Abstract
Scholars do not seem to come to terms with Brand’s role in Ibsen’s career as a playwright. While the importance of Brand is widely accepted, the play is at the same time said to be the most misunderstood of all Ibsen’s plays. The argument goes that Norway’s “heavy and provincial” intellectual atmosphere at the time created a barrier for Ibsen, and that only after being recognized outside Norway did the play get acceptance among Norwegians. Ibsen himself contributes to this conception in his famous letter to Brandes from 26 June 1869, where he complains about how Brand has been misunderstood. This article challenges the impression that Brand was not accepted or understood by the Norwegians in the 1860s. We approach the subject via three different angles. Firstly, by reading the reviews of Brand from the 1860s, we see that the critics respected the play and its artistic qualities beyond doubt. Secondly, a look at how the play was received in the public shows that not only was Brand a great commercial success, it also became the prime subject of discussion, both in private and public settings. Finally, I read Ibsen’s letter in light of some dominating intellectual currents in Norway at the time, and ask: Are there alternative ways of interpreting Ibsen’s allegations about being misunderstood? Could it be that one should pay less attention to Ibsen’s break with Norway and more to how the authorship was connected to social, intellectual, religious and financial currents within the Norwegian community at the time?
Highlights
This article is about the events that made it possible for the most important turning point in Ibsen’s career to transpire
After being voted the most worn out member among the Scandinavians in Rome the winter of 1866, Ibsen resumed in the spring his elegant style from the Bergen years: a visible and theatrical way of underlining the fact that Brand had become a great success and that ‘Ibsen the playwright’ had gotten his breakthrough
While the importance of Brand in Ibsen’s career is widely accepted, the play is at the same time said to be the most misunderstood of all of Ibsen’s plays
Summary
This article is about the events that made it possible for the most important turning point in Ibsen’s career to transpire. The dissenting interpretations underline the impression of a play of transition, a play that captures the tense relationship between the religious and “modern” currents, between idealistic and domestic heroes and between learned critics and common reading in a time when reading became widespread. In this perspective one can see the focus on “breaks” and “epochs” in the history of literature in later scholarly attempts to categorize and explain how a complex web of impulses and expressions manifest themselves in new and original ways. This is to me a testimony of how the play captured a Norwegian Zeitgeist
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