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IBSEN’S MOTHERLESS WOMEN

Ellen Hartmann

Department of Psychology, University of Oslo

The incisive complexity and richness of Ibsen’s art allow us to examine his dramas from
different points of view. In this paper I will focus on one element, which is appa rent in
many of his plays, but seldom focused on – the fact that strikingly many of the young
female protagonists in Ibsen’s contemporary dramas are motherless. Nora Helmer,
Rebecca West, Ellida Wangel, and Hedda Gabler are the most famous of Ibsen’s women
who grew up without a mother, but with a dominating father or father figure. In contrast
to this, the great male heroes Brand and Peer Gynt grew up fatherless.
Ibsen’s contemporary dramas are known to be family dramas. With Ibsen’s superb
theatrical sense, it was surely not a coincidence that he created these strong and enigmatic
women as motherless. On the contrary, I think that it was through this deliberate strategy
that Ibsen tried to come to grips not only with the psychology of women in general but to
emphasize in different contexts important elements in female development from young
girls to mature women in general, and, in particular, in concrete settings of the middle
class culture of the nineteenth century.
Freud, who lived in a similar cultural background as Ibsen, has admitted that Ibsen in
dramatic forms foresaw many of the insights of psychoanalysis. One of Freud’s main
assumptions about mankind was that women and men have different psychobiological
development, although at birth they are psychologically very similar. As babies all
children become emotionally attached to the person who is their main caretaker. At the
time of Freud and Ibsen, this was typically the mother or another female person. During
the first years of life, the quality of the mother-child relation plays an important role for
the young developing individual’s feeling of inner harmony and security as well as for his
or her curiosity and willingness to become involved in the outer world and attached to
other people. But as the child grows older, the father or a father substitute becomes
increasingly significant for both girls and boys, but in diverse ways. According to
psychoanalytic theory, the psychosexual development that from then on takes place is
different for females and males. The start of this development Freud called the “Electra
complex” for little girls and the “Oedipus complex” for little boys. According to Freud,
all children have to face the universal challenge of coping with the intense feelings of
love, hate and guilt that the triangular relationship between the child and his or her
mother and father awake in both girls and boys. Here, I will only focus on the female
challenges. To summarize very briefly: during this period the little girl, in contrast to the
little boy, has to change her primary love object. She turns away from her mother and
becomes devoted to her father. She develops intense sexual and idealizing feelings and
fantasies for her father, accompanied by hateful, fearful, and belittling feelings and
fantasies about her rival, her mother. However, according to psychoanalytic theory, the
turn away from the mother is never complete. The attachment to the mother stays deep,
but ambivalent, and represents a protection against the strong feelings and longings for
the father. Normally, the little girl both out of guilt feeling and fear of the intensity of her
feelings and in fear of punishment manages to regulate and tame her yielding impulses
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and to imitate and identify with her mother in order to become alike the person who is the
love object of her father. When, however, there is no mother there, the little girl is in
danger of being overwhelmed by her strong feelings and longings and thus is not able to
cope with them in a workable manner. One solution then, might be strict self-control
where the desires and the longings are suppressed and thus become unresolved
psychosexual conflicts in the unconscious. Another danger of being physically or
psychological motherless is that there might be no protection against males’ desires.
Trying to be faithful to Ibsen’s text, I will first point to significant signs in A Doll
House, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea , and Hedda Gabler, which reveal the
absence of the mother and the presence of a strong paternal figure in the childhood of the
female protagonist. I will try to show that a focus on some of the psychological
implications of growing up motherless may throw new light on the complexities and
ambiguities of these great female figures.
A motherless, or actually parentless, woman appears already in The League of Youth
from 1869 – Selma Brattsberg. My reason for noting Selma in this paper is her enigmatic
utterance to lawyer Steensgaard: “We fairy princesses don’t have families…. The most
we have is a sort of wicked stepmothers”. And she also tells him that proper princesses, if
they become queens, “have to go into exile … away to a foreign land” (McFarlane, 1966-
77, II, pp. 53) 1. Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder is another of Ibsen’s motherless
women. In The Lady from the Sea she is one of Dr. Wangel’s two daughters with his first
wife who died when Hilde was a little girl. In The Master Builder Hilde looks up Solness
because he ten year earlier had kissed her and promised her that when she grew up, she
could be his princess. And when Solness doubts her allegation, she further insists: “then
you said you’d come back in ten years, like a troll, and carry me off – to Spain or
someplace. And then you promised to buy me a kingdom. … It was going to be the
kingdom of Organia, you said” (pp. 806).
