Sometimes a Ghost is Just a Ghost: Agnes and Spectrality in Henrik Ibsen’s Brand

1 Introduction

A popular saying among students of Ibsen is that “all of his plays could be called Ghosts,” and, indeed, the images of the dead continuing to work their power on the living, of the past reappearing unexpectedly and uncannily in the midst of the present, are concerns that clearly struck deeply into the poetic imagination of the most influential dramatist of the modern European theatre. (Carlson 2003, 1)

These words by Marvin Carlson are often quoted to highlight the so-called “retrospective technique” Henrik Ibsen developed in his cycle of twelve modern plays, beginning with Pillars of the Community (1877) and ending with When We Dead Awaken (1899). Although this ghostly metaphor is well-rooted in the literary jargon of Ibsen studies, it is nonetheless surprising to see that the figure of the ghost in Ibsen’s plays has garnered scarce scholarly attention. The present article seeks to bridge this gap and lay the foundation for a study of spectrality in Ibsen’s plays, understood as a study of literal spectral figures, i.e., on “proper” or “material” ghosts that appear on page and stage and haunt living characters. For the sake of delimitation, I will focus my analysis on one of these figures, the ghost of Agnes in Ibsen’s Brand (1866), although there are other plays in which spirits of deceased characters are a part of the dramatis personae and interact with living characters.^[1]

Drawing upon different theoretical articulations of the so-called “spectral turn,” and most notably on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, this article will study the spectral manifestation of Agnes and how it affects our understanding of Ibsen’s play. Her ghost appears in a crucial moment at the end of the fifth act and speaks in just one scene; a spectral interpretation of it not only explores its nature and status, but affects our understanding of the play as a whole. The present article avoids a metaphorical and/or psychological reading of spectral figures – which sees ghosts as projections of the minds of other characters – and will instead concentrate on their spectral features as ghosts. The article will thus seek to answer the following research questions: what role does this seemingly secondary figure play in Ibsen’s dramatic poem? If one of the characters in Brand is in fact a ghost, what are the consequences for our interpretation of the play? In the course of my analysis, I will show that these perspectives are especially related to the Christ-like status of the protagonist, Brand, and to the agency of Agnes.

2 Ghosts on Stage and the Spectral Turn

The scarcity of scholarly studies of Ibsen’s ghosts is even more surprising if one takes into account the importance of such figures in the history of drama. Ghosts have haunted Western stages ever since Antiquity, with plays by Aeschylus, Euripides and Seneca as early examples (Burr 1987, 2–3; Davies 2007, 217). In this early stage of theatrical spectrality, spectral figures were characterized by their “dependency […] on the potency of souls still in mortal form” (Burr 1987, 3), meaning that ghosts only raised to dramatic status as a function of their interaction with living characters, and not as characters themselves. In this context, their reclaim of past misdeeds often turns their helplessness into rage and a desire for vengeance (Burr 1987, 3). The figure of the Senecan ghost had a rich afterlife, for instance in Shakespeare’s drama, where its main role was one which claimed vengeance; ghosts appeared to the living to settle accounts that they had not been able to resolve in life, either because they did not have the capacity, or because of the very fact that they were killed. Their dependency on the living was mirrored by the requests, or rather impositions, that came along with their haunting of the living.

As early as the seventeenth century, a debate arose regarding whether Shakespeare’s ghosts were intended as representations of dead characters or whether they should instead be considered hallucinations or projections of the characters’ psyches (Davies 2007, 218–219). This spurred a process of psychologization throughout the Baroque and Romantic periods, when ghosts came to be conceived as products of the characters’ minds (Davies 2007, 221–222, 225). Still, such skepticism about the existence of ghosts did not impede their proliferation on European stages, fueled by Gothic melodrama and the continuing interest in Shakespeare on the part of European audiences; but the theatrical ghosts that entered the drama of modernity had completed this process of psychologization and never rose to the status of protagonists (Davies 2007, 232–223, 239; Jones 2018, 270; Saglia 2015, 389).

This is perhaps the reason why most Ibsen scholarship that touches upon ghosts is not so interested in them as ghosts. Suzanne Burr, in her Ghosts in Modern Drama, treats them as mere psychological categories:

Throughout Ibsen’s work, we see minds protesting and struggling against themselves, personalities at war with their own impulses and desires. […] Ghosts become expressions of fleeting, barely conscious impulses; of repressed psychic material that ultimately resurfaces and demands the protagonist face previously unresolved psychic conflicts; and of voices within the mind that urge both regressive and constructive action. (Burr 1987, 10)

In other words, Ibsen’s ghosts are to be taken seriously only as manifestations of inner forces of the living and do not exist independently. From this perspective, they lack any form of agency, and any claim, request or utterance – let alone yearnings for revenge or vengeance – originate in the mind of the other characters.^[2] My concern, on the contrary, is less metaphorical than it is literal in its conceptualization of spectrality, and in doing so it also insists on the materiality of these ghosts in their textual presence. In short, my interest lies in the dramatic experience of the spectral and of the possibilities that ghosts create an opening for. This aspect is emphasized by Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, who, in the introduction to the anthology Theatre and Ghosts, insist on “the particular advantages of putting spectrality and theatre studies in dialogue” (Luckhurst and Morin 2014, 2), as “the stage is a space in which otherworldly encounters can be powerfully dramatized and playwrights, actors, directors and scenographers have actively shaped the ways in which those encounters are imagined and codified” (Luckhurst and Morin 2014, 4). From a slightly different perspective, Terry Castle has pointed out how the perception of spectral figures in the theater from the late eighteenth century is related to what Sigmund Freud’s came to define as the Uncanny, “a sort of phantom, looming up out of darkness: an archaic fantasy or fear, long ago exiled to the unconscious, that nonetheless ‘returns to view”’ (Castle 1995, 7). However, I deem it necessary to take a step back from Freud, whose main preoccupation with the theory of the Uncanny was indeed to get rid of the slippery problem of “ghosts” and those who believed in them (Castle 1995, 9). My contention, on the contrary, concerns taking theatrical ghosts as ghosts and making sense of their function in drama. Alice Rayner, in her Ghosts. Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre singles out the specificity of theatrical ghosts and their consequences for the understanding of dramatic texts that contain them:

