Peer Gynt—A Study of Insecurity

In an interpretation of Peer Gynt as a personality, P. H. Wicksteed has described Peer1 as “the embodiment of poverty of spirit and half heartedness—as the very incarnation of a compromising dread of decisive committal to any one course”—a man who has “brooded perpetually over the former grandeur of his family, his idle dreams of the future and his neglect of every present duty—who was cynically indifferent to all higher motives and who subscribed to a religion which was the ‘apotheosis of the art of hedging’.” To Ibsen, Peer Gynt was a composite of the undesirable personality-traits of the Norwegian people which were responsible for the political and economic backwardness of their country. The emotional background for such a personality will be the subject of this essay.

Essentially, Peer is a sensitive youth of twenty years of age, who is insecure in his relation to himself and to the world around him. He is living with a mother who has alternately worshipped and cursed him throughout his childhood. His father has become a mere memory, painted by the domineering and disappointed mother,—a gambler who did not care enough about his wife and child to sacrifice his own selfish instincts in order to provide the necessities of life for his family. Peer Gynt was a child who was brought up in the midst of economic and emotional insecurity without a father-ideal to emulate. He was nevertheless expected to be both husband and child to a woman with definite and conscious desires but very little insight.

As a result, Peer at the age of twenty, is emotionally very dependent on his mother, yet attempts to protect her and so show his superiority to her—or could his desire to get somewhere in the world be an effort to show her that he was capable of fulfilling the husband-ideal she had instilled in him? This ideal takes the form of physical strength at first—a strength which he feels belongs to him alone and which he does not have to share with his mother—a strength