*4.2. Secular Guilt*

The second kind of secularisation, the anthropologically motivated narrative of secularisation, becomes obvious if *Rosmersholm* is reconstructed based on the notion of guilt.<sup>4</sup> By collecting the statements about freedom and happiness made by the atheist Rosmer throughout the drama, only very vague ideas about the subject will be found. Yet, one thing is obvious: Rosmer believes he will be able to ge<sup>t</sup> rid of his feeling of guilt if he gets rid of religion. His ideal: 'Quiet, happy innocence.' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 270)—'Happiness [ ... ] is more than anything that serene, secure, happy freedom from guilt.' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 279)—'Any cause that is to win a lasting victory must have at its head a happy and guiltless man.' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 282)—'your happy innocence' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 290)—'Yes, innocence. Where happiness and contentment are found.' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 302). The Norwegian original makes it even clearer by repeating the words skydfrihed/skyldfri again and again: 'Den stille, glade skyldfrihed.'(Ibsen 2009, p. 418)—'Lykke [ ... ], det er først og fremst den stille, glade, trygge følelse af skyldfrihed.' (Ibsen 2009, p. 436)—'Den sag, som skal vinde frem til varig sejr, —den må bæres af en glad og skyldfri mand.' (Ibsen 2009, p. 440)—'din glade skyldfrihed' (Ibsen 2009, p. 456)—'Skyldfriheden, ja. I den er lykken og glæden' (Ibsen 2009, p. 482).

One could rightly assume that being free of guilt is the result of the abolition of a judging divine entity. Within the play, this idea is tested but then dismissed with the example of sexuality: When the other characters are told that Rosmer has lost his faith, everyone is convinced that he shares not only board but also the bed with his companion Rebekka West. Whether it is his wife Beate, headmaster Kroll, the editor Mortensgård, or the housekeeper Madam Helseth, they all interpret Rosmer's behaviour according to this logic: As soon as God's punitive gaze disappears, the same applies to the guilty conscience; a mind freed of religion is followed by free love. This logic would fit into the interpretation presented above: Social secularisation and sexual liberation go hand in hand. But, although everyone else might think this way, Rosmer does not. When he learns about the accusations, he reacts indignantly: 'Ah ... ! So you don't think there is any sense of virtue to be found among freethinkers? Doesn't it strike you they might have a natural instinct for morality?' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 257). One might see these statements as the new phrasing of old Christian austerity and thus Rosmer's atheist asexual freedom as self-delusion. Yet, one has to take into account that there is no reason for Rosmer to feel guilty—even if he is still influenced by a Christian denial of drives and instincts. For there is nothing going on between him and Rebekka. And, where there is no offence, there is no reason for remorse. Consequently, the guilty conscience that he thinks he can ge<sup>t</sup> rid of as an atheist must have been caused by something other than the Christian fear of sexuality. So, how does Rosmer define guilt after his lapse in faith? Which guilt is dissipated by his new lifestyle in which sexual abstinence is obviously an essential element?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to consider Freud's analysis of Rebekka West in his essay *Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytical Work,* because Freud integrates sexuality into the wider context of its social function. Freud shows very convincingly that Rebekka joins a constellation corresponding to the Oedipal triangle by taking up her new employment at Rosmersholm: Being a young woman herself, she encounters a married couple that, owing to their age and authority,

<sup>4</sup> For my following argumentation, I owe thanks to the chapter 'Totem, Tabu og Skuld. Om *Rosmersholm* (1886)' in Atle Kittang's important book *Ibsens Heroisme. Frå Brand til Når vi døde vågner* (Kittang 2002). Kittang analyses *Rosmersholm* with the help of *Totem and Taboo*, but (a) he is not interested in the religious-analytical potential of Ibsen's drama and is therefore not interested in the concept of secularisation. (b) He interprets the relationship between Freud's theory and Ibsen's drama in a completely different way. According to him, Freud realises man's anthropological basis and, with the help of Freud's terminology, he shows how even Ibsen represents this anthropology. Freud becomes his template to read Ibsen. I, however, intend to emphasise that both Ibsen and Freud work on the same project.