Unlike a metaphor, which also joins two unlike entities in a single image, a ghostly double involves secrets and a return. Ghosts hover where secrets are held in time: the secrets of what has been unspoken, unacknowledged; the secrets of the past, the secrets of the dead. Ghosts wait for the secrets to be released into time. (Rayner 2006, x)

Return is the key feature of these dramatic ghosts, and their appearance spurs dramaturgical quests for problems and issues related to the past (their “secrets”) that resurface in the minds of characters. In addition, the shock and awe that the return of someone who is not supposed to return provokes, introduces a fundamental doubleness: the ghost is a referent of both the deceased person and their revenant. Such doubleness thus introduces an element of doubt as to the identity and nature of the ghost, emphasized by the very presence – either physical or textual – of the ghost on the stage and the page of the dramatic text.

Although I disagree with Rayner when she, drawing upon an empirical approach to dramaturgy, denies theater ghosts the “power of action in any pragmatic sense” (Rayner 2006, xix), because “they call upon the living to act for them […] to fulfill their demands, to respond, and ultimately to set them to rest” (Rayner 2006, xx), I find her conceptualization of the doubleness of ghosts to carry a great potential: the ghost becomes a no-thing “that can[not] be examined, unearthed, analyzed” (Rayner 2006, xxii) and therefore a powerful actor:

Theatre’s ghosts, when they are present, induce another force entirely, something close to the fearful astonishment or even vertigo in the radical unknowing and lack of explanation for what appears. [ …] The ghost is known only by its affective presence, when one asks from a state of wonder, What am I seeing, how does this happen, where is this coming from, this “thing” happening before my eyes? If words are successful in naming the ghost, there is no ghost. (Rayner 2006, xxiii)

Such affective presence, to my mind, contradicts somehow Rayner’s claim about the ghost’s lack of agency: one can discuss to which degree the ghost needs the living to complete its action, but this is precisely that of spurring ideas in the characters’ minds and making the dramaturgical wheels turn. Commenting on the possibilities that ghosts have opened up for critical theory, Rayner also emphasizes how theater’s visual nature helps to bring ghosts out of their “safe confines of thought” (Rayner 2006, xxviii), as pieces of vocabulary for the epistemology of memory studies and post-structuralism. Her reference is to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) and his own understanding of the questions of spectrality, which he termed hauntology and which spurred a so-called “spectral turn” in the humanities in the late 1990s. Although the development – and the contextual reduction – of the ghost into a postmodern critical trope has caused both epistemological and theoretical challenges that have emphasized the limits of the spectral turn (Luckhurst 2013), I still find the central elements of Derrida’s hauntological project to be useful methodological tools for investigating spectral figures in Ibsen’s Brand. My approach to Derrida’s hauntology is rather literal and is not concerned with memory and the “metaphorical” specters of Marxism, to which the French philosopher devotes the second half of Specters of Marx. While both deconstruction and Marxist theory can indeed open interesting avenues of research within Ibsen studies, these would take us far from the aim and scope of this article. Therefore, I deem it necessary to concentrate on Derrida’s spectrality as a study of “proper” ghostly figures, if we are to make sense of Agnes as a ghost. This is what Derrida is concerned of in the first half of the book, where he draws largely upon the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the next paragraphs, I will address the salient points of his theory.

Derrida’s conceptualization of spectrality finds its starting point in the problem of making sense of something that “is not. […] Neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, [ …] never present as such” (Derrida 2006, xvii. Emphasis in the original) and its temporal disjointment with the present of the living that the specter interacts with (Derrida 2006, xviii–xix). The crucial issue of the specter is related to meaning-making: “the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (Derrida 2006, 4–5). The uncertainty on the nature of the specter – and therefore of the possibility to grasp its essence – is profoundly related to vision because, as Derrida eplains, “A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the presence with its absence in advance” (Derrida and Stiegler 2013, 39). Such a problem with vision spurs one of the two main asymmetries between the living and the specter; according to Derrida, the specter can see, judge, and look at us, while we cannot ever be sure of what we see or that we are really seeing; this asymmetry is de-synchronizing and spurs a shift or anachrony between the living and the dead (Derrida 2006, 6). The emergence of anachrony is the source of an asymmetrical power relationship between the living and the specter: “The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are ‘before the law,’ without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity” (Derrida and Stiegler 2013, 40). The specter comes back to speak about justice (Derrida 2006, xviii), and here lies its specific agency, entering in a dialogue with the living and influencing their actions.

But there is more about anachrony and power. The time of the specter is neither our present nor another present, the specter speaks from out of time and from a dimension that has a touch of the eternal, while not permanent. The specter’s return among the living eradicates it from the past (the time when the spectral person was alive), the present, and the eternity of the afterlife. It returns by definition, but this is not a fully developed return in the sense that the specter is and is not at the same time, and is and is not the person whose body it belonged once in life. This spurs a tension between repetition, first, and last time:

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum? […] Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. (Derrida 2006, 10. Emphasis in the original)

This uncertainty about time is summed up by Derrida in the famous shakespearian loan of “the time is out of joint,” or “disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged [ …] off course, beside itself, disadjusted” (Derrida 2006, 20). Disajointedness is the condition of spectrality, and what empowers the specter. Faced with insecurity about the nature of the specter, of its existence, of its belonging in space and time, the only human reaction is that of uncertainty: “[o]ne does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge” (Derrida 2006, 5). And precisely this uncertainty opens up great possibilities for the interpretation of the speech of the specter, because its unclear nature also means that its utterances must necessarily be unclear. This is to my mind the crucial aspect of Derrida’s theory of spectrality and the potential it has for the interpretation of literary texts where ghosts are present. I will now see how this theory applies to the case of Brand and Agnes.

