Oceanic Discourse, Empowerment and

Social Accommodation in Kate Chopinʼs

The Awakening and Henrik Ibsenʼs The
Lady from the Sea.1
Christophe Den Tandt
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
1997

Late-nineteenth-century literature is ambivalent about the degree of

empowerment women protagonists may enjoy: in many canonical
works—one thinks of Flaubertʼs Madame Bovary, Tolstoyʼs Anna
Karenina, Louis Couperusʼs Eline Vere or Edith Whartonʼs The House
of Mirth—heroines are allowed to rebel against patriarchal domesticity;
yet, according to a seemingly ineluctable strategy of containment, they
pay for their temporary emancipation with some significant loss—of
life, of social respectability. The present essay contrasts two stories that
follow this pattern of disenfranchisement and loss: Henrik Ibsenʼs play
The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Kate Chopinʼs The Awakening
(1899); the former ranks among the symbolist works of Ibsenʼs late
career; the latter, written by a novelist formerly pigeonholed as a Loui-
siana local colorist, has become a classic of feminine literature in the
United States. Like most texts in the tradition of Flaubertʼs Bovary,
these two works suggest that the social maladjustment of women is the
symptom of a crisis affecting the upper- and middle classes as a whole.
Their distinctive characteristic within the post-Bovary corpus resides in
their use of what might be called oceanic discourse: Chopin and Ibsen
turn the sea into a polysemic metaphor embodying realms of experi-
ence tantalizingly broader than the confines of middle-class conformi-
ty; in their texts, the charactersʼ scenarios of thwarted empowerment
and utopian longing are played out in a social space that spreads over
two heterogeneous areas—the open-ended oceanic horizon and, on the
other hand, the claims of the familiar world, depicted through domestic
realism.
Edna Pontellier, the protagonist The Awakening, is married to a
New Orleans stockbroker. The daughter of a Kentucky minister, she
2 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

feels like an exile in Creole society; particularly, unlike her friend

Adèle Ratignolle, Edna resents her imparted role as a New Orleans
“mother-woman,” sacrificed to the care of her two children (Chopin
51). Ednaʼs awakening to independent selfhood and sexual fulfilment
comes during her stay at Grand Isle, a summer resort where she learns
to swim: in this crucial moment, the sea appears to her as the embodi-
ment of a sensuous power incommensurable to the rituals of her do-
mestic world. Ednaʼs oceanic epiphany ushers in a movement of eman-
cipation that leads her to embark on a tentative affair with Robert
Lebrun, the son of her hotel manager—an adventure soon thwarted by
the young manʼs family. Later, Edna enters a more cynical relationship
with Alcée Arobin, a New Orleans playboy. In the process, Edna, fed
up with domestic constraints, leaves her husband and attempts to gather
around her a society of friends of her own choosing. This dynamic of
emancipation soon stalls, however: by the end of the The Awakening,
Edna is affected with spells of despondency and she enjoys little signif-
icant support on the part of her two lovers, who are reluctant to accept
the love of a woman who professes to give herself only “where [she]
chooses” (167). In a famous finale, Edna goes back to Grand Isle, turns
back to the ocean and swims to exhaustion. Suicide is for her the only
way to preserve the integrity of her new-born self.
Contrary to Chopinʼs Edna Pontellier, Ibsenʼs Ellida Wangel
needs no awakening to the ocean: her psychological exile is from the
outset rooted in the fact that she is, as her husband puts it “one of the
sea people” (290). According to the symbolist format of the play,
Ellidaʼs personality is presented by means of fragmentary, sometimes
inconsistent evidence—her recollections, other characterʼs reminis-
cences, her dreams, even descriptions of works of art. The key symbol-
ic characterization of the heroine is provided by Ballested, a secondary
character who describes the allegorical motif of a sea landscape he is
about to paint: there, we learn that Ellida is like a mermaid stranded in
the brackish waters of a fjord. Overall, we can reconstruct that Ellida,
the daughter of a lighthousekeeper, was raised in a remote location by
the ocean. As Dr Wangelʼs second wife, she faces the hostility of her
husbandʼs two daughters, Bollette and Hilda, who still revere the
memory or their own dead mother. Her husband Wangel is a physician
in a tourist resort, who lives among a group of aging or invalid men—
teachers and amateur artists like Arnholm, Lyngstrand and Ballested. In
this context, Ellida is obsessed with memories of a glamorous affair
with a mysterious sailor, who fled after being accused of murder. The
3

