영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 바다에서 온 여인
『바다에서 온 여인』은 1888년에 쓰인 희곡이다. 등대지기의 딸 엘리다 방엘은 노르웨이의 한 피오르 마을에서 의사인 남편, 그리고 두 의붓딸과 함께 산다. 그녀는 바다에 사로잡혀 있고, 살인을 저지른 뒤 달아난 어느 뱃사람과 맺었던 정체 모를 약혼의 기억에 붙들려 있다. 여러 해가 지나 그가 그녀를 데려가겠다며 돌아오면서 그녀의 삶은 무너지기 시작한다. 엘리다는 옛 연인과 지금의 남편 사이에서 선택해야 한다. 자유와 의무, 그리고 과거가 끌어당기는 힘을 파고드는 심리극이다.
Classics Read in English _ The Lady from the Sea by Henrik Ibsen
Ellida Wangel grew up on an island where the lighthouse stood, in open water, and she has been living for years now at the head of a fjord — landlocked, in a comfortable house, married to a kind doctor who chose her and paid for her and has never once asked whether she wished to be chosen. She swims every day in the brackish inlet and it is not the same and she knows it. Her stepdaughters are civil to her. Her infant son is dead. Something in her has been drying out slowly and no one in the household has a name for it.
Then a ship comes into the harbour and a man steps off it: the sailor she once stood beside on a beach years ago, while he threw two rings joined on a keyring into the sea and told her they were wed to the water. He killed his captain and vanished. She has never stopped feeling him out there, the way one feels weather coming. Now he is at the garden fence in the twilight, entirely calm, saying he has come for her — and that she must come of her own free will, or not at all.
The extraordinary thing is what her husband does. Wangel first refuses, then forbids, then locks the gates in his mind and finds it changes nothing. And at the last moment, understanding that he has been holding a woman the way one holds property, he releases her: go, he says, freely, on your own responsibility. The choice is yours to make.
And the moment it is genuinely hers, the compulsion breaks. The stranger walks back to his ship alone, and Ellida stays — not because she is bound, but because for the first time she is not. Ibsen wrote very few endings in which anyone is saved. This is one, and its condition is exact: the sea does not release her, her husband does, and only by giving up his right to keep her.
Summary
BALLESTED, middle-aged, wearing an old velvet jacket, and a broad-brimmed artist's hat, stands under the flagstaff, arranging the ropes. The flag is lying on the ground. A little way from him is an easel, with an outspread canvas. By the easel on a camp-stool, brushes, a palette, and box of colours.
BOLETTE WANGEL comes from the room opening on the verandah. She carries a large vase with flowers, which she puts down on the table.)
Bolette. Well, Ballested, does it work smoothly?
Ballested. Certainly, Miss Bolette, that's easy enough. May I ask—do you expect any visitors today?
Bolette. Yes, we're expecting Mr. Arnholm this morning. He got to town in the night.
Ballested. Arnholm? Wait a minute—wasn't Arnholm the man who was tutor here several years ago?
Bolette. Yes, it is he.
Ballested. Oh, really! Is he coming into these parts again?
Bolette. That's why we want to have the flag up.
Ballested. Well, that's reasonable enough.
