In Ibsen's Brand, the title character has such strength of conviction that he sacrifices everything, including his family, to stick to his beliefs. On the surface, this appears to be a noble thing to do. In fact, many critics, like Edmund Gosse, who in the 1889 Fortnightly Review notes that the play is a ‘‘beautiful Puritan opera,’’ have seen Brand as a hero. However, as Irving Deer states in his 1961 article, "Ibsen's Brand: Paradox and the Symbolic Hero,'' this is not a foregone conclusion with all critics. Wrote Deer, ‘‘Simply stated, the controversy boils down to whether Ibsen intended him to be a hero or a villain.’’ By studying Brand's spiritual journey, however, it appears that Ibsen meant to show Brand as a man who ultimately goes mad from the strain of trying to reconcile the contradictory ends of religious fanaticism and humanity.

At the beginning of the play, the audience is led to believe, as are the peasant and his son, that Brand is not a normal human. He claims himself to be "a Great One's messenger’’ and shows little concern for the bad weather in the mountains, which the Showbill cover from the theatrical production of Brand, written by Henrik Ibsen and directed by Craig D. Kinzer peasant fears will kill them all if they continue on. Brand says he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if God requires it: "If of my life the Lord hath need / Then welcome precipice and flood!’’ The peasants think that Brand is crazy and do not follow him. Brand notes that these peasants, like most others in the world, are unwilling to make ultimate sacrifices: ‘‘Much will they give with willing mind, / Leave them but Life, dear Life, behind.’’ With this thought, Brand suddenly remembers his childhood and ‘‘two fancies of the brain'' that he had. He describes these states of mind as "An Owl that dreads the dark, a fish / With waterfright.’’ In other words, as a child, he had a fear of living the life that he was meant to live. Just as an owl is meant to live at night and a fish is meant to live in water, Brand felt that he was ‘‘bound to bear’’ a burden and, as a child, had a moment of weakness about this fact.

This passage introduces the idea that Brand is not invincible, as audience members might first believe after seeing him risk his life and survive harsh mountain weather whereas normal mortals turn back. It also underscores the idea that Brand is different from many other humans, who live in fear most of their lives, as other characters show. Brand is so strong in his mission for God that the fears only appear to have plagued him when he was a child. At this point, the audience gets another glimpse into Brand's past, when he runs into Agnes and Einar—a boy with whom he went to school. Einar describes Brand's childhood as follows: ‘‘Aye, the same solitary elf / Whom, still sufficient to himself / No games could ever draw away.’’ Brand, with his philosophical thoughts and fears about the meaning of his life and his greater mission, chose to isolate himself from the other schoolchildren. This is an important idea that Ibsen plants in the beginning because it foreshadows what will eventually happen to Brand as he alienates himself from the human race as a whole.

It is appropriate, then, that after Brand meets Einar in the mountains, he runs into Gerd, a mad little gypsy girl who has visions. She questions Brand: "You saw the hawk just now?’’ Brand is not mad, however, and so cannot see the visions that Gerd speaks of. Gerd is not deterred. When they start to talk about the church in the valley where Brand is headed, Gerd makes mention of a much more impressive one,"A church built out of ice and snow!'' Brand recognizes that Gerd is talking about the Ice-Church, a natural, chapelshaped structure that exists in the mountains, but he warns Gerd that she should not go there, for fear of an avalanche:"A sudden lurch / Of wind may break the hanging ice: / A shout, a rifleshot, suffice—.’’ The rifleshot foreshadows the avalanche at the end that kills both Brand and Gerd, but more important, this reference to the Ice-Church helps to illustrate Brand's mentality at the beginning of the play. While he is willing to face any danger and give his life for his mission to God, he does not see the IceChurch as a worthy spiritual endeavor, and so he cautions against going there.

