Directions: 1) Please read the background material on Henrik Ibsen. 2) In a blog post, please comment on the following: How did Ibsen's life impact his plays? How did Ibsen change modern drama? In the article, below, there are several quotations by Ibsen or about Ibsen. Choose 1-2 quotations, cut and paste them into your response. Next, explain its significance to Ibsen and to you as a scholar of drama. I look forward to your responses. We will be reading his play Ghosts.
1850 - Catiline (Catilina)
1850 - The Burial Mound also known as The Warrior's Barrow (Kjæmpehøjen)
1851 - Norma (Norma)
1852 - St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten)
1854 - Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
1855 - The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
1856 - Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
1857 - The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
1862 - Digte - only released collection of poetry
1862 - Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
1863 - The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
1866 - Brand (Brand)
1867 - Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
1869 - The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
1873 - Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
1877 - Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter)
1879 - A Doll House (Et Dukkehjem)
1881 - Ghosts (Gengangere)
1882 - An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
1884 - The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
1886 - Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
1888 - The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet)
1890 - Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
1892 - The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
1896 - John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
1899 - When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)
Introduction
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) published his last drama, "When We Dead Awaken", in 1899, and he called it a dramatic epilogue. It was also destined to be the epilogue of his life's work, because illness prevented him from writing more. For half of a century he had devoted his life and his energies to the art of drama, and he had won international acclaim as the greatest and most influential dramatist of his time. He knew that he had gone further than anyone in putting Norway on the map.
Henrik Ibsen was also a major poet, and he published a collection of poems in 1871. However, drama was the focus of his real lyrical spirit. For a period of many hard years, he faced bitter opposition. But he finally triumphed over the conservatism and aesthetic prejudices of the contemporary critics and audiences. More than anyone, he gave theatrical art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical gravity, a psychological depth, and a social significance which the theater had lacked since the days of Shakespeare. In this manner, Ibsen strongly contributed to giving European drama a vitality and artistic quality comparable to the ancient Greek tragedies.
It is from this perspective we view his contribution to theatrical history. His realistic contemporary drama was a continuation of the European tradition of tragic plays. In these works he portrays people from the middle class of his day. These are people whose routines are suddenly upset as they are confronted with a deep crisis in their lives. They have been blindly following a way of life leading to the troubles and are themselves responsible for the crisis. Looking back on their lives, they are forced to confront themselves. However, Ibsen created another type of drama as well. In fact, he had been writing for 25 years before he, in 1877, created his first contemporary drama, "Pillars of Society".
Life and Writing
Ibsen's biography is lacking in grand and momentous episodes. His life as an artist can be seen as a singularly long and hard struggle leading to victory and fame - a hard road from poverty to international success. He spent all of 27 years abroad, in Italy and Germany. He left his land of birth at the age of 36 in 1864. It was not until he was 63 that he moved home again, to Kristiania (now Oslo), where he would die in 1906 at the age of 78.
In lbsen's last drama, "When We Dead Awaken", he describes the life of an artist that in many ways reflects on his own. The world renowned sculptor, Professor Rubek, has returned to Norway after many years abroad, and in spite of his fame and success, he feels no happiness. In the central work of his life, he has modeled a self-portrait titled "Remorse for a ruined life" During the play he is forced to admit that he has taken the pleasure out of his own life as well as spoiling others'. Everything has been sacrificed for his art - he has forsaken the love of his youth and his earlier idealism as well. It follows that he has actually betrayed his art by relinquishing these essentials. It is none other than his old flame Irene, the model who posed for him in his youth, who goes to him in his moment of destiny and tells him the truth: it is first when we dead awaken, that we see what is irremediable that we have never really lived.
It is the tragic life feeling itself that gives Ibsen's drama its special character, the experience of missing out on life and plodding along in a state of living death. The alternative is pictured as a utopian existence in freedom, truth and love - in short - a happy life. In Ibsen's world the main character strives toward a goal, but this struggle leads out into the cold, to loneliness. Yet the possibility of opting for another route is always there, one can chose human warmth and contact. The problem for Ibsen's protagonist is that both choices can appear to be good, and the individual does not see the consequences of the decision.
In "When We Dead Awaken" the chill of art is contrasted with life's warmth. In this perspective, art serves as a prison from which the artist neither can, nor wishes to escape. As Rubek says to Irene:
"I am an artist, Irene, and I take no shame to myself for the frailties that perhaps cling to me. For I was born to be an artist, you see. - And, do what I may, I shall never be anything else."
This is not an acceptable excuse for Irene, whom he has betrayed. She sees things from a different angle. She calls him a "poet", one who creates his own fictitious world, neglecting his humanity and that of the people who love him. Ella Rentheim, in "John Gabriel Borkman" (1896) makes the same complaint against the man who sacrificed her on the altar of his career. The tragic element in Ibsen's perspective is that for the type of people that concern him, this seems to be an insoluble conflict. Yet this fact does not exonerate them from the responsibility or their own decisions.
Although "When We Dead Awaken" criticizes the egocentricity of the artist, it would be going too far to view the drama as the writer's bitter self-examination. Rubek is not a self-portrait. However, some Ibsen researchers have seen him as a spokesman for the author's standpoint on the question of art. At one point, Rubek says that the public only relates to the external realistic "truth" in his human portrayal. What people do not understand is the hidden dimension in these portraits, all the deceitful motives that hide behind the respectable bourgeois facades. In his youth, Rubek had been inspired by an idealistic vision of a higher form of human existence. Experience has turned him into a disillusioned exposer of people, a man who believes he portrays life as it really is. It is the animal governing man that dominates his vision; this is Rubek's version of Zola's "La béte humaine", and he explains the changes in his art in the following way:
"I imagined that which I saw with my eyes around me in the world. I had to include it (...) and up from the fissures of the soil there now swarm men and women with dimly- suggested animal-faces. women and men - as I knew them in real life."
Understandably, some students of Ibsen have fallen into the temptation of drawing a parallel between life and art, and see this work as a merciless self-denunciation. Once again, "When We Dead Awaken" is by no means auto-biographical. Rubek's relationship with the writer has to be sought on a deeper level - in the conflicts that Ibsen, toward the end of his life, saw as a general and essential human problem.
Ibsen the Psychologist
In the work of the aging writer we meet a number of people who are experiencing similar conflicts. John Gabriel Borkman sacrifices his love for a dream of power and honor. Master builder Solness wrecks his family's lives in order to be regarded as an "artist" in his trade. And Hedda Gabler resolutely changes the fates of others in order to fulfill her own dream of freedom and independence. These examples of people who pursue their own goals, involuntarily trampling on the lives of others, are all drawn from the playwright's last decade of writing. In Ibsen's psychological analyses, he reveals the negative forces (he calls them "demons" and "trolls" in the minds of these people. His human characterization in these latter dramas is extremely complex - a common factor shared by all his last works, starting with "The Wild Duck" in 1884. In his last 15 years of writing, Ibsen developed his dialectical supremacy and his distinctive dramatic form - where realism, symbolism, and deep-digging psychological insights interact. It is this phase of his work that has prompted people to call him - rightly or wrongly - a "Freud of the theater." In any case, Freud and many other psychologists have made use of Ibsen's human portraits as a basis for character analysis or even to illustrate their own theories. Especially well known is Freud's analysis of Rebekka West in "Rosmersholm" (1886), a portrayal he discussed in 1916 together with other character types "who collapse under the weight of success." Freud sees Rebekka as a tragic victim of the Oedipus complex and an incestuous past. The analysis reveals perhaps more about Freud than about Ibsen. But Freud's influence, and the sway of psychoanalysis in general, have had a considerable effect on the way the Norwegian dramatist has been regarded.
Interest in Ibsen as a psychologist can too readily obscure other, equally important, sides of his art. His account of human life is from an acute social and conceptual perspective. Perhaps this is the essence of his art - that which turns it into existential drama exploring many facets of life. This concerns everything he wrote, even prior to his emergence as an international dramatist around 1880.