lovers had vowed to marry themselves “to the sea"—a bond that Ellida
broke by marrying Wangel (Ibsen 261). The Stranger embodies the
“terrifying attraction” of the ocean, and is therefore linked with the
romantic, but unstable dimensions of Ellidaʼs self (301). His status as a
character remains paradoxical throughout—part a figment induced by
Ellidaʼs mental imbalance, part a figure perceived by all. The dramatic
crisis of the play is precipitated by the Strangerʼs return, who wants to
reclaim Ellida for himself. After long hesitations, the young womanʼs
refuses to follow him back to the universe of the sea. In contrast with
Chopinʼs novel, Ibsenʼs play leads to reconciliation with domesticity:
Ellida reintegrates Wangelʼs family, which is now presumably regener-
ated.

Ibsen and Chopinʼs oceanic discourse lends itself to a psychoanalytical

reading that focuses on maternal metaphorics. As Marie Bonaparte
indicates in her study of Edgar Allan Poe, the sea is “an ancient, uni-
versal symbol of the mother” (Bonaparte 91). texts obsessed with
oceanic immersion revolve therefore around issues of uterine regres-
sion, engulfment and regeneration. The logic of Bonaparteʼs analysis of
oceanic imagery can be traced back to Freudʼs The Interpretation of
Dreams, which contains a passage that seems transparently relevant to
Edna Pontellierʼs ecstatic embrace of the sea. Freud discusses the
“pretty water dream” of a patient who sees herself staying at a summer
resort, and diving “into the dark water just where the pale moon [is]
mirrored in it” (Interpretation 436). Paradoxically, the psychoanalyst
claims that “[d]reams like this one are birth dreams” (436): though their
manifest content enacts a death-like regression to the mother, their
latent message is that of new delivery. For Edna, this means that im-
mersion in the ocean symbolizes her accession to a realm of uncon-
scious stirrings, endowed with a regenerating potency: after the swim,
she realizes that “she herself—her present self—[is] in some way
different from the other self” (88).
Freudʼs analysis of oceanic dreams, because it takes into account
paradoxical reversals, allows us to highlight the well-orchestrated
ambiguities that inform Chopinʼs rhetoric of immersion. The Awaken-
ing contains two main oceanic moments—Ednaʼs discovery of the sea
and her suicide. Each scene plays off against each other connotations of
ecstasy and dread, regeneration and death. In the first passage, the
ocean is associated with the smell of “new-plowed earth, mingled with
4 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

the heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms” (73); yet, during her
powerful swim, the heroine also feels “a quick vision of death” smiting
her soul (74). “Despondency” is the key note of Ednaʼs second outing;
yet, the heroineʼs last reported thoughts are full of “the hum of bees and
the musky odor of pinks” (176). Through this interplay of contradictory
accents, Chopin represents a movement of self-engendering immune to
loss. Because the “ungovernable dread” Edna experiences in the water
can tip over into its ecstatic opposite, it is not the expression of a flaw
in the experience of maternal immersion: it is rather the trace of the
social constraints that bear on the heroine. Even at the moment of her
death, Edna feels “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a
familiar world that it had never known” (175).