When Brand's mother arrives, the audience gets one more example of Brand's self-imposed exclusion from humanity: says Brand to his mother, ‘‘I've gone against you from my youth; / You've been no mother, I no son, / Till you are grey and I am grown.'' Brand is disgusted with his mother's materialistic behavior, which first manifests itself after his mother dies. Unseen by his mother, Brand watches as she loots his father's dead body, searching for money, then expands her search to the rest of the room: "Finding, she seized with falcon's pounce / 'Twixt tears and glee, each several ounce.’’ This base materialism horrified the young Brand and shaped his disparaging view of humanity: "Barely one in thousands sees / How mere life is one immense / Towering mountain of offence!'' Instead of living an offensive life with other humans, Brand devotes himself to what he believes is a higher cause, setting the ultimately unachievable goal of suppressing his humanity through sheer will. When the doctor accuses Brand of being inhumane, since he would not give his mother last rites after her failure to give up material goods, Brand states his view of humanity:

Humane! That word's relaxing whine
Is now the whole world's countersign!
It serves the weakling to conceal
The abdication of his will;

However, even though Brand tries to suppress his humanity, this is impossible, a fact that gradually becomes clear. Although Brand is not interested in preserving his money, his power, or his physical health, as others are, he does have an obsession with his mission—something that he is initially unwilling to give up. One of the peasant men points this hypocrisy out to Brand when he is trying to talk Brand into abandoning his grander plans and do a good service by helping their village: "This Call of yours, this holy strife / You yearn for and will not let drop—/ It is then dear to you?'' Brand is emphatic, letting the man know that ‘‘It is my life to me!’’ At this point, the man turns Brand's words back on himself, saying that, as Brand has counseled others to be willing to give up things that are dear to them, such as their lives, Brand should be willing to give up his own "life." Brand recognizes this and decides to stay.

Even though he stays in the village, Brand tries to maintain his seclusion from humanity. Says Brand: "Of what the paltering world calls love, /I will not know, I cannot speak; /I know but His who reigns above.’’ This, however, is not true, because he falls in love with Agnes, his wife, and loves their son, Alf. These attachments threaten to compromise Brand's mission, starting with his son, Alf. Brand and Agnes are unsure whether or not Alf will be able to survive the harsh weather in the fiord, but Brand is convinced that the sacrifices he has already made for God mean that he will not be called upon to sacrifice Alf, too: ‘‘He will not take away our joy . . . / My little lad in time will grow / As big and strong as can be found.’’ However, as he starts to dwell on this idea, he realizes the immensity of such a sacrifice, questiong the possibility of it along with his strength of will: ‘‘But if He dared demand?’’ When the doctor tells Brand and Agnes that their son will die if they do not leave, Brand immediately says he will go, even though it will mean abandoning his parish and his mission. Here, he is responding to his human emotions, which want to preserve the life of his son. However, he is eventually able to suppress these emotions once again, and through the strength of his will, he stays at the parish, sacrificing his son for his mission.

Although Alf's death affects Brand greatly, he suppresses his grief, though barely, and requires Agnes to do the same. But when Agnes dies, Brand can no longer suppress his humanity, and the strain of trying to follow his mission while ignoring his humanity is apparent. Says the clerk: "Aye, he's not quite right: / He's felt a lonely, gnawing tooth / Since he became a widower.’’ The clerk notes that Brand expresses his grief by playing the organ and that "Each note's as wild / As if he wept for wife and child.'' The musical notes are not the only thing that is wild about Brand at this point. When the townspeople try to make him a hero, idolizing him and the new church he has built, Brand is once again disgusted with the materialism of humanity, which now has intruded into his vocation. He gives an impassioned speech to the crowd about "the flaw, in me and you,’’ and the impressed crowd follows Brand into the mountains.

The dean is worried that Brand is stealing their villagers, but the sheriff says: ‘‘Who would butt against a bull? / Let him have his craze out full!’’ The sheriff can see that Brand has gone mad from the strain of trying unsuccessfully to suppress his humanity, and he knows that the villagers will eventually turn on Brand when he offers them gloomy sermons instead of comfort. When this inevitably happens, the clerk, echoing the sentiment of many others, says: ‘‘Let be the lunatic!’’ Brand retreats into the upper reaches of the mountains. He is distraught, searching for the strength of will he once had, and at this point totally mad from his grief:

Alf and Agnes! O come back
Where the peaks are bleak and black
Lone I sit, the wind blows through me
Chilled by visions weary and gloomy—