A Desperate Drama
Ibsen's work as a writer represents a long poetic contemplation of people's need to live differently than they do. Thus there is always a deep undercurrent of desperation in his work. Benedetto Croce called these portrayals of people who live in constant expectation and who are consumed by their pursuit of "something else" in life, "a desperate drama".
It is precisely this distance between what they can achieve and what they want to achieve that is the cause of the tragic (and in many cases the comic) aspect of these people's lives. Ibsen felt that this contradiction between will and real prospects was at the root of his art. Looking back on 25 years of writing in 1875, he declared that most of what he had written involved "the contradiction between ability and aspiration, between will and possibility". In this conflict he saw "humanity's and the individual's tragedy and comedy simultaneously." - A decade later, he created the tragicomic constellation of the priest Rosmer and his scruffy teacher Ulrik Brendel. These two men, who are reflections of each other, both end up on the brink of an abyss where all they see is life's total emptiness and insignificance.
In Ibsen's 12 modern contemporary plays, from "Pillars of Society" (1877) to "When We Dead Awaken" (1899), we are led time and again into the same milieu. His characters' are distinguished by their staunch, well-established bourgeois lives. Nevertheless, their world is threatened and threatening. It turns out that the world is in motion; old values and previous conceptions are adrift. The movement shakes up the life of the individual and jeopardizes the established social order. Here we see how the process has a psychological as well as a conceptual and social aspect. Yet what starts the whole process is the need for change, something springing forth from the individual's volition.
In this sense, Ibsen is a powerful conceptual writer. This does not mean that his main concern as a dramatist was the didactical use of theater, or the waging of an abstract ideological debate. (Some of his critics, contemporary and later, have made this accusation - and it's fairly obvious that Ibsen was drawn towards the didactic.) However, the basis of Ibsen's human portrayal is his characters' conceptions of what makes life worth living - their values and their understanding of existence. The concepts they use to describe their position may be unclear; their self-understanding may be intuitive and deficient. A good example of this is Ellida Wangel's description of her ambivalent attraction to the sea in "The Lady from the Sea" (1888). But for a long time, in Ellida's consciousness, a desire has grown for a freer life coupled with a need for other moral and social values than those dominating Dr. Wangel's bourgeois existence. And this discovery within her creates shockwaves on the psychological and the social plane.
The Human Conflicts
Ibsen himself has given the best characteristic of his approach to drama. This was as early as 1857 in a theater review:
"It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory."
This undoubtedly touches upon something essential in Ibsen's demands to dramatic art: it should as realistically as possible unify three elements: the psychological, the ideological and the social. At its best, the organic synthesis of these three elements is at the heart of Ibsen's drama. Perhaps he only succeeds completely in a few of his plays, such as "Ghosts", "The Wild Duck", and "Hedda Gabler". Interestingly, he considered his major work to be "Emperor and Galilean" (1873), contrary to everyone else. This could indicate how much emphasis he put on ideology, not overt, but as a conflict between opposing views toward life. Ibsen believed that he had created a fully "realistic" rendering of the inner conflict in the abandoned Julian. The truth is, however, that Julian is too marked by the dramatist's own thoughts - what he calls his "positive philosophy of life." Ibsen first succeeded as a theatrical writer when he seriously took another approach - the one he described in connection with "Hedda Gabler" (1890):
"My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions."
Ibsen took many years, after "Emperor and Galilean", to orient himself in this direction. Five years after that great historical dramatization of ideas came "Pillars of Society", the starting point for lbsen's reputation as a European theatrical writer.
Ibsen's International Breakthrough
In 1879, Ibsen sent Nora Helmer out into the world with a demand that a woman too must have the freedom to develop as an adult, independent, and responsible person. The playwright was now over 50, and had finally been recognized outside of the Nordic countries. "Pillars of Society". had admittedly opened the German borders for him, but it was "A Doll's House". and "Ghost" (1881) which in the 1880s led him into the European avant-garde.
"A Doll's House" has a plot which he repeated in many subsequent works, in the phase when he cultivated "critical realism". We experience the individual in opposition to the majority, society's oppressive authority. Nora puts it this way: "I will have to find out who is right, society or myself."
As noted earlier, when the individual intellectually frees himself from traditional ways of thinking, serious conflicts arise. For a short period around 1880, it appears that Ibsen was relatively optimistic about the individual's chances of succeeding on his own. Although her future is insecure in many ways, Nora seems to have a real chance of finding the freedom and independence she is seeking. Ibsen can be criticized for his somewhat superficial treatment of the problems a divorced woman without means would face in contemporary society. But it was the moral problems that concerned him as a writer, not the practical and economic ones.
A Singular Success
In spite of Nora's uncertain future prospects, she has served in a number of countries as a symbol for women fighting for liberation and equality. In this connection, she is the most "international" of lbsen's characters. Yet this is a rather singular success. The middle-class public has enthusiastically applauded a woman who leaves her children and husband, completely breaking off with the most important institution in the bourgeois society - the family!
This points to the basis of Ibsen's international success. He took deep schisms and acute problems that afflicted the bourgeois family and placed them on the stage. On the surface, the middle-class homes gave an impression of success - and appeared to reflect a picture of a healthy and stable society. But Ibsen dramatizes the hidden conflicts in this society by opening the doors to the private, and secret rooms of the bourgeois homes. He shows what can be hiding behind the beautiful façades: moral duplicity, confinement, betrayal, and fraud not to mention a constant insecurity. These were the aspects of the middle-class life one was not supposed to mention in public, as Pastor Manders wished Mrs. Alving to keep secret her reading and everything else that threatened the atmosphere at Rosenvold in "Ghosts". In the same manner, the social leaders in "Rosmersholm" put pressure on Rosmer to keep him from telling that he, the priest, had given up the Christian faith.
But Ibsen did not remain silent, and the spotlights of his plays made contemporary aspects of life highly visible. He disrupted the peace of the lives of the bourgeoisie by reminding them that they had climbed to their position of social power by mastering quite different ideals than tranquillity, order and stability. The bourgeoisie had betrayed its own motto of "freedom, equality, and brotherhood", and especially after the revolutionary year 1848 they had become defenders of the status quo. There was, of course, a liberal opposition within their class, and Ibsen openly joins these ranks in his first modern contemporary drama. He considered this movement for freedom and progress to be the true "European" point of view. As early as 1870, he wrote to the Danish critic Georg Brandes that it was imperative to return to the ideas of the French revolution, freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The words need a new meaning in keeping with the times, he claimed. In 1875 he writes, again to Brandes:
"Why are you, and the rest of us who hold the European viewpoint, so isolated at home?"
Eventually, as Ibsen grew older, he had trouble accepting certain extreme forms of liberalism which overemphasized the individual's sovereign right to self-realization and to some extent radically departed from past norms and values. In "Rosmersholm", he points out the dangers of radicalism built solely on individual moral norms. It is obvious here that Ibsen is concerned with European culture's basis in a Christian inspired moral tradition. One has to build on this, he indicates, even though one has given up the Christian faith. This is certainly the conclusion that Rebekka West reaches.
Simultaneously, this drama, like "Ghosts", is a painful clash with the melancholic, killjoy aspects of the Christian bourgeois tradition which subdues the human spirit. Both these works contain, for all their despair, a warm defense of happiness and the joy of life - pitted against the bourgeois society's emphasis on duty, law, and order.
It was in the 1870s that Ibsen oriented himself toward his "European" point of view. Even though he lived abroad, he continually chose a Norwegian setting for his contemporary dramas. As a rule, we find ourselves in a small Norwegian coastal town, the kind Ibsen knew so well from his childhood in Skien and his youth in Grimstad. The background of the young Ibsen certainly gave him a sharp eye for social forces and conflicts arising from differing viewpoints. In small societies, such as the typical Norwegian coastal town, these social and ideological conflicts are more exposed than they would be in a larger city.
