Ibsen's Play Research Articles

CONFLICT WITH SOCIETAL GENDER ROLES: A COMPARATIVE FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF EDNA PONTELLIER AND NORA HELMER

Kate Chopin, an American novelist and short story writer representing women’s revolt against patriarchal rule, positions women in the center of her works. She deals with women's experiences in the context of gender roles, their conflicts with society, their discovery of their own bodies and the following awakening. Henrik Ibsen is one of the most important writers of Norwegian drama. Similarly, Ibsen highlights the individual's conflict with society as a kind of alienation on the axis of individual-society antagonism. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Chopin's novel The Awakening (1899), and Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879), do not fit into the gender roles imposed on them by their societies. Both characters gain self-awareness through the discovery of their uniqueness. Henrik Ibsen and Kate Chopin wrote realistically about the problems their female characters encountered in the patriarchal social structure and their conflicts with social codes. The lives and choices of Edna and Nora, who both have the duties of pleasing their spouses, meeting the needs of the house and taking care of their children within the encompassing structure of the institution of marriage, are similar to each other. In this article, the lives of Edna and Nora, who are the objects of the patriarchal structure in the triangular relationship of man - child - family, will be examined comparatively in terms of their contradictions with society, their journey to self-discovery, their alienation and choices.

The Graphic Novel as Mediation of the Anthropocene

Abstract This article presents a comparative analysis of Henrik Ibsen's play En folkefiende [An Enemy of the People, 1882] and its adaptation into a graphic novel by Javi Rey (2022). The plot revolves around Dr Tomas Stockmann's discovery that the water of the touristic baths of his hometown is polluted and his futile attempt to convince his fellow citizens to take action. I argue that this can be read as an allegory of specific aspects of the Anthropocene. Moreover, while both works address the production of ignorance about human environmental change, the graphic novel possesses medium-specific ways of depicting the gap between knowledge and action. Finally, while the play is a black comedy, the graphic novel conveys a stronger faith in democratic pedagogy, adapted to twenty-first-century discourses on climate.

Introduction

The articles in this edition of European Comic Art cover a range of themes, including adaptation, whether from an Ibsen play or a range of classic novels, and a corresponding scrutiny of the affordances of the comics medium, along with a reflection on the differential apportioning of artistic prestige from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. An in-depth interview with an award-winning translator brings in further angles on comics as a transnational medium, and an essay by an eminent semiologist revisits the linear/tabular distinction that has been the basis of much formal analysis of comics. The issue of pedagogy recurs both as subject matter of primary texts and in the form of a constructive proposal for enlightened curriculum development. Politics pervades all the articles: the environmental crisis and media collusion in obfuscation, the process of achieving change in education, the responsibility of a satirist to adhere or refuse adherence to one camp or another, the negotiations and frictions that arise out of relocation into new contexts of reception, and an exploration of the borderline regions of the social unconscious.

The Portrayal of Women in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

This research investigates the portrayal of women characters in Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House. Ibsen is the father of modern theater and often advocates for social issues in his plays. This study aims to shed light on the portrayal of women in this play and how they are different from each other, the study is an important to portray women's experiences in Ibsen's era. Ibsen himself champions gender parity, reflects in characters like Nora Helmer, Mrs. Linde and Anne Marie. The study uses a feminist framework to analyze the play's multiple feminist trends. Considerable attention will be devoted to illuminating the inequitable marriage system, the constraints impose upon women's autonomy, and their endeavor for emancipation. The study concluded that those women fought a lot to be free and did many unfortunate things to solve their problems. Researcher strongly suggested that there are stark differences between the women characters in this play. While Nora Helmer, Mrs. Linde, and Anne Marie seemed happy as the play began, they moved in parallel but in opposite directions. Nora left her husband's house to live an independent life, having her thoughts and decisions, and facing her fears about the future; Mrs. Linde and Anne Marie quickly overcame obstacles in life and grew up. They sacrificed a lot to get safety and provide for their families.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

