Henrik Ibsen was also a major poet, and he published a collection of poems  in 1871. However, drama was the focus of his real lyrical spirit. For a  period of many hard years, he faced bitter opposition. But he finally  triumphed over the conservatism and aesthetic prejudices of the  contemporary critics and audiences. More than anyone, he gave theatrical  art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical  gravity, a psychological depth, and a social significance which the theater  had lacked since the days of Shakespeare. In this manner, Ibsen strongly  contributed to giving European drama a vitality and artistic quality  comparable to the ancient Greek tragedies.  

It is from this perspective we view his contribution to theatrical history. His  realistic contemporary drama was a continuation of the European tradition  of tragic plays. In these works he portrays people from the middle class of  his day. These are people whose routines are suddenly upset as they are  confronted with a deep crisis in their lives. They have been blindly following  a way of life leading to the troubles and are themselves responsible for the  crisis. Looking back on their lives, they are forced to confront themselves.  However, Ibsen created another type of drama as well. In fact, he had been  writing for 25 years before he, in 1877, created his first contemporary  drama, "Pillars of Society.”  

Life and writing 

Ibsen's biography is lacking in grand and momentous episodes. His life as  an artist can be seen as a singularly long and hard struggle leading to  victory and fame — a hard road from poverty to international success. He  spent all of 27 years abroad, in Italy and Germany. He left his land of birth  at the age of 36 in 1864. It was not until he was 63 that he moved home  again, to Kristiania (now Oslo), where he would die in 1906 at the age of  78.  

In lbsen's last drama, "When We Dead Awaken,” he describes the life of  an artist that in many ways reflects on his own. The world renowned  sculptor, Professor Rubek, has returned to Norway after many years  abroad, and in spite of his fame and success, he feels no happiness. In the  central work of his life, he has modeled a self-portrait titled "Remorse for a  ruined life" During the play he is forced to admit that he has taken the  pleasure out of his own life as well as spoiling others'. Everything has been  sacrificed for his art — he has forsaken the love of his youth and his earlier  idealism as well. It follows that he has actually betrayed his art by  relinquishing these essentials. It is none other than his old flame Irene, the  model who posed for him in his youth, who goes to him in his moment of  destiny and tells him the truth: it is first when we dead awaken, that we see  what is irremediable that we have never really lived.  

It is the tragic life feeling itself that gives Ibsen's drama its special  character, the experience of missing out on life and plodding along in a  state of living death. The alternative is pictured as a utopian existence in  freedom, truth and love — in short — a happy life. In Ibsen's world the main  character strives toward a goal, but this struggle leads out into the cold, to  loneliness. Yet the possibility of opting for another route is always there,  one can chose human warmth and contact. The problem for Ibsen's  protagonist is that both choices can appear to be good, and the individual  does not see the consequences of the decision.  

In "When We Dead Awaken," the chill of art is contrasted with life's  warmth. In this perspective, art serves as a prison from which the artist  neither can, nor wishes to escape. As Rubek says to Irene:  

"I am an artist, Irene, and I take no shame to myself for the frailties that  perhaps cling to me. For I was born to be an artist, you see. And, do what  I may, I shall never be anything else."  

This is not an acceptable excuse for Irene, whom he has betrayed. She sees  things from a different angle. She calls him a "poet,” one who creates his  own fictitious world, neglecting his humanity and that of the people who  love him. Ella Rentheim, in "John Gabriel Borkman" (1896) makes the  same complaint against the man who sacrificed her on the altar of his  career. The tragic element in Ibsen's perspective is that for the type of  people that concern him, this seems to be an insoluble conflict. Yet this fact  does not exonerate them from the responsibility or their own decisions.  

