THEME OF MARGINALITY IN SELECT PLAYS OF HENRIK

Submitted by: REEFAQAT HUSAIN

Under the supervision of Dr. Rahatullah Khan (Associate Professor)

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY, ALIGARH 2012

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY, ALIGARH-202002

Certificate

This is to certify that Mr. Reefaqat Husain has worked for his Ph. D. thesis entitled Theme of Marginality in Select Plays of under my supervision. This thesis is a bonafide work of the researcher and has not been submitted for the award of any degree at any other

University. In my opinion this research work is of the expected standard.

I, therefore, recommend it for submission for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English.

26 Dec. 2012 Dr. Rahatullah Khan (Associate Professor)

Acknowledgements

By the Grace of Almighty Allah the long awaited auspicious day has come when I must place on record my deep and sincerest gratitude to my Rev.

Supervisor Dr. Rahatullah Khan whose guidance, motivation, painstaking efforts and incessant interest has enabled me to accomplish this study.

My special thanks are due to Professor S. N. Zeba (Ex. Chairman, Department of English, AMU, Aligarh) and Professor Asif Shuja (Chairman, Department of

English, AMU, Aligarh) for their co-operation and timely help which was always available to me.

I don’t have words which could express my deep sense of gratitude to my parents for their blessings which enabled me to reach this academic accomplishment.

I am also indebted to my wife Roshan Ara, little daughter Zainab Ara (Kashish), my niece Nisha, Aksha, Rahemeen, Ayesha and my nephew Mohd Danish for their well-wishes. I must acknowledge the affectionate help and support I received from my brothers Mr. Sharafat Husain and Mr. Riyasat Husain who undertook all responsibilities of my family during my absence for doing this research work.

I must acknowledge the inspiration, encouragement and co-operation extended to me by my friends Dr. Abdul Salam, Abdul Maobood, Md Saquib Abrar, Dr. Mohd Shareef, Dr. Mohd Kaish and Abu Moazzam at every step during the completion of this study. i

Last but not the least, I must thank the staff of the Maulana Azad Library,

AMU, Aligarh, and the staff of the office and the Seminar Library of the

Department of English, AMU, Aligarh, for their co-operation and timely help.

26 Dec. 2012 Reefaqat Husain

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CONTENTS

Page No.

Acknowledgements i-ii

Chapter I Introduction 1-38

Chapter II Gender-Based Marginality

(Suppression and Subjugation of Women) 39-83

Chapter III Gender-Based Marginality

(Emerging Image of Women) 84-121

Chapter IV Socio-Political Marginality 122-151

Chapter V Economic-Marginality 152-181

Chapter VI Other Forms of Marginality 182-204

Chapter VII Conclusion 205-214

Bibliography 215-221 Abstract

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), a Norwegian dramatist of the 19th century, is acclaimed, by the common consent of diverse critics, to be the pioneer of modern realistic drama which is generally considered to begin with the publication of his play A Doll’s House (1879). It is a landmark in the history of modern realistic drama.

The present study has been divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is of introductory nature. It has been divided into two sections. The first section deals with a biographical cum litrerary background. All the important events of Ibsen’s life along with a detailed account of literary events and figures, who had formative influences on Ibsen as a playwright, have been presented here. While in the second section an attempt has been made to discuss and define the concept of marginality.

The second chapter Gender-Based Marginality (Suppression and Subjugation of Women) deals with the suppression and marginalisation of women characters in Ibsen’s three plays, namely (1881), (1886), and (1899). The term gender-based marginality is defined as the state of exclusion from and deprivation of equal opportunities, equal participation both inside the house hold as well as in the public sphere, and equal social status and living standard of female sex in comparison to male sex who avails oneself of all opportunities and rights, and consequently dominates the society. The chapter also presents a brief survey of how women’s subordinate position has been represented in literature during the different periods upto Ibsen.

Mrs. Alving, the protagonist of the play Ghost, is forced by her parents, against her consent, to marry a man whom she found to be dissolute and debouche man who pushed her to a very abject situation. The whole play is the depiction of Mrs. Alving’s struggle for the happiness in the face of insurmountable and malignant forces of the patriarchal system that thwarts her efforts at every step. She appears to be a pygmy and helpless in the face of these giant forces. The next play Rosmersholm deals with the wilful, independent and free-thinking Rebecca who seems initially to be an incarnation of the new womanhood. But by the end of the play, she is infected by the patriarchal views of Rosmer who is deeply rooted in his long-train of patriarchal traditions for which Rosmersholm is known and is forced to put her lively life at his disposal. She

1 now appears to be an embodiment of the old ideals of female quality of self-sacrifice. Thus the play deals with the individual efforts of Rebecca for her emancipation from the constricting factors of the society and her eventful helplessness and frustration in defeat. The play When We Dead Awaken is the delineation of the annihilation of the precious lives of both the female characters, Irene and Maia, by a male artist, Arnold Rubek, who in her blind pursuance of his vocational idealism, has raked the charming, young and graceful body of Irene for his art and put the life of his wife, Maia, into boredom and uselessness. All the female protagonists Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Rebecca West (Rosmersholm) and Irene (When We Dead Awaken), despite their best efforts for emancipation, fail and get nothing except frustration or tragic end of their life in the process.

The third chapter Gender-Based Marginality (Emerging Image of Women) is about the marginalisation of women. It deals with their struggle for emancipation and their ultimate emergence from thier marginalzed conditions. Here also three plays have been selected for study. They are A Doll’s House (1879), (1888) and (1890). Besides presenting women’s struggle for their emancipation to come out of their marginalised condition, these plays specifically highlight the element of messianic consciousness in the female protagonists_____Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House), Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) and Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler). When Nora Helmer realises that her life in her husband’s house is unbearable, she leaves her husband and children behind in search of her self identity. But Ellida Wangel does not desert her husband, children and home. She stays back with her husband forever. But her decision to live with him is her own without any compulsion. Hedda Gabler also, like Nora and Ellida, takes her decision by her own free will and, instead of bowing before a man, Judge Back who wants to exploit her sexually, breaks all the shackles of constraints by committing suicide in a manly manner. Torvald Helmer (A Doll’s House), Dr. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) and Tesman (Hedda Gabler), the male couneterparts of these female characters, are the products of patriarchal system of society. They tried to keep these females in a subordinate position but they struggled for their independence because of the messianic consciuosness in them. They ultimately succeed to lead a free life of their own.

The fourth chapeter Socio-Political Marginality deals with the politically marginalized characters in Ibsen’s plays The League of Youth (1869) and (1882).

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The politically marginalised people do not share the equal rights, powers and opportunities in the legal and political system, in comparison with those who enjoy all political powers and opportunities. Stensgard, an ambitious lawyer in The League of Youth, comes from a poor family of a rural area to the Baths, a town, to make his career in politics but the more experienced and currupt politicians; Doctor Fieldbo, a physician at the Chamberlain’s works, Mons Monsen, of Stonelee, Bastian Monsen, his son, Ringdal, the manager of the iron-works, Anders Lundestad, a landowner, and Daniel Heire, all make fool of him and force him to leave the town all alone. Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of the play An Enemy of the People, is stranded in the hypocritical and corrupt political system. Like Stensgard he is also left alone, isolated and completely marginaliged in the end. Thus both Stensgard and Dr. Stockmann had aspired to rise from their deplorable condition but their hopes are ultimately thwarted and they are crushed and suppressed by the dominant political stratum.

The fifth chapter Economic-Marginality takes for scritiny two plays The Pillars of Society (1877) and (1884). They reflect problematic issues of economically marginalized people who, despite their struggle, are unable to have access to economic resources for essential and vital needs which are required to lead a normal life. Hence they find themselves isolated and excluded from the normal social life desired by all, and are unable to maintain the average social standard. In the play The Pillars of Society, Aune, foreman shipbuilder in Consul Bernick’s Company and Krap, a clerk, both representing the proletariat, Lona Hessel and her younger brother Johan Tonnesen are all exploited and pushed to the periphery of society by the rich Consul Bernick and his business partners Rummel, Vigeland and Sandstad, who represent the capitalistic class, and dominate the entire commercial resources of the town. The Ekdals in The Wild Duck have to lead poverty-stricken life and face a variety of problems, exploitations and humiliation due to their penury while the wealthy and rich Werles avail themselves of all opportunities ____social, political and economical. Actually Elder Werle deceives Old Ekdal by involving him deceitfully in the scandal of timber and since then he has forced the Ekdals to an abject and humiliating situation, treating them as ‘Other’ whenever they dare enter his rich circle. At last the entire Ekdal family is collapsed. The poor and working class in both the plays is humiliated and exploited by their rich counterparts and is compelled to live in a marginalised situation. Through them Ibsen has represented the universal marginalisation of the proletariat class and the dominant position of the capitalist class

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The sixth chapter Other Forms of Marginality deals with various other types of marginality like socio-spatial marginalisation, marginalisation of the physically challenged or the disabled and the marginalisation of those who once enjoyed all the opportunities and rights of the mainstream society but due to some sudden change in fortune they are pushed or shifted to a marginalised position. That is why marginality is also called a shifting phenomenon. To deal with the spatial marginality I have selected Ibsen’s play (1865) which, though written with some other great purpose of a young idealist to save the world or at least the Man’s soul, has some suggestions of the socio-spatial marginalization of the Norwegian people who live in the distant areas. Brand, the protagonist, goes in the storm-swept glacier to save these unfortunate people who find it difficutl to meet both ends together in this stormy region cut off from the mainstream society where life is easy and comfortable with all kinds of socio-economic and socio-political opportunities.

The second play taken for studied in this chapter is Little Eyolf (1894) which incorporates, along with other issues, the marginalization of the physically challenged through the character of nine years old boy Eyolf, who is crumbled in one of his feet. Eyolf represents those persons who are not paid proper attention or are unable to lead a normal life like other people around them because of their physical or mental disabilities. The physically challenged people face all kinds of problems; stereotyping, unemployment, inferiority complex, all sorts of unequal and unjust treatment, and the deprivation of their full participation in the normal social activities which further enchance their level of inferiority complex. The whole play, Little Eyolf, revolves around the sufferings of Eyolf due to his lameness. His marginalisation lies in his desperate effort and inaccessible approach to participate in the average social life with the other boys of his age. Other boys don’t like his company. Even his parents, whether consciously or unconsciously, don’t like him with his crutch.

The third play included for study in this chapter is (1896) which reflects the issue of shifting marginalisation in the case of John Gabriel Borkman, the protagonist of the play. He was once the manager of a bank but after his suspension from the post, he is pushed to a marginalized position. His friends desert him and he is confined to a solitary annexe of a house which Ellida Rentheim, his wife’s sister, offered to them in their destitute condition. Nobody, including his wife and

4 children, pays any attention to him. He is thus excluded from the participation in the common social activities.

The seventh chapter recapitulates the whole study by way of Conclusion. The thorough study of some thirteen plays of the playwright Henrik Ibsen establishes him as the champion of the marginalised section of society, particularly of women-folk. His plays stir the flame of messianic consciousness in them and help it keep burning with greater force in order to bring about healthy changes in the society where every one, irrespective of his or her sex, social status, caste, creed and religion, may lead an independent and prosperous life.

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Chapter I

Introduction

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I

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the four major literary figures of the 19th century Norwegian literature_____other three are Alexander Kielland (1849-1906), Jonas Lie (1833-1908) and Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjornson (1832-1910). He was born on March 20, 1828, in a relatively well-to-do family in , , a small coastal “town of between 2,000 and 3,000 inhabitants”1 about a hundred miles south of the capital, Christiana (now ). Ibsen has been a very controversial figure throughout his dramatic career. G. B. Shaw (1856-1950) immortalised his dramatic genius through his monumental work The Quintessence of Ibsenism while Ibsen’s contemporary Strindberg, a Swedish dramatist and novelist (1849-1912) found in Ibsen little to admire. But Ibsen seems to be the least affected by any disparaging criticism of his works as he himself told to his sister, “I have always liked storms.”2 In his review of Ibsen’s last play When We Dead Awaken (1899) James Joyce (1882- 1941) describes the multifarious personality of Ibsen in the following words:

Twenty years have passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote, A Doll’s House, thereby almost marking an epoch in the history of drama. During those years his name has gone abroad through the length and breadth of two continents (Europe and America) and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man. He has been upheld as a religious reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness and as a great dramatist. He has been rigorously denounced as a middlesome intruder, a defective artist, an incomprehensible mystic and in the eloquent words of a certain English critic, “a muck ferreting dog.” Through the perplexities of such diverse criticism, the great genius of the man is day by day coming out as a hero comes out amidst the earthly trails.”3

Ibsen was the second child born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen. Three brothers and a sister were born after him. He was the only promising member of the family whom they expected to do something in life and undoubtedly he fulfilled the promise. He was a descendent of one of the oldest and distinguished families of Norway including the . In a letter to George Brand he tells about his ancestors and

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relatives. His father belonged to a family of skippers from . He founded his business in Skien and became a prosperous merchant. Thus, Ibsen led a luxurious life as a child. But his father’s speculation in salt and timber business and his extravagant way of living without any effort for earning more money for the preservation of family fortune led to depletion of all he had in 1832, when Ibsen’s age was only eight years. Knud Ibsen didn’t care about the loss in the fortune because he did not earn it by himself but it was brought by Ibsen’s mother in dowry from her affluent parents. When the investment failed, he began to mortgage the family property and within no time they became bankrupt. Ibsen recalled how his father’s friends broke all their connections with him and the ‘Altenburg Manor’ that was famous for dinners and festivities:

The youthful Ibsen did not see his family in all its glory of prosperity and social success since its fortune vanished irretrievably by the time he was eight. Of all its wealth only a small farm a few miles north of Skien remained, and it was there that the family lived for about eight years, neglected by former acquaintances and distinctly declasse. 4

The spendthrift nature of Knud Ibsen, during the period of his prosperity, has been reflected in his play (1867), in the figure of Peer Gynt’s father, Jone Gynt, the hospitable and frivolous wastrel who had land in every parish and drove in luxurious and costly wagons. In disgrace the family moved to Venstop farm house. After the failure in the business, out of frustration his father went into depression and became bitter, suspicious and alcoholic. Instead of earning money for the compensation of loss in business, he developed a tyrannical and violent attitude towards his children and particularly towards his wife. He would always abuse her bitterly without any sufficient reason. Halvdan Koht, the biographer of Ibsen’s Norwegian life points out that “Henrik had ample opportunity to feel his father’s heavy- handed insistence on obedience”.5

His mother, Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg belonged to an affluent family. It is said that before her marriage to Knud, she had a love affair with a man named Tormud but they could not marry. She had to get married to Knud Ibsen as he was chosen by her parents. Knud’s step father and Marichen’s mother were brother and sister so Knud and Marichen grew up playing together. Ibsen’s father ran a small

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general store while her father was a flourishing merchant in Skien. Marichen was an avid painter before her marriage and little Ibsen seemed to have inherited his mother’s passion and talent. She also loved theatre and her passion for theatre left the lasting impression on the tender mind of the little Ibsen. We notice this impression on Ibsen early in his childhood in puppet theatres that he would make for the recreation of others and himself, and later his passion for the theatre and his popularity as a playwright was much due to the influence of his mother. She was a self-sacrificing mother of introspective nature who was devoted to her husband, children and household for which she had to suppress her creative tendencies. With the turn of fortune for the worse, and due to Knud’s violent and oppressive behaviour towards her, she broke down and suffered silently. She was so much subdued that she turned to religion for solace, and in her later life, she lived in an almost complete seclusion. Marichen’s submissive and oppressive life left an abiding effect on the mind of the young Ibsen. He, therefore, developed a sympathetic and compassionate attitude towards the women in general because in his mother he observed the helplessness and powerlessness of the women in a male-dominated society. He grew up in an atmosphere of lop-sided values of an orthodox gender-biased society. Due to his father’s oppressive attitude towards his mother, he was passionately attached to her. Ibsen has described her characteristic traits in the figures of the King’s mother Inga in Pretenders, Ase in Peer Gynt, and Helene Alving in Ghosts. All these female characters reflect one or the other aspect of Marichen’s personality. They are the instruments of male ambition and the victims of their monopoly and cruelty. Edmund Gosse, Ibsen’s biographer, has rightly pointed out that the dramatist’s “earliest flight of fancy seems to have been his association of womanhood, with the shriek of the saw mill.”6 Ibsen himself recalls his boyhood period spent in Skien when he says that the air,

was filled all day long with the subdued roar of Long Falls, Cloister Falls and all the many other rapids and waterfalls. And the roar was pierced from morning till night with a sound like that of shrieking and moaning women.7

Out of his four brothers and sisters he gave importance to his sister Hedvig whose childhood has been portrayed in the figure of Hedvig in The Wild Duck.