Ibsen's first painful experiences came from such a small community. He had seen how conventions, traditions, and norms could exercise a negative control over the individual, create anxiety, and inhibit a natural and joyful lifestyle. This is the atmosphere of the "ghosts" as Mrs. Alving experiences it. According to her, it makes people "afraid of the light."
This was the atmosphere of his youth that formed the basis for his writing and world fame. As an insecure writer and man of the theater in a stifling Norwegian milieu, he set out to create a new Norwegian drama. He began with this national perspective. At the same time, from his first journey abroad, he oriented himself toward the European tradition of theater.
lbsen's Years of Learning
In the history of drama, early in the 1850s Ibsen carried on the traditions of two highly dissimilar writers, the Frenchman Eugéne Scribe (1791-1861) and the German Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). For 11 years the young Ibsen was occupied with day to day practical stagework, and it follows that he had to keep himself well informed about the latest contemporary Euro-heatrical art. He worked with rehearsals of new plays and was committed to writing for the theater.
Scribe could teach him how a drama's plot should be structured in a logically motivated progression of scenes. Hebbel provided him with an example of the way drama could be based on life's contemporary dialectics, creating a modern conceptual drama. Hebbel's pioneering work was his conveyance of the ideologicalconflicts of his day into the theater where he created "a drama of issues" pointing forward. He also knew how the Greek tragedy's retrospective technique could be used by a modern dramatist.
In other words, Ibsen was in close contact with the art of the stage for a long uninterrupted period. His six years at the theater in Bergen (1851-57) and the following four or five years at the theater in Kristiania from 1857 were not easy. But he acquired a sharp eye for theatrical techniques and possibilities.
During a study tour to Copenhagen and Dresden in 1852, he came across a dramaturgical work newly released in Germany. It was Hermann Hettner's "Das moderne Drama" (1852). This programmatic treatise for a new topical theater deeply affected Ibsen's development as a dramatist. In Hettner too, we see the strong influence of Scribe and Hebbel, combined with a passionate interest for Shakespeare. Ibsen also gleaned knowledge from other writers, most notably Schiller and the two Danes Adam Oehlenschleger (1779-1850) and John Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860).
Ibsen's apprenticeship was long, lasting about 15 years, and included theater work he later would claim to be as difficult as "having an abortion every day." There was a strong pressure to produce hanging over him; one that led to fumbling attempts in many directions. He experienced a few minor artistic victories - and numerous defeats. Very few believed that he had the necessary gift to become more than a minor theatrical writer with a modicum of talent.
In spite of this insecurity, it is a determined young writer we see during these years. His goal was clearly national. Together with his friend and colleague Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910), he founded "The Norwegian Company" in 1859, an organ for Norwegian art and culture. They had a joint program for their activities. Ibsen was especially concerned with the role of theater in the young Norwegian nation's search for its own identity In these "nation-building" pursuits, he gathered his material from the country's medieval history and perfected his art as a dramatist. This is prominent in the work that caps Ibsen's period of apprenticeship, "The Pretenders" from 1863. The story takes place in Norway in the 1200s, a period marked by destructive strife. But Ibsen's perspective is Norway of the 1860s when he has the king, Haakon Haakonsson, express his thoughts on national unity:
"Norway was a kingdom, now it will be a nation (... ) all shall be as one hereafter, and all shall know in themselves that they are one!"
"The Pretenders" was Ibsen's breakthrough, yet he had to wait a few years before being recognized as one of the country's leading writers. This honor came in 1866 with "Brand" "The Pretenders", constitutes the end of his close relationship with Norwegian theater. It was also his farewell performance - he now started his long exile. In the years that followed, he turned away from the stage and sought a reading public.
The Great Topical Dramas
Both the great dramas for reading, "Brand" (1866) and "Peer Gynt" (1867), were based on Ibsen's problematic relationship with his country of birth. Political developments in 1864 led him to lose his optimistic belief in his country's future. He even began to doubt whether his countrymen had a historical raison d'être as a nation.
What he had earlier treated as a national problem of identity now became a question of the individual's personal integrity. It was no longer sufficient to dwell on an earlier historical era of greatness and focus on the continuity of the nation's life. Ibsen turned away from history, and confronted what he considered the main contemporary problem - a nation can only rise up culturally by means of the individual's exertion of will. "Brand" is mainly a drama with a message that the individual must follow the path of volition in order to achieve true humanity In addition, this is the only way to real freedom - for the individual, and it follows, for society as a whole.
In the two rather different twin works "Brand" and "Peer Gynt", the focus is on the problem of personality, Ibsen dramatizes the conflict between an opportunistic acting out of an unnatural role, and a dedication to a demanding lifelong quest. In "Peer Gynt", the dramatist created a scene which artistically illustrates this situation of conflict. The aging Peer, on his way back to his Norwegian roots is forced to come to terms with himself. As he looks back upon his wasted life, he peels an onion. He lets each layer represent a different role he has played. But he finds no core. He has to face the fact that he has become "no one", that he has no "self".
"So unspeakably poor, then, a soul can go back to nothingness, in the misty gray. You beautiful earth, don't be annoyed that I left no sign when I walked your grass. You beautiful sun, in vain you've shed your glorious light on an empty house. There was no one within to cheer and warm; - The owner, they tell me, was never at home."
Peer is the weak, spineless person - Brand's antithesis. But it is precisely in Ibsen's living portrayal of a personality's "dissolution" in changing roles, that some historians of the theater see the harbinger of a modernistic perception of the individual. The British drama researcher Ronald Gaskell puts it this way: "Peer Gynt" inaugurates the drama of the modern mind", and he continues: "Indeed, if Surrealism and Expressionism in the theater can be said to have any single source, the source is undoubtedly "Peer Gynt".
Thus does this early Ibsen drama though very "Norwegian" and romantic claim a central position in theatrical history, even though it was not written for the stage. In fact, it is "Peer Gynt" that in modern times has helped Ibsen to retain his position as a vital and relevant writer. Thus it was not only his contemporary plays that have made him one of the most towering figures in the history of the theater. Although it was mainly these works the well-known Swedish researcher in drama, Martin Lamm, had in mind when he claimed:
"Ibsen's drama is the Rome of modern drama: all roads lead to it - and from it."
Even though Ibsen withdrew from his Norwegian starting point in the 1870s and became "a European," he was always deeply marked by the country he left in 1864, and to which he first returned as an aging celebrity. It was not easy for him to return. The many years abroad, and the long struggle for recognition, had left their indelible stamp. Towards the end of his career, he said that he really was not happy with the fantastic life he had lived. He felt homeless - even in his mother country.
But it is precisely this tension between the Norwegian and the foreign (an element of freer European culture) in Ibsen that characterized him more than anything else as an individual and a writer. His independent position in what he called "the great, free, cultural situation" provided him with the broad perspective of distance, and freedom. Simultaneously, the Norwegian in him created a longing for a more liberated and happier life. This is the longing for the sun in the grave writer's poetic world. He never denied his distinctive Norwegian character. Toward the end of his life, he said to a German friend:
He who wishes to understand me, must know Norway. The magnificent, but severe, natural environment surrounding people up there in the north, the lonely, secluded life - the farms are miles apart - forces them to be unconcerned with others, to keep to their own. That is why they become introspective and serious, they brood and doubt - and they often lose faith. At home every other person is a philosopher! There, the long, dark, winters come with their thick fogs enveloping the houses - oh, how they long for the sun!
