Henrik Ibsen Study Guide

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 Table of Contents
Biography.............................................................................................................................................................1

Critical Essays...................................................................................................................................................10

Analysis..............................................................................................................................................................23

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Biography
Biography
Article abstract: Ibsen is one of the leading figures in modern drama. Moving beyond the melodramas of the
nineteenth century, Ibsen created a drama of psychological realism. His dramas helped to create modern
realistic theater.

Early Life

Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway, the second child of Knud Ibsen, a well-to-do
merchant, and his wife, Marchinen, née Altenburg. Ibsen’s house, which faced the town square, was across
from a church and a town hall that housed lunatics in its cellar. Early in life, Ibsen was faced with what he
would later see as the symbol of spiritual freedom (the church spire) countered by the forces of confinement
(the town hall). When his father went bankrupt and the family was forced to move to a small farm, Ibsen felt
the pressures of being socially ostracized. Also, rumors that he was illegitimate haunted the young Ibsen.

Theater was one of Ibsen’s outlets, and by the age of twelve Ibsen had seen six plays by Eugène Scribe and
had read Friedrich Schiller. As a child, Ibsen amused himself by staging puppet shows, magic acts, and
ventriloquist’s routines. In 1843, Ibsen went as an apothecary’s apprentice to Grimstead, where he fathered an
illegitimate child by a servant girl. This event would account for the themes of guilt, fear, and burdensome
responsibility attached to sexual relationships in his works. At Grimstead, Ibsen absorbed himself in the
realism of Charles Dickens, the biting satire of Voltaire, the explosive dramas of William Shakespeare, and
the Romantic tragedies of Schiller. Also, he began to develop his skill as a social critic by writing lampoons
and satires. In addition, he wrote poetry which ranged from introspective meditations to political propaganda,
and he published Catalina (1850; Catiline, 1921), his first play. It focused on one of his favorite themes: the
conflict between the lone individual and the forces of power. That same year, Ibsen moved to Christiana to
study medicine, but he paid more attention to his literary pursuits and never finished his degree. His play
Kjœmpehøien (1850; Burial Mound, 1912) was produced by the Christiana Theater. Ibsen continued to
sharpen his skill as a poet, ventured into political journalism, and wrote perceptive theatrical criticism. Active
in leftist political movements, he barely escaped being arrested. From then on, Ibsen distanced himself from
political activism.

In 1851, Ibsen became stage manager and playwright-in-residence at Ole Bull’s Norwegian Theater in
Bergen. Having received a travel grant, he toured Denmark and Germany to learn the latest developments in
theater. Overworked, underpaid, and unable to produce innovative works, Ibsen left Bergen to become the
artistic director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiana. This job was no less frustrating, however, and Ibsen
was eventually driven to bouts of depression and alcoholism. Given a small travel grant and aided by friends,
Ibsen finally left Norway for Italy. He was to spend the better part of his career in exile from family and
country.

During Ibsen’s career in Norwegian theater, he wrote nationalistic sagas and satirical comedies. His
experience as a director taught him how to structure his dramas and how to make effective use of visual and
poetic imagery. Although the dramas of this early period are full of bombast and mechanical contrivances,
Ibsen was starting to formulate a new kind of drama.

Life’s Work

Ibsen’s career as a major world dramatist began in Rome. Exiled from a Norway whose narrow provincialism

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had stifled him, and infuriated over his country’s refusal to aid Denmark, Ibsen created Brand (1866; English
translation, 1891), a monumental poetic drama delving into the spiritual crisis of a romantic idealist. Ibsen had
now gone beyond the aestheticism of his earlier nationalistic sagas to write a profound drama which would
rouse his countrymen from their complacency and force them to face the great issues of life. Widely discussed
and hotly debated, Brand became a best-seller and won for Ibsen a pension from his government. Ibsen
countered Brand with another massive poetic drama, Peer Gynt (1867; English translation, 1892), the story of
an opportunistic double-dealer who compromises his inner self to achieve material gains. These two dramas
established Ibsen’s reputation.

In 1868, Ibsen moved to Dresden. He was lionized by the king of Sweden and later represented Norway at the
opening of the Suez Canal. By 1869, Ibsen started to move in the direction of modern realistic drama. De
unges forbund (1869; The League of Youth, 1890) focused on a contemporary setting, employed colloquial
speech patterns, and satirized political chicanery. In Kejeser og Galilœer (1873; Emperor and Galilean,
1876), Ibsen created an epic tragedy in prose. In this drama, Ibsen tried to reconcile the Christian call for
self-sacrifice with the pagan command to enjoy the pleasures of life to the fullest, thereby exposing the
underlying dilemma of the late nineteenth century.

Ibsen now began to dissociate himself from political reform movements in favor of a spiritual revolution
based on a radical individualism bordering on anarchy. Influenced by the Danish critic George Brandes and
the realist director George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, Ibsen shifted away from historical plays and poetic
epics to concentrate on prose dramas set in contemporary Norway. Eventually, he also helped to give form
and depth to the modern realistic problem play. In Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House, 1880) and
Gengangere (1881; Ghosts, 1885), Ibsen helped to shape the path of modern drama. Both plays treat
contemporary issues, center on a small ensemble of characters, and take place in confined settings. They are
crafted around tightly constructed plots which are based on the careful unraveling of past events. Their terse,
choppy dialogue is loaded with double meanings, their decor is reflective of the moods and shifts of the
characters, and their conflicts are intensely psychological. Both plays deal with women who are asked to
sacrifice their duty to themselves in order to meet social obligations. Nora in A Doll’s House leaves her
husband and children, whereas Mrs. Alving in Ghosts settles for a loveless marriage, wreaking destruction on
her entire family.

In these two dramas, Ibsen exploded both the form and content of the contrived, sentimental, and moralistic
melodramas of his time and considered such taboo subjects as venereal disease, incest, and mercy killing.
Ibsen even attacked the cherished institution of marriage. On the legitimate stage, his plays were banned or
rewritten, but in the new avant-garde theaters of Europe, Ibsen’s works became staples of the new repertory.
Ibsen created plays that attacked bourgeois values at the same time as he elevated domestic drama to the status
of high tragedy.

Soon Ibsen would go beyond social drama to probe the recesses of the unconscious in such plays as
Rosmersholm (1886; English translation, 1889). Ibsen now began to show that an individual’s repressed
drives can bring about his or her destruction. In Hedda Gabler (1890; English translation, 1891), Ibsen
combined realistic techniques with psychological drama. He dropped the standard exposition, eliminated long
monologues, and created broken dialogue infused with underlying meanings. Hedda is a middle-class woman
with no purpose in life. She tries to release her pent-up drives by controlling the destinies of the men around
her. Failing in this, she shoots herself in the head.

After wandering back and forth between Italy and Germany, Ibsen returned to Norway a national hero. He
was given the Grand Cross in Denmark, honored by royalty, and celebrated in torchlight parades. Frightened
and fascinated by the new generation, Ibsen passed through a series of platonic affairs with young girls such
as Émile Bardach, Helene Raff, and Hildur Andersen. The theme of a young girl beckoning an aging architect
to create a masterpiece appears in the first of his final plays, Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder,

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1893). In these plays, Ibsen experiments with a form of mystic and visionary drama. Ibsen now focuses on the
artist and his relationship to art. These short, narrowly focused dramas have a somber, poetic quality laden
with symbolic overtones. Their claustrophobic, intense, and anxious mood of finality foreshadows the
techniques of the modernist dramas of the twentieth century.

In 1901, Ibsen suffered the first of a series of strokes, which would eventually lead to his death on May 23,
1906. His last words were “On the contrary!”—an appropriate exit line for a man who celebrated the
individual’s right to define himself contrary to both the wishes of the establishment and the pressures of the
crowd.

Summary

Henrik Ibsen was one of the first playwrights to create tragic dramas about ordinary people caught in the webs
of fate and forced to choose between their self-fulfillment and their responsibility to others. Ibsen helped to
create the modern psychological drama which probes the recesses of the unconscious. His scenic details,
suggestive imagery, poetic symbols, and double-edged dialogue created a dramatic technique that would help
to revolutionize the modern theater. His dramas depended on a subtle, truthful form of acting which inspired
ensemble productions free from rhetoric, bombast, and posturing. Ibsen’s plays challenged avant-garde
directors such as André Antoiné, Otto Brahm, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Ibsen also influenced a diverse
group of dramatists. George Bernard Shaw saw him as the champion of the propaganda drama. Arthur Miller
centered on Ibsen’s social dramas, whereas Luigi Pirandello and Harold Pinter focused on Ibsen’s existential
pieces.

Ibsen defies classification. He sought to go beyond photographic realism, yet he shunned symbolism. He
attacked the hypocrisy of social and political establishments but refused to attach himself to any liberal reform
movements. He probed deeply into the problems of women but dissociated himself from feminist causes.
Ibsen, the true existentialist, had his characters ask two questions which would become the focal questions of
modern drama: Who am I? and How can I be true to myself?

Bibliography

Beyer, Edvard. Ibsen: The Man and His Work. Translated by Marie Wells. New York: Taplinger, 1978. A
biographical, critical study of Ibsen which relates Ibsen’s works to cultural and political events in Norway at
the same time as it establishes his place in world literature. Profusely illustrated with drawings, editorial
cartoons, and production photographs. Contains a substantial bibliography of critical works in English.

Chamberlain, John S. Ibsen: The Open Vision. London: Athlone Press, 1982. Analyzes Peer Gynt, Ghosts,
The Wild Duck, and The Master Builder. Uses significant plays from the major periods in Ibsen’s career to
show how Ibsen creates dramatic tension by pitting a variety of intellectual positions against one another
without settling on a single resolution. Offers detailed analysis of seminal works.

Clurman, Harold. Ibsen. New York: Macmillan, 1977. A very readable introduction to Ibsen’s plays, covering
his early works as well as his major plays. A theatrical director, Clurman pays careful attention to production
values. Places Ibsen in perspective with other major dramatists. The appendix provides director’s notes for
several plays.