3 Who is the Ghost of Agnes?

The question of spectrality in Brand is closely related to the final scene of the fifth and last act of the play, which has always been an intense topic of discussion in Ibsen studies. In this scene, Brand is confronted with his life’s actions and suffers their extreme consequences. Having caused the death of his child, Alf, and his wife, Agnes, because of his uncompromising relationship to religion, he has also been abandoned by his parishoners. Brand is alone in the midst of a snowy mountain landscape, and we sense that his end is near. First, an invisible choir confronts Brand with his failure to reach to the essence of God, and then, the figure of a woman appears from a spotlight in the mist and enters the scene. The stage directions clearly state: “Det er Agnes” (Ibsen 2007, 460).

Agnes is the only character in the play who has a feeling for the spectral. In the fourth act, when she is desperately mourning the loss of his son Alf, she tells Brand that his ghost has visited her during the night and peeked through the window (331). Whether she really experienced a ghostly visit or this is just a product of her imagination, the text does not say, but Brand strongly refuses Agnes’ sentiments: “Liget ligger under Sneen; /Barnet er till Himlen baaret” (331. Italics in the original). In other words, he rejects the possibility of communication between this world and the afterlife, while Agnes keeps it open.

Brand’s meeting with the ghost of Agnes in the fifth act continues this opposition. He exclaims: “O, du lever! Lovet være –!” (461). A few lines later he repeats the same verb when talking about Alf. He is therefore convinced (or deluded) that his wife and son are still alive, and that they can save him from his situation. In response to his outburst, the ghost replies “hurtigt”: “Hys, tal heller derom siden!/Følg mig, følg mig; knapp er Tiden” (461). Why is the ghost in such a hurry to correct Brand, and at the same time does not answer the question? The ghost neither confirms nor denies that she is alive, and this is her strategy for keeping Brand’s attention. But such ambiguity, I would argue, finds its foundation in the very spectral nature of Agnes’ apparition, as I will elaborate on in the next subchapter. For the moment, it suffices to say that Brand does not seem to understand what is happening around him. He does not even realize that he has invoked the ghost of Agnes in the very last lines he speaks before the ghost appears: “Alf og Agnes, kom tillbage; /ensom sidder jeg paa Tinden, /gjennemblæst af Nordenvinden, /bidt af Gjenfærd, klamme, spage –!” (460). He identifies the invisible choir as ghosts (gjenferd), but this is only his way of framing entities he cannot categorize – not Agnes, whom he has recognized.

Agnes’ ghost speaks to him in soft terms: “Alt var Feberdrøm, min Ven!/Nu skal Sottens Taager lette!/[…]/Ej du drømmer, ej du sover, /ej du mer med Syner slaas. /Du har været syg, du kjære, – /drukket Vanvids bittre Drikk, /drømt, din Hustru fra dig gik –” (460–461). What the ghost is seemingly telling him here, is that he has merely “dreamed” about his troubles, the deaths of his wife and son included, and that he can come back to a happy life with them – “som i de gode Tider” (462). My intention is to problematize and discuss whether Agnes, as a ghost, is speaking ambiguously here. Agnes knows that she and Alf are dead. What is the reason, one might ask, for her to lie to Brand? Or, to put it another way, is she really lying to him?

Brand, with his inexperience about all things spectral, takes Agnes’ words literally. And the ghost continues: “Alle Sorger har du drømt; /al din Kamp var ikkun Skrømt. /Alf er hos din gamle Moer; /hun er frisk og han er stor” (461). Brand is relieved about this news, but the ghost warns him of a condition necessary for him to be able to follow her: “Atter vil du taaget glide/bort fra min og Barnets Side, /atter vil din Tanke sløves, – /hvis ej Lægemidlet prøves” (462). What is this medicine? Brand needs to abandon his quest for “Intet eller alt” (463. Italics in the original); in other words, he needs to leave his radical Christian worldview and return to a more humane understanding of the Christian word. This is what a number of other characters argued for earlier in the play: the doctor, Agnes’ ex-fiancé Ejnar and Agnes herself. A rejection of Brand’s calling is so fundamental to the possibility of joining her, that the ghosts adds: “Saa visst jeg lever, /og saa visst du engang dør!” (464). These words are important beyond their rhetorical value, because the ghost is making clear what she left vague earlier in the conversation, namely that she is “alive.” We know that this is not the case, at least in the sense Brand understands it. So in which sense is Agnes “alive” here?

Let me briefly clarify that this question is strictly related to how we understand Agnes’ ghost. In this respect, Brand considers her a living person and therefore misses the point. He, in any case, starts doubting the possibility of a reconciliation and exclaims: “Ve os begge! Sverdet svæver/draget over os som før!” (464). In other words, he can only rely on his usual, patronizing attitude towards Agnes. Now it is he who tells her to follow him, as he has done all his life: “Følg mig, Agnes!” (464). It is clear that any reconciliation with Agnes’ ghost is impossible on such a basis. Brand is ready to both “slippe Barnet” again and “med Offersvøber slaa mig [Agnes] indtill Døden” (465). Agnes asks him whether he really is ready to persist in his quest for misery, and to Brand’s affirmative answer, the ghost violently disappears, putting an end to the scene:

SKIKKELSEN forsvinder i et Brag; Taagen vælter sig hvor den stod, og der skriges hvasst og skjærende, som fra en der flygter

Dø! Dig har ej Verden Brug for! (467)

As will probably be clear from the above, this scene is far from straightforward, and its interpretation is closely tied to how we understand the dramatic poem as a whole. Brand is arguably one of the Ibsen plays that has posed the most problems of interpretation and on which there is no clear scholarly consensus. The main point of discussion regards the validity of Brand’s religious discourse, or, to frame it another way, whether he is saved or not when the avalanche takes him at the end of the play and “a voice” utters the famous, mysterious words “Han er deus caritatis!” (474). Some scholars have also broadened this issue by questioning whether Brand is a religious play at all, or whether the issues at stake are of a more general, ethical nature.