Major Plays
“Only by grasping and comprehending my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts…I therefore appeal to the reader that he not put any play aside, and not skip anything, but that he absorb the plays…in the order in which I wrote them.” - Henrik Ibsen1850 - Catiline (Catilina)
1850 - The Burial Mound also known as The Warrior's Barrow (Kjæmpehøjen)
1851 - Norma (Norma)
1852 - St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten)
1854 - Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
1855 - The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
1856 - Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
1857 - The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
1862 - Digte - only released collection of poetry
1862 - Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
1863 - The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
1866 - Brand (Brand)
1867 - Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
1869 - The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
1873 - Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
1877 - Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter)
1879 - A Doll House (Et Dukkehjem)
1881 - Ghosts (Gengangere)
1882 - An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
1884 - The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
1886 - Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
1888 - The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet)
1890 - Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
1892 - The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
1896 - John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
1899 - When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)
Background Material by Professor Bjorn Hemmer, University of Oslo
Introduction
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) published his last drama, "When We Dead Awaken", in 1899, and he called it a dramatic epilogue. It was also destined to be the epilogue of his life's work, because illness prevented him from writing more. For half of a century he had devoted his life and his energies to the art of drama, and he had won international acclaim as the greatest and most influential dramatist of his time. He knew that he had gone further than anyone in putting Norway on the map.
Henrik Ibsen was also a major poet, and he published a collection of poems in 1871. However, drama was the focus of his real lyrical spirit. For a period of many hard years, he faced bitter opposition. But he finally triumphed over the conservatism and aesthetic prejudices of the contemporary critics and audiences. More than anyone, he gave theatrical art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical gravity, a psychological depth, and a social significance which the theater had lacked since the days of Shakespeare. In this manner, Ibsen strongly contributed to giving European drama a vitality and artistic quality comparable to the ancient Greek tragedies.
It is from this perspective we view his contribution to theatrical history. His realistic contemporary drama was a continuation of the European tradition of tragic plays. In these works he portrays people from the middle class of his day. These are people whose routines are suddenly upset as they are confronted with a deep crisis in their lives. They have been blindly following a way of life leading to the troubles and are themselves responsible for the crisis. Looking back on their lives, they are forced to confront themselves. However, Ibsen created another type of drama as well. In fact, he had been writing for 25 years before he, in 1877, created his first contemporary drama, "Pillars of Society".
Life and Writing
Ibsen's biography is lacking in grand and momentous episodes. His life as an artist can be seen as a singularly long and hard struggle leading to victory and fame - a hard road from poverty to international success. He spent all of 27 years abroad, in Italy and Germany. He left his land of birth at the age of 36 in 1864. It was not until he was 63 that he moved home again, to Kristiania (now Oslo), where he would die in 1906 at the age of 78.
In lbsen's last drama, "When We Dead Awaken", he describes the life of an artist that in many ways reflects on his own. The world renowned sculptor, Professor Rubek, has returned to Norway after many years abroad, and in spite of his fame and success, he feels no happiness. In the central work of his life, he has modeled a self-portrait titled "Remorse for a ruined life" During the play he is forced to admit that he has taken the pleasure out of his own life as well as spoiling others'. Everything has been sacrificed for his art - he has forsaken the love of his youth and his earlier idealism as well. It follows that he has actually betrayed his art by relinquishing these essentials. It is none other than his old flame Irene, the model who posed for him in his youth, who goes to him in his moment of destiny and tells him the truth: it is first when we dead awaken, that we see what is irremediable that we have never really lived.
It is the tragic life feeling itself that gives Ibsen's drama its special character, the experience of missing out on life and plodding along in a state of living death. The alternative is pictured as a utopian existence in freedom, truth and love - in short - a happy life. In Ibsen's world the main character strives toward a goal, but this struggle leads out into the cold, to loneliness. Yet the possibility of opting for another route is always there, one can chose human warmth and contact. The problem for Ibsen's protagonist is that both choices can appear to be good, and the individual does not see the consequences of the decision.
In "When We Dead Awaken" the chill of art is contrasted with life's warmth. In this perspective, art serves as a prison from which the artist neither can, nor wishes to escape. As Rubek says to Irene:
"I am an artist, Irene, and I take no shame to myself for the frailties that perhaps cling to me. For I was born to be an artist, you see. - And, do what I may, I shall never be anything else."
This is not an acceptable excuse for Irene, whom he has betrayed. She sees things from a different angle. She calls him a "poet", one who creates his own fictitious world, neglecting his humanity and that of the people who love him. Ella Rentheim, in "John Gabriel Borkman" (1896) makes the same complaint against the man who sacrificed her on the altar of his career. The tragic element in Ibsen's perspective is that for the type of people that concern him, this seems to be an insoluble conflict. Yet this fact does not exonerate them from the responsibility or their own decisions.
Although "When We Dead Awaken" criticizes the egocentricity of the artist, it would be going too far to view the drama as the writer's bitter self-examination. Rubek is not a self-portrait. However, some Ibsen researchers have seen him as a spokesman for the author's standpoint on the question of art. At one point, Rubek says that the public only relates to the external realistic "truth" in his human portrayal. What people do not understand is the hidden dimension in these portraits, all the deceitful motives that hide behind the respectable bourgeois facades. In his youth, Rubek had been inspired by an idealistic vision of a higher form of human existence. Experience has turned him into a disillusioned exposer of people, a man who believes he portrays life as it really is. It is the animal governing man that dominates his vision; this is Rubek's version of Zola's "La béte humaine", and he explains the changes in his art in the following way:
"I imagined that which I saw with my eyes around me in the world. I had to include it (...) and up from the fissures of the soil there now swarm men and women with dimly- suggested animal-faces. women and men - as I knew them in real life."
Understandably, some students of Ibsen have fallen into the temptation of drawing a parallel between life and art, and see this work as a merciless self-denunciation. Once again, "When We Dead Awaken" is by no means auto-biographical. Rubek's relationship with the writer has to be sought on a deeper level - in the conflicts that Ibsen, toward the end of his life, saw as a general and essential human problem.
Ibsen the Psychologist
In the work of the aging writer we meet a number of people who are experiencing similar conflicts. John Gabriel Borkman sacrifices his love for a dream of power and honor. Master builder Solness wrecks his family's lives in order to be regarded as an "artist" in his trade. And Hedda Gabler resolutely changes the fates of others in order to fulfill her own dream of freedom and independence. These examples of people who pursue their own goals, involuntarily trampling on the lives of others, are all drawn from the playwright's last decade of writing. In Ibsen's psychological analyses, he reveals the negative forces (he calls them "demons" and "trolls" in the minds of these people. His human characterization in these latter dramas is extremely complex - a common factor shared by all his last works, starting with "The Wild Duck" in 1884. In his last 15 years of writing, Ibsen developed his dialectical supremacy and his distinctive dramatic form - where realism, symbolism, and deep-digging psychological insights interact. It is this phase of his work that has prompted people to call him - rightly or wrongly - a "Freud of the theater." In any case, Freud and many other psychologists have made use of Ibsen's human portraits as a basis for character analysis or even to illustrate their own theories. Especially well known is Freud's analysis of Rebekka West in "Rosmersholm" (1886), a portrayal he discussed in 1916 together with other character types "who collapse under the weight of success." Freud sees Rebekka as a tragic victim of the Oedipus complex and an incestuous past. The analysis reveals perhaps more about Freud than about Ibsen. But Freud's influence, and the sway of psychoanalysis in general, have had a considerable effect on the way the Norwegian dramatist has been regarded.
Interest in Ibsen as a psychologist can too readily obscure other, equally important, sides of his art. His account of human life is from an acute social and conceptual perspective. Perhaps this is the essence of his art - that which turns it into existential drama exploring many facets of life. This concerns everything he wrote, even prior to his emergence as an international dramatist around 1880.
A Desperate Drama
Ibsen's work as a writer represents a long poetic contemplation of people's need to live differently than they do. Thus there is always a deep undercurrent of desperation in his work. Benedetto Croce called these portrayals of people who live in constant expectation and who are consumed by their pursuit of "something else" in life, "a desperate drama".
