are – is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Here, in the bathroom, we are all soft. If the bathtub is the point, in Ibsen’s apartments, where modernity is most concentrated, then it is fitting, some might wish to say, because it is where this middle-class progressive twice daily washed and scrubbed at the crust of convention that tried to carapace him as it does us all. No, some may counter; rather, this is where the powers of modernity are harnessed in service of bourgeois comfort: this most modern of bathtubs is where the theoretical progressive and artistic radical was most truly himself – when washing, cleansing, moisturizing, beautifying; when being nakedly the bourgeois liberal he really was.
We look, some of us, for such metaphorical echoes and metonymic compressions, neat as we can (sometimes) make them. But Ibsen did alright for himself; he was famous; he and his wife employed a maid. Buck-Rogers-bathtub or no, the Master Builder could have bathed as often as he wished.
II
It is strange going from the Vigeland sculptures in Frogner Park, in the west end of Oslo, to Ibsen’s apartments, the main attraction of Oslo’s Ibsen Museum. The museum is sombre, quiet (almost, it seems, a little forgotten); its permanent exhibition is informative but underwhelming and repetitive, the most interesting notes – on the non-western reach of Ibsen – tucked away in the margins, an intersticial nook between the two main rooms; meanwhile, its temporary exhibition – on, at time of writing, Ibsen’s possible influence on The Beatles – is thinly stretched (Lennon’s glasses and sideburns are adduced to the case for). One end of the main exhibition has been turned into a cinema that plays a brief Ibsen documentary on a loop, the narration alternating between Norwegian and English (the latter voiced by Simon Callow), through which, it seems, always a lone man is sitting.
The Vigeland installation and its setting, by contrast, are grand, impressive; in the summer months the installation is inundated with tourists, and at any moment one can find oneself drowning in the tidal movements of a guided posse. But Vigeland’s sculptures are striking. There is heft and dynamism to them, these entwined, writhing bodies; one feels that the movements of living as striving have been – not captured, but set in motion; and one sees concentrated in these pared down, beautifully stylized, dense figures, the impresses of life as they etch themselves onto the body: constellations of vitality and tiredness, contraction and relaxation, harmony and discord, strength and frailty, tautness of the body and, in the pleats and folds of the skin, the exceeding of its elastic limits. Vigeland brings us up short against the corporeality – the baseline fleshiness – of life; reminds us that problems of the spirit cannot not be problems of the body also. In Vigeland, the variegated movements of life are enacted by the whole figure; here is a body of work, in the richest possible sense. Unsurprising that so many visitors want simply to touch the figures surrounding the great Monolith.
So it is strange to go from Vigeland to Ibsen: strange, because one wishes to keep a little distance from bland incantations about the universality and humanity of Art, and of this or that artist. And yet. Ibsen’s bathtub – or rather, any attempts to make it speak the “truth” (truth as the face behind the mask, the contents of the suitcase with the fake bottom) about Ibsen and his social-historical milieu – is far less interesting than the fact that a man used to sit at a desk and write plays that would stir things up then and now, the world over.* The two sites are complimentary and seemed, when we moved between them, complementary: they seemed to excite something in common – perhaps the urge to ponder self-involved and -involving questions of the sort one only can because one is washed, housed, overstuffed, and over-privileged – and yet one still wishes to avoid the threadbare appeal to the universal.
III
Towards the end of A Doll’s House, Nora proclaims that one’s “duties” to oneself are every bit as “sacred” as the culturally styled obligations of wifedom and motherhood. “I believe,” she tells her husband, “that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are – or, at all events, that I must try and become one. [...] I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.” Here, in 1879, is a Kierkegaardian movement of faith, a blind leap towards the sanctified ground of the self, understood as a work in progress, and one in need of hermeneutic teasing-out. Speaking of the universality of art is bland, to be sure; lazy, too, for it is said so often it is not clear any longer what such pronouncements mean. But perhaps we have not yet worked through Ibsen, and reached a point where his work is uninteresting because unimportant. His problems remain problems, and his questions continue to ask. Existential anxieties like those rendered and echoed and provoked by Vigeland and Ibsen are not universal; it became possible to articulate them as such – as so many questions and quests – by historical accident. But the search for the self that takes on renewed urgency and sharpness at the advent of modernism has yet to be laid to rest; we are still reckoning with the legacy of modernist subjectivity, and so it is possible to see and hear it, not as reflections or copies but as modulations, in Vigeland and Ibsen, as you move from the first to the second while holding hands and passing the time of day, with the someone you love, while the sun shines and while the rain spits.
* See the documentary Immortal Ibsen for a brief and selective history of adaptations of A Doll’s House.