Ibsens Ghosts premiered in Chicago of all places Bruce Hatton Boyer While Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) never visited

d America, he does have one little-known connection with Chicago it was here that the world premiere of his play Ghosts occurred on May 20, 1882. Why such an important premiere should have occurred here is a curious tale, which will help us see how misunderstood Ibsen was in the English-speaking world, where his championing by two of the most influential voices in theater, William Archer and George Bernard Shaw, far from securing his reputation, nearly scuttled it! Ghosts occupies the central position in Ibsens works. Chronologically, it lies near the middle of his output, the 17th of 26 plays. More significantly, it lies at the center of Ibsens thematic output, for in no other of his works did he as explicitly examine the central theme of his oeuvre that social environment imprisons and dooms the individual. The plot of Ghosts is quickly recounted. It takes place in the household of Mrs. Alving, widow of the late Captain Alving, a noted (and notorious) member of the society in a small Norwegian town. At the plays opening, Mrs. Alving has established an orphanage in her late husbands memory, just as her only son Osvald returns from Paris, where he has been living as an artist. We soon learn that Osvald has inherited not only his fathers philandering ways but a fatal, unnamed venereal disease. By plays end, Mrs. Alving is forced to see the curse her husband has laid upon her life as the orphanage burns down and, in one of the most wrenching moments in all European theater, she helps Osvald commit suicide to spare him the ravages of his disease. Ghosts represented the high-water mark of the naturalist revolution then sweeping Europe. The father of the revolution was the French novelist, Emile Zola, who saw life as a struggle for survival and that the outcome of that struggle was determined by the collision between genetics and environment. That Ibsen was familiar with Zolas theories is evidenced by his famous remark that Zola descends to the gutter to bathe in it while I descend there to cleanse it! However, the two men looked at life through distinctly different prisms. Zola came to literature through journalism, and he quite deliberately saw literature as an engine of social reform. He was no great stylist and his best novels, Therese Racquin, Germinal and Nana, are crude polemics compared to those of his nearest competitor in France, Gustave Flaubert. But what they lack in aesthetic refinement, they more than make up for in shock value. Zolas description of the harrowing life in Flemish coal mines led to many needed reforms, and his depiction of Nanas depraved sexual encounters rocked the country. Ibsen, on the other hand, began his career as a poet and was never interested in social issues per se. Indeed, he spent most of his life in exile from Norway, first in Italy and later in Germany. He was a loner and an introvert, the opposite of Zola, whose great moment was not literary but political, when he defended the wronged Captain Adolph Dreyfus.

Unfortunately for Ibsen, however, the surface resemblances were strong. Both men believed that restrictive social conventions caused personal unhappiness and for them, as for so many other writers of the period, venereal disease was the perfect metaphor for depicting a corrupt society. It mixed both biology and social repression into a perfect Darwinist cocktail. It was this similarity with Zola that proved Ibsens undoing in English-speaking countries, and the greatest malefactor in this regard was none other than George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, like Zola, was a social reformer at heart, and he saw the theater as a place where he could vent his Fabianist ideals. Witty, charming, and acerbic as he was, Shaw was a second-rate dramatist and a fourth-rate psychologist. Yet, when Ibsens star rose on the continent, Shaw insisted on seeing a kindred spirit. He turned Ibsen into what he wanted Ibsen to be, and the result was his catalog of misperceptions, the Quintessence of Ibsenism. The result? Ibsen was seen in England as a social radical, not as an astute observer of human psychology. Worse, he was seen merely as dirty-minded. Ghosts was forbidden public performance in England for nearly 40 years, and even then it was only allowed performance in front of British troops departing for France during World Wear I the original VD movie we all suffered through in high school sex education classes! And the idea of Ibsen as a social reformer lingered hard the present author remembers an otherwise-revered Oxford-trained professors remarking that the problem with Ibsen is that once youve invented penicillin, hes obsolete! As was the custom in those days, Ghosts was published before it was performed, and theaters across the continent were afraid to stage it lest censors shut them down. The reaction in England was especially adverse. A sample of contemporary criticism tells us all: An open drain. . . Candid foulness . . . Absolutely loathsome and fetid . . . Gross, almost putrid indecorum. Given this environment, it is hardly surprising that the first performance had to occur far from a shocked European establishment, and Chicago in the 1880s certainly fit the bill. It was, by any standards, a city not easily shocked. Its unrestrained gambling, drinking, and prostitution were so pronounced that even Mayor Carter Harrison declaimed that you cant make people moral by ordinance and theres no use trying. In the 1880s, Chicago was still primarily a Germanic and Scandinavian town. The Swedes and Norwegians had settled north and west of downtown, around what is now Kedzie and Diversey. Norwegians were especially plentiful. Between the Civil War and World War I, for example, there were some 565 Norwegian-language newspapers and magazines published in America. In Chicago, the leading paper was Norden, edited by a Synod minister named Hallvard Hande. Contrary to its counterparts on the continent, Norden did not shrink from controversy. In 1880, it carried a heated debate over A Dolls House, even while English-speaking literati in Chicago remained ignorant of the plays existence. The native-language theater was active as well and, while records are spotty, we do know that there was enough demand that the Norwegian actor Thorvald Koht founded the Norske Folketeater in Chicago in 1913 and for the next decade produced works by Ibsen, Holberg, and Bjornson. All this was, remember, while England was still keeping Ibsen out of theaters at all costs!

We know nothing of who produced Ghosts in Chicago. That it was a semi-professional production is attested to by the presence of the Danish actress Helga von Bluhme as Mrs. Alving. Following the single performance in the Aurora Turner Hall before a large audience with a successful outcome, it subsequently toured to Minneapolis and other Midwestern cities. The most striking fact about the performance, however, is that there were no riots and no bellicose statements from the clergy. In the words of another paper, Verdens Gang, the plays reprimand of vices in certain portions of the upper level of Norwegian society [was] no hindrance to its acceptance in Chicago. The absence of attacks from the English-speaking clergy is especially significant because at the very same time, the Protestant clergy was engaged in an active campaign to curtail English-speaking theatrical activities in Chicago. Why the marked difference between the reactions here and abroad? Victorian prudishness is part of the answer, although Scandinavian Lutheranism of the 1880s was hardly more tolerant than the American Methodism of the day. The answer lies in part, I believe, in how Ibsen had been translated into English. William Archer, Ibsens first English translator, was a member of Shaws circle and a noted dramaturge himself. Archer happened to speak Norwegian by a fluke; as a youth, he had summered in Orkney, halfway between Scotland and the Scandinavian mainland, where Norwegian was common. So it was sheer coincidence that, when Ibsen took the continent by storm, there was waiting for him in England someone who not only spoke Norwegian but who had a keen interest in the theatre. Unfortunately, Archer, like Shaw, had a social agenda, and his translations while literally accurate tended toward the melodramatic. Generations of English-speakers, prejudiced by Shaws misconceptions and weaned on Archers stilted language, have seen Ibsen as a social critic shuffling cardboard characters around the stage. It was not until the 1960s that the starchy Ibsen of Archer yielded to the more nuanced and psychological Ibsen of Michael Meyer and Rolf Fjelde, both translators who spent their lives immersed in Scandinavian languages. In their hands, the character of Pastor Manders in Ghosts,1 for example, traditionally seen simply as an attack on the church, emerges as a narcissist with great sexual charm, an understandable temptation to the emotionally-battered Mrs. Alving. So, too, Mrs. Alvings sexual and emotional needs become apparent enough to make her tragedy a distinctly human one. Ghosts becomes a play not about venereal disease but about doomed people, just as Pillars of Society loses its theme of leaky boats and Enemy of the People its theme about polluted water. The result, for anyone willing to go back and revisit Ibsen in new translations, is an Ibsen far closer to the one those Norwegian-Americans saw with such clarity 140 years ago in our very own city.
1

Even Archers translation of the plays title is misleading. The title in Norwegian is Gengangere, a gerund structure better translated as those who have gone before. http://www.caxtonclub.org/reading/2003/Mar/ghosts.htm

