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Modern Dramatic Elements in Three Plays by Henrik Ibsen (IBS4390-Master Thesis in Ibsen Studies)

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Modern Dramatic Elements in Three Plays by Henrik Ibsen (IBS4390-Master Thesis in Ibsen Studies) Modern dramatic elements in three plays by Henrik Ibsen (IBS4390-Master Thesis in Ibsen Studies) Student Supervisor Milica Vasic-Jovanovic Astrid Sæther 1 Contents: Introduction………………………………………………………………………………......1 A Doll’s House………………………………………………………………………….........10 Relationship between man and woman (the issue of idealism)………………………...13 Question of gender………………………………………………………………………..18 Psychological elements in the play…………………………………………………….....24 Aesthetic and psychological function of means of expression………………………….30 The Wild Duck…………………………………………………………………………..........37 Everyday and idealism in the play……………………………………………………....40 Symbolism in the play (the wild duck and the loft)………………………………….....46 The Wild Duck-subtext and metatext…………………………………………………...53 When We Dead Awaken………………………………………………………………...........58 Love as creative inspiration……………………………………………………………...62 Question of artistic creation……………………………………………………………..67 Motif of death…………………………………………………………………………….72 The function of stage space………………………………………………………………75 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...84 References………………………………………………………………………………........89 2 INTRODUCTION A thing that has always interested me about literary art is how I am supposed to read and interpret it, not to mention questions such as: is the way I feel about a work of art similar to the one the author himself had in mind when he created it, or am I missing the essential part of it which is supposed to be the author’s hidden message, and so on and so forth. My dilemmas were to a certain extent cleared after I had read the correspondence of a famous and very influential Balkan writer with his friend. There he says that all his writings were exclusively a reflection of his need to free himself of his own burdens, of the accumulated weight, in order to get it off his chest! He didn’t care, he adds, about literary movements and schools, and even less about the critics and literary education! It made him very sad, he emphasizes, that his plays were too often targeted in literary debates and that hundreds of pages of literary criticism had been written about them, imbuing his work with meanings that had never been there at all, thus laying grounds for the future critics, historians and others to build up on it in their modest paper about this or that novel or play… And many of those he couldn’t care less about “wrestled” to prove and explain why he used this or that method, how systematical he was in introducing modern dramatic techniques, etc., etc.! All that affected me a lot and made me think very thoroughly about the whole issue. What would Henrik Ibsen, one of those authors who have been targeted more often than others, say today to the people acquainted with his work? How many theories would he have denied and questioned had he been able to read them? And the crucial question is: does this mean that one should abandon any idea of interpreting and dealing with him or literature as such? However, if we leave the author himself aside, everything can be seen in a different light, just as Wimsatt suggested that” the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (1954, 3). Therefore, let us stick to his texts alone. Ibsen’s works have left a significant trace marking an important period in the development of playwriting. He influenced many of his followers as writers and, finally, affected the lives of many individuals. Drama, one of the oldest and most stable genres in terms of its persistence throughout history, calls for a definition of Ibsen’s work within its own development, just as his work is unavoidable in literary debates because of its significance and influence on the literary works of modern writers and readers as individuals, not only in his own time but, maybe even more importantly, in our own time also. Yet, burdened with all the hesitations and prejudices, I feel 3 I should attempt a general overview of literature itself and define, as much as possible, the concepts to be used in this literary analysis. The field of literary, i.e. artistic creativity in general, is so wide and complex because it reflects, or rather contains the history of the entire human kind, man’s way of life and thinking from the ancient times up to this very day. By creating, man expressed his own fears, as it was the case at the beginning, but slowly moved his focus to his thoughts, feelings, and experiences… With the development of civilization and society itself, man’s interests kept changing and never stopped developing, thus changing the very subject matter of literary art. Exploring the relationship between literature and society, their interdependence and mutual influence, could lead us into a very complex sociological study, which would only take us away from the essence of literary creativity and its purpose. There are so many questions and dilemmas about the field of creative work, starting from the question of its purpose and purport, role and objectives, links with other fields of human existence, to, in the end, attempts to turn it into a well-structured system. “A system” in this context applies to the well established scientific disciplines attempting to define literary movements, elements of a literary work, place and significance of certain movements and authors in the development of literary art in general, and finally those dealing with the relationship between a literary work and its recipient, i.e. with the esthetic aspect in general. In his work Literary Theory, Jonathan Culler deals with issues such as definition and purpose of literature. What are our chances to succeed after his assertion:” This is a difficult question. Theorists have wrestled it, but without notable success” (1997, 20). Yet, the goal is worth the attempts. Literary theories, history, criticism, esthetics, as scientific disciplines, make questions, give answers, set the criteria, and define various phenomena. A lot has been done to provide for a scientific framing of one of the most sophisticated fields of human activity and develop it as a system functioning according to certain rules. At this point one must bear in mind Culler’s words referring to all possible answers and proofs:” In this game the answer must meet certain conditions: it cannot be obvious, for instance; it must be speculative” (1997, 64). Although I am personally skeptical about the scientific “evidence” as far as arts are concerned, and against definitions of closed type, I do believe that there are some constants, some eternal values that serve as etalons for our criteria, that Aristotle’s Poetics should be the basis of any serious scientific consideration of literature, and that ancient art, primarily dramatic, is the classics with which we compare the literary accomplishments of all other epochs in the history of literature. 4 Then again, over and above everything established and defined so far, we are still preoccupied with the same issues in an attempt to redefine what has already been defined, to find some new aspects and offer new interpretations, hoping to be able to contest or at least challenge or reopen, to debate the assertions and statements made by the literary theoreticians and historians ever since the science of literature emerged. But where does that need to re- examine and supplement some of the theories, spring from? In a certain way, each literary movement is a negation of the preceding one, tearing apart the poetic postulates of the previous stylistic formations and embracing an entirely new view of the world and its phenomena. Just an insight into the literary movements and schools of the late 19th and early 20th Century (Symbolism, Dadaism, Zenithism, Cubism…) reveals that each of them incorporated a certain destructive dimension and tendency to demolish the tradition in order to build something completely new and original on that wreckage. This review of that unique principle incorporated in each literary movement is in fact meant to be a parallel with the theoretical considerations about literature and the principles underlying them, as well as a possible answer to the above question. What is the reason underlying the changes of the theory of literature? Basically, it is the change of human perception of some concepts concerning creative work in literature. This does not imply a complete change of everything written before; rather, it means that the same phenomena, seen from a different angle, can get a somewhat altered dimension. Such assertions are always seen as risky and one may assert that anyone, and literally anyone, can interpret literary creations as he/she may please and contest the established theories under the umbrella of the universal right to see things in this or that way. Here I must cite Culler who says that if ”a literary work is conceived as a succession of actions upon the understanding of a reader, then an interpretation of the work can be of that encounter, with its ups and downs…To interpret a work is to tell a story of reading” (1997, 63). So, anyone has a right to have his/her own attitude, but if we deal with literature in a serious way, including scientific grounds, we must have, as a necessary prerequisite, literary education, culture and awareness of certain criteria and permanent values that should serve as guidelines in the procedure. My objective here is to examine the modern dramatic techniques through several, or to be more precise, four Ibsen’s plays and to show why those four, out of so many others, have been selected as emblematic as far as the beginnings of the modern drama is concerned. This analysis will hopefully help me to define Ibsen’s place in the development of the modern drama. 5 When dealing with, let’s say, a play, as it is the case in this study on celebrated and esteemed Henrik Ibsen, we must bear in mind the principles underlying the creation of a play, the elements that a dramatic work embraces, the principles of building drama characters or conflicts.
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