Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House, Ebooks (various), E-books
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A Doll’s House.
Henrik Ibsen.
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Doll’s House.
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About the author
father declined into a severe depression. The characters in his plays
often mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of fi-
nancial difficulty.
Henrik Johan Ibsen
(March 20, 1828 - May 23,
1906) was an extremely influ-
ential Norwegian playwright
who was largely responsible for
the rise of the modern realistic
drama.
Ibsen left home and became an apprentice druggist at fifteen, and
began writing plays. His first play, Catilina (1848), was published
when he was only 20, but was not performed. His first play to see
production was The Burial Mound (1850), but it did not receive much
attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although he
was not to write again for some years.
He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian The-
ater, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays
as a writer, director, and producer. During this period he did not publish
any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as
a playwright, at the Norwegian Theater he gained a great deal of prac-
tical experience, experience that was to prove valuable when next he
wrote.
His plays were considered scandalous in much of society at the
time, when Victorian values of family life and propriety were still very
much the norm, and any challenge to them considered immoral and
outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many
a facade, which the society of the time did not want to see.
He returned to Oslo in 1857, where he lived in very poor financial
circumstances. Still, he managed to marry in 1859. He became very
disenchanted with life in Norway, and left for Italy in 1864. He was
not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he
returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.
In a very real way, Ibsen created the modern stage, by introducing
a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of
morality. Prior to him, plays were expected to be moral dramas with
noble protagonists pitted against darker forces. Every drama was ex-
pected to result in a "proper" conclusion, meaning that goodness was
to bring happiness, and immorality only pain. Ibsen was to turn that
concept on its head, challenging the beliefs of the times and shattering
the illusions of his audiences.
His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim
he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was his next
play, Peer Gynt (1867).
With success, he became more confident and began to introduce
more and more his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, explor-
ing what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are
often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his
power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across
He was born into a relatively well-to-do family in the small port
town of Skien, Norway, which was primarily noted for shipping timber.
Shortly after his birth, however, his family's fortunes took a significant
turn for the worse. His mother turned to religion for solace, while his
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Doll’s House.
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Europe.
her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal disease was scan-
dalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of
morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous.
Hers was not the noble life which Victorians believed would result
from fulfilling one's duty rather than following one's desires. Those
idealized beliefs were only the Ghosts of the past, haunting the present.
A Doll's House (1879) was a scathing criticism of the traditional
roles of men and women in Victorian marriage. He has his protagonist,
Nora, leave her husband in search of the wider world, after realizing he
was not the noble creature she had supposed him to be. Her role in the
marriage was that of a doll, her house a "Doll's House", and indeed her
husband Torvald refers to her incessantly as his little "starling" and his
"squirrel". She is not even permitted a key to the mailbox. When she is
blackmailed due to an impropriety she committed in order to save her
husband's life, forging her father's name on a note, her husband de-
clares that he will put her away. His only concern is his own reputation,
despite the love for him which prompted her to it.
Society's criticism of Ibsen was raised to a fever pitch at this point,
but Society itself was losing its control over the mass of people, most of
whom didn't live in the rarefied air of the Victorian Gentleman. They
wanted to see Ibsen's plays because he showed what so many of them
already knew to be the reality. The tide had turned.
When the blackmailer recants, it could all be over, and in a tradi-
tional Victorian drama all would then be resolved. For Ibsen, however,
and for Nora, it is too late to go back to the way things were. Her
illusions destroyed, she decides she must leave him and their children,
and leave her Doll's House to discover what was truly real and what
was not. To the Victorian, this was scandalous. Nothing was considered
more sacrosanct than the covenant of marriage, and to portray it in
such a way was completely unacceptable. Some theatre houses re-
fused to stage the play, so Ibsen was pressured to write an alternate
ending that was far less black. This distressed him considerably, and he
actually on occasion at the last minute submitted a "correction" to the
actors on opening night.
In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. Be-
fore, controversial elements were important and even pivotal compo-
nents of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual
households. In An Enemy controversy became the primary focus, and
the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the
play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than
the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The
Victorian belief was that the community was a noble institution that
could be trusted, a fiction Ibsen challenged.
The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a
vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discov-
ers that the water used by the bath is being contaminated when it
seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to be ac-
claimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors
with disease, but instead he is declared An Enemy of the People by
the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his
windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to
the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor,
due to the community's unwillingness to face reality.
Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scath-
ing commentary on Victorian morality. In it, a widow reveals to her
pastor that she has hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration.
The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite his phi-
landering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him.
But she was not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's
philandering continued right up until his death, and the result is that
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As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked
entrenched beliefs and assumptions -- but this time his attack was not
against the Victorians but against overeager reformers and their ideal-
ism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was as willing to tear down the ide-
ologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.
Probably Ibsen's most performed play is Hedda Gabler (1890),
the leading female role being regarded as one of the most challenging
and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. There are many
similarities between Hedda and the character of Nora in A Doll's
House.
The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest
work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers
Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended
exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the
course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' appar-
ently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the
absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths:
Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to
Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and
imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar
spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is
earning the household income.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism
which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in
the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions
and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the
factors that makes a play Art rather than entertainment.
Finally, Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many
ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in
the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was
on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the
theater, but across public life.
Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insis-
tence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates,
and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers
hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until
he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded
by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing
the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and
suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet,
to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters,
recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the
deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which
does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove
her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do
Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is
sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.
With a stellar career behind him, the likes of which few authors or
playwrights ever see, Ibsen died in Oslo.
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