To me, these utterances of Selma and Hilde are pointers to how vulnerable these and
the other motherless women in Ibsen’s plays are to blending wishful fantasy and realism,
which might result in arrested development and fatal death, but also in transcending
possibilities of reaching new land. Thus, my main intention in this paper is not to
demonstrate psychological links between being motherless and abnormality or
psychopathology in Ibsen’s women. In stead, I will try to underline that by creating so
many of his famous protagonists as motherless, Ibsen was able to penetrate into some of
the hidden and most frightening aspect of the female psyche and to highlight existential
and moral problems that all women are struggling with.
The fact that Nora Helmer in A Doll House (1879) lost her mother as a little girl, is
revealed in the beginning of Act Two when Nora tells Anne-Marie who once was Nora’s
own nurse and now is the nurse of Nora’s children: “You old Anne -Marie, you were a
good mother when I was little”, and Anne-Marie answers: “Poor little Nora, with no other
mother than me” (pp. 155). Other places, we get glimpses into the strong feelings Nora
had for her father. In Act One Nora admits to Torvald: “Ah, I could wish I’d inherited
many of Papa’s qualities” (pp. 128). And later in the same act, she confesses to Mrs.

1
These English quotations are taken from ”The Oxford Ibsen (1966-77) in eight volumes, edited by James
Walter McFarlane and translated by McFarlane and others. The other English quotations are taken from
“Henrik Ibsen. The Complete Major Plays (1978) in one volume translated and introduced by Rolf Fjelde.
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Linde that it was the worst time of her marriage when she couldn’t make the trip to nurse
her dying father, as she was expecting her first son and “with my poor sick Torvald to
care for. Dearest Papa, I never saw him again” (pp. 132). And Mrs. Linde affirms that she
knows how much Nora loved her father.
Rebecca West in Rosmersholm (1886) is the next of Ibsen’s famous young women
who lacked a close mother-child relationship. Little is known about her mother, but in
Act Three in a dialogue between Rebecca and Dr. Kroll the audience is informed that just
after Rebecca’s mother died, Rebecca was adopted by Dr. West and took his name. Kroll
is convinced that Rebecca is the illegitimate child of Dr. West and that all Rebecca did
for the doctor, for example taking care of him the last years of his life, can be explained
by the fact that he was her father. Kroll tells her: “What you did for him I ascribe to
instincts any daughter couldn’t help but feel” (pp. 560). Rebecca protests strongly against
this assault. “But in everything you say there’s not a word of truth!” (pp.560). However,
later in the same act she tells Kroll and Rosmer that the doctor had taught her so much –
“so many different things that were all I knew about life then” (pp. 564). Dr. West was
Rebecca’s tutor in becoming a self-educated and emancipated young woman.
Ellida Wangel in The Lady from the Sea (1888) is the next motherless woman whom
Ibsen created. Ellida early lost contact with her mother, who went mad. “She died
insane, I know that,” Hilde points out in Act Two (pp. 620). Ellida and her father lived
isolated from the outside world far out by the open sea, at the lighthouse in Skjoldviken,
and the life there never lost its hold on her.
Hedda Gabler (1890) is perhaps the most tragic of all Ibsen’s women and there are
indications in the play that Ibsen also created her as motherless. The Norwegian Ibsen
researcher Hanne Andrea Kraugerud (2000) makes this assumption in an article in the
Norwegian journal Filologen . But while there is no reference to Hedda’s mother in the
text, one nevertheless gets an intense sense of the absence of a mother-daughter relation
in contrast to a very present father-daughter relationship. Miss Tesman talks in the
beginning of Act One about Hedda as “General Gabler’s daughter. What a life she had in
the general’s day. Remember seeing her out with her father” (pp. 696). Furthermore,
when Eilert Løvborg in Act Two talks with Hedda about their former intimate talks, he
refers to his visits in the following terms—“When I’d come over to your father’s in the
afternoon – and the general sat by the window reading his papers – with his back to us”
(pp. 738)—and we get the clear impression that for a long time there had been no mother
in the home.