«Гедда Габлер» на российской сцене: жизнь во времени

The subject of the study is the perception and interpretation of the play Hedda Gabler, by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, which has been staged in theatres of Moscow and St. Petersburg over the century. The study is based on critical reviews published in Moscow’s press over the last century up to our time, as well as the author’s own impressions from some performances of the early 21st century. Despite the fact that Hedda Gabler was staged in Russian theatres more often than any other Ibsen play, it has continuously resulted in disputes and contradictory reviews, which often reflect both misunderstanding of the play itself and also of various director’s interpretations of it. In the pre-revolutionary period, on the one hand, there were realistic productions staged, while others were made in the Art Nouveau style of Vsevolod Meyerhold. According to critics, both ways to interpret the play strayed far from the plot in Ibsen’s play. In Soviet times, Kama Ginkas interpreted the play as a psychological drama. In the post-perestroika period, Nina Chusova and Mindaugas Karbauskis offered simplified and even vulgarized versions of the play. In the author’s opinion, the performance which came closest to Ibsen’s idea and style for the play was created by V. Pazi in Saint Petersburg State Academic Lensoviet Theatre. The reason for such difficulties in productions on the Russian stage is in the very nature of the drama, which ends with the protagonist’s suicide. Such a finale is not logically motivated or conditioned by a total inevitability, it is also not prepared for by the chain of events taking place on stage. With such a finale, Ibsen altered the traditional structure and content of tragedy in its classical sense.

Aleramo’s Una donna via Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

This article provides a detailed comparison of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and Sibilla Aleramo's novel Una donna (1906), focussing specifically on the similar endings of both works where the respective protagonist walks out on her family. It begins by examining the various contexts and collaborative networks that enabled the theatre of Ibsen to travel into late nineteenth-century Italy, namely Luigi Capuana's translation of the play, Casa di bambola, and early interpretations of the lead role by Italy's star actress, Eleonora Duse. The article proceeds to offer a close reading of Casa di bambola and Una donna, elucidating how Aleramo's first-person novel is able to expand on key issues which are only dealt with briefly in Ibsen's play. In so doing, the analysis illustrates what it was about Aleramo's narrative technique which both aligns her with, but also sets her apart from, her predecessor, shedding new light on the connective associations between the two authors.

Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film

Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film

State Responsibility in the International Legal Order: A Critical Appraisal by Katja Creutz [Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, 352pp, ISBN 978-1-108-49429-8, £95 (h/bk)

State Responsibility in the International Legal Order: A Critical Appraisal by Katja Creutz [ Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, 352pp, ISBN 978-1-108-49429-8, £95 (h/bk)] In Ibsen's play The Enemy of the People, Dr Stockman fights relentlessly for the truth, even if it runs counter to the wishes of the majority. [...]the book ends by discussing the fragmentation of the regime and alternatives to responsibility that are better suited to tackling current challenges, namely international liability and criminal law. [...]no field of law, whether domestic or international, can escape the ultimate argument of ‘political will’. [...]as the author's approach is pragmatic, the argument of political will could not have been avoided.

An Enemy of the People

An Enemy of the People

Rewriting Ibsen's Nora: Fiction and the New Woman in Thailand (1920s–1940s)

Previous research has shown that the New Woman was a global phenomenon and that fiction was crucial to the emergence of this New Woman. One work that was of particular importance was Henrik Ibsen's A doll's house. This article examines the rise of the New Woman in early twentieth century Thailand. It traces the campaigns for gender equality that Thai women waged in local newspapers and magazines. It also examines the reactions towards these campaigns by three major authors, all of whom turned to Ibsen's play in their engagement with the New Woman phenomenon.

Investigating Failure in Establishing Intimate Relationships: A Psychoanalytical Study of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler is full of psychological implications. It is a play in which Ibsen has dealt with the complexity of romantic relationships. The study relies on Freud's theory of the unconscious involving unconscious motives, repression, fear of intimacy, displacement, anxiety and neurosis. Many young characters in the play try to establish intimate relationships, but they fail in their effort. Most of the characters are suffering from the fear of intimacy. This leads to make an analysis of their unconscious motives and desires. The study finds that most of the characters in this play are controlled by their unconscious desire for having power over the people they want to be intimate with. This is why they fail to establish intimate relations with the important individuals in their life. The study offers an application of Freudian concepts to literature. It also helps in understanding causes for the failure of intimate relationships.

