*
The book cited is Histoire du Costume au Théâtre, 1880.
4
HENRIK IBSEN: 1828–1906
1 CONTEXT
Ibsen’s development as a playwright can only be understood in terms of the cultural battle for Norwegian independence. Up until 1814 Norway had been ruled by Denmark, and even then remained in a union with Sweden, subordinated to a foreign King and unable to deal with foreign affairs. Ibsen himself puts emphasis on the libertarian effect of revolution elsewhere in Europe: as he remarked in the Preface to a reprinting of Catiline in 1875, his first play was written in “exciting and stormy times. The February Revolution of 1848, the revolutions in Hungary and elsewhere, the Prussian-Danish war over Schleswig and Holstein – all this had a powerful and formative effect on my development.” But the struggle for a Norwegian culture was even more central. During the first half of the century Norwegian art and literature remained almost exclusively Danish, while (as in Ireland before the Irish Renaissance of the early twentieth century) the Norwegian language itself was largely restricted to the peasants.
It is only fairly recently that historians have analyzed the social and cultural aspect of national development, which forms the context for Ibsen’s writing. Significantly, the areas considered crucial by historians are also integral elements in Ibsen’s early plays: the recording of folklore and the historical glorification of the Vikings (which became the subject of several heroic tragedies), and the development of the Norwegian language (the first grammar being published when Ibsen was just 20 years old). From the first Ibsen was associated with cultural independence, being appointed as resident dramatist, then director at the first theatre to perform in Norwegian, the new Norske Theater in Bergen.
In choosing to write his poems and plays in Norwegian, Ibsen was making a political statement. At the same time, once he began writing naturalistic drama, he ensured that his plays were available for the world repertoire by having them immediately translated into German.
His early historical dramas may have had nationalistic themes, however his study of history (including Emperor and Galilean) also formed a basis for his naturalistic plays. As he commented just after completing A Doll’s House: “An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to an author; without it he is not in a position to understand the conditions of his own age, or to judge men, their motives and actions, except in the most incomplete and superficial manner” (Letter to John Paulsen, 20 September 1879). His letters, and later public speeches, also show that as he turned to naturalistic work, with its inherent criticism of society, he was less concerned with nationalism than individual freedom. One of his comments on the proposed new Norwegian flag is typical:
It is said that Norway is an independent state, but I do not value much this liberty and independence so long as I know that the individuals are neither free nor independent. And they surely are not so with us. There do not exist in the whole country of Norway twenty-five free and independent personalities …
Let the union sign remain, but take the monkhood sign out of the minds; take out the sign of prejudice, narrow-mindedness, wrong-headed notions, dependence and the belief in groundless authority – so that individuals may come to sail under their own flag. The one they are sailing under now is neither pure, nor their own.
(Letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, July 1879)
Indeed Ibsen’s dissatisfaction with Norwegian society had already led to self-imposed exile in 1864 (25 years before A Doll’s House).
4.1.1 Anne-Lise Seip, Cultural Nationalism in Norway
The 1830s was a period in which a compromise was prepared. In three cultural fields important work was started which led to what has been labelled the “national breakthrough” in the 1840s. History became a science dedicated to the building up of an independent, national past. The first attempts at collecting folklore, folk-songs and folk-tales were made, and the possibility of creating a proper Norwegian language was discussed.
History became the handmaiden of nationalism. The historians Rudolf Keyser and Peter Andreas Munch established what was to be labelled by Danish colleagues “The Norwegian historical school”. Keyser (1803–1864) was the theorist. In 1828 he gave his first lectures at the University, and maintained that Norway was populated from the north – an old idea, as we remember – while most of the Swedes and the Danes were “Goths”, coming from the south and even being conquered by the northern race later on. He found his evidence in comparative linguistics. The quest for a separate “ethnic”, in Anthony Smith’s words, had started.
The instrumentality of the immigration theory in nation-building was clear. The Norwegians were seen as descendants of one race, with a common language, legal code and religion. From this “mother-race” the Norwegians had developed into a people with its own “national character” and “an undiluted Norwegian spirit (Volks-geist)”.
This theory, which by the way was contested also in Norway, was taken up by P. A. Munch, the greatest Norwegian historian of his time. It underpinned the Norwegian claim to be the true “owner” of the old Nordic language and culture, notably the sagas. The Norwegians fought hard for these and other historical treasures: “No right of property deserves more to be respected among nations than the right each has to its historical relics. To deprive a nation of these, is almost as unjust as to deprive it of part of its territory”. And this generation indeed made an almost superhuman effort to secure these treasures for the nation.
