HENRIK IBSENHISTORICAL BACKGROUND

b. 1828 – d. 1905 [Norway]

NEW NORWAYHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

• Napoleonic Wars coming to an end

• Norway on the path to independence

• Norwegian language use for literature and theatre

NEW NORWAYHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

• Agriculture-based population at the time of Ibsen’s birth

• Capitalist and Industrialised

• New Social Groups• Industrial Working Class• Middle Class• Bourgeoisie

NEW NORWAYHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

1848 – farming and factory worker revolution…failed

• Ibsen felt sympathy and wrote a play• The League of Youth (1869)

1864 – German Prussians invade Denmark

• Ibsen ashamed of Norway’s inability to assist

NEW NORWAYHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

An Enemy of the People (1882)• One man’s struggle against bureaucratic complacency

“The majority is never right”

“Those qualified to vote are only a small and arbitrarily limited minority”

NEW SCIENCEHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

Ibsen was fascinated with the function of technological advancement in reducing the gap between the everyday folk and the richer population

Sociology had also begun to establish itself• The Norwegian Middle Class interested in itself

Naturalistic theatre • Everyday language can reveal motivation

NEW SCIENCEHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)

A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881)• Questions of heredity, survival and the struggle of the

individual towards meaning in life without religion

Nora’s determination and Helmer’s shock

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

“I am obviously not thinking of a nobility of birth…I am thinking of one of character, a nobility of mind and will” [Ibsen]

Shift away from agriculture to industrialisation• Cultural move away from gender-governed societal

groups • Focus on Individual rather than group identity (away

from gendered groups)

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

More formal relationship between men and women

White-collar women like Mrs Linde were common

Middle-class women had to give up their jobs if they chose to marry

Man’s social status enhanced by a wife• Consider Helmer and Nora

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

Agitation for the rights of women

Socialism and Feminism inextricably linked

Helmer’s separate spheres• Women were morally infantilized by it• Educated to be pleasing at the expense of every solid

virtue

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

Major writers of the last century – French Romantics and English Victorians

• Unable to imagine a woman who was not “Half teasing demon, half saint…fire in a crust of ice, or the other way around” [Camilla Collett]

Ibsen’s Women changed:

• Historical Dramas – strong, articulate, powerful• Modern Life – marginalised unift, petty

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

Nora fully aware that she is at odds with her society

Anxiety about gender roles was acute in nineteenth-century England

The women’s suffrage movement in the UK was concerned with many aspects of women’s lives

NEW WOMENHISTORIAL BACKGROUND

The Political Education of Ibsen• persuasive and convincing language for society to

debate the relationship between men and women

Karl Marx:

“The most direct, natural and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman… from this

relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development.”

Historical context

Ibsen’s Lifetime

1828 - 1905

New Norway

New Science

New Women

Sourced from York Notes – A Doll’s House by Frances Gray, York Press, London 2008