occupies the position of imaginary parents. Rebekka lusts for the parent of the opposite sex (meaning the imaginary father Rosmer)—she herself talks about 'wild, uncontrollable passion' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 299)—and therefore orchestrates the suicide of the parent belonging to the same sex (meaning the imaginary mother Beate). The puzzling question challenged by Freud is, why does Rebekka first rejoice at Rosmer's marriage proposal and thus the fulfilment of her wishes, but vehemently rejects his proposal the very next moment? How can that happen? Freud argues that later on in the story, Rebekka is forced to recognise that her adoptive father, Dr. West, who became her first lover, is actually also her biological father. This means she actually not only broke the taboo of killing by intriguing against her symbolical mother Beate, but also broke the taboo of incest with her biological father, Dr. West. When Rosmer asks her to marry him, she shies away from repeating this taboo of incest with her symbolical father Rosmer.

I quote Freud: 'Everything that happened to her at Rosmersholm, her falling in love with Rosmer and her hostility to his wife, was from the first a consequence of the Oedipus complex—an inevitable replica of her relations with her mother and Dr. West' (Freud 2001b, p. 330). Ibsen's poetic achievement consists of illustrating the model that everyone experiences in an imaginary form during the period of initial socialisation, which is at the age of three or four, through his particular set of characters. In other words: The symbolical father (in Rebekka's case it is of course the mother) is always more important than the real one.<sup>5</sup> In whatever way the biological father might behave himself, he becomes a surface onto which the symbolical father is projected. This symbolical father figure claims the object of desire for himself and therefore has to be eliminated by the son. The desire to kill causes the emergence of a guilty conscience, which only then turns the individual into a human being who can put their immediate desire aside for the sake of the community. That is exactly what happens when Rebekka denies herself the rewards of her scheme. She describes it as follows: 'It is the Rosmer philosophy of life [ ... ] that has infected my will. [ ... ] Made it a slave to laws that had meant nothing to me before' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 301). Here—in a guilty conscience—lies the link that opens Freud's analysis of a single character to anthropological speculation about the beginning of all religion in *Totem and Taboo*.

## *4.3. Ibsen's Totem and Taboo*

In accordance with the knowledge formations of his time, in his analytical essay on religion, Freud assumes that totemism is the archetype of all religions. All other religions and even his own period, which was critical of religion, should consequently be regarded as derivations of the one cultural achievement that was generated by totemism. Consequently, *Totem and Taboo* resembles the prolegomena of a narrative of secularisation which—and this is how one certainly can interpret Freud—reaches its desired goal through psychoanalysis. Yet, in contrast to the sociological version that was later canonised in Europe's cultural consciousness, this particular narrative of secularisation is not centred around a turning point where society's sacral legitimisation turns into a secular one. Rather, it is a narrative with an anagnorisis, a recognition. What is being recognised is that the process that originally created religion makes every individual a social human being, that phylogenesis and ontogenesis correlate—and that the core of religious ambivalence ('the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object,' Freud 2001a, p. 157) will not be overcome by turning away from Christianity.

So, what constitutes this capacity for creating religions that totemism passed on to all following religions? It is precisely in the sense of repentance. In the following, I will extensively quote from *Totem and Taboo*'s best-known passage, in which Freud talks more comprehensively about history's first

<sup>5</sup> Hiebel states the same in his analysis of *Rosmersholm* (pp. 145–46): 'Wieder ist die symbolische Vaterschaft wichtiger als die biologische, reale.' That is the reason why Ibsen introduces Rebekka's adoption by Dr. West. Rebekka's legal father, Gamvik, never appears, 'weil er nicht von der Aurole des Symbolischen umgeben war'.

patricide.<sup>6</sup> Its origin lies in the Darwinian primal horde which is governed by 'a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up' (Freud 2001a, p. 141): "One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. [ ... ] They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had go<sup>t</sup> rid of him, [ ... ] the a ffection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance [ ... ]. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been—[ ... The brothers] revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex" (Freud 2001a, pp. 141–43).

Thus, the various religions are to be regarded as versions of the deification of the father as a reaction to an experienced guilt. Consequently, the basic feeling of guilt that religion is struggling with, derives—according to Freud—only partially from illicit desire, and most certainly from the experience of patricide which is being transferred from generation to generation—at least in its imaginary form.