Also, other treasures had survived into the present. Folk-tales, songs and fairy-tales had long been the object of scientific interest in other countries, including Denmark and Sweden. The first collection of folk legends was not published in Norway until 1833. It was an edition more in the tradition of the 18th century, exposing superstition in a dry language so as to expel it. In the years to come other important works were published: folk-songs collected by Jørgen Moe, M. B. Landstad and their informant Olea Crøger, daughter of a priest in Telemark and a great collector, and folk-tales by the same Jørgen Moe and P. G. Asbjørnsen.
[…]
The third field for cultural nation-building was in language. Here too, lines of demarcation were drawn in the 1830s. Henrik Wergeland wanted to enrich his prose and poetry with everyday expressions and words taken from the spoken language, which in many ways differed from the printed language, which was pure Danish. He met with fierce opposition from P. A. Munch. To create a genuine Norwegian language, he maintained, one had to go to those dialects which were less changed in the course of time, and which could bridge the gap with the old Norse language. This historical, etymological approach came to influence development immensely. Very soon a young genius took up the task of creating a Norwegian language. Ivar Aasen, son of a peasant on the west coast, started to collect samples of dialects in the vernacular, and also to prepare a grammar to create a common language. His motives were both national and social. Language was “the most distinctive mark of a nation”, and Norway needed a language of its own. But the elements of such a language he found in his own social class, the rural population. He wanted to give it a language of its own. He was himself an autodidact, and declined to take his baccalaureate. In his personal conduct he underlined his peasant upbringing, never hanging his hat on the peg on the wall, but dropping it on the floor behind the door. His self-conceit was, however, mixed with true modesty, which perhaps explains why he gave up his own first plan to base a written Norwegian language on the existing dialects. He succumbed to the theories of P. A. Munch, who became his friend and mentor, and modelled his language after historical etymological principles, making it archaic and much less suited to the task he had set himself of creating a language that was easy to understand for the uneducated masses. Nevertheless, his Norwegian grammar, first published in 1848, as well as his dictionary of 1850 confirmed his theory that the vernacular was founded on the old Norse language, and was not, as hitherto believed, a distortion of Danish.
In the two dec
ades from 1830 to 1850 the elements on which to build a Norwegian national identity had thus been established: a scientifically argued theory of a separate origin as a separate race, with its own territory and its own culture and institutions and “character”, a documentation of a rich cultural heritage of music and orally transmitted literature hidden among the rural population, and a theory of a Norwegian language which had survived also among this population, going back to the Middle Ages, that distant but glorious time in history before the union with Denmark.
All this gave occasion for pride, and in the year 1849 the national enthusiasm exploded, so to speak, in the capital. In a series of so-called “tableaux”, the daughters of Christiania acted as peasant girls against a background of curtains painted by Norwegian artists whom the revolutions of 1848 had forced back to Norway, while folk-music was played on the Hardanger fiddle and a choir of 100 men performed songs composed by musicians educated in Leipzig, but inspired by the “Norwegian tone” of the folk-songs.
These evening performances in 1849 were later on seen as the culmination of an epoch imprinted with national feeling.
It was a time in the latter part of the 1840s when we, who were then young, so to speak realized that we – in the concrete and not only in the abstract – had a country (Vaterland), when we discovered that our people possessed a beautiful, big, common treasure of history, tales, songs, music, language, poetry and art, which all at once made it a cultured people (Kulturvolk) with a distinctive national stamp.
This was the verdict of an acute observer, the art historian Lorentz Dietrichson.
[…]
The 1860s saw the rise of a new wave of nationalism.
It started with a crisis in the relationship with Sweden. Toward the end of the 1850s the government decided to do away with one of the marks of inferiority which had been much resented, the provision that the king could place a Swedish governor in Norway. Nobody had occupied this post since the 1830s, and the abolishment of the office was considered in Norway to be uncontroversial, an impression which had been confirmed by the king himself. But the Swedish government said no. This created an intense national animosity, and once more a series of questions concerning the nature of the union were raised. […]
This went together with other conflicts. Scandinavism was revitalized, but instead of uniting the elite, it divided it. In the wake of 1864, when Denmark was left to fight alone against Germany, some wanted to strengthen the bonds between Sweden and Norway, to protect the Scandinavian Peninsula. Others insisted on Denmark joining in. The split between “two-state Scandinavism” and “three-state Scandinavism” was seen as a conflict of nationalism. […]
On this political background a nationalist revival took place. It centred around the same old questions: history and language.
