Eve Cremers
February 4, 2009
ENTH2186X
A Doll’s Life: The Uncanny Life of Objects in Ibsen’s The Master Builder
In Ibsen’s The Master Builder, objects are more than just plot points and pieces of fate as they are in the well-made play; here, objects become relics of people, traces of their lives. We are familiar with objects that work on a character’s conscious or subconscious in strange and telling ways (the letter containing a fateful revelation, a gun on the wall, a clock, etc). Yet in The Master Builder there is something of an equal and opposite reaction, in which the emotions or aspirations of a character give uncanny “life” to the objects to which she is intimately connected. Freud writes of the uncanny effect that occurs when we perceive a blurring in the distinction between living things and objects in a setting which either is—or appears to represent—the real world. Ibsen goes one step further (or perhaps deeper) in suggesting that objects can somehow absorb some of the emotional life of the characters around them.
At the beginning of Act Three, Mrs. Solness voices her grief over the burning of her beloved childhood dolls, the portraits of the walls, and her mother’s and grandmother’s lace and old silk dresses in the fire that destroyed her home and caused the death of her infant sons. She tells Hilda that “I and the dolls had gone on living together,” and that “in a way there way life in them too. I used to carry them under my heart. Just like little, unborn children” (p.367). While a mother who grieves more over the destruction of inanimate objects than over the death of her children would usually be judged callous to the point of monstrousness, in The Master Builder, Ibsen sidesteps the normal societal view and trades judgment for objectivity (or ambiguity, depending on how you see it). Mrs. Solness’s heartbreak over her lost dolls strangely makes her seem a more sympathetic and sensitive character. Her grief is not over the monetary value of the objects (“No, it’s the small losses in life that strike at your heart. Losing all of those things that other people value at next to nothing”) but over the traces of human life that clung—as a last physical remainder of a vanished human life or happy childhood—to those things (366). In light of the fact that she had hugged and cradled them from childhood to adulthood, the “death” of Mrs. Solness’s “nine beautiful dolls” aquires an uneasy tragedy (367).
The scene takes place on the veranda. The idea of the action taking place on the porch seems compatible with the idea of objects retaining traces of the of characters whose lives these objects reciprocally shape. “The House” is after all the major object of value in The Master Builder. Halvard and Aline Solness find themselves stranded somewhere in the space between “House” and “Home.” Just as Mrs. Solness’s dolls came “alive” through her emotional investment in them, so will the house transform into a home only when its inhabitants can reciprocate and begin to define their environment. The destruction of a cherished object—particularly one that, as in the case of a doll, a portrait, or a dress, is an intimate trace, remainder, footprint of a human life—is the ultimate representation of mortality. Since objects have no claim to an immortal soul, once they are gone they are gone completely and forever. Mrs. Solness can take comfort in the thought that her twin boys are enjoying themselves in the afterlife. However the burning of her dolls whom she claims to have loved almost as children, and who at any rate were a comforting, touchable remainder of her home and childhood, causes her a sadness for which religion and duty supply no coping mechanism, no “double” (as the immortal soul is the double of the body) to convince us of our “preservation against extinction” (“The Uncanny”, p.9).
While Mrs. Solness’s thoughts on the life and death of her dolls may or may not strike the reader as poignant, they will almost certainly strike him as uncanny. When Freud writes about the production of that uncanny feeling, he notes that it is generally the resurfacing of some fear which has been repressed or “surmounted.” Frequently that fear is the fear of death. In The Master Builder we can interpret Mrs. Solness’s line “Don’t talk anymore to me about the two little boys. We can only be happy for them. Because they’re well off—so well off now” in Freudian terms as evidence that she uses the idea of heaven as a method of repressing her fear of death (The Master Builder, p. 366). Freud writes: “Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation” (“The Uncanny”, p.13). The destruction of her dolls however, shatters that repression mechanism, the afterlife. Dolls, though they have been glutted with enough excess human emotion to possess a kind of life of their own, or at least trace or reflection of the character’s life, are nevertheless not privileged to an afterlife. Through the combination of dolls which are nearly alive (uncanny enough in themselves) combined with a provocation of the fear of death sans traditional method for repressing that fear (the notion that the deceased has passed on to a better place) Ibsen creates a radically unsettling effect in the space of a few short lines.
Taking figuratively Newton’s third law, that we cannot touch without being touched, what we find in The Master Builder is that not only are the characters influenced and defined by their surroundings, but that the characters in turn influence and define the things that surround them. The almost-life that the characters imbue their surrounding objects with is an effective tool for creating the unsettling effect of the play. If the house that burned was just a “house” (merely an object) rather than a “home,” with all the emotional saturation implied by that word, its destruction would not be half as upsetting and unsettling. Similarly the image of the burning dolls would not be uncanny were it not for the “life” that Mrs. Solness’s love had given them.