Fjelde, Rolf, ed. Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. A
sampling of articles covering a wide variety of plays. Focuses on both Ibsen’s major themes and his
techniques. Contains a balanced sample of the works of important Ibsen scholars.

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Haugen, Einar. Ibsen’s Drama: Author to Audience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Uses
current communication theories to demonstrate how Ibsen’s work can be decoded by a modern audience.
Highlights a variety of themes, styles, and production techniques. The appendix includes a chronology of
Ibsen’s life and brief plot summaries of his works. Also has a detailed bibliography of foreign and English
sources, plus a checklist of Ibsen’s works using Norwegian titles.

Hurt, James. Cataline’s Dream: An Essay on Ibsen’s Plays. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Using
the techniques of depth psychology, Hurt traces the mythic pattern of ascent, descent, and transformation
throughout Ibsen’s works. Focuses on recurring motifs, characters, and symbols.

Meyer, Michael. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. A lengthy and exhaustive
biography detailing Ibsen’s personal and professional life. It not only documents Ibsen’s development as a
dramatist, his working methods, and his philosophical shifts but also gives a detailed account of the
production history of his plays in Germany, France, and England.

Northam, John. Ibsen: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Covers Ibsen’s major
work, concentrating on the evolution of Ibsen’s later prose plays from the themes of his earlier poetic works.
Pays careful attention to Ibsen’s imagery.

Thomas, David. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Grove Press, 1983. An excellent, concise introduction to Ibsen’s
work. Thomas offers a brief biographical sketch and discusses literary and theatrical influences. Analyzes
selected plays using a thematic approach that highlights the role of women in Ibsen’s plays as well as his use
of symbolism. Also gives a brief production history of major dramas and a review of critical works in English.

Biography
Ibsen was born March 20,1828, in Skien, Norway, a lumbering town south of Christiania, now Oslo. He was
the second son in a wealthy family that included five other siblings. In 1835, financial problems forced the
family to move to a smaller house in Venstop outside Skien. After eight years the family moved back to
Skein, and Ibsen moved to Grimstad to study as an apothecary's assistant. He applied to and was rejected at
Christiania University. During the winter of 1848, Ibsen wrote his first play, Catiline, which was rejected by
the Christiania Theatre; it was finally published in 1850 under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme and generated
little interest. Ibsen's second play The Burial Mound was also written under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme,
and became the first Ibsen play to be performed when it was presented on September 26, 1850, at the
Christiania Theatre.

In 1851, Ibsen accepted an appointment as an assistant stage manager at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. He
was also expected to assist the theatre as a dramatic author, and during his tenure at Bergen, Ibsen wrote
several plays, including Lady Inger (1855) and Olaf Liljekrans (1857). These early plays were written in verse
and drawn from Norse folklore and myths. In 1857 Ibsen was released from his contract at Bergen and
accepted a position at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. While there, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen
(1858). Their only child, Sigurd, was born the following year.

By 1860, Ibsen was under attack in the press for a lack of productivity. When the Christiania Theatre went
bankrupt in 1862, Ibsen was left with no regular income, relying on a temporary position as a literary advisor
to the reorganized Christiania Theatre for his livelihood. Thanks to a series of small government grants, by
1863 Ibsen was able to travel in Europe and begin what became an intense period of creativity. During this
period, Ibsen completed a dramatic epic poem, Brand, which achieved critical notice (1866). This was
followed by Peer Gynt (1867). The first of Ibsen's prose dramas, The League of Youth (1869), was the first of
his plays to demonstrate a shift from an emphasis on plot to one of interpersonal relationships. This was

4
followed by Emperor and Galilean (1873), Ibsen's first work to be translated into English. A Doll's House
(1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882) are among the last plays included in Ibsen's realism period. Ibsen
continued to write of modern realistic themes in his next plays, but he also relied increasingly on metaphor
and symbolism in Hedda Gabler (1890).

A shift from social concerns to the isolation of the individual marks the next phase of Ibsen's work. The
Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead Awaken (1899) all treat the conflicts that arise between art and life,
between creativity and social expectations, and between personal contentment and self-deception. Many
critics consider these last works to be autobiographical. In 1900, Ibsen suffered his first of several strokes, and
his ill health ended his writing career. Ibsen died May 23, 1906.

Biography
Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 to a wealthy family in Skien, on the east coast of Norway. His father’s
ancestors had been seafarers; his mother came from a family of the most prominent merchants in the town.
During the early years of his life, Ibsen grew up in luxury. His father owned one of the most prosperous stores
in Skein, and the family had servants and a stable of horses and a house in the country. That changed early in
the author’s life, in 1835, when a drop in timber prices forced his father into bankruptcy. The store was lost,
the house was sold at auction, and the family had to move to a rented house outside of town. Many critics
point to the sudden reversal in his family’s fortune as a key to Ibsen’s later cynicism about the social order.

After the family’s fall from social prestige, life became difficult in the Ibsen household. His father became a
hot-tempered bully, constantly shouting and arguing. His mother, whom Ibsen adored, became silent and
moody. Henrik became withdrawn, interested in reading and in producing puppet shows. He did not get along
with many of the neighboring children, but when he did it was more often with the girls than with the boys.

Ibsen dropped out of school at age fifteen and worked for several years as a pharmacist’s assistant. He went to
Christiana (which has since become known as Oslo) in 1850 and attempted to enroll in Christiana University,
only to be rejected after failing the entrance exams in mathematics and Greek. He became an assistant stage
manager at the National Theater in Bergen: one of his duties was to write patriotic plays that celebrated the
national character of Norway. This was the beginning of his playwriting career.

Critics often divide Ibsen’s plays into three groups or stages. The first stage of his writing, from the 1850s
through the end of the 1860s, is marked by dry, traditional, nationalistic plays. These plays were often based
in Norwegian legends, such as tales of the Vikings. Ghosts belongs to the second period, which is considered
to be the most artistically productive. Starting from 1863, and for twentyseven years after, he lived abroad in
Italy and Germany, returning to Norway only once. The plays in this second period are realistic, driven by
dialog and not theatrical conventions, while challenging social morality. Also included in this stage are the
well-known plays A Doll’s House (1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882). This phase of realism hit its
high point with Hedda Gabler in 1890. The plays of his last period, during the 1890s, depart from the theme
of the individual against society and deal with the individual alone. The most successful of these plays is The
Master Builder from 1892, which many critics consider Ibsen’s most autobiographical work. In 1901, Ibsen’s
writing career came to an end when he suffered the first of a series of paralyzing strokes. He died in Norway,
on May 23, 1906, from complications from the strokes.

Biography
Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway, to Knud (a businessman) and Marichen
(Altenburg) Ibsen. His wealthy family was thrown into poverty in 1834 when his father lost his store. As a
result, Ibsen was forced to leave school at age fifteen and accept a position as a pharmacist’s assistant. The

5
humiliation his family suffered as they sold off most of their property to pay off debts became a dynamic in
his later plays, especially in A Doll House (1879) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896). Fire, which was a
constant threat to Skien’s wooden shacks, was another subject in some of his plays, including Ghosts (1881)
and The Master Builder (1892).

In the early 1850s, Ibsen attended Christiania University in what is now Oslo and began writing poetry. In
1850, he wrote his first play, Catiline, but it did not appear on the stage for several years. Soon after
completing the play, he began a stint as stage manager for the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, where he was
required to write and stage a play each year. These plays were not well received; however, they helped Ibsen
fine-tune his dramatic skills. The plays explored the intricacies of human behavior against the backdrop of a
repressive society, a theme that would reemerge in his later work. His fears that he was illegitimate, coupled
with the birth of his own illegitimate child, surfaced in his characters, including Dina Dorf in Pillars of
Society (1887), Regine in Ghosts, and Hedvig in The Wild Duck (1884).

In 1864, Ibsen left Norway after suffering severe mental stress brought on from overwork. Assisted by
government grants and scholarships, he traveled through Italy and Germany for the next few decades,
continuing his playwriting, which became increasingly well received. By the production of Master Builder in
1892, Ibsen’s reputation as one of the world’s leading dramatists was cemented. Although he never completed
his degree at Christiania University, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Uppsala in
1877. After suffering a series of strokes, Ibsen died on May 23, 1906, in Oslo, Norway.

Biography
At the time Henrik Ibsen wrote and published Hedda Gabler (1890) he was sixty-two and a well-established
but highly controversial dramatist, but the road to that success had been paved with deprivation and hardship.
Although he was born in a well-to-do family in Skien, Norway, on March 20, 1828, financial reversals led to
poverty, making Henrik's youth a dismal one. At sixteen, he began a lonely and unhappy six-year
apprenticeship to an apothecary (a pharmacist). He found his principal solace in the theater and writing, which
he hoped would provide a means of escaping from his misery.

His first serious attempt at drama, Cataline (1850), earned him the support of friends who helped him escape
from drudgery. He moved to Christiania (Oslo), where he undertook an apprenticeship as dramatist with the
Bergen National Theatre. He also spent time in Copenhagen, studying at the Royal Theatre.

Ibsen's first plays borrowed freely from the French intrigue drama that he derided for its artificiality. Hoping
to write something new, in 1857 he left the Bergen Theatre to become the director of the Norwegian Theatre
in Christiania. The next year, despite his wretched financial state, he married and began a family. Nothing
seemed to go right, however. His plays and poetry gained no influential following, and his theater went
bankrupt within five years.

Lack of public support forced him into exile. In 1864, he moved to Rome. It was the first major turning point
in his long career, for it was as an expatriate that he wrote most of the plays on which his great international
reputation was built. Not only did he leave Scandinavia, he left behind a direct participation in theater. While
in Italy, he wrote Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), two important poetic dramas. The former play was an
immediate success and helped alleviate Ibsen's dire poverty.

In 1868, the French invasion of Italy obliged Ibsen to move to Germany, where he began writing the series of
plays on which his fame largely rests. He turned from writing mythic-poetic drama to realistic, social-problem
drama in prose, starting with The League of Youth in 1869, which, like so many of its successors, caused an
uproar when first staged. Although his success was limited, by the time he returned to Rome in 1878, he had

6
permanently freed himself from debt.

