HENRIK IBSEN

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

b. 1828 – d. 1905 [Norway]

• Napoleonic Wars coming to
an end
• Norway on the path to
independence
• Norwegian language use for
literature and theatre

NEW NORWAY
HISTORIAL BACKGROUND
• Agriculture-based
population at the time of
Ibsen’s birth

• Capitalist and Industrialised

• New Social Groups

• Industrial Working Class
• Middle Class
• Bourgeoisie

NEW NORWAY
HISTORIAL 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 NORWAY
HISTORIAL 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 NORWAY
HISTORIAL 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 SCIENCE
HISTORIAL 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 SCIENCE
HISTORIAL 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 WOMEN
HISTORIAL 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 WOMEN
HISTORIAL 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 WOMEN
HISTORIAL 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 WOMEN
HISTORIAL 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 WOMEN
HISTORIAL 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.”

NEW WOMEN
HISTORIAL BACKGROUND
Historical context

 Ibsen’s Lifetime  New Norway

1828 - 1905  New Science

 New Women

Sourced from York Notes – A Doll’s House by Frances

Gray, York Press, London 2008