All
this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom
happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their
conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
truth over this tissue of falsehoods.
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