At this point, in his despair, Brand sees a vision of his dead wife, Agnes, tempting him to compromise and give up his mission. Brand fights the vision, however, and refuses to give up his mission, saying: "Wandering dreams no more are rife: / No, the horror now is ... life!’’ Having exiled himself from humanity, Brand now turns his back on his life and the memory of his wife. As the vision disappears, Gerd, the mad girl, comes up to him. She asks him if he has seen the hawk of compromise, her vision from before, and he admits:"Aye! For once I saw him true.’’ Although Brand shied away from Gerd before, now he finds in her the only human company he can have, since, in her madness, she has set herself on a similar mission as Brand—hunting down and killing the spirit of compromise. Unlike in the beginning of the play, Brand now willingly allows Gerd to lead him to the IceChurch, where she sees the hawk and shoots him with her rifle. The resulting avalanche buries them both but not before Brand calls out to God asking if human will is enough to achieve salvation. Brand hears a voice cry out, ‘‘God is Love!’’ Although there are several interpretations of this, the most likely, given Brand's steady breakdown into madness, is that he is hearing a voice that does not exist.

Since he was a child, Brand has attempted to adhere to an impossible ideal, which was easy enough for him to do when he had no attachments. However, by falling in love with Agnes and loving their son, Alf, he succumbed to one of the human material weaknesses that he has despised since his childhood. Over the course of the play, Brand's attempt to suppress this weakness fails, and the strain, coupled with the grief over his dead family, slowly drives him mad.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Brand, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Any discussion of Ibsen's mature art must start with Brand, since this monolithic masterpiece is not only the first play he completed after leaving his native country, but his first, and possibly his greatest, work of enduring power. Nothing in Ibsen's previous writings prepares us for a play of this scope, not even the substantial talent he displays in The Vikings at Helgeland and The Pretenders, for Brand is like a sudden revelation from the depths of an original mind. It is highly probable that Ibsen's achievement in Brand was intimately connected with his departure from Norway, for he seemed to find an important source of creative power in his self-imposed exile: "I had to escape the swinishness up there to feel fully cleansed,’’ he wrote to his mother-in-law from Rome. "I could never lead a consistent spiritual life there. I was one man in my work and another outside—and for that reason my work failed in consistency too.’’ Ibsen's desire for creative consistency was certainly fulfilled during his sojourn in Rome. Besides filling him with admiration for the "indescribable harmony'' of his new surroundings (‘‘beautiful, wonderful, magical,’’ he called them), Ibsen's Italienische Reise, like Goethe' s before him, seems to have opened him up to an expansive romanticism. Ibsen himself was quite conscious of the influence of Rome on his art, for in describing to a friend how Brand had come to be written, he said: ‘‘Add to this Rome with its ideal peace, association with the carefree artist community, an existence in an atmosphere which can only be compared with that of Shakespeare's As You Like It—and you have the conditions productive of Brand.’’ It was a period of the most exquisite freedom Ibsen had ever known, and his nostalgia for these years was later to find expression in Oswald's enthusiastic descriptions of the buoyant livsglaede (joy of life) to be found in the Paris artist community.

On the surface, Brand—an epic of snow and ice with a glacial Northern atmosphere and a forbidding central figure—would seem to have little in common with this warm, sunny Italian world. Yet the sense of abandon which Ibsen was experiencing is reflected in the play's openness of form and richness of inspiration (‘‘May I not. . . point to Brand and Peer Gynt,’’ wrote Ibsen later, ‘‘and say: 'See, the wine cup has done this!'’’). Though it was originally conceived as a narrative poem, Ibsen soon reworked Brand into a five-act poetic drama, a work so conscientiously long and unstageable that Ibsen was astonished when a Scandinavian company decided to produce it. For Ibsen, exulting in the luxury of pure self-expression, had written the work unmindful of the limiting demands of an audience or the restricting requirements of a theatre. Having finally freed his imagination from its frozen Northern vaults, Ibsen had at last discovered how to make his work an integral part of his spiritual life. The solution was simple enough; he had to be the same person in his work as outside it. Although in The Pretenders Ibsen had dramatized the conflicts in his own soul through a fictional external action, Brand has the most thoroughgoing revelation of his rebellious interior life that Ibsen had yet attempted, an act of total purgation, in which he exorcised the troll battle within his heart and mind by transforming it into art. With Brand, Ibsen confronted for the first time and in combination the great subjects which were to occupy him successively during the course of his career: the state of man in the universe, the state of modern society, and the state of his own feverish, divided soul.

