Henrik ibsen biography a doll house essay

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) made a true name for himself in the mid-nineteenth century when he tackled the traditional marriage model and the role of the woman in the home with the play A Doll’s House, first performed in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 1879. Ibsen’s character Nora shocked contemporary audiences by leaving her husband and children in an effort to find herself—an endeavor largely unheard of for the time period. Nineteenth century women were supposed to stay home and contentedly care for their husbands and children. Ibsen’s direct critique of this social norm put him at the center of controversy on gender and the role of women during a time when many feminist women’s organizations were being created in Northern and Western Europe.

Henrik Ibsen was born into a well-off merchant family in Skien, Norway in 1828. Following his marriage to Suzannah Thoresen, he moved his family to Italy in 1858 after struggling to find financial success. Over the following 27 years, Ibsen lived in a sort of self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany before returning to his native Norway prior to his death in 1906. Though Ibsen wrote the majority of his work while living in Italy or Germany, he often used Norway as his setting. His plays were controversial both in content and dramatic style. Nineteenth century theater was expected to reflect a model of a world with strict morals that conformed to society’s ideas of family life and propriety. However, Ibsen rarely conformed to this expectation and used his plays as a vehicle for social critique. Though he never directly called himself a feminist, many of Ibsen’s writings, including his most prolific, A Doll’s House, revealed that he had put much thought into gender relations and norms. His ideas reflected the growing formation of women’s organizations dedicated to suffrage and equal political and social rights at the end of the century.

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is perhaps his biggest statement regardin

Written in 1879, the play “A Doll’s House” refers to the time when “new drama” appears in Europe, together with August Strindberg he is an author of “Scandinavian school”. The play was highly controversial, as it criticizes sharply “Victorian marriage norms”. Before that time there was a reign of romanticism in the theatre, when theatre depicted “unreal situations, involving royal characters in heroic tragedies, written in rhymed verse.”

On the edge between 19th & 20th century a number of “new type” theatres appear, their favourite hero is a usual person, they need critical plays about present time & everyday life. These “independent theatres” proclaimed “the principle of art democratization”, they intend to make a performance with few actors, less décor, just for a small audience of 300-500 people. New drama developed on the principles of French “naturalism”, as we see it in Emile Zola novels, it was obligatory to show “the surrounding”, where the characters existed, actors’ costumes & make-up had to tell the audience about the biography & character of their personages. Typical themes of dramas are the conflict of generation, problems of marriage & the woman’s status in the society.

Henrik Ibsen started as a druggist from the Norwegian provinces, but he made a real revolution in dramatic art. He put new meaning, new problems (social, philosophical, moral) into the old theatrical form & presented new means of expression: polemics, omission, counterpoint.
By the end of 1870 Ibsen came to a notion of “analytic drama”, which shows “a modern conflict in modern conditions.” He demanded that actors reproduce everyday life in its exact details: a spectator has to recognize his home, his neighbours, himself on the stage. Portraits & interiors must give maximum information about the hero & his surroundings, but also they should have symbolic meaning: four doors that define the

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a famous Norwegian playwright whose works still raise much controversy and draw the public’s attention. In 1862, at the age of 34, Ibsen was forced to move to Italy. Several years later, the writer moved to Germany, where he created one of his most distinguished plays, A Doll’s House (1868) (“Henrik Ibsen Biography”). Ibsen’s other notable works include Brand (1862), Peer Gynt (1867), and Hedda Gabler (1890) (“Henrik Ibsen Biography”). The author had a large body of work: he created 26 plays during his life (Lombardi) and about 300 poems (“Henrik Ibsen Biography”).

The themes raised in Ibsen’s plays were so important that they continue to be popular even nowadays. The author mostly focused his works on family relationships. In his most famous play, A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen concentrated on the roles of women in the family and society. Many critics dedicated research to analyzing whether Ibsen’s female characters were feminists. In her study on A Doll’s House, Moi remarks that Nora, the main character, suffered from being misunderstood both as a woman and as a human being (256-257).

In the analysis of Hedda Gabler, Farfan mentions that Hedda, the main heroine, was a powerful woman who strived to express her femininity (61-62). Thus, it is relevant to notice that relationships between genders and within the society constituted some of the most crucial themes in Ibsen’s plays.

The features given by Ibsen to his female characters made scholars consider him “the first male feminist” (Blake). Whereas in real life, women appealed for autonomy and the extension of their rights, no author before Ibsen reflected those demands on the stage (Blake). In the works