Death and Suicide in Henrik Ibsen's Drama with Special Reference to Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and Ghosts

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century, Henrik Ibsen (1828- 1906) was revered a major artist throughout Europe and North America. He created singular and very complex characters who sought to discover their mission in life and to resist the pressures of society. 
 As a mature dramatist Ibsen would give death and suicide substantial focus in his plays. However, it was no longer he who struggled with thoughts of death and suicide. Rather he created a series of stage characters who look death in the eye and choose suicide – whether directly or indirectly – as their exit from (but not necessarily) the final solution.
 The aim of this paper is to investigate the various types of suicide and death in Ibsen's plays with special reference to three plays: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and Ghosts and discuss the main reasons and the surrounding conditions that have led to these tragic acts. 
 The paper concludes that in Ibsen's plays as in the Greek tragedy the past haunts the present. The dead maim the living; the past is powerful enough to kill. As in ancient Greek tragedy, the sins of the parents destroy their children. In A Doll's House and Ghosts, fathers "kill" their sons via the transmission of hereditary syphilis; in Hedda Gabler a father "kills" his daughter. Hedvig, in The Wild Duck, is an innocent victim, but the generations before her are the guilty ones. In Ghosts the mother is the central figure, forced to reexamine her life and to acknowledge that her puritanism contributed to her husband's corruption, that her sacrifice produced not redemption but disaster for her son. 
 Henrik Ibsen (1828- 1906) bewildered and shocked his contemporaries a century ago with his seemingly obscure dramas, with his controversial themes, images and subject matters and delineation of characters unfamiliar to the theatre of his time, providing commentators and drama critics with very little idea about the real purpose of the texts.