In Ibsen's drama, the same concept of guilt can be found in statements made by the character Rosmer. This becomes clear at a point in the story in which Rosmer is not talking about his own guilt, but the feelings of guilt and shame that drove his wife Beate into suicide. In fact, he calls them 'grundløse'/'unnecessary': 'the way she used to reproach herself quite unnecessarily' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 254—'hendes grundløse, fortærende selvbebrejdelser', Ibsen 2009, p. 387). What he means by that is that 'she had been told that she would never have any children' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 254). Thus, Beate's feeling of guilt stems from not being able to continue the Rosmers' genealogical succession—a genealogy that is not only omnipresent to the residents at Rosmersholm, but also to the theatre audience. The first thing the audience sees as the curtain is rising is 'the living-room at Rosmersholm' in which the eponymous genealogy has an overwhelming presence: 'The walls are hung with past and recent portraits of clergymen, o fficers and o fficials in their robes and uniforms' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 223). Asbjørn Aarseth has called this stage scenery the most extreme example of an Ibsenesque e ffect of claustrophobia (Aarseth 1999, p. 174). There is also a second aspect I would like to emphasise. Even if the motif of infertility is well known as a punishment by God or Gods in the history of religion, it is in fact the opposite that is emphasised by Rosmer in the statement above—i.e., that these feelings of guilt are 'grundløse'/'unnecessary'. It is Ibsen's intention to demonstrate at various points in his plot that it is precisely this carefree attitude toward filiation (meaning the continuation of genealogy) that represents the crucial novelty of Rosmer's atheist attitude. The freedom he experiences through his apostasy is not related to suppressed sexuality; as I have shown earlier, he has little or no interest in Eros—no matter which way one chooses for interpreting this fact; what actually turned out to be a burden instead, was the duty to continue the family line. The text repeatedly emphasises that atheism represents a betrayal of the fathers. From the various text passages, I will quote only one: 'The descendant of these men here looking down on us ... he'll not escape so easily from what has been handed down unbroken from generation to generation' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 284).<sup>7</sup>

<sup>6</sup> Does this narrative simply represent a heuristic artifice that is supposed to make an unrepresentable circumstance plausible? Many commentators on Freud's work adopt this train of thought. Yet, Freud himself does not speak of an invention of fiction but of a 'lack of precision,' 'its abbreviation of the time factor and its compression of the whole subject-matter' in his narrative (Freud 2001a, pp. 142–43).

<sup>7</sup> Another example is Rebekka's speech 'Oh, all these doubts, these fears, these scruples—they are just part of the family tradition. The people here talk about the dead coming back in the form of charging white horses.' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 281). And Rosmer himself formulates it as follows: 'To me it seems I have a bounden duty to bring a little light and happiness into those places where the Rosmers have spread gloom and oppression all these long years;' to which Kroll answers sarcastically: 'Yes, that would indeed be an undertaking worthy of the man who is the last of his line' (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 259).

For Rosmer, being childless is—in contrast to Beate—no reason for a guilty conscience. Instead, the filiation that he is committed to represents the instance that causes his guilty conscience. The analogy to Freud is unmistakable. Rosmer's atheism proves to be something deeper than just a lapse of faith. Like Freud, he focuses on religion itself and furthermore, just like Freud, he recognises religion's basic pattern to be the divine idealisation of a dead father figure who rules the son through a sense of guilt. The freedom of guilt that Rosmer experiences due to atheism is thus indeed obtained through sexual abstinence. Not because sexual desire in itself is forbidden, but because sexuality could potentially continue the sequence of guilt. This succession can only be dissolved without a child. Remaining childless does not constitute the cause for religious feeling of guilt (like for Beate), but as the remedy against an anthropologically construed guilt. Rosmer, consequently, does not interpret his asexual relationship to Rebekka as a sign of pathological loss of libido, but as the beginning of a love that evades the system of guilt, because it is not meant to produce descendants. Rosmer refuses to become a father himself. The imaginary unification with Rebekka<sup>8</sup> through their joint suicide is the ultimate manifestation of this refusal. According to Freud, the history of religion is a constant variation of symbolical patricide and its remorsefully attempted annulment. Rosmer also recognises this connection. His anagnorisis leads him to the only rebellion a son can make towards his father that does not perpetuate the filiation of the father's power and the son's guilt. He refuses the identification with his father by refusing to become a father himself.