Ibsen, the Master Builder

Ibsen is still often regarded as primarily a social writer i.e. as a writer whose principal concerns were social themes, and whose principal interests were ideologies advocating social reform. And while some have praised him for this reason, many others see this as a weakness: for if ones principal concern is the righting of specific social wrongs, ones work can be of little other than merely historic interest once those wrongs have been righted. Here, for instance, is Erich Auerbach in his classic study Mimesis: Through the complete transformation of the bourgeoisie since 1914 and in general through the upheavals brought about by the current world crisis, his problems have lost their timeliness One may spend much time digging out similar views of Ibsen views which even now seem widely held. But since this is a casual post in a blog rather than a scholarly dissertation, Ill not litter this page with more references: the interested reader may easily find expressions of such views for his or her own self. But the basic idea behind this criticism remains well, basic: it is still believed by many that while Ibsens superior stagecraft ensures his continuing popularity on the stage, his plays dont really have much to offer nowadays other than allowing us an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back for being so much more advanced and enlightened than we used to be. And those of us who love Ibsen as a literary artist rather than as a social reformer are left wondering whether there is any other writer of comparable stature who is so continually, and, it sometimes seems, so wilfully, misunderstood. Of course, it is true that Ibsen did address social issues; and, in those three plays that are possibly his best known (though not necessarily his finest) A Dolls House, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler these social themes are very much to the fore. But even here, I dont think these plays are primarily about social issues. A Dolls House certainly addresses the suppression of women within the institution of marriage, but in more general terms, its about the masks we, all of us, are forced to wear so we can take our place within a structured society; and its about the consequences of the mask refusing to fit. The masks we wear now may be different from the mask Nora had to wear (or, for that matter, the mask her husband Torvald had to wear), but masks havent gone away: we must all, to a lesser or greater extent, suppress something of our individual selves to be part of a greater whole, and Ibsens examination of the nature of this suppression, and of its consequences, seems to me to be a theme of continued significance. An Enemy of the People may deal with the hypocrisy of a society which, out of self-interest, refuses to acknowledge the truth; but on a somewhat deeper level, it is also about the inherent difficulty all humans have in accepting uncomfortable truths. And it is also, I think, about the fanaticism of those who refuse to recognise human limitations and frailties, and who insist upon the truth at all costs. This may not be the most profound of Ibsens plays, but its scope does, for all that, extend beyond that of merely social issues. And by the time we come to Hedda Gabler, we find ourselves in waters so deep that interpretation merely in terms of social issues seems utterly inadequate. Hedda is trapped, partly by the conventions of society, but, to a much greater extent, by her own cowardice: she despises the dolls house that she has, of her own volition, entered, but fails to find the courage required to break out. The reasons for this failure are purely internal, not external: they are nothing to do with society. And furthermore, the consequences, not merely of

Heddas cowardice, but also of her awareness of her cowardice, are terrifying: all her energies turn inwards, and become wantonly destructive. To see all this merely in terms of social issues is, it seems to me, to do the play a great disservice. These works belong to a sequence of twelve plays in prose written between 1875 and 1899: near the turn of the new century, a debilitating stroke put an end to Ibsens literary career. A convincing case can be made to see these twelve plays as, essentially, a cycle, as one large work. Ibsen himself had referred to these plays as a cycle, although it is highly doubtful that he had planned them as such when embarking on the first one (The Pillars of Society). But however one regards them, with these plays, drama changed for ever: there was no going back. Drama, from now on, had to be in prose: while attempts have been made to revive verse drama (most notably, perhaps, by T. S. Eliot), they havent really convinced. And from now on, there were no more kings and queens or bishops and nobles, no more finely crafted poetic soliloquies revealing the characters innermost thoughts. Of course, new generations of dramatists from Pirandello to Brecht to Beckett to Pinter have sought out even newer paths, but the path back was now closed for ever. It is hard to over-estimate the significance of the revolution brought about in drama by these twelve plays. Yet, rather ironically, it was Ibsen himself, the great pioneer of realistic drama (although the adjective realistic does, I think, need to be qualified), who wrote the last great plays in verse: the austere Brand, and the exuberant, demonic Peer Gynt. If we follow the line of Ibsens artistic development, we can see these two plays not as aberrations (however remarkable), but as essential to Ibsens dramatic art: indeed, these two plays seem to loom behind everything Ibsen subsequently wrote. Ibsens probing into the nature of our identity and of the masks we wear is prefigured in Peer Gynt, in which the protagonist, Peer, is happy to allow his face to grow into whatever mask he finds most convenient at any given time, and whose personal identity becomes like the onion he peels merely layer after accumulated layer, with no real core. Ibsens questioning of our ability to apprehend the truth, and his study of inflexibility in the face of human weakness, are both apparent in Brand: here, the protagonist is a preacher whose intolerance of human weakness, of the human desire for comfort, leads him eventually high into the mountains, where he finds a crevice roofed above by ice his cold, perfect ice church. Even in the most realistic of his later plays, we may find the themes and motifs that haunt these great poetic dramas; and we may find also the same extraordinary ability to create powerful symbols and images that resonate in the mind. Brand and Peer Gynt, monumental achievements both, had not been written for the theatre: they had been written to be read. And it was almost as if freedom from the demands of the theatre had liberated Ibsens imagination. But even so, these poetic dramas, intended for the study rather than for the stage, are irresistibly theatrical, and cut-down versions of them (full versions are infeasibly long for a single nights performance) still hold the stage. Theatre was in Ibsens blood, and he had, he knew, to return to it. But how? He could not go on writing the same kind of stodgy melodrama that he had mainly been writing before Brand and Peer Gynt. Yes, he had to move on but where? And in which direction? It is perhaps impossible for us now to try to work out how Ibsen reached his decision, but there it was: drama must now be in prose; and it must deal, in a realistic manner, with people from ordinary walks of life. As a literary medium, drama had been overtaken by the novel, and tragic protagonists in novels werent Clytemnestras or Hamlets, nor even Romeos and Juliets: they were Clarissa Harlowe, Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel, Yevgeny Bazarov. Can the achievement of the novel be replicated on stage? The difficulties were obvious. In a novel,

one could enter characters minds; on stage, one is restricted merely to what characters say and do. In drama of a past age, one could be as stylised as one wanted: people could speak the most exquisite blank verse or the most sonorous alexandrines, and reveal their innermost minds. But realism forbids that: to be realistic, people must speak in much the same manner as the audience watching them; and far from letting these characters depict the innermost selves as an Othello or a Phdre had done, they must be allowed to be as inarticulate and as self-unaware and as self-deluded as the rest of us. The technical problems posed were immense. These problems were not surmounted immediately. The first play in this new style was a comedy The League of Youth: it is an effective play in many ways, but this was not the vision Ibsen wanted to communicate. And in any case, prose had been used often enough for comedy from Molire to Sheridan to Gogol: nothing particularly new there. And then, for some nine years, Ibsen worked on the epic two-part historic drama, Emperor and Galilean, about Julian, the apostate Byzantine emperor: its a fascinating work in many respects, but it hasnt really proved of much interest to any but the most diehard of Ibsenites. The breakthrough, when it did come, was far more modest in scale and in scope: indeed, it scarcely seems like a breakthrough at all. It is The Pillars of Society a serious drama about corruption in high places. The characters here are everyday people, and speak in everyday language; there was no soliloquy directed at the audience, no creaking mechanics of convoluted plots; no eavesdropping, no outrageous coincidence moving the storyline along; and yet, although tragedy is averted at the very end, the tragic potential is clearly there. It is a fairly modest play in terms of artistic ambition, and, in retrospect, this play may even seem somewhat dated; but for all that, it was a breakthrough. It must be admitted that it did take Ibsen some time to find his feet with this new type of drama. His next play was A Dolls House, which became a succs de scandale, and, thanks to a great extent to the opportunities it presents to showcase the talents of a star actress, it has retained its popularity on the stage. But compared to his later plays, the technique is not yet quite there: Ibsen is still relying on creaky plot devices such as intercepted letters; the principal plot and subplot arent ideally integrated; and Ibsen later went on to say more with less. But for all that, it remains a masterpiece. In the play, we see a husband and wife both playing roles: the wife is clearly the more intelligent of the two, and yet she acts the scatterbrain, the ingenue who needs to be looked after and cared for by a good, strong man: that is the role expected of her. And her husband too acts the role expected of him, and to which, he, too, is not suited that of the strong man, the provider, the decision-maker of the family. In that astonishing final scene, the masks come off, and neither is entirely sure who they really are. As in Peer Gynt, once all the accumulated layers have been peeled off the onion, there seems to be no real core underneath. The final slam of the door as Nora walks out seems emphatic enough, but the overall tonality of that ending is one of uncertainty: what we see is but the first step of a long and painful journey towards the truth. But many questions remain unanswered: What is the truth? To what extent are we capable of apprehending it? In the plays that followed Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck Ibsen addressed these questions. He perfected the realist drama, but even as he was doing so, his restless artistic imagination seemed to be moving on to other things. I get the impression that he wasnt too happy with strict realism: it didnt allow sufficient scope to depict the internal lives of his characters. And so, although he continued to write about people in everyday walks of life, conversing in everyday language, his plays were increasingly characterised by a poetic