It is precisely this distance between what they can achieve and what they want to achieve that is the cause of the tragic (and in many cases the comic) aspect of these people's lives. Ibsen felt that this contradiction between will and real prospects was at the root of his art. Looking back on 25 years of writing in 1875, he declared that most of what he had written involved "the contradiction between ability and aspiration, between will and possibility". In this conflict he saw "humanity's and the individual's tragedy and comedy simultaneously." - A decade later, he created the tragicomic constellation of the priest Rosmer and his scruffy teacher Ulrik Brendel. These two men, who are reflections of each other, both end up on the brink of an abyss where all they see is life's total emptiness and insignificance.
In Ibsen's 12 modern contemporary plays, from "Pillars of Society" (1877) to "When We Dead Awaken" (1899), we are led time and again into the same milieu. His characters' are distinguished by their staunch, well-established bourgeois lives. Nevertheless, their world is threatened and threatening. It turns out that the world is in motion; old values and previous conceptions are adrift. The movement shakes up the life of the individual and jeopardizes the established social order. Here we see how the process has a psychological as well as a conceptual and social aspect. Yet what starts the whole process is the need for change, something springing forth from the individual's volition.
In this sense, Ibsen is a powerful conceptual writer. This does not mean that his main concern as a dramatist was the didactical use of theater, or the waging of an abstract ideological debate. (Some of his critics, contemporary and later, have made this accusation - and it's fairly obvious that Ibsen was drawn towards the didactic.) However, the basis of Ibsen's human portrayal is his characters' conceptions of what makes life worth living - their values and their understanding of existence. The concepts they use to describe their position may be unclear; their self-understanding may be intuitive and deficient. A good example of this is Ellida Wangel's description of her ambivalent attraction to the sea in "The Lady from the Sea" (1888). But for a long time, in Ellida's consciousness, a desire has grown for a freer life coupled with a need for other moral and social values than those dominating Dr. Wangel's bourgeois existence. And this discovery within her creates shockwaves on the psychological and the social plane.
The Human Conflicts
Ibsen himself has given the best characteristic of his approach to drama. This was as early as 1857 in a theater review:
"It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory."
This undoubtedly touches upon something essential in Ibsen's demands to dramatic art: it should as realistically as possible unify three elements: the psychological, the ideological and the social. At its best, the organic synthesis of these three elements is at the heart of Ibsen's drama. Perhaps he only succeeds completely in a few of his plays, such as "Ghosts", "The Wild Duck", and "Hedda Gabler". Interestingly, he considered his major work to be "Emperor and Galilean" (1873), contrary to everyone else. This could indicate how much emphasis he put on ideology, not overt, but as a conflict between opposing views toward life. Ibsen believed that he had created a fully "realistic" rendering of the inner conflict in the abandoned Julian. The truth is, however, that Julian is too marked by the dramatist's own thoughts - what he calls his "positive philosophy of life." Ibsen first succeeded as a theatrical writer when he seriously took another approach - the one he described in connection with "Hedda Gabler" (1890):
"My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions."
Ibsen took many years, after "Emperor and Galilean", to orient himself in this direction. Five years after that great historical dramatization of ideas came "Pillars of Society", the starting point for lbsen's reputation as a European theatrical writer.
Ibsen's International Breakthrough
In 1879, Ibsen sent Nora Helmer out into the world with a demand that a woman too must have the freedom to develop as an adult, independent, and responsible person. The playwright was now over 50, and had finally been recognized outside of the Nordic countries. "Pillars of Society". had admittedly opened the German borders for him, but it was "A Doll's House". and "Ghost" (1881) which in the 1880s led him into the European avant-garde.
"A Doll's House" has a plot which he repeated in many subsequent works, in the phase when he cultivated "critical realism". We experience the individual in opposition to the majority, society's oppressive authority. Nora puts it this way: "I will have to find out who is right, society or myself."
As noted earlier, when the individual intellectually frees himself from traditional ways of thinking, serious conflicts arise. For a short period around 1880, it appears that Ibsen was relatively optimistic about the individual's chances of succeeding on his own. Although her future is insecure in many ways, Nora seems to have a real chance of finding the freedom and independence she is seeking. Ibsen can be criticized for his somewhat superficial treatment of the problems a divorced woman without means would face in contemporary society. But it was the moral problems that concerned him as a writer, not the practical and economic ones.
A Singular Success
In spite of Nora's uncertain future prospects, she has served in a number of countries as a symbol for women fighting for liberation and equality. In this connection, she is the most "international" of lbsen's characters. Yet this is a rather singular success. The middle-class public has enthusiastically applauded a woman who leaves her children and husband, completely breaking off with the most important institution in the bourgeois society - the family!
This points to the basis of Ibsen's international success. He took deep schisms and acute problems that afflicted the bourgeois family and placed them on the stage. On the surface, the middle-class homes gave an impression of success - and appeared to reflect a picture of a healthy and stable society. But Ibsen dramatizes the hidden conflicts in this society by opening the doors to the private, and secret rooms of the bourgeois homes. He shows what can be hiding behind the beautiful façades: moral duplicity, confinement, betrayal, and fraud not to mention a constant insecurity. These were the aspects of the middle-class life one was not supposed to mention in public, as Pastor Manders wished Mrs. Alving to keep secret her reading and everything else that threatened the atmosphere at Rosenvold in "Ghosts". In the same manner, the social leaders in "Rosmersholm" put pressure on Rosmer to keep him from telling that he, the priest, had given up the Christian faith.
But Ibsen did not remain silent, and the spotlights of his plays made contemporary aspects of life highly visible. He disrupted the peace of the lives of the bourgeoisie by reminding them that they had climbed to their position of social power by mastering quite different ideals than tranquillity, order and stability. The bourgeoisie had betrayed its own motto of "freedom, equality, and brotherhood", and especially after the revolutionary year 1848 they had become defenders of the status quo. There was, of course, a liberal opposition within their class, and Ibsen openly joins these ranks in his first modern contemporary drama. He considered this movement for freedom and progress to be the true "European" point of view. As early as 1870, he wrote to the Danish critic Georg Brandes that it was imperative to return to the ideas of the French revolution, freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The words need a new meaning in keeping with the times, he claimed. In 1875 he writes, again to Brandes:
"Why are you, and the rest of us who hold the European viewpoint, so isolated at home?"
Eventually, as Ibsen grew older, he had trouble accepting certain extreme forms of liberalism which overemphasized the individual's sovereign right to self-realization and to some extent radically departed from past norms and values. In "Rosmersholm", he points out the dangers of radicalism built solely on individual moral norms. It is obvious here that Ibsen is concerned with European culture's basis in a Christian inspired moral tradition. One has to build on this, he indicates, even though one has given up the Christian faith. This is certainly the conclusion that Rebekka West reaches.
Simultaneously, this drama, like "Ghosts", is a painful clash with the melancholic, killjoy aspects of the Christian bourgeois tradition which subdues the human spirit. Both these works contain, for all their despair, a warm defense of happiness and the joy of life - pitted against the bourgeois society's emphasis on duty, law, and order.
It was in the 1870s that Ibsen oriented himself toward his "European" point of view. Even though he lived abroad, he continually chose a Norwegian setting for his contemporary dramas. As a rule, we find ourselves in a small Norwegian coastal town, the kind Ibsen knew so well from his childhood in Skien and his youth in Grimstad. The background of the young Ibsen certainly gave him a sharp eye for social forces and conflicts arising from differing viewpoints. In small societies, such as the typical Norwegian coastal town, these social and ideological conflicts are more exposed than they would be in a larger city.
Ibsen's first painful experiences came from such a small community. He had seen how conventions, traditions, and norms could exercise a negative control over the individual, create anxiety, and inhibit a natural and joyful lifestyle. This is the atmosphere of the "ghosts" as Mrs. Alving experiences it. According to her, it makes people "afraid of the light."