Finally, there is one further aspect I would also like to address: Does Ibsen give his audience any hints on how to normatively interpret *Rosmersholm*'s joint suicide? Should it be understood as a heroic rebellion, an existential break with genealogy's logics, with the original crime at the beginning of humanity, which inevitably enslaves man in a regime of guilt? Or, is the crime instead found at the end of the play? Is it possible that the joint suicide represents a crime against life itself, which is—despite (or rather because of) its inevitable entanglement in guilt—still precious, worth living, and lovable? Ibsen does not provide an answer. Of course not! But the question once again leads me back to Freud's *Totem and Taboo*, more accurately to one specific phrasing in the German original of the previously quoted text passage, which contains a certain revelational potential. After the brothers of the primal horde have eliminated their father, the following happens: 'es entstand ein Schuldbewußtsein.' (Freud [1913] 1999, p. 173—'it appeared a sense of guilt'; in the words of the Standard Edition: 'A sense of guilt made its appearance' (Freud 2001a, p. 143)). When dealing with an author who is as conscious of style as Freud is, it must be noticed that he uses the syntactic expletive 'es' (Engl.: it)—a pronoun that does not possess any semantic content. It is used, both in German and in English, because grammatically correct sentences require a grammatical subject—as seen in the examples 'it rains' ('es regne<sup>t</sup>') or 'it seems' ('es scheint'). This expletive 'it' hides the fact that a sense of guilt does not appear out of thin air. Instead, it needs a prerequisite; and this prerequisite is not the crime, but love and thus the obligation towards loved ones. The deed only becomes a crime when this obligation is violated. Thus, even in Freud's narrative about the primal horde, culture does not really originate through crime, but through love, which makes the deed a crime in the first place. Felix culpa!

## **5. Agents of Secularisation**

I hope it has become clear that *Rosmersholm* presents two very di fferent narratives of secularisation and even confronts them with one another. One of them resembles the narrative which was later canonised by sociology and thus became essential for the European perception of modernity. According to this narrative, the transition into a modern society requires the dismissal of any finalised metaphysical order—resulting in the ambivalent emotional simultaneity of freedom and alienation. It interprets the joint suicide at the end of the drama as collateral damage brought about by the process of modernisation. Nevertheless, if one approaches the issue of guilt, then one instead encounters a di fferent model

<sup>8</sup> (Ibsen [1886] 1960, p. 311): 'For now we two are one.'

of secularization—a model that admittedly manages to abolish institutionalised religion, but posits religion's origin, namely the sense of guilt, as an anthropological constant at the same time. In this light, the suicide at the end of the drama turns into a refusal to transfer the sense of guilt that came from the original crime to a new son.

Furthermore, I hope it has become clear that Freud's psychoanalysis or the sociological idea of modernisation is not simply regarded as my model for interpreting Ibsen in the same way shown by previous research on Ibsen (e.g., Gerland 1998). Ibsen should not simply be understood as a clear-sighted observer of his time who recognised the society's process of secularisation and chose it as a topic for his drama. Yet, at the same time, he must not be understood as a psychoanalyst *avant la letter,* who already surmised religion's secular 'truth', which was later made public by Freud. Instead, he conceptualises di fferent narratives of secularisation, he even confronts them with one another and thus puts their plausibility to the test. In this way, like Freud and the founding fathers of sociology, he becomes a powerful agent, who contributes to the narrative structure's composition.

By embracing the challenge presented above of thinking of secularisation as a narrative structure, the perspective on the literary material to be analysed changes fundamentally. The argumen<sup>t</sup> that suggests that Strindberg, Ibsen, Jacobsen, Lagerlöf, etc. should be regarded as lucid interpreters of their time, because they concur with the results of the sociological paradigm developed by Simmel, Weber, Parsons, and others, represents an anachronism, because it disregards the fact that the mentioned Scandinavian authors themselves were important agents of discourse formation. They lived before there was a social consensus that defined history as a process of secularisation; in fact, they were involved in shaping the idea of secularisation in the first place, in propagating it and in working on its implementation. They did not react to the process of secularisation with their texts. Instead, they were involved in the creation and shaping of the interpretative category 'secularisation'. Therefore, their texts should not (solely) be read as time-diagnostic sources but as performative-political investments.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The article was translated from German with the assistance of Franziska Sajdak.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
