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Ibsen Project

Dramaturgical Guide

By
Michael Durkin
Table of Contents

Part I= Basic Info


Part III= Social Ethics of the Time
- Chronology of Life
- Art, Culture, Society, Philosophy of the Time
- Full Canon of Works
- Nora
Part IV= Conceptual Images

Part II= Family Life


- Ibsen’s Family
- Ibsen’s Colleagues
Basic Information
Chronology of Life
1828 Henrik Johan Ibsen born on March 20th in Stockmannsgården in Skien. Parents: Marichen (née Altenburg) and Knud Ibsen, merchant.

1835 Father has to give up his business. The properties are auctioned off. The family moves to Venstøp, a farm in Gjerpen.

1843 Confirmed in Gjerpen church. Family moves to Snipetorp in Skien. Ibsen leaves home on December 27th.

1844 Arrives in Grimstad on January 3rd to be apprenticed to Jens Aarup Reimann, chemist.

1846 Has an illegitimate child by Else Sophie Jensdatter, one of Reimann's servants.

1847 Lars Nielsen takes over ownership of the chemist's, moving to larger premises.

1849 Ibsen writes Catiline.

1850 Goes to Christiania to study for the university entrance examination. Catiline is published under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. Edits the Students' Union paper
Samfundsbladet and the satirical weekly Andhrimner. First Ibsen staging in history: the one-act The Burial Mound is performed at Christiania Theater on September 26th.

1852 Moves to Bergen to begin directing productions at Det norske Theater. Study tour to Copenhagen and Dresden.

1856 Becomes engaged to Suzannah Thoresen.

1857 Is appointed artistic director of Kristiania Norske Theater.

1858 Marries Suzannah Thoresen on June 18th.

1859  His son Sigurd is born on December 23rd.

1862 Kristiania Norske Theater goes bankrupt. Ibsen goes on a study tour to the valley of Gudbrandsdalen and to the West Country to study folklore. Is appointed
consultant to Christiania Theater.

1864 Leaves for Italy and lives in Rome for four years.

1866 Brand is published and is a success. Ibsen is awarded one of the state stipends for artists.

1867 Writes and publishes Peer Gynt (first performance at Christiania Theater on February 24th 1876).
 
1868 Moves to Dresden, where the family lives for seven years.

1869 The League of Youth is published and given its first performance at Christiania Theater. Ibsen takes part in a meeting on Scandinavian spelling in Stockholm. Goes
to Egypt and is present at the opening of the Suez Canal.
1871 Publishes a collection of poems (Digte) for the first and last time.

1872-3  Completes and publishes Emperor and Galilean. Is a member of an international art jury at the world exhibition in Vienna.

1874 Visits Norway (Christiania). Goes on to Stockholm.


1875 Publishes Catiline in a new version. Moves to Munich, where he lives for three years.
 
1877 Pillars of Society written and first staged at Det Kongelige (Royal) Teater in Copenhagen. Awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Uppsala.

1878 Moves to Rome again and stays there for seven years except for several breaks.
 
1879 Writes and publishes A Doll's House, which is first staged at Det Kongelige (Royal) Teater in Copenhagen.
 
1881 Ghosts written and published (staged at the Aurora Turner Hall in Chicago on May 20th 1882).

1882 An Enemy of the People written and published (first staging at Christiania Theater on January 13th 1883).

1884 Writes and publishes The Wild Duck (first staging at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen on January 9th 1885).
 
1885  Moves to Munich and stays there for six years.

1886 Writes and publishes Rosmersholm (first staging at Den Nationale Scene on January 17th 1887).

1888 Writes and publishes The Lady from the Sea (first performed at Hoftheater in Weimar and at Christiania Theater on the same day, February 12th 1889).

1889 Last summer in Gossensass. Gets to know Emilie Bardach.


1890 Writes and publishes Hedda Gabler (first performed at the Residenztheater in Munich on January 31st 1891).

1891 Returns to Norway and settles in Christiania. Meets Hildur Andersen.

1892 Writes and publishes The Master Builder (first performance at the Lessingtheater in Berlin on January 19th 1893). Sigurd Ibsen marries Bergliot Bjørnson.

1894 Writes and publishes Little Eyolf (first staged at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on January 12th 1895).

1895 Moves into the apartment on the corner of Arbiensgate and Drammensveien in Christiania and stays there for the rest of his life.
1896 Writes and publishes John Gabriel Borkman (first performed simultaneously at Det svenske (Swedish) and Det finske (Finnish) Teater in Helsingfors on
January 10th 1897).

