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Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts?, another scathing commentary on Victorian morality. In it, a widow reveals to her priest that she has hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The priest had advised her to marry her then fiancee despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief 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 a syphalitic son. Even the mention of [venereal disease]? was scandalous, 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. |
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Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts?, another scathing commentary on Victorian morality. In it, a widow reveals to her priest that she has hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The priest had advised her to marry her then fiancee despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief 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 a syphalitic son. Even the mention of [venereal disease]? was scandalous, 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. |
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In [An Enemy of the People]? (1882), Ibsen went even further. Before, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components 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 the the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a fiction Ibsen challenged. |
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In [An Enemy of the People]? (1882), Ibsen went even further. Before, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components 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. |
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By the time of An Enemy and his next play, [The Wild Duck]? (1884), he had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism? which was to be adopted by Chekov? 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. |
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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 idealism. Always the iconoclast?, Ibsen was as willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own. [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 to be reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Eckdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Eckdal's apparently 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 invented "invention", his wife is earning the household income. Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence 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. Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism? which was to be adopted by Chekov? 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. |
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