Among them, Per Thomas Andersen and Atle Kittang have argued that the play itself makes it impossible to reach a final answer to these questions. Andersen focuses on its structure and how it influences the content: “Ibsens tekst forteller to historier samtidig om Brand. I denne teksten forekommer det nemlig ikke bare tematisk definerbare konfrontasjoner. Det fins også friksjon mellom ulike tekstlige strategier” (Andersen 1997, 78). According to Andersen, there is a fundamental tension between composition and decomposition of both textual and thematic elements, rooted in a fundamental ambiguity (Andersen 1997, 78). Kittang points out: “det verdi-og menneskesynet som ein fellande dom over Brand kviler på, viser seg å vere identisk med den dvaske humanismen som diktverket sjølv speglar i satirens vrengespegel gjennom fogden og prosten” (Kittang 2002, 34). More generally, the very question of whether Brand is saved or not is a false problem, according to Kittang: “den føreset at den dramatiske kjernen i verket verkeleg er av kristen-religiøs karakter og at den spesifikt kristne førestillinga om frelse kan oppfattast som sjølve perspektiveringspunktet i dramaet” (Kittang 2002, 34).

These two fundamentally contradictory aspects of the play – the story of a man who is both “saint” and “sadist” (Durbach 1994, 71), and a story that is all about religious questions, while, at the same time, it escapes a theological and/or Christian explanation – frame my discussion of spectrality and the role played by Agnes’ ghost. My contention is that Agnes’ ambiguity as a ghost problematizes the questions at stake in the play, which are represented by Brand’s role as priest and human being, as well as Agnes’ agency and importance in the context of the play.

This is particularly relevant to keep in mind when looking at previous interpretations of Brand, as claiming that a play resists definitive answers and interpretations does not mean refraining from taking a stance for or against its main character. Andersen has, for example, expressed a rather critical view of Brand, from a more or less explicitly humanist point of view: “hvis Brand blir ‘frelst,’ så vil jeg ikke frelses til den samme himmel som ham” (Andersen 1997, 135). On the contrary, Kittang has emphasized the heroic nature of Brand’s character, which in turns means giving him, if not a fully positive interpretation, at least a place as the play’s focal point and the carrier of its crucial literary and poetical questions: “Det dreier seg om evne og vilje til sjølvoverskriding eller sjølvpotensiering” (Kittang 2002, 13).

I am insisting on the problem of taking a position for or against Brand not necessarily because, as Erik Bjerck Hagen claims, it is impossible to be neutral towards him (Hagen 2009, 45), but, rather, because the way in which scholars have interpreted Brand has also had consequences for the way they have approached Agnes, and especially her ghost. This does not mean denying Agnes’ ghost any form of agency, but such agency needs to be put in dialogue with that of her companion or opponent, Brand.

As it has been pointed out by many scholars before me, the crux of the problem related to Agnes’ ghost lies in its identity, and here is where the spectral plays a key role. I have mentioned earlier that the stage direction clearly says that the ghost is Agnes and that Brand recognizes her as his wife (although he does not necessarily realize that she is a ghost). In the dramatis personae, however, the text does not list Agnes’ ghost, but a mysterious “Tempter in the Wilderness” (“Fristeren i Ødemarken”, 194), which several scholars have interpreted to mean Satan. It must be underlined that the connection between the Tempter and Agnes is not made explicitly in the text, and that it is thus an interpretation made a posteriori. Such an interpretation is based on two factors; first, it is made by exclusion, as all other characters in the dramatis personae have the same name/role in the play; the “Tempter” is the only one who is not mentioned explicitly in the stage directions. Second, scholars have seen a similarity between the ghost’s (allegedly deceitful) offer to Brand to return to his family life, and Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert, where he promises him “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them” (Matthew 4:8). The ghost, in addition, often speaks to Brand in a tempting fashion, and this opens for reading passages like the following in a sort of devilish key:

SKIKKELSEN

Brand, vær mild; min Favn er varm;

hold mig med din stærke Arm; –

lad os søge Sol og Sommer – (464)

Such an interpretation is backed up by Brand himself, who, shortly after the ghost disappears, exclaims: “Ha, det var Akkordens Aand!” (467). Knowing that he, earlier in the play, explicitly said that this “Akkordens Aand” is Satan (426) has led many to conclude that the ghost is actually Satan in disguise, or at least his emissary. In what will follow, I intend to problematize this identification, and I will do so by insisting on Agnes’ spectral nature.

It is important to note that there is no complete scholarly consensus on this identification between the ghost and Satan. While there is a rich and authoritative research tradition supporting it (Bø 2000, 8; Cappelørn 2010, 76–78; Haugan 2014, 231; Hemmer 2003, 69–71; Kittang 2002, 142; Molland 1955, 265–266; Reinert 2013, 179–180; Rekdal 2012, 186; Thorn 1981, 55–58; Wærp 2010, 69; Wyller 2006, 133), there are also a number of scholars who mention the ghost without making any reference to the Devil (Andersen 1997, 160; Banks 2004, 146; Johnston 1980, 132–133; Lombnæs 2013, 89–90; Templeton 1997, 25–26; Theoharis 2000, 186; Ystad 1996, 148–150).^[3] It appears that the identification of Agnes with Satan is necessary for scholars from what we may term “the Devil school” in order for the play to make sense at all. Kittang sums up this problem succinctly: “dersom ein går så langt som å la gjenferdet av Agnes i 5. akt representere dramaets bodskap og siste avgjerande ord [ …] så har ein faktisk gjort den figuren Ibsen sjølv i rollelista kallar ‘Fristeren i Ødemarken,’ til norm og urokkeleg referanseramme” (Kittang 2002, 34). In other words: Agnes needs to be Satan, or otherwise Brand’s project – and for Kittang, his heroic status – would fall apart. Egil Wyller’s framing is even more polemical and normative: “[S]kam over det teater, som her lar fremstille Agnes selv på scenen og derved forveksler en Gud-sendt skikkelse med et fantom sendt av Satan!” (Wyller 2006, 265).