While oceanic discourse in The Awakening is rife with the optimism of

utopian romance, it carries in The Lady from the Sea the darker accents
of the gothic. Unlike in Chopin, there is no room in Ibsenʼs play for a
positive, first-hand characterization of Ellidaʼs oceanic experience:
Ellidaʼs habit of “bathing in the sea” (237) is pictured as a symptom of
maladjustment; the heroine herself, alluding to this immersion ritual,
complains that the water is “sick here in the fjord” (238); likewise,
when Ellida describes for her husbandʼs sake the bond that ties her to
the open sea and to the Stranger, she can only refer to this distant world
as a “horror"—as “something that [...] terrifies and attracts” (300). In
retrospect, we understand that Ibsenʼs ocean needs to be depicted in
these disquieting terms because it is the element to which Ellida might,
but will eventually not, return. In particular, Ellidaʼs ambivalence
towards the sea is expressed in recurrent allusions to its irresistible
mesmeric persuasion. The oceanic power of the Stranger, for instance,
is channeled through his hypnotic gaze; in the premonitory dreams that
tell Ellida of his return, he is seen sporting a stickpin graced with a
pearl that Ellida compares to “the eye of a dead fish [...] staring at
[her]” with hypnotic insistence (265). Ellida confronts the same gaze
once the Stranger is standing in front of her; no sooner does he look at
her than she falters back crying out “[t]he eyes! [t]he eyes!” (274).
When Ibsen alludes to the “terrifying attraction” of the sea, he im-
plicitly connects his play with the tradition of the Romantic sublime.
Thomas Weiskel describes the sublime as the discourse that articulates
the subjectʼs relation to unrepresentable objects and superhuman pow-
er; in the context of romanticism, it expresses the link between the self
5

and Nature, in so far as the latter is viewed as an object of dread and

fascination (Weiskel 4, 23). Oceanic discourse is a typical channel for
sublime emotions: Immanuel Kant, one of the main theoreticians of the
aesthetic of sublimity, regards the “boundless ocean” as one of the
features of nature whose “aspect is all the more attractive for their
fearfulness” (Kant 110). Placing Ibsenʼs and Chopinʼs works within the
corpus of the sublime is illuminating because it reveals the gamut of
meanings carried by the overdetermined oceanic imagery. Chopinʼs
and Ibsenʼs discourse of the sea, for instance, echoes the language of
many naturalist novels where oceanic tropes express, as novelist Frank
Norris puts it, “the life-tides of the city” (79)—the destabilizing move-
ments of crowds and financial speculation. In this light, Chopinʼs and
Ibsenʼs works construct a social topography that implicitly opposes the
pieties of middle-class life against the oceanic turmoil of new urban
practices. The line of interpretation I wish to follow here, however,
rather stresses the contribution that the oceanic sublime brought to the
elaboration of a proto-Freudian discourse of the unconscious. In this
respect, the otherness of the ocean is, as Weiskel puts it in a comment
about the sublime at large, the metaphorical embodiment of “unattaina-
ble psychological areas” (23).
Using the Romantic sublime as a psychological paradigm makes
it possible to broaden the terms of the maternal reading I have been
following so far. One of the most uncanny aspects of Ibsenʼs play is
indeed the fact that it shows a male character endowed with the potency
of the ocean: the Stranger is, as Wangel puts it, “like the sea” (282).2
Moreover, we learn that the same oceanic force was embodied in
Ellidaʼs son, who died in infancy. The child, Ellida claims, had eyes
that “changed color with the sea” (265), thus recalling the Strangerʼs
mesmeric gaze. Thomas Weiskelʼs analysis of the emotional underpin-
nings of the sublime suggests that the strange ubiquitousness of the
oceanʼs power is rooted in the fact tha oceanic discourse condenses
several psychological narratives, and can therefore express itself
through paradoxical manifestations. The narratives Weiskel has in
mind are the oedipal and pre-oedipal parental scripts of psychoanalysis:
sublime fear, in this logic, is activated by the encounter with the over-
whelming authority of the superego. Yet, against classical Freudian
logic, Weiskel argues that this awesome instance need not exclusively
be an emanation of a castrating father: the affects of natural sublimity
seem to emanate from a superego that is “a precipitate of the mother as
well of the father” (102); beyond castration fears, sublime dread and
6 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

