WOMEN IN REALITY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF THREE OF HENRIK IBSEN’S PLAYS IN ORDER TO DETERMINE THE MOST PREVALENT FEMINIST THEMES A Thesis by Lesa M. Bradford MA, Wichita State University, 2007 BS, Northwestern Oklahoma State University, 1992 Submitted to the department of Communication and the faculty of the Graduate School of Wichita State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 2007 © Copyright 2007 by Lesa M. Bradford All Rights Reserved WOMEN IN REALITY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF THREE OF HENRIK IBSEN’S PLAYS IN ORDER TO DETERMINE THE MOST PREVALENT FEMINIST THEMES. I have examined the final copy of this Thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication, with a major in Theatre and Drama Steve Peters, Committee Chair We have read this Thesis and recommend its acceptance: Betty Monroe, Committee Member Royce Smith, Committee Member iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family for all the support and love that they have given me throughout this whole process. They have been selfless and I have put them through quite an ordeal trying to accomplish my dreams. I love you all dearly. I would also like to thank my two dearest friends who encouraged and helped motivate me when things got tough and life threw obstacles in my way. I couldn’t get through it all without your support. Lastly, I would like to thank the faculty, staff, and students at WSU who made my time there so cherished and wonderful. Thank you all for believing in me. iv PREFACE I grew up loving to read, yearning to learn, and feeling that because I am a woman I shouldn’t feel that way. I am not the type of woman who is content with serving others in menial day-to-day chores. In fact, I hate doing all of those things. I am unique and unusual. My mother was extremely supportive of me and my father was extremely oppressive. I never fit into what he thought a woman should be. I am a woman but still I made straight A's in school, went on to college and now grad school. I love to teach as much as I love to learn. I want to grow and fill my mind with as much knowledge as will fit. That is what drew me so much to Henrik Ibsen. He has a unique ability to materialize my thoughts and feelings regarding society’s expectations of females in his plays. The women in Ibsen's plays embodied the struggles that I experienced while growing up. I have often felt that I am not normal because I am not happy doing the traditional things women throughout the years have done. That is one of the main reasons why Ibsen’s women characters are so very real to me. They are rebellious, outspoken, and unique in nature and problems. I immediately felt inspired by his works although they were written so long ago. It was only much later in my life that I realized the motivating nature of Henrik Ibsen’s work on the women in Victorian times. The feminist movement was just beginning and he had a certain unique understanding about how women of his era were thinking and feeling. He is an amazing man for his time. Women were drawn to him and his plays for this very reason. A major argument goes on among scholars to this day about whether or not Henrik Ibsen was a feminist. By today’s standards he probably v wouldn’t have a problem with that label but because of the stigma of his time, he never considered himself such. That doesn’t mean that his plays weren’t feminist in nature. By taking a closer look at them individually we can determine if they are in fact feminist works. I am going to take an in-depth look at A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. These plays were among the first to challenge women’s roles in society. I hope to clarify once and for all the idea that he just was creating women who were crazy or out of touch with reality and was in fact being more true to life with his women’s feelings, emotions, and day to day conflicts. By taking a close look at these three plays, attention should be drawn to the significance of the women characters. These women that Ibsen created did things and acted in ways that were shocking to the society in which they lived in. These actions might seem normal today because women have come so far since the 1800’s, but for the society in which they lived, these women were so different, so daring, that even some women of the time were distressed over the characterizations. These plays challenged the cultural norms of the time in regards to women and Ibsen’s personal relationships with women in real life contributed to these characterizations. This gave him a different perspective on issues that women were facing and these same issues still effect women today. The feminist themes that I will be looking for include: (1) money: men have the money and give it to the women in the form of allowance or they must ask for more if they need it, making money on their own was considered scandalous, (2) dominance and power: the woman does what the man says and what he wants even if she disagrees because compliance is better than upsetting the man, (3) work: refers to a skill that the woman enjoys and wants to do but is not one of her duties, therefore it is considered vi unimportant, (4) desires: refers to something that the woman wants for herself that is not one of her duties, (5) role: refers to all of the things that are expected of women; their duties according to society, (6) children: refers to woman’s feeling about reproduction and children, and the fact that women have no say in the matter, (7) body/image; refers to the way that men see women in that the body and a woman’s beauty are her most important traits and also women using this image to get what they need or want from men, (8) property: women are a man’s possession, (9) intellect: women are not smart therefore they have no need for knowledge or education and do not understand the things that men must deal with on a regular basis, (10) rebellion: refers to incidents in which women do not conform to the other nine categories and chose instead to rebel. While reading the plays and determining the motivation for the text, I looked at each sentence individually in order to code them into these ten categories if they applied. By looking at the actual text in these plays and finding the prevalence of feminist themes in the dialogue of the sentences, it can be determined if Henrik Ibsen was intending to put feminist themes and issues in his plays and therefore whether or not he himself was a feminist becomes a mute point. The important thing to look at is whether the works themselves were feminist. Feminism is defined in the Websters Dictionary as: the theory of political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Introduction..............................................................................1 II. Prevaling Themes in Three of Ibsen’s Plays...........................21 A Doll’s House........................................................................22 Ghosts .....................................................................................27 Hedda Gabler...........................................................................31 III. Conclusion...............................................................................35 IV. Bibliography............................................................................39 V. Appendix..................................................................................41 A Doll’s House.........................................................................42 Ghosts.....................................................................................131 Hedda Gabler..........................................................................209 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Most people today still believe the myth that the Victorian era was a period of a universally accepted value system; that most women lived leisurely, inactive lives, and that husbands and wives remained serenely together, both serving their separate functions in making life pleasant and meaningful. Such, however, was not the case, as recent scholarship has shown. The 1800’s were transitional years in the struggle for individual democratic human rights. As Walter Houghton has argued so forcefully in The Victorian Frame of Mind, the Victorian period could best be characterized by the word “doubts.”? The controversy surrounding the Women question is but one example of the shifting sands underlying the so-called firm foundation of the period’s attitudes toward faith, morality, and “every assertion [was] met with a counter-assertion.” Some wanted the preservation of society’s traditional values, some wanted reform, and some wanted a radical break with old customs and institutions. The debate over the Women question, what roles and jobs should be within society, provided a forum for every shade of Victorian opinion on faith and morality. Respectability was the watchword for conventional Victorian men and women. The conventional view that colored most middle class thinking was that women were physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally different from – if not inferior to – men. Therefore, women, because of these constitutional differences, could not be accorded equal opportunity with men in the world outside the home. Women were intended by nature to be mothers. That was their chief 1 and almost exclusive occupation. Anything that interfered with this domestic sphere was suspect. Women, according to conventional morality of the time, should be put on pedestals to protect them from the taint of worldly economic pursuits. If women were allowed to participate in the country’s political and industrial activities, they would undoubtedly be tarnished by being pulled down to the “brutish” level men were forced to live on.