I, on the other hand, am convinced that the identification between Agnes and Satan is merely arbitrary, and that the ghost as ghost offers much more convincing interpretive keys to both this scene and the play. To my knowledge, there are only two scholars or critics who have directly argued against an identification of Agnes’ ghost with Satan. One is Trond Jahr Larsen in his book Brand-gåten (Larsen 2007); unfortunately, he only contests the identification in order to make a painstaking, 600-page long attempt at demonstrating that Brand himself is Satan, a thesis that I see as largely irrelevant to an understanding of the play.^[4] A more interesting approach is proposed by Per Buvik:

Dette er etter mitt syn en høyst diskutabel lesning […] fordi den logisk forutsetter at Brand virkelig kan sammenlignes med Jesus, at den viljestroen han tviholder på, er den sanne tro, og dessuten at den døde Agnes er en satanisk skikkelse. Ingen av disse forutsetningene har klar dekning i Ibsens tekst, selv om den er langt fra entydig. (Buvik 2010, 104)

What Buvik is proposing here, is to dissociate Agnes from Satan; in doing so, he also proposes a continuity of the figure of the Tempter in the characters that appear in the last scene (Buvik 2010, 104). In continuation of Buvik’s claim, I would argue that the Tempter appears in Brand to be an incorporeal entity that permeates the whole scene, and that colors the speeches of different characters.^[5] A few of Agnes’ speeches may sound “satanic,” but this is only the case if we agree with Brand’s interpretation of them and take his worldview as our focal point of departure. They are not fully representative of the ghost’s message, and there is nothing that opposes identifying other characters who appear in the last scene as the Tempter, especially if there are devilish “hints” in the picture. It may suffice to mention, for example, that Brand uses the biblical phrase “Vig fra mig!” which is originally addressed to Satan (Matthew 4:10), twice in the play, and only towards Gerd (320, 470; see also Buvik 2010, 105). It may also be helpful to examine the final stage direction concerning the ghost more closely:

SKIKKELSEN forsvinder i et Brag; Taagen vælter sig hvor den stod, og der skriges hvasst og skjærende, som fra en der flygter (467)

After the ghost has disappeared, “der skriges […] som fra en der flygter.” This can be read as Satan’s defeat against Brand. It is, of course, logical to say that it is the ghost that screams, since it is leaving the scene, but the impersonal form “det skriges” followed by “som fra” makes it uncertain that the scream really comes from the ghost. One could add that Gerd enters the scene just moments after the scream is heard, and that screaming is one of her preferred modes of expression in the play (225, 229, 474). I am not writing this in order to propose a new theory that identifies Gerd with Satan; Buvik rightly points out yet another ambiguity, namely that she is both identified as a falcon (i.e., a “satanic” bird of prey) and a dove (Buvik 2010, 106). My intention is to underscore a fundamental ambiguity in the relationship between the Tempter and Agnes’ ghost. Such ambiguity, I argue, is made possible and reinforced by the unclear, spectral status of the ghost, and, disassociating Agnes’s ghost from Satan makes it possible to investigate her figure as a ghost, with the spectral consequences this entails.^[6]

But what exactly are these “spectral consequences”? They are related to two aspects: (1) the identification of Brand with Jesus, and (2) an understanding of Agnes’ agency in the play. The first problem is already hinted at in Buvik’s quotation above – if we consider Agnes’ ghost as the tempter in the desert, it is a natural consequence that Brand assumes Christ-like qualities. This is the conclusion drawn by several scholars of the “Devil school” (Hemmer 2003, 77–78; Kittang 2002, 144; Sprinchorn 2020, 70; Thorn 1981, 79). But is this identification with Jesus really justified by the text, and does Brand really possess “den sanne Tro,” as Buvik asks? Not surprisingly, the play does not provide clear-cut answers, and there is ample room to problematize this claim.

4 Brand’s Imitatio Christi and its Consequences for Agnes’ Ghost

Brand occasionally mentions the figure of Christ. In the very first scene, a peasant is desperately trying to convince Brand not to cross the ice lakes that would bring certain death. He answers boldly: “Dem gaar vi over. […] En har dog vist, – er Troen sand, /saa slipper Karlen tørrskod over” (197). He seems to identify himself clearly with Jesus here. Shortly after, he asks the peasant if he would give his life to make sure that his daughter dies a Christian death, and receives an anguished and unsure answer: “I Jesu Navn, du faar ej glemme, /at jeg har Barn og Kone hjemme.” Brand’s comment is: “Han, som du nævnte, havde Moer” (199–200). This is not a direct self-identification with Christ, but an ironic hint, as we know that later on Brand will have no problem to let his mother die without the comfort of the priest, who is also her son. This ironic statement alone, together with the rather hybris-loaded self-identification with Jesus in the very first lines of the play, should be enough to make the reader dubious about understanding Brand as a Christ-like figure. But there is more. Later in the play, Brand again refers to Jesus when criticized by the Doctor about not being “humane” in his understanding of religion:

BRAND ser opp

[…]

Var Gud human mod Jesus Krist?

Hvis eders Gud fik dengang raade,

han under Korset raabte Naade, –

og Soningsværket sagtens blev

et diplomatisk Himmelbrev!

(skjuler Hovedet og sidder i stum Sorg) (309)

It seems as if Brand’s understanding of religion is closer to an Old Testament doctrine than to a Christian one; if Brand denies that he can be humane, he cannot be like Jesus Christ, first because Christ was incarnated – and therefore human – and second because his preaching always aimed toward compassion. The point I am trying to make is that Brand, as it does not give clear-cut answers about the truth of Brand’s faith or whether he is saved or not after death, also sows a deep uncertainty regarding the identification of Brand with Christ. In his discussion of the play as an Imitatio Christi, Fredrik Engelstad concedes that while “there are striking parallels between Brand’s destiny and that of Christ,” certain paradoxes are found in such an identification (Engelstad 1994, 85). For instance, “Jesus very consciously did not marry and had no children. His mission demanded him to be absolutely free from earthly bindings. Brand has no understanding of this. On the contrary, he gives up his plans of mission in the great world, marries and settles down in the small farming and fishing community” (Engelstad 1994, 85).