Although "When We Dead Awaken" criticizes the egocentricity of the  artist, it would be going too far to view the drama as the writer's bitter  self-examination. Rubek is not a self-portrait. However, some Ibsen  researchers have seen him as a spokesman for the author's standpoint on  the question of art. At one point, Rubek says that the public only relates to  the external realistic "truth" in his human portrayal. What people do not  understand is the hidden dimension in these portraits, all the deceitful  motives that hide behind the respectable bourgeois facades. In his youth,  Rubek had been inspired by an idealistic vision of a higher form of human  existence. Experience has turned him into a disillusioned exposer of  people, a man who believes he portrays life as it really is. It is the animal  governing man that dominates his vision; this is Rubek's version of Zola's  "La béte humaine,” and he explains the changes in his art in the following  way:  

"I imagined that which I saw with my eyes around me in the world. I had to  include it...and up from the fissures of the soil there now swarm men and  women with dimly-suggested animal-faces. Women and men — as I knew  them in real life."  

Understandably, some students of Ibsen have fallen into the temptation of  drawing a parallel between life and art, and see this work as a merciless  self-denunciation. Once again, "When We Dead Awaken" is by no means  auto-biographical. Rubek's relationship with the writer has to be sought on  a deeper level — in the conflicts that Ibsen, toward the end of his life, saw as  a general and essential human problem.  

Ibsen the psychologist  

In the work of the aging writer we meet a number of people who are  experiencing similar conflicts. John Gabriel Borkman sacrifices his love for  a dream of power and honor. Master builder Solness wrecks his family's  lives in order to be regarded as an "artist" in his trade. And Hedda Gabler  resolutely changes the fates of others in order to fulfill her own dream of  freedom and independence. 

These examples of people who pursue their  own goals, involuntarily trampling on the lives of others, are all drawn from  the playwright's last decade of writing. In Ibsen's psychological analyses,  he reveals the negative forces (he calls them "demons" and "trolls" in the  minds of these people. His human characterization in these latter dramas is  extremely complex — a common factor shared by all his last works, starting  with "The Wild Duck" in 1884. In his last 15 years of writing, Ibsen  developed his dialectical supremacy and his distinctive dramatic form —  where realism, symbolism, and deep-digging psychological insights interact.  It is this phase of his work that has prompted people to call him — rightly or  wrongly — a "Freud of the theater." In any case, Freud and many other  psychologists have made use of Ibsen's human portraits as a basis for  character analysis or even to illustrate their own theories. Especially well  known is Freud's analysis of Rebekka West in "Rosmersholm" (1886), a  portrayal he discussed in 1916 together with other character types "who  collapse under the weight of success." Freud sees Rebekka as a tragic  victim of the Oedipus complex and an incestuous past. The analysis reveals  perhaps more about Freud than about Ibsen. But Freud's influence, and the  sway of psychoanalysis in general, have had a considerable effect on the  way the Norwegian dramatist has been regarded.  

Interest in Ibsen as a psychologist can too readily obscure other, equally  important, sides of his art. His account of human life is from an acute social  and conceptual perspective. Perhaps this is the essence of his art — that  which turns it into existential drama exploring many facets of life. This  concerns everything he wrote, even prior to his emergence as an  international dramatist around 1880.  

"A desperate drama" 

Ibsen's work as a writer represents a long poetic contemplation of people's  need to live differently than they do. Thus there is always a deep  undercurrent of desperation in his work. Benedetto Croce called these  portrayals of people who live in constant expectation and who are  consumed by their pursuit of "something else" in life, "a desperate  drama.”  

It is precisely this distance between what they can achieve and what they  want to achieve that is the cause of the tragic (and in many cases the  comic) aspect of these people's lives. Ibsen felt that this contradiction  between will and real prospects was at the root of his art. Looking back on  25 years of writing in 1875, he declared that most of what he had written  involved "the contradiction between ability and aspiration, between will and  possibility.” In this conflict he saw "humanity's and the individual's tragedy  and comedy simultaneously." A decade later, he created the tragicomic  constellation of the priest Rosmer and his scruffy teacher Ulrik Brendel.  These two men, who are reflections of each other, both end up on the brink  of an abyss where all they see is life's total emptiness and insignificance.  