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As a boy Ibsen was very meditative, lonely and shy. The hero, in the epic version of Brand, has reflected his lack of normal happiness in his home:

I was homeless and alone...... Children of the southern land Were fashion’d of another clay Than I, born by a rocky strand In shadow of a barren brae.8

The north of Norway is really barren and closed to the south. His withdrawal tendency kept him cut off from the mainstream of the society for a long time. There was also a bright sight of his personality. He enjoyed making toy theatres, puppets and comic drawings. People would come to see his toy theatre in his house. In all these he reflected his bitterness and anger at society in general, and his father in particular, in the scathing caricatures of drawings and in tirades against his young playmates. Afterwards he developed his interest in paintings and became a poet of felicity and power. Actually he could imitate his mother’s paintings and drawings. He was a great entertainer .With the help of strings he used to move the scarlet clad stars to amuse his spectators. He also enjoyed reading books. As a boy Ibsen was a voracious reader and non-athletic. All these factors_____his passion for dramatic activities; comic drawings, puppets and toy theatre, and his father’s tyrannical attitude towards his mother, and his mother’s marginalised plight in his own home_____combined together as the motivating force to make him a playwright who devoted his life and energy in writing about the rights and upliftment of the women. At the age of fifteen Ibsen’s education was discontinued due to his father’s penury. He was obliged to work at this tender age for six years at a chemist’s shop in Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist. Here he was regarded as an outsider. Both his meals and wages were skimpy and the place, where he had to live in his employer’s home, was appallingly cold. He led an utterly wretched life with only an occasional free Sunday:

He was painfully alone, as he could hardly communicate his mental gropings to the few people he knew, and in his loneliness he turned to one of the servant girls of the household who was ten years his senior.9

Worst of all, in 1848 he became the father of an illegitimate child with the maid servant whom he seduced (or vice-versa) but he didn’t accept the child. It is

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reported that he did not see him again till he himself was an old man. But he had to support the child for the next fourteen years. He expressed this gnawing memory in one of the best scenes of Peer Gynt. Although he was too reserved to make friends yet he developed friendship with a group of young artists. In Grimstad he wrote his earliest dated poem Resignation (1847).

As stated earlier Ibsen was a voracious reader. He had the cravings for higher studies, and the desire for university education haunted his mind day and night. He went to Christiana with the intention of entering the University for Matriculation. But he had to drop the idea as he could not pass all his entrance exams. Here he made friendship with Bjornson who was later to become famous as the National Poet of Norway. During Ibsen’s financial crisis, he helped raise money for him. He also came in close contact with the members of the incipient labour movement and literary men like and Botten Hensen in whose collaboration he edited a periodical named Manden (The Man), later he started Andhrimmer in which he published many articles and a satirical opera called , or A Politician’s Love (1851). He further developed its theme later in The League of Youth. When Ibsen was studying Latin as a part of preparation for the examination, he happened to study Cicero and was deeply moved by the character of , the rebellious hero. Being inspired by Catiline he wrote Catiline (1850), his first play, a tragedy in verse, published under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme but it could not be performed. His first play to be staged was (1850) which received little attention. But Ibsen was not discouraged by these early failures although he did not write any play for some years.

The revolutionary changes were taking place in politics during the early phase of his career. Monarchy was being threatened by the rebellious activities in many countries. Throughout Europe there was a political unrest by 1848. Rebellions against royalty and aristocracy reached to the point of no return. People were emerging out of ignorance, and were finding their own individuality which had been crushed for long under the oppressive reign of royalty, monarchy and aristocracy. Society was marching towards its modernisation. Ibsen and his contemporaries were deeply influenced by these revolutionary changes. In fact their revolutionary writings augmented these movements. Ibsen’s early writings also reflect the revolutionary changes which were taking place in the society. The violist Ole Bull founded the first National Theatre in Bergen. In the autumn of 1851 Ibsen was called to Bergen to

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produce a new play every year. Here he staged more than 145 plays as a writer, director and producer. It was here that Ole Bull conferred on Ibsen the position of “Theatre Poet”_____a post he held for six years. In 1852 his theatre sent him on a study tour to and Germany. During this tour he acquainted himself with Hermann Hettner’s book, Das Moderne Drama (1852) which influenced him very much. During this period he did not publish any new play of his own but he gained a good deal of practical experience which stood by him when he resumed writing plays. His time spent as an assistant and director in the National Theatre provided him a valuable training in stage effect, and he could also see the performance on the stage of his own characters. Besides, he also had chance of seeing foreign stages. Ibsen, therefore, had a good deal of practical experience from other countries and was influenced by their dramatic art.

In spite of all these foreign influences Ibsen was a committed nationalist although Norway remained under the rule of Denmark for a long time. When Denmark freed Norway, the great powers, England and Russia, handed over Norway to as a reward because Sweden helped England and Russia against Napoleon. After a long period of subordination Norway got its own government for the first time during this period. They were making efforts to avoid their political and cultural influence. In spite of long suppression, Norwegian sagas were written by many Norwegian authors. Ibsen received inspirations from the historical memorials of Bergen and the natural beauty of the mountains of the Western Norway. Plays written during this early phase of his dramatic career are replete with patriotic and nationalistic elements. They were about Norwegian sagas, Vikings and political heroes.

In 1857 Ibsen returned to Christiana and became artistic director of the Norwegian Theatre which was founded in 1852 after the model of Ole Bull’s Theatre in Bergen. He stayed in Christiana from 1857 to 1864, and during this stay he suffered the greatest disappointment of his life. At every step his attempts and hopes for success were thwarted. He demanded annual subsidy from the ‘Storthing’ to improve the deteriorating condition of the theatre. He had to write many satirical articles attacking the directors of the Christiana Theatre. He also composed many poems for the national cause of Norway. With the help of Bjornson he established Norwegian Society to promote nationality in literature and art. Bjornson became its first president

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and Ibsen its vice-president. While Ibsen was engaged in the welfare of the nation, he had to go through many ordeals of defeats. The performance of The Warriors of Helgeland at Christiana Theatre, where he was later appointed the literary advisor, was detained for a year. He attacked the Christiana Theatre violently for its Danish taste. The Warriors was also rejected at the Danish Royal Theatre in by J. L. Heiberg himself. He stumbled at every step, satisfying his creative desire by paintings and facing one literary fiasco after another. His distress reached at its highest point when he was plagued by fever and faced the severe depression leading to the idea of committing suicide. In 1861 he got some relief, when he manipulated some successful productions of the plays by Bjornson and de Musset, and received a government grant to collect folk songs. He also made a successful attempt to present the versified version of Svanhild into Love’s Comedy. With the bankruptcy of his theatre in 1862 he was appointed literary advisor to the Christiana Theatre in 1863. He experienced another phase of depression, debts and failures until he got another government grant in 1864 to collect more folk- songs. Very soon he was given yet another grant for a study tour abroad. With the successful performance of his play at the Christiana Theatre, he left Christiana for Copenhagen in 1864.

Ibsen had a romantic temperament. Since he had seen the sorry plight of women in general and that of his mother in particular, at the hand of his cruel father, he had been very sympathetic and emotionally attached to his mother. Same attitude of Ibsen is seen in his relationship with the other women. Too much closeness of Ibsen with any woman developed into emotional relationship. Every woman, with whom he had been in love, influenced his personality, his way of thinking and his attitude towards women in general. Ibsen happened to meet Marthe Clara Ebbel, a nineteen year old girl, in a local ball in Grimstad. Clara Ebbel was not only beautiful and attractive but also a shrewd, sharp-minded and ambitious young girl. With her propensity for music, piano and poetry she inspired Ibsen to compose poetry. Ibsen adorned her as a bright star. But his weak financial condition proved a hindrance in their union because she belonged to an affluent merchant family. Clara was compelled by her parents to be engaged to her maternal uncle, Hemming Bie, who was a ship’s captain. Ibsen was shocked and depressed. His helplessness and frustration in love was fully represented in his nostalgic poems about death and reminiscences. Ibsen dedicated his poem Memories of a Ball to Clara Ebbel in which he expressed his love

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for her. In this poem he described their short association as a bouquet of fresh flowers blossomed in summer and withered in autumn. After breaking her engagement with that aged ship captain she hurried to meet Ibsen in Oslo. Ibsen told her about his perplexed mental condition after their separation and which he had expressed in his poems. She was shocked at the depth and sincerity of Ibsen’s love for her. The poems composed during the period of their separation presented Ibsen as a heart-broken and jilted lover wandering here and there in search of his love. Later, when Clara performed as a Troubadour at a ball, Ibsen offered her a poem, To a Troubadour that was a vivid expression of his silent and genuine love. But Clara had to return to Hemming Bie and Ibsen had to live with the reminiscences of his first love. The similarity between Ibsen’s first love and that of his mother, Marichen Ibsen, is really mind-striking. Both Clara and Marichen had poetic proclivity before their marriage but after their marriage these women were so much engaged in their domestic drudgery that their poetic sense was crushed under the pressure of serving their husbands and the household. Both were deprived of their prerogative of matrimonial choice. Both were the victims of marginalisation at the hands of their parents, particularly, their fathers.

Ibsen had also close friendly terms with Rikke Holst who, like Clara, was also witty, intelligent and beautiful and belonged to a prosperous family. This only sixteen year old girl was fascinated to Ibsen because of his magnificent manners and theatrical fondness. Within a short time their mere friendship turned into love relationship. As in the case of Clara, Rikke too was forced to get married to a wealthy merchant. As usual, Ibsen again resorted to relieve himself by expressing his distress and frustration in his poems. Being depressed and disappointed he finally left Grimstad in 1850 for Oslo with a friend Schulerud. While living in Christiana (Oslo) Ibsen met Suzannah Thoresen whom, within a short time of their acquaintance, he proposed and they were married on June 18, 1858. Suzannah was the step-daughter of Magdalene Thoresen, novelist, dramatist and the translator of French plays. She was very compassionate and kind-hearted lady who took Ibsen under her protecting care and made him the stage manager at the Bergen Theatre. Suzannah had inherited from Magdalene Thoresen the qualities of irrepressibleness and independence with which she inspired Ibsen. Suzannah, who was strong-willed, assertive, straightforward, independent, practical-minded and expert in

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the management of domestic affairs, saved Ibsen from the thought of suicide when he went into depression. Ibsen loved her from the core of his heart and called her by her nickname “the Eagle”. He found in Suzannah an “inspirer” and “guardian.” It seems that Ibsen would not have been able to portray daring and strong-willed women characters craving for emancipation if Suzannah had not been his inspirer and model. The fierce Hjordis in The Vikings at Helgeland and dauntless and strong-willed Svanhild in Love’s Comedy have been inspired by Suzannah Thoresen. She was also an avid reader. She was good at Italian, French, English and German classics. She approached nature with a poet’s mind. Once she gave a vivid poetic delineation of natural beauty of Sorrento in Italy in the following words:

How carefree one lives there in the warmth and cools oneself everyday in the sea. Take Tancerd and little Irene (Bergliot’s and Sigurd’schildren) with you one day and show them where we lived, don’t forget. Every day I climbed up the cliffs in the scorching heat. It was a long climb, but I was lissom and good at climbing them and up there were grasses and wild flowers. The road to Desserto passes by and there is a strange perfumed atmosphere there. To this day I can smell the scent of roots, herbs and flowers on that road to Massa.10

Their only child, Sigurd, was married to Bergliot Ibsen, the daughter of the poet and dramatist Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Bergliot Ibsen narrates in The Three Ibsens that these three “formed a compact and militant unit, in joint dedication, even while Sigurd was still a school boy to the great man’s destiny.”11 Sigurd said about the mutual collaboration of his parents, “He was the genius, she was the character—his character—and well he knew it. He could hardly admit it except towards the end she knew it all the time.”12 In fact the credit of Ibsen’s eminence and universal popularity goes to a great extent to Suzannah’s love, care and timely support. Suzannah revealed to Bergliot Ibsen, her daughter-in-law, the reason behind Ibsen’s widespread popularity. She forced Ibsen to get rid of his so many friends to have time and peace for his work and it was she who gave strength to his character.

After some time Ibsen was disenchanted with the life in Norway. In 1864 he moved to Sorrento in Italy and did not return to his native land for the next twenty seven years except for brief visits. His mother passed away in 1869 but he could not visit Skien to see her for the last time perhaps because he had suffered a lot in his early

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life there. His father also died in 1874, five years after the death of his mother. Ibsen could neither see his parents nor even write to them for a long time. He didn’t even go there to attend their funeral ceremony. In a letter to his uncle he wrote that he could not see or write to his parents because he was unable to help them financially and thanked those kiths and kins who had performed, “the duties and obligations that I myself should have carried out.”13 Whatever he might have said to his biographer or his uncle, but the most authentic reason behind his not visiting his parents for such a long time, seems that the memories of his father’s cruel, violent and abusive attitude towards his children, and particularly, towards his mother was so harassing and painful that he did not like to revive the memories of Skien by visiting there as he himself confessed:

I felt strongly disinclined to have any contact with certain tendencies that prevail there, tendencies with which I do not sympathise. A clash with them might have led to unpleasantness, which I preferred to avoid.14

In 1868 he moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, where he wrote (1873) which he recognised as his greatest achievement. In1875 he came to Munich where he published his most controversial play A Doll’s House in 1879. In 1891 he returned to Norway as an old man. During this period when he moved from place to place, he wrote almost all of his best known plays and gained world-wide popularity as an eminent playwright, despite all sorts of controversies. After two successive paralytic strokes, first in 1900 and then in 1903, he was unable to move or write. Henrik Ibsen died in Christiana on May 23, 1906. He was buried in the graveyard of Central Oslo named “Var Frelsers Gravlund” (meaning “The Graveyard of Our Savior”). In 2006 the 100th anniversary of Ibsen’s death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries. The Norwegian authorities dubbed the year 2006 as “The Ibsen’s Year”. Suzannah Thoresen, his wife, died eight years after his death at the age of seventy eight.

