A hundred years ago, on June 1, 1906, Ibsen was buried in Oslo’s St. Savior’s cemetery after a state funeral of great pomp and circumstance. King, parliament, civil service, military, and clergy gathered in Trinity Church to honor the dead dramatist with a magnificent tribute of processions, music, and speeches grandly directed by a master of ceremonies.
Ibsen’s lavish funeral could have been the ironic ending of an Ibsen play: A radical young playwright leaves the country where he feels hounded and scorned. During twenty-seven years of exile, he writes twelve plays that bring him fame throughout Europe. When the playwright returns home at the age of sixty-three, his ship is met at the quay by pillars of society, including a leading drama critic who has systematically excoriated his plays, and a ceremony is conducted in which the playwright is welcomed back to a praiseful nation. Seven years and three plays later, his seventieth birthday is celebrated with enormous fanfare, and eight years after this, having become famous throughout the Western world, he is accorded the most magnificent funeral in the history of the land.
Ibsen’s change of status is a fine example of what the incorrigible troublemaker Dr. Stockmann says about truth in An Enemy of the People: “Truths aren’t the stubborn old Methuselahs people imagine. The truths that everybody accepts now were proclaimed by the radicals of our grandfathers’ time; those of us who are fighting on the frontiers today no longer recognize them.”
Much of the world is still catching up with the new truth that Ibsen’s housewife Nora Helmer learns in A Doll House. Her husband sternly preaches her identity as instrument: “Before all else, you’re a wife and mother.” But to his horror, his audacious wife replies: “I don’t believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being.”
Nora’s new truth made A Doll House one of the greatest scandals in literary history. It inspired countless attacks in newspapers and magazines which reviled Ibsen as indecent and godless and Nora as unwomanly and perverted. At the same time, the play became a rallying text for the nascent movements for women’s rights in the U.S. and Europe. A Doll House is now regarded as a central text for modern feminism, and Nora has become a feminist icon.
However important A Doll House has been for feminism, it is fashionable in the world of Ibsen scholarship to claim that the play is not feminist. Favorite arguments are that A Doll House is really about the transformation of the individual self, not of the female self; that Nora’s husband, Torvald, is as much a victim of society’s expectations as Nora is; and that Ibsen was not a writer of tracts, but of literature, whose subject is universal human experience in which feminism, or any other “ism,” has no place.
If Nora’s sex does not matter in A Doll House, then her conflict has essentially nothing to do with her identity as a nineteenth-century married woman, a married woman, or a woman. In other words, she could just as well be a man. But make her a man, and the play becomes not only ludicrous but impossible. Or let us say Nora represents men as well as women, so we can let her keep her sex but free her from its constraints, i.e., we can give her the same power as her husband. Again, there is no play. And however much Torvald Helmer is a product of society’s expectations, he is the figure of male authority against whom Nora struggles. The action of the play’s last scene, the famous confrontation between wife and husband for whose sake Ibsen said he wrote the whole play, is the conflict between Torvald’s insistence that Nora’s most “sacred duties” are to her husband and children and Nora’s conviction that she has “equally sacred duties” to herself. As for the argument that A Doll House is about human beings, not issues or social movements, this is true, but this is also what makes the play quintessentially feminist. Unlike pandemic venereal disease, corrupt business practices, euthanasia, government scandals, and other issues that preoccupied Ibsen’s world (and continue to preoccupy ours), women, feminism insists, are not issues but people. Nora will leave the doll house to try, as she says, to become a person.
Nora Helmer is Ibsen’s best-loved character, and her journey from playing a part to asserting a self is among the most prized roles in the dramatic repertory worldwide. At the same time, both in Ibsen’s day and ours, critics condemn Nora as frivolous and deceitful (the same accusations that her husband makes against her). But no criticism of Nora begins to equal the calumnies hurled at another greatly prized role, that of Hedda Gabler, who is the most reviled woman in literature. Whereas Medea and Lady Macbeth are safely fixed in Euripides’ mythic Greece and Shakespeare’s medieval Scotland, Ibsen’s unwomanly Hedda is horribly of the here and now.