In Ibsen's 12 modern contemporary plays, from "Pillars of Society" (1877)  to "When We Dead Awaken" (1899), we are led time and again into the  same milieu. His characters' are distinguished by their staunch,  well-established bourgeois lives. Nevertheless, their world is threatened  and threatening. It turns out that the world is in motion; old values and  previous conceptions are adrift. The movement shakes up the life of the  individual and jeopardizes the established social order. Here we see how  the process has a psychological as well as a conceptual and social aspect.  Yet what starts the whole process is the need for change, something  springing forth from the individual's volition.  

In this sense, Ibsen is a powerful conceptual writer. This does not mean  that his main concern as a dramatist was the didactical use of theater, or  the waging of an abstract ideological debate. (Some of his critics,  contemporary and later, have made this accusation — and it's fairly obvious  that Ibsen was drawn towards the didactic.) However, the basis of Ibsen's  human portrayal is his characters' conceptions of what makes life worth  living — their values and their understanding of existence. The concepts  they use to describe their position may be unclear; their self-understanding  may be intuitive and deficient. A good example of this is Ellida Wangel's  description of her ambivalent attraction to the sea in "The Lady from the  Sea" (1888). But for a long time, in Ellida's consciousness, a desire has  grown for a freer life coupled with a need for other moral and social values  than those dominating Dr. Wangel's bourgeois existence. And this  discovery within her creates shockwaves on the psychological and the  social plane.  

"The human conflicts" 

Ibsen himself has given the best characteristic of his approach to drama.  This was as early as 1857 in a theater review:  

"It is not the conscious strife between ideas parading before us, nor is this  the situation in real life. What we see are human conflicts, and enwrapped  in these, deep inside, lay ideas at battle — being defeated, or charged with  victory."  

This undoubtedly touches upon something essential in Ibsen's demands to  dramatic art: it should as realistically as possible unify three elements: the  psychological, the ideological and the social. At its best, the organic  synthesis of these three elements is at the heart of Ibsen's drama. Perhaps  he only succeeds completely in a few of his plays, such as "Ghosts,” "The  Wild Duck,” and "Hedda Gabler.” Interestingly, he considered his major  work to be "Emperor and Galilean" (1873), contrary to everyone else.  This could indicate how much emphasis he put on ideology, not overt, but as  a conflict between opposing views toward life. Ibsen believed that he had  created a fully "realistic" rendering of the inner conflict in the abandoned  Julian. The truth is, however, that Julian is too marked by the dramatist's  own thoughts — what he calls his "positive philosophy of life." Ibsen first  succeeded as a theatrical writer when he seriously took another  approach — the one he described in connection with "Hedda Gabler"  (1890):  

"My main goal has been to depict people, human moods and human fates,  on the basis of certain predominant social conditions and perceptions."  

Ibsen took many years, after "Emperor and Galilean,” to orient himself in  this direction. Five years after that great historical dramatization of ideas  came "Pillars of Society,” the starting point for lbsen's reputation as a  European theatrical writer.  

Ibsen's international breakthrough 

In 1879, Ibsen sent Nora Helmer out into the world with a demand that a  woman too must have the freedom to develop as an adult, independent, and  responsible person. The playwright was now over 50, and had finally been  recognized outside of the Nordic countries. "Pillars of Society.” had  admittedly opened the German borders for him, but it was "A Doll's  House” and "Ghost" (1881) which in the 1880s led him into the European  avant-garde.  

"A Doll's House" has a plot which he repeated in many subsequent works,  in the phase when he cultivated "critical realism.” We experience the  individual in opposition to the majority, society's oppressive authority.  Nora puts it this way: "I will have to find out who is right, society or  myself.”  