Ibsen was able to understand and present in his plays the predicament of the marginalised people because in the early phase of his life Ibsen faced depression and isolation, particularly when he was working as a pharmacist in Grimstad he was completely cut off from the mainstream society. When he looked at the world with the

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penetrating insight, he found the women-folk entrapped in the mess of male- dominated society. It seems he had an urge in his soul to help out these marginalised people, particularly the women-folk, so that they could actively participate in and contribute to public as well as in the private spheres. In 1871 he, in a letter to George Brandes, wrote, “There is no way in which you can benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself.”15 So far as Ibsen’s understanding of the 19th century women’s marginalised plight is concerned, it has much to do with his personal life because he himself had observed the cruel and violent treatment meted out to his mother by his dissolute father. His own closeness with other women, from time to time, also widened his perception of women’s helplessness and powerlessness before the domineering will-power of their male counterparts, whether they were their fathers, brothers or husbands. Both Clara Ebbel and Rikke Holst jilted him because they were forced against their consent to marry the men of their fathers’ choice. Before her marriage, his mother was also in love with another man but her father forced her to marry to Knud Ibsen, Ibsen’s father. Thus, he observed that women’s choice and will had no importance and their fathers determined their fates. After her marriage Marichen Ibsen became the victims of her husband’s egoism. Although he gave nothing but disgrace and penury to his family by flouting into winds the wealth brought by his mother yet he was the domineering authority in his house, particularly over his wife, because the then patriarchal society regarded women only as an agent to bear and rear the children for which they are sheltered in their houses. Thus Ibsen grew up in an atmosphere where his mother’s talent and literary interest were crushed down by his father who blindly followed the patriarchal norms and values. But after his marriage he found in his wife, Suzannah, an embodiment of emancipation. So in his plays Ibsen portrayed not only the suffering and submissive female characters but also the daring ones who are always ready to avail themselves of all opportunities, and are bold enough to face any hurdle in the way to their emancipation. Thus he has depicted multifarious aspects of women characters in his plays. Hjordis and Helene Alving are forced to marry against their consent. Hedda Gabler in the play after her name and Nora in A Doll’s House proved that they can do whatever they like and are no longer the instruments of the male ambition. Thus Ibsen’s education and training in this regard began right at home. He wrote to Peter Hansen, a Danish critic, that “Everything that I have created_____has had its origin in a frame of mind and situation in my life.”16

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Ibsen was really concerned with the marginalised position of the working men and women throughout Europe, particularly Norway. When he arrived in Norway in 1885, he expressed the goal of his life and the purposes behind his plays in the following words:

The reshaping of social conventions which is now under way out there in Europe is concerned chiefly with the future position of the workingman and of woman. That is which I hope for and wait for; and it is that that I will work for, and shall work for my whole life so far as I am able.17

There is a consensus among critics that Henrik Ibsen is the pioneer of modern drama and the leader of the writers who brought into existence the “theatre of revolt”. He introduced the concept of realistic prose plays, and through his problem plays he made the theatre a forum of discussion and debate. Martin Lamm has rightly encapsulated the invaluable contribution of Ibsen in the development of the modern drama of the 19th century, which was a critical phase for the debate of the contemporary problems and issues, when he says, “Ibsen’s work is the Rome of Modern Drama, all roads lead to it and away from it”18 In order to understand properly Ibsen’s true place and importance as the founder of modern realistic drama, his concern with contemporary problems and his preoccupation with the marginalised position of variously disadvantaged section of society in general and the women in particular, it is essential to have a brief survey of Ibsen’s contemporary dramatic sitiation, which is the products of the efforts of various iconoclastic dramatists, including Henrik Ibsen.

The latter period of the 19th century marks the rise of the modern English drama which is directed against the many outmoded conventions and traditions of drama and theatre of the earlier periods. It saw a large number of foundational figures who invented new forms of drama and created different values for performance. They took for scrutiny the major social problems of the time and dealt with them threadbare. In England T. W. Robertson (1829-71) with his Society (1865) and Caste (1867), W. S. Gilbert ((1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) with their operettas, satirised the contemporary social institutions and the problems they created. Henry Arthur Jones’ problem plays; Breaking a Butterfly (1884) (an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, 1879), Saints and Sinners (1884), The Crusaders (1893), The Case of

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Rebellious Susan (1894) and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), etc. dealt with some contemporary social problems and were the earlier attempts at realism which is the hallmark of modern English drama but they could not free themselves entirely from the conventions of the melodrama and sentimentalism. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and in England, August Strindberg (1849-1912) in Sweden, Gerhard Hauptman in Germany, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) in Italy, Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) in Spain, Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in the United State of America, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in Russia and Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) in Norway, despite their major differences, have noticeable common features of revolt against the old traditions and a preponderating interest in the new tendencies. Almost all of these dramatists dealt with some contemporary problems with a realistic approach. The whole atmosphere of the dramatic world of this period is surcharged with the spirit of inquiry and questioning about the long established social institutions, and thier norms and values. The modern drama is generally thought to begin with the publication of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). It was the English translations and the publicity of his plays by William Archer that helped in spreading the popularity and influence of Ibsen while it was G. B. Shaw who infused the real Ibsen spirit into the English Drama through his monumental work, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). Ibsen’s contribution has been two-fold: the presentation on the stage of life as it was really being lived in the contemporary society, and thereby initiating a debate about them in drama. Ibsen emerged as a dramatist who was to liberate and raise the modern drama from its deplorable state and to make it an instrument of bringing about the revolutionary changes in European society. That is why Ramond William regards him as the “consciousness of modern European Drama.”19

Henrik Ibsen spent most of his life out of his native place living in various European countries like Italy, Germany and Denmark etc. This provided him an opportunity to come into contact with various literary men, movements and tendencies which provided him literary training and influenced his works. In the following pages an attempt has been made to trace some of the literary and social events which had major formative influences on Ibsen’s writings:

To some extent the literary and cultural influence of Denmark, under whose subordination Norway remained for a long time untill 1814, may also be discerned on

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Ibsen. When he wrote his first play Catiline (1850) he knew two Danish writers Holberg and Ehlenschlager. Inspite of his tragic strain, Ibsen was much impressd by Holberg’s predilection for the comedy and social criticism. Ehlenschlager (1779-1850) was nearer to Ibsen’s genuis and Catiline’s declamatory form is in consonance with one of Ehlenschlager’s. In its subject matter Ibsen’s play The Warrior’s Barrow bears a striking resemblance to Ehlenschlager’s plays Earl Hakon and Varangians in Miklagard. Ibsen’s St. John’s Eve (1853), a comedy in three acts, with its blend of fantastical and bourgeois, lyrical and dramatic elements, owes to Seven Sleepers’ Day of Heiberg (1797-1861), another Danish dramatist and the representative of Hegelian philosophy in Danmark. Ibsen was also influenced by Heibeg’s cardinal theory articulated in his aesthetic essay ‘On the Vaudeville’. He rationalised in his plays Feast at Solhaug (1856) and (1857) the supernatural elements presented by Henrik Hertz (1805-1871) in his famous work The House of Svend Dyring (1837). Although Ibsen denied of receiving any literary impression from Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Danish philosopher who, along with Nietzsche, is considered to be the founder of existentialism, yet Ibsen’s plays, Love’s Comedy (1862), Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) display a striking influence of Kierkegaard whose aesthetic stage of ‘Either-Or’ appears in a variant form ‘All or Nothing’ in Ibsen’s Brand. Kierkegaard’s contempt for the modern clergy is evident in Ibsen’s Brand, Emperor and Galilean (1873), The Wild Duck (1884) and The Ghosts (1881). Kierkegaard’s insistence on power and importance of the human will and the free choice seems to instill in Ibsen’s women characters the messianic consciousness. For the subject matter of his Peer Gynt Ibsen is also indebted to Adam Homo (1841-8), a narrative poem of Frederik Paludan-Muller (1809-76). Ibsen was also impressed by Muller’s two other poems The Aeronaut and the Atheist (1852) and particularly Kalanus (1854). But Ibsen transcended these earlier influences of Danish dramatists and its culture very soon.

So far as the Norwegian literature is concerned, Welhaven (1807-1873) and Wergeland (1808-1844) are generally considered its originators. The discrepancy found between Wergeland’s sanguine spirit and Welhaven’s spirit of criticism, tainted with nihilism, is later found between Bjornson, an admirer of Wergeland and Henrik Ibsen, who studied Welhaven’s style very attentively and inherited much that was best in Welhaven. For his early interest in folk-lore, balladry and fairy romanticism of

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Norwegian folk-traditions, Ibsen is indebted to P. A. Jensen’s The Fairy’s Home, Botten Hansen’s The Fairy Wedding, Landstad’s Norwegian Folk-Songs (1853) and a ballad, Olaf Liljukrans besides Faye’s Norwegian Folk-Tales (1833). Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjornson (1832-1910), Henrik Ibsen’s contemporary and the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903 helped the latter a lot when he was in financial crisis. For his saga style in his The Viking in Helgeland (1858) he is most probably indebted to Bjornson’s Between Battles (1856-57) and Limping Hulda (1858). Bjornson’s A Bankruptcy (1875) and The Editor (1875), with their theme of commercial speculation and the improper manipulation of public opinion, might have provided some idea to Ibsen’s Pillars of Society (1877). With regard to The League of Youth (1869), with which he had already got success with this theme, it is very difficult to say as to who was influenced by whom. But A Doll’s House (1879) is certainly influenced by Bjornson’s The Newly Wed (1865) with a young modern wife, clearly aware of her fundamental rights in this male-dominated society, who considers herself as a daughter and never a spouse until her husband’s forbearance changes her heart. The main literary source of inspiration for Ibsen is Camilla Collett’s The Sheriff’s Daughter, a novel on women’s question, a girl’s struggle for emancipation from parental monopoly and the male prerogative of choice. Thus the earlier formative influences on Ibsen were from his sparse Norwegian precursors and from Danish playwrights who were almost his contemporaries.

The spirit of rebellion against the traditional social system found in German dramatist Schiller’s (1759-1805) The Robbers, Love and Intrigue, Fiesco, Don Carlos and William Tell is found in Ibsen’s plays beginning from Catiline (1850). Ibsen held Goethe (1749-1832), a German poet, novelist and dramatist, in a higher esteem than Schiller and in Love’s Comedy refered to him as the Right Honourable Herr Goethe. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867), with its plot of a man’s course of life from his early manhood to crumbling old age when he is once again brought befor the woman whom he loved and deserted_____Solvejg in the one case and Gretchen in the other_____both women remain faithful and devoted throughout their lives to their lovers, bears resemblance to Goethe’s (1749-1832) Faust. Another German critic, Herman Hettner’s critical book about dramatic art, Das Moderne Drama (1851) also influenced Ibsen a lot. In his depiction of female oppression he also received

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inspiration from Friedrich Hebbel’s (1813-1863) tragedy Maria Magdalene in which the female protagonist dies as the victim of conventional morality.

Ibsen began the movement called the “theatre of revolt” against the moth- eating, decaying values and traditions of the 19th century at a time when dissatisfaction and disillusionment were simmering in the European society. Two important figures influencing the movement of revolt in all spheres of life and bringing about change in the modern drama are Marx (1818-1883) and Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche, an influential German philosopher, rejected Christian values, declared that “God is dead.” Nietzsche’s doctrine was totally incompatible with the Victorian belief in God that is reflected in Robert Browning’s poem Pippa Passes:

God’s in his heaven...... All is right with the world.20

He denied the existence of God and believed that Western civilization, despite its apparent veneration for God, had become totally frustrated and a decaying society with its spiritual bankruptcy. Under his influence a number of contemporary writers and dramatists began to question the existence of God, the long-standing authority of Church, the institution of religion. They also question the validity and utility of accepted norms, values and ideals; and insisted upon the supremacy of the rights of individuals against the claim of morality, conventions and rules. Such kind of innovative ideas brought about a radical break up from the values and traditions of the past. Henrik Ibsen in Europe and G.B. Shaw in England introduced such innovative ideas in the field of literature, particularly, in drama. The French dramatist Scribe’s (1791-1861) techniques of intrigue, ignorance and misunderstanding are also found in Ibsen’s Lady Inger (1855) and The Vikings in Helegeland (1858). Scribe’s favourite technique of handling a man erotically attached to two women found in his plays: The Queen of Navarre’s Tales, A Glass of Water and The Ladies’ Battle is frequentlty resorted to by Ibsen in his plays, particularly in the rivalry of Beata and Rebecca for Johannes Rosmers in Rosmersholm, Halvard Solness’s erotical attachment with Aline and Hilde in Master Builder, Borkman’s with Erhart Borkman and Miss Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Rubek’s with Irene and Maja in When We Dead Awaken and Alfred Allmers’ with Mrs. Rita Allmers and Miss Asta Allmers in Little Eyolf, thus exposing the sexual exploitation

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of women. The dramatic devices of expectation, suspense and apprehension, operative in Scribe, have made Ibsen’s plays exciting and vigorous. Besides these Danish, Norwegian, German and French influences Ibsen also indirectly made use of his knowledge of Shakespeare (1564-1616) for the subject matter of his plays. He knew the dramatist indirectly through his wife’s step-mother who admired Shakespeare besides the Danish Dramatist Ehlenschlager’s translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, etc. There is a striking similarity between Shakespeare’s Roman play Julius Caesar and Ibsen’s Catiline, in the nocturnal setting and the anxiety of the conspirator’s wife, in each play. The scene of the old man and the young girl on the remote southern island where a crew of violent men and a wooer is about to land, reminds us the second scene of The Tempest. The insanity of the noble Skule and the ghost-ridden hallucination in Ibsen’s The Pretenders shares some features with Hamlet and Macbeth of Shakespeare. The most noticeable factor in the modern drama is the change both in content and form, and Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, published in 1879 is generally acclaimed as the pioneer of this changing phase in Modern drama. Modern drama violated the dramatic techniques of the well made plays of the French playwrights Scribe and Sardou, and the English playwrights Pinero and Jones. Modern dramatist discerns the exploitation and victimisation of human being by society. It also breaks down the distinct boundaries between comedy and tragedy. It does not give importance to such things as character, story, big scenes, and romance and so on. It gives preference to ordinary people, common places and pedestrians instead of the privileged belonging to higher section of society. Almost all these changes are easily discernible in the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen made drastic changes in the existing dramatic conventions. The dramatists frequently used the stock situations and the predictable responses. But Ibsen entered the dramatic arena with an altogether different perspective. He adopted the method of well made plays and dropped the older worn-out techniques of presentation through exposition, soliloquies and chorus, and cast aside the older five act division. He made organic of what was mechanic in the earlier plays through his realistic prose plays. Ibsen made the drama free from the clutches of vaudeville and melodrama, and changed its function from mere imaginative diversion to a realistic portrayal of the society. That is why Ibsen is considered to be the firm advocate of the movement of realism which had germinated in the works of Flaubert and Balzac and

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was in direct reaction against the traditions of Gothic romances, picturesqueness, picaresque adventures and allegorical fantasy, and the accepted norms, values, and traditions of conservative morality. He adopted not only the realistic mode of presentation but also introduced many changes in theme and style of his prose plays.