1898 70th birthday - large-scale celebrations in Christiania, Copenhagen and Stockholm.

1899  Writes and publishes When We Dead Awaken (first staged at the Hoftheater in Stuttgart on January 26th 1900).

1900  Suffers his first stroke.


1906 Dies on May 23rd.  For More Information

http://bit.ly/3xs3DT
Canon of Works

National-Romantic and Historical Dramas


- Cataline (1850)= Based off of Lucius Catalina, a politician in Ancient Rome who tried to overthrow the government. Written in iambic pentameter with
blank verse.
- The Pretenders (1863)= Set in the 13th Century, and deals with the rivalry between Ibsen and Bjornstjerne Bjornson over the Poet Laureate status in
Norway.

Dramas of Ideas
- Loveʼs Comedy (1863)= A love story regarding two men staying at a country house where they fall in love with the ownerʼs daughters, whom the propose
marriage to and are rejected.
- Brand (1866)= A devout priest, Brand believes in doing the right thing, and wonʼt stop until everyone follows that ideal. His view of society is that of bleak
and harsh.
- Peer Gynt (1867)=
- Emperor and Galilean (1873)
Realistic Contemporary Dramas
- Pillarʼs of Society (1877)
- A Dollʼs House (1879)
- Ghosts (1881)
- An Enemy of the People (1882)

Psychological and Social Dramas


- 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)
- When We Dead Awaken (1899)= Ibsenʼs most surreal work. A love story on the cliffs on a mountain.
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11
Nora from A Doll’s House

Nora is one of the most studied literary characters of all times. Ibsen has constructed a woman, not
a daughter, not a mother, not a sister, and especially not a wife. Above all of these things, Nora is a
woman and deserves to be treated as equal as any person. Ibsen takes huge leaps in drama, let
alone literature with the construction of Nora. Not only is she able to leave her husband, but do it in
a way that makes her happy. She doesnʼt have to leave for any other reason except that she wants
to, and has to.

For More Information:


http://bit.ly/13ogHT
Ibsen’s Family and Colleagues
Suzannah Ibsen Sigurd Ibsen

For More Information


http://bit.ly/2PoXJU
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Björnstjerne Björnson, together with Henrik Ibsen the first Norwegian to embody to
any considerable extent the true spirit of his native land in modern times, and create a
distinctly national literature, was born in Kvikne, Norway, in 1832. His primary
education was received in Molde. At the age of twenty, he entered the University of
Christiania, where he made the acquaintance of Ibsen. His first book appeared in
1857, an idyllic novel called Synnöve Solbakken, which was received with
considerable enthusiasm; it has remained one of his most popular books. The
following year Björnson assumed the directorship of the Bergen theater and there
produced some of his earlier plays, the subject-matter of which was drawn largely
from Norse sagas. The next few years were devoted to travel, the writing of stories,
plays, and poems, and to practical politics. The years 1865-1867 saw him in charge of
a theater in Christiania, as well as editor of a newspaper, which he used to further his
struggle for Norwegian independence, political and literary. For practically the rest of
his life, Björnson participated in the great political upheaval in Norway, and was
considered the leader of the liberal party. In 1880 he came to America and delivered a
number of lectures in the Northwest. From 1881, when he returned to his native
country, until 1910, when he died in Paris, he spent most of his time on his estate in
the south of Norway. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1903.

From Theatre Database

For more information: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bjornson.htm


Social Ethics of the Time
Society in Europe in 1880’s

Imperialism and Expansion


Nationalism
Social Darwinism (Survival of the Fittest)
Separation of peoples (Men vs. women, different races)
Technological Advances- Industrial Revolution
Medical Advances
Wars
Reorganization of Lands
Impressionism and Expressionism Art Movement
Age of Realism
Becoming aware of surroundings
Standing up to the government
Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss
Impressionism Art
Impressionism began in France in the mid 1800s. The Impressionists were not very popular because they
had a different approach to painting. At this time many artists painted in a very traditional way that involved
spending hours in a studio, painstakingly creating paintings that were extremely detailed. These paintings
were sometimes of people or landscapes or historical events.

The Impressionists often painted out of doors and wanted to show the more immediate effect of light and
color at particular times of the day. Their works are sometimes described as 'captured moments' and are
characterized by short quick brushstrokes of color which, when viewed up close looks quite messy and
unreal. If you step back from and Impressionist painting, however, the colors are blended together by our
eyes and we are able to see the painter's subject which often showed colorful landscapes, sunlight on water
as well as people engaged in outdoor activities and enjoyment.
Edvard Munch
Paintings by Impressionist artists have become some of the most popular artworks of all time. This is
probably due to the fact that their subjects were usually pleasing and uncomplicated.

