Life & Background
Ibsen was born in Skien, Norway in 1828; his father's business collapsed when he was seven, and the family's fall in social standing marks his work throughout. He was apprenticed to an apothecary, fathered a child at eighteen with a servant ten years older, and failed his university entrance. He worked in theatres in Bergen and Christiania, learning stagecraft from the inside, then left Norway in 1864 in disgust at its provincialism and spent twenty-seven years in Italy and Germany. The realist prose plays that made his reputation were all written abroad. A Doll's House caused an international scandal in 1879; German theatres would not stage the ending until he supplied an alternative under protest. He returned to Norway in 1891 and died in 1906.
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer appears to be a cherished wife in a comfortable household, indulged by her husband Torvald, who calls her his squirrel and his skylark. She is concealing a debt: years earlier she borrowed money to pay for the trip that saved Torvald's life, forging her dying father's signature to do it, and has been secretly repaying it. Krogstad, the lender, is about to be dismissed from Torvald's bank and threatens exposure. When the letter arrives, Torvald's response is not gratitude but fury at the damage to his reputation, and he tells her she is unfit to raise their children. Krogstad then withdraws the threat and Torvald declares himself saved and forgiving. Nora, having seen what he is, tells him they have never had a serious conversation in eight years, and leaves — closing the door behind her.
The door slam was the most consequential sound effect in modern theatre, and Ibsen's method is what made it land: a tightly constructed realist play in which every element of the machinery — the forged signature, the letterbox, the tarantella — is planted early and pays off. He also perfected retrospective exposition, in which the crisis has already happened before the curtain rises and the present action consists of the past coming out. Ibsen resisted being made a feminist emblem, telling a Norwegian women's rights society that he had been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than they supposed — a remark that is itself an examination topic. Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and The Wild Duck complicate the realism with symbol.
Why Ibsen Matters
Ibsen is the founder of modern drama in the sense that almost every serious playwright after him works in the space he opened: domestic realism carrying social critique, characters with hidden histories, and endings that refuse resolution. Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism introduced him to England and invented the problem play in his image; Joyce learned Norwegian to read him. For examinations he anchors questions on realism, the well-made play, the New Woman, and the transition from nineteenth-century theatre to the twentieth.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Brand1866
- Peer Gynt1867
- A Doll's House1879
- Ghosts1881
- An Enemy of the People1882
- The Wild Duck1884
- Hedda Gabler1890
- The Master Builder1892