Ibsen preferred the medium of prose to write his plays about social problems of the society of 19th century Europe as he thought that prose was more effective than poetry. He made a slashing attack on the existing notions and beliefs of the middle class society. The middle class was very orthodox and conservative in its beliefs and assumptions. It is particularly in this class that Ibsen could discern the marginalised position of women. He started a social revolution in the society and this social revolt is the core of the modern drama in general and those of Ibsen in particular. Ibsen’s contribution to the introduction of modernism and realism in drama has been expressed very well by Michael Egan when he remarks:

Ibsen had energised the banal settings of the Victorian bourgeois farce; he dared to write drawing-room tragedies. His generic antecedents were not Shakespeare or Racine; they were Scribe and Sardou— remorselessly, frighteningly modern. Ibsen, for the first time, portrayed on the stage a contemporary, tragic middle class . . . he dealt uncompromisingly with a recognisable modern world, a world dominated throughout the nineteen century by a thrusting, ambitious, self-confident social class. His heroes were not distanced from bourgeois audience by time, costume or social degree, and were therefore, in their travail, profoundly disturbing. They (whether men or women) opposed, or were opposed by, a modern world; in Ibsen society replaced Nemesis as the tragic force crushing the individual expression. His protagonists did not move, as the pastiche heroes and heroines of Romantic tragedy moved, in an obsolete feudal world. He broke free from the traditional tragic mode, a mode unable even to conceive of the genre without a at its centre, by liberating it from the supremacy of Attic, Elizabethan and neo-classic drama. Or rather, he broke into it by mining the auriferous vein of European social comedy and transforming its emphases; he created the tragedy of manners.21

Modernism of Ibsen is founded not only on his rejection of melodrama and sentimentalism of the preceding age but also on the projection of a kind of messianic

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consciousness in his plays. The first prerequisite of messianic consciousness in drama is to effect a change in the long-held traditions in order to transform the life of man accordingly. The word ‘messianic’ has been derived from ‘Messiah’ which means a person who conveys a new message to the community for its welfare. Messiah endeavours to set people free from the trammels of orthodox and conservative society, and to make them independent individuals by recognising their rights. As a messianic playwright Ibsen also brought about a change and started a revolution in the society through the message he conveyed in his realistic plays. He conveyed the message of freedom and emancipation of women from their slavish domestic drudgery that has been determined for them by the patriarchal system of society. Through his plays he exposed the hypocrisy and unjust traditional values of bourgeois society to public. He used simple language so that everybody could understand the message of his plays which are the depiction of the life of common men and women of the middle class with their day to day problems. He took for scrutiny and debate the issues that were anathema to the conservative people of bourgeois society and discussed them threadbare in a realistic manner. He questioned the traditional concept of morality and looked at it from a new perspective, and found that it was this blind adherence to this outmoded standard of morality that was perniciously gnawing into the fabric of society and pushing it into the abysmal depth of destruction. He has been called the harbinger of modernist movement and the champion of women’s cause. In this regard Eric Bentley’s remarks are worthquoting:

calling attention to the rotten bottom of ships, the subjugation of Victorian wives, the ravages of syphilis and the corruption of municipal politics and journalism, (Ibsen) made himself the father of the reformist drama of the end of 19th century.”22

Robert Brustein declares Ibsen as a social reformer when he enumerates, “divorce, euthanasia, (and) cures for syphilis, alongside issues of women’s rights,” “social amelioration” and “political reform” associated with Ibsen’s work.23

In his dramatic career Ibsen experienced multiple shifts in dramatic form and philosophy. During the early phase of his creative life, he was lost in the realm of historical or epic themes, folklores and romantic pageantry. With the publication of The League of Youth (1869) and Pillars of Society (1877) he stepped into the realm

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of social realism and assumed for himself the role of a veiled prophet. He started to write the social dramas in prose which were considered as acts of rebellion in disguise. He now consciously suppressed his romanticism along with his poetry and mysticism, and turned his attention to the problems of modern society among which the marginalisation of socially, economically and politically disadvantaged, and particularly that of women is the glaring problem. Since then he committed himself to the genre of prose drama embodying his social vision of modern life.

The Pillars of Society was followed by A Doll’s House (1879), a scathing criticism of the blind acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in the Victorian matrimonial system which targetted and

confronted his audiences with a new conception. Woman was no longer to be the shadow following man, or if you will, a skin-leka attending man, but an independent entity, with purposes and moral functions of her own.24

Initially she is represented as a suppressed and depressed figure whose presence has no importance in the house of her husband. Her own individuality has been crushed by him. But finally her desertion of her husband and children for good stimulated the issue of female emancipation and the concept of a woman’s duty to herself rather than to her self- sacrifice in marriage. It unleashed a serious debate in Europe and America about the marginalised situation of women and their real place and role in the society. It was followed by Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on Victorian morality where:

His purpose was to demonstrate how a series of withered conventions, unthinkingly perpetuated, could result in the annihilation not only of a conventional family but by extension the whole modern world.25

Its central theme is the warping of the individuality through the venereal disease but it shows very realistically the devastating consequences of the blind acceptance of the society’s ideals of morality which made it mandatory for woman to fulfill her conventional wifely duty rather than following her own desires.

Being depressed and hurt by the ruthless attacks on the play he planned to produce quite a different play in An Enemy of the People (1882) which marks a

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transitional phase in his career as a dramatist. It is his most mature piece as a craftsman and a specimen of that peculiar philosophy which made Ibsen the Jeremiah of the modern social world. It is the projection of his radical beliefs and ideas, and is considered to be a polemical work, and a ‘revolutionary pamphlet’. It is the depiction of the tricks of the crooked politicians and the marginalisation of the honest men among them. The primary message of this play is that the individual, “who stands alone, is more often” right than the masses who are ignorant and no better that the sheep. Its protagonist Dr. Stockmann seems to be echoing:

Ibsen’s private convictions about the filth and disease of modern municipal life, the tyranny of the compact majority, the mediocrity of parliamentary democracy, the cupidity of the conservatives and the hypocrisy of the liberal press.26

His next play The Wild Duck (1884) with its symbolic presentation is a further development in his dramatic genius where he has presented “the broken, frustrated people who have forgotten “their natural life”27 due to their financial downfall. On the one hand it shows the economic marginalisation of the Ekdals and on the other hand it shows its newness in the presentation of the wild duck not only as a symbol but also as the instrument that controls the plot and the action of the play.

The Wild Duck was followed by Rosmersholm (1886), a strikingly new type of play. Edmund Gosse in his “Ibsen’s Social Drama” says about this play:

The most obvious of many morals in this striking play is that new faith, modern ideas in ethics and religion, cannot with safety be put into old bottles. Opinions may perforce be altered, but the hereditary tendency remains, paralyzing the will.28

Both the leading characters Johannes Rosmer and Rebecca West, who are opposite to each other in their attitudes, nature and personality, come together to form a drama of love, fatal attraction and ultimate destruction. Through them Ibsen has presented two diametrically contradictory worlds. Rebecca West represents the modern world while Rosmer represents the conservative world, and the conflict between them leads to a grim tragedy where both of them commit suicide. The play Hedda Gabler (1890) is the study of a neurotic woman, Hedda Gabler. Actually Ibsen

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has presented the same adherence to the worn-out conventions and ethical standards of the middle class as in his preceding play The Lady from the Sea (1888). She inherits the ethical nullity of her class and now in her husband’s house her desire for a free life is not fulfilled. She ultimately commits suicide.

In the last phase of his career as a dramatist Ibsen entered a new world of conflict_____the realm of the spirits. Now he came to the self-realisation, self-conquest and self annihilation. In his later plays Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead awaken (1899), he transcended the simple rejection of the Victorian conventions of morality. The play Master Builder revolves around the life of a prosperous architect, Harvard Solness whose one passion is to build churches but later he finds no reward and satisfaction in this work, and begins to build high towers under the mesmerising effect of his young beloved Hilda Wangel. “As a child, Hilda has been hypnotised by Solness, and now, grown up, she comes to hypnotise him, to impose her will upon his.”29 He defies God very carelessly and,

becomes himself a ‘Free Builder,’ to shape his life after his own fashion; only to find that he is clogged by chains everywhere,_____chained by marriage to a dead wife, chained to a living conscience which he cannot kill. Still, the impossible, the idea of an impossible happiness on earth, beckons him on; and in his last desperate effort to attain it, his ‘dizzy conscience’ once more asserts itself, and he is crushed for ever.”30

In this play Ibsen seems to give the message that “there is no good on earth, he seems to say; its conventions and its morality are equally rotten and useless, _____neither beyond the earth is there any happiness.”31

His last play When We Dead Awaken (1899) is actually “Ibsen’s rejection of the “individual personality” . . . the “drama is enacted by symbolic creatures formed out of human consciousness; puppets if you like; but not human individuals.”32 It has been often described as the expressionist play which is defined as a “manifestation of an inner, autobiographical drama, projected into characters which are posed in contrasted poles. This would be a just description of When We Dead Awaken.”33

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After the study of Ibsen’s plays, especially his later socio-realistic plays, we come to understand the appropriateness of Raymond Williams’ comment that “Ibsen created: the consciousness of modern European drama.”34 Arthur Symons has very succinctly remarked about the art of Ibsen and his modernity:

The art of Ibsen in his social dramas is of that essentially modern kind which is not content with holding the mirror up to nature, but desires to drive in certain reformatory ideas over and above the impression conveyed by an impartial reflection of life. Indeed, art such as Ibsen’s is never impartial, and yet, it be art at all, it is precisely in its reflection of life that almost the whole of its value lies. Ibsen is passionately in earnest; he hates the false and loves the true more warmly than a mere artist finds it needful to do; and it is with a deliberate purpose that he takes up his pen. But the power of his work_____the justification, and the only artistic justification, of such a line of work_____is in this, that his purpose thrusts him of itself into the very midst of humanity, forces him to know men and women as they are, to describe them as they are, and thus to base his art on the only unshifting basis. The very passion which moves him serves to sharpen the outline of the characters who move, types yet never abstractions______rather living men and women who reflect ideas_____across the stage on which they appear so much at home. Ibsen’s grip on his subject-matter is prodigious, and his subject-matter is modern life_____life and the abuses of life.”35

Describing Ibsen’s motifs as a playwright Arthur Symons says that he attacks at everything that is decaying and moth-eaten and even then people are following them as sacred age old traditions. Within his scathing and slashing blow come all the ills of society whether they are individual, socio-political, economical or gender-based. According to Arthur Symons:

His fundamental demand is for individual liberty; he would have men live according to nature, and he can conceive of a reasonable society only as an organisation founded on the truth of things, and bound together by sincerity. ‘To revolutionise people’s minds’, as he himself has said, ‘that is the one thing that avails’. Thus his plays are no party- pamphlets, but a gospel of real light: they illuminate, they do not merely argue.36

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Ibsen is sometimes considered to be an idealist_____“an unpractical visionary” in the contemptuous sense but in fact “he is directly and steadily practical, full of common sense, shrewdness, attention to fact, to detail.”37

II

The Concept of Marginality

Robert Park, an American sociologist at the University of Chicago, was the first person who introduced the concept of marginality in his book, Human Migration and the Marginal Man (1928) when he saw people of different areas migrating from one place to another leaving behind themselves their native places and people. Thus, they dissociated themselves from their own cultural and social context and tried to mix themselves up in the socio-cultural life of others. They found themselves marginalized in this new set of group whose norms, traditions and culture they could never assimulate, nor could they be accepted by the new group they had joined. Both these cultures, the one they had left behind but still have in their blood and the one they joined, could never be completely merged into an organic whole. They were in a dilemma, finding themselves unfit and uncomfortable both in the inherited culture and the newly acquired one. Thus, there emerged a ‘new type of personality’ which was called by Robert Park as a “cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples . . . a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.”38 This sociological concept of marginality, introduced by Robert Park, is chiefly concerned with migratory patterns according to which the marginalized personality arises at time and place where there is a significant merging of different cultures and people. Generally the people in minority find themselves in marginal situations on the basis of language, ethnicity, traditions, religion, social and cultural values.

Edwin Stonequist, Robert Park’s student, was also much influenced by his teacher and finds the origin of marginality in the cultural conflict that arises when the people belonging to two or more than two different cultures clash to maintain the superiority of their own culture and ignore the culture of other people. Such kind of

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marginal situation is found both on mass level and individual level. Although Stonequist does share the views of his teacher, he further developed the concept of marginality with greater clarification and explains how this new type of personality faces the marginal situation. In his book The Marginal Man_____ (A Study in Personality and Cultural Conflict (1937) he described the marginalized man as

One who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds, one of which is dominant over the other, within which membership is implicitly, if not explicitly, based upon birth and ancestry (race or nationality); and where exclusion removes the individual from a system of group relations.39

According to Stonequist a marginalized man develops certain characteristics by which he is recognized. He highlighted the mental states of the marginalized man according to which he has a “double consciousness’. He will be ambivalent in attitudes and sentiments, have a divided loyalty, be irrational, moody and temperamental. He is likely to be excessively self and race conscious, has feelings of inferiority, be hypersensitive and hypercritical and so be liable to withdrawal tendencies.”40 The development of this dual personality in a marginalized man is due to the effects of acculturation. In fact, the characteristics of hypersensitiveness and inferiority are fostered in him because he has to pass through the crushing embarrassment and irritating circumstances at the hands of the people belonging to the dominant culture. But along with these traits he also develops the penetrating insight capable to note the inherent contradictions and hypocrisies prevalent among the people of the dominant culture. The marginal situation creates in him a sense of self awareness and self dependence. According to Stonequist the marginal persons may turn out to be pioneers and creative agents to form a new social order. Their practical efforts to solve their own problems lead them consciously or unconsciously to transform the situation. For example the daring and practical efforts of Nora Helmer in A Doll’s house to make herself free from the domestic prison of her domineering husband, Torvald, changed or we can say, developed a new social order in which even a woman can take a free decision if her husband treats her as an inferior human being or a material commodity. Such kind of situation created by Nora at the end of the play was not hitherto conceived of by any dramatist throughout the world. Stonequist’s concept of marginality was wider in some respects, more detailed and contained new

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elements in comparison with the theory developed by Robert Park and included both the psychological uncertainty and the exclusion from the mainstream of social activity but he laid greater emphasis on the effects of acculturation on the personality of the marginalized man and did not put due stress on the exclusion, the emphasis it deserves because the factor of exclusion of the marginalized man from the mainstream social phenomena is the main cause of their marginalised situation. In fact, the effects of their marginalized condition are not uniform on all the marginalized people. But he insists that “a certain degree of personal maladjustment is inherent in the marginal situation . . . At a minimum it consists of an inner strain and malaise, a feeling of isolation or of not quite belonging.”41

Later Arnold Green further developed the theory postulated by Robert Park and Stonequist. Arnold Green was followed by Lewin and Hughes according to whom the marginalized man is the one “who had a ‘status dilemma’ or who was confused about his social identity and so was uncertain of the role he was expected to play.”42 The theory propounded by Robert Park and Stonequist was basically concerned with the merging of two or more than two cultures and the emergence of the new personality that was recognized as the marginalized personality due to this acculturation. In other words it was limited to emigration and immigration. But Lewin and Hughes observed that not only the culturally disadvantaged people are marginalized cases but also:

The newly rich, career women, adolescent, the middle classes, the hard of hearing and others who are uncertain of their social identity or for whom society has not yet specified a role may also be considered as marginal people.43

Lewin and Hughes included in the marginalized cases the people who are not necessarily the products of acculturation but are disadvantaged for various reasons and are not given full approval in their own culture and social activities. Later on, Kerckhoff, McCormick and Mann developed the concept of marginality more extensively and intensively. Kerckhoff and Mann dealt with all the three levels or dimensions of marginal situation: the group or community level, the individual level and the third one is the subjective definition of the situation. Apart from this historical

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background the term marginality has variously been defined. Some of these definitions are as follows:

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of the term, marginalize, is (to) “treat (a person, group or concept) as insignificant or peripheral: attempting to marginalize those who disagree”44

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the term as “To relegate to a marginal position within a society or group.”45

Peter Leonard defines marginality as, “being outside the mainstream of productive activity and or social reproductive activity”46

The marginalised people are further divided into the voluntarily marginalized and involuntarily marginalized groups, the second group, that is, the involuntarily marginalized group is our concern in the present study. It is further characterized by Peter Leonard as remaining outside “the major arena of capitalist productive and reproductive activity and as such experiencing, “involuntary social marginality.”47

According to Ghana S Gurung and Michael Kollmair:

Marginality is generally used to describe and analyze socio-cultural, political and economic spheres, where disadvantaged people struggle to gain access (societal and spatial) to resources, and full participation in social life. In other words, marginalized people might be socially, economically, politically and legally ignored, excluded or neglected, and are, therefore, vulnerable to livelihood change.48

Besides these definitions, the term marginality is generally defined as a social process that makes an individual or a group marginalized within the larger society. It refers to the overt or covert process of man-made societies which exclude the people, who are considered to be undesirable and unimportant, from the full participation in the mainstream social activities. The process of marginalization relegates individual or specific group of people to the periphery of society. The marginalized people are identified as dislocated from the centre of society to its margin, economically, politically, culturally and socially following the policy of exclusion. Their marginalized position deprives them of equal access to mainstream power structure

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and productive resources. Thus, they don’t realise their creative human potentialities for their full utilization and promotion. Their progressive social mobility is held in check. In all its diversity the term marginality also refers to social exclusion whereby individuals and, at times, entire communities of people are somehow blocked from rights, opportunities and resources that are normally available to the dominant stratum of society.

They, thus, being excluded from the mainstream social system, are detached from the social relations, institutions and are prevented from the full participation in the normal activities of the society in which they live. Their sense of exclusion leads them to their inability to assert their rights. They experience a sense of disadvantage and powerlessness compared to more powerful and dominant section of society, who are wealthy, enjoying better opportunities, privileges and political power. This process of marginality is really a gradually evolving normal social process to which we all consciously or unconsciously contribute and subscribe. It is not necessarily an act of deliberate social exclusion directed solely at the marginalized people. It emerges and evolves with the time in various forms under socio-economical and geo- political environment. Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler), Irene (When We Dead Awaken) and many other female characters in Ibsen’s plays are prone to the marginalized situation, not because it was deliberately desired by their respective father, husband or other male companion but it was due to the social process that gradually evolved with the passage of time in the form of patriarchal ideology that deprived women of the privileges and powers enjoyed by the men folk. This is also true in other socio-economic and political fields where different ideologies such as capitalist and hierarchy operate.

There are basically two types of conceptual frameworks of marginality: societal and spatial, they encompass almost all human dimensions. Under the domain of societal framework come such human dimensions as religion, culture, caste, ethnicity, hierarchy, age, education, marital status, gender, occupation and even economy and politics. Imbalance and discrimination in this regard bring about disharmony, disparity and disruption in the society. Among these human dimensions lie almost all the causes of exclusion, inequality, suppression, social injustice and even spatial segregation of people. Societal concept of marginality can be further sub-

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divided into various types of marginality. We can identify some broad types such as economic, political and gender- based marginality which is my main concern in the present study.

Economic marginalization is a kind of process that is related to economic structure in which economically marginalized people are likely to have meagre involvement. They lag behind in their access to the resources of income in comparison to those who have dominance over the mainstream economic system. They struggle but are unable to have access to the economic resources for essential and vital things which are required to lead a normal life. They find themselves isolated and excluded from the normal social life as desired by all. Thus, they are unable to maintain the average social standard. Poverty, dependence and feeling of inferiority complex are the results of this economic dislocation and social marginalization. Charlesworth while giving an account of the working class life in England discusses the ways in which economically marginalized people’s social position affects their identities and their standards of living. He says that “It is the economic changes and the social conditions they ushered in that have consigned these people to a life of marginality which, naturally enough, manifests itself in their comportment, manner and style.”49 Peter Leonard defines the economically marginalized people as remaining outside, “the major arena of capitalist productive and reproductive activity” and as such experiencing “involuntary social marginality.”50 Henrik Ibsen’s plays Brand, The Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck deal with the issues of economic marginalization.

Political marginalization is the process that denies an individual or a certain group of people, equal access to the formal political power structure and democratic participation in the decision-making process leading to their sub-ordination to and dependence on the politically dominant group or groups of society. They are thus shunned from the mainstream relegating to the periphery of society with little political representation which is mainly meant to cater to those in power or those with power. Dr. Stockman, in Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882), is the victim of political marginalization because his voice is suppressed by the higher authorities enjoying the power and privileges in local politics.

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Gender-based marginality is the hierarchical discrimination and disparity between man and woman where women folk find themselves on the lower ranking and are consequently denied equal access to opportunities and participation both in public and private fields of activity. They are crushed under the yoke of traditional gender roles which force them to be modest and non-assertive to their equal rights with men. Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler) are Ibsen’s women characters who are suppressed and exploited due to this gender bias prevalent in the male dominated society.

There is yet another type of marginality: spatial marginality that is also called the geographical or physical marginality because it is based upon the geographical location of an area. Hence, geographical remoteness from the centres of development is called spatial marginality. People who are spatially marginalized are at the edge of the integrated system. In the absence of appropriate infrastructure, it is difficult for them to approach the major economic centres and therefore, they are deprived of the mainstream development. They are unable to fulfil their daily requirements. While enjoying the beautiful, charming and luxurious life of the Italian landscape, Ibsen was also aware of the stern and rugged life of the Norwegian landscape. He knew how the peasant folk of Norway struggled desperately for their bread in the fjord and the storm-swept glacier while the people belonging to officialdom, were engrossed in their material progress of which the peasants and other tribes living in the distant areas, were deprived. Ibsen expressed his concern for spatially marginalized people in his play Brand (1865). Brand, the protagonist, through whom Ibsen expressed his concern, sacrificed his mother, his wife and his children for the salvation of these marginalized people. He went through the storm of glacier to save these people in the remote areas.

On the other hand, there are certain other types of people who fall through the net and then they fail to find a social group they feel comfortable with. They are certainly marginalized because they don’t feel loved, secured and wanted. They lose their sense of identity. They have less friends and their sense of self importance is fragmentary. They feel that there is nobody in the world to share their feelings and emotions. John Gabriel Borkman, in the play after his name, is the typical example of such kind of marginalized character. After his suspension from the post of the

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manager of a bank, he is pushed to a marginalized position. His friends desert him and he is confined to a solitary annexe of a house which Ellida Renthiem, his wife’s sister, offered to them in their destitute condition. Nobody, including his wife and children, pays any attention to him. He is thus excluded from the participation in the common social activities.

There are different levels of marginality such as individual, group or community and global levels. Marginality at individual level results in an individual exclusion from the active and free participation in the social activities of common interest. The exclusion of single mothers from the welfare system prior to the welfare reforms of 1900s is an example of individual level of marginalization. Another example of the marginality at individual level is the case of the individual having physical or mental disabilities. They are excluded from the work force. Bearing different identities they are, somehow, neglected and discarded. Hence their potentialities are curbed. Ibsen was not unaware of the sufferings of the unfortunate lot of the physically handicaps. He was painfully aware of the hardships and the humiliations they had to undergo. The play, The Little Eyolf, is based on the event of the pathetic sufferings and the ultimate death of Eyolf, a nine years old child, clumped in his feet. His marginalization lies in his desperate and inaccessible attempts to participate in the average social life due to his lameness.

Marginalization at community level is linked to the disparity and variation in degree of privilege and power, status and opportunity between two groups or communities, one of which is dominant or non marginal and the other is subordinate or marginalized in the society. “All the members of a subordinate group who recognize themselves or who are recognized by others as such, are in this marginal situation.”51 Proletariat, the tribal, aboriginals, women and many other minority communities are the cases of marginalization at community level. Norway also remained under the rule of Denmark, Sweden, England and Russia. The aboriginal communities of Norway lost their culture and traditions for a long time. Ibsen, along with many other Norwegian writers, contributed a lot to the restoration of Norwegian culture and traditions by writing Norwegian sagas, about Vikings and political heroes. The second example of marginalization at community level is the

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marginalization of the women which is discussed at length in the present study under the head gender-based marginality.

Moosa-Mitha rightly thinks that the feminist movement was a direct result of the marginalization of women in the society in which they were excluded from the labour force and public decision making and have no value at their homes in the absence of any monetary resource. Consequently a hierarchical gap develops between men and women in the society in which men play a dominant part. Men-folk enjoy status, privilege, and power, and thus become the part and parcel of the mainstream social system while the women are relegated to the marginalized condition both at home and in the public field. In the process their own culture, traditions and values are sacrificed and crushed by the male members of the community in various parts of the world. They have lost their own sense of identity. All through the early parts of history women have been treated as an inferior sex, being born only to bear and rear the children. In spite of some awareness among the women of the 20th century, gender-equality is a constant challenge that affects the employment and income potentialities of women and their ability to overcome the limits and limitations imposed upon them. Even in our times majority of women suffers from drudgery and other forms of exploitations due to their assigned roles. In the male dominated society gender-based marginality can be noticed both on micro and macro levels. They are marginalized not only in the geographically remote areas but also in the heart of the metropolitan cities.

Marginality is thus a multi-dimensional concept. Sometimes the whole society can be marginalized at the national and international levels while certain classes and communities within the society can be marginalized from the dominant stratum of the society. Similarly certain individuals within the family or the families can be marginalized within the localities. Marginalization is really a shifting phenomenon, concerned with the social standing. Certain individuals or groups of individuals might enjoy a high social status at one point of time but at another time when the social changes take place for the worse, they lose their high social status and become marginalized. Thus, social as well as spatial marginality persists everywhere across human settlements around the globe____ from the highly developed metropolitan cities to the remote and isolated geographical human settlements. It is imperative to address

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marginality by fully exploring options to reduce social, economic and political disparities among marginal regions and people. First and foremost, they must be understood as they are, seen as they see themselves. They should be viewed through a lens of their own, not that of ours. They should be ensured that the boundaries between the marginalized and the dominant group are not fixed and permanent but are fluid and negotiable and might be overcome by their constant efforts.

Whatever the types, levels or scale of marginality might be, it is a fact that the marginalized people face a variety of tortures and discriminations such as stereotyping, exploitations, humiliations, suppression and even violence as they lack political and legal recourse. They have relatively little control over their lives and the resources available to them. They are stigmatized and are often at the receiving end of negative public attitudes. They develop low self-confidence and self-esteem. They are thus stuck in the eddy of deprivation and find themselves unable to come out easily from this situation. Charlesworth rightly describes the harassing suppression and tortures of the marginalised people and their predicament in the following words:

. . . no matter what one has done occupationally . . . [Once marginalized] . . . there is no way one can escape the experience of a social context that is like a stagnant pond in which we are the suffocating organisms. There is an absence of the social conditions that make optimism and hope a realistic life strategy.52

The plays of Ibsen are the notable examples in which the problems of the marginalized section of society have been discussed threadbare with a realistic approach. In his plays the main victims of marginality are the persons of lower strata of society, the prostitutes, the poor, the sub-ordinate people in politics and particularly the married women who, like other marginalized people, have no right of living independently; hence they have no personality of their own.

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References:

1. Heiberg, Hans. Ibsen: A Portrait of the Artist. Trans. Joan Tate, George Allen and Unwin Ltd. London: Ruskin House, Museum Street, 1967. p. 13.

2. Meyer, Michael. Ibsen on File. London: Methuen, 1985. p. 68.

3. MacFarlane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Cambridge: CUP, 1990. p. 172.

4. Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications, inc.; 1954. p. 357.

5. Koht, Halvdan. Life of Ibsen, trans. Elinar Haugen and A.E.Santaniello. New York: Bloom, 1971. p. 29.

6. Gosse, Edmund. Henrik Ibsen. The Works of Henrik Ibsen. Ed. And trans. William Archer. New York: Scribbler’s, 1917, Vol. 13. p. 9.

7. Sprinchorn, E, ed. Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. p.100.

8. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. Trans. and ed. C. H. Herford and William Archer, Vol. III. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924. p. 19.

9. Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications, inc; 1954. p. 357.

10. Ibsen, Bergliot. The Three Ibsens. Trans. and ed. Gerik Schzelderup. London: Hutchinson, 1951. p. 167.

11. , G. W. Ibsen. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. p. 3.

12. Ibsen, Bergliot. The Three Ibsens. Op. Cit. p. 172.

13. Sprinchorn, E. Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. Op. Cit. p. 172.

14. Ibid, p. 172.

15. Ibsen, Henrik. (A letter) To George Brandes, 24 Sept, 1871; quoted in G. W. Knight’s Ibsen. Op. cit. p. 4.

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16. Sprinchorn, E. Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. Op. Cit. p.100.

17. “Speech to the Workingmen of Trondhjem.” Speeches and New Letters. Tr. Arne Kildal (Boston, 1910), quoted in Rolf Fjelde’s A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, Inc; 1965. p.152.

18. Lamm, Martin. Modern Drama.Trans. Karim Elliot. New York: Philosophical Literary, 1853. p.75.

19. Ibid, p. 72.

20. Browning, R. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Oxford University Press; 1940, p. 171.

21. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. pp. 12-13.

22. Bentley, E. The Playwright As Thinker: A Study of Drama In Modern Times 1946. Cleveland: World, 1965. p.92.

23. Brustein, R. The Theatre of Revolt_____ An Approach to the Modern Drama. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1962. p. 84.

24. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 84.

25. Brustein, R. The Theatre of Revolt_____ An Approach to the Modern Drama. op. cit. p. 70.

26. Ibid. p. 71.

27. Williams, R. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. p. 57.

28. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. p. 91.

29. Ibid. p. 281.

30. Ibid. p. 297.

31. Ibid. p. 297.

32. Williams, R. Drama From Ibsen to Brecht. Op. cit. pp.70-71.

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33. Ibid. pp. 73-74.

34. Ibid. p. 74.

35. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. pp. 95-96.

36. Ibid. p. 96.

37. Ibid. p. 96.

38. Park, Robert. “Marginality, Routledge M. Dennis”, Blckwell Encyclopedia of Sociology online, (2007). Web. 16 Sep. 2011. .