I think that Ibsen had many reasons for creating so many of his female protagonists as
motherless. Firstly, and perhaps paradoxically, having no mother might explain why his
female characters are such strong, independent and enigmatic personalities. Having no
maternal model when growing up may make it easier for women to choose their own
way, to transcend the prescribed rules for women of their time, to emancipate themselves,
to struggle for equality and independence, to be different and do things that “people don’t
do.” Thus, the state of motherlessness makes many aspects of the personalities and
significant acts of Ibsen’s women more convincing. For example, even when she was the
the childish and dependent doll-wife of Torvald, Nora was also able to earn money and
save her spouse’s life. And she was also able to challenge the laws of the man’s world
when defending her own acts; she tells Krogstad: “This I refuse to believe. A daughter
hasn’t a right to protect her dying father from anxiety and worry? A wife hasn’t a right to
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save her husband’s life?” (pp. 149). Nora’s transition from doll-wife to the freedom and
truth-searching individual she becomes in the last act is also more convincing in the light
of the fact that she had few internalized female personality traits derived from her
mother. Furthermore, the emancipated and liberal thinking of Rebecca as well as the
almost masculine personality of Hedda, who adores playing with her father’s pistols,
might be reflections not only of their strong relations to their fathers or father substitute,
but also of the absence of their mothers. Rebecca is the educator of Rosmer. She wants to
liberate him from conventionality and teach him revolutionary ideas. Hedda had the
power in her to ask such questions that made Eilert Løvborg tell her things about himself
“that no one knew of then” (pp. 738) because she curiously wanted to get “some glimpse
of a world … that she was forbidden to know anything about” (pp. 739).
It is also worthwhile to note that Ibsen is not the only writer who creates his female
heroines as motherless. I remember from my early youth that I read many stories about
young brave, untraditional motherless girls, like for example de tective Nancy Drew.
But being motherless also has its great costs. So secondly, but perhaps most important,
I think Ibsen wanted to examine some enigmatic and veiled aspects of the female psyche
and in the sexual relationship between woman and man. From a psychological
perspective we would imagine that Ibsen looked upon his motherless women as
individuals who had not experienced good enough mothering. Clinical evidence indicates
that such individuals have an insecure identity. They have not achieved stable maternal
introjects and what Ainsworth (Bowlby, 1988) has called “a secure base”.
For women, an insecure identity most of all implies that they have not developed
strong enough projective psychic counterforces to manage masochistic impulses, the
yielding forces involved in the female psychosexual processes. Menstruation, the sexual
act, pregnancy, giving birth, nursing and looking after children, are all complicated
experiences that involve attacks on the woman’s body. What is me/ not-me in relation to
blood and milk running from a woman’s body, a man penetrating her, a fetus growing
inside her, a child who once was a part of her body? Such experiences demand some kind
of masochism in order to be endured. Female masochism implies a certain readiness for
acceptance of painful experiences, self-sacrifice, and surrender and a way of facing
danger and the possibility of losing oneself, even dying, in order to give and gain
satisfaction during the critical events associated with motherhood. Normally, the
conflicts between self-protection and self realization on the one hand and the claims of
sexuality and motherhood and fear of surrender on the other hand are solved more or less
successfully by accepting some kind of sacrifice and self-abandon, but without losing or
being frightened of losing complete control and surrendering of the self. But for females
who have not experienced good enough mothering, intimate love and sexuality become
decisive challenges, as their psychic structures are fragile. They have not enough inner
security and strength to regulate the yielding sexual and aggressive impulses and the
immense, conflicting feelings which men as well as possible pregnancy and motherhood
arise in them.
As adults, neither Nora, Rebecca, Ellida, or Hedda were ps ychologically ready for
intimate love, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. They seem, however, to have been
aware of their own fear of sexuality and everything that it involves. And in their own
individual ways they all struggle both to protect themselves and to develop themselves
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and try to find out who they really are, and how to live authentically and in accordance
with themselves.
Nora married an infantile and Hedda a passionless man, neither of whom threatened
their sexuality. Rebecca is devoted to a man who has strong aversions to sexuality.
Ellida’s love for the much older Wangel is more like a child’s love for its parents and
represents a flight from the strong sexual feelings that the stranger had awakened in her
and that she felt unable to control. And later, after the death of her son, Ellida refused to
have sex with her husband and has not had intercourse with him for three years.
Likewise, Hedda’s marriage represents a protection against intimacy and sexuality.
She also will not have “any of that.” Ibsen has explained that he chose to call his
protagonist Hedda Gabler and not Hedda Tesman because she “is to be regarded rather as
her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife” (LS 297. When Eilert Løvborg in Act
Two asks her, “Was there no love with respect to me, either?.” Hedda answers, “I
wonder, really, was there? To me it was as if we were two true companions – two very
close friends” (pp. 738) ; she insists that their relationship was a companionship.
Similarly, when Rosmer talks about his and Rebecca’s relationship, he calls it “a
beautiful friendship” (pp. 541) and “a spiritual marriage” (pp. 555). And he further
explains that what drew Rebecca and him together and binds them so closely to each
other was the belief “that a man and a woman can live together simply as friends” (pp.