Camille Pissaro

Edgar Degas
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg is the most important Norwegian composer of the later 19th century, a period of growing national consciousness. As a child, he was encouraged by the violinist
Ole Bull, a friend of his parents, and studied at the Leipzig Conservatory at his suggestion. After a period at home in Norway he moved to Copenhagen and it was there that
he met the young composer Rikard Nordraak, an enthusiastic champion of Norwegian music and a decisive influence on him. Grieg's own performances of Norwegian music,
often with his wife, the singer Nina Hagerup, established him as a leading figure in the music of his own country, bringing subsequent collaboration in the theatre with
Bjørnson and with Ibsen. He continued to divide his time between composition and activity in the concert-hall until his death in 1907.

Stage Works
Grieg collaborated with the dramatist Bjørnson in the play Sigurd Jorsalfar, for which he provided incidental music, and still more notably with Ibsen in Peer Gynt. The original
music for the latter makes use of solo voices, chorus and orchestra, but is most often heard in orchestral form in the two suites arranged by the composer. These include
'Morning', 'Aase's Death', 'Anitra's Dance' and 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' in the first suite, and 'Ceremonial March', 'Arabian Dance', 'Peer Gynt's Homecoming' and
'Solveig's Song' in the second, the order not corresponding to the sequence of events in Ibsen's remarkable play.

Orchestral Music
In addition to the two Peer Gynt Suites and three pieces from Sigurd Jorsalfar, Grieg wrote one of the most famous of all romantic piano concertos, completed in 1868. The
Holberg Suite, for string orchestra, celebrates the Scandinavian Molière, the Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg, an almost exact contemporary of J.S. Bach and Handel.
The two Elegiac Melodies of 1881 are also for strings only, with other arrangements of piano music, and the Lyric Suite, based on four piano pieces of 1891, was orchestrated
in 1904.

Chamber Music
Grieg's three violin sonatas remain a part of standard romantic repertoire, revealing his mastery of harmonic colour in the clearest of textures. The third of these, in C minor,
was completed in 1887 and is particularly striking.

Piano Music
As a pianist himself, Grieg wrote extensively for the piano, excelling, in particular, in his ten volumes of Lyric Pieces, and in other sets of short compositions for the instrument,
often derived directly or indirectly from Norwegian folk-music.

Youtube Links: About his life and how people viewed him:

http://bit.ly/3tqm7b http://bit.ly/GoRos

http://bit.ly/T3ob9
http://bit.ly/1UaLpY
Philosophy of the Time

Soren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
- Freedom as Choice
- Reason as principle
- Existential Philosophy
- Interest of Classical Philosophy
- Able to choose is to be human
- Influential Philosopher of the Time
- Norwegian
- For more information: http://bit.ly/18ISB1
- For more information: http://bit.ly/3CV8e