sensibility, and a use of symbolism to express those aspects of the human mind that are too deep, too elusive, to be stated explicitly. Even as early as Ghosts which is still regarded by many as primarily an attack on social institutions we see the development of symbols and of imagery that probe at matters much deeper. On the surface, it is a play attacking the hypocrisy of society, and the institution of marriage, which is seen as oppressive. And it is a play that seems quite clearly intended to shock: after all, one didnt talk on the public stage about matters such as inherited syphilis! But now that we are no longer shocked by it, we may see it somewhat differently: we may see it as a picture of the ghosts of the past that we cannot rid ourselves of, ghosts that continue to live with us. The past is all-important: to understand the present, we must understand the past. But the past is elusive: all we have are narrations, which are all necessarily subjective, and therefore all unreliable. Mrs Alving reveals that her happy marriage has been a sham: her late husband, whose memory is now being honoured, was in fact a dissipated lecher. But there is more to it than this: Mrs Alvings story as she herself half-realises is not the whole story. As we, the audience, try to piece together the past from the fragments of it that remain in the present, we begin to see Captain Alving as a man who like the protagonists of A Dolls House had been forced to live a lie. And what had once been joy had decayed into mere depravity. And Mrs Alving, too, has lived a lie ever since, pretending to honour the memory of a man she continues to despise. All that, she thinks, is now over, but in that almost unbearably intense tragic finale, the past returns with a vengeance: the ghosts of the past cannot be laid to rest. To find another play of comparable tragic intensity, we have to go back to Shakespeare, to the Greeks. Predictably, the critical response to Ghosts was vituperative, and it is difficult to see the next play, An Enemy of the People, as anything other than a response to that vituperation: it is a play about the moral pusillanimity that prevents us from facing the truth. It is a superbly theatrical work, but it lacks the deep resonances we normally find in Ibsen: the surface is splendid, but there isnt, perhaps, too much beyond it. It seems to me to come close to being the sort of play detractors of Ibsen claim to be characteristic of him. But perhaps even here, we may see more than is usually reckoned to exist. To what extent should we accept Stockmans heroism at face value? Are his motives entirely altruistic, and devoid of self-regard? Is it, indeed, reasonable to expect humanity to face the truth fearlessly, no matter how unpleasant that truth may be? It is in the next play, The Wild Duck, that Ibsen addresses these issues more explicitly. Here, Gregers Werle, who insists on the truth, the truth at all costs, is seen as a fanatic, and possibly mentally unbalanced. Indeed, we may see in him the inflexible preacher Brand, who had only found perfection in the ice-church high in the mountains, far from humanity. The setting of The Wild Duck is realistic, the speech is everyday, but the poetic sensibility that that informs it is quite clearly that which had created Brand. And the poetic imagery of the work the wild duck that had dived into the deep blue sea, and had been brought back to the surface; the mysterious attic that fires the imagination of the young Hedvig; blindness in all its forms takes us to a world far more mysterious and elusive than that of mere social drama. If, to put it crudely, An Enemy of the People was about the importance of accepting the truth, and The Wild Duck about the impossibility of doing so, then the next play, Rosmersholm, takes us further into regions unknown, and examines the elusive nature of truth itself. As in Ghosts, most of the principal action has already taken place when the curtain rises: the action

we see on stage consists of the characters trying to understand the true nature of what has happened, and trying to come to terms with it. This is, perhaps, not as novel as it may seem: one may argue that Sophocles Oedipus is constructed along similar lines. But nothing quite like this had been attempted in modern drama not even in Ghosts. And no play had focussed quite so insistently on the inner landscape of the characters minds, on those aspects of our minds that are hidden even from our own selves. It is no accident that Freud was particularly fascinated by this play: he wrote an illuminating study of the character Rebecca West, psychoanalysing her as if she were a real person. Ibsen by now was in complete control of his technique, and masterpiece followed masterpiece. Daringly, he used the drama, the most public of all art forms, to explore the most private of worlds the elusive and enigmatic depths of the human psyche. Even now, even after Freud and Jung and the reams of theory about the unconscious and the subconscious, it is often difficult to follow Ibsen into these mysterious worlds he presents. As with many other writers who have attempted to depict these areas of human existence, Ibsen made increasing use of symbolism: the wild horses of Rosmersholm, the mysterious ghostly stranger of The Lady From the Sea, the towers of The Master Builder, those water lilies in Little Eyolf that shoot up from the depths and bloom suddenly upon the surface these all point tantalisingly to areas of human experience too vaguely understood to be put explicitly into words. The next play, The Lady From the Sea is still surprisingly little known: while star actresses queue up to play Hedda Gabler, or Nora in A Dolls House, they tend to bypass the role of Ellida, which is surely among the finest and most challenging of any leading role. Perhaps, if The Lady From the Sea were better known, more people would question the stereotypical image of Ibsen as a mere social dramatist. This play is full of mysterious elements that hint at the supernatural, and which cannot be taken at face value: we are far from social realism here. And, while, once again, we have a dissection of a marriage, the view of the marriage that emerges from the dissection is not in the least condemnatory: Ibsen was no mere dogmatic critic of the institutions of society. And, instead of the doom and gloom with which he is normally associated, the play, despite its potential for tragedy, ends with a burst of sunlight: the final scene is radiant. But the very next play, Hedda Gabler, takes us into a very different world. Far from the cold, bracing, open air of The Lady From the Sea, we are now trapped, as Hedda is, in a claustrophobic drawing room; and her marriage is so obviously doomed from the start, that there is no point even attempting to dissect it. In many ways, this is a return to the more socially realistic plays such as A Dolls House, and may seem a step back from the poetic sensibility apparent in the immediately preceding works; but a comparison with A Dolls House shows us clearly how far Ibsen had advanced in terms of technique, and how much deeper his artistic vision now was. Ibsen could now convey far more with far less; the themes are fully integrated with each other; and while the poetic imagery here does not carry us into the mysterious, vaguely glimpsed regions of the human mind, they are more subtly embedded into the texture of the drama. The drama itself, from beginning to end, is grim: we are as far as can be imagined from the sunlight that had flooded the stage at the end of The Lady From the Sea. This is not to say, of course, that Ibsen is here repudiating the earlier play: as ever, he is exploring similar themes, but from different perspectives.

After Hedda Gabler, in 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway from self-imposed exile. He had left his homeland some twenty-seven years earlier, a little-known writer: he returned now a Grand Old Man of Letters with an international reputation. When he had left, his mind had been seething with new ideas, and he had not been entirely sure how to give them shape: but now, his artistic vision was clear, and he was moving into new areas of expression. The new terrain isnt easy, even now. The Master Builder remains a mysterious play. Once again, the setting is realistic, the characters are from everyday walks of life, and they speak in everyday language: and yet, it is impossible to take anything at face value. The more solidly Ibsen represents this world, the more mysterious it seems to become. Halvard Solness is a successful master builder, but he is ruthless. His wife seems but a pallid, phantom presence. We can sense that there are ghosts from the past haunting their lives, but we cannot quite put our finger exactly on the nature of these ghosts, not even when the events of the past are revealed. Into this world comes the young Hilde Wangel, whom we had already seen as a minor character in The Lady From the Sea. She makes certain claims about the past, which Master Builder Solness denies vehemently. And yet, for all that, she has a curious effect on him. In a series of the most extraordinary scenes, brimming with intricate and the most powerfully resonant of symbols and images, Solness begins to take stock of his life his marriage, his past, his tragedies. He is a man on the threshold of old age, and yet still vigorous, both mentally and physically; he longs for a freedom, for a joy, that he knows he cannot have. His wife Aline we merely glimpse through most of the play, but near the start of the third and final act, Ibsen gives us a scene between Aline and Hilde that is amongst the most chilling in all drama: Aline is a woman whose existence is that of a ghost; her spirit is already dead. After this scene, Hilde says that she feels as if she has come out of the grave. Solness himself describes his marriage as being chained to a corpse. And yet, if Aline is dead, it is he who had killed her, and he knows it; the chains that bind him to the corpse are of his own conscience, his own guilt. No summary could hope to do justice to this astonishing drama: the deeper we look into it, the greater the depths we discern. When Ibsen had started his literary career, the novel had far superseded the play as a literary form: the novel could take a realistic milieu, familiar to readers, and yet explore to as great a depth as the author was capable of exploring the internal landscape of the characters hearts and minds: drama, as a form seemed ill-equipped to do this. But Ibsen had, as it were, now turned the tables: he was exploring in drama areas of the human experience that now seemed beyond the scope of the novel. And novelists seemed to acknowledge this: London performances of Ibsens plays (in translations by William Archer) attracted the major British literary figures of the day, including possibly the two finest novelists of the time writing in English Henry James and Thomas Hardy. (James was sufficiently taken by Ibsen to want to write plays himself: the result, as is well known, was spectacularly unsuccessful.) And Ibsens last play, When We Dead Awaken, inspired a certain young man named James Joyce to learn Norwegian so he could write a letter to his literary idol: Ibsen remained one of Joyces favourite writers, and one of his major influences. Another Irish writer who took Ibsen very much to heart was, of course, Bernard Shaw, whose own career as a dramatist would have been unthinkable without the influence of Ibsen. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw, rather unaccountably but with characteristic megalomania, tried to present Ibsen as a sort of forerunner of himself a dramatist of social concerns: but in his dramatic criticism, he was far more perceptive. Though not a man given to flights of fancy, he said of Ibsens characters: There is not one who is not, in the old phrase, the

temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that mystery. Two years after The Master Builder saw the first performance of Little Eyolf, possibly Ibsens most harrowing work. Sometimes, one wonders what could have possessed anyone to write something so very raw and intense for what was, after all, a public entertainment: the answer is that, by this stage, Ibsen was writing primarily for himself. A good performance of this play can still leave the audience shell-shocked: the laying bare of the human soul is, perhaps, still a bit too much to take. In describing his next play, John Gabriel Borkman, translator Una Ellis-Fermor asks us to imagine Macbeth and Lady Macbeth not dead at the end of the play, but exiled. This disquieting thought sets the scene for what artist Munch described as the greatest of all winter landscapes. It is a measure of the tragic intensity of this drama that its the most terrifying of Shakespeares tragedies that it calls to mind. The play starts, as many of Ibsens plays do, in the drawing room, but by the end, we have broken out of those four walls: we are in the chill of the high mountains. On the height of the mountains, by the depths of the sea: the very settings of these late plays seem to reflect a breaking free from the conventions of bourgeois middle-class drama conventions that Ibsen himself had developed. In the last play, When We Dead Awaken, all the scenes are set outdoors. It starts at the foot of the mountains, and ends on the top; and, like the poetic drama Brand, it ends with the protagonists overwhelmed by an avalanche. The characters are drawn from real life, and they speak in prose, but we are back once again in the world of the earlier poetic dramas: translator Michael Meyer once opined that the play should ideally have been written in verse, and that he would have preferred to have translated it as a verse play. It seems as if Ibsen had turned back full circle. Not everyone, however, is convinced by this play: Joyce thought it Ibsens greatest, but many, including even the first translator, William Archer, thought Ibsens powers were in decline. He may not have been far wrong there: soon after Ibsen sent the manuscript to the publishers, he suffered a severe stroke. Given how surprisingly short the final act is, it is reasonable to infer that Ibsen, possibly in some physical distress, did not have the energy to finish the play as he would ideally have liked. In effect, this is an unfinished play, which gives us a glimpse, but no more, of Ibsens final artistic vision. Ibsens literary career was now at an end: after the stroke, he could barely recognise the alphabet. The last seven years of his life, this supremely great author became, effectively, illiterate. When on his death-bed, a nurse took his pulse and declared that he was a bit better. On the contrary, replied Ibsen, and died, a stern and unflinching seeker of truth to the very end. The body of work he left behind remains forbidding for a number of reasons, but it is monumental. Sadly, the picture of Ibsen merely as a social reformer has stuck, but for those prepared to look further into the works of Master Builder Ibsen will find riches beyond compare. http://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/ibsen-the-master-builder/

Henrik Ibsen
Encyclopedia of World Biography | 2004 | Copyright

Henrik Ibsen
The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) developed realistic techniques that changed the entire course of Western drama. There is very little in modern drama that does not owe a debt to him. Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in the town of Skien. His father, a businessman, went bankrupt when Ibsen was 8, a shattering blow to the family. Ibsen left home at 15, spending the next six, difficult years as a pharmacist's assistant in Grimstad, where he wrote his first play. In 1850 he moved to Christiania (Oslo) to study. In 1851 he became resident dramatist, later director, of a new theater in Bergen. Although he never became a good director and his plays were mostly unsuccessful, the years in Bergen gave him invaluable experience in practical stagecraft. Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1857, where he spent the worst period of his life. His plays were either rejected or failures, he went into debt, and his talent was publicly questioned. He left Norway in 1864, spending the next 27 years in Italy and Germany. While bitter and humiliating personal memories explain, in part, his long exile, it seems also that only by distancing himself from everything he held dear could he devote himself completely to his art. When he left Norway, he looked like a rather dissolute bohemian. In the following years he changed his appearance, habits, and even his handwriting. He became the "Sphinx" he still is to many peopleunapproachable, secretive, an avid collector of medals and honors which he wore to protect himself from the real and imagined hostility of others. Long before he returned home in 1891, he had become the world's most famous dramatist.

Early Plays
For all its youthful excesses, Catiline (1850), his first play, is remarkably Ibsenian. The theme, as Ibsen wrote later, is the discrepancy between ability and aspiration, which he called "mankind's and the individual's tragedy and comedy at the same time." Like the characters in many of Ibsen's later plays, Catiline is torn between two women who represent conflicting forces in himself: one of them embodies domestic virtues, the other his calling and, significantly, his death. Also, the play begins with words which could be uttered by many later Ibsen heroes and heroines: "I must, I must, a voice deep in my soul urges me onand I will heed its call." The six following plays (The Warrior's Barrow, 1850; St. John's Eve, 1853; Lady Inger of straat, 1855; The Feast at Solhaug, 1856; Olaf Liljekrans, 1857; and The Vikings in Helgeland, 1858) are all in the spirit of romanticism and show Ibsen struggling to find a form and techniques which would embody his personal vision. The two plays he wrote during his second stay in Christiania deserve to be better known, both for their merits and for the light they shed on Ibsen's authorship: Love's Comedy (1862), a satire on bourgeois versus romantic love, and The Pretenders (1864), a magnificent historical and psychological tragedy.

In the first 10 years of his "exile" Ibsen wrote four plays. The immensely successful Brand (1866) is a towering drama of a man who strives to realize himself in terms of Sren Kierkegaard's "either/or" and of the consequences of such an effort. His next play, Peer Gynt (1867), made Ibsen Scandinavia's most discussed dramatist. Peer Gynt is Brand's opposite, a man who evades his problems until he loses everything, including himself. Peer is Ibsen's most universally human character. The League of Youth (1869), a political satire, shows Ibsen moving toward the later "realistic" plays. Ibsen called Emperor and Galilean (1873), a 10-act play about Julian the Apostate, "a world-historical drama." In Julian's rejection of Christianity, his futile attempt to restore the pagan cult of man, and his doomed quest to found "the third kingdom," a Hegelian synthesis of the two ways of life, Ibsen dramatized what he saw as Western man's, and his own, dilemma. The play is a failure, but one can glimpse Julian's quest beneath the polished, modern surfaces of many of Ibsen's later plays.

Plays of Contemporary Life

Inspired by the demand of the critic Georg Brandes that literature begin to take up contemporary problems for discussion, and influenced by changing public taste, Ibsen now set out to develop a dramatic form in which serious matters could be dealt with in the "trivial" guise of everyday life. Since there were models for such a drama, Ibsen cannot be said to have invented the realistic, or social reform, play. However, he brought it to perfection and, in doing so, made himself the most famous, reviled and praised dramatist of the 19th century. It should be stressed, however, that Ibsen had no intention of becoming merely a dramatist whose plays reflected contemporary manners and attacked social evils. He remained what he had always been, essentially antisociety, concerned with the individual and his problems. Ibsen solved the technical difficulties involved in translating his tragic vision from the romantic forms to a realistic form in two central ways. First, he developed a retrospective technique whereby, as the play progresses, the past events leading to the climax are gradually brought to light through the words and acts of the characters. In Ibsen's hands (but not always in those of his followers), the past is not just dead matter: it grips the present and changes its significance. Ibsen's characters live in a continual, exciting "now," moving toward the truth about themselves and their condition. Second, and equally important, was Ibsen's exploitation of visual imagery, whereby he gave his plays, through set, costume, and stage direction, much of the poetry denied the dramatist who deals with modern people speaking in everyday prose. The term "Ibsenite," as used by G. B. Shaw, Ibsen's disciple and champion in England, describes a play which exposes individual and social hypocrisy. It can be used, in the narrowest sense, only about Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll's House (1879), which do seem to stress the aspects of society and personal dishonesty that hinder personal development. But even Nora, in the latter play, is a sufficiently complex character to suggest other interpretations. Already in Ghosts (1881), however, the heroine, Mrs. Alving, discovers that the forces working against human development are not just dead social conventions: there are forces in the individual that are more elusive and destructive than the "doll house" of marriage and society. The last of the "Ibsenite" plays, An Enemy of the People (1882), takes the consequences of Mrs. Alving's discovery and laughs at the social reformer. The laughter,

however, is compassionatethe hero has a certain resemblance to Ibsen himselfand the play is one of Ibsen's finest comedies.