As noted earlier, when the individual intellectually frees himself from  traditional ways of thinking, serious conflicts arise. For a short period  around 1880, it appears that Ibsen was relatively optimistic about the  individual's chances of succeeding on his own. Although her future is  insecure in many ways, Nora seems to have a real chance of finding the  freedom and independence she is seeking. Ibsen can be criticized for his  somewhat superficial treatment of the problems a divorced woman without  means would face in contemporary society. But it was the moral problems  that concerned him as a writer, not the practical and economic ones.  

A singular success 

In spite of Nora's uncertain future prospects, she has served in a number of  countries as a symbol for women fighting for liberation and equality. In this  connection, she is the most "international" of lbsen's characters. Yet this is  a rather singular success. The middle-class public has enthusiastically  applauded a woman who leaves her children and husband, completely  breaking off with the most important institution in the bourgeois society —  the family!  

This points to the basis of Ibsen's international success. He took deep  schisms and acute problems that afflicted the bourgeois family and placed  them on the stage. On the surface, the middle-class homes gave an  impression of success — and appeared to reflect a picture of a healthy and  stable society. But Ibsen dramatizes the hidden conflicts in this society by  opening the doors to the private, and secret rooms of the bourgeois homes.  He shows what can be hiding behind the beautiful façades: moral duplicity,  confinement, betrayal, and fraud not to mention a constant insecurity.  These were the aspects of the middle-class life one was not supposed to  mention in public, as Pastor Manders wished Mrs. Alving to keep secret  her reading and everything else that threatened the atmosphere at  Rosenvold in "Ghosts.” In the same manner, the social leaders in  "Rosmersholm" put pressure on Rosmer to keep him from telling that he,  the priest, had given up the Christian faith.  

But Ibsen did not remain silent, and the spotlights of his plays made  contemporary aspects of life highly visible. He disrupted the peace of the  lives of the bourgeoisie by reminding them that they had climbed to their  position of social power by mastering quite different ideals than tranquillity,  order and stability. The bourgeoisie had betrayed its own motto of  "freedom, equality, and brotherhood,” and especially after the  revolutionary year 1848 they had become defenders of the status quo.  There was, of course, a liberal opposition within their class, and Ibsen  openly joins these ranks in his first modern contemporary drama. He  considered this movement for freedom and progress to be the true  "European" point of view. As early as 1870, he wrote to the Danish critic  Georg Brandes that it was imperative to return to the ideas of the French  revolution, freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The words need a new  meaning in keeping with the times, he claimed. In 1875 he writes, again to  Brandes:  

"Why are you, and the rest of us who hold the European viewpoint, so  isolated at home?"  

Eventually, as Ibsen grew older, he had trouble accepting certain extreme  forms of liberalism which overemphasized the individual's sovereign right  to self-realization and to some extent radically departed from past norms  and values. In "Rosmersholm,” he points out the dangers of radicalism  built solely on individual moral norms. It is obvious here that Ibsen is  concerned with European culture's basis in a Christian inspired moral  tradition. One has to build on this, he indicates, even though one has given  up the Christian faith. This is certainly the conclusion that Rebekka West  reaches.  

Simultaneously, this drama, like "Ghosts,” is a painful clash with the  melancholic, killjoy aspects of the Christian bourgeois tradition which  subdues the human spirit. Both these works contain, for all their despair, a  warm defense of happiness and the joy of life — pitted against the bourgeois  society's emphasis on duty, law, and order.  

It was in the 1870s that Ibsen oriented himself toward his "European"  point of view. Even though he lived abroad, he continually chose a  Norwegian setting for his contemporary dramas. As a rule, we find  ourselves in a small Norwegian coastal town, the kind Ibsen knew so well  from his childhood in Skien and his youth in Grimstad. The background of  the young Ibsen certainly gave him a sharp eye for social forces and  conflicts arising from differing viewpoints. In small societies, such as the  typical Norwegian coastal town, these social and ideological conflicts are  more exposed than they would be in a larger city.  