The paradoxes I pointed out earlier resonate with Engelstad’s argument. Not only is Brand’s Imitatio Christi, in the end, a project of hubris. Brand also shows through his behavior that he is not worthy of that comparison. He not only had – unlike Christ – a wife and child, but he is also willing to sacrifice them for his own religion, or, perhaps, for himself. There is no trace, in the earthly development of Brand as a human being, husband and father, of a will to die for the sins of others. Exposing himself to risk, as he does, for instance, by getting into a boat in a storm, is not the same thing, as he is sure that God is on his side and will spare him. He is asking of others what he is unable to give himself.

I have spent time problematizing Brand’s identification with Christ because, as I mentioned earlier, it is closely related to our understanding of Agnes’ ghost. Simplifying to the extreme, one could say that the only reason why we should not take a ghost for a ghost, and instead interpret the figure as Satan, is for the purposes of confirming the Christ-like nature of the protagonist. When this similarity no longer appears convincing, there is essentially no reason to maintain that Agnes’ ghost is Satan. This point adds to the discussion of the devilishness of other characters in the last scene, which I have made earlier, and opens up for giving the ghost of Agnes another role and another importance in the play.

Agnes bears the marks of a Derridean ghost. The spectral uncertainty of her nature, the very fact that she exists and does not exist at the same time, add an ambiguity to the scene that justifies her sibylline speeches and has lead scholars to think that someone else lays concealed behind her figure. To my mind, Agnes, as a ghost, does not produce devilishness, but rather ambiguity; the reason why scholars have long discussed whether this is a devilish figure or not, is a consequence of her spectrality – and not of Brand’s identification with Christ, which I hope I have sufficiently brought into doubt. Detaching Agnes’ ghost from a devilish figure would also allow us to reassess and discuss the tension between dependency and agency, in the Derridean sense. For while this ghost – in line with a long list of theater ghosts that have appeared through the history of drama – shows a degree of dependency insofar the ambiguity of her character and nature are instrumental to understanding the character and nature of Brand, it also shows a strong form of personal agency.

The ghost of Agnes, in fact, speaks with all the Derridean authority that the French philosopher saw in spectrality, an authority which is provided by the asymmetry of vision. The ghost watches and recognizes the living, but it is seldom the other way around. When Agnes appears to Brand right after he has “invoked” her and Alf, she “smiler og breder Armene mod ham,” exclaiming, “her har du mig igjen!” (460). She has therefore fully recognized him and speaks from a position of power – namely, that of love and possible reconciliation. It is Agnes who has power over Brand here; he is, as we know, in an extreme situation, abandoned by everyone in a hostile mountain landscape. Brand, on the contrary, is unable to “see”: he “farer forvildet opp” at the sight of Agnes, asking “hva er dette” (460); in other words, he has not, as mentioned earlier, understood the nature of his interlocutor, whom he believes, in his delusion, to still be alive. Brand is therefore, to use the words of Derrida, “before the law” (Derrida and Stiegler 2013, 40), as it is Agnes who leads the conversation. After having listed all the things Brand allegedly would get back by following her, it is she and not Brand who presents the conditions for his salvation: “Alle Syner, stygge, blege, /mantes frem med trende Ord. /Dem maa kjækkt du overstrege, /ud af Mindebladet slette, /væk fra Lovens Tavle stryge” (463. Italics in the original). The fact that Brand denies such a possibility and categorically repeats that he is ready to both “slippe Barnet” and “Blodig rive mig [Agnes] av Garnet” (465) must not lead one to think that he has regained any form of control in this conversation. This is just his stubborn repetition of the familiar hierarchy he was used to. But Agnes is a ghost now, and no marital hierarchy works with her anymore. Brand lost that battle long before.

That Brand is now before the law also means that Agnes’ ghost has come to him to speak about justice, and also about vengeance. She does so, interestingly enough, not in the fashion of the senecan or shakespearian ghost, asking for the protagonists to avenge a gruesome death or inflicting the same medicine on them. Instead, Agnes comes with a message of divine justice. Brand has a chance to be saved, if he is willing to renounce his interpretation of faith. Here it is crucial to decide whether or not we stand with the “Devil school.” In the first case, it would mean that Satan is asking Brand to renounce the Christian faith; but if we take a ghost purely for a ghost, what Agnes is asking is for Brand to simply admit to and understand his own shortcomings and the sins he has committed in his lifetime, beginning with his hubristic Imitatio Christi and continuing with the death of his wife and son – and the list could be much longer. Before the avalanche of the Deus caritatis falls on Brand’s head, Agnes is the last character in the play to speak organically about (divine) order and (divine) justice; Gerd’s speech is more a condescending, mock heroic support of Brand’s ego than a real ascent to a divine sphere. Agnes’ “vengeance,” if there is any in the play, is simply to condemn Brand to the punishment he has deserved. Her cry of “Dø! Dig har ej Verden Brug for!” (467) seems to me to come less from a disappointed, devilish emissary – Satan would not be disappointed that Brand is of no use “in the world” – than a Solomonic statement about Brand’s destiny. If Agnes is vindicated here, in the context of a divine order – and this would paradoxically justify her indignation at Brand’s stubborn refusal to understand his condition – it is because Brand is doomed to die. But die in which sense? This is another important question related to spectrality and it concerns the fact that Agnes is not necessarily lying when she promises Brand a new “life” with her and Alf. In what follows, I will argue for why this is the case and why scholars before me have missed this point.

5 Agnes’ Spectral Agency

To grasp this aspect of the play in relation to Agnes’ ghost, we need to go back to another fundamental aspect of Derrida’s spectrality, namely the idea that in the meeting with the spectral, “time is out of joint” (Derrida 2006, 20). The time of the specter is neither the time of the other characters, nor a “past” time in which the specter was a living person; nor is it eternity. The specter exits its eternal dimension when stepping back into the world. The anachrony that is at stake in the encounter between the living and the spectral spurs a paradoxical situation in which the two meet “again,” “for the first time” and “for the last time,” all at once. This condition is reinforced by the fundamental uncertainty about who and what the specter is; the ghost is neither the person whom the living knew alive, nor a proper entity, as the specter is per definition a “no-thing.” This ontological anachrony also spurs another asymmetry related to the hierarchy of vision mentioned before: as the specter is not the same person whom the living knew in life, it also has an advantage on the living: the specter may come up with requests and statements that are surprising or inconceivable to the person who knew him or her in life.

