19th Century Realism and Henrik Ibsen

19th Century Drama The artistic style known as “realism”

becomes prominent during the second half of the 19th c.

Definition of Realism: an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity. Although realism is not limited to any one century or group of writers, it is most often associated with the literary movement in 19th-century France, specifically with the French novelists Flaubert and Balzac. George Eliot introduced realism into England, and William Dean Howells introduced it into the United States. Realism has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes, where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications. http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Realism

Ibsen is the playwright most often cited as the representative of realistic drama in the 19th century. Some of his predecessors and contemporaries include the Russian dramatists of the 19th century, such as Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Three Women in Church (1878-82) Wilhelm Liebl

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Born and raised in Norway. The family’s finances collapsed while Henrik

was young; his father became a bitter alcoholic, and his quiet mother suffered.

Forced to leave school at 15 to work. At 20, begins writing plays and working at

theater-related jobs. Married in 1858, had one child the next

year; he and his wife loved and respected one another—but she twice left him for brief periods.

Struggled as a playwright until 1864, at which time he exiled himself to Italy, and soon Germany. Didn’t return to Norway until 1891—at age 63.

The plays he wrote abroad earned him a reputation as a highly controversial and iconoclastic playwright and social critic.

Ibsen’s Plays

“Problem plays”: His earlier plays (including A Doll’s House and Ghosts) are characterized by the concentration on “respectable” middle class families and the unsettling realities that underpin their conventionally moral facades. Ibsen called this type of play “the drama of ideas.”

Ibsen’s final plays--such as Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder—were written after his return to Norway. In these, Ibsen shifted from a focus on social and moral criticism to studies of psychology and inner torment.

Because of these later plays, Ibsen is a transitional figure between 19th century (largely realist) and modernist literary methodologies, and is often looked at as the father of “modern” drama—preceding George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill.

A Doll’s House First performed in 1879 and

produced in many countries at the end of the 19th century, including England, America, and Germany.

The content was considered too radical for some audiences; in Germany Ibsen was persuaded to alter the ending to make the play more conventionally acceptable.

Occupies a place in what we now call the “New Woman” movement. In literature, this is a sort of sub-category of 19th c. realistic fiction that concentrates on the “Woman Question”

As you read the play, think about what would have made Nora “new” to a 19th century audience.

Film version of A Doll’s House starring Jane Fonda, 1973.

Contemporary Responses to A Doll’s House

From Clement Scott in The Daily Telegraph, 1889: “There are already signs of weakness in the over-vaunted Ibsen cause. The Ibsenites, failing to convince common-sense people of the justice of their case, are beginning as a last source to ‘abuse the opposing counsel.’ Hard words and ill names are flying about.… Having shown us [in A Doll’s House] a child-wife compounded of infantile tricks and capriciousness, a frivolous and irresponsible young person who does not hesitate to fib, and can, at a pinch, condescend to forge….having flung upon the stage a congregation of men and women without one spark of nobility in their nature, men without conscience and women without affection, an unloveable, unlovely, and detestable crew—the admirers of Ibsen, failing to convince us of the excellence of such creatures, turn round and abuse the wholesome minds that cannot swallow such unpalatable doctrine, and the stage has hitherto steered clear of such unpleasing realism.”

Edmund Gosse (1889): “But Nora Helmer has capacities of undeveloped character which make her far more interesting than the, to say the truth, slightly fabulous Dora [referring to another child-wife character, in Dickens’s David Copperfield]. Her insipidity, her dollishness, come from the incessant repression of her family life. She is buried, as it were, in cotton-wool, swung into artificial sleep by the egotistical fondling of the men on whom she depends for emotional existence. But when once she tears the wrappings away, and leaps from the pillowed hammock of her indolence, she rapidly develops an energy of her own, and the genius of the dramatist is displayed in the rare skill with which he makes us witness the various stages of this awakening.”

In Ibsen’s Words From his notes for A Doll’s House: “A

woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.”

From The Wild Duck: True marriage is “based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin."

HOWEVER, Ibsen explicitly denied being a feminist: “To me it has been a question of human rights.”

Study Questions A Doll’s House is often described as a feminist

play. To what extent is this characterization helpful? To what extent might it be misleading?

To what extent does Ibsen suggest that appearances or reputations are reliable?

How might Ibsen’s treatment of sickness and/or inheritance contribute to the meaning of the play?

How is human agency depicted in the play? How do the characters fulfill or alter their expected roles?

Should A Doll’s House be categorized as a tragedy? Why or why not?

“I do but ask; my call is not to answer.”

—Henrik Ibsen