The politics of dark ecologies in Deepan Sivaraman’s Peer Gynt

This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of bhana used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,' and argue that the bhana's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen’s play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.

REVISITING IBSEN'S HEDDA GABLER THROUGH DURKHEIM’S SOCIOLOGICAL SUICIDE: A BODY TO END THE DOOM OF ORGANIC SOLIDARITY

The debate over Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler sometimes constitutes the belief that all of the interpretations over the play should be learned from a feministic perspective. Closer readings of Ibsen's play noting Georg Brands' categorization of Ibsen's plays and Peter Wessel Zapffe's exceptional perspective spurred a new reading of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in our mind. Hence, a discussion of it in relation with sociological issues is proved to be highly effective in dissecting different layers of meaning from Hedda Gabler's tragic ending. As such, Emile Durkheim's sociological model of suicide is recommended as a reliable platform to become the mainstay of the Ibsen's Hedda Gabler's discussion. Under the purview of sociological issues, Ibsen's Hedda plays the role of a literary description of an individual entangled in the modern world unavoidably committing suicide to free herself from the limitations of the modern world.

From domination to emancipation and freedom: reading Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism in conjunction with Philip Pettit’s neo-republicanism

In this paper, I bring Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist approach into conversation with the analytical thinker Philip Pettit, who has developed an influential neo-republican conception of freedom as ‘non-domination’. Both thinkers aim to reconfigure power and domination towards more democratic and egalitarian relations and I evaluate the political implications of their respective conceptions of domination/non-domination, emancipation and freedom. I show that despite these common points of reference, the two authors exhibit considerable differences which manifest in their respective conceptions of structure and agency. In the opening section, I compare Laclau's and Pettit's respective conceptions of ‘domination’ where I highlight the differences between them in two alternate readings of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. In the second section, I examine their respective understandings of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom’, and I demonstrate that Pettit does not model his conception of freedom as non-domination on the idea of emancipation. This stands in contrast to Laclau, for whom emancipation remains the focal point of political struggle, despite formal equality, and who maintains the idea of the possibility of a more radical transformation in the underlying structures of society. In the final section, I consider Laclau's and Pettit's alternative conceptions of politics where both thinkers place a premium on democratic contest in challenging and overturning arbitrary power. I show that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, while Laclau's notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order. I conclude by amalgamating the respective strengths of both thinkers to provide a multi-layered analysis of contemporary forms of domination to better aid our understanding about the kinds of struggle needed to contest them.

When We Dead Awaken —What About the Living?

Alexandra Matthee reviews Ibsen play in translation

Na Hyesŏk: The "Korean Nora"

Na Hyesŏk (1896–1948), the so-called "Korean Nora" of colonial Korea, challenged existing patriarchal conventions and tried to dismantle androcentric myths. In her poem, "A Doll's Song" (1921), an adaptation from Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House, she exclaims, "I have a divine duty, setting out on my mission to become a person." Her feminism was a common theme among Korean new-age women and her task was one shared with Japanese new women artists. Japan and Korea's new-age women had ideological ties, despite their political differences as constituents of empire and colony, a fact closely linked to the reception of "Nora" in East Asia. Korean international students in Tokyo learned and experienced Western culture via Japanese intellectuals and celebrated Ibsen's "Nora" as a role model of modern individuality. For Korean male students, being a "Nora" implied having a sense of enlightenment both as a modern person and a colonial intellectual with an awareness of nationalistic boundaries. However, Na Hyesŏk made it her priority to break with patriarchal ideology so that Korean female intellectuals could play a role equal to that of their male counterparts in modern Korean society.

