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!