fascination are mobilized by pre-oedipal anxieties like “the wish to be

inundated by pleasurable stimuli and a fear of being incorporated,
overwhelmed” (104)—in fact by the oceanic emotions we have en-
countered in Edna Pontellierʼs epiphanies.3 Weiskel concludes that the
sublime is a complex psychological structure in which awe-inspiring
authority can have, figuratively speaking, different faces, now maternal,
now paternal.
Weiskelʼs argument suggests that the sublime experience consists
in a confrontation with fascinatingly remote figures of legitimation—
substitute parents or alternative paradigms of selfhood. In this logic,
when Ellida Wangel and Edna Pontellier try to establish a bond with
the ocean, they seek the endorsement of parental figures radically
different—freer, more glamorous, more potent—than the real-life
mothers, husbands and fathers that inhabit the stifling sphere of domes-
ticicity. The fact that this realm of substitute kinship is portrayed in
sublime or gothic terms signals the chasm that separates middle-class
existence from the heroinesʼ utopian aspirations. Interestingly, Ibsenʼs
and Chopinʼs thematics of hypnotic fascination is a key element in this
parental dialectic: According to Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi,
mesmerists derive their hold on a personʼs will by substituting them-
selves to the hypnotized subjectʼs parental voice: through the hypno-
tistʼs agency, an alien, uncanny persuasion invades the subjectʼs super-
ego.4 In this light, the mesmeric gaze of Ibsenʼs Stranger, or the
“whispering, clamoring, murmuring” voice of the sea in Chopin (175)
are the direct emanations of the sublime parental world that serves as
model for Ednaʼs and Ellidaʼs rebellion: mesmerism for Ibsen and
Chopinʼs characters functions as a mediating channel towards mysteri-
ous grounds of power.
The paradigm of the sublime also reveals how Chopinsʼ and Ib-
senʼs texts enact a problematic of existential allegiance and communi-
ty-building. In The Awakening and The Lady from the Sea, characters
join or construct social groups that are evaluated according to the status
they enjoy towards the oceanic world that, figuratively speaking,
surrounds middle-class domesticity. In the Awakening, it seems initially
simple to draw a dividing line between the patterns of behavior that
heed the call of the sea and those that remain entrenched within existing
norms. Antithetical to Ednaʼs newly-awakened aspiration is the com-
munity of the Creole “mother-women"—the self-effacing characters
who idolize their husbands and protect their “precious brood” against
“any harm, real or imaginary” (51). The claustrophobic control exerted
7