The play, a storage house for all of Ibsen's future themes and conflicts, is constructed like a series of interlocking arches, each ascending higher than the last. The lowest arch is a domestic drama, in which Ibsen examines the relationship of the idealist to his family (the basis for later plays like The Wild Duck); the middle arch is a social-political drama, in which he analyzes the effect of the aristocratic individual on a democratic community (the basis for plays like An Enemy of the People); and the highest arch is a religious drama, in which he shows the rivalry between the messianic rebel and the nineteenth-century God (the basis for plays like The Master Builder). Pastor Brand—a reforming minister of extraordinary zeal (his very name means "sword and fire’’)—is the hero of all three dramas, and Ibsen's supreme idealist, individualist, and rebel. In the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, and those apostles of religious purification who arise in human history to change the course of the world, Brand is remorselessly dedicated to his cause. Like Luther, he has elected to be the "chastiser of the age,’’ scourging the excesses of individuals and institutions; like Moses, he is determined to bring new codes of spiritual purity to a generation of idlers, appeasers, and dreamers; and like Christ, he is committed to the salvation of all mankind through a complete transformation of human character. Brand, however, is a very peculiar Christian, if indeed he can be called Christian at all. Intensely masculine, patristic, strict, and unyielding, he rejects the compassionate side of Christianity in his determination to close the gap between what is and what should be by making human practice conform to spiritual ideals. Actually, Brand is more extreme than the most apocalyptic Puritan reformers, a Savonarola of the will who brings Protestant individualism to the furthest reaches of its own implications. For, as Brand develops his theology, he demands not only that each man become his own Church, but—so strict are the extremes of his ideal—even his own God.

Man becomes a god by imitating God, but Brand's God—not a"gentle wind'' but a"storm''— is almost inimitable, being the purest and most uncompromising of celestial beings. He is identified with the Ideal itself, to be attained through the unlimited striving of the human will. Because of his emphasis on will, the mortal sin for Brand is cowardice and halfheartedness. Like Kierkegaard before him, and Nietzsche after, Brand is disposed towards the great saint or the great sinner—the man who lives his life extremely with a purpose either good or evil—but he cannot abide the willless mediocrities who fail to be anything fully. Brand's Devil, therefore, is the spirit of compromise, while his concept of evil is identified with the middle way of moderation, accommodation, luxury, ease, and moral laziness. Taking ‘‘All or nothing’’ as his rebellious credo, he has resolved to make "heirs of heaven'' out of the dull and cloddish inhabitants of the modern world, fashioning a new race of heroes to match the heroic figures of the past.

Brand, who follows his own precepts with uncompromising integrity, is himself one of these heroes—but at a terrific cost. Struggling painfully to conquer any emotions which might lead him from the path of righteousness, he becomes contemptuous of any but the hardest virtues: for him, love is merely a smirch of lies (‘‘Faced by his generation / Which is lax and slothful, the best love is hate’’), while charity and humanitarianism are the encouragement of human weakness (‘‘Was God humane when Jesus died?’’). Thus, Brand finally succeeds in suppressing his own human feelings, an ambiguous victory which makes him at the same time both wholly admirable and wholly impossible. Like most monastic, disciplinary types, he has something forbidding and inhuman in his nature. Ibsen usually associates him with images of cold and hardness (snow, steel, iron, stone); even the conditions of his birth (he was "born by a cold fjord in the shadow of a barren mountain’’) suggest his icelike qualities. By comparison, the beautyloving painter Ejnar and his lovely fiancée Agnes are identified with "mountain air, the sunshine, the dew, and the scent of pines,’’ and their pursuit of Southern pleasures is a striking contrast to Brand's singleminded pursuit of the ideal.

