IBSEN, THE LIBERATOR

I. "A MUCK-FERRETING DOG"

When Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts arrived in London in 1891, the reviewers were unkind. Ibsen's champion and translator, William Archer, collected some of their comments: "Ibsen's positively abominable play entitled Ghosts....An open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly....Gross, almost putrid indecorum....Literary carrion.... Crapulous stuff"–Daily Telegraph. "Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous ....Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent."–Daily Chronicle. "Morbid, unhealthy and disgusting story....A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman."–Lloyd's. "Lugubrious diagnosis of sordid impropriety....Characters are prigs, pedants and profligates....Morbid caricatures.... Maunderings of nookshotten Norwegians"–Black and White. "As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre....dull and disgusting....Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel."–Era. "Ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste, in exact proportion to their nastiness"–Sporting and Dramatic News. "Ugly, nasty, discordant, and downright dull.... A gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes"–Gentlewoman. "The socialistic and the sexless....The unwomanly women, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats....Educated and muck-ferreting dogs.... Effeminate men and male women..... They all of them–men and women alike–know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing.... The Lord Chamberlain [the censor] left them alone to wallow in Ghosts.... Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his works.... A wave of human folly"–Truth.

2. NIGHTMARES OF THE BOURGEOISIE

What is so astonishing about Ibsen is that he found his detractors and admirers in the great cities of Europe, where he spent most of his adult life, but the plays are set in the small provincial towns of his Norwegian childhood. They depict small-town life as stifling, hypocritical, preoccupied with scandal and gossip. The first really modern playwright fashioned his drama from a place that was barely on the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, the social and moral issues he exposed in the cycle of "problem plays" that began with A Doll's House in 1878 were familiar to middle class audiences all over Europe. "Victorian" cultural assumptions were pervasive, and Ibsen challenged them.

Ibsen (1828-1906) was born in a small trading town on the east coast of Norway, a hundred miles south of the capital Christiania (Oslo). His father, a merchant who ran a general store, suffered financial ruin when Ibsen was still a boy, and there were rumors that the boy was illegitimate. As an apothecary's apprentice, Ibsen at eighteen fathered a child with a domestic servant who was twenty-eight, a poor woman whom he soon abandoned. Bankruptcy and illegitimacy, financial and sexual impropriety, were two of the nightmares of the bourgeoisie in this period, and the young Ibsen had experience with both of them.

In 1850 Ibsen managed to escape his small Norwegian town for a larger one, Bergen, and became involved in running a theater. It was not a good period for European theater: the only plays from this era that have survived are the farces. No one expected plays to reflect everyday life and its problems, anymore than they expected opera to do so. Nor was Ibsen well acquainted with the classical canon of European literature. He was inspired by the Icelandic sagas he encountered in the mid-1850s, and by some bad translations of Shakespeare, but on the whole he was cut off from the wider European culture by his ignorance of all foreign languages except German. He was one of the few great nineteenth-century writers who lacked a personal library, and during the last half of his life read little except for newspapers and the Bible. Yet his isolation from the main tradition of classical tragedy was eventually to prove an advantage, because it forced him to strike out on his own. He was the playwright who brought tragedy out of the the palaces of kings and princes and into the bourgeois drawing-room.

"While Ibsen was at Bergen, one hundred and forty-five plays were produced, and seventy-five of them were French. The typical production was the play of dramatic intrigue, which depended on a complicated plot, moving at high speed around certain stock scenes: the confidential document dropped in public; the abducted baby identified by a secret talisman or birthmark; the poisoned goblet passing from hand to hand, and being drunk in the end by everyone except the intended victim. Characters were similarly conventional: 'heavy father, innocence distressed, rough diamond, jealous husband, faithful friend'. The plays, that is to say, did not deal in nuances. Character and action werer drawn in bold, theatrical lines: action was varied, complicated, and continuous in order to provide excitement and surprise and suspense in the theatre; characters wer set in a single, simple colourful mould, in order to provide theatrical recognition" (Raymond Williams).