39. Stonequist, E. V. The Marginal Man-(A Study in Personality and Cultural Conflict’1937), quoted in Dickie-Clark’s Marginal situation: A sociological Study of A Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 8.

40. Stonequist, E. V. The Mrginal Man, quoted in Dickie-Clark’s Marginal situation: A sociological Study of A Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 9.

41. Stonequist, E. V. The Marginal Man, quoted in Dickie-Clark’s Marginal situation: A sociological Study of A Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. pp. 9-10.

42. Hughes, E. C. and H. M. Hughes. Where People Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers, quoted in Dickie-Clark’s Marginal situation: A sociological Study of A Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 13.

43. Dickie-Clark’s Marginal situation: A sociological Study of A Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 13.

44. The New Oxford American Dictionary. Ed. Elizabeth J. Jewell, Franke Abate, Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 1044.

45. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. Encyclopaedia Britannica (India), New Delhi, 2001. p. 709.

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46. Leonard P. Personality and Ideology: Towards a Materialist Understanding of the Individual. London: Macmillan, 1984. p.180.

47. Ibid. p.181.

48. Gurung, Ghana S. and Michael Kollmair. “Marginality: Concepts and Their Limitations,” IP6 Working Papers Series. North-South Dialogue, 2005. p. 10. 12. Web. Dec. 2007.

49. Charlesworth, S. J. A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p. 160.

50. Leonard, P. Personality and Ideology: Towards a Materialist Understanding of Individual. Op. cit. p. 160.

51. Dickie-Clark. Marginal Situation: A sociological Study of A coloured Group. Op. cit. p. 22.

52. Charlesworth, S.J. A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Op. Cit. p. 60.

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Chapter II

Gender-Based Marginality

(Suppression and subjugation of Women)

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The most conspicuous aspect of Ibsen’s plays, selected for study, is the ways in which they incorporate the experience of the marginalised characters, particularly, female characters. This experience of marginality is often linked with their pursuit of individual freedom and autonomy with special focus on women’s emancipation from the monopoly of men folk. The plays, Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), discussed in this chapter, deals with the marginalisation of the female characters who, despite their efforts, could not raise themselves from their marginalised position.

Gender-based marginality is the state of exclusion and deprivation of one sex from equal opportunities, equal participation inside the household as well as in the public sphere, equal social status and living standard in comparison to another sex who avails oneself of all opportunities and rights and consequently dominates the society. This deprived category of sex is a woman who is crushed under the yoke of traditional gender role prescribed for her by the man. These gender roles have been assigned to them by the patriarchal male desire, the desire to have one who could perform the role of a wife and a mother of his children. That role can only be performed by a human being who is by nature and upbringing modest, unassuming, self-effacing, nurturing and submissive. By living in a subordinate position for long, women-folk have imbibed all these characteristics. In Victorian culture she was the angel in the house. It was her duty and responsibility to make her husband’s home a safe heaven where he found himself spiritually fortified and his children were properly looked after and received moral guidance to accept automatically their own traditional gender roles.

In fact not only men but women have also been socially programmed from the time immemorial that they (women) are inferior to men and therefore, they are unable to realise how women are being ignored, suppressed and marginalised by conventional gender roles assigned to them. Patriarchy incessantly asserts itself to undermine women’s self-confidence and capacity to assert, in the absence of which men assume that women are innately inferior and they deserve subordinate position. In fact there are biological or physical differences between the two sexes but the gender categories of masculine or feminine are determined by our culture and society, and the main contributing factor in the marginalisation of women is this gender category and the

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assignment of weaker qualities (for example submissiveness) to the feminine gender. But these physical differences make women female, not feminine which is really, as mentioned earlier, a cultural programming. Thus women are not inborn feminine to whom the qualities of overemotionality and irrationality are generally associated in the patriarchal society. Traditionally men are considered as rational and strong being, that is, the superior pivot of the society. They are considered to be the protector and decision-makers, both in the domestic management as well as in the public dealings. The traditional subordinate roles that women have been playing for a long time in the society have developed in them the attributes of being emotional, irrational and submissive. Actually the traditional roles, that both men and women have been playing, have shaped their personalities accordingly. This belief, of male superiority over female, has been manipulated to seem natural to maintain the existing inequality between men and women. This justification of male monopoly in social, political and economic sphere has left women powerless, besides depriving them from the equal opportunities to participate in social activities. Beauvoir rightly says that women are not born feminine but are conditioned to be so through the process of social construction. She coined the famous phrase in 1949 in her book The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”1 Thus Women’s marginalisation is the result of gender prejudice created through the dissemination and internalisation of patriarchal ideology:

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the means by which they are kept so.

2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is objectified and marginalised, defined only by her difference from male norms and values, defined by what she (allegedly) lacks and that men (allegedly) have.2

If a woman does not accept her traditional gender role with her supposed common qualities of gentleness, compassion, submissiveness and virginity, she does not deserve to be called a human being. She is branded as a monster with the characteristics of aggressiveness and violence. In many literary works, it is seen, if a female character deviates from her traditional gender role, she is not considered to be a normal human being. Lady Macbeth, for instance, is stigmatised as a ‘fourth witch’,

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i.e. other than a human being, for conducting the deed that is expected of a man. If Macbeth had committed the same crime, no doubt he would have surely been punished for that but he would not have perhaps been entitled as a non-human. When Nora Helmer recognised her marginalised position in her own home and resists her exploitation in order to become an independent individual, she is also stigmatised as ‘monster’, ‘wicked woman’ by many critics who have already internalised patriarchal ideology, its norms and values.

The relationship between men and women varies in literature. However, women are generally represented as the marginalised section of society in one way or the other. The role of man as dominating figure over woman might be traced back to the ancient pre-historic period. Book I of Metamorphoses portrays women as victims at the hand of men. Io, having been raped by Jove, is turned into a young cow so that she might not expose his crime and thus left in the hands of others:

When she tried to lift her arms to plead with Argus, found she had no arms to stretch; and when she tried to utter some lament, nothing but lowings issued from her lips, a sound that she was frightened to emit.3

Not only the repression and exploitation of women have been delineated in ancient literature but the consciousness about their marginalised position and their craving for equal rights has also been reflected there. In Book VI of Metamorphoses, Philomena, in spite of having been raped by her sister’s husband Teresis does not accept her victimised position passively. She faces Teresis boldly:

Myself, abandoned, and devoid of shame, thro’ the wide world your actions proclaim; or tho’ I’m prison’d in this lonely den, obscur’d, and bury’d from the sight of men, My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move, And my complainings echo thro’ the grove . . . (Ovid)4

Although Teresis cuts off her tongue, she meets out vengeance on him and achieves the heroic stature no less than of any man.

But in Elizabethan period, particularly in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare, female protagonists have been represented as charming and glistening beauty meant exclusively for man’s sensual gratification. All the hazardous undertakings are conducted by male characters either for possessing any beautiful and

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helpless lady or for power and prestige that are not supposed to be in the lot of women. In the 19th century the problematic issues of women’s marginalisation in the patriarchal society were getting the high water mark among myriad of problems. The Victorian literature, particularly the novels, highlights the emerging image of women, rising from the quagmire of the preceding ages. This preoccupation with the place of women was also a recurring theme in the works of late 19th century. ’s (1828-1910) Anna Karenina (1873-77), Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880) Madam Bovary (1857), and Thomas Hardy’s (1840-1928) Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and so many other innumerable works of literature mirror the women’s marginalised condition and simultaneously motivate them to acquire their appropriate place and role in the society, and pose before them the question as to what should be their position in the society. Tillie Oilsen in her article “Silences” made the world aware of women’s suppression and marginalisation. She says that women have always been,

Isolated, cabined, cribb’d, confined; the private sphere. Bound feet; corseted bedecked, denied one’s body, powerless. Fear of rape, male strength. Fear of aging, subject to fear of expressing capacities. Soft attractive grace, the mirror to imagify man.5

Marry Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in her revolutionary book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) advocates for the equal rights for both man and woman. There exists no inborn disparity between men and women except the biological differences. She appeals the world to, “first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.”6. He further says that like men, women are also rational human beings. Their first subject of laudable ambition should be, “to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of their sex.”7

During the late Eighteenth and the Nineteenth century there was a profusion of novels that stirred the consciousness of women further. They appealed them to rise from their lethargy. Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), a very revolutionary and controversial novel, proved a mile stone in women’s emancipation and in making them aware of their actual position in the society. Its heroine, Lyndall recognises her marginalised position. She rebels against not what is done to them, but what is made of them. Throughout their life cycle women have to undergo a long

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process of socialisation. They are first trained as a submissive daughter under the control of her parents, particularly their father, then as a dutiful wife under the high hand of their husband and at last as mother, the sole bearer and rearer of their children. Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House also rebels against the strenuous socialisation of her personality.

In England Elizabeth Barret Browning’s (1806-1861) Aurora Leigh (1856), a novel in verse, gave voice to women’s emancipation by creating a very strong-willed female protagonist who defies society and its norms to become a poet. In America Margaret Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845) contributed much in women’s consciousness, their desire for equality and self-expression. Emily Dickenson, (1830-1886) an American poetess, was considered as the champion of women’s cause. She went into the depth of women’s psychology and protested against the gender-based patriarchal system of society. She demonstrated the predicament and the restriction under which the female childhood suffers:

They shut me up in prose As when a little girl They put me in the closet Because they liked me still.8

In The Sheriff’s Daughters, Camilla Collet (1813-1895), one of the most active feminists in 19th century Europe and the founder of modern Norwegian novel, expressed her grievance over the deteriorating condition of both married and unmarried women. Its publication stimulated women to plead their own cause and carve their path of freedom. Ibsen came in her contact in 1870 and was profoundly impressed by her zeal for the betterment of the marginalised situation of women. She became the regular visitor in the Ibsen’s household. She persuaded Suzannah, Ibsen’s wife, to turn Ibsen’s mind directly to the women’s cause. Ibsen discussed with her every matter concerning the contemporary women’s movement of liberation. Camilla Collet, Mathilde Schjott and Aasla Anstein struggled for women’s rights and opportunities and in 1884 ‘Storthing’ passed a bill to confer women a legal right to the property and earnings. This petition was signed not only by Bjornson but by Ibsen as well. Thus Ibsen was not the first person to realise women’s marginalisation but many feminist authors and liberal writers before Ibsen showed their zeal and compassionate attitude towards women’s liberation. Ibsen’s contemporaries J. S. Mill

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(Subjection of women, 1869) and Margaret Fuller (Women in the Nineteenth Century, 1845) were two forceful advocates of women’s cause. Knut Hansen called Ibsen, “unconsciously a child of Norway of the century and of John Stuart Mill.”9 M.C. Bradley also said, “Ibsen’s true place is in the army raised by J. S. Mill and brought up by H.G.Wells.”10 Both Mill and Ibsen are fundamentally on the same line in advocating women’s rights and social standing at par with men. In spite of all this Ibsen denies of being a feminist and defends himself against the ascription of being called a feminist. He was in fact in favour of the upliftment of mankind in general and the women in particular. But when A Doll’s House was published in 1879, Ibsen was acclaimed by many critics as a feminist, the champion of women’s Liberation Movement, the messiah of the oppressed section of society. When the Norwegian Women’s Right League arranged a banquet in his honour on his 70th birthday on May 26, 1898, he made his position clear: I thank you for the toast but must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women’s right movement . . . True enough, it is desirable to solve women’s problem, along with all the others; but that has not been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity.11

Thus he preferred to be called a humanist. But there is no denying the fact that no writer can remain aloof from what is happening in society to which he or she belongs. Ibsen was well aware of the events and ideas of his time, the time of emerging problematic issues comprising women’s questions of which A Doll’s House is the clearest and most substantial expression. He spent most of his time surrounded by the intellectuals and friends, especially George Brands, who were engaged in the upliftment of women. Ibsen supported Women’s Liberation Movement heart and soul. In 1879 he offered two suggestions to Scandinavian Club founded in Rome, first, the librarian post that was banned for woman candidate must be opened for them and secondly, the women should have permission of voting in Club meetings. When the proposal was produced in the Club for discussion, he gave very strong argument in women’s favour:

Is there anyone in this gathering who dares assert that our ladies are inferior to us in culture, or intelligence or knowledge or artistic talent? I don’t think many men would dare that. Then what is it that men fear? I

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hear that there is a tradition here that women are cunning intriguers and that therefore we don’t want them. Well, I have encountered a good deal of male intrigue in my life.12

Actually Ibsen didn’t have any preponderating interest in women as a sex but he was involved in the issues concerning with women because:

Women afforded him specimens of humanity peculiarly trammelled by their conventional disabilities in the struggle for personal emancipation which formed his passionate preoccupation.13

Sub-ordinate or the marginalised position of women, found in Ibsen’s plays, has been highlighted by the article Henrik Ibsen in English:

He thinks with John Mill, that woman is too much subject to the caprice of other sex. She is a dependent, a mere plaything of some men and is allowed to develop little individuality of her own. She is brought up in ignorance of the ways of the world and the defects of her education are apt to affect the foundation of her character.14

Ibsen’s plays Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886) and When We Dead Awaken (1899) which are going to be taken up for scrutiny in the following pages are about the women who despite their utmost efforts couldn’t free themselves from their marginalised situation. Being a realistic dramatist Ibsen knew that in spite of their efforts there were women who failed to achieve emancipation in the patriarchal system of society that was deeply rooted in the traditions and conventions, which they found beyond their power to eradicate. The female protagonists Mrs. Alving (Ghosts, 1881), Rebecca West (Rosmersholm, 1886), and Irene (When We Dead Awaken, 1899) are the women who have to lead a marginalised life in a male-dominated world. These female characters do try to emancipate themselves but don’t succeed and ultimately get frustrated leading to a tragic end of their lives.

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Ghosts (1881)

The play, Ghosts (1881) is actually Ibsen’s reply to the objections raised against his preceding play A Doll’s House (1879) which met a very unfavourable criticism for Nora who at the end of the play deserted her husband, children and home, and went away in search of her self identity. Ibsen wrote to the Swedish Feminist Sophie Andlesparre that “After Nora Mrs. Alving had to come.”15 But the play’s popularity does not stem from its being a befitting reply to the European objections to A Doll’s House. It has been approached from different angles such as children born out of wed- lock or a defence of free thinking or existential attitude to sex and society, incest, infidelity, euthanasia, the venereal disease, a nightmarish evocation of spiritual degeneration in civilisation and the marginalised condition of a woman due to the gender dichotomy etc. The play presents various aspects of the then marriage system imposed upon women against their will by the family and society, and its harmful consequences upon them. Its devastating consequences are discerned in the life of Mrs. Alving, the protagonist of the play, who, after her marriage with a man against her will, realises that she can no longer remain with a dissolute man whom she does not love. Initially she does desert him and his home and goes to the man, whom she loved prior to their marriage, but she is forced to go back to her lawful husband and live with him as a dutiful wife without making any complaint against him and against the situation she was likely to be put in by her husband. Another female character, a girl, who is a maid servant in the household of the Alvings, also undergoes the marginalised situation created by the gender-based dichotomy. It is in this context that the play is studied and analysed in the present study.