This was the atmosphere of his youth that formed the basis for his writing and world fame. As an insecure writer and man of the theater in a stifling Norwegian milieu, he set out to create a new Norwegian drama. He began with this national perspective. At the same time, from his first journey abroad, he oriented himself toward the European tradition of theater.
lbsen's Years of Learning
In the history of drama, early in the 1850s Ibsen carried on the traditions of two highly dissimilar writers, the Frenchman Eugéne Scribe (1791-1861) and the German Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). For 11 years the young Ibsen was occupied with day to day practical stagework, and it follows that he had to keep himself well informed about the latest contemporary Euro-heatrical art. He worked with rehearsals of new plays and was committed to writing for the theater.
Scribe could teach him how a drama's plot should be structured in a logically motivated progression of scenes. Hebbel provided him with an example of the way drama could be based on life's contemporary dialectics, creating a modern conceptual drama. Hebbel's pioneering work was his conveyance of the ideologicalconflicts of his day into the theater where he created "a drama of issues" pointing forward. He also knew how the Greek tragedy's retrospective technique could be used by a modern dramatist.
In other words, Ibsen was in close contact with the art of the stage for a long uninterrupted period. His six years at the theater in Bergen (1851-57) and the following four or five years at the theater in Kristiania from 1857 were not easy. But he acquired a sharp eye for theatrical techniques and possibilities.
During a study tour to Copenhagen and Dresden in 1852, he came across a dramaturgical work newly released in Germany. It was Hermann Hettner's "Das moderne Drama" (1852). This programmatic treatise for a new topical theater deeply affected Ibsen's development as a dramatist. In Hettner too, we see the strong influence of Scribe and Hebbel, combined with a passionate interest for Shakespeare. Ibsen also gleaned knowledge from other writers, most notably Schiller and the two Danes Adam Oehlenschleger (1779-1850) and John Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860).
Ibsen's apprenticeship was long, lasting about 15 years, and included theater work he later would claim to be as difficult as "having an abortion every day." There was a strong pressure to produce hanging over him; one that led to fumbling attempts in many directions. He experienced a few minor artistic victories - and numerous defeats. Very few believed that he had the necessary gift to become more than a minor theatrical writer with a modicum of talent.
In spite of this insecurity, it is a determined young writer we see during these years. His goal was clearly national. Together with his friend and colleague Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910), he founded "The Norwegian Company" in 1859, an organ for Norwegian art and culture. They had a joint program for their activities. Ibsen was especially concerned with the role of theater in the young Norwegian nation's search for its own identity In these "nation-building" pursuits, he gathered his material from the country's medieval history and perfected his art as a dramatist. This is prominent in the work that caps Ibsen's period of apprenticeship, "The Pretenders" from 1863. The story takes place in Norway in the 1200s, a period marked by destructive strife. But Ibsen's perspective is Norway of the 1860s when he has the king, Haakon Haakonsson, express his thoughts on national unity:
"Norway was a kingdom, now it will be a nation (... ) all shall be as one hereafter, and all shall know in themselves that they are one!"
"The Pretenders" was Ibsen's breakthrough, yet he had to wait a few years before being recognized as one of the country's leading writers. This honor came in 1866 with "Brand" "The Pretenders", constitutes the end of his close relationship with Norwegian theater. It was also his farewell performance - he now started his long exile. In the years that followed, he turned away from the stage and sought a reading public.
The Great Topical Dramas
Both the great dramas for reading, "Brand" (1866) and "Peer Gynt" (1867), were based on Ibsen's problematic relationship with his country of birth. Political developments in 1864 led him to lose his optimistic belief in his country's future. He even began to doubt whether his countrymen had a historical raison d'être as a nation.
What he had earlier treated as a national problem of identity now became a question of the individual's personal integrity. It was no longer sufficient to dwell on an earlier historical era of greatness and focus on the continuity of the nation's life. Ibsen turned away from history, and confronted what he considered the main contemporary problem - a nation can only rise up culturally by means of the individual's exertion of will. "Brand" is mainly a drama with a message that the individual must follow the path of volition in order to achieve true humanity In addition, this is the only way to real freedom - for the individual, and it follows, for society as a whole.
In the two rather different twin works "Brand" and "Peer Gynt", the focus is on the problem of personality, Ibsen dramatizes the conflict between an opportunistic acting out of an unnatural role, and a dedication to a demanding lifelong quest. In "Peer Gynt", the dramatist created a scene which artistically illustrates this situation of conflict. The aging Peer, on his way back to his Norwegian roots is forced to come to terms with himself. As he looks back upon his wasted life, he peels an onion. He lets each layer represent a different role he has played. But he finds no core. He has to face the fact that he has become "no one", that he has no "self".
"So unspeakably poor, then, a soul can go back to nothingness, in the misty gray. You beautiful earth, don't be annoyed that I left no sign when I walked your grass. You beautiful sun, in vain you've shed your glorious light on an empty house. There was no one within to cheer and warm; - The owner, they tell me, was never at home."
Peer is the weak, spineless person - Brand's antithesis. But it is precisely in Ibsen's living portrayal of a personality's "dissolution" in changing roles, that some historians of the theater see the harbinger of a modernistic perception of the individual. The British drama researcher Ronald Gaskell puts it this way: "Peer Gynt" inaugurates the drama of the modern mind", and he continues: "Indeed, if Surrealism and Expressionism in the theater can be said to have any single source, the source is undoubtedly "Peer Gynt".
Thus does this early Ibsen drama though very "Norwegian" and romantic claim a central position in theatrical history, even though it was not written for the stage. In fact, it is "Peer Gynt" that in modern times has helped Ibsen to retain his position as a vital and relevant writer. Thus it was not only his contemporary plays that have made him one of the most towering figures in the history of the theater. Although it was mainly these works the well-known Swedish researcher in drama, Martin Lamm, had in mind when he claimed:
"Ibsen's drama is the Rome of modern drama: all roads lead to it - and from it."
Even though Ibsen withdrew from his Norwegian starting point in the 1870s and became "a European," he was always deeply marked by the country he left in 1864, and to which he first returned as an aging celebrity. It was not easy for him to return. The many years abroad, and the long struggle for recognition, had left their indelible stamp. Towards the end of his career, he said that he really was not happy with the fantastic life he had lived. He felt homeless - even in his mother country.
But it is precisely this tension between the Norwegian and the foreign (an element of freer European culture) in Ibsen that characterized him more than anything else as an individual and a writer. His independent position in what he called "the great, free, cultural situation" provided him with the broad perspective of distance, and freedom. Simultaneously, the Norwegian in him created a longing for a more liberated and happier life. This is the longing for the sun in the grave writer's poetic world. He never denied his distinctive Norwegian character. Toward the end of his life, he said to a German friend:
He who wishes to understand me, must know Norway. The magnificent, but severe, natural environment surrounding people up there in the north, the lonely, secluded life - the farms are miles apart - forces them to be unconcerned with others, to keep to their own. That is why they become introspective and serious, they brood and doubt - and they often lose faith. At home every other person is a philosopher! There, the long, dark, winters come with their thick fogs enveloping the houses - oh, how they long for the sun!
As a child, Ibsen lived in poverty and faced harsh times. His childhood was hard but he pushed through and eventually it paid off for he became very successful. He spent much of his time traveling and living in different countries other than his homeland. Even though he was away from his family a lot, he knew that the work would pay off and he would eventually become a success in literature. Many people theorized that his life impacted his plays and it is backed up by a lot of evidence. In his last drama, “When We Dead Awaken” much of what happened in that drama occured in his life. The drama is about the life of an artist that follows a similar path as Isben as a child. It is most likely because he was able to express his feelings into this character that he wrote such an interesting drama. But what made his dramas better than the others one would see is that Ibsen refused to follow the rules of theater of his time. He wanted to create his own style and intrigue the audience in a different way. He wanted to give the theater a different type of art that has not been seen since the days of Shakespeare. He brought a social significance, a psychological depth, all of these aspects helped him continue the tradition of tragic plays one would see mostly in Shakespeare. He focused mainly on the middle class and how they always blindly followed society’s expectations. And from all of these different aspects, Ibsen created his first contemporary drama, “The Pillars of Society”.