Ibsen’s contemporaries called Hedda “atrocious and intolerable,” “malignant,” and, most frequently, “a monster.” The great critic Georg Brandes, normally an astute reader of Ibsen, called her “a true degenerate” who cannot even meet the bottom line of womanhood, “the ability to give herself body and soul to the man she loves.” Lou Andreas-Salomé, the famous feminist free spirit, spent fifteen pages of vitriolic attack on Ibsen’s “monster” of “lifeless iciness.” Later on, Freudian readers would classify Hedda as a study in sexual neurosis and repressed hysteria, a “phallic woman” who refuses normal female desire. In our own time, Elizabeth Hardwick calls Hedda “a temptation, very special, like the Serpent,” with no motivation for the evil she creates. Harold Bloom agrees; even if Hedda Gabler Tesman was free from her marriage and had a career she liked, she would still be “sadomasochistic, manipulative, murderous, and suicidal.” Hedda, it seems, was born bad.
Henry James, a great admirer of Ibsen, wittingly and pointedly responded to Hedda’s contemporary detractors by noting: “That Mrs. Tesman is a perfectly ill-regulated person is a matter of course.” Her critics, he said, seem to have wanted Ibsen to “represent in her stead a person totally different.” But what interests Ibsen is precisely “a wicked, diseased, disagreeable woman,” and once one has experienced her drama, James adds, one “isn’t so sure” that she is wicked and “by no means sure” that she is disagreeable.
To argue that Hedda is a defective or neurotic woman because she rejects both Tesman, the boring, pedantic boy-man she married because no one else asked, and Løvborg, the brilliant, alcoholic frequenter of brothels she prefers, is to assume that simply because they are there, she ought to love one of them. But the marriageable man is sexless, the sexual man unmarriageable. It is curious that while no critic of Hedda would wish his or her own daughter, sister, or friend to join her life to a Tesman or a Løvborg, Hedda is required to do so happily. As for Hedda’s hating her pregnancy, a fact that is often used to argue her essential perversity, why should Hedda want to bear the despised Tesman’s child, or any child? As Ibsen commented, “They are not all meant to be mothers.”
Hedda Gabler, like A Doll House, is a play about female confinement and powerlessness. A Doll House takes place “in Helmer’s residence” and Hedda Gabler, “in Tesman’s residence.” Both Nora and Hedda try to play the roles expected of them: the scatterbrained husfru wholly dependent on her superior husband, and the contented wife and society hostess of the capital’s smart set. In the end, Nora leaves the doll house for the open world, hoping she can learn how to live in it on her own terms, while Hedda ends her increasingly futile effort to live in a world she despises by blowing herself out of it. Hedda’s oily sexual blackmailer, the reprobate Judge Brack, responds to Hedda’s suicide with the now famous line: “People don’t do such things!” But he has misjudged Hedda’s integrity; death is preferable to life as Tesman’s wife and the judge’s mistress.
Relations between men and women are also at the heart of The Master Builder, the first play of Ibsen’s “last quartet,” four variations on the theme of male achievement in which men make use of women to fulfill their quest for greatness. Self-made master builder Solness got his start when his wife’s family home burned down years ago; now in late middle-age and guiltily chained to his joyless wife, he is tormented by fears that the younger generation will eclipse him. He finds his salvation in provocative Hilda Wangel, who arrives one fine day to claim the “kingdom” she insists he promised her ten years ago. Solness dismisses Hilda’s claim as a childhood, fairy-tale fantasy, but her charms succeed in making him believe her; her conviction of his genius makes her a perfect ally, and her demand that he create soaring, exhilarating buildings establishes her as the soul mate he has longed for.