As in A Doll’s House, in Ghosts also, Ibsen is seen as the champion of women’s lib in his vehement critical approach to the contemporary marital morality and in dealing with the socio-domestic problems that condemn the women folk within the four walls. Thus the play is a sequel to A Doll’s House where Ibsen has shown that if Nora had remained in obedience of the current marital morality and other dead conventions and failed to get rid of her despotic husband, she must have to suffer like Mrs. Alving. The contemporary as well as the late 19th, and the early 20th century critics were indignant with Ibsen’s attack on the Victorian moral complacency. The

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play met a very gruesome criticism. It was called, “An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.”16 Ibsen touched the current social ideals which, despite having devastating effect, were being followed and respected slavishly. The devitalising effect of the old conventions of morality and respect and the lack of courage on the part of man, especially women to protest against them are the discernible strands in the play. Thus the play is the depiction of Mrs. Alving’s struggle for the happiness in the face of insurmountable and malignant forces of the patriarchal system that blow down her efforts at every step. She appears to be a pygmy and helpless in the face of these giant forces.

The play mainly deals with Mrs. Alving’s decision to stay back with her so called lawful but actually dissolute and debouche husband who was sexually a moral wreck, leading the family to its downfall and the unfortunate consequences, born out of her cowardly obedience to the conventional social morality, defined through the patriarchal point of view. The crux of the matter is that Mrs. Alving struggled intermittently to shake off the constricting social forces but her efforts were thwarted at every step.

The play is set in Mrs. Alving’s lonely country house by a large fjord. “A glimpse of a gloomy fjord-landscape, veiled by steady rain”17 reinforces the gloom inside the house and also serves to enclose us in a dark and anxious world. The play opens with the appearance of Engstrand, a carpenter, whose left leg is deformed. His external deformity is the indicative of his inner depravity. He forces a dialogue with Regina whom he claims his daughter. He proposed her to go back home with him and co-operate him in his new business, a kind of prostitution. But she rejects the idea with contempt. Mrs. Alving, now a widow, has built an orphanage where she plans to employ Regina permanently because she has brought up and educated her with some care. Ten years after her husband’s death she is going to dedicate an orphanage to his memory. Pastor Manders has come to the country side to participate in its inaugural ceremony. Oswald, Mrs. Alving’s son has come back home from Paris where he was studying since his childhood. Oswald has been kept unaware of his father’s debauchery and profligacy. He was attracted to Regina, his half-sister; his action conjures up the ghosts of their parents’ unhappy marriage. Oswald’s free nature surprises Pastor Manders. After his disappearance, Manders reprimands Mrs. Alving

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for her past lapses in performing her duty as a true and faithful wife and now for her failure in conducting her son to the path of righteousness which resulted in his belief in the life of free thinking. Pastor Manders is further shocked when even Mrs. Alving, who has been under his thumb, also shows her agreement with her son’s views of free thinking. In their conversation we come to know through Pastor Manders that within one year after her marriage with Captain Alving she left her husband and went away to Pastor Manders with whom she had a love affair before her marriage with Captain Alving. But pastor Manders, deeply rooted in patriarchal conventions, sent her back to the path of matrimonial duty by reminding her that it was her duty as a wife to remain with her lawful husband, no matter how much cruel and morally depraved he is. Mrs. Alving returned to her husband and since then she suffered the consequences of her cowardice. She undergoes a very miserable and wretched life to keep up the show of social respectability of her husband who was an unrelenting moral wretch, a lecher and an abominable debauch. She tried her best to keep him away from the immoral indulgences and shameful lecherous deeds:

I had borne a great deal in this house. To keep him at home in the evenings_____and at night_____I had to make myself his boon companion in his secret orgies up in his room. There I had to sit alone with him, to clink glasses and drink with him, and to listen to his ribald, silly talk. I have had to fight with him to get him dragged to bed______18

But Mrs. Alving remained helpless when Captain Alving’s debauchery started to happen under his very nose. The Captain’s adultery with her maid servant had its consequences in the form of Regina. Mrs. Alving’s intolerable and humiliating sufferings and endurance reflects women’s pathetic condition. All these ignoble conjugal sufferings of Mrs. Alving are due to a male, Pastor Manders whom she blames of destroying her whole life when she says, “you forced me under the yoke you called Duty and Obligation; when you praised as right and proper what my whole soul rebelled against it as something loathsome.”19 Actually Mrs. Alving’s sufferings started from her father’s home where she was forced to accept Captain Alving’s marriage proposal against her consent. She lived with him in spite of her loveless marriage, very common phenomenon in the bourgeois homes of Europe and bears a son expecting that with her son the things might improve and the wheel of her fortune might come back to the right track leading her to an active participation in the

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mainstream society but the condition of her home further deteriorated. When she observed her husband’s debauchery with the maid servant, she was horrified to think lest her son should be contaminated in touch with the contaminated father. So to keep him away from the contaminated and unwholesome atmosphere of the house, she sent him away to Paris for study at a very young age so that he might not inherit the bad habits of his lecherous father. Since her husband was least concerned with anything in the household, she took the responsibility of supervising the estate and handling the money by herself. He was always busy in drinking and sitting idle and had an illegitimate daughter Regina who was unaware of her real paternity and lived in his house as a maid servant. After the death of his father Oswald returned home from Paris for the dedication of the Orphanage established in his memory. He thought that his father was a very respectable man in the city. Everything was kept secret from him. Mrs. Alving thinks that with the inauguration of the Orphanage every trace of her husband in the household will be obliterated. Very hopefully she says:

This long, hateful comedy will be ended. From the day after to-morrow it shall be for me as though he who is dead had never lived in the house. No one shall be here but my boy and his mother.20

But when, later in the play, she witnesses the lecherous pursuit of Regina by her son as did his father in the same conservatory, she thinks that the past cannot be obliterated. All her struggle, sacrifices and life-long sufferings, prove futile. In the final act of the play Mrs. Alving has to receive the disastrous consequences of her guilt of substituting a sense of duty and responsibility for the joy of life. Her decision first to marry Captain Alving against the violation of her will and then to return to him to preserve the sanctity of marriage and its ancient social respectability and decorum, destroy the creative mind of her artist son Oswald and Regina’s blooming womanhood. The ghosts of the past reappeared, the dead man, Captain Alving, returned through his son’s unwitting repetition of his father’s activities—the scrape of overturned chair, in the pop of wine cork, the squeal of a maid-servant in the same conservatory surprised by her master’s amatory embrace and finally Oswald’s suffering from syphilis, after which Regina deserts him and adopts the career of prostitute in a brothel. Mrs. Alving’s optimistic edifice of happy and free life with her son crashes down upon her when Oswald illness recurs and he cries with agony for “the sun”. She is almost paralysed with shock and hopelessness. She remains standing,

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“a few steps from him with her hands twisted in her hair and stairs at him in speechless terror.”21 The curtain falls with the depressing and agonising cry for “the sun.” The rays of the sun are seen falling on the house which had remained gloomy throughout the play.

Throughout the play Mrs. Alving reflects dual personality. Theoretically she appears to be an emerging and emancipated woman but practically she represents the figure of an agonised and cornered woman, whose meagre endeavours at disentangling herself from the web of conventional matrimonial intricacies and sufferings are thwarted at every step. In other words she represents the women who submit to the marginalised position prescribed to them by the male dominated system of the society. Such types of women are readily accepted in a conventional and orthodox society. Hence Alving’s submission and sacrifice for the old and conventional conjugal sanctity, and respectability bring about nothing but misfortune for her, in the form of miserable lives of her son and Regina. Once she is trapped in a marriage of convenience compelled by her parents, she suffers a lot throughout her life. Although Pastor Manders forced her to return to her lawful husband but he didn’t look back to the condition in which she might have been living with such a dissolute husband who always remained indulged in all kinds of wild oats, irregularities and wild excesses. She has suffered all alone but her suffering didn’t devitalise her energy instead it stimulated her to develop into a more confident personality. Her life which has been “a vale of tears” strengthens her probity and dignity. Although she has been baffled and battered throughout her life yet she remained optimistic throughout the play to have victory over life with a certain assurance. She does not lose courage and continues her struggle up to the last:

That has been my ceaseless struggle, day after day. After Oswald’s birth, I thought Alving seemed to be a little better. But it didn’t last long. And then I had to struggle twice hard, fighting for life or death, so that nobody should know what sort of a man my child’s father was . . . I had gone on bearing with, although I knew very well the secret of his life out of doors.22

She left no stone unturned to bring her husband back to the right track but being a man and especially her husband, it was against his manly self-respect and

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dignity to be persuaded by a woman, particularly his wife. With all these efforts she was in fact, in search of true human condition as she says:

I had to bear it for my little boy’s sake. But when the last insult was added; when my own servant-maid_____Then I swore to myself: This shall come to an end. And so I took the reins into my hand_____the whole control over him and everything else. For now I had a weapon against him, you see; he dared not oppose me. It was then I sent Oswald from home.23

No doubt the light of truth does come to Mrs. Alving but it comes too late to avoid the dire consequences of her life-long deceit. In spite of her being derailed to futility, whether due to lack of courage on her part or due to the pressure of maintaining social decorum and age-old conventions; she resolves that, like her own life, her son’s life shall not be sacrificed to the ideals in vogue that are unnatural and were not going to provide joy to him. Her unfulfilled desire and craving for participation in the mainstream social system is quite visible in her frustrated endeavours to link her husband to the social mainstream. G. B. Shaw rightly says:

She so manages her husband’s affairs and so shields his good name that everybody believes him to be a public-spirited citizen of the strictest conformity to current ideals of respectability and family life.24

Besides Mrs. Alving other female character, Regina, is also prone to the marginalised position. She is an illegitimate girl born to Johanna, once the maid- servant in the household of the Alvings. Captain Alving, Mrs. Alving’s husband, had sexual liaison with her and Regina was the result of this adultery. Mrs. Alving is quite aware of her husband’s debauchery and Regina’s illegitimacy. She keeps Regina in her household as a maid-servant. Oswald, Mrs. Alving’s son, who has returned from Paris, makes amatory advances towards her. Actually he is suffering from syphilis, a venereal disease and he knows that he is not going to exist for a long time. So he plans to marry Regina not out of love for her but out of his self-interest so that she might look after him during his illness because very soon he was going to be bed-ridden. Another reason is that he has an evil-eye over her fully developed body; graceful gait and attractive personality as he says to his mother, “Isn’t she splendid to look at? How

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beautifully she’s built! And so thoroughly healthy!”25 He was actually charmed and fascinated by this “Fresh, lovely and splendid girl.’’26

Regina’s so called father, Jacob Engstrand, also tries to misuse her for earning money by selling her youthful body. He has opened a boarding house and a tavern for sailors. He wants Regina to give him a hand in his projected business, in which he intends to cater the baser nature of the sailors. His proposed “high class lodging house” is in reality a brothel where he wants Regina to work as a prostitute. His intention to employ Regina as a prostitute exposes his monstrous depravity and rottenness. Such kind of attitude on the part of Engstrand reflects the extent to which a man can go to utilise a woman for his personal interests. This Jacob also received three hundred dollars, given to him by his wife, who told him that one sailor had offered her for his sexual satisfaction with her and he received the sum without any grudge. In reality Regina remains in a marginalised position throughout her life, serving within Mrs. Alving’s home, having no connection with the outer world. She has no influence, no importance and no role to play except the one assigned to her by Mrs. Alving. But at last she breaks away the bond of servitude because she does not want to lose her individuality in serving the invalid Oswald. She leaves the house to search for her own identity. Unlike Mrs. Alving she represents the image of an emerging woman when with the shrug of the shoulder she says, “A poor girl must make the best of her young days, or she’ll be left out in the cold before she knows where she is. And I, too, have the joy of life in me, Mrs. Alving.”27

There are so many other factors discernible in this play that contribute to the marginalisation of women in general and the women of this play in particular. Ibsen was familiar with the situation of the period when women were not supposed to be appropriate for education and reading books, containing revolutionary and innovative ideas. They have been barred from the sphere of logic, reasoning and mathematics due to the assumption that they lack the logical power. Pastor Manders is taken aback to find the books containing the revolutionary ideas in Mrs. Alving’s house. He himself studies such kind of books to acquire knowledge and to condemn the new and idol- breaking ideas arising from the study of such kind of writings but he does not want women to study them. It is clearly the violation and deprivation of the rights of women in the field of education. It seems to be an intentionally manipulated device of patriarchy to exclude women from the field of logic and reasoning by which they

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themselves dominate the women folk. According to G.W. Knight, “Mrs. Alving is now a free thinker whose reading of advanced books shocks the Pastor, encrusted as he is by conventional fear of scandal and respect to the press and public influence.”28 The hypocritical nature of Manders and the marginalised position of women in the male-dominated system of the society come to the surface in the conversation between Manders and Mrs. Alving when Mrs. Alving asks him as to what he finds objectionable in these books:

MANDERS. Object to in them? You surely don’t suppose that I have nothing to do but study such productions as these?

Mrs. ALVING. That is to say, you know nothing of what you are condemning.

MANDERS. I have read enough about these writings to disapprove of them.

Mrs. ALVING. Yes; but your own opinion______

MANDERS. My dear Mrs. Alving, there are many occasions in life when one must rely upon others. Things are so ordered in this world; and it’s well that they are. How could society get on otherwise?29

People like Pastor Manders don’t want the women to improve their conditions in the society lest their authority and simulation should be challenged and exposed to public. They want to keep the patriarchal system of the society intact so that they might maintain their superiority over the women folk. Pastor Manders is the symbolic representative of the destructive forces of social conventions. He is, in fact, responsible for Mrs. Alving’s wretched, tormented and marginalised condition. He is the embodiment of patriarchal values, norms and traditions. According to him, even if people, especially women folk, are in touch with revolutionary and intellectual movement, they should not give outlet to their thoughts for the betterment of the society as he once remarked, “One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.”30 He is a self-righteous man who cares more about public opinion than doing what is right and beneficial for the society. Although Mrs. Alving has already got everything insured but Manders does not let Mrs. Alving insure the Orphanage without knowing the general feeling in the

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neighbourhood so that he might remain on vantage point, safe from the public criticism. He is not afraid of any contingency and fortuitous mishap but of the “responsible people . . . people in such independent and influential positions that one can’t help allowing some weight to their opinions.”31 He is not concerned with the loss or misfortune that may fall upon her but only with his fake prestige as a clergyman. If Mrs. Alving wants to liberate herself from the fell clutches of the patriarchal dead ideals, she must do away with such conservative and orthodox men as Pastor Manders. But Mrs. Alving realises her real situation too late to shun the tragic web the men like Manders have woven for women.