Even though many of the theories of the Norwegian historical school had been abandoned, the problem of how to interpret the past was still there. The idea that the union with Denmark represented a “false soldering” between two parts of a broken golden ring – the Norwegian history – once put forward by Henrik Wergeland, was challenged by younger historians. “Who are our true ancestors?” asked the historian Mikael Birkeland in a speech to the Student Association in Christiania in 1866. Could it be denied that the economic development had been favourable during the union with Denmark? Was it not true that commerce and the cities had played a great part in this economic growth? Had not Norway benefited from the contact with other nations? Were our forefathers during those 400 years of civilizing development not our true fathers?
But this interpretation was not echoed by the new, radical intellectuals who gathered around the young historian Ernst Sars. The more “materialist” interpretations of conservative historians met with an idealist history-writing, which was for the rest of the century – and far into the next – to dominate the understanding of the past, stressing the link with the glorious Middle Ages through the mediation of the rural, peasant population. The bureaucracy was seen as “aliens” and “colonists”. The task was to “demolish foreign elements and rebuild national unity.”
The radical writers and publicists who gathered around Sars, also took up the cause of a national language. It was a cultural movement at first. Language societies were formed, uniting radical urbans and rural intellectuals, and a publishing house was established. In the course of the century the question was politicized. A series of laws strengthened the position of the “landsmål”. In 1885 both languages became official.
*
Another crucial element in Ibsen’s plays, which only became central once he turned to naturalistic subjects, was the position of women. Writing to Camilla Collett, one of the earliest and most influential advocates of women’s rights through her novels The Sheriff’s Daughter (Amtmandens Dotre, 1855) and From the Camp of the Dumb (Fra de Stummes Lejr, 1877), Ibsen recorded his “warm, complete sympathy with you and your life-task” and made a clear connection between literature and political change:
The ideas and visions with which you have presented the world are not of the kind destined merely to lead a barren life in literature. Living reality will seize on them and build upon them. That this may happen soon, soon, I too wish with all my heart.
(Letter to Camilla Collett, August 1881)
As the first historical survey below indicates, the situation of women in Scandinavia had already become a subject of debate by 1854 (the date when Norwegian daughters were given equal inheritance rights to sons). The way ideals of femininity frustrated self-expression and isolated women from public life forms the context for Ibsen’s characters such as Hedda Gabler. Similarly, although male guardianship of unmarried women was abolished in Norway in 1863, and after 1866 women had the right to earn an independent living, the situation facing unmarried women was still bleak, giving added weight to both Mrs. Linde’s attitude and Nora’s decision in A Doll’s House. In addition Norwegian nationalism itself contained a symbolic representation of gender, which denied equality. For instance, at the 17 May celebration of statehood in 1827 the procession carried paintings of Nora – a female symbol of the Norwegian nation – while the national anthem composed by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and first performed on 17 May 1864(Ja, vi elsker dette landet – “Yes, we love this country”) codified different roles for men and women. As a recent historical study argues,
The song reflected the roles assigned to each gender in the construction of the national home: the strong father protecting his house, actively supported by his wife … Women, however, were given another activity as well: “all that the fathers have fought for, the mothers have wept for.” Against this background, it seemed natural that men, as fathers and defenders of the nation, had the right to take part in political decisions. Men were obviously associated with the nation, whereas women had a more ambiguous role. As mothers they had their special function in the national home, but to take part in active combat did not comply with their femininity …
This was clearly expressed, for example, in the debate in the Storting in 1890 about the first constitutional proposal for female suffrage. One argument cited against female suffrage was “the word ‘public’ – for how fine and ironic language often is – there is nothing to prevent us from saying that all of us, we are public men, but we know of course that if we linked the word public with the name of a woman, it would be the utmost disgrace … the veil is a garment that belongs to the woman, but never to the man, and whoever tears a woman’s veil is guilty of a shameless deed” [Bishop J. C. Heuch]. The idea that women had no place in the public sphere could scarcely have been expressed more clearly.
(Ida Blom, “Nation – Class – Gender,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 1966)
The Norwegian Women’s Rights League was founded in 1884, just five years after the first performance of A Doll’s House, and from 1886 on published a biweekly woman’s suffrage magazine, Nylaende. When they invited Ibsen to address their Festival in 1898, it was in recognition of the role his
drama had played in fostering public awareness of the position of women in Norwegian society (as well as generally in Europe). That Festival marked the campaign for the first constitutional proposal to give women the vote, which reached parliament in 1890. But it was typical that his speech rejected any specific gender bias – just as he earlier denied the relevance of national liberation.
4.1.2 B.J. Hovde, The Position of Women in Scandinavia
The Scandinavian Countries 1720–1865: The Rise of the Middle Classes (vol. II), Kennikat Press, 1972
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 10