In the next year, 1879, he published A Doll's House, garnering international acclaim and putting him,
critically, at center stage. Each succeeding social-thesis play brought increased recognition and notoriety, for
each was, in some quarters, condemned. For example, Ghosts (1881) created such a furor that it could not be
staged immediately. Others, like An Enemy of the People (1883) and The Wild Duck (1885), though less
sensational, still caused critical controversy. Ibsen's fame and his notoriety spread quickly.

By 1890, when Hedda Gabler was published, he had even become a national hero in Norway. He returned
home in 1891, where, before his death, he wrote The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf(1894), John Gabriel
Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899), dramas that are more symbolic and introspective than
any of his previous works. He died on May 23, 1906, widely regarded as the most important dramatist of the
age.

Biography
Ibsen was born March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway, a lumbering town south of Christiania, now Oslo. He was
the second son in a wealthy family that included five other siblings. In 1835, financial problems forced the
family to move to a smaller house in Venstop outside Skien. After eight years, the family moved back to
Skein, and Ibsen moved to Grimstad to study as an apothecary's assistant. He applied to and was rejected at
Christiania University. During the winter of 1848, Ibsen wrote his first play, Catiline, which was rejected by
the Christiania Theatre; it was finally published in 1850 under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme and generated
little interest. Ibsen's second play, The Burial Mound, was also written under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme
and became the first Ibsen play to be performed when it was presented on September 26, 1850, at the
Christiania Theatre.

In 1851, Ibsen accepted an appointment as an assistant stage manager at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. He
was also expected to assist the theatre as a dramatic author, and during his tenure at Bergen, Ibsen wrote Lady
lnger (1855), The Feast at Solhoug (1856), and Olaf Liljekrans (1857). These early plays were written in
verse and drawn from Norse folklore and myths. In 1857, Ibsen was released from his contract at Bergen and
accepted a position at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. While there, Ibsen published The Vikings at
Helgeland and married Suzannah Thoresen in 1858. The couple's only child, Sigurd, was born the following
year.

By 1860, Ibsen was under attack in the press for a lack of productivity—although he had published a few
poems during this period. When the Christiania Theatre went bankrupt in 1862, Ibsen was left with no regular
income except a temporary position as a literary advisor to the reorganized Christiania Theatre. Due to a series
of small government grants, by 1863 Ibsen was able to travel in Europe and begin what became an intense
period of creativity. During this period, Ibsen completed The Pretenders (1863) and a dramatic epic poem,
"Brand" (1866), which achieved critical notice; these works were soon followed by Peer Gynt (1867). The
first of Ibsen's prose dramas, The League of Youth, published in 1869, was also the first of his plays to
demonstrate a shift from an emphasis on plot to one of interpersonal relationships. This was followed by
Emperor and Galilean (1873), Ibsen's first work to be translated into English, and Pillars of Society (1877). A
Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882) are among the last plays included in
Ibsen's realism period. Ibsen continued to write of modern realistic themes in his next plays, but he also relied
increasingly on metaphor and symbolism in The Wild Duck (1884) and Hedda Gabler (1890).

A shift from social concerns to the isolation of the individual marks the next phase of Ibsen's work. The
Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken
(1899) all treat the conflicts that arise between art and life, between creativity and social expectations, and

7
between personal contentment and self deception. These last works are considered by many critics to be
autobiographical. In 1900, Ibsen suffered his first of several strokes. Ill health ended his writing career, and he
died May 23, 1906.

Although Ibsen's audiences may have debated the social problems he depicted, modern critics are more often
interested in the philosophical and psychological elements depicted in his plays and the ideological debates
they generated.

Biography
Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway, to a wealthy family. However, in 1834, Ibsen's family
lost its money when the family business failed. When he was fifteen, Ibsen left school to work as a
pharmacist's assistant, although he eventually tried to get admitted to Christiania University. When he failed
the entrance exams, Ibsen turned his attention to writing and wrote his first play, Cataline, in 1850. At this
point, Ibsen's work was relatively unknown, so he became assistant stage manager at the Norwegian Theater
in Bergen, where he was expected to write and produce one drama each year. These early plays were not well
received, and in 1862 Ibsen petitioned the government for a pension that would allow him to travel while he
wrote. He was eventually given a small stipend in 1864.

The same year, Ibsen began a self-imposed exile from Norway that would last for the majority of his adult
life. Although many critics say that Ibsen left his country to get away from bad memories of his father's failed
business and Ibsen's own failure as a stage manager, the playwright himself said that he needed to leave his
homeland to write drama that accurately reflected Norwegian life. While in Italy during the first few years of
his exile, Ibsen published Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), two plays that made him famous. From this
point on, Ibsen's works were more popular, but in some cases, such as 1879's A Doll's House, which addressed
the oppression of women, his plays dealt with controversial topics.

In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway from his twenty-sevenyear exile and continued to write major plays,
including The Master Builder (1892) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896). Shortly after completing When We
Dead Awaken (1899), a highly autobiographical play in which Ibsen questions his own life as an artist, Ibsen
suffered several strokes, which rendered him an invalid until his death several years later. Ibsen died on May
23, 1906, in Oslo, Norway.

Biography
Ibsen was born in 1828 in a small town in Norway. When he was fifteen years old, Ibsen left his family’s
home to begin an apprenticeship as an apothecary. Two years later, Ibsen fathered a child with an older
housemaid, and he was obligated to provide financial support over the next fifteen years.

In the late 1840s, he began to prepare for university examinations. Once at university in Christiana
(present-day Oslo), Ibsen became very involved with journalism. He edited a student paper, contributed
articles to another paper, and worked on a satirical journal. He also spent a great deal of time on his writing.
He completed and published his first play, Catiline, by 1849, and published poetry in a journal. In 1859, his
one-act play, The Warrior’s Barrow, becomes the first of his plays to be staged.

In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, Ibsen was engaged as playwright in residence at the National
Theater in Bergen. Over the next several years, the theater company performed a new Ibsen play each year.
By the end of the decade, his plays were also being performed at the Norwegian Theater in Christiana, where
he assumed duties as the artistic director. In both of these capacities, Ibsen was expected to produce ‘‘national
drama,’’ which checked his artistic expression. The bankruptcy of the Norwegian Theater left Ibsen free to

8
write for himself.

He was awarded a travel grant by the government, which was only the first of many grants that Ibsen received
from the Norwegian government, including an annual stipend. He left Norway for Italy in 1864, and he spent
the next twenty-seven years primarily living abroad, only returning to Norway for short visits in 1874 and
1885. Despite his absence from his native country, he remained a well-known figure there. For instance he
attended the opening of the Suez Canal as Norway’s representative, and in 1873, he was knighted.

With A Doll’s House (1879), classic Ibsen was born. In his work, Ibsen began the exploration of controversial,
social issues. Many of his plays created a furor among European audiences. By the late 1880s, however,
Ibsen’s work had become more self-analytic and symbolic. Works such as The Master Builder (1892) explore
an artist’s relation to society and contains an autobiographical element.

In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway to live, and he continued to write plays. On his seventieth birthday, he was
honored throughout Scandinavia. Also that year, the first volumes of the collected edition of his works was
published in Denmark and Germany. In 1901, he suffered his first stroke. Another stroke two years later left
him unable to write or walk. He died in 1906.

9
Critical Essays
Critical Essays: Henrik Ibsen Drama Analysis
“To be a poet is, most of all, to see,” Henrik Ibsen said, and early in his literary career, he had already
recognized the hammer as at once the symbol of creation and of destruction, with mythical overtones of the
Old Norse thunder god, Thor, who unflinchingly sacrificed his own hand to bind the wolf Fenris and save his
world from the unleashed forces of the underworld. Ibsen’s early poem “The Miner” shows his gaze fixed
firmly into the depths: “Downward I must break my way . . . break me the way, my heavy hammer, to the
hidden mystery’s heart.” Throughout his literary canon, although he is best known for his prose dramas, the
rich poetic vein is never far from the working face of Ibsen’s creativity.

The constructions and destructions necessary to the realization of Ibsen’s vision fall into two distinct
categories on either side of the watershed year of 1875. Fjelde differentiates them in apt architectural
metaphor, viewing the earlier romantic group of Ibsen’s plays as a diverse old quarter, ranging from Roman
villa to Viking guildhalls and even a contemporary honeymoon hotel, while glimpsing immediately beyond a
small arid space “what appears to be a model town of virtually identical row houses . . . dark and swarming
with secret life.”

Whatever the outward style of their construction, at the core, all of Ibsen’s earlier plays share a basically
romantic orientation. Romanticism had already reached its fiery height in most of Europe by the time Ibsen
published his first verse drama in 1850, but like the Northern summer sun, the German-derived glow of
romanticism lingered longer in Norway, where the emerging Norwegian state, lately reestablished, was
seeking its national identity in its Viking heritage. While reviewing a folkloristic play in 1851, Ibsen
presented his own characteristically individual theory on nationalism in literature: “A national author is one
who finds the best way of embodying in his work that keynote which rings out to us from mountain and valley
. . . but above all from within our own selves.” Following that precept at the risk of alienating superpatriots,
Ibsen wrote three Viking plays, Lady Inger of Østraat, The Feast at Solhaugh, and The Vikings at Helgeland.
In 1862, he made an extensive field trip to gather folklore, which he incorporated with Rousseauistic ideals of
the simple natural life in The Pretenders, another medieval Viking drama; in the volcanic Brand, set in the
harsh west fjord country; and in the lighthearted Peer Gynt.

An important part of Norway’s nationalistic fervor stemmed from its state Lutheranism, in which Ibsen had
received a traditionally rigorous grounding as a child, although none of his plays portrays clergymen
sympathetically. In Brand, Ibsen also seemed to embody Søren Kierkegaard’s famous “either-or” in Brand’s
call for “all or nothing,” challenging the institutionalized religion of his day. Haugen has commented that
paradoxically “the rascal Peer is saved, but the heroic Brand is sacrificed,” seeing therein a reflection of
Ibsen’s early religious training, similar to his puritanical attitude toward sex and his emphasis on the necessity
of confession and atonement for redemption.