Discouraged by the poor quality of these plays and by his own initial failures in the theater, Ibsen began to drink heavily, and more than once was seen insensible in the gutter. His great opportunity came in 1864 when, after many unsuccessful applications, he won a travel grant to study and write in Rome. For Scandinavian writers Italy was the Promised Land of sun, art, and classical serenity, a release from the gloom and oppression of the north. Ibsen became an expatriate writer: one of those artists who leaves a stifling home only to write about it again and again. After Rome he migrated to Munich and Dresden. Ibsen was in Dresden at the same time as Dostoevsky, who was writing The Possessed and complaining about the Germans, who were forever short-changing him in the shops and restaurants and misdirecting him in the streets. "Dresden," said the great Russian novelist, "is a very dull place. I can't bear these Germans." But unlike Dostoevsky, who was impatient to return to his native land, Ibsen stayed in the German cities for twenty years, practicing his craft in exile.

3. HOME

Ibsen wrote some remarkable plays in verse, but the real breakthrough came in the late 1870s with plays in prose that disclosed the dark side of middle class family life. His early verse plays were about the distant past; the prose plays were about the influence of the past on the present. On stage we have the bourgeois "doll's house"; just offstage there is a raw world of bankruptcies and betrayals and brothels and sexually transmitted diseases. Home is revealed as a nursery for hypocrisy and repression, possessiveness and lies. Ibsen's most famous heroine, Nora Helmer, finds herself patronized by her husband as a child, losing herself in the supportive role she plays, flattering her husband's ego at the cost of destroying her own. In this period, Ibsen became the scourge of conventional middle class morality, exposing all of those compromises and inhibitions that stand in the way of free and unfettered self-realization.

Ibsen's plays expose the great issues of the day as they work through the lives of ordinary people, in the politics of marriage and the relations of parents and children. The problem is to know oneself, to see through to the true self underneath the various roles one is forced to play–the flirtatious wife, the dutiful mother, the successful patriarch, the idealistic artist or reformer. A crisis of some sort–brought on by illness or blackmail–forces the painful exposure of family secrets. Taken together, Ibsen's drama display a catalogue of failure–in daily life, in the professions, in the arts, in marriage and parenting, in friendship, in communication.

Here of course is the clue to the vehement attacks on Ibsen's alleged morbidity. In the dominant ideology of the period, the middle class home is sheltered from the harsh realities of business, poverty, and crime. But Ibsen shows how the effort to build a "doll's house" is doomed to fail, and to distort the self and the most basic relationships. Ghosts and Hedda Gabler may seem tame to us now, but sexually transmitted disease, incest, suicide, infanticide, "free love," and euthanasia were themes that were bound to shock critics in the 1880s, and to scandalize audiences that were used to regarding the theater as a place of shallow amusement.

4. LANGUAGE

But of course it wasn't simply what Ibsen said that rankled his critics, but how he said it. In a period when the theater was dominated by melodrama, comedy, and spectacle, Ibsen renovated the genre of tragedy. And he did so with a new kind of double-layered theatrical language, in which the subtext was as important as the dialogue. Ibsen's dialogue is full of evasions and circumlocutions, on the one hand, and on the other of pregnant remarks and loaded words that his characters utter but do not fully understand. In Ghosts Mrs. Alving and Parson Manders spend much of their time circling around a subject to which they dread to refer directly; they say one thing and mean another. In A Doll's House, Helmer's words come back to haunt him; his enormous narcissism prevents him from realizing that his own words apply to himself.

"Ibsen's art consists in opening insights into the characters' unconscious motivations and feelings through the interstices between the most trivial exchanges of small talk. The introduction of this principle of uncertainty into drama represents a fundamental revolution in dramatic technique, a revolution which is still with us. The line extends directly from Ibsen to Chekhov, who refined the technique of oblique or indirect dialogue and evolved the concept of the sub-text hidden beneath the explicit language of the dialogue, as well as to Wedekind who was the first to employ deliberately non-communicating dialogue so that the characters–too involved in themselves to listen to what their partners say–deliver what amounts to two monologues in parallel. And it is from Chekhov and Wedekind that the masters of contemporary non-communicating dialogue, Pinter and Ionesco, trace their descent" (Martin Esslin).