by this community is symbolised, for instance, in the Creole mothersʼ

habit of sewing intricate night-drawers “fashioned to enclose a babyʼs
body so effectually that only two small eyes might look out from the
garment, like an Eskimoʼs” (52). In Ednaʼs view, such a blind dedica-
tion to patriarchally-defined motherhood is typical of women who have
not realized their “position in the universe as [...] human being[s]” (57),
and who therefore cannot look at their situation from the exterior
vantage-point Edna has achieved through her oceanic epiphany.
Edna seeks to distance herself from Creole domesticity by shaping
her life along artistic principles. Within the circle of her acquaintances,
the only female role model she can emulate for this purpose is Miss
Reisz, an unmarried pianist whose talent can send “keen tremor[s]
down Mrs Pontellierʼs spinal column” (71). Miss Reiszʼs vocation as
an artist offers only a fragmented form of emancipation, however. Her
connection to oceanic empowerment is evidenced in the fact that her
music makes passions surge in Edna with the same violence as the
movement of the waves, which “daily beat upon [Ednaʼs] splendid
body” (72). Yet, for the rest, Miss Reisz is a sexless misanthrope who,
ironically, is famous among the bathers of the Grand Isle summer resort
for her “avoidance of the water” (97).
Instead of Miss Reiszʼs dissonant existential stance—part sensual
ecstasy, part instinctual repression—Edna strives for a real-life utopia
that might transcend both the darker aspects of oceanic seduction and
the strictures of domesticity. Her efforts to reach this goal are illustrated
in the banquet scene that marks the high-point of her awakening. The
banquet, is, as Ednaʼs lover Arobin suggests, a coup dʼétat (141),
organized to celebrate Ednaʼs departure from Léonce Pontellierʼs
house. As such, the occasion represents an exercise in conviviality by
elective affinities. Contrary to the stream of visitors that Edna, as any
New Orleans lady, is expected to entertain every afternoon, the guests
at the banquet are “few and [...] selected with discrimination” (142).
The implicit theme of the gathering is the transfiguration of reality
through art. For instance, Victor Lebrun, the brother of Ednaʼs first
lover, finds himself graced with a garland of roses, and transformed
“[a]s if a magicianʼs wand had touched him” into “a vision of Oriental
beauty” (146). This kind of artistic sublimation has a direct bearing on
the creation of new social arrangements, since it offers the hope that a
social group could be held together by the strategies of an artist whose
medium would be life itself. Edna would fit this creative part, since, at
her banquet, she appears as “the regal woman, the one who rules”
8 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

(145). This project is, however, hampered by the inadequation between

its utopian goals and the raw materials—human or other—available in
the New Orleans bourgeoisie. Victor is after all only a slightly drunk
poseur; likewise, the fall of lace around Ednaʼs shoulder might be
mistaken for “vibrant flesh,” were it not that it lacks its glow (145).
Thus, like a weary Kubla Khan, Edna soon feels her “old ennui” rise up
“from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed” (145). The end of the
scene shows the dissolution of the short-lived commonwealth—a
debacle embodied in the “voices of Ednaʼs disbanding guests [jarring]
like a discordant note in the quiet harmony of the night” (148-149).
Pessimism about self-emancipation reaches its climax in the scene
where the heroine is called, together with Dr Mandelet, the family
physician, to support her friend Adèle Ratignolle during the latterʼs
painful delivery. Standing by Adèleʼs bedside, Edna witnesses a “scene
of torture” that stirs the heroine to an “outspoken revolt against the
ways of Nature” (170). Mandelet, who has some inkling of the change
the heroine has been going through, tries to pacify the young woman by
casting the pains of childbirth in the perspective of Darwinian science:
The trouble is [...] that youth is given up to illusions. It
seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure
mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of
moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we
create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any
cost. (171)
To Edna, Mandeletʼs wisdom is devastating because it implies that
childbirth and motherhood serve as tests of truth that expose the artifi-
ciality of all social arrangements—including her utopia of conviviality,
art and desire. If Mandelet is right, Edna can no longer contrast her
awakened self, rooted in the sublime oceanic world, with the empty
conventionality of domesticity. Indeed, the doctorʼs argument suggests
that middle-class patriarchy, which regulates reproduction, is not
absurdly closed in upon itself, but has on the contrary its own sublime
figures of legitimation: the unbroken chain of motherhood—the very
fabric both of the patriarchal family and of biological evolution—is, in
this argument, undergirded by natural forces as fascinating and unrep-
resentable as the maternal presence Edna encounters in her oceanic
epiphanies. This Darwinian insight threatens to cancel out Ednaʼs
previous illuminations: it suggests that emancipation and repression
proceed from the same sublime realms.
9