This is, in my reading, exactly what is happening with Agnes’ ghost. If we disassociate her from the Tempter, we could ask ourselves whether the dead Agnes speaks in the same way as the living Agnes spoke. Which values is she the carrier of, and what are the requests that she asks of Brand? To answer these questions, we need to examine how Agnes interacted with Brand when she was alive, with a special emphasis on her understanding of Christianity during their married life. Since Brand is the focal point of most analyses of the dramatic poem, it should come as no surprise that Agnes is given relatively little consideration in scholarly discussions. Traditionally, she has been interpreted as a caring, rather submissive figure (Haakonsen 1941, 127, 132; Hemmer 2003, 363; Høst 1927, 139–141), or, when she has been granted a specific role, it has been as a kind of “buffer” that Brand uses to take care of his earthly problems (Andersen 1997, 98), or as Brand’s antagonist in religious matters (Ystad 1996, 143). The consequence of these readings is usually that Agnes succumbs to Brand both in life and in death, and, in some cases, that both her own and Alf’s death are necessary in order for Brand to reach a higher goal (Wærp 2010, 186–189).

Insisting on the anachrony that is spurred by the entrance of the ghostly Agnes in the fifth act and on the asymmetrical relationship it causes with Brand would, in my reading, suggest a revision of this narrative. It is clear that the text, from the very beginning, introduces a framework of submission that Agnes is supposed to fit into; even before meeting Brand, Ejnar characterizes her as “min dejlige Sommerfugl” who “snart sidder […] fangen i Nettet” (205). Later, she repeatedly gives expression to her submission to Brand’s faith (254–255), although she stresses, in a dialogue with Ejnar that also marks their definitive separation, that “Jeg har intet Valg at gjøre” (271). If this means accepting Brand’s faith, one wonders whether this is a real choice or an act of brainwashing or indoctrination. Agnes does not seem to willingly accept Brand’s interpretation of the Christian faith, but is instead driven by her love for him and the conditions of their marriage (279–282). This spurs a sadistic dialectic of submission that escalates through the play and finds its first climax at the end of the third act, when Brand forcibly convinces Agnes to stay at home, directly causing Alf’s death. At the end of Brand’s act of coercion, she exclaims: “Hustru er jeg; tør du byde, /skal jeg bøje mig og lyde!” (321). Once again, this seems less a deliberate declaration of faith than of defeat.

The Agnes we meet in the fourth act is a physically and morally wrecked person, whom Brand repeatedly calls “Barn” (326, 336), a patronizing term that he had only used once with her earlier (281). The end of the fourth act sees the culmination of Brand’s annihilation of Agnes, who now only speaks of despair and resignation: “AGNES brister i Graad/O, sig mig da, hvor langt gaar Kravet!/Min Fod er dødstrætt, – Vingen faldt –” (363). The only mode she knows is that of the submissive wife: “jeg følger, hvor du gaar” (366). The final blow is given when Brand forces her to give even the last piece of Alf’s clothing to a Roma woman: “AGNES brudt/Viljen ske. Mit Hjertes Rødder/skal jeg træde under Fødder. /Kvinde, kom og tag imod; – /deles skal min Overflod –” (374–375). This brings us to the final scene of the fourth act, where Agnes suddenly cries:

AGNES: Røvet, røvet, – alting røvet, –

sidste Baand, som bandt till Støvet!

(staar en Stund ubevægelig stille; lidt efter lidt gaar Udtrykket i hendes Ansigt over till høj straalende Glæde. Brand kommer tillbage; hun flyver ham jublende imøde, kaster sig om hans Hals og raaber)

Jeg er fri! Brand, jeg er fri!

BRAND: Agnes!

AGNES: Mørket er forbi!

Alle Ræddsler, som har tynget

lig en Mare paa mit Bryst,

ligger nu i Sluget slynget!

Der er Sejr i Viljens Dyst!

Af er alle Taager strøget,

bort er alle Skyer føget;

gjennem Natten, over Døden

ser jeg Skimt af Morgenrøden!

Kirkegaarden, Kirkegaarden!

Ordet aabner ej for Taaren.

Navnet river ej i Saaret; –

Barnet er till Himlen baaret! (378–379)

This scene can be interpreted in its own right as the last act of submission to Brand’s faith; after this moment, Agnes is practically doomed to death (Andersen 1997, 118–119). There are, however, a few nuances to be added to this interpretation. Her claims to have “freed” herself from material goods and have turned to a wholly religious worldview are put to a halt by the very fact that she, as the subsequent lines make clear, will not survive her choice. Although she said that she had given away the last pieces of clothing, symbols of her last ties to earth, “willingly” (villigt, 378), one can ask whether her behavior, emphasized by the stage direction that sees her illuminated and throwing herself into Brand’s arms, is rather the description of a psychological wreckage than of a religious conversion. Andersen suggests that “in the last scene Agnes is a completely broken person who rejoices in her own destruction, gives thanks to him who has bullied and bewildered her, and displays feelings that reflect internalized ideology rather than actual circumstances of life. The feelings do not appear false, not even composite or ambivalent, just lacking in agreement with reality” (Andersen 2016, 111).

This interpretation is reinforced by the last line of the quotation above, where she uses the same words that Brand used earlier: “Barnet er till Himlen baaret” (331, 379). The consequence of this utterance is, however, the opposite of what Brand wishes, as it is shown in her speech shortly later: “O, se oppad, se ivejret!/Ser du Alf for Tronens Fod, /lysglad som i Livets Dage, /strække Armen os imod?” (379). In other words, when she looks up, she is not seeing God, but Alf. To my mind, this signals that this scene depicts a psychological wreckage rather than a step towards religious salvation, although the text, as usual, leaves things ambiguous. For instance, the text offers an intriguing reversal of roles towards the end of the scene, when Agnes asks Brand whether he is willing to renounce his faith – because, in that case, “jeg din Hustru er som før”, i.e., she would renounce death and be ready to continue living with him:

AGNES

[…]

Glemmer du de tusind Sjæle,

som dit Hverv er her at hele, –

dem, Gud Herren bød dig føre

fremad, hjem, till Frelsens Kilde?