The exploitation, domination and subjugation of women due to their traditional roles and duties as wife and mother are deeply rooted in the western religion and ideology. This is another factor contributing to women’s marginalisation. The priests have prescribed the roles and duties for women as wife and mother in the society. Pastor Manders, once Mrs. Alving’s lover and Captain Alving’s close friend, is now her business manager and adviser in the matter of the Orphanage but when Mrs. Alving shows agreement with the free nature of men and women, he becomes out of control and forgets his intimacy with her and her husband. He, a priest, does not realise the harrowing and ignoble sufferings and tortures that Mrs. Alving has been undergoing. He only knows that a wife should perform her duties and responsibilities under the conditions her husband and the society have created for them. A wife should never question the authority of her husband. They are naturalised to believe that their inferior position is destined upon them by God. When Mrs. Alving complains of infinite miserable situation she has had faced while living with her dissolute husband, he admonishes her:

And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen and to whom you were bound by a holy tie . . . a wife is not to be her husband’s judge. It was your duty to bear with humility the cross which a Higher Power had, for your own good, laid upon you.32

Her independent decision of deserting her reckless and drunkard husband, whom she was forced to marry against her consent, and her decision of sending her son abroad for study in order to keep him away from the polluted atmosphere of their home, have been taken as the acts of rebellion against the society, the violation of her

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duties and responsibilities as a wife and as a mother. Thus her desires and struggle for emancipation from the constricting and crushing atmosphere of her husband’s home are persistently hampered. In spite of all ignoble sufferings, Manders accuses her of not sincerly obeying her husband:

You have been all your life under the dominion of a pestilent spirit of self-will. All your efforts have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never known how to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will.33

The institution of marriage is another factor, contributing to the marginalisation of women. As in his preceding plays, Ibsen has also raised the question of marriage here but with a slightly different perspective. His broadened vision could now anticipate the possibility of a decent and creative life for both men and women even beyond the matrimonial alliance. But he could also perceive the limits of the patriarchal society in which the conservative people like Pastor Manders, with their limited outlook, were not capable to imagine any relation of young man and woman without marital bond. This is the bond that keeps a woman tied to a man in an endless eddy within the four walls of the household. Wedlock is the lock that a woman can’t unlock until her death. A free living relationship between men and women can upset the complacency of the authority of the “really responsible people”34 as Pastor says, “How can the authorities tolerate such things?”35 Unlike Mrs. Alving, who does not have the courage to say openly due to the fear of being branded as a backslider, Oswald, her son, exposes the hypocrisy of the so called gentlemen and higher authorities who talk highly about morality in the public places but in reality are the regular visitors to the brothel for the exploitation of women’s body and soul.

The concept of sin and disgrace borne out of sexual liaison is also a factor contributing to the marginalisation of women. This concept is gender-biased. If a woman has sexual extra-marital affairs with a man before or after marriage, she is stigmatised as a fallen woman, who does not deserve to be accepted in the society, particularly, as a wife. On the other hand, if a man commits the same crime, his action is considered as the natural outcome of the excesses of the youth and vitality. In the play the extra-marital affair between Captain Alving and the maid servant, Johanna,

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represents this double standard. Captain Alving made sexual exploitation of Johanna. When she became pregnant, he gave her the sum of three hundred dollars to hush up the matter and was safe. She went to the town and renewed her old familiarity with Engstrand and married him. This surprises Pastor Manders who considered it impossible for any man to marry her. He says how it was possible that Engstrand, “for a miserable three hundred dollars to go and marry a fallen woman!”36 But he forgets that Captain Alving was also a fallen man, the guilty of the same crime, to whom Mrs. Alving was forced by him to remain as a dutiful wife leading a tortuous and depressing life. He never mentions that Captain Alving was also a fallen man with whom she should not have stayed. On the other hand he is aghast at Mrs. Alving’s proclamation of the Captain as a fallen man. A hot argument between Pastor Manders and Mrs. Alving exposes the gender-dichotomy inherent in the society:

MANDERS. There! think of that! for a miserable three hundred dollars to go and marry a fallen woman!

Mrs. ALVING. Then what have you to say for me? I went and married a fallen man.

MANDERS. But_____good heavens!_____what are you talking about? A fallen man?

Mrs. ALVING. Do you think Alving was any purer when I went with him to the altar than Johanna was when Engstrand married her?

MANDERS. Well, but there’s a world of difference between the two cases______

Mrs. ALVING. How can you compare the two cases? You had taken counsel with your own heart and with your friends.37

Mrs. Alving’s sticking to duty and obligation through a hypocritical marriage has made only a ghastly mockery of her entire life. Pastor asserts that her marriage was totally in accordance with ‘law and order’. But who forms these ‘law and order’? They are infact made by the menfolk and are later on justified by menfolk themselves as the natural system laid down by Higher Providence for the welfare of the human beings. But they are implicitly, if not explicitly, for the benefit of men. Mrs. Alving

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becomes aware of the underlying devastating effects of these laws for women when she says, “Oh! That perpetual law and order! I often think that’s what does all the mischief here in this world.”38 But she finds herself helpless to break away the shackles of these constricting social factors, partly due to the discriminating dual gender-system of the society, and partly due to her cowardice that does not let her determine her own course of life.

Mrs. Alving, brought up as a dutiful and obedient daughter, becomes a dutiful wife and mother too because throughout her life she took for granted the outworn false social ideals that led her to marginal situation. But the desperate circumstances compel her to reassess the blindly held ideals and values, she was taught to maintain up to now. Bearing the tortures of her lecherous husband, handling his business, reading “those horrible, revolutionary, free-thinking books!”39 and thinking for herself have energised her static intellect. By the end of the play she realises that her sanctimoniousness has only perverted Captain Alving’s joy of life into debauchery, adultery and drunkenness. She is now fed up with all those dead ideals and she resolves, “Well, I can’t help it; I can endure all this constraint and cowardice no longer. It’s too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.”40

If she had earlier enough courage to face public criticism against her independent and free choice, she might have broken the shackles of marriage bond and would have led a free life, and had saved the creative life of Oswald and the blooming youth of Regina. In an article, ‘Ghosts at the Jubilee’, G. B. Shaw has underlined this fact:

She is a typical figure of the experienced, intelligent woman who, in passing from the first to the last quarter of the hour of history called the nineteenth century, has discovered how appallingly opportunities were wasted, morals perverted, and instincts corrupted, not only_____sometimes not all_____by the vices she was taught to abhor in her youth, but by the virtues it was her pride and uprightness to maintain.41

Actually Mrs. Alving is entangled in a woman’s denying world where only men are expected to express themselves aggressively and self-confidently. In spite of

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all her courage, determination and struggle she is unable to make herself and her son free from the ghosts of the past:

I almost think we’re all of us ghosts, Pastors Manders. It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that “walks” in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.42

The play’s theme is not the quest of the protagonist for her self-truth but rather the dire consequences of rejecting that truth for the sake of hypocritical ideals. The play, “exposes social hypocrisy and moral cowardice, and illustrates the evil results of the subjection of women, and the slavish addiction of men to outworn creeds and ethical standards.”43 John Gassner rightly says that Ibsen deplores, “Mrs. Alving’s sacrifice of her happiness for the family respectability when she failed to leave her husband.”44

Rosmersholm (1886)

The play Rosmersholm bears a striking similarity with Ghosts. The original title of the play, was White Horses which recalls the play Ghosts. It was altered into Rosmersholm perhaps to avoid the noticeable resemblance with the title of the earlier play. Like Ghosts the story of the play oscillates on the conflict of the past and the present events. Again like Ghosts it incorporates diverse themes as the incest motif and the ghosts of the past, which, for Rosmer, exist in the form of aristocratic patriarchal traditions. Initially Rebecca West, the female protagonist of the play, is bold enough to free herself from the shackles of the religious and moral prejudices but in the end, as Mrs. Alving is obsessed of them, Rebecca too, though under the pressure of Rosmer, embraces death for the expiation of her guilt-ridden soul. The constricting social forces against which individuals fight in Rosmersholm are akin to those “all sorts of dead ideals, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth,”45 in Ghosts. These forces symbolised by the Rosmersholm, an old manor, in the play under consideration, are anti-life and they have broken Rebecca by sapping her former energy and vitality. Harold Clurman’s assertion that “there is no mystery in the symbolic “white horses”, they are name given to a social superstition or “spook” forbidding death”46 is not well sounding and has no stable bearings in comparison with Sandra E. Saari’s opinion that

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white horses are the symbols of those conventions and traditions that hamper the path leading to complete freedom.

The play, Rosmersholm, that seems in the beginning to incorporate as its central theme the contemporary social and political upheaval in which the traditional ruling classes relinquish their rights to impose their ideology on the rest of the society, eventually turns to be a serious drama of sin and expiation in which the action becomes entirely personal, revolving around the free-thinking protagonist Rebecca West, the ultimate focal point of the entire action. Due to her unflinching determination and certainty of direction she is acclaimed as one of the most passionate and emancipated women, the leading light for all future generations of women-folk. The wilful, independent and free-thinking Rebecca seems initially to be an incarnation of the new womanhood. But by the end of the play Rebecca, who has abandoned Christianity and its ethical system and sets herself to undermine Rosmer’s religious and political beliefs and authority because of his popularity in the community, is at last infected by the patriarchal views of the same man, deeply rooted in his long-train of patriarchal traditions for which Rosmersholm is known, and is forced to put her lively life at his disposal. She now appears to be an embodiment of the old ideals of female quality of self-sacrifice, the emotional weak point, of which the patriarchal man takes full advantage according to his whims. By the end of the play she, having been overpowered by Rosmer, renders a complete surrender to his patriarchal ideological dominion. Thus the play deals with the individual efforts of Rebecca for freedom and emancipation from constricting factors of the society and her eventful helplessness and frustration in defeat. That is, it is the delineation of the conflict between the conventional morality of Rosmer and the emancipated view of life of Rebecca in which Rebecca’s ideology is ultimately marginalised.

Rosmer and Rebecca West, the leading characters of the play Rosmersholm, are closely modelled on the real personalities: Carl Snoilsky, the great Swedish aristocrat and an outstanding poet, in sympathy with liberal movement, and Countess Ebba Piper, the liberal minded member of society respectively. Her elopement with Snoilsky, the husband of one of her relatives, created furore. Rebecca enters Rosmersholm as one of the relatives of Rosmer’s former wife, Beata. She turns to be his second wife by their “spiritual marriage”. It is the patent recollection of Snoilsky’s personal life experience with Ebba Piper. In 1879, like Rosmer, he resigned

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his post, divorced his former wife and married Countess Ebba Piper who was in reality one of the relatives of his former wife. His wife’s death out of consumption with all rumours that it was precipitated due to Snoilsky’s sudden decision and the Ebba Piper’s ill treatment of her bears close affinity with the tragic end of Beata due to the indifferent and passionless attitude of Rosmer and the ill treatment of her by Rebecca.

The locale and setting of the play has ambiguity of meaning. The Rosmers live in a manor house called ‘Rosmersholm’, situated on a fjord, a natural enclosure cut off from the mainstream society. The interior of the house is “spacious, old fashioned and comfortable” with “fresh birch branches and wild flowers”. On the walls are hanging “old and recent portraits of clergyman, officers and government officials in uniform.”47 Juxtaposition of the dead with the symbols of life, joy and regeneration implies the gloomy and tragic streak along with the regenerative paraphernalia. The plants, birch branches and flowers signifying life, joy, merriment and freedom are surrounded all over by the portraits of clergymen and officials in uniform implying discipline, strictness, oppression and constriction which are the hall-marks of patriarchal monopoly and authority. The portraits show ultimate dominance of the patriarchal symbols. Whatever the implication of the regenerative paraphernalia is, Rosmersholm is generally looked upon as the family infused with the conservative, honourable and reserved male members who don’t let the women and their children indulge in any kind of merriment and joy of life. It is in this kind of atmosphere overshadowed with gloom and the monopoly of male members that Beata, Rosmer’s former wife, finding herself isolated and dislocated, ultimately committed suicide in utter hopelessness and frustration.

The play opens one year after Beata, the late wife of Rosmer who is the central male character and the last of a long and influential line of the clergy, officials and senior civil servants, had committed suicide by drowning in a mill race just outside of their home. Beata, as we are told at first, was a highly emotional person often driven to a distracted state of mind due to her infertility to procreate and hence her inability to ensure the continuation of the Rosmer’s line and also due to her lonely and marginalised position in her own home. It is in this household, governed by the patriarchal norms and traditions, overwhelmed by the despair, depression, isolation, alienation and dismay that Rebecca West gains admittance through Beata’s brother Rector Kroll as one of her relatives and soon desires to take the reins of the house into

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her hands. By her efforts the home is soon replete with flowers and fragrance which the lady of the house when alive detested. Since her death, the house and its inmates appear to have been enjoying the quiet and placid way of life. Rebecca initially very energetic and with an adventurous character craving for independence and power, ultimately plays the role of a sacrificing woman by offering her blooming youth to Rosmer as Kroll also points out, “Do you know_____it is really fine for a woman to sacrifice her whole youth to others as you have done.”48Again in their conversation kroll hints at Rebecca as being Rosmer’s virtual yet unsolemnised wife. Rebecca protests his insinuation. Rector has also political motive for visiting there. After the domestic affairs of Rosmer’s house, the discussion turns to the contemporary politico- moral scenario. Rector Kroll, the pillar of the conservatism, and some of his friends are countering the spirit of revolt among the radicals. He pays visit to Rosmer only to persuade him to join hand with them in crushing the revolutionary spirit. To his great dismay and indignation he finds that Rosmer has turned to be an apostate and is on the side of the people struggling for emancipation, independence and free-thinking as Rebecca says, “Rosmer has come to take a wider view of life than he used to.”49 Apparently he seems to be grasping the wave of emancipation in the contemporary society but his radical verbosity is confined to his personal interest and utility, lacking any remarkable potentialities of dealing with the larger weal of people. Whatever sense of freedom and revolutionary ideas he seems to maintain, it is due to the encouragement and stimulation by Rebecca.

For some time the discourse between Rector Kroll and Rosmer appears to be concerned with the socio-political issue, the political battle between the liberal and conservative forces in Norway, building a democratic outlook in the country. But the later development in the action of the play establishes Ibsen’s central thesis about the exploitation of the individual inner-self and its lethal consequences on the individuals blindly following the dead conventions. It is evident from his letter to Bjorn Kristensen that the play is principally concerned with the story of human destiny and the human beings struggling with themselves to bring their lives into harmony with their convictions. The central theme of the play is the gradual unskinning layer after layer of the guilt-ridden conscience of the main characters, Rosmer and Rebecca West and the harmful consequences of the age old conventions for which the manor Rosmersholm stands.

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In Act II, the action of the play turns from the public affairs to Rosmer’s household where his lonely and frustrated wife, Beata, ultimately preferred death to the feeling of otherness by jumping into the mill-race. It is Kroll who unfolds the mystery of Beata’s death. She committed suicide because she was suffering from the gnawing feelings of otherness and alienation, and also a sense of guilt in allowing her husband to lead a free and unrestrained life, free to choose his own course of life. Gradually he develops an apathetic and indifferent attitude towards her. Later Rosmer also realises his guilt and share in the tragic end of her life because she was acutely aware of the emotional relationship between Rosmer and Rebecca who always remained hug to each other. Rebecca also confesses her guilt in Beata’s marginalised life and her ultimate death. Rosmer has always considered Rebecca as a close and bosom friend, and considers his relationship with her as pure and untainted. He is unwilling, rather, afraid of relinquishing his old and traditional world honour, prestige and religious traditions as a clergyman. But when the rumour of their scandalous relationship, as they reside under the same roof, is in the air, he proposes her to become his second wife. He calls his relationship with Rebecca as a “spiritual marriage.” But the impression of his undeclared fleshly motive is unmistakably evident in his own utterances which indicate his moral lapses in the