It is tempting to discard Mandelet as a scientific enforcer of patri-

archal principles, eager to reorient Edna towards what he takes to be
sanity and sexual health. However, unlike most men in the novel,
Mandelet does not believe that Ednaʼs awakening is a symptom of
mental illness. Rather than preaching a return to conventions, he holds
out the promise of a more eccentric form of social accommodation.
After the childbirth scene, Mandelet invites Edna to visit him in order
to “talk of things [she] never [has] dreamt of talking about before”
(172). The doctor indicates thereby that science affords to its practition-
ers the knowing detachment of a brotherhood of initiates who have
fathomed the sublime secrets of Nature. The appeal of such an ascetic
life-choice is understandably lost on Edna. She shares Mandeletʼs
evolutionary pessimism only in her moments of dejection, when hu-
manity appears to her as “worms struggling blindly toward inevitable
annihilation” (109). Otherwise, she will choose only between her
artistic utopia and the rejection of all conventions through self-inflicted
death—commitments that, in Chopin, are expressed through imagery of
oceanic open-endedness and sensuous delight. By comparison, Man-
deletʼs scientific asceticism carries a claustrophobic ring that reminds
her of the moment when her father read “the Presbyterian service, [...]
in a spirit of gloom” (60). To escape this stern father figure, she would
dash away for a meadow nearby—a plot of grass “through which one
might walk “forever, without coming to the end of it” (60).

As in The Awakening, controversies about Darwinian evolution—about

nature and culture—are the framework within which the heroine ofThe
Lady from the Sea takes her final decision to reintegrate middle-class
marriage. Phrased in Darwinian terms, Ellidaʼs gesture constitutes a
commitment to the idea that, as her stepdaughter Bollette puts it, human
beings “have to make do with dry land” (272). Until then, Ellida had
envisaged the possibility that “mankind could have adapted itself from
the start to a life on the sea—or perhaps in the sea,” thereby escaping
the “secret sorrow” and the “melancholy” caused by the break from this
realm of origins (273). Other characters object that this hypothesis only
condones an unacceptable regression: it is not possible, Arnholm
jokingly contends, to “amend the error” by which mankind “took the
wrong turn and became land animals, instead of sea creatures” (273).
Likewise, Ballested claims, with a telltale stutter, that people must
10 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

“learn to accli˗acclimatize themselves” to the discontents of a land-

bound civilization (305).
The narrative logic that renders credible Ellidaʼs switch to the
doctrine of acclimatization can be traced, first, in the way Ibsen manip-
ulates the dichotomy of land and sea. Both Ibsenʼs play and Chopinʼs
novel require that the starkly contrasted definitions of the familiar and
the oceanic realms be made more complex as the stories progress. This
reshuffling of boundaries yields, however, different results in each
author. In The Awakening, the patriarchal household, once it is placed
in an evolutionary framework, becomes an even more daunting obsta-
cle to Ednaʼs emancipation. In Ibsen, on the contrary, the family
sphere, in its opposition to the call of the sea, becomes the more allur-
ing as it proves to be an unstable space of compromise and negotiation.
The summer resort where Wangel lives is indeed not a firmly rooted
Gemeinschaft, but a haven for transplanted people, who have “grown
attached to the place” by “time and habit” (230). Ballested is a carica-
tural embodiment of this rootlessness, since he acts simultaneously as
the townʼs hairdresser, its dance instructor and the Director of the Wind
Ensemble.
I do not mean to argue that Ibsen opposes to the seduction of the
sea the utopian picture of a civilization of half-hearted bargains. Only, I
believe that, just as the playwright depicts the oceanic realm in the
contrasted terms of terror and fascination, he discerns negative and
positive dimensions in life on land. At its worst, the culture of the
summer resort is an unpalatable social traffic that encourages brokered
marriages like, initially, Wangelʼs and Ellidaʼs. At the end of the play,
this danger is made visible in the subplot involving Wangelʼs daughter
Bollete and her former teacher Arnholm. In an echo of Ellidaʼs rela-
tionship both to Wangel and the Stranger, Bollete consents to Arn-
holmʼs marriage plea—replete with commercial and judicial clichés—
because she is dying to leave her family and “learn what life really is”
(309).
The transactions between Bollete and Arnholm are, however, the
satyr play of more vital bargainings among Ellida, the Stranger and
Wangel—negotiations in which we discover that the utopian side of life
on land is the very possibility of freedom. In Chopinʼs romantic per-
spective, freedom was located in the oceanic realm. In Ibsen, however,
it is Wangel, the realist, who broaches this issue when he points out that
the Stranger cannot take Ellida away “forcibly—against her will”
(278). Instantly, Ellida becomes entranced with the new horizon of
11