Yet, such is Brand's heroic stature, fierce courage, and charismatic power that by the end of Act II Agnes has been converted to his religion of "grayness," leaving Ejnar to take up her duties by Brand's side. It is in the domestic scenes that follow (Acts III and IV) that Brand's defective humanity is most strongly dramatized, for his fanatic ideals of moral purity succeed in destroying his entire family; first his mother, who dies unshriven when Brand refuses to visit her unless she freely gives away her fortune; then his young son Alf, a victim of the Northern cold who has been refused the Southern warmth (an Ibsenist image for love); and finally Agnes herself, forced into dreadful choices and ultimately deprived of even the relics of her mother love. All this while, Brand has been engaged in a terrific struggle with himself, torn between his ideal and his love for Agnes and Alf. Yet his decision to be a god has left him with no real choice; and when Agnes warns him ‘‘He dies who sees Jehovah face to face," he can only accept the terrible implications of his Godhead and let her die. When she abdicates her painful life with an ecstatic cry (‘‘I am free Brand! I am free!’’), Brand has achieved a moral victory only through the sacrifice of everything he loved in the world—as Shaw put in through "having caused more intense suffering by his saintliness that the most talented sinner could possibly have done with twice his opportunities.’’

Yet it is only in the domestic portions of the play that Brand emerges as a villainidealist; like all great reformers (even Christ treated his family with scant respect), he has no time or capacity for a happy private life. When he plays a public role, in the socialpolitical scenes, he is a bright contrast to the citizenry he has come to reform. Here, Brand, a typical Sturm-und-Drang hero, is the individual at war with society, denouncing its wormeaten conventions, its limited aspirations, its corrupt institutions. His antagonist, in this drama, is the Mayor, society's elected representative—like Mayor Peter Stockmann and Peter Mortensgard, a "typical man of the people,’’ and therefore Brand's instinctive enemy. The conflict between them arises from their conflicting expectations from their constituents. Brand, appealing to spiritual man, seeks the salvation of the individual through a revolution in his moral consciousness; the Mayor, appealing to social man, seeks the pacification of the community through attention to its material needs. Wishing to make life easier, the Mayor wants to construct public buildings; Brand, wishing to make life harder, wants to construct a new Church. This conflict—in which Brand obviously expresses Ibsen's own predisposition in favor of the individual against the community, the moral against the social, the spiritual against the material, radical revolution against moderation and compromise—is ultimately irreconcilable. But since Brand's following has increased, the Mayor, pulling his sheets to the wind, capitulates, following the desires of the compact majority by helping Brand with his plans. The Mayor, however, has not lost the battle. He has merely made a strategic retreat in order to assimilate his enemy. And, as for Brand, his temporary success has made him unwittingly betray his own ideal.

In Act V, which forms the climax of the religious drama and the heart of the play, Brand becomes what Ibsen really intended him to be—neither a villainidealist nor a heroreformer but a tragic sufferer existing independently of moral judgments. At the beginning of the act, Brand is seen as a fashionable preacher, a popular commercial personality like Billy Graham. His new Church is about to open and Brand himself is to be decorated by the State for his services to the community. Multitudes have gathered for the event—vaguely sensing that the destruction of the old Church was some form of sacrilege and trembling with apprehension ‘‘as though they had been summoned to elect a new God.’’ Brand himself is very morose; he cannot pray and his soul is full of discords. His mood grows blacker when the Provost—the theological counterpart of the Mayor—begins to inform him that religion is merely an instrument of the State to insure itself against unrest. When he warns Brand to concern himself with the needs of the community rather than the salvation of the individual, Brand suddenly becomes aware that the Church is a lie and that he has become a corrupt institution himself. Ignoring the Provost's contention that ‘‘the man who fights alone will never achieve anything of a lasting nature,’’ he tells his enthusiastic followers that the only true Church is the wild and natural world of the fjords and moorlands, not yet tainted by human compromise, hypocrisy, and evil: ‘‘God is not here! / His kingdom is perfect freedom.’’

Like Moses leading his people towards the beautiful promised land, Brand makes his way upwards to the freedom and purity of the cliffs and mountains. But like Moses' followers, the people begin to slacken and grumble when the way grows hard. The Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, had told the resurrected Christ that the common man seeks not Godhead, but miracle, mystery, and authority. And now it is Brand's turn to learn of human limitation, as his followers clamor for water, bread, prophecies, security, and miracles in place of the spiritual victory he promises. When he offers them no more than ‘‘a new will," "a new faith,’’ and ‘‘a crown of thorns,’’ they feel betrayed and begin to stone their Messiah. And when the Mayor arrives with the Provost to reclaim the sheeplike flock with a promise of food and safety, they repudiate Brand's salvation altogether, meekly returning to their secular lives below.