The Meaning of Vermoulu in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts

In 1881, Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts shocked the theatrical world by bringing to center stage the taboo topic of venereal disease. A major character in the drama, Oswald Alving, age 26, suffers from neurosyphilis. Oswald's headaches and neck stiffness (“like a tight iron band squeezing me from my neck up” 1 Ibsen H The Complete Major Prose Plays. Plume, New York, NY1978: 249-251 Google Scholar ) indicate chronic meningitis. His difficulty concentrating (“I couldn't focus any of my thoughts” 1 Ibsen H The Complete Major Prose Plays. Plume, New York, NY1978: 249-251 Google Scholar ) and inability to work suggest the meningoencephalitis of general paresis. And, in the play's tragic climax, Oswald suffers a devastating, catastrophic neurologic deterioration on stage with altered mental status and an unresponsiveness that leaves him permanently an invalid (“Oswald appears to crumple inwardly in the chair; all his muscles loosen; the expression leaves his face; and his eyes stare blankly” 1 Ibsen H The Complete Major Prose Plays. Plume, New York, NY1978: 249-251 Google Scholar ). This sudden collapse could have been caused by a cerebrovascular accident from meningovascular syphilis.

A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions by Julie Holledge et al

Reviewed by: A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions by Julie Holledge et al Antje Budde A GLOBAL DOLL'S HOUSE: IBSEN AND DISTANT VISIONS. By Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 234. Reflecting on their project, the authors of A Global Doll's House write that "[t]he study of so many productions of a single play is unprecedented in the historiography of modern drama, and the techniques of data analysis and visualization that we used have far-reaching possibilities for the field" (202). One might assume that there cannot possibly be anything substantial or even minor left to be said about the globally performed production of Henrik Ibsen's well-known Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House). This book will convince the reader otherwise. A Global Doll's House sets out to map the contradictory forces of the global production history of this canonical play in order to meticulously identify factors for its global success on five continents and across many cultures. There have been other valuable publications discussing Ibsen's work within the context of globalization and cross-cultural exchange. However, this book, using digital data analytics as a major methodological tool, opens an entirely new door to the Ibsen research of the future. The writing style is very concise and scientific, yet leaves space for playfulness and surprise. This stylistic dynamic mirrors—and quite joyfully so—the research methodology that is based on a very effective dialectical integration of close readings and distant visions, an interesting switching between tree and forest vision. The authors state that the "underlying premise of the book is that new ways of looking produce new ways of thinking" (6; emphasis in original). In this particular case I am very much in agreement, as this is precisely what this book does. While close readings are an established method of critical analysis in literature and theatre studies, exercising a distant view enabled by digital data visualization offers immense potential for research. The book is divided into two parts, "Cultural Transmission" and "Adaptation," which are the two chosen angles through which it explores the mechanics, dynamics, and historical stages of the play's growing global significance over the last 135 years. The organizing pattern of each of its parts introduces its use of terminology and methodology, before it launches into the analysis of two very specific aspects or case studies, and then concludes with a summary of its major findings. Part 1 includes "Mapping the Early Noras," in which we learn about the early commercial history of this play and patterns of transmission that challenge conventional narratives of Ibsen's success as a playwright. This is juxtaposed with brief vignettes about the lives of performers who played Nora—each vignette a breathtaking miniature provocation, ready to set off a cascade of new research in the future. This is followed by "'Peddling' Et dukkehjem: The Role of the State," which reveals "the intertwined forces of major theatre companies, theatrical families, state departments, and state policy initiatives in producing Et dukkehjem" (103). It also addresses a set of motivations for these transmissions on the Norwegian side that are not at all necessarily grounded in artistic appreciation of Ibsen's work or the desire for social/feminist change and/or individual liberation. Part 2, "Adaptation," is broken down into "Adaptation at a Distance" and "Ibsen's Challenge: The Tarantella Rehearsal." These two chapters provide exciting new insights into the patterns and structures of dramaturgical and performative engagement with Ibsen's dramatic text, exemplified through visualizations and critical discussions of artistic, cultural, and political interventions that speak to the enormous flexibility that Ibsen's play offers to theatre artists across time and space. My personally favorite section, which will inform my teaching, research, and [End Page 261] creative praxis, is the discussion of physical scores embedded in dramatic writing, of which Ibsen was a highly sophisticated maker. The book includes not only rigorous scholarly narratives, but also visualized graphs, maps, and networks that allow us to understand patterns, structures, and models of Ibsen's global success from a metaphorical bird...