Plays after 1882

After 1882 Ibsen concentrated more and more on the individual and his dilemma, as he had done prior to 1877, and on those timeless forces, reflected in individual psychology and working through social institutions, that hinder individual growth. The Wild Duck (1884) might be said to introduce Ibsen's last period by showing how the average man needs illusions to survive and what happens to a family when something that may be truth is introduced into it. Here Ibsen also moved toward a new symbolism, rising from and intimately bound up with his realistic surfaces. In Rosmersholm (1886), a man raised in a tradition of Christian duty and sacrifice tries, under the influence of a free, "pagan" woman, to break with his past. The Lady from the Sea (1888) is considered a remarkable anticipation of psychotherapy, but the heroine's "cure" makes unconvincing theater. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a savage portrait of a frustrated woman, spiritually, sexually, and socially. There is, however, much of Ibsen, as he saw himself at the time, in Hedda Gabler. With the exception of Little Eyolf (1894), the weakest of the later plays, the last plays are, to a great extent, confessional. The Master Builder (1892) is one of Ibsen's most beautiful dramas, essentially a dialogue between a guilt-burdened artist and the youth he betrayed, played against the wife and children he has "murdered" for his ambition. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), Ibsen's bleakest play, is a study of a man (he could be today's industrialist) who has sacrificed everything to his vision, until he is killed by the forces in nature he has sought to control. Glimpsed in the background, in scenes alternately comic and pathetic, is the alternative to Borkman's way of life, the life of sensual pleasure. But no synthesis seems possible of the spirit and the flesh: the "third kingdom" of which Ibsen had dreamed so long is farther away than ever. Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), more symbolic than even those which immediately precede it, is an artist's confession of his failure as a man and of his doubts about his achievement. The play is not, however, just about the cost of great achievement: it is also about that achievement and about the man who, as Ibsen expressed it in his first words as a dramatist, hears a voice urging him on and heeds that voice. Soon after this play, Ibsen suffered a stroke that ended his career. He died on May 23, 1906.

Further Reading
Ibsen's collected works, together with all draft material, lists of English translations and criticism, and introductions by the editor, were translated in Ibsen, edited by James W. McFarlane (7 vols., 1960-70). The standard biography is by Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen (2 vols., trans. 1931). Ibsen's daughter-in-law, Bergljot Ibsen, in The Three Ibsens (trans. 1951), gives valuable information on his life. More specialized is Brian W. Downs, The Intellectual Background (1946). On Ibsen's plays generally, George Bernard Shaw's classic The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913) stresses the social reform aspects, and Herman J. Weigand, The Modern Ibsen: A

Reconsideration (1925), emphasizes Ibsen the psychologist. John Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method (1953), is invaluable for the light it sheds on Ibsen's visual imagery. See also Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (1964), and Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle (1964), on Ibsen and August Strindberg and their contribution to modern drama. The prefaces to Rolf Fjelde's excellent translations of some of Ibsen's plays (Signet paperbacks) are well worth reading.

Additional Sources
Bull, Francis, Ibsen, the man and the dramatist, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977. Duve, Arne, The real drama of Henrik Ibsen?, Oslo: Lanser forl., 1977. Gosse, Edmund, Henrik Ibsen, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978 c1907. Jorgenson, Theodore, Henrik Ibsen: a study in art and personality, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978, 1945. Macfall, Haldane, Ibsen: the man, his art & his significance, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978; Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976. Shafer, Yvonne, Henrik Ibsen: life, work, and criticism, Fredericton, N.B., Canada: York Press, 1985. "Henrik Ibsen." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (February 21, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404703192.html

Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian dramatist and poet in full Henrik Johan Ibsen born March 20, 1828, Skien, Norway died May 23, 1906, Kristiania [formerly Christiania; now Oslo] Major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating dialogue, and rigorous thought. Ibsen was born at Skien, a small lumbering town of southern Norway. His father was a respected general merchant in the community until 1836, when he suffered the permanent disgrace of going bankrupt. As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wifes withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate. There was no redeeming the family misfortunes; as soon as he could, aged just 15, Henrik moved to Grimstad, a hamlet of some 800 persons 70 miles (110 km) down the coast. There he supported himself meagerly as an apothecarys apprentice while studying nights for admission to the university. And during this period he used his few leisure moments to write a play. This work, Catilina (1850; Catiline), grew out of the Latin texts Ibsen had to study for his university examinations. Though not a very good play, it showed a natural bent for the theatre and embodied themesthe rebellious hero, his destructive mistressthat would preoccupy Ibsen as long as he lived. In 1850 he went to Christiania (known since 1925 by its older name of Oslo), studied for entrance examinations there, and settled into the student quarterthough not, however, into classes. For the theatre was in his blood, and at the age of only 23 he got himself appointed director and playwright to a new theatre at Bergen, in which capacity he had to write a new play every year. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man eager to work in drama, but it brought Ibsen up against a range of fearsome problems he was ill-equipped to handle. In the medieval Icelandic sagas Norway possessed a heroic, austere literature of unique magnificence; but the stage on which these materials had to be set was then dominated by the drawing-room drama of the French playwright Eugne Scribe and by the actors, acting traditions, and language of Denmark. Out of these materials young Ibsen was asked to create a national drama. First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862, Ibsen tried to make palatable dramatic fare out of incongruous ingredients. In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and unacceptable to audiences, he did a lot of directing. He was too inhibited to make a forceful director, but too intelligent not to pick up a great deal of practical stage wisdom from his experience. After he moved to Christiania and after his marriage to Suzannah Thoresen in 1858, he began to develop qualities of independence and authority that had been hidden before. Two of the last plays that Ibsen wrote for the Norwegian stage showed signs of new spiritual energy. Kjaerlighedens komedie (1862; Loves Comedy), a satire on romantic illusions, was violently unpopular, but it expressed an authentic theme of anti-idealism that Ibsen would

soon make his own; and in Kongsemnerne (1863; The Pretenders) he dramatized the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man, a king, or a great playwright. This one play was in fact the national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long, and before long it would be recognized as such. But it came too late; though the play was good, the theatre in Christiania was bankrupt, and Ibsens career as a stage writer was apparently at an end. But the death of his theatre was the liberation of Ibsen as a playwright. Without regard for a public he thought petty and illiberal, without care for traditions he found hollow and pretentious, he could now write for himself. He decided to go abroad, and applied for a small state grant. He was awarded part of it, and in April 1864 he left Norway for Italy. For the next 27 years he lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874 and 1885. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as smallmindedness, his homeland had left a very bitter taste in his mouth. With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named Brand. Its central figure is a dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well. All or nothing is the demand that his god makes of Brand and that Brand in turn makes of others. He is a moral hero, but he is also a moral monster, and his heart is torn by the anguish that his moral program demands he inflict on his family. He never hesitates, never ceases to tower over the petty compromisers and spiritual sluggards surrounding him. Yet in the last scene where Brand stands alone before his god, a voice thunders from an avalanche that, even as it crushes the pastor physically, repudiates his whole moral life as well: He is the god of love, says the voice from on high. So the play is not only a denunciation of small-mindedness but a tragedy of the spirit that would transcend it. The poem faced its readers not just with a choice but with an impasse; the heroic alternative was also a destructive (and self-destructive) alternative. In Norway Brand was a tremendous popular success, even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling. Hard on the heels of Brand (1866) came Peer Gynt (1867), another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly antithetical view of human nature. If Brand is a moral monolith, Peer Gynt is a capering will-o-the-wisp, a buoyant and self-centred opportunist who is aimless, yielding, and wholly unprincipled, yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal. The wild and mocking poetry of Peer Gynt has ended by overshadowing Brand in the popular judgment. But these two figures are interdependent and antithetical types who under different guises run through most of Ibsens classic work. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are universal archetypes as well as unforgettable individuals. With these two poetic dramas, Ibsen won his battle with the world; he paused now to work out his future. A philosophicalhistorical drama on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had long been on his mind; he finished it in 1873 under the title Kejser og Galilaeer (Emperor and Galilean), but in a ten-act form too diffuse and discursive for the stage. He wrote a modern satire, De unges forbund (1869; The League of Youth) and then after many preliminary drafts a prose satire on small-town politics, Samfundets sttter (1877; Pillars of Society). But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice; when he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with Et dukkehjem (1879; A Dolls House). This play presents a very ordinary familya bank manager named Torvald Helmer, his wife Nora, and their three little children. Torvald supposes himself the ethical member of the

