Ibsen, Henrik 1828–1906

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Ibsen, Henrik
1828–1906

Henrik Ibsen, born on March 20 in Skien, Norway, is one of the great dramatists of world literature. He began as a writer of poetic dramas that included the masterpiece Peer Gynt (1867) and then turned to prose to write realistic plays that earned him the title "the founder of modern drama": Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen died on May 23, 1906.

Ibsen's exposure of corruption in government, the hypocrisy of established religion, and above all the inhumanity and foolishness of the gendered division of the world into masculine and feminine spheres made him a major fighter in the European culture wars of the 1880s and 1890s. Influenced by his wife, Suzannah; his mother-in-law, Magdalene Thoresen, one of the first European women of letters; and his friend the novelist Camilla Collett, the founder of Norwegian feminism, Ibsen became an early champion of women. His rejection of traditional notions of male and female identity allowed him to discover the socialization of sexual identity that now is referred to as gender and investigate women as full moral beings struggling against the norms that define and limit them.

Pillars of Society, whose unfeminine spinster hero exposes the corrupt politics and sexist assumptions of the governing class, gave Ibsen recognition in Europe. His next play, A Doll House, brought him world fame. The play is widely regarded as the most eloquent literary argument for the notion that women, like men, are human beings first and spouses and parents second. At the end of the play the protagonist, Nora Helmer, leaves both her husband and her children as Ibsen identifies the source of her oppression: the ideology of a female nature whose sphere is domestic wifehood and whose essence is maternity. Nora's transformation from her husband's plaything to a person took on mythic status in twentieth-century feminism, and her slamming of the door has become the most famous stage direction in theatrical history. A Doll House is Ibsen's most frequently performed play.

One of the greatest literary scandals of the nineteenth century, A Doll House was attacked viciously in the press. Ibsen responded with the great tragedy Ghosts; "after Nora," he said, "Mrs. Alving had to come" (Templeton 1997, p. 146). Like Nora, Helene Alving leaves her inauthentic marriage, but unlike Nora, she returns home to perform her wifely duty, and the result is a syphilitic son who begs her to help him die. The play's metaphorical title points to the core subject of Ibsen's work: the old, dead ideas and beliefs that return to haunt and plague the living.

Ibsen continued to portray women struggling against cultural expectations in Rosmersholm, whose scandalous character Rebecca West provided the British feminist Cicely Fairchild with her pen name; in the more optimistic pendant to A Doll House, The Lady from the Sea, in which Ellida's husband learns to recognize his wife's autonomy; in Hedda Gabler, whose protagonist, like Helene Alving, is trapped in a terrible marriage by her fear of scandal but who chooses death over her meaningless life; and in When We Dead Awaken, in which a male artist's discarded muse confronts him about his use of her.

Ibsen's portraits of women struggling to replace instrumentality with autonomy, the most striking manifestation of the playwright's modernity, are among the most prized roles in the world's dramatic repertory.