545). Probably, it was as necessary for Rebecca as for Rosmer that the relationship was
not a sexual one. Although Rebecca felt an ”unbearable sensual desire” (pp. 575) for
Rosmer and desperately wanted to capt ure him, it is my belief that she would have cried
out in despair and refused to marry him even if Rosmer had asked her before the death of
his wife and before Rosmersholm had “ennobled” her and stolen her strength. Rebecca
lacks the inner security and strength to regulate her yielding impulses. She knows that for
her, sexuality implies complete surrender and that her immortal, uninhibited longings can
only be satisfied through the act of dying. I think this is one of the reasons for her
warning to Rosmer that if he ever again asks her to marry him, then she will “go the same
way as Beata went. Now you know, John” (pp. 547). For Nora, also, the doll world and
all her tricks can also be seen as protection against true intimacy.
Childbearing and mothering also represent very often an overwhelming challenge for
women who have lost their own mothers early since it is very difficult to give to others
what has not been given to oneself. There are many signs in Ibsen’s texts that illustrate
that the challenges of mothering represent overwhelming demands that the motherless
women in Ibsen’s plays are not capable of meeting. Ellida’s child died, and Ellida is not
able to relate maternally to her stepdaughters. She misunderstands Hilde’s urgent need
for love because she is not able to give her the motherly care she never got herself. Hedda
rejects any talk about and even denies her pregnancy. Bearing and later living for a child
seem to be intolerable for her. When Judge Brack brings up motherhood as her new
respons ibility, Hedda angrily replies” “ Be quiet! You’ll never see me like that … I have
no talent for such things, Judge” (pp. 730). Nora’s love for her children also seems to
have been ambivalent long before she decides to leave them. She finds her children
“lovely” and thinks that “it’s such fun” (pp. 143) to dress and undress them, but there are
good reasons to believe that it is Anne-Marie and not Nora who is the primary caretaker
of the Helmer children. It is probably not just one time that Anne-Marie tells Nora that
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“The children are begging so hard to come in to Mama”, and Nora answers “No, no, no,
don’t let them into me! You stay with them, Anne-Marie” (pp. 153).
In varying degrees, these four women exhibit in common a refusal to face repressed
psychosexual conflicts and the overwhelming feelings of guilt and unhappiness that the
demands of womanhood put on them. They also share a common attempt to try to solve
their problems by urgent longings for something wonderful to happen which would
release them from their unhappiness. They have been able to endure their lives through
unrealistic beliefs and idealizing fantasies about the significant men in their lives. Ellida’s
longing for the stranger – her demonic lover from the sea - represents the absolute and
immense sexual feelings, the boundless and limitless passions, that both are so luring and
attractive, but also so dreadful and frightening for her, feelings that she does not dare to
live out in her marriage with Wangel. Nora has waited patiently eight long years for her
miraculous event to occur. For Rebecca it is urgent that Rosmer is a grandiose liberator
who would go “from house to house, winning minds and wills to your vision and creating
a new nobility – “ (pp. 543). Hedda in her imagination sees Løvborg as a Dionysian free
spirit: “At ten o’clock - he’ll be here. I can see him now – with vine leaves in his hear –
fiery and bold - … And then, you’ll see – he’ll be back in control of himself. He will be a
free man, then, for the rest of his days” (pp. 745).
When the wishful fantasies are destroyed by the fatal acts of their idealized men, the
vulnerable boundaries of these women’s lives collapse. “When the miraculous thing
didn’t come, then I knew you weren’t the man I’d imagined,” (pp. 194) Nora explains to
Helmer. “Torvald – in that instant it dawned on me that for eight years I’ve been living
here with a stranger, and that I’d even conceived three children – oh, I can’t stand the
thought of it! I could tear myself to bits” (pp. 195). When Løvborg fails to fulfill Hedda’s
dream, and in despair at having destroyed Thea by losing their manuscript wants to kill
himself, Hedda still desperately hopes that she can inspire him to die “beautifully.” She
gives him one of her father’s pistols. And in a kind of exited triumph she burns the
manuscript—“their child”—and symbolically burns her unwanted fetus. When she hears
the details of her failed savior’s death, she knows that the only solution for her is that she
just die by the pistol herself.
As we all know , these women’s solutions and struggles are very different. When Nora
stops believing in miracles, she decides to go to an unknown, but probably difficult
existence, where she hopefully will be strong enough to be responsible for her decisions.
