HENRIK IBSEN

1828 - 1906

General

• Henrik Ibsen's plays anticipate major developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:– the individual's feelings of alienation and actual

alienation from society,– the pressures by which society insures conformity

to its values and suppresses individuality,– the barriers which modern life sets up against

living heroically.

General

• Ibsen exposed other stresses of modern life by showing the inner pressures and conflicts that inhibit and even destroy the individual.

• Some of these pressures stem from conditioning, i.e., from the individual's internalizing society's values.

General

• John Northam distinguishes the opposing elements within the individual as the social self and the essential self.

• The social self is the persona which conforms to the demands of family, friends, community, and society and which an individual generally develops for acceptance or as a protection.

General

• The essential self is an individual's true Self and expresses the individual's thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, etc.

• This distinction, which is a useful concept in general, has particular relevance to A DOLL’S House, I will refer to it repeatedly in our discussions of the play.

General

• A primary value for Ibsen is freedom, which he believed to be essential for self-fulfillment.

• Of the "many things" which his later writings, including A Doll’s House, were concerned with, Ibsen specifically identified "contradictions between ability and desire, or between will and circumstance, the mingled tragedy and comedy of humanity and the individual."

General

• Ibsen was constantly experimenting and pushing boundaries in his writing.

• This habit of exploration often made him and his plays controversial and shocked conservative critics and audiences.

• Of this habit, he said, "Where I stood then, when I wrote my various books, there is now a fairly compact crowd, but I myself am no longer there; I am somewhere else, I hope in front."

General

• His constant changing often confused contemporary theater-goers and critics, who had to keep adjusting their expectations of an Ibsen play.

• His repeated changes and experimenting also make it difficult to place Ibsen and his plays in neat categories.

• Adding to the difficulty of classifying him is the complexity with which he presents his heroes and themes.

• Over the years, Ibsen has been called a revolutionary, a nationalist, a romantic, a poet, an idealist, a realist, a socialist, a naturalist, a symbolist, a feminist, and a forerunner of psychoanalysis.

General• Ibsen had a profound effect on the drama both of

his own time and in the twentieth century.

• His plays stimulated the avant-garde theater in Germany and France, and only the plays of George Bernard Shaw had a greater impact in England.

• The demands of his plays caused directors to find new ways of staging plays and actors to develop new ways of acting.

General• The declamatory style of acting in vogue during Ibsen's day

could not, for example, convincingly present the natural dialogue of Ibsen's later plays, with its sentence fragments, exclamations, and short statements.

• Such dialogue is commonplace in plays, movies, and TV dramas today, & we take it for granted; however, in Ibsen's day it was an innovation which confused & upset theater-goers.

Ibsen called “A Doll’s House”,The Modern Tragedy

• Ibsen has written a modern play about a modern woman in a modern situation but he adds a new stature and a new dimension to it by concentrating different kinds of imagery to suggest that society works upon Nora like some dreadful, hidden and inexorable disease

• Ibsen said,” A woman cannot be herself in the society of today, which is exclusively a masculine society, with laws written by men and with accusers and judges who judge feminine conduct from the masculine standpoint.”

“ A Doll’s House represents a woman imbued with the idea of becoming a person.” R.M Adams

“ Ibsen’s Nora is not just a woman arguing for female liberation; she is much more. She embodies the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life.” Einar Hangen

The theme of finding one’s true vocation recurs throughout Ibsen’s life and work. It signifies not only a subjective quest for personal realization, but also an objective effort towards imaginative insight. Ibsen’s protagonists are shown facing the dilemma as to what to make of their lives for they neither know their place nor has reason to. It is a pressing question of the “self”

It was very radical on Ibsen’s part to depict the inward predicament facing 19th century man. He fortunately had the intellect, imagination and energy to get to the root of things based on truth.

“ Radical truth as the essential goal and guiding principle in life stands at the center of his achievement in drama.” Rolf Fjelde

Writers such as Goethe and Schiller had also focused on it.

Ibsen’s dramatic career can be divided into 3 parts:-1. Romantic Period: 1850-1873: Two verse dramas( Brand, Peer

Gynt) and several other plays; sympathizing with historical figres famous for rebellion

2.Realistic Period: 1877-1890: Ibsen turned to realistic prose drama dealing with contemporary problems, writing 8 plays all about individuals attempting to realize themselves in realistic settings in the face of established conventions.First popular play was “Pillars of Society”.A Doll’s House shocked people so Ibsen had to rewrite the ending“Ghosts” next play shocked society even more, followed by “An Enemy of the People” which was a comedy

3.Symbolistic Period: 1892-1899: Ibsen wrote 4 plays all depicting a realization of defeat. The best of these is “ The Master Builder”Ibsen remained to the end a champion of the individual against the encroachment of society.He is credited with the origin and the development of the “problem play” or the drama of ideas, presenting a social or psychological problem, with characters subordinate to the theme, hardly ever offering a solution. Ibsen always maintained that a dramatist’s business was to ask questions not to answer them

The essential tragic experience is that of irreparable human loss…death.Human sensibility can be injured and not be healed. What does generate it is the predicament of human alienation.The three tragic modes contain their own historical expression of that alienation: the Greek mode is basically divine: the Renaissance is predominantly noble: the Modern is fundamentally socialIn Greek tragedy divine fate is more impersonal. Alienation is in the form of gods who are shown as superior to human beings and so this alienation becomes a basis for confrontation when fate is defied by a hero. The birth of tragedy occurs( according to Nietzsche) from the Dionysian urge of man to create divinity through his ow will.In Renaissance tragedy the emphasis shifts from the divine to the human. Internal struggle occurs between the resistant individualism of the hero and the privileged position of his royal person. He isolates himself by betraying his privileged role and exceeding it.

• The tragedy of social alienation begins with Ibsen and ends with Tennessee Williams. In modern tragedy the dilemma of the hero is psychological and social in a social context. The alienation occurs within a family which can be socially estranged and divided internally. While the inner conflicts within the household are personal and psychological, the wider terms of reference are social..it is unlike the earlier two a cultural phenomenon.

The central theme of this social mode of tragedy is alienation from bourgeois society.

The reversal of personal fortune becomes a key element in the dynamic process of estrangement, the self recognition of tragic fate a liberating of social consciousness which comes too late to alter the experience of loss. The alienation is structural for it is an estrangement from dominant cultural values.

Introduction to the Play

Written in 1879 while in Rome, 2nd of his realistic plays written after The Pillars of Society which had made him famous.

ADH highlights the cultural conflicts in society, in particular critically presenting the traditional roles of men and women in a marriage and becoming a subject of public controversy.

A skilled craftsman he carefully uses excellent dramatic techniques to produce realistic plays.

First performed in the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark on 21st December 1879

First performed in London on June 7th 1889

An actress in Germany refused to play the role of Nora, declaring that no mother would leave her children. Ibsen decided to write another ending for the play ( which was never popular) saying hat he wanted to avoid somebody doing a ‘barbaric outrage’ to his play.

Major Themes

Role of a woman and a man in marriage

Self liberation and freedom of the individual: the self vs society

Responsibility

Money

Appearance and reality

Light

Heredity

Illusions

Love

Symbols

The title

Macaroons

Tarantella

Nora’s fluttering

The stove

The Christmas Tree

What To Look For

1. Language: simple; recurrent use of certain words and their inference

2. Ibsen’s skill as a dramatist: plot, characterization, stage setting, suspense

3. Is self realization important? And what cost?

4. The role of a tragic hero in modern tragedy