empowerment opened by her husband; the Stranger, for his part, tries to
appropriate freedom as a prerogative of the sea. In this, he is, however,
overreaching his powers: the act of free choice requires the possibility
of negotiation that Ibsen associates with the land community; converse-
ly, taking Ellida back to the ocean means returning her to a universe of
irresitible hypnotic coercion, where free choice has no meaning; the
oceanic “life that terrifies and attracts,” Ellida says, is one “that [she]
canʼt give up—not of [her] own free will” (306). Rolf Fjelde, com-
menting on Ellidaʼs confrontation with “the horror” of existential life-
commitments, describes her dilemma as an instance of “the Kierke-
gaardian hazard of ... an absolutely unqualified free choice” (xxix).
Against a reading in terms of unqualified choice, one might object that,
by launching a negotiation over freedom, Wangel sets a rhetorical trap
that can only bring Ellida closer to the land—the site of bargains and
deliberation. Between these two interpretations, I would argue that
Ibsen establishes a subtle synthesis between the constraints of worldly
culture—the mechanics of contracts—and the seduction and horror of
the unknown sea: what raises Ellidaʼs and Wangelʼs reflections on free
choice above Arnholmʼs and Bolleteʼs marriage bargains is precisely
the awareness of having to negotiate over unfathomable depths.
12 Den Tandt “Oceanic Discourse”

notes:
1. Originally published in Marc Maufort, ed., Union in Partition:
Essays in Honour of Jeanne Delbaere, Liège: L3 (Liège, Language,
and Literature): 1997, 71-80.

2. Janet Garton mentions that, for the construction of the uncanny

Stranger, Ibsen drew on Norwegian folk sources: men from the sea—
mermen—are recurrent characters in Nordic tales (Garton 117).

3. The importance of pre-oedipal stage in human development is the

object of Dorothy Dinnersteinʼs The Mermaid and the Minotaur,
Nancy Chodorowʼs The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender and Julia Kristevaʼs Pouvoirs de
lʼhorreur. These three authors rewrite Freudʼs oedipal scenario by
emphasising that, before the oedipal crisis, children are fashioned by
their relation to the mother. What is at stake in this pre-oedipal relation-
ship is not castration, but narcissism and the definition of ego-
boundaries.

4. See Sigmund Freud ʼs Group Psychology and the Analysis of the

Ego and Sandor Ferencziʼs “Introjection and Transference.”
13

Works Cited

Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-
analytic Interpretation. London: Imago, 1949.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Awakening and Selected Short
Stories. 1899; New York: The Penguin Group, 1984.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York:
Harper and Row, 1976.
Ferenczi, Sandor. “Introjection and Transference.” First Contributions
to Psycho-Analysis. 1909. London: 1952.
Fjelde, Rolf. Foreword. Ibsen, Henrik. The Lady from the Sea, in Four
Major Plays, Volume II. New York: Signet; Penguin Books, 1970.
ix-xxiv .
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon
Books, 1965)
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921;
New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1967.
Garton, Janet. “The Middle Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to
Ibsen. James McFarlane, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994. 106-125.
Ibsen, Henrik. The Lady from the Sea, in Four Major Plays, Volume II.
New York: Signet; Penguin Books, 1970.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1952.
Kristeva, Julia. Pouvoirs de lʼhorreur. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980
Norris, Frank. The Pit. 1902; Cambridge, Mass: Robert Bentley, 1971.
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and
Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1976.