The dominant philosophical trend of Ibsen’s time and place was the idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who died in 1831. Ibsen’s enormous double play, Emperor and Galilean, departs from the strictly
romantic theories present in his earlier work to take the direction of a Hegelian dialectic conflict between
“thesis” and “antithesis,” which is resolved by a “synthesis” that itself becomes the “thesis” of a new conflict.
Ibsen pits the pagan happiness that he had celebrated in his Viking plays against the spiritual beauty
represented by Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the Cross. The failure of Julian the Apostate to bring about the
required “third empire,” mingling the Christian and the pagan worlds, may be read as Ibsen’s rejection, like
Kierkegaard’s, of the possibility of achieving a synthesis in this life. For Ibsen, duality was inescapable in the
human condition, with man caught between what he is and what he should be, between the beastly nature and

10
the divine.

In 1875, midway in his literary career, Ibsen struck an “arid place” where he reluctantly had to concede that
the rhyme and meter suitable to romantic drama could no longer convey his explorations of “the hidden
mystery’s heart.” The literary trend in Europe, leading toward the realistic and even naturalistic expression of
contemporary social problems, came to Scandinavia principally through the critic Georg Brandes, who had
become Ibsen’s close friend in 1871. Ibsen’s last twelve plays divide neatly into three distinct subgroups of
four dramas each, characterized by their dominant thematic elements—social, psychological, and
philosophical. This sequence, which Ibsen clearly intended as an organic whole, leads inexorably from social
agony to spiritual conflict and at last to an area hitherto unexplored in Ibsen’s time, described by Fjelde as an
“extraordinary, pre-Freudian sensitivity to unconscious pressures behind the conscious mind—the
relationships of motives and conflicts bred in the troll-dark cellar.” In each category, Ibsen employed his
personal experiences differently. From The Pillars of Society to An Enemy of the People, the social plays use
contemporary settings that might have been encountered on the streets of Christiania and characters caught up
in the new industrialized manifestation of the old conflict between what is and what ought to be. Between The
Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s hammer broke through to a deeper layer of consciousness beyond the
social, forcing away the barriers which the individual erects between his self-image and his ideals. Finally,
from The Master Builder to When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen probed the clash between his artistic vocation and
his responsibility to those who loved him, using in each play a flawed creative personality who at last realizes
that the ultimate height of achievement is denied him because he has not been able to merge love with his art.
With the twelve plays of his prose cycle, Ibsen adopted what Fjelde calls “a way of seeing, deceptively
photographic on the surface, actually a complex fusion of perspectives, which then became his dramatic
method,” as, even more significantly, he simultaneously reached the summit and the deepest heart of his own
experience of life.

To the theater in particular and to literature in amazing generality, Ibsen bequeathed innovations almost as
astonishing in retrospect as they must have been to his contemporaries. He was first to involve ordinary
human beings in drama, abandoning the old artificial plots and instead creating scenes that might be
encountered in any stuffy drawing room or aching human heart. He conveyed for the first time in centuries a
depth and subtlety of understanding of human character and relationships, especially those of women,
evocative of the height of human tragic experience seen previously among the Elizabethans and the Periclean
Greeks. He dared to challenge social abuses, knowing their agonizing sting at first hand. He explored the
unconscious mind to an extent unmatched until the promulgation of Freud’s theories decades later.

The Vikings at Helgeland

Before Ibsen gained the summit of his creative efforts he participated in the attempt to create a national
Norwegian theater by writing plays based on Norwegian folktales. Ibsen gathered his material for The Vikings
at Helgeland not from the medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied but from a much older work, The
Völsungasaga, itself a derivation of the Elder Edda containing the story of the Valkyrie Brynhild, who
destroys her beloved hero Sigurd because he has betrayed her trust. Ibsen chose to base The Vikings at
Helgeland on the Icelandic family saga, in which, he said, “the titanic conditions and occurrences of The
Nibelungenlied and the Volsung-Saga have simply been reduced to human dimensions.” Yet he saw an
insoluble incompatibility between the objective saga and the dramatic form: “If a writer is to create a dramatic
work out of this epic material, he must introduce a foreign element. . . .” Ibsen’s “foreign element” in The
Vikings at Helgeland is realism, a rendition of the myth of Brynhild set in tenth century Norway, at the advent
of Christianity. The Brynhild-figure is Hjørdis, a merciless visionary, married to Gunnar but in love with
Gunnar’s close friend, the weak-willed warrior Sigurd, who had won her under the guise of Gunnar and with
whom she has had her only satisfying sexual experience. When Hjørdis learns of the deception—Sigurd is
married to another woman—she slays her lover, hoping to be united with him in death, but as he dies, Sigurd
reveals that his meek wife Dagny has converted him to Christianity. In despair and rage, the pagan Hjørdis

11
hurls herself into the sea. Ibsen’s preoccupation in The Vikings at Helgeland is not with the fall of mythic
goddesses and heroes but with the human tragedy wrought by deliberate falsehood, a theme to which he
would often return.

Brand

Ibsen called Brand “a dramatic poem.” Brand is a stern young pastor who defies both his church superiors and
the self-serving local governmental officials, demanding “all or nothing” in the service of his God. Brand even
applies his unbending doctrines to his mother, to whom he refuses to grant forgiveness unless she relinquishes
all her property, and to his wife and his child, who die because Brand will not take them to a milder climate.
Brand then leads his flock to an “ice church” high in the mountains, where he believes that they will all be
closer to God, but, daunted by the painful journey, his people at last stone him and return to their valley far
below. Brand is finally moved to tears by a vision of his dead wife shortly before he is buried by a mammoth
avalanche, above whose roar he hears a voice proclaim, “He is a God of love.” In Brand, the story of a man
whose tragedy is the negation of love, Ibsen not only used the figure of an acquaintance he had met in Rome,
Christopher Bruun, a devout reformer who fought the established church as well as the spirit of compromise,
but also drew on his own personality. He remarked in an 1870 letter, “Brand is myself in my best moments.”

Emperor and Galilean

Emperor and Galilean, the double play that stands between Ibsen’s two groups of dramas, ranges over much
of the fourth century Roman Empire, interpreting successive phases in the life of Julian the Apostate, who
tried to replace Constantine’s Christianity with a renewed paganism. In part 1, Caesar’s Apostasy, the young
Julian is disillusioned by Christianity and is influenced by the pagan seer Maximos, who desires a “third
empire” uniting classical beauty and Christian ethics. In part 2, The Emperor Julian, force proves ineffective
in reinstating pagan religious observances; in battle, Agathon, a Christian, slays Julian, who mutters as he
dies, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” Like Cain and Judas, Julian unknowingly changed history in a way he
never intended. Ibsen told Edmund Gosse, “The illusion I wanted to produce is that of reality . . . what I
desired to depict were human beings.” He also said later that Emperor and Galilean contained “more of my
own personal experience than I would care to admit.” He saw Christianity as removing the joy from human
life, his own included, encasing people in an emotional confinement from which only violent action could free
them. This play marks Ibsen’s “farewell to epic drama” and his adoption of prose as his dramatic medium;
Meyer calls it the “forerunner of those naturalistic plays which were shortly to explode . . . like a series of
bombs.”

A Doll’s House

The famous slamming of the Helmer front door in A Doll House was the second realistic explosion in Ibsen’s
bombardment of his society’s outmoded thought and repressive lifestyle. Significantly, new translations of the
play point out the vital difference between the older title, A Doll’s House, a house belonging to the “doll”
Nora, and A Doll House, a complex toy, as Fjelde suggests, that itself is “on trial . . . tested by the visitors that
come and go, embodying aspects of the inescapable reality outside.” At the beginning, Nora is merely a pretty
young wife preparing for Christmas, almost a child herself in her eagerness to please her banker-husband as
his “squirrel” and “lark.” As Hermann J. Weigand has demonstrated, however, Nora’s love of playacting, her
readiness to lie, and her desire to show off make her all the more convincing as she reveals that she has
secretly borrowed money needed to save her husband from a physical collapse. Worse, the conventions of the
day denied women the right to take out loans in their own names, so Nora was forced by circumstances to
forge her dying father’s signature to the loan. Her creditor, Nils Krogstad, blackmails her to keep his position
at Helmer’s bank. When Helmer learns of Nora’s debt, he selfishly and brutally declares that she is unfit to
rear their children. Nora recognizes the falsity of her position and leaves her husband and children, slamming
the door on her life as the toy of Helmer, who is himself a toy of society.

12
In his “Notes for a Modern Tragedy” (1878), Ibsen wrote, “There are two kinds of moral laws . . . one for men
and one, quite different, for women.” He knew that in his day, “woman is judged by masculine law,” and he
used for specifics the contemporary real-life tragedy of Laura Kieler, a friend of Ibsen who had taken out a
secret loan so that she could travel with her husband to Italy for his health. The loan went bad; she forged a
check; and when the bank refused payment, her husband had her committed to a public asylum and demanded
a separation, so that her children would not be contaminated by her presence. Kieler grudgingly took his wife
back eventually, but Ibsen’s use of her sad story in his play placed additional stress on their already difficult
relationship, and Laura Kieler resented A Doll House fiercely.

Many interpreters narrowly see A Doll House as a plea for female emancipation. Nothing seems further from
Ibsen’s intention. In 1879, he did strongly support equal voting rights for female members of the
Scandinavian Club in Rome, but nearly twenty years later, in 1898, when he spoke to the Norwegian League
for Women’s Rights, he declared, “My task has been the description of humanity,” as Fjelde notes, putting the
issue of women’s liberation squarely in the larger context of “the artist’s freedom and the evolution of the race
in general.”