When Hedda cannot believe in vine leaves any more, she becomes unable to find any
meaning or beauty in life. The only freedom left for her is a well-controlled, consciously
decided death in beauty. When Rebecca understands that Rosmer has lost faith in his own
life work, she is willing to sacrifices herself for his sake :“My going will save all that’s
best in you.” However, through her bold willingness to show her selfless love for
Rosmer, the miracle happens for Rebecca and Rosmer. At the end of the play they
“marry’ and follow each other into the mill-race, thereby achieving in death what they
were not able to do in life: to love each other.
Ellida is the only one who is able to choose a meaningful relationship in this world.
Through her intimate conversations with Wangel, Ellida gradually becomes able to
confide to him both her inner feelings and the truth about her past. The ability to share
one’s past is an important part of a mature relationship. But this is not enough. Ellida
needs to be freed of her burden of guilt for not having been able to fulfill the demands of
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womanhood. In order to free her from this guilt, her husband has to cancel their marriage.
And Wangel gets the courage to give her freedom on her own responsibility. He treats her
as an independent person, thus giving her absolution and the possibility for growth. The
change that takes plays in Ellida’s mind is that she understands what forces she has to
master and what the options are in her dilemma: the enigmatic power of absolute freedom
which means death, and the attractions and dangers of human love on the other. Ellida
becomes free to complete herself both as sexual partner to her husband and as mother of
children. They reconstitute the marriage into a true unit of independent and united
individuals. I agree with Errol Durbach that this is the closest Ibsen comes to responding
to Nora’s longing for a miracle.
Although there are many motherless women in Ibsen’s dramas, the term “motherless”
is never used, except in the alternative, “German” ending of A Doll House:
Helmer: Go then. But first you shall see your children for the last time!
Nora: Let me go! I will not see them. I cannot!
Helmer: (draws her over to the door) You shall see them. (Opens the door and says
softly) Look, there they are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they wake up
and call for their mother, they will be – motherless.
Nora: Motherless .. !
Helmer: As you were.
Nora: Motherless! (Struggles with herself, lets her travelling bag fall) Oh, this is a sin
against myself, but I cannot leave them. (Half sinks down by the door.)
Ibsen wrote this alternative under strong pressure, and very reluctantly. It was not
made from conviction; he later called it a “barbaric outrage” (“en barbarisk
voldshandling”), and correctly anticipated that it would not be used very often.
I have mixed feelings about this ending. What fascinates me is both that it gives
evidence to Ibsen’s awareness of having made Nora and most of his other female
protagonist motherless and that Ibsen in the one sentence “Oh, this is a sin against
myself, but I cannot leave them” sums up the central existential dilemma of all women.
The claims of motherhood on one side and those of self-realization on the other provide a
universal conflict to all women. We are trapped in unsolvable contradictions between our
duty to our children and our duty toward ourselves, a conflict that continues to make us
depressed and confused; sometimes the outcome may be the same as Ibsen imagined for
Nora: “despair, resistance, defeat.” Today, a modern Nora probably would have taken
the children with her, but this does not solve the conflict.
My negative feelings about the alternative ending are actually not that it isn’t
revolutionary or dramatic enough, but that it is too explicit and obvious. Nora was
motherless and this experience is an important aspect of her feminine selfhood, but when
this is used so directly as the motivational reason for not slamming the door and leaving
her children, it reduces the enigmatic, but also convincing complexity of Nora’s
personality. To me, it is precisely because Nora grew up without a mother that she is able
to make the choice to leave them in order to fulfill her own project: “I have to try to
educate myself … to discover myself and the world out there (pp. 192). Nora knows that
although it has its costs, it is possible to survive being motherless. And she also knows
that Anne-Marie will be a good mother substitute for her children as she was for Nora
herself.
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My intention in this paper has been to come to a better understanding of Ibsen’s

women, but also to show how psychologically convincing Ibsen has made their
characters and how universal their feelings, conflicts, and challenges are. So although
Nora, Rebecca, Ellida, and Hedda still are enigmatic to me, and although our attitudes to
equality between men and women, and to sex and marriage have changed, the issues
these plays raise reflect problems which women of today are still struggling with.
Perhaps it is especially important in our society where equality between men and women
is valued so highly.
It is an aspect of Ibsen’s greatness that by placing his protagonists in critical contexts,
he was able to transform scenes from everyday life into dramatic plots about human
conditions. In his major characters he portrays the loneliness and alienation that pervade
modern life and separate people from their environment and from each other, but there
exists also an implied hope for the healing power of love and the possibility of human
existentia l freedom in sexually loving relationships.
So, let me end by quoting my daughter, who has pointed out to me that all Ibsen’s
characters are motherless. They have only a father – Henrik Ibsen.