Ibsen Context

Father of…

Modern Naturalism

Class

Middle-class

Relationship with mother

selfless woman who would sacrifice her own needs for those of her family

Finances

Experienced financial difficulties in his childhood

• moved out of their home at 7

• left school at 15

Aims

Use drama as a medium to discuss the pressing problems of his community including:

• unhealthy adherence to the psychologically damaging bourgeois values that in practice fostered cruelty, hypocrisy, shame and self-loathing

Principles of Naturalism

1. Plays must feature realistic but complex characters facing realistic challenges

2. Plays must deal with important themes with current significance for the characters and by proxy the audience

3. Plots must be clear with minimal side-stories

Fiction or Reality

Ibsen preferred to read the news over fiction to be able to better express the experiences of everyday people on stage

Feminism?

Ibsen was not a feminist

He believed in empowering the individual (Humanism)

Ibsen Quote about Reality

“People demand reality, no more, no less”

Brand

• contains the character of Agnes who, like Ibsen’s mother (and to some extent like Nora), is prepared to sacrifice herself for her husband

Ghosts

• frank discussion of syphillis

• women who stays with her unfaithful husband against her better judgement on the advice of her pastor

Hedda Gabbler

Naturalism focuses on

• sex & sexuality

• violence

• poverty

• prostitution

• misery

• disease

  it was often criticized for being too pessimistic about human life

Naturalism def.

the idea that science shows that powerful heredity and environment factors govern human action making our lives ultimately pre-determined, giving us limited free will

Idea that each play should test a hypothesis of what happens when you put characters with certain traits under certain circumstances

Who first came up with Naturalism?

• French novelist Émile Zola (1867)

• “a rejection of all artifice in the theatrical arts”

Who coined the term fourth wall?

Jean Jullien (1892)

thought the purpose of naturalistic theatre was to make the audience think about the influence of social and hereditary conditions on the character

“a slice of life” - naturalism (1887)

Independence

• the Danish king had ceded Norway to Sweden fourteen years before Ibsen was born

• his whole life, Ibsen was concerned with retaining Norwegian independence and this was only achieved in 1905 (a year before his death

Voting

Working class didn’t have voting rights

Revolutions

• In 1848 (Ibsen was 20) there were civil rights protests and revolutions across Europe (starting in France and Italy)

• In Norway, a movement to reform conditions for farm and factory workers (90% of Norwegians) was brutally put down with the help of the Swedish monarchy

Social Landscape at the time of publication

• industrialised country

• towns linked by railways

• growing middle class but slow to develop socially

• In Europe this was the age of invention and new ideas (the telephone in 1876)

• The Origin of Species (1859)

• Growing pressure to address the issue of women’s rights

  • Eleanor Marx’s discussion of ‘The Woman Question’

• Women were allowed the right to attend university in 1882

  • however for social attitudes persisted that married women did not work

  • a man’s social status was raised by a wife who stayed at home

Ibsen on reality and illusions

“the illusion I wished to produce is that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened” 1874 (Brand)

Nora inspo (other play)

• Selma from The League of Youth

• “You dressed me up like a doll. You played with me the way one plays with a child”

• A friend of Ibsen suggested Selma was worthy of her own drama

Female friendship

friends with Camilla Collett a leading Norwegian feminist

Inspo for Doll’s House (real)

• Laura Kieler

• Kieler secretly borrowed money to finance a journey to Italy, in order for her husband to recover from tuberculosis, with Ibsen claiming she forged a check whilst doing so

• On discovering the crime, Kieler's husband divorced her, and Kieler was put in a lunatic asylum.

• Kieler later denied committing forgery, and asked Ibsen to publicly state such, which he declined

1880 production

When the play was first presented in Germany in 1880, the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to act the final scene on the grounds that "I would never leave my children"

Peer Gynt

• tells the story of a quasi-mythical Norwegian folk hero

• Peer’s misguided quest to discover his own true authentic self is a journey of resistance to a horrifying conformity

• his individuality ultimately warps him into becoming as selfish and narrow-minded as the monstrous trolls he meets on his journey