Vælg; du staar paa Vejens Skille! (381)

In her emotional turbulence, it is now Agnes who impersonates Brand’s faith, and this spurs a very peculiar answer from him, namely: “[j]eg har intet Valg at gjøre” (381). This line can be interpreted as a confirmation of Brand’s stubbornness, but a careful reader will notice that this exact formulation was used by Agnes in an earlier dialogue with Ejnar, where she makes it clear to him that her path is chosen. If this means, as I have argued earlier, that Agnes has started a process of indoctrination and progressive loss of personal agency, the striking similarities of the two utterances may point to the fact that Agnes’ sacrifice is not a victory for Brand’s religious discourse, but rather a declaration of defeat. He has lost agency and is completely locked in his condition and worldview. Andersen suggests this when he interprets Agnes’ death scene as a moment of submission, but also as a possibility of rescue for her and the beginning of a new phase in the relationship between her and Brand. From now on, Brand has a nemesis: “Frihetsekstasen kan tolkes som tegn på fanatismens frembrudd i et jeg som har vært under et utålelig press. Samtidig gar det an å se et element av nemesis i Agnes’ siste handling. Hun bruker eget liv og egen død til å snu maktspillet. Det krav hun har lidd under i ekteskapet, rettes nå mot Brand fra en desperat posisjon” (Andersen 1997, 119).

This nemesis is what Brand meets when he is brought “before the law” by the ghost of Agnes. But there is more to the spectral scene and its relationship to Agnes’ death. We have seen earlier that Agnes, before she exits the play and life, sees Alf in heaven rather than God. With this in mind, I would like to return to a passage from the beginning of the dialogue between her ghost and Brand, when she tells him: “Alf er hos din gamle Moer; /hun er frisk og han er stor” (461). Traditionally, this utterance has been considered by Ibsen scholars to be a lie, both because we know that they are dead, and because they typically interpret Agnes’ ghost as Satan or his emissary.^[7] When we, on the contrary, take a ghost for a ghost, these words acquire quite a different meaning.

What the ghost is actually telling Brand here, is that things can turn out for the good – its function as agent of nemesis goes no further than telling him that there is a way out, if he is finally ready to acknowledge the failure of his religious project and his hubristic Imitatio Christi. The ghost knows that Brand’s mother and Alf are alive, because they belong to the same realm as her; they are not alive in an earthly meaning of the word – which would indeed be a devilish lie – but they are alive in the glory of God. This is the exact same place where Agnes saw her child before succumbing to Brand’s fanatism. This is the crucial line that tells us that Agnes’ ghost is not lying to Brand, one that he tragically misunderstands, convinced as he is that he is in the right and that his interlocutor is satanic. What Agnes is trying to tell him, is that there is a possible exit of his religious delusion through repentance and a true Christian death; he is close to the end of his earthly life and the gates of heaven, which she apparently knows well and belongs to, are open to him if he is willing to give up his “Intet eller Alt” (463. Italics in the original). The law she represents requires this sacrifice in order to restore the justice Agnes’ ghost has come back to claim.

Brand, as we know, chooses otherwise. It is here that Agnes’ ghost, as a function of the law, has to give Brand the tragic message that he has to die, because the world has no more use for him (467). In this sense, the death the ghost is talking about is not a physical death, but a spiritual one; according to this interpretation, Brand is doomed by the ghost. What the Deus Caritatis decides on Brand’s destiny through his avalanche, is still open to interpretation, but the ghost’s stance seems clear here. The notion of Brand not being of use to the world, which also seems rather opaque, finds its meaning here in a humane understanding of religion, where, following the example of Christ, one is a good Christian for the deeds one does in the world, and not for religious speculation.

6 Conclusions

Reading the ending of the play through the lens of spectrality allows us to grasp Agnes’ regained agency. This is not in the sense that Helje Kringlebotn Sødal has introduced, in the only scholarly article I have found that gives Agnes a primary role, where she claims that Agnes has never been Brand’s opponent, but instead his ally, and that in the end she has deliberately chosen the system of values he represents (Sødal 2001, 84–89). My interpretation goes in a radically different direction, which is based on Agnes not sharing Brand’s worldview, and on her spectral nature at the end of the play. Andersen has argued that the relationship between Brand and Agnes contains a fundamental “emotional hegemony” in which the male exerts power on the female and in which she internalizes all impulses to rebel and directs destructive drives towards herself (Andersen 2016, 106–108). In doing so, Brand progressively isolates Agnes in an environment that ultimately kills her (Andersen 2016, 108–110). However, this battle ends in defeat for Brand, because “Brand suffers the same fate in his social community as Agnes does in her family one. Death is waiting” (Andersen 2016, 110). The point I am trying to make here is that Agnes finds her agency precisely by being a ghost. As a response to the humiliation and the suffering she has gone through in life, she presents Brand with a newly-found harmony she has gained in heaven, in a communion with her beloved Alf, and she is now in the position – by means of spectral anachrony and asymmetry – to reverse the power structure that the couple had in life. As a further token of agency and the power connected to it, she is not seeking retaliation or vengeance. She is making clear by her ghostly appearance that the way to heaven is open to Brand, if only he has the eyes to see his situation for what it is, and to see her for what she is.

A spectral reading of Agnes’ character thus allows a more nuanced reading of her role in the play and of the agency she is a carrier of, without making her an ally to Brand’s project. This reading needs accepting Agnes’ condition at the end of the play, i.e., that of being a ghost and not a devilish figure. This puts Brand’s hubristic project into perspective and gives the otherwise often overlooked Agnes the stature as a character who, as Bjerck Hagen puts it, is the only one in the play to attain real tragic pathos, in contrast to Brand, who does not have “det liv og den edelhet som skal til for å gi ham sanne tragiske dimensjoner” (Bjerck Hagen 2009, 50). Such a reading gives Agnes the ghost her rightful place in the religious and moral battle in Ibsen’s play.