ReplyDelete"My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions." -Ibsen
Ibsen believes in extracting his characters emotions or feelings and mirroring them with their actions during the drama. It took him a very long time to accomplish this task but he knew that doing so would lead to his success as a writer. Dramas work best when your audience can empathize with the characters and align their emotions with them. Only then will the audience truly feel the play and understand the motives and actions of the characters. Knowing that Ibsen was able to accomplish this in his writings, I as a scholar of Drama can analyze his style of writing and how he was able to accomplish this goal much better than the other writers of his time.
Henrik Ibsen had to put up with a lot of hardships throughout his life. He pushed through and was very productive, but it was excruciating. Of course, this isn't the worst story I've ever heard, but it's still pretty excruciating. He combined his experiences with elements of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. The results qualify as film noir material.
ReplyDelete"So unspeakably poor, then, a soul can go back to nothingness, in the misty gray. You beautiful earth, don't be annoyed that I left no sign when I walked your grass. You beautiful sun, in vain you've shed your glorious light on an empty house. There was no one within to cheer and warm; - The owner, they tell me, was never at home." That sure sounds like the cynical, foreboding remarks you hear a lot in hard-boiled crime dramas.
Delete"I will have to find out who is right, society or myself." And this is how you usually question the morality of your actions when nothing's really black and white, as it were.
DeleteIt surprises me that I haven't heard of any films noir based on his stuff.
DeleteHenrik Ibsen was saturated by the grip of poverty for a good part of his life. Some of the plays mimic how his life went, for example in “When we dead awaken”. In that particular play, Ibsen describes the life of an artist which in many ways reflects how his own life went. Henrik sort of developed his own type of drama called a desperate drama in which pursuit of something by a character is portrayed in a somewhat desperate way. "My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions." This quote from Ibsen really outlines what he set out to do through writing dramas and his career. It seems like Ibsen wanted to tackle social issues/conditions in which people were suffering and bring them to light in his writing. His next quote: "Norway was a kingdom, now it will be a nation (... ) all shall be as one hereafter, and all shall know in themselves that they are one!" This quote exemplifies how Ibsen changed the country of Norway with his plays. It shows how Ibsen’s country of Norway has evolved due to what he as an individual and a writer did to change it.
ReplyDeleteAs a young child going through poverty, Ibsen faced hard times in his life which hugely impacted him as person and also his writing. He spent a lot of his life travelling to different countries other than his homeland. Even though he was away from his family most of the time, he decided to push through and become a successful writer knowing his hard work would pay off. His famous play "When We Dead Awaken", much of what happened in this drama is similar to what happened in Ibsen's. The drama is about an artist who travels a similar path as Ibsen's as a child. Ibsen expresses his life and feelings in his characters which is what made it very interesting and famous. He wanted to give a different writing style and art to his audience which was different than Shakespeare's. His writings revolved around social problems of society mainly the middles class and how they had to follow the rules all the time.
ReplyDelete"My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions."
Ibsen projects his emotions and his onto his characters in the drama. Plays, and Drama's are entertaining and meaningful when the audience can relate their lives to the characters and the author. Ibsen worked very hard to have that connection which is why he is still honored today. I as a scholar am very excited to read his play "Ghosts" because I know that Ibsen's life was not easy and he had that mindset to push through. He is unique which is the best part about literature because normal is boring.
Undoubtedly, Ibsen’s own social status, and the problems that he faced growing up, contributed to the subject matter of his plays- the upper middle class. He focused on the struggles that they faced, that many did not like to talk about, and he opened the door into their private lives on stage. Many of Ibsen’s plays also focused on the conflicts between the real life of an artist, and the art that he is devoted to. This concept pertains to Ibsen’s life as he was an artist himself, and a devoted one at that. He spent years writing, despite the fact that he only achieved international acclaim at the age of 50. One would imagine that Ibsen faced similar struggles in his life of reconciling “human warmth and contact” with “the chill of art,” as he admitted in his play “Remorse for a ruined life.”
ReplyDeleteIbsen’s plays also dramatically changed the drama of his time period, elevating it to something that had not been seen since Shakespear. He examined the psychological, social, and ethical issues in society, and focused on human inner conflict. He also argued the idea that, regardless of the situation, we are obligated to examine our lives and take responsibility for our actions and our own unhappiness. Through his plays, Ibsen managed to inject artistry, depth, and reality back into theater that eventually allowed him to triumph “over the conservatism and aesthetic prejudices of the contemporary critics and audiences.”
Quote 1- “My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions.”
This quote embodies Ibsen’s goal, as well as his influence on theater of the time period. He is responsible for the change that arose in the plays of his time period. His plays, depicting the struggles faced by the middle class, human conflict, and real problems, like divorce, elevated his work to something containing psychological, and social depth, possibly arising from the struggles that he faced in his own life. As a reader, knowing that his goal was to really encapsulate people changes the focus of the writing and the lense through which we read his work.
Quote 2- “It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory.”
This quote is another look into the depth behind Ibsen’s work. It discusses the depth that he is trying to achieve and the fact that he was less concerned with external struggles, like economic issues, and instead concerned with the internal battles that all people must contend with and work to overcome. This focus changes the way that a reader looks at Ibsen’s plays and serves as a reminder to analyze the emotional conflicts instead of getting caught up in the details or inconsistencies of mundane problems.
Ibsen seems to have lived a very difficult life, something which he described in his plays. Several of his plays, such as “When We Dead Awaken”. It is through his experiences that seems to allow his plays to be more meaningful and realistic to the reader. In addition, much of his work includes his own opinions and views on society. This is quite similar to most of the famous authors who all use their experiences to make their work even better. Many of Ibsen’s work was based on the contradiction between will and real prospects. In this conflict, Ibsen changed modern drama. He discovered tragicomic works. He incorporated both aspects of a tragedy as well as comedy into his plays. His relevant plays that advertised the issues of society was extremely well blended with his new style that it was quickly noted and acknowledged, which began his rise to fame. One of his famous quotes was, "My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions." This quote basically encompasses Ibsen’s motives when creating his works. However, in addition to this, the quote also begins to hint Ibsen’s biggest discovery that changed modern drama. It was based off of his motives to reveal his own views of society that led him to create his new style of plays: tragicomic. This was the step right before he discovered this new way of creating plays as he blended the components of comedies with the components of tragedies.
ReplyDeleteHenrik Ibsen was born in Norway, and was thrown into poverty at the age of eight. At 15, he dropped out of school and went to work. He used his limited free time to write poetry and paint. In 1849, he wrote his first play, Catelina, which was modeled after the work of one of his influencers, Shakespeare. In 1850 he moved to Christiana and built a network of other writers and artistic type people, one of which paid for the publishing of Catilina. He managed two theatres in a few years and wrote Love’s Comedy in the meantime. He left Norway in 1862 and was exiled to Italy where he wrote Brand, which made him famous in Scandinavia. He wrote Peter Gynt two years later and returned to Norway in 1891 as a literary hero. Ibsen’s use of his journey and upbringing is evident in his pieces. His plays were a hybrid of both tragedy and comedy, and incorporated aspects of each in his writing. He examined societal issues by presented psychological and ethical conflicts. He shared, “My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions.” This proves that his main agenda was to be blatant with his audience about the ideas he was presenting. Whether it was the struggle of the middle class or other societal problems at the time, Ibsen presented them honestly.