Brand is left alone on the moorlands, torn and bleeding, to meditate upon his mistakes. In putting vengeance, justice, and retribution before forgiveness, charity, and compassion; in repudiating the ‘‘God of every dull and earthbound slave,’’ Brand has pursued Godhead through the pursuit of an incorruptible ideal. But while making him Godlike, this quest has also made him a rebel against the very Deity he had tried to serve. Brand's messianism has turned him into something harder and crueler than God, and it has broken the backs of his all-too-human followers. Now Brand must learn that man cannot be God; that he must live with the Devil if he is to live at all; and that even the freedom of the will is limited by the inexorable determinism of inherited sin. Now, like Moses on Mount Nebo, Brand is denied the promised land, and must await retribution himself. Yet, still he adheres to his ideal. When a specter appears, in the shape of Agnes, offering him warmth, love, and forgiveness if he will only renounce the awful words ‘‘All or nothing," Brand refuses; and when the spirit is transformed into a hawk flying across the moorlands, Brand recognizes his ancient enemy, the Devil of Compromise.

Still struggling upwards, Brand finally reaches the Ice Church, a mighty chasm between peaks and summits where ‘‘cataract and avalanche sing Mass.’’ It is Brand's true parish, for there, in the ideal habitat of the extreme Romantic, Brand may preach his gospel of the absolute, free from the human world and its compromising influences. When Gerd—the wild gypsy girl who has accompanied him—suddenly has a halfironic, half-sincere vision of Brand as the incarnation of Christ and begins worshiping him as a God, Brand, at last, gives way to human feeling:

Until today I sought to be a tablet
On which God could write. Now my life
Shall flow rich and warm. The mist is breaking.
I can weep! I can kneel! I can pray!

But it is too late. Shooting at the devilhawk with her rifle, Gerd has started an avalanche, and Brand is about to be buried in the snow. At the last minute, Brand asks a final tortured question of God: ‘‘If not by Will, how can man be redeemed?’’ And the answer comes from the heavens in booming tones: Han er deus caritatis—‘‘He is the God of charity, mercy, love.’’

It is an answer which completes the play, but denies its philosophical basis. For if Brand's severe demands have all been wrong, and man is redeemed only through love, then the whole intellectual structure of the work collapses; and Brand's relentless attacks on compromise and accommodation are all superfluous. We must remember, however, that Ibsen is not rejecting Brand's revolt as an idea; he is merely rejecting it as a form of action. And since Brand's judge is a God of love, even Brand, we must assume, is forgiven at the last. The ending of Brand, nevertheless, like the ending of so many of Ibsen's plays, is inconclusive, an early example of Ibsen's failure to integrate his drama of ideas with his drama of action—and this itself is the result of his refusal to adopt a positive synthetic doctrine. Up until the ending, we can regard Brand both as a great hero-saint-reformer with a redeeming message of salvation and as a flawed, repressed, and icecold being whose ruthless dedication to an impossible ideal causes untold suffering and needless deaths. Up until the ending, we can admire Ibsen's extraordinary capacity for keeping two antithetical attitudes in his mind at the same time, so that he is able to exalt messianic rebellion as an idea, while condemning it in practice. But the ending demands a synthesis which the author cannot provide; instead, he chooses to invalidate the intellectual hypothesis of his play. Still, even in this vaguely unsatisfying ending, one is filled with admiration for this defeated, yet triumphantly Godlike hero whose eternal struggle upwards has somehow enlarged the spiritual boundaries of man.

We must conclude, then, that both the success and failure of the play stem from the unreconciled conflicts of the playwright. For Ibsen's split attitude towards his hero reflects the clash in his own soul between the twin poles of his temperament—the Romantic idealism of the reforming rebel and the Classical detachment of the objective artist. This dualism—fatal to a man of action but invaluable to a dramatist—is present whenever Ibsen examines the effect of absolute idealism on private happiness, a subject that is to obsess him all his life. But though he will treat this delicate theme again and again in the future, he will never make a presentation of such compelling power and grandeur.

Source: Robert Brustein, ‘‘Henrik Ibsen,'' in The Theatre of Revolt, Little, Brown and Company, 1962, pp. 35-84.