28 The New York Review
Franco-Prussian War the same year
completed Ibsen’s political disillusion-
ment. Henceforth, the only political
party that would interest him was his
own: “I am a one-man political party,
and the only choice people are really
going to have is to join me,” he w rote.
His party’s ideology was a monumen-
tal egoism, what de Figueiredo calls
“aristocratic individualism,” an almost
Nietzschean opposition to the tyranny of
equality. “What is the majority?” Ibsen
asked. “The ignorant mob. Intelligence
is always to be found in the minority.”
“He was at once reactionary and
revolutionary,” de Figueiredo writes,
“almost a personification of what is
known as ‘the dilemma of freedom,’
the contradiction between freedom as
vision and the inevitable consequences
of freedom in real life.” Starting with
The Pillars of Society in 1877, he began
engaging directly with the main cur-
rents of contemporary life, just as
Brandes had encouraged. The Pillars
of Society, in fact, could just as easily
have been the title of any of the subse-
quent dramas he wrote: A Doll’s House
(1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy
of the People (1882). These “trage-
dies of middle-class life,” as the Ibsen
scholar Tore Rem has called them, are
all dramatizations of the individual’s
struggle for freedom—Nora escaping
the dollhouse of her marriage, Regina
fleeing Mrs. Alving’s “infected home,”
Dr. Stockmann doggedly pursuing
scientific truth. The opening scene of
The Pillars of Society reads almost
like an announcement of what readers
can expect of Ibsen. Mr. Rørlund, the
parochial schoolmaster, the very em-
bodiment of the dutiful and moralizing
citizen, is reading to a group of local
women in Consul Bernick’s home:
MR RØRLUND: And that, my dear
lady listeners, brings us to the end.MRS RUMMEL: Oh, what an
instructive tale!MRS HOLT: And so moral!MRS BERNICK: Such a book gives
us a great deal to think about.MR RØRLUND: Oh yes, it forms
a salutary contrast to what we un-
fortunately see in the newspapers
and magazines every day. The
gilded and rouged exterior that
these larger societies and commu-
nities present us with—what does
it actually conceal? Hollowness
and decay, if you ask me. No moral
bedrock under their feet. In a
word—they are whited sepulchres,
these great modern-day societies.To contemporary theatergoers, the
experience of seeing an Ibsen play was
uncanny. They saw their own lives re-
flected back at them: the tastefully fur-
nished rooms, the country houses, the
servants and maids coming and going.
This was the drama of everyday life, a
world filled with people much like them-
selves—bankers, merchants, carpen-
ters, academics—who spoke and acted
naturally. Often tightly plotted, Ibsen’s
plays were for the most part relatively
straightforward, hinging on moments
of revelation and recognition. In this
respect, Ibsen liberated modern theater
from “historicism, mimicry and super-
ficial entertainment,” as de Figueiredo
observes, paving the way for the interior
dramas of Strindberg, Chekhov, Eugene
O’Neill, and Arthur Miller.
To conservative critics, however,
there was always something tabloid-
like in Ibsen’s plays. Like Zola, he was
viewed by many contemporaries as a
spectacle of vulgar immorality. Ghosts,
which squeezes alcoholism, adultery,
incest, and syphilis into three neat acts,
proved so controversial that theaters in
Europe refused to stage it. (It had its
premiere in Chicago in 1882.) A Doll’s
House was sometimes performed in a
“corrected” version in which the sight of
her sleeping children persuades a tear-
ful Nora not to abandon her family—a
change Ibsen, shockingly, consented to.
Still, even in the most controversial
of Ibsen’s dramas during the 1870s and1880s, one gets the impression, on occa-
sion, of a writer a little too pleased with
the gasps of his audience, someone who
writes to unsettle and shock rather than
explore his characters’ psychological
depth. As Chekhov is reported to have
told Stanislavsky, Ibsen “doesn’t know
life; in life it simply isn’t like that.”
Take the idea of freedom. In a re-
vealing letter to Brandes, Ibsen wrote:
“The only thing I love about freedom
is the struggle to achieve it; possession
of it is of no interest to me.” The Pillars
of Society, A Doll’s House, and Ghosts,
for all their obvious merits, leave the
deeper meaning of freedom largely
unexamined, taking it for granted that
freedom is inherently desirable. (The
exception here is An Enemy of the
People, an often riotously funny outlier
in Ibsen’s mostly humorless oeuvre.)
Strindberg found Nora’s decision to
leave her family psychologically un-
convincing; given her age and lack of
occupation, he thought she was surely
walking out into a life of prostitution.
What exactly does it mean for Nora to
“stand alone,” as she puts it? We are
witness to her liberation from the doll’s
house of her marriage, but what her
newfound freedom will consist of is a
question neither she nor Ibsen seems
particularly interested in. “I have noidea what is going to become of me,”
Nora says, a little unconvincingly.This weakness in Ibsen’s dramas be-
gins to fade with The Wild Duck, the
first of his prose dramas to introduce the
allegorical and symbolic components
that would characterize his late style. Dr.