ReplyDeleteIbsen's life inspired his plays heavily. Near the end of his life, he wrote his last his last drama “When we dead awaken” and it's basically a reflection of what happened in Ibsnen’s life. While some people try to say it’s not a true representation of his life, but from the way it’s described, to me it seems like it’s Ibsen’s last goodbye. It’s about an artist who sacrifices a lot to please the fans of his art. It’s similar to Ibsen's life because Ibsen made a lot of sacrifices for his art and it reflects in his last piece of work. "It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory." I feel that this quote shows what Ibsen was doing with his art, and how he changed drama. By trying to tell real story with human conflict it makes the story’s relatable, and because I enjoy drama I appreciate the ways this changed modern day storytelling in movies and other forms of storytelling.
ReplyDeleteHenrik Ibsen’s life began with poverty, and constant struggle. Although his early years were filled with sorrow and hardship he persevered and became very famous. Ibsen spent most of his first 27 years abroad, mostly in Germany and Italy. He left the land he was born in, Oslo, at the age of 36 and didn’t return until he was 63. During his time away Ibsen became very famous as a playwright. Although he had undeniable success Ibsen still was very unhappy. He writes a play named “Remorse for a Ruined Life” and within it describes how he has lost pleasure in life and everything he does. Ibsen wrote to please his fans but he also wrote about how he didn’t get any pleasure from making anyone else happy. He writes a lot about his depressing life and how nothing will make him happy. Ibsen once said, “A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.” He believes that a larger group of people can lie and a smaller group of people can see the truth.
ReplyDeleteIbsen adult life was heavily influenced by his life, as he grew up living in a poor environment. Early on he showed little sign of his genius, dropping out of school at age 15, and started working full time at such a young age. His plays were made as mirrors to his life, for example one of his last dramas "When we dead awaken" was a reflection of his life and was very similar to his situation. It displayed the conflicts that Ibsen saw throughout life.
ReplyDeleteQuote 1: "It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory."
This quote is Ibsens view on drama at the time, when he was starting his career. He was trying not tell the story, but instead paint or show the story visually, and that changed the dynamic of drama at the time.
-Bryant
As a adult, Henry Ibsen's work could draw signs of his very poverish life. He chose a life on the road and left his homeland of Norway at age 36 and did not return until his sixties. He desired a more nomadic life and started a life of travel, living abroad in Italy and Germany for a majority of his adult life. During his time abroad, he wrote his first play Catalina, which was a slight story of his life with a ode to his role model Shakespear, having clear inspiration from him. He moved to Christiana and went to school, started a group of writers and published Catalina. He was exiled to Italy and wrote brand, which found him much success a fame. He once said, "I am an artist, Irene, and I take no shame to myself for the frailties that perhaps cling to me. For I was born to be an artist, you see. - And, do what I may, I shall never be anything else." To Henry Ibzen, he was a artist, and his plays were representations of his life. Many of his plays combined comedy and tragedy. - Troy Kennedy
ReplyDeleteFrom a young age, Ibsen struggled growing up in his hometown. Ibsen's first painful experiences even came from such a small community. He had seen how conventions, traditions, and norms could exercise a negative control over the individual, create anxiety, and inhibit a natural and joyful lifestyle. Because of those kinds of experiences that he goes through, he puts that into his characters, specifically in Ibsen’s play “Ghosts”. After the character Oswald goes through so much in his life like getting a sexual transmitted infection and the love of his life leaves him, he asks his mother to end his life because of the amount of pain he goes through. Even though Ibsen didn’t commit suicide, Ibsen had suhc thoughts growing up because of the environment he was growing up in and I think that’s what sparked him to write these kinds of things in his plays. He said that one of his “main goal [as a playwright] has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions." But when he did, he got a lot of backlash for it because the way he interpreted those emotions in his character was different from other playwrights like Shakespeare. Even in the Ghosts, “Ibsen [was] criticized for his somewhat superficial treatment of the problems a divorced woman without means [that] would [be faced] in contemporary society, but it was the moral problems that concerned him as a writer, not the practical and economic ones.” I really appreciate that his thought process of how he was writing this play in particular was because back then, most playwrights would have focused more on the life of a widow and only revealing the surface level of what a divorced woman might be going through internally and financially because women aren't independent at that time. But Ibsen broke that barrier for his character and instead of focusing on the widow herself, he went in depth of all these other characters in his such as the widow’s son who has an incurable STD or the pastor that is associated with her family and another family that she didn't think she had a connection with until later in the story. As a scholar review this side of his work, it amazes me how he was able to add so much and still make it interesting for the viewer rather than doing what everyone else was doing at that time. This is so important to me because as the viewer, you have to captivate your audience and make parts that would be the least expected unexpected. And I think that Ibsen does a great job at doing that so I can’t wait to read more of his works and see what comes next as we go through this Ibsen unit.
ReplyDeleteHenry Ibsen, like many boys in his time who lived in Europe grew up poor and joined the workforce at a young age. his father's business failed, and they had to sell nearly all of their assets to survive. even under these unfortunate circumstances, Ibsen was a genius and used his free time to write poetry. He was inspired by Shakespeare and wrote numerous plays into his adult life. he moved to Italy in 1862 where he wrote Brand, a five-act tragedy about a clergyman whose devotion to his faith costs him his family and his life. in 1868 he moved to Germany where he saw his social drama The Pillars of Society first performed. The play helped launch his career and was soon followed up by one of his most famous works, A Doll's House, a controversial story about the traditional roles of women. His next play Ghosts was so controversial that it wasn't played in certain places. He continued to write numerous great plays and died a literary hero
ReplyDeleteHenrik Ibsen did not live a very lavish life to begin with, and he left his homeland in his early 30’s in search of the nomadic life, he started to travel, living in Italy and in Germany. During this time he wrote his first plays with Catalina being one of them, that is the story of his life with him paying homage to the man who was his idol William Shakespeare, he then “moved” to a place named Christiana where he attended school, met with a group of writers and finally published Catalina which he succeeded from very much, he was also a poet with him publishing a collection of poems in 1871, however his main focus was drama. "I am an artist, Irene, and I take no shame to myself for the frailties that perhaps cling to me. For I was born to be an artist, you see. - And, do what I may, I shall never be anything else." I liked this quote because it shows that he really enjoyed what he did and he knew that he had found his true calling in life, which might be why we’re still reading and having meaningful conversations about the work he did. -Aidan Foley
ReplyDeleteHenrik Ibsen was born into poverty and the harshness of reality. His early years were full of struggle. Like Charles Dickens, he grew up working as a child laborer. Through these experiences, he gained a great understanding of reality which may have contributed to his incredible writing. Through inspiration from the great playwright, Shakespeare, he wrote his first play Catilina. "My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions." This quote exactly reflects his experience as a child laborer and his desire to correctly reflect the cruelty in those factories. By accomplishing these goals, he was able to appeal to the larger audience. “It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle - being defeated, or charged with victory." His view clearly impacted drama. Ibsen focuses less on external struggles and more on internal battles. Emotional conflicts are more in-depth than one thinks and he believes that the majority of plays forget that.
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ReplyDeleteIbsen’s work was most impacted by his early life. He was brought up in poverty and worked his way to international success. In his drama, “When We Dead Awaken” he outlines the life of an artist that draws many parallels with his own life. The character has much success later in life but he is never really happy. His views on society also come through in his works. In “A Doll House” his views on a woman’s role in society and her family are shown as well as in “Ghosts”. He once said, "I imagined that which I saw with my eyes around me in the world. I had to include it”. He was referring to his works where he often shows his views on controversial topics. He is not afraid to speak his thoughts in his plays and uses his characters to show what he sees in the world. He describes his work by saying, “My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates, on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions”. By this, he means that his plays show the truths of the world around him, their real moods and ideas and how they really feel. This was very different from what most playwrights were doing at the time,.
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