Henrik Ibsen and Hedda Gabler
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Henrik Ibsen, creator of the "realistic" school of drama that has dominated the 20th Century theater agenda, has travelled a curious path of critical review. Reviled at first writing of his dramas in the popular press and satirical cartoons as the sour old man of scandal and shame (Beyer 192-195), he was then canonized for the "social significance" of his realistic dramas by the "Ibsenites" - not the least being George Bernard Shaw, whose The Quintessence of Ibsenism has seemingly been the most-often heard First and Last Word on the subject of what Ibsen's plays are supposed to mean (Williams 25-26). "Fools belabored him and fools defended him; he was near to being suffocated and done for in the fog of balderdash," wrote the acerbic critic H. L. Mencken fifty some-odd years ago (vii) - and fifty some-odd years after the majority of Ibsen's realistic plays were written - who went on to dismiss Ibsen's social significance in favor of praising him as "a play-maker of astounding skill ... his direct and adept manner of clothing simple and even self-evident arguments in unusually lucid and brilliant dramatic forms - in brief, his enormously effective technique as a dramatist (ix)." Clearly, when critical review is so extremely at odds with itself, there must be some middle ground that approaches the "objective" truth; that is, an evaluation of Ibsen's plays from a perspective minus a critic's personal social agenda. This paper will not attempt to find that middle ground. Rat
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social context for Hedda Gabler. "It was not my desire," he was to explain, "to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain social conditions and principles of the present day (Mencken xiv)."
Ibsen was, perhaps, being a bit disingenuous: his "depiction," biographer's agree, was based upon an episode in his own life experienced only a year earlier. In 1889, the sixty year-old playwright became infatuated with eighteen year-old Emilie Bardach, a young woman whose photographs closely resemble Ibsen's descriptions of Hedda Gabler. Such was their infatuation that Ibsen considered leaving his wife of several decades, Susanna. In the end, somewhat prompted by an independence of spirit exhibited by Emilie - a combination of aristocratic assumptions and "women's suffrage" attitudes prevalent in the upper circles of European society - the older man fled to another city, writing to the young woman and telling her she must no longer try to contact him (Beyer 157-167).
Critic Jeannette Lee writes that "Hedda Gabler is the pistol (Williams 54)," and on that one point feminist - or at least feminine - critical study of Ibsen
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Approximate Word count = 4020
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
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