Ibsen's first painful experiences came from such a small community. He  had seen how conventions, traditions, and norms could exercise a negative  control over the individual, create anxiety, and inhibit a natural and joyful  lifestyle. This is the atmosphere of the "ghosts" as Mrs. Alving  experiences it. According to her, it makes people "afraid of the light."  

This was the atmosphere of his youth that formed the basis for his writing  and world fame. As an insecure writer and man of the theater in a stifling  Norwegian milieu, he set out to create a new Norwegian drama. He began  with this national perspective. At the same time, from his first journey  abroad, he oriented himself toward the European tradition of theater.  

lbsen's years of learning 

In the history of drama, early in the 1850s Ibsen carried on the traditions of  two highly dissimilar writers, the Frenchman Eugéne Scribe (1791-1861)  and the German Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). For 11 years the young Ibsen  was occupied with day to day practical stagework, and it follows that he had  to keep himself well informed about the latest contemporary Euro-heatrical  art. He worked with rehearsals of new plays and was committed to writing  for the theater.  

Scribe could teach him how a drama's plot should be structured in a  logically motivated progression of scenes. Hebbel provided him with an  example of the way drama could be based on life's contemporary dialectics,  creating a modern conceptual drama. Hebbel's pioneering work was his  conveyance of the ideologicalconflicts of his day into the theater where he  created "a drama of issues" pointing forward. He also knew how the Greek  tragedy's retrospective technique could be used by a modern dramatist.  

In other words, Ibsen was in close contact with the art of the stage for a  long uninterrupted period. His six years at the theater in Bergen (1851-57)  and the following four or five years at the theater in Kristiania from 1857  were not easy. But he acquired a sharp eye for theatrical techniques and  possibilities.  

During a study tour to Copenhagen and Dresden in 1852, he came across a  dramaturgical work newly released in Germany. It was Hermann Hettner's  "Das moderne Drama" (1852). This programmatic treatise for a new  topical theater deeply affected Ibsen's development as a dramatist. In  Hettner too, we see the strong influence of Scribe and Hebbel, combined  with a passionate interest for Shakespeare. Ibsen also gleaned knowledge  from other writers, most notably Schiller and the two Danes Adam  Oehlenschleger (1779-1850) and John Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860).  

Ibsen's apprenticeship was long, lasting about 15 years, and included  theater work he later would claim to be as difficult as "having an abortion  every day." There was a strong pressure to produce hanging over him; one  that led to fumbling attempts in many directions. He experienced a few  minor artistic victories — and numerous defeats. Very few believed that he  had the necessary gift to become more than a minor theatrical writer with a modicum of talent.  

In spite of this insecurity, it is a determined young writer we see during  these years. His goal was clearly national. Together with his friend and  colleague Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910), he founded "The Norwegian  Company" in 1859, an organ for Norwegian art and culture. They had a  joint program for their activities. Ibsen was especially concerned with the  role of theater in the young Norwegian nation's search for its own identity  In these "nation-building" pursuits, he gathered his material from the  country's medieval history and perfected his art as a dramatist. This is  prominent in the work that caps Ibsen's period of apprenticeship, "The  Pretenders" from 1863. The story takes place in Norway in the 1200s, a  period marked by destructive strife. But Ibsen's perspective is Norway of  the 1860s when he has the king, Haakon Haakonsson, express his thoughts  on national unity:  

"Norway was a kingdom, now it will be a nation...all shall be as one  hereafter, and all shall know in themselves that they are one.!"  

"The Pretenders" was Ibsen's breakthrough, yet he had to wait a few  years before being recognized as one of the country's leading writers. This  honor came in 1866 with "Brand." "The Pretenders,” constitutes the end of  his close relationship with Norwegian theater. It was also his farewell  performance — he now started his long exile. In the years that followed, he  turned away from the stage and sought a reading public.  