Charles Darwin
- The Origin of Species (1858)
- Rational Thought rather than Christian
- Evolution, Survival of the Fittest
- Influential Philosopher of the Time
- For more information: http://bit.ly/9dDMn
Literature and Ibsen
Fiction as Social Fantasy: Europeʼs Domestic Crisis of 1879-1914
By: Rudolph Binion
In the years 1879-1914 European fiction took a searching look at entrenched social institutions, scrutinizing the family in particular with a premium on
boldness. Indeed, the bolder its approach, the broader and stronger did its appeal tend to be. At first the aim was to turn up problems that might be solved or evils
that might be remedied. But a depressive, defeatist, even destructive mood fast carried the day. By the 1890s any ambitious fiction that probed domestic life, as most
fiction then did, was apt to present it as a pernicious mistake, and the more pernicious the deeper the probing had gone.
This fictional assault on the family, along with marriage as the familial breeding ground, was only rarely explicit, as when a Tolstoi or a Shaw fell to pamphle-
teering within a novel or a play. Nor were authors' own statements of purpose in prefaces or elsewhere authoritative, for even a work of creative genius may convey a
message other than its author intended. To tease arguments out of fiction can be tricky, but such a massive fictional trend as this antifamilial one is unmistakable. At
the same time, the charges leveled at the family within that trend do not add up to a coherent indictment. Rather, they are like so many swipes taken at it from
various standpoints and different angles. Those swipes scored no quick knockout, but they did eventually deflate the received familial ideal.
Europeans targeted the family in literary fantasy just when, in those decades before the First World War, it was thriving among them in public esteem and
popular sentiment as perhaps never before. Even so, that onslaught against it was not fiction only; it was the down side of Europeans' restructuring of the family
through their widespread adoption of birth control within marriage. This collective demographic doing by Europeans, and especially their innermost feelings about it,
are my subject. Both show through Europe's fictional case against the family when that case is seen as a whole and seen as social fantasy. So my argument starts
with that case spelled out in some detail from fictional intimations and implications mostly as hazy as they are strong.
A Darwinist-sounding fictional charge against human family life that cut deep at the time was that it constricted and confined a species naturally free and
loose. This was the force of Menalque's famed exclamation in Andre Gide's The Foods of the Earth (1897): "Families, I hate you!" Gide's whole generation learned
this reason for hating families from Henrik Ibsen. And Ibsen's supreme representation of human domesticity as a false departure from nature was The Wild Duck
(1884). In this dramatic masterwork, a stunted household shares quarters with a captive, wounded wild duck lodged in a fake forest. A visitor from the woodlands
asks the grandfather, a broken outdoorsman, how he can ever "live in the midst of a stuffy town, between four walls." By way of reply the grandfather points self-
contentedly to those indoor, make-believe woodlands where the lamed duck has been growing fat in its confinement. His dreamy, washed-out son explains: "She's
been in there so long now that she's forgotten the true wild life; it's as simple as that." In Ibsen's deft symbolism, that hapless duck stood for the human animal in
captive domesticity, maimed and degenerating. In his earliest notes for the play Ibsen specified: "Human beings are sea creatures--like the wild duck--not land
creatures." And he added hopefully: "In time, all people will live on [the sea], when the land becomes swallowed up. Then family life will cease."
Ibsen taught Europe first off to look at marriage, the basis of its family life as far back as it knew, as an unequal partnership that turned the woman into a mere wife
and mother, thereby arresting her personal development. As Ibsen saw it, woman may not have been man's rib to begin with, but her domestication had made her into
man's appendix. "You are first and foremost a wife and mother," her husband admonishes rebellious Nora in A Doll House (1879), and Nora replies: "I don't believe that
any longer." Never could Nora have told her husband, for all his uxorious doting, that he was first and foremost a husband and father: such was the disparity built into
their domestic setup. But the trouble with their marriage could, and at first mostly did, seem to onlookers across Europe to lie elsewhere--in his patronizing sexism, or in
her legal disadvantages--and to be remediable accordingly through moral or legislative reform. Indeed, even in slamming the door on her "playpen" with a
resounding bang, Nora leaves it figuratively open to "the greatest miracle" of a true marriage with that same husband at some future time. That tiny residual crack of an
opening was unreal to her, to be sure: as she puts it at their grand moment of truth, "I no longer believe in miracles." And Ibsen's dramas thereafter left no room for wishful
thinking by his audiences about a woman's fulfillment within marriage whatever her husband's character or her relative rights: "Marriage . . . has ruined the human race"
was his simple verdict. For the basic problem in Ibsen's sight was that very institution, designed as it was for a woman to make a home for a man and to bear and rear his
children. In marriage so conceived, the woman was perforce subordinate psychologically, an instrument of her husband and family, with no more satisfactory way to rebel
against that subordination than to renounce sex and maternity. While some Ibsenite women after Nora, beginning with Mrs. Alving in Ghosts (1882), merely submit and
suffer for want of a viable recourse, angry Rita in Little Eyolf (1894) reacts with an erotic possessiveness such that she inadvertently cripples and later kills the child that
has become her husband's refuge from her.
Ibsen's deadly Rita at least loves her man, however badly. But marital love was literarily in short supply at this juncture. Leo Tolstoi's wife-killer in The Kreutzer
Sonata (1887/1889) loathes his victim just because of his carnal bond with her: his situation as husband and father by its very nature incites the jealousy that prompts his
deed. Tolstoi represented his bloody hero as exceptional only in that with manic consequence he acts out the murderousness that husbands otherwise repress. For Guy
de Maupassant, marriage spelled the death of love, but not by dint of a Tolstoian dialectic of lust and shame; rather, the role of wife and mother was for Maupassant
inherently inimical to love with its need for freedom. His "Adieu" (1884) is a lament over a former mistress's comedown to wifery and motherhood, and in his "Once Upon
A Time" (1880) a grandmother sighs back to a mythic golden age when marriage was for breeding children while love was free outside.
Conceptual Images

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