Relling’s famous line in that play (proba-
bly the most quoted line in Scandinavian
literary history)—“Take the life-lie away
from the average man and straight away
you take away his happiness”—hints at
Ibsen’s encroaching pessimism, a slack-
ening of his anti-Victorian crusading.
The finest works of this late style—Ros-
mersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890),
The Master Builder (1892)—are dramasof intense self-scrutiny and reexami-
nation in which Ibsen appears to turn
against even his own cherished ideals of
freedom and individualism. An unmis-
takably oppressive atmosphere pervades
these later works, filled with guilt, sui-
cide, bankruptcy, and death, all of which
served to make Ibsen an annoyingly dif-
ficult figure for his contemporaries to
place. Was he a liberal or a conservative?
A revolutionary or a reactionary? A be-
liever in progress or a cultural pessimist?
To his champions, Ibsen’s ambigu-
ity is central to his art. “Ibsen’s dra-
mas are fundamentally ambivalent,”
de Figueiredo writes toward the end
of his biography. “They do not preach,
they investigate.” In this reading, the
controversy that Ibsen’s plays provoked
only serves to demonstrate the author’s
Flaubert-like devotion to his art and
the moral squeamishness of his critics.
For at least one generation of readers,
this made the Norwegian dramatist a
figure of almost Shakespearean gran-
deur. Writing in the Fortnightly Review
in 1900, six years before Ibsen’s death,
James Joyce, who ranked him above
Shakespeare, questioned “whether any
man has held so firm an empire over
the thinking world in modern times.”
Yet one cannot help but wonder, as
Elizabeth Hardwick did in these pagesnearly fifty years ago, whether Ibsen is
still our contemporary.^2 He may at first
glance appear to be, given the impor-
tance of individual freedom, especially
that of women, to his dramas. Writing
in American Theatre last year, Misha
Berson pointed to President Trump’s
repeated use of the phrase “enemy of
the people” as proof of the relevance
of Ibsen’s play of the same name. Yet
compared to other nineteenth-century
monoliths like Dickens or Tolstoy, his
reputation seems to have dipped. His
plays are still widely performed and
often assigned in college courses, but as
the scholar Toril Moi writes in her excel-
lent study Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of
Modernism (2008), he has come to oc-
cupy a “strangely liminal position as an
artist at once essential and irrelevant to
the theory and history of modernism.”
It’s an issue de Figueiredo doesn’t
address—understandably, given that
Ibsen’s position in Norwegian (and
Danish and Swedish) literature will al-
ways be so much more fixed, bound up
as he was with those countries’ cultural
and social history in the nineteenth
century. Still, it is a question that can
be traced back to Ibsen’s own lifetime,
and even to his plays themselves—in
The Master Builder, for instance, the
aging Halvard Solness anxiously fears
his downfall at the hands of a younger
generation of builders, a fear that Ibsen
likely shared. At the height of his in-
ternational fame in the 1890s, he was
attacked by a new generation of writ-
ers for his psychological rigidity and
moral preachiness. Chief among the
dissenters was his fellow Norwegian
Knut Hamsun, who once delivered a
scathing lecture, in Ibsen’s presence, in
which he ridiculed the playwright for
his “indefensibly coarse and artificial
psychology”—a criticism the inscru-
table protagonist of Hamsun’s novel
Mysteries repeats. Ibsen’s writing, he
says, “is simply mechanical routine.”
I find it hard to disagree. Unlike
Hamsun and Strindberg, Ibsen never re-
ally questioned the stability and coher-
ence of the self (except for Peer Gynt,
that odd outlier in Ibsen’s oeuvre), and
perhaps for this reason he doesn’t strike
us as modern in the way they do. For
all that he scandalized polite society,
he remained the very emblem of bour-
geois respectability, as the younger gen-
eration never ceased to remind him. In
this and many other respects, perhaps
Ibsen’s stature most closely resembles
Ivan Turgenev’s—particularly the Tur-
genev whose “finely discriminating,
slightly ironical vision” Isaiah Berlin
once contrasted with the obsessive ge-
nius of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
In a similar fashion, Ibsen’s ambigu-
ity can seem bland when set beside the
colorful rebellions of Strindberg and
Hamsun. Who would not prefer the
flame of their genius to the cool, calm
granite of Ibsen? And yet sometimes it
is the voice of composure and reason
that we desire—the voice, for instance,
of the patient Mrs. Stockmann in An
Enemy of the People who, in response
to her husband’s triumphant declara-
tion that in his reckless, idealistic quest
for truth he has the “compact major-
ity” behind him, wearily responds:
“Yes, that’s just the misery of it—that
you have something so horrible behind
you.”Eleonora Duse as Rebecca in a production of Rosmersholm at the Norwegian Theater in
Kristiania shortly before Ibsen’s death, 1906Culture Club/Getty Images(^2) See her series of articles on Ibsen
and women, March 11, March 25, and
April 18, 1971.