family, while his wife assumes the role of a pretty irresponsible in order to flatter him. Into this snug, not to say stifling, arrangement intrude several hard-minded outsiders, one of whom threatens to expose a fraud that Nora had once committed (without her husbands knowledge) in order to obtain a loan needed to save his life. When Noras husband finally learns about this dangerous secret, he reacts with outrage and repudiates her out of concern for his own social reputation. Utterly disillusioned about her husband, whom she now sees as a hollow fraud, Nora declares her independence of him and their children and leaves them, slamming the door of the house behind her in the final scene. Audiences were scandalized at Ibsens refusal in A Dolls House to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright would have done) a happy ending, however shoddy or contrived. But that was not Ibsens way; his play was about knowing oneself and being true to that self. Torvald, who had thought all along that he was a sturdy ethical agent, proves to be a hypocrite and a weak compromiser; his wife is not only an ethical idealist, but a destructive one, as severe as Brand. The setting of A Dolls House is ordinary to the point of transparency. Ibsens plot exploits with cold precision the process known as analytic exposition. A secret plan (Noras forgery) is about to be concluded (she can now finish repaying the loan), but before the last step can be taken, a bit of the truth must be told, and the whole deception unravels. It is a pattern of stage action at once simple and powerful. Ibsen used this technique often, and it gained for him an international audience. Ibsens next play, Gengangere (1881; Ghosts), created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. Ostensibly the plays theme is congenital venereal disease, but on another level, it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism. Even after lecherous Captain Alving is in his grave, his ghost will not be laid to rest. In the play, the lying memorial that his conventionally-minded widow has erected to his memory burns down even as his son goes insane from inherited syphilis and his illegitimate daughter advances inexorably toward her destiny in a brothel. The play is a grim study of contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Alvings timidly respectable views. A play dealing with syphilis on top of one dealing with a wifes abandonment of her family sealed Ibsens reputation as a Bad Old Man, but progressive theatres in England and all across the Continent began putting on his plays. His audiences were often small, but there were many of them, and they took his plays very seriously. So did conventionally-minded critics; they denounced Ibsen as if he had desecrated all that was sacred and holy. Ibsens response took the form of a direct dramatic counterattack. Doctor Stockmann, the hero of En folkefiende (1882; An Enemy of the People), functions as Ibsens personal spokesman. In the play he is a medical officer, charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends. When he finds their water to be contaminated, he says so publicly, though the town officials and townspeople try to silence him. When he still insists on speaking the truth, he is officially declared an enemy of the people. Though portrayed as a victim, Doctor Stockmann, like all Ibsens idealistic truth-tellers after Brand, also carries within him a deep strain of destructiveness. (His attacks on the baths will, after all, ruin the town; its just that by comparison with the truth, he doesnt care about this.) Ibsens next play would make this minor chord dominant.

In Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck) Ibsen completely reversed his viewpoint by presenting on stage a gratuitous, destructive truth-teller whose compulsion visits catastrophic misery on a family of helpless innocents. With the help of a number of comforting delusions, Hjalmar Ekdal and his little family are living a somewhat squalid but essentially cheerful existence. Upon these helpless weaklings descends an infatuated truth-teller, Gregers Werle. He cuts away the moral foundations (delusive as they are) on which the family has lived, leaving them despondent and shattered by the weight of a guilt too heavy to bear. The havoc wrought on the Ekdal family is rather pathetic than tragic; but the working out of the action achieves a kind of mournful poetry that is quite new in Ibsens repertoire. Each of this series of Ibsens classic modern dramas grows by extension or reversal out of its predecessor; they form an unbroken string. The last of the sequence is Rosmersholm (1886), in which variants of the destructive saint (Brand) and the all-too-human rogue (Peer) once more strive to define their identities, but this time on a level of moral sensitivity that gives the play a special air of silver serenity. Ex-parson Johannes Rosmer is the ethical personality, while the adventuress Rebecca West is his antagonist. Haunting them both out of the past is the spirit of the parsons late wife, who had committed suicide under the subtle influence, we learn, of Rebecca West, and because of her husbands high-minded indifference to sex. At issue for the future is a choice between bold, unrestricted freedom and the ancient, conservative traditions of Rosmers house. But even as he is persuaded by Rebeccas emancipated spirit, she is touched by his staid, decorous view of life. Each is contaminated by the other, and for differing but complementary reasons, they tempt one another toward the fatal millpond in which Rosmers wife drowned. The play ends with a double suicide in which both Rosmer and Rebecca, each for the others reasons, do justice on themselves. Ibsens playwriting career by no means ended with Rosmersholm, but thereafter he turned toward a more self-analytic and symbolic mode of writing that is quite different from the plays that made his world reputation. Among his later plays are Fruen fra havet (1888; The Lady from the Sea), Hedda Gabler (1890), Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder), Lille Eyolf (1894; Little Eyolf), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and Naar vi dde vaagner (1899; When We Dead Awaken). Two of these plays, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, are vitalized by the presence of a demonically idealistic and totally destructive female such as first appeared in Catiline. Another obsessive personage in these late plays is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last dramas; perhaps these resulted from Ibsens decision in 1891 to return to Norway, or perhaps from the series of fascinated, fearful dalliances he had with young women in his later years. After his return to Norway, Ibsen continued to write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. He died in Kristiania in 1906. Ibsen was in the forefront of those early modern authors whom one could refer to as the great disturbers; he belongs with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake. Ibsen wrote plays about mostly prosaic and commonplace persons; but from them he elicited insights of devastating directness, great subtlety, and occasional flashes of rare beauty. His plots are not cleverly contrived games but deliberate acts of cognition, in which persons are stripped of their accumulated disguises and forced to acknowledge their true selves, for better or worse. Thus, he made his audiences reexamine with painful earnestness the moral foundation of their being. During the last half of the 19th century he turned the European stage back from what it had becomea plaything and a distraction for the boredto make it what it had been long ago among the ancient Greeks, an instrument for passing doomjudgment on the soul.

Robert M. Adams

A DOLL'S HOUSE
Type of work: Drama Author: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Nineteenth century Locale: Norway First presented: 1879

Nora Helmer, the central character of this play, realizing that after eight years of marriage her husband has never viewed her as anything more than a sheltered, petted doll, leaves him in order to learn to become a person in her own right. One of Ibsen's best-known and most popular works, A Doll's House has become a classic expression of the theme of women's rights.

Principal Characters
Nora, the "doll-wife" of Torvald Helmer. Seeking to charm her husband always, Nora is his "singing lark." his pretty "little squirrel," his "little spendthrift." She seems to be a spendthrift because secretly she is paying off a debt which she incurred to finance a year in Italy for the sake of Torvald's health. To get the money, she had forged her dying father's name to a bond at the bank. Now Krogstad, a bookkeeper at the bank where Torvald has recently been appointed manager, aware that the bond was signed after Nora's father's death, is putting pressure on Nora to persuade Torvald to promote him. Frightened, Nora agrees to help him. When her friend Christine Linde, a widow and formerly Krogstad's sweetheart, also asks for help, Nora easily persuades Torvald to give Christine an appointment at the bank. The position, unfortunately, is Krogstad's. Torvald, finding Krogstad's presumption unbearable, plans to discharge him. While Christine helps Nora prepare a costume for a fancy dress ball in which she will dance the tarantella, Krogstad writes a letter, following his dismissal, telling Torvald of Nora's forgery. Nora desperately keeps Torvald from the mailbox until after the dance. She decides to kill herself so that all will know that she alone is guilty and not Torvald. After the dance Torvald reads the letter and tells Nora in anger that she is a criminal and can no longer be his wife, although she may continue to live in his house to keep up appearances. When Krogstad, softened by Christine's promise to marry him and care for his motherless children, returns the bond, Torvald destroys it and is willing to take back his little singing bird. Nora, realizing the shallow basis of his love for her as a "doll-wife," leaves Torvald to find her own personality away from him. She leaves him with the faint hope that their marriage might be resumed if it could be a "real wedlock." Torvald Helmer, the newly promoted manager of a bank. Concerned with business, he is unaware that his wife Nora, whom he regards as a plaything, is capable of making serious decisions. When he discovers her forgery, he is horrified and convinced that he will be