Ghosts

Ibsen wrote to Sophie Adlersparre in 1882, “After Nora, Mrs. Alving had to come,” and he often said that
writing Ghosts was “an absolute necessity” for him. Mrs. Alving is not simply a Nora grown older, but a
character evolved into a vastly more tragic figure. Nora leaves her home, but Mrs. Alving stays with her
debauched husband, an irredeemable syphilitic sot. After his death, she builds an orphanage with his fortune
and welcomes home their son Oswald, who has been living as an artist in Paris. A villainous carpenter at the
orphanage, Engstrand, tries to entice his daughter Regine, Mrs. Alving’s maid, into becoming a hostess (and
more) in a seamen’s hangout he plans to build, and Engstrand convinces Mrs. Alving’s pastor, Manders, to
speak to Mrs. Alving in that regard. Manders, once Mrs. Alving’s lover, though he counseled her to return to
her husband, learns not only that Regine is Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter but also that Mrs. Alving
has begun to question her religion. As they talk, they overhear an innocent flirtation between Oswald and
Regine in the next room, a “ghost” of a flirtation of years before, when Mrs. Alving overheard her husband
and her maid, Regine’s mother. After fire destroys the uninsured orphanage, consuming the captain’s financial
legacy, the ill and exhausted Oswald learns the horrifying truth about Regine’s birth and his own inherited
venereal disease. Regine consequently leaves to join Engstrand, who blackmails Manders into supporting his
new business venture, and Mrs. Alving is left alone with Oswald as he slips into paretic insanity, begging his
mother to help him end his life at once.

Ibsen knew that such material could hardly help but inflame Victorian sensibilities. Early in 1882, he wrote,
“The violent criticisms and insane attacks . . . don’t worry me in the least.” As always, Ibsen relished the thrill
of the battle, but Ghosts aroused more negative sentiment than any of his other plays. Norwegian critics led
Europe in dismissing it, Ludvig Josephson calling it “one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia,”
and Erik Bøgh rejecting it as “a repulsive pathological phenomenon.”

Nevertheless, Ghosts stimulated the young and the daring. By 1888, some observers noted that the play was
comparable to classical Greek tragedy though written about modern people, an opinion still popular today.
Whereas in the Greek drama, inexorable Fate brings heroes low, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, the power of the past
devours the central figures. A choice once made must stand, regardless of the consequences, Ibsen is saying,
and all the shocks that he delivers to his audience reinforce his basic message. The human choice must be
made, in Fjelde’s words, “out of the integrity of one’s whole being.” The ghosts of the past rise to strangle
Helene Alving, the hypocritical Pastor Manders, and even the innocent victims of their parents’ mistakes,
Oswald and Regine. The most powerful of Ibsen’s tightly constructed social plays, Ghosts also marks an
important milestone in dramatic history; according to Meyer, it was “the first great tragedy written about
middle-class people in plain, everyday prose.”

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Rosmersholm

Ghosts of a somber past also haunt the brooding manor house in Rosmersholm, the second of Ibsen’s
psychological dramas and the one that, after Ghosts, had the worst contemporary reviews. Among the few
who supported it, Strindberg, in a rare tribute to Ibsen, declared Rosmersholm “unintelligible to the theatre
public, mystical to the semi-educated, but crystal-clear to anyone with a knowledge of modern psychology.”

The central problem of Rosmersholm is the redemption of a human spirit. A young, liberal-spirited woman,
Rebecca West, came to the estate on a western fjord as companion to Rosmer’s wife, Beate, and after Beate’s
suicide stayed on as manager of the household, influencing Rosmer, who feels drawn to her unconsciously.
His brother-in-law, the inflexible schoolmaster Kroll, attempts to turn Rosmer back to conservatism, but when
he fails, he recalls his late sister’s intimations of “goings-on,” as does the leader of the radical element, the
journalist Mortensgaard. Rosmer tries to quiet the talk by proposing to Rebecca, but she rejects him violently.
After Rosmer’s sense of guilt at his wife’s despair begins to eat at him, Rebecca openly admits her guilt in
urging Beate to death, confessing that she had acted out of love for him. As she prepares to leave the estate,
she tells Rosmer that her earlier “pagan” will has fallen under Rosmersholm’s traditional moralistic spell,
which “ennobles . . . but kills happiness.” Rosmer and Rebecca pledge their mutual love, savoring one final
moment of bliss before, in atonement, they follow Beate into the white foam of the millrace.

Meyer claims that “in this play Ibsen was, for the first time . . . in any play for over two centuries, overtly
probing the uncharted waters of the unconscious mind.” Ibsen had given the play the working title “The White
Horses,” after the ghost reputedly seen frequently on the estate, a white horse, the symbol of irresistible
unconscious forces driving the individual to excessive behavior, based on a folktale about a water spirit in
equine shape that lures its victims into dangerous depths. Ibsen gradually reveals that Rebecca came to
Rosmerholm as not only the former mistress of one Dr. West but also, as she learned too late, his daughter.
Her Oedipal guilt, as Freud observed in 1914, drove her to dispose of Beate, “getting rid of the wife and
mother, so that she might take her place with the husband and father.” Beate’s death in the millrace was only
the most recent guilt-inspired act of violence that Rebecca, under the refining, “ennobling” influence of
Rosmer, found she must expiate. Ironically, Rosmer himself is weak, and his one act of heroism is performed
for Rebecca: “There is no judge over us; and therefore we must do justice upon ourselves.”

In his advice to a young actress undertaking the role of Rebecca in Christiania, Ibsen wrote, “Observe the life
that is going on around you, and present a real and living human being.” He also instructed the head of the
Christiania Theater that Rebecca “does not force Rosmer forward. She lures him.” His characterization of
Rebecca West, who throughout the play crochets an indefinable white garment, calls up mythic overtones of
the Norse Norns, spinning out human destiny in some white-fogged eternal night. Ibsen’s revelation of man’s
destiny in Rosmersholm is once more in woman’s hands, here lightening the eternal dark with one perfect
gesture of sacrificial atonement made ironically for an imperfect lover, an echo of the myth of Brynhild that
he had treated earlier in The Vikings at Helgeland and to which he would return before long.

With Rosmersholm, Ibsen left off political themes as motivation in his drama. The men and women of the
Ibsen plays that followed became increasingly aware of what Meyer calls “the trolls within, not the trolls
without . . . strange sick passions which direct their lives.” Ibsen’s earlier plays had portrayed men such as
Rosmer undone by their involvement with provincial politics, while his later works stress figures, mostly
women such as Rebecca, who feel intense passion but who cannot express it and thus become “ennobled”
without some salvific act of atonement requiring the emancipation of self-sacrifice.

Hedda Gabler

In the powerful domestic tragedy Hedda Gabler, often considered his most popular play, Ibsen adapted the
old myth of Brynhild to startling new uses. Around this time, he wrote, “Our whole being is nothing but a

14
fight against the dark forces within ourselves,” and he began to see that the greatest human resource in that
struggle, the will, tended to remain undeveloped in women of his day. As the daughter of General Gabler,
Hedda had romantically dreamed of a perfect hero, but her dreams and her physical realization with a man not
her equal were quite different. Eilert Løvborg, whose combination of profligacy and brilliant scholarship had
originally fascinated her, proved unworthy, and she turned in anger and frustration to mediocre Jørgen
Tesman, settling for the weaker man as Hjørdis had done in The Vikings at Helgeland. Like Hjørdis, too,
Hedda is violently jealous of the gentle girl her first hero seems to prefer. At the opening of the play, Hedda
and Jørgen have returned to their bourgeois home and to Jørgen’s bourgeois aunts after a wretched six-month
European honeymoon. Hedda is suffering from massive ennui already, compounded by a pregnancy she
ferociously denies. When she learns that Eilert Løvborg has reformed under the tutelage of ordinary Thea
Elvstad, whose lovely curling hair she has always envied, Hedda exacts a horrifying vengeance. She goads
Løvborg to drink again; he loses the only manuscript of the monumental book he has composed with Thea’s
help, and he later comes to his senses in the boudoir of the redheaded Mlle Diana, a notorious fille de joie.
Jørgen finds Løvborg’s manuscript and gives it to Hedda, but when Løvborg, frantic at the loss of his “child,”
comes to Hedda for help, she denies all knowledge of it. Alone, she burns his book, and after a final
conversation, she sends him to a “beautiful” death by handing him one of her father’s dueling pistols. Hedda’s
own moment of despair arrives when she learns that Løvborg has botched his suicide disgracefully. She now
is trapped not only with Jørgen, and Thea Elvstad, now Jørgen’s scholarly inspiration, and his remaining aunt,
but also with a blackmail threat from lascivious Judge Brack. Her only escape is to kill herself and Jørgen’s
despised unborn child.

The portrayal of Hedda Gabler has challenged actresses throughout the play’s history, and critics have read
her variously as a frustrated feminist, a remnant of the shattered aristocracy, a sadistic psychopath, and even,
as Meyer does, as Ibsen’s “Portrait of the Dramatist as a Young Woman.” No one-sided interpretation seems
adequate. Throughout this play, the most claustrophobic of Ibsen’s dramas, Hedda Gabler moves in a web of
complex symbols, trapped at last, according to Haugen, “between a Christian-bourgeois domesticity and a
pagan-saturnine liaison.” Her father’s pistols, symbols of his rank, his avocation, and his personality,
represent both Hedda’s entrapment and her release, for the pistol found with the mortally wounded Eilert
Løvborg at Mlle Diana’s establishment catches Hedda in an unthinkable scandal, while the remaining one
allows her to make restitution to the only person who matters now to Hedda Gabler—herself.

Hedda Gabler is appropriately the last of Ibsen’s psychological dramas. Ibsen often claimed that
“Self-realization is man’s highest task and greatest happiness,” yet, as he expressed it in Peer Gynt, “to be
oneself is to slay oneself.” Hedda Gabler’s tragedy is not merely the selfish act of a spoiled, bored woman, but
a heroic act to free herself from a domination she cannot accept. Incapable of selfless love for a fatal multitude
of reasons, Hedda Gabler at last even ruefully abandons her youthful dream of “vine leaves in his hair,” the
pagan ecstasy that had aroused her sensuous curiosity toward Eilert Løvborg. Her self-realization allows her
one last moment of paradoxical human life, the moment she leaves it, a poetic truth of “hidden and mysterious
power,” in Martin Esslin’s words, “which springs from the co-existence of the realistic surface with the deep
subconscious fantasy and dream elements behind it.”