The great topical dramas 

Both the great dramas for reading, "Brand" (1866) and "Peer Gynt"  (1867), were based on Ibsen's problematic relationship with his country of  birth. Political developments in 1864 led him to lose his optimistic belief in  his country's future. He even began to doubt whether his countrymen had a  historical raison d'être as a nation.  

What he had earlier treated as a national problem of identity now became a  question of the individual's personal integrity. It was no longer sufficient to  dwell on an earlier historical era of greatness and focus on the continuity of  the nation's life. Ibsen turned away from history, and confronted what he  considered the main contemporary problem — a nation can only rise up  culturally by means of the individual's exertion of will. "Brand" is mainly a  drama with a message that the individual must follow the path of volition in  order to achieve true humanity In addition, this is the only way to real  freedom — for the individual, and it follows, for society as a whole.  

In the two rather different twin works "Brand" and "Peer Gynt,” the focus  is on the problem of personality, Ibsen dramatizes the conflict between an  opportunistic acting out of an unnatural role, and a dedication to a  demanding lifelong quest. In "Peer Gynt,” the dramatist created a scene  which artistically illustrates this situation of conflict. The aging Peer, on his  way back to his Norwegian roots is forced to come to terms with himself.  As he looks back upon his wasted life, he peels an onion. He lets each layer  represent a different role he has played. But he finds no core. He has to  face the fact that he has become "no one,” that he has no "self.”  

"So unspeakably poor, then, a soul can go back to nothingness, in the misty  gray. You beautiful earth, don't be annoyed that I left no sign when I  walked your grass. You beautiful sun, in vain you've shed your glorious  light on an empty house. There was no one within to cheer and warm; the  owner, they tell me, was never at home."  

Peer is the weak, spineless person — Brand's antithesis. But it is precisely  in Ibsen's living portrayal of a personality's "dissolution" in changing roles,  that some historians of the theater see the harbinger of a modernistic  perception of the individual. The British drama researcher Ronald Gaskell  puts it this way: "Peer Gynt" inaugurates the drama of the modern mind,”  and he continues: "Indeed, if Surrealism and Expressionism in the theater  can be said to have any single source, the source is undoubtedly "Peer  Gynt.”  

Thus does this early Ibsen drama though very "Norwegian" and romantic  claim a central position in theatrical history, even though it was not written  for the stage. In fact, it is "Peer Gynt" that in modern times has helped  Ibsen to retain his position as a vital and relevant writer. Thus it was not  only his contemporary plays that have made him one of the most towering  figures in the history of the theater. Although it was mainly these works the  well-known Swedish researcher in drama, Martin Lamm, had in mind when  he claimed:  

"Ibsen's drama is the Rome of modern drama: all roads lead to it — and  from it."  

Even though Ibsen withdrew from his Norwegian starting point in the 1870s  and became "a European," he was always deeply marked by the country  he left in 1864, and to which he first returned as an aging celebrity. It was  not easy for him to return. The many years abroad, and the long struggle  for recognition, had left their indelible stamp. Towards the end of his  career, he said that he really was not happy with the fantastic life he had  lived. He felt homeless — even in his mother country.  

But it is precisely this tension between the Norwegian and the foreign (an  element of freer European culture) in Ibsen that characterized him more  than anything else as an individual and a writer. His independent position in  what he called "the great, free, cultural situation" provided him with the  broad perspective of distance, and freedom. Simultaneously, the Norwegian  in him created a longing for a more liberated and happier life. This is the  longing for the sun in the grave writer's poetic world. He never denied his  distinctive Norwegian character. Toward the end of his life, he said to a  German friend:  
 

He who wishes to understand me, must know Norway. The  magnificent, but severe, natural environment surrounding  people up there in the north, the lonely, secluded life — the  farms are miles apart — forces them to be unconcerned with  others, to keep to their own. That is why they become  introspective and serious, they brood and doubt — and they  often lose faith. At home every other person is a philosopher!  There, the long, dark, winters come with their thick fogs  enveloping the houses — oh, how they long for the sun!