5. GHOSTS

In Ibsen as in Freud the past haunts the present. The dead maim the living, the past is powerful enough to kill. As in ancient Greek tragedy, the sins of the parents destroy their children. In A Doll's House and Ghosts, fathers "kill" their sons via the transmission of hereditary syphilis; in Hedda Gabler a father "kills" his daughter. In Ghosts the mother is the central figure, forced to reexamine her life and to acknowledge that her puritanism contributed to her husband's corruption, that her sacrifice produced not redemption but disaster for her son.

"Like many of Ibsen's late plays, Ghosts seems to start remarkably late in its own story, in the aftermath of great events that have taken place at other times and in other places, but are now concentrated into the small domestic set. The ghosts are not just memories of the past, nor previous actions repeated. They are the consequences of moral choices once made, and they construct a new drama from the old, producing not just re-enactments but terrible new crises. They acquire their extraordinary depth, their symbolic resonance, from the fact that they both represent actions and recreations of things gone before that have been concealed and repressed" (Malcolm Bradbury).

Like the great tragedies of the ancient Greeks, Ibsen's major plays turn on "recognition scenes." Such a scene not only offers the rectification of an error or mistaken identification, it reveals that the protagonists had completely misunderstood their situation, the real forces determining their lives. We said earlier that Ibsen departed from classical tragedy in moving the scene of the action from the palace to the parlor. But perhaps his real achievement was to find, in the most unlikely places, modern equivalents for the ancient tragedies of hubris (arrogance and moral blindness). In A Doll's House, Nora recognizes that her husband, the man with whom she has shared her life for years, is really a stranger to her, and that she does not really know herself. Where are the equivalent moments of recognition and tragic self-awareness in Ghosts and Hedda Gabler?

6. IBSEN AND MARX

No, not that Marx, but rather his daughter Eleanor. Eleanor Marx was a brilliant young woman who had a short and unhappy life. She translated a number of Ibsen's plays, and appeared, with the future playwright George Bernard Shaw, in the first English production of A Doll's House. Eleanor Marx was of course a socialist, and since she was England's first Nora, there was a tendency to see the scandalous Ibsen as a socialist as well. But Ibsen was not a socialist. He was bourgeois to the core: he dressed in impeccably bourgeois style, had strict working habits, and avidly sought honors and decorations. Perhaps it would be best to classify Ibsen as a liberal, since self-realization, being true to oneself, was the primary theme of his best work.

7. IBSEN AND LIBERALISM

Suffusing the sense of the modern in the 1880s was a confident faith in social advance, a readiness to believe that to expose abuses and lies and repressions was to annihilate them and to clear the way for healthy moral growth. To be sure, Ibsen’s Ghosts was a warning that the past could taint or crush even the most determined efforts to break free. But the liberal note is unmistakable: Ibsen’s ghosts are not the invisible spirochetes of syphilis but the virulent prohibitions and proprieties of bourgeois morality. The hysterical response to the play suggested how conventional audiences felt threatened by Ibsen’s attack on the principles of conjugal obligation, feminine purity, and social conformity–all those related factors which, under the guise of duty or loyalty stunt, the personality and cut us off from genuine living.

RECOMMENDED:

Martin Esslin, "Ibsen and Modern Drama," Ibsen and the Theatre, ed. E. Durbach (NYU, 1980). See also his brilliant contribution to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theater, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford,1997).

Malcolm Bradbury, "Henrik Ibsen," The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (Viking, 1988). A superb introduction, centering on Ghosts.

Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Penguin, 1973). A tough-minded survey of the great modern playwrights by a great modern critic.

Michael Egan (ed.), Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972). Collection of contemporary reviews of Ibsen's plays as they appeared in Britain.

Michael Meyer, Ibsen (Penguin, 1985). The standard biography.