blamed as the instigator, and he plans to try to appease Krogstad in order to forestall his own disgrace. As soon as the bond is returned, Torvald becomes himself again, wants his pet reinstated, and is eager to forget the whole affair. He is baffled when Nora says that she no longer loves him and is leaving him. At the end, he has a sudden hope that what Nora has called "the most wonderful thing of all" might really happen, the "real wedlock" which she wanted. But Nora has gone. Nils Krogstad, a bookkeeper at the bank, dissatisfied with his appointment and with life in general. At first Krogstad appears as a sinister blackmailer threatening Nora with disaster if she does not help him gain a promotion at the bank. Later, when he finds the love of Christine Linde, whose loss had embittered him in the first place, he becomes a changed man and returns the bond. Christine Linde, a widow and Nora's old school-friend. When Mrs. Linde first appears, she is quite worn and desperate for work. She had married for money which she needed to support her mother and two young brothers. Now husband and mother are dead and the brothers grown. In the end, when she and Krogstad have decided to marry, she is happy because she will have someone to care for. She decided that Nora cannot continue to deceive Torvald and that Krogstad should not retrieve his letter, presumably Krogstad will retain his position at the bank. Doctor Rank, a family friend, in love with Nora. Suffering bodily for his father's sins, Dr. Rank is marked by death. Nora starts to ask Dr. Rank to help her pay off the debt, but after he reveals his love for her, she will not ask this favor of him. He tells Nora that he is soon to die and that when death has begun, he will send her his card with a black cross on it. The card appears in the mailbox with Krogstad's letter. Dr. Rank serves no purpose in the play except to show Nora's fidelity to Torvald when she refuses Rank's offer of help after she knows that he loves her.

The Story
On the day before Christmas, Nora Helmer was busying herself with last minute shopping, for this was the first Christmas since her marriage that she had not had to economize. Her husband, Torvald, had just been made manager of a bank and after the New Year their money troubles would be over. She bought a tree and plenty of toys for the children, and she even indulged herself in some macaroons, her favorite confection, but of which Torvald did not entirely approve. He loved his wife dearly, but he regarded her very much as her own father had seen her, as an amusing dolla plaything. It was true that she did behave like a child sometimes in her relations with her husband. She pouted, wheedled, and chattered because Torvald expected these things; he would not have loved his doll-wife without them. Actually, Nora was not a doll but a woman with a woman's loves, hopes, and fears. This was shown seven years before, just after her first child was born, when Torvald had been ill, and the doctor said that unless he went abroad immediately he would die. Nora was desperate. She could not seek Torvald's advice because she knew he would rather die than borrow money. She could not go to her father, for he himself was a dying man. She did the only thing possible under the circumstances. She borrowed the requisite two hundred and fifty pounds from Krogstad, a moneylender, forging her father's name to the note, so that Torvald could have his holiday in Italy. Krogstad was exacting, and she had to think up ways and means to meet the regular payments. When Torvald gave her money for new dresses and such things, she never spent more than half of it, and she found other ways to earn money. One winter she did copying, but she kept this work a secret from Torvald, for he believed that the money for their trip had come from her father.

Then Krogstad, who was in the employ of the bank of which Torvald was now manager, determined to use Torvald to advance his own fortunes. But Torvald hated Krogstad, and was just as determined to be rid of him. The opportunity came when Christine Linde, Nora's old school friend, applied to Torvald for a position in the bank. Torvald resolved to dismiss Krogstad and hire Mrs. Linde in his place. When Krogstad discovered that he was to be fired, he called on Nora and informed her that if he were dismissed he would ruin her and her husband. He reminded her that the note supposedly signed by her father was dated three days after his death. Frightened at the turn matters had taken, Nora pleaded unsuccessfully with Torvald to reinstate Krogstad in the bank. Krogstad, receiving from Torvald an official notice of his dismissal, wrote in return a letter in which he revealed the full details of the forgery. He dropped the letter in the mailbox outside the Helmer home. Torvald was in a holiday mood. The following evening they were to attend a fancy dress ball, and Nora was to go as a Neapolitan fisher girl and dance the tarantella. To divert her husband's attention from the mailbox outside, Nora practiced her dance before Torvald and Dr. Rank, an old friend. Nora was desperate, not knowing quite which way to turn. She had thought of Mrs. Linde, with whom Krogstad had at one time been in love. Mrs. Linde promised to do what she could to turn Krogstad from his avowed purpose. Nora thought also of Dr. Rank, but when she began to confide in him he made it so obvious that he was in love with her that she could not tell her secret. However, Torvald had promised her not to go near the mailbox until after the ball. What bothered Nora was not her own fate, but Torvald's. She pictured herself as already dead, drowned in icy black water. She pictured the grief-stricken Torvald taking upon himself all the blame for what she had done and being disgraced for her sake. But the reality did not quite correspond with Nora's picture. Mrs. Linde, by promising to marry Krogstad and look after his children, succeeded in persuading him to withdraw all accusations against the Helmers, but she realized that Nora's affairs had come to a crisis and that sooner or later Nora and Torvald would have to come to an understanding. This crisis came when Torvald read Krogstad's letter after their return from the ball. He accused Nora of being a hypocrite, a liar, and a criminal, of having no religion, no morality, no sense of duty. He declared that she was unfit to bring up her children. He informed her that she might remain in his household but she would no longer be a part of it. Then another letter arrived from Krogstad, declaring that he intended to take no action against the Helmers. Torvald's whole attitude changed, and with a sigh of relief he boasted that he was saved. For the first time Nora saw her husband for what he wasa selfish, pretentious hypocrite was no regard for her position in the matter. She reminded him that no marriage could be built on inequality, and announced her intention of leaving his house forever. Torvald could not believe his ears and pleaded with her to remain. But she declared she was going to try to become a reasonable human being, to understand the worldin short, to become a woman, not a doll to flatter Torvald's selfish vanity. She went out with irrevocable finality, slammed the door of her doll house behind her.

Critical Evaluation
Although Henrik Ibsen was already a respected playwright in Scandinavia, it was A Doll's House (Et Duk-kehjem) that catapulted him to Internationa/ fame. This drama, the earliest of Ibsen's social-problem plays, must be read in its historical context in order to understand its impact not only on modern dramaturgy but also on society at large. Most contemporary theater up to the time, including Ibsen's earlier work, fell into two general categories. One was the historical romance; the other was the so-called well-made (or

"thesis") play, a contrived comedy of manners revolving around an intricate plot and subplots but ultimately suffocated by the trivia of its theme and dialogue as well as by its shallow characterization. An occasional poetic dramasuch as Ibsen's own Brand and Peer Gym would also appear, but poetic form was often the only distinction between these plays and historical romances, since the content tended to be similar. Into this dramaturgical milieu, A Doll's House injected natural dialogue and situations, abstinence from such artificial conventions as the soliloquy, the "aside," or observance of the "unities" of time and place, and insistence upon the strict logical necessity of the outcome without wrenching events into a happy ending. These theatrical innovationsnow so familiar that twentieth century audiences hardly notice themconstitute Ibsen's fundamental contribution to the form of realistic drama. Realism in the theater emphasizes believability; the guiding question is, "Could this event actually have happened in the lives of real people?" There is no attempt to achieve the comprehensiveness of, say, photographic reality; rather, realism is selective, striving for representative examples in recognizable human experience. And through selectivity, realism implicitly assumes a critical stance. Thus, the Helmers' domestic crisis had, and still has, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I impact on theater audiences. Since A Doll's House was first produced, drama has not been the same. And it is for that reason that Ibsen is called the father of modern drama. Ibsen's influence on modern drama was twofold, for he combined both technique and content in the realism of his A Doll's House. Specifically, Ibsen elevated play-making to a level above mere entertainment by validating the respectability of plays about serious social issues. And one of the most volatile issues of his day was the position of women, for at that time women throughout virtually all of Western civilization were considered by law and by custom chattel of fathers and husbands. Women were denied participation in public life; their access to education was limited; their social lives were narrowly circumscribed; they could not legally transact business, own property, or inherit. In the mid-nineteenth century, chafing under such restrictions, women began to demand autonomy. They pushed for the right to vote and the opportunity for higher education and entry into the professions. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, open defiance developed as women began engaging in such traditionally men's sports as bicycling, hunting, and golf. Their demands and their behavior predictably evoked cries of outrage from men. Against this turbulent background, Ibsen presented A Doll's House. The response was electric. On the strength of the play, suffragists construed Ibsen as a partisan supporter, while their opposition accused the playwright of propagandizing and being an agent provocateur. Yet Ibsen was neither a feminist nor a social reformer in the more general sense. (Indeed, Ibsen personally deplored the kind of emancipation and self-development which brought women out of the domestic sphere into the larger world; he saw women's proper role as motherhood, and motherhood only.) His apparent feminist sympathies were but a facet of his realism. His own responsibility extended no further than describing the problems as he saw them; he did not attempt to solve them. Nevertheless, he had a sharp eye and many sharp words for injustice, and it was the injustice of Torvald's demeaning treatment of Noraa deplorably common occurrence in real life, Ibsen concededthat provided the impetus for the play. In the raging debate over the morality of Nora's behavior, however, it is altogether too easy to neglect Torvald and his dramatic function in the play. For this smug lawyer-bank manager is meant to represent the social structure at large, the same social structure that decreed an inferior position for women. Torvald is, in effect, a symbol for society: male-dominated and authoritarian. Thus, he establishes "rules" for Norathe petty prohibition against macaroons, for one; he also requires her to act like an imbecile and insists upon the Tightness, empirical