The Master Builder explores the implications of an old erotic pattern: the aging male striver who believes that a vibrant young woman will restore his failing powers and the young woman who is enamored of a successful older man, father figure and lover. Hilda and Solness experience an ecstatic communion as he vows to fulfull her demand that he climb the scaffolding of his new building to hang the celebratory wreath, then descend in glory to embrace her. He will then build for himself and her a “castle in the air” on “a firm foundation.” But only the first part of the romantic scenario takes place, for Solness falls to his death performing the ultimate gallantry, risking his life to satisfy a screaming young woman. And yet Solness’ death does not cancel out the play’s romantic parable, giving The Master Builder, one of Ibsen’s most ambitious dramas, its peculiar tension and power. “Was it so insane,” Ibsen asked rhetorically, “if he lost his life, if he did it for his happiness and realized it only now for the first time?”
Like the other plays in this volume, The Wild Duck is a domestic drama, but unlike the Helmers, the Tesmans, and the Solnesses, the Ekdals are a happy family. No silent recriminations or hidden resentments mar their simple existence. The family myth is that Hjalmar Ekdal, a poor studio photographer, will restore the family honor, tarnished by his father’s involvement in a business scandal, by a great invention. The reality is that the lazy, self-indulgent Hjalmar is principally interested in eating. His wife, Gina, who does most of the photography, and his daughter, Hedvig, who adores her father, are happy to indulge Hjalmar’s notion of himself as the genius of modern photography. They flatter and spoil him, even going without butter so that he can slather it on his bread. The Ekdals’ strange world within a world, a skylighted attic whose inhabitants are rabbits, poultry, and the wild duck of the play’s title, the special pet of Hedvig, is itself a place of refuge from reality. Hjalmar tinkers with contraptions for the animals, Hedvig “loans” him her pet, and Grandfather Ekdal shoots an occasional rabbit for dinner.
The delusional but functional world of the Ekdals is invaded by a dangerous intruder. Gregers Werle’s program for living, “the claims of the ideal,” requires people to face the absolute truth about themselves and their relations with others. Gregers forces Hjalmar to confront the falsity of his self-image as family breadwinner and inventor, and, worse, information that Gregers has ferreted out about Gina’s “sexual past” with Gregers’ own father. The truth-mongering messiah is less objective than he knows; telling Hjalmar of Gina’s past allows him to damn his hated father. Far more important, the knowledge he forces on Hjalmar not only brings misery to him and Gina, wrecking their marriage, but a much more terrible catastrophe. Hjalmar has always encouraged his daughter’s powerful adolescent love, but when he learns that he may not have fathered her, he reviles and denies her, transforming the innocent, loving Hedvig into a deceitful and money-hungry hypocrite who is waiting for her “real” father, the rich Werle, to adopt her. Confused and desperate, Hedvig puts into action the perverse suggestion of the sanctimonious Gregers that she shoot her beloved wild duck as a “sacrifice” to prove her love for her father. But the deeply grieved daughter shoots herself.
The pathos of Hedvig’s death is heightened by its futility. The sight of the dead girl juxtaposed with the maudlin religious spoutings of a drunken lodger and the sickening, self-pitying clichés of Hjalmar and Gregers closes a powerful work that is perhaps the greatest tragicomedy in drama. The Wild Duck is often called Ibsen’s greatest play. Implicit in it is the ethos that life is complex and difficult, that there can be no formula for living, that people need privacy and mercy.
The ending of The Wild Duck reflects Ibsen’s uncompromising dramaturgy, his characteristic building toward a momentous and inevitable crisis that embodies the play’s thematic core. Gregers Werle’s forcing unpalatable facts on a weak egotist sustained by blissful self-deception leads to the death of an innocent child. Nora Helmer’s discovery of her demeaning life as doll wife and mother compels her to leave it, even her beloved children, no matter how ill equipped she is to live in the world. Hedda Gabler chooses to destroy herself rather than live a vile existence as Tesman’s contented wife and Brack’s secret sexual slave. The master builder risks his life, and loses it, to become the fearless, dazzling creator of Hilda’s vision.
Ibsen’s grave in St. Savior’s cemetery is marked by a column with the simple image of a hammer. In Ibsen’s poem “The Miner,” the narrator summarizes his life’s work: “Hammer blow ‘til hammer blow / ‘Til the last lights burn low.” Ibsen’s glory is that he relentlessly went to the bottom of things.
JOAN TEMPLETON