Volume 16, Number 6 · April 8, 1971
Ibsen and Women III: The Rosmersholm Triangle
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Rosmersholm is one of Ibsen's best plays. The heroine, Rebecca West, is torn apart by high motive and low passion, by ugly necessity and splendid hopes, in a manner of the greatest dramatic and psychological interest. The play has Ibsen's usual atmosphere of a petty social constriction. Coldness and the bitterest heats of feeling fight miserably with each other. In the background there are dirty politics and cowardly conventionality, but the essential action, the backward and forward movement of the plot, lies in the character and the competitive struggle between the two women.
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