as well as ethical, of his view in all matters. (In fact, Ibsen remarks in his "Notes" for the play that men make the laws and judge a woman's conduct from a man's point of view, "as though she were not a woman but a man.") His righteous refusal to borrow money is a particularly ironic example, and his contemptuous attitude toward Nora's intelligence and sense of responsibilityhe calls her his "little lark," his "little squirrel," his "little featherbrain," his "little spendthrift," and so onactually reflects men's prevailing view toward women: that they are owned property, playthings, dolls to be housed in toy mansions and be indulged, but only sparingly. In this Neanderthal context, it is difficult not to view Torvald as a thorough-going villain. But like society, Torvald is not completely devoid of redeeming grace else why would Nora have married him to begin with; why would she commit forgery at great personal risk and use her utmost ingenuity to save his life and to protect him from shame; why would she continue to sacrifice for him, if he possessed not a shred of virtue to elicit from her a feeling of genuine love? For Nora is both sensible and sensitive, despite Torvald's disparaging insinuations, and her awareness of her own worth is gradually awakened as the play unfoldsand with it her sense of individual responsibility. When at last she insists on her right to individual selfdevelopment, the spoiled girl-doll becomes a full-fledged woman. She slams the door of the doll house in a gesture symbolic of a biblical putting away of childish things and takes her rightful place in the adult world. Needless to say, that slam shook the very rafters of the social-domestic establishment, and the reverberations continue to the present time. So powerful an echo makes a powerful drama. http://www.all-art.org/world_literature/ibsen1.htm

Henrik Ibsen. By: Means, Richard, Henrik Ibsen, 2005 Early Life & Work Few writers have faced as much scorn for their work as Henrik Ibsen. The Norwegian dramatist and poet did all he could to express his bleak view of European politics and social crisis in his plays, which were largely misunderstood and unappreciated during his lifetime. However, his plays are still performed today, and are considered some of the most celebrated and influential literary and dramatic works of the nineteenth century. Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, Norway. His early family life was one of financial struggle and depression. His older brother died only weeks after Henrik was born, and one of his four younger siblings was dropped by a nurse at birth and was crippled for life. His father, Knud Ibsen, was a well-established merchant until he went bankrupt, causing embarrassment and ruin for the family. At age 16, Ibsen moved alone to the town of Grimstad, where he worked as an apprentice apothecary for six years. He was publicly disgraced when he accidentally impregnated a servant, and had to support the woman and his newborn son, Hans Jakob Henriksen. While barely supporting himself, Ibsen used his free time to begin his writing career. In 1850, his first play, "Catiline," was released while he was a university student. "Catiline" is a tragedy written in rhymed verse. This style is typical of some of his early plays, but is not representative of his later work. Other plays from this period include "The Hero's Grave" (1850), "St. John's Night" (1852), and "The Feast at Solhaug" (1856). Ibsen eventually moved to Kristiania, Norway, the city that has since 1925 been known as the nation's capital, Oslo. It was there that he was given a directorial position at a theater in Bergen. Ibsen, only 23 years old, was now expected to write plays on a steady basis. He married Suzannah Thorensen in 1858, while he was still sending money to his son. The plays that resulted from his early career were generally unpopular. Among the more notable plays is "Love's Comedy" (1862), which was received with mixed reviews. While many denounced it as radical, it continued to draw crowds and was staged numerous times in later years of his life. In 1863, Ibsen's play "The Pretenders" had become quite popular, but the theater in Kristiania had gone bankrupt, leaving him without a stage. However, this turn of bad luck meant that he would no longer be forced to write for an audience that demanded popular material. He considered the Norwegian public "small-minded," and left for Italy in 1864. It was in Italy that Ibsen achieved his first major success. In 1866 he completed his work on a long poetic drama, "Brand." This thought-provoking work, named for its main character, addressed moral dilemmas and religious issues. Ibsen was now expressing his own beliefs in his writing, and despite its dark tone, "Brand" became very successful in Norway. Another, even more popular poetic drama, "Peer Gynt" (1867) soon followed. This would become one of Ibsen's most influential works. Irish novelist James Joyce greatly admired Ibsen, and used the character Peer Gynt as a model for Stephen Daedalus in his novels "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Ulysses." In 1869, Ibsen wrote a satire, "The League of Youth," which was also successful.

Politics & Plays Although Ibsen's works were written as plays, not all were intended for the stage. "Emperor and Galilaeer" (1873) is an early example -- it is far too long and confusing to be performed, but it is written in dialogue. Ibsen did not believe that a play could only be seen and not read. Later examples of Ibsen's non-performance works include "When We Dead Awaken" (1899), which, although it is a short play, includes elements of dreams that are not meant to be seen onstage. After another staged satire, "Pillars of Society" (1877), Ibsen began writing the most important plays of his career. Although they were innovative and influential, these plays were also his most hated and misunderstood. Many of Ibsen's best-known works come from his views on political and social issues in Europe. His most famous play, "A Doll's House" (1879), focuses on a housewife named Nora and her terrible husband, Torvald. Nora is a character who is oppressed by her family and her society, and is not given respect or freedom of thought. At the end of the play, Nora leaves her family, slamming the door of the house, and does not return. The character of Nora shocked audiences, and the play was an affront to the family values of the late nineteenth century. In addition, Nora's name was quickly recognized as a symbol for Norway, and audiences in Ibsen's native country were offended and angered by the playwright's solution to their problems. Some theaters even staged an alternative "happy" ending, in which Nora returns to her family, and all is forgiven. Ibsen was disappointed that audiences could not accept the play's message. Despite its poor reception, many modern critics view Ibsen's social commentary as heroic. "A Doll's House" is now considered progressive in its treatment of feminism, liberation, and individuality. Shortly after "A Doll's House," Ibsen wrote "Ghosts" (1881), clearly not discouraged by the negative reaction to the earlier play. "Ghosts" also displays aspects of human nature that many people did not want to see expressed. Like "A Doll's House," the play was considered deranged and upsetting. Its characters include Oliver, a vain, young womanizer who moans about his constant headaches; his illegitimate sister, to whom he is attracted; their mother, Mrs. Alving, whose values and morals are seen as petty; and a drunk who accidentally burns down an orphanage. European society had no tolerance for dramatic works featuring such unlikable characters, and therefore "Ghosts" was unappreciated by most audiences. However, small theaters around Europe were staging these plays for select audiences that had a strong interest in Ibsen's drama. At the same time, critics and the general public continued to express their hatred for Ibsen and his work. English critics invented the word "ibscene," a combination of Ibsen's name and the word "obscene," to describe his work. Later Life & Work Ibsen's 1882 play, "An Enemy of the People," features a doctor who is scorned for speaking the truth about contamination in his village. This character represented Ibsen's desire to reveal ugly truths to an unwilling world. In his next play, "The Wild Duck" (1884), another character works to expose the truth to others, but in this play, he hurts people by doing so.

The darkest play of this period is "Rosmerholm" (1886), a tragedy that deals extensively with failed relationships, and features numerous instances of suicide. The final plays of Ibsen's career are less shocking than they are contemplative. Ibsen began his career with a strong female character in "Catiline," and revisited this concept in his most notable late-career work, "Hedda Gabler" (1890). This was yet another examination of frustrated characters in need of a new social order, which ends tragically. Ibsen returned to Kristiania, Norway, where he wrote the remaining plays of his career, including "The Master Builder" (1892), "Little Eyolf" (1894), "John Gabriel Borkman" (1896) and "When We Dead Awaken" (1899). A play about marital difficulties and lost passions, "When We Dead Awaken" features a sculptor who has lost his inspiration because of his age. This calm, trance-like play about connecting with the past is a fitting end to Ibsen's career of writing with energy and emotion. When he was young, Ibsen once told his sister, Hedvig, of the things he wished to accomplish in his life. When she asked him what he would do upon finishing these things, he replied, "Then, I'll die." Having written and directed dozens of plays, the dramatist and poet had challenged the world with his honesty and boldness. He changed modern drama and inspired generations of writers. Ibsen died in Kristiania in 1906 following a series of strokes. ~~~~~~~~ By Richard Means