The Master Builder

Not long after the publication of The Master Builder, Ibsen stated, “It’s extraordinary what profundities and
symbols they ascribe to me. . . . Can’t people just read what I write?” Ibsen insisted then, as always, that he
only wrote about people’s inner lives as he knew them: “Any considerable person will naturally be . . .
representative of the . . . thoughts and ideas of the age, so that the portrayal of such a person’s inner life may
seem symbolic.” Having shared experiences, at least to some degree, with many of his characters, Ibsen’s last
plays, the philosophical garnering of his life’s harvest, are in that sense rich in symbol.

15
The title “Master Builder” has been applied frequently to Ibsen himself in recognition of his mastery of his
craft and art, and more perilously, as an identification of the dramatist with the hero of the first of his
philosophical plays, Halvard Solness, a talented architect just realizing that he is passing his prime. At the
peak of his chosen profession, Solness is gnawed by his wife’s unhappiness, a result of his absorption in his
work, and obsessed by his strange ability to affect the lives of others, especially his bookeeper Kaja, by the
extrasensory projection of his powerful will. Solness had begun his career with churches erected to the glory
of God, though for the last ten years he has defied God by choosing to build only human dwellings. Now
Solness is attempting a synthesis, a “third world” of architecture, by building himself a home with a tall spire,
like a church. At this difficult moment in his art and life, the passionate young Hilde Wangel enters both. She
had become infatuated with Solness ten years earlier when he had daringly hung his last dedication wreath on
the tower of her village church. She now urges him to repeat the feat, though he has begun to suffer from
vertigo, and, inspired by her youthful ardor, he attempts “the impossible” again. As Hilde waves her white
shawl—like Rebecca’s, but completed, quivering to unseen harps—Solness plunges to his death.

Critics following William Archer have often played heavily on overt resemblances between Ibsen and
Solness. Their ages are similar, their marriages unhappily affected by their devotion to their work, their
infatuations with much younger girls notorious. Other commentators stress the resemblance between
Solness’s three types of building and Ibsen’s three types of prose drama. Still others stress the Hegelian
thesis-antithesis-attempted synthesis structure of Solness’s work and Ibsen’s several dramatic versions of that
theme. Meyer cites Ibsen’s 1898 lecture to students in Christiania, in which he observed that Solness was “a
man somewhat akin to me.” In an interview, Ibsen also declared that architecture was “my own trade.” His
“May sun,” Emilie Bardach, was unspeakably grieved to have been identified publicly with the vicious Hilde
of The Master Builder, and conjectures about Solness’s marriage injured Ibsen’s relations with his own wife.
Haugen suggests that The Master Builder “involves the Christian-pagan conflict,” since Solness defies God,
ceases building churches, and attempts to find his creative outlet solely among “happy human beings.” Fjelde
convincingly warns against equating Solness’s “homes for happy human beings” with Ibsen’s Ghosts or
Rosmersholm, and suggests an archetypal reading, in which Solness represents the sacred king who has
reached the acme of his powers and must be sacrificed by his own consent to ensure the continued existence
of his clan, an impression reinforced, Fjelde claims, when at the close of the play “the young king, Ragnar,
brings to the old king, Solness, that ambiguous symbol of victory and death, the ribboned wreath.”

Thus, Solness’s death, which illuminates the entire play, may be seen on various levels of meaning, as
biographically, realistically, symbolically, and mythically significant. The Master Builder perhaps more than
any other of Ibsen’s plays illustrates the immense control that Ibsen could exert over his expressed theme
through the limpid prose he used as his dramatic vehicle, which approaches poetry in its compression,
imagery, and suggestiveness. Here, too, Ibsen examines not only the workings of the unconscious mind but
also mysterious powers beyond ordinary sensory perception, without destroying his chosen naturalistic
perspective. Fjelde aptly describes the dramatic method in Solness’s tragedy as “Truths beyond, within,
outside the self . . . a lyric and seamless unity.”

Critical Essays: Henrik Ibsen World Literature Analysis

Ibsen’s protagonists generally have great difficulty in coming to terms with the ideas, institutions, and laws
that direct their lives. For that reason, they battle for freedom and truth, though their efforts are frequently
undermined by the fact that their own past misdeeds threaten to destroy them. This pattern is already evident
in Cataline, the protagonist of Ibsen’s first play. An ardent idealist, Cataline is powerless to reform a corrupt
society because he is haunted by the ghosts of his own past. The two women in his life, his gentle wife
Aurelia and the avenging Furia, represent the opposing forces at war within him. The alternative to active
engagement with the forces that limit freedom is aesthetic withdrawal. The conflict between Ibsen’s own
desire to retreat into aesthetic contemplation and his need to act is clearly expressed in “On the Fells,” a poem

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about a hunter who contemplates life from the heights. Ascent to the mountain top, a common Romantic
symbol of artistic detachment, is nearly always connected with the aesthetic view of life in Ibsen’s plays.

Many of the concerns of Ibsen’s early plays come into sharp focus in the two verse dramas Brand and Peer
Gynt, both of which raise the question of how one can be true to one’s self. Loosely based on some of the
ideas of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Brand, with its insistence on total commitment (“all or
nothing”), is an existentialist tragedy. Brand is a fiery young pastor who carries Romantic individualism to the
extreme. After an unrelenting struggle against “the spirit of compromise,” a struggle that costs the lives of his
infant son and his wife, he is swallowed up by an avalanche, which reproves him with the words, “He is the
God of love.” If Brand represents commitment to duty and to a high-minded way of life that kills joy and
denies love, Peer Gynt, the hero of Ibsen’s next play, learns—almost too late—that only by rejecting the
self-sufficiency of the romantic individualist and committing oneself to love can one transcend the limits of
the self.

The opposition between Brand’s self-denial and Peer’s self-indulgence is restated in Emperor and Galilean as
the conflicting claims of Christian asceticism (the Tree of the Cross) and pagan hedonism (the Tree of
Knowledge). In this play, the Emperor Julian dreams of effecting a synthesis between these two views of life
by establishing a mysterious “third empire.” The hope that some such synthesis will open a new path for
happiness and self-fulfillment recurs in many of Ibsen’s subsequent dramas. Emperor and Galilean was
Ibsen’s last historical play; Peer Gynt was his last verse drama. After The Pillars of Society, all of Ibsen’s
plays deal with contemporary life. The Pillars of Society is a thesis play designed to show that society is built
on rotten foundations. Following the pattern of the popular French “well-made play,” Ibsen makes the gradual
unveiling of past misdeeds the source of dramatic tension in this play, but instead of trivializing and resolving
all conflicts in the last act, he adds psychological depth and social significance to this technique by pressing
forward to an unmasking and a confession. A similar pattern underlies all of his subsequent dramas: The
protagonist is forced to confront a problem from the past.

In most of these plays, personal conflict is rooted in ideological differences. Ultraconservative characters,
usually businessmen or lawyers, oppose any sort of social change that will jeopardize their wealth or their
authority. Their outmoded ideas are challenged by rebellious, idealistic individualists who may be political
reformers, artists, or women. The truth-seeking idealists in The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, and An
Enemy of the People believe that it is their duty to identify and label “life-lies,” that is, the evasions and
distortions of the truth in the light of which most people lead their lives. Serving as foils to Ibsen’s female
rebels are a number of female figures for whom ideas or moral issues are less important than security and the
opportunity to be devoted wives and mothers. Many of Ibsen’s important characters have lost their chance for
happiness by marrying for money rather than for love. Others have an unfortunate tendency to misjudge or
overestimate the people whom they are trying to reform or to dominate.

Ibsen first began to question the power of the truth to make humanity free in The Wild Duck, where he seems
to conclude that most people have a very limited capacity for facing the truth and that harmless illusions are
much less dangerous than full-blown ideals. In his next three plays, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and
Hedda Gabler, he offers psychological portraits of women whose inner struggles threaten to destroy them.
Isolated male figures tend to dominate the plays that he wrote after his return to Norway—The Master
Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken—all of which deal with impotence,
old age, and the lack of love. In one way or another, all four of these plays raise once again the question of
aesthetic withdrawal, only to show that love, not art, is the only means of self-fulfillment.

More a gadfly than a preacher, Ibsen frequently poses problems without attempting to solve them. The master
of the strong curtain, he favors contrapuntal endings: Two opposing views of life collide, leaving motivations
and outcomes in doubt. Ibsen believed that the playwright’s task was to raise questions, not answer them.

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Peer Gynt

First produced: 1876 (first published, 1867; English translation, 1892)

Type of work: Play

A romantic dreamer tries to find an empire within himself but finally discovers that his empire really lies in
the love of Solveig, the woman who loves him.

Peer Gynt, the title character, is a man in search of himself. His problem is that he misunderstands
“self-realization” and seeks fulfillment in his poetic dreams because he fears life and love. In order to show
the full range of his negative development, Ibsen shows Peer first as a feckless young man of twenty, then as a
middle-aged tycoon, and finally as a broken old man returning to his native Norway.

As a youth, Peer lives fictional adventures so vividly in his imagination that they almost become his own life
experiences. He dreams of being an emperor but is never ready when opportunity knocks. While he has been
playing hooky in the uplands, Ingrid of Hegstad, an heiress whom he might have married, has been betrothed
to another young man. Looking for trouble, Peer sets off for Hegstad to engage in belated courtship. Among
the wedding guests is Solveig, a pure young woman whom Peer instantly loves. When Solveig refuses to
dance with him, he gets drunk and steals the bride. Abducting Ingrid makes Peer an outlaw. Though Ingrid is
quite willing to marry Peer, he sends her back to her father because he loves Solveig. In what may be a dream
sequence, he encounters a woman in green, the daughter of the Troll King, who takes him to her father’s
kingdom, where everything is reversed: Black seems white and foul looks pure. Peer is a candidate for the
hand of this troll princess, a negative counterpart of Solveig, but in order to win her father’s full approval he
must wear a tail and accept selfishness as a way of life. Peer is quite willing to accept these conditions, until
he learns that in doing so he can never return to humanity.

After his narrow escape from the trolls, Peer’s path is blocked by a languid monster called the Boyg, who tells
him to “go roundabout.” The Boyg seems to be a portmanteau symbol for everything that prevents Peer from
being himself. By having church bells rung, his mother Åse and Solveig—the women who love
Peer—manage to save him both from the trolls and the Boyg, yet they cannot save him from himself. What
little remains of Åse’s property is seized to compensate Ingrid’s father; yet she gladly suffers for her son.
Solveig makes an even bigger sacrifice for Peer: She leaves her beloved family and searches for Peer in his
mountain hut. When the troll princess arrives accompanied by their troll son, however, Peer realizes how
unworthy he is of Solveig’s love and “goes roundabout,” abandoning her there.

Many years later in North Africa, Peer is a middle-aged millionaire who owes his fortune to all sorts of
unprincipled enterprises. Though still apparently human, he has espoused the troll way of life, which he now
defines as “the Gyntian self.” Most of the fourth act takes place in a symbolic desert that represents the aridity
of this “Gyntian self.” Riding a stolen horse, he encounters a group of Bedouins who take him for a prophet.
He falls in love with the exotic dancer Anitra and believes that he is emperor of her thoughts, but she strips
him of his rings and clothes and rides off on his horse, abandoning him as he once abandoned Ingrid. While
contemplating the Great Sphinx, Peer meets Begriffenfeldt, the mad director of an insane asylum in Cairo. At
the asylum, the only place where illusion truly triumphs over reality, the inmates hail Peer as one of them, and
Begriffenfeldt crowns him the Emperor of Self.

One brief scene in act 4 shows the faithful Solveig still waiting for Peer’s return. In act 5, the aged and
embittered Peer does return to Norway, where everything that he encounters reminds him of his wasted life
and points to his impending death. Near his old mountain hut, he hears Solveig singing and realizes that this
was where his true empire lay. Yet he is still afraid to face her. Haunted by the emptiness of his stillborn
visions, he next encounters the eerie Button Moulder, a mysterious figure who has been sent to dissolve him,

18
since he has never become the self that he was intended to be. During the final scenes in the play, Ibsen
illustrates what “being oneself” really means. Only in the loving arms of Solveig does the dying Peer discover
that he has always been himself in her faith, her hope, and her love.

A Doll’s House

First produced: Et dukkehjem, 1879 (first published, 1879; English translation, 1880)

Type of work: Play

After eight years of marriage, a woman discovers that her husband has never understood her and that
marriage has prevented her from becoming herself.

In A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer returns home on Christmas Eve with a Christmas tree that must be hidden
from the children until it is trimmed. Indeed, hiding is a major theme in this play. Later in the first act, Nora
plays hide-and-seek with her children, and she hides the macaroons that her husband, Torvald, has forbidden
her to eat. A more dangerous secret is the fact that, years earlier, she had borrowed a large amount of money
to pay for the sojourn in Italy that enabled Torvald to recover from a serious illness. She had borrowed the
money illegally from a usurer named Krogstad, and she has secretly been repaying the loan out of the small
sums that she is able to earn by copying documents or to save from her household budget. To spare her dying
father, who was to have been her cosigner, she even forged his signature on the contract.

That something is wrong with the Helmers’ marriage quickly becomes evident in the first scene: Torvald
treats Nora more like a favorite child than a wife, and to please him she seems perfectly willing to pretend to
be his little “skylark” or his “squirrel.” In other words, she is content to live in a dollhouse. Nora’s old school
friend, Mrs. Linde, is one of those Ibsen characters who has married for money, not for love. The man she did
love—and jilted—was Krogstad. Now a penniless and childless widow, she would be very happy to settle
down in a dollhouse, but necessity forces her to beg Nora to help her get a job in Torvald’s bank.

The plot hinges upon Nora’s ignorance of three important facts: Krogstad holds a minor position in the bank
of which Torvald is shortly to become manager; Torvald is so embarrassed by Krogstad’s presumptuous
familiarity that he plans to fire him; and forgery, no matter what the motivation, is a serious crime. Ironically,
Torvald fires Krogstad and promises his position to Mrs. Linde. This act prompts Krogstad, who is trying to
regain his respectability, to use his knowledge of Nora’s forgery to blackmail her: If he loses his job, he will
expose her and ruin Torvald. Nora’s attempt to persuade Torvald to retain Krogstad precipitates the crisis:
Torvald angrily dispatches the letter of dismissal. Her situation worsens when Krogstad delivers an ultimatum
and leaves a letter exposing her crime. In desperation, Nora tells Mrs. Linde about the incriminating letter now
locked in the mailbox and urges her to use whatever power that she may still have over Krogstad to persuade
him to ask for it back unread. By the end of the second act, Nora sees only two possible ways out of her
dilemma: Either she will save her beloved husband’s reputation by committing suicide, or what she calls “the
miracle” will happen, and he will magnanimously assume full responsibility for her crime. In an interview
with Krogstad, Mrs. Linde succeeds in reviving his love for her, but she precipitates the final crisis by
forbidding him to retract his letter.

Torvald’s explosive reaction to Krogstad’s letter shows Nora that the man for whom she was willing to
sacrifice her life, the man capable of “the miracle,” is a fiction. Discovering that he is self-centered, petty, and
unfeeling, she can no longer love him. To challenge his outmoded ideas about marriage, she becomes a rebel
and informs him that she is leaving him and the children. When he admonishes her that she is duty bound to
remain, she says that she has discovered a higher duty: her duty to herself. She exits, slamming the door on a
bewildered Torvald.

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Part of the play’s effectiveness on stage depends on Ibsen’s suggestive use of props, costumes, and activities
(for example, the Christmas tree, the macaroons, the game of hide-and-seek) to illustrate psychological states
or to underscore symbolic meanings. In its day, A Doll’s House was extremely controversial. While many
applauded Nora’s determination to “be herself,” many more condemned her as “unnatural” for deserting her
children. More than a century later, the play still raises questions that stimulate readers and spectators.

An Enemy of the People

First produced: En folkefiende, 1883 (first published, 1882; English translation, 1890)

Type of work: Play

When a doctor tries to reveal that the water supply for a planned health resort is infected, he is discredited
and ostracized because the truth threatens the economic stability of the community.

In An Enemy of the People, Dr. Thomas Stockmann is chief medical officer at The Baths, a health resort that
is soon to open. Though he first conceived the idea of developing this resort, his older brother, Peter, the
mayor of the town, had the business sense and political connections to put it into effect. Ibsen uses the
contrast between the two brothers to establish the ideological framework of the play: Thomas is a liberal but
impractical idealist; the ultraconservative Peter is motivated chiefly by self-interest and what he calls “the
good of the community.” Dr. Stockmann’s home is a haven for people with liberal ideas: Billing and Hovstad,
who edit the town’s liberal newspaper; Horster, an open-minded sea captain; and Thomas Stockmann’s
freethinking daughter, Petra, a schoolteacher. Petra is the first character to raise what is to become the major
theme in the play, the “life-lie.” When she complains that, at school, she is forced to teach children to believe
in lies, Captain Horster encourages her to found a school where children will learn the truth.

The crucial issue in the play emerges when Dr. Stockmann receives a laboratory report confirming his
suspicions that the water supply for The Baths is polluted. Jubilant that he has detected the contamination in
time to prevent a disastrous epidemic, all the liberals offer their support and declare him a public hero. Peter
Stockmann, however, intends to discredit his brother, because the enormous costs of reconstructing the water
system spells financial ruin for the investors and, ultimately, for the whole town. Because he has the liberal
press and the majority on his side, and, above all, because he is right, Thomas is confident of victory. The
battle lines are quickly drawn, but the motives on both sides are mixed. Thomas Stockmann’s wife, Katherine,
sees the impending fight as a threat to the security of her family. The mayor fears financial ruin and the
erosion of his political power. Hovstad is a spineless political opportunist who will espouse any cause that
promises to increase his power. Katherine’s surrogate father, Morten Kiil, wants revenge for having been
voted off the town council. Because Thomas Stockmann and Petra are the only combatants free of
self-interest, it proves easy for the mayor to swing the entire community to his side.

Unable to get his message across through the press, Thomas Stockmann calls a public meeting in Captain
Horster’s house, where he intends to expose the fact that the whole town’s prosperity is rooted in a lie. His
opponents take charge of the meeting, however, and rule all discussion of The Baths out of order. Goaded to
fury, he abandons his intended subject and develops the symbolic significance of the situation: The town’s
spiritual sources are polluted, and the whole civic community is built over a cesspool of lies. The authorities
may be stupid and inflexible, but the worst enemy of truth and freedom is the majority. He launches into a
diatribe against the whole notion of a democratic society. The majority is always wrong, he claims, because
most people are fools, too lazy to think for themselves and therefore easily led by demagogues. Truth is
relative and always changing; by the time that truths filter down to the majority, they are so outdated that they
can hardly be distinguished from lies. One such lie is that the common herd has the same right to criticize,
govern, and counsel as the few intellectuals. The elitism and incipient racism of his remarks about the relation
between class and intelligence so incense the crowd that he is voted “an enemy of the people.”

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The hostility of the mob does not stop with a vote of censure; the Stockmann family is assaulted on every
front. The mayor and his supporters visit Thomas Stockmann and try to appeal to his self-interest in the hope
of getting him to retract his report on the pollution at The Baths. The final test comes when old Morten Kiil
informs him that all the money that he would have left to Katherine’s children is invested in The Baths and
will be lost unless he says he was mistaken about the contamination. All these threats to his integrity convince
Thomas Stockmann to abandon his plan to take his family to the United States. He realizes that he must stay
in Norway and fight. He and Petra vow to open a school in Horster’s house, where they will try to train the
“mongrels” to become decent and independent-minded people.

One problem that arises in interpreting this play stems from the disparity between Thomas Stockmann’s facts,
which are correct, and his opinions, some of which are indeed questionable. He is frequently ridiculous, and
his elitism (his talk of “mongrel” people) clashes sharply with the progressive views that he claims to cherish.
Ibsen apparently undermines his protagonist in this manner because there is no reasonable spokesman for the
other points of view. In adapting this play for the American stage, American playwright Arthur Miller
eliminated Thomas Stockmann’s disagreeable or ridiculous traits, as well as his “fascistic” opinions.

Hedda Gabler

First produced: 1891 (first published, 1890; English translation, 1891)

Type of work: Play

An unsuccessful attempt to shape the destiny of the man whom she once loved deprives a bored aristocratic
lady of her last remaining sense of freedom.

While the familiar Ibsenian patterns remain intact in Hedda Gabler, the conflict is no longer rooted in
ideology. Though she loved the glamorous and dissolute Eilert Løvborg, fear of scandal and of her own
repressed sexuality prevented Hedda Gabler from giving her love free rein. As a last resort, she has married
George Tesman, a humdrum, middle-class historian, whom she does not love. While George is astonished that
he has had the good fortune to marry the daughter of the late General Gabler, Hedda is despondent to find
herself trapped in the hopelessly bourgeois Tesman family. George and Hedda both have returned from their
long wedding trip with expectations: George fully expects to be appointed to a professorship, and Hedda,
much to her dismay, is expecting Tesman’s child. George has assumed that the appointment will
automatically be his, because Eilert Løvborg, his only serious rival, has long suffered from acute alcoholism.
He soon learns, however, that Eilert has stopped drinking and has published a very successful book. He is not
aware, however, that Eilert is still deeply in love with Hedda.

Eilert has recently completed another book, which promises to be his masterpiece. When Thea Elvsted, the
wife of Eilert’s former employer, beseeches Tesman to keep an eye on Eilert because she fears that he may
start drinking again, Hedda is intrigued. Without difficulty, she gets Thea to admit that, though she has
managed to reform Eilert, she has never been able to win his love because he is still haunted by the shadow of
another woman. Thea is unaware that Hedda is that woman, and Hedda is extremely gratified to learn that she
may still exercise great power over Eilert. She puts this power to the test when she successfully tempts him to
take a drink and then to accompany George to a party. Hedda wants to shape Eilert’s destiny by freeing him
from fear of alcoholism. Though she assures Thea that he will return “with vine leaves in his hair,” by which
she means that his debauchery will have been translated into Dionysian creativity, she is also aware that he
may instead succumb to his weakness. Either way, she will have gained control over him.

Unable to control himself, Eilert becomes so drunk at the party that he loses the manuscript of his new book.
Tesman, who finds it, entrusts it to Hedda for safekeeping. When the distraught Eilert enters near the end of
act 3, he tells Hedda and Thea that he has destroyed the manuscript. Thea, who regards this book as her and

21
Eilert’s “spiritual child,” is crushed. After Thea’s departure, Eilert confesses to Hedda that he dared not tell
her that he had simply lost “their child,” and he intimates that he intends to “end it all” as soon as possible.
Firmly believing that his sense of honor will not allow him to live with his failure to master his weakness,
Hedda gives him one of her father’s dueling pistols and tells him to “do it beautifully.” After he leaves, she
gleefully burns Eilert’s and Thea’s “child.”

Though the first account of Eilert’s death suggests that he has fulfilled Hedda’s expectations, the audience
subsequently learns that he has not committed suicide at all. In fact, he has been fatally shot by accident in a
brothel, where he was raving about “a lost child.” Hedda’s failure to shape his destiny brings her face-to-face
with her own failure to achieve selfhood. The final degradation occurs when Judge Brack, who recognized the
gun that killed Eilert as one of General Gabler’s pistols, intimates that the price of his silence is Hedda’s
agreement to become his mistress. This final loss of freedom seems to motivate her to shape her own destiny.
While Thea and George are patiently working at the task of reconstructing Eilert’s lost book from notes that
Thea has kept, Hedda goes into the adjacent room and shoots herself in the temple.

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Analysis
Analysis: Other Literary Forms
Henrik Ibsen’s volume of poetry, Digte, was published in 1871; Ibsen: Letters and Speeches appeared in
English translation in 1964, and The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen appeared between 1906 and 1912 and in
1928.

Analysis: Achievements
Henrik Ibsen is widely acknowledged as the father of modern drama, but his significance in literature and
history overshadows the influence of his revolutionary stage techniques and his iconoclastic concept of the
theater. James Joyce observed of Ibsen, his youthful idol, “It may be questioned whether any man has held so
firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times.” Despite early disappointments, which led to
twenty-seven years of self-imposed exile from Norway, Ibsen at last received the acclaim there that he had
been accorded previously throughout Europe, and by the end of his long and immensely productive career, the
Norwegian government granted him a state funeral as one of its most illustrious, if controversial, citizens.
Ibsen’s plays continue to be revived throughout the world, and a steady stream of scholarly books and articles
testifies to his popularity among critics and readers who appreciate the therapeutic Northern blasts of Ibsen’s
message.

The unvarying setting of Ibsen’s quest as a creative artist was the human mind. At first, he concentrated, with
little success, on Norwegian nationalistic themes and historical subjects, in opposition to the Danish
domination of Scandinavian theater. As he probed increasingly profound psychological themes involving the
individual and society, his analytic dramas seemed threateningly radical, largely incomprehensible, or simply
obscene to European audiences then content with frothy farce or Scribean melodrama. His first plays written
from exile in Italy won for him fame, but their critical reception was mixed. Later, his social problem plays
found their greatest contemporary acceptance in England through William Archer’s devoted translations and
George Bernard Shaw’s espousal of Ibsen’s work as support for his own Socialist theories. In his next stage,
Ibsen concentrated on the individual’s psychological condition; his last plays, written after his return to
Norway, which deal with the conflict between art and life, exhibited his shift to Symbolism and were greeted
with enthusiasm by James Joyce and Thomas Mann, who both learned Norwegian solely to read Ibsen’s
works. Another lonely thinker, Sigmund Freud, wrote a perceptive essay on the Oedipus complex as
motivation in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Much of Europe, especially czarist Russia, saw Ibsen’s plays as
potentially explosive, but by 1935, the prominent critic Johanna Kröner commented, “Through Ibsen’s
influence, European drama has experienced a powerful renewal and progress.”

Ibsen’s technical innovations in the theater have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to grasp the
intense novelty that they represented to their contemporary audiences. The strongly realistic and even
naturalistic stage settings of his mature plays contain a wealth of closely observed detail that requires a
corresponding intensity of attention by actors to the individualized behavior of his characters. His tense,
crackling interchanges of dialogue, a dramatic shorthand, often seem to omit more words than they include,
conveying highly complex states of mind and passions through implication and demanding a high degree of
emotional stamina from his actors. As his American translator Rolf Fjelde has observed, the language of
Ibsen’s finest plays resembles poetry in its compaction and resonance. Above all, as Henry James noted, Ibsen
has a “peculiar blessedness to actors . . . the inspiration of dealing with material so solid and so fresh,” an
attraction that seems as valid for the careful reader as it is for Ibsen’s stage interpreter. Though Ibsen’s
contributions to dramatic theory and form have been outmoded by many of the very dramatists his work
inspired, his insight into the human condition has not dated. Ibsen insisted that he not only “described human

23
beings” but also “described human fates.” Such fates, springing from deep conflicts in human personalities,
provide both solid and fresh material for endless meditation. In scholar Einar Haugen’s words, “Ibsen’s plays .
. . enable people to look beyond the little cares of the day and . . . give them some glimpses of eternity.”

Analysis: Discussion Topics

In what ways did Henrik Ibsen forge a remarkably effective preparation for his career?

Which accounts for the fact that Ibsen wrote most of his best-known plays while living in Munich and Rome:
frustration, a perspective gained by being away, an escape from “the ghosts of the past,” or some other factor?

Was Ibsen a champion of the rebel or an admirer of just a selection of rebellious characteristics?

Show how the structure of Ibsen’s plays demonstrates his correctness in choosing the drama rather than
narrative art.

In Hedda Gabler, what is the significance of the oft-repeated phrase about vine leaves in Eilert’s hair?

What does it mean that Ibsen’s plays “complement and correct one another in a dialectical manner”?

The conflict in An Enemy of the People seems very relevant today. Would it have been even more so then if
Ibsen had substantiated more effectively the opposition to Dr. Stockmann?

Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Henrik Ibsen. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. A collection of criticism regarding
Ibsen’s plays. Bibliography and index.

Ferguson, Robert. Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography. London: R. Cohen, 1996. A basic biography that covers
the life and works of Ibsen. Bibliography and index.

Garland, Oliver. A Freudian Poetics for Ibsen’s Theatre: Repetition, Recollection, and Paradox. Lewiston,
N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1998. A Freudian approach to examining the psychology that pervades Ibsen’s plays.
Bibliography and index.

Goldman, Michael. Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. An
analysis of Ibsen’s plays with respect to his portrayal of fear. Bibliography and index.

Johnston, Brian. The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from “Pillars of Society” to “When We Dead
Awaken.” Rev. ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. An examination of some of
Ibsen’s social plays. Bibliography and index.

Ledger, Sally. Henrik Ibsen. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in association with the British Council,
1999. A biographical study of the dramatist Ibsen. Bibliography and index.

McFarlane, James, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A
comprehensive reference work devoted to Ibsen. Bibliography and index.

Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997.
An examination of Symbolism, modernism and Ibsen, focusing on his reception in England and France.

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Bibliography and index.

Templeton, Joan. Ibsen’s Women. 1997. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A study of
Ibsen’s drama that examines his portrayal of women. Bibliography and index.

Theoharis, Theoharis Constantine. Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996. A critical examination of Ibsen’s plays, with special emphasis on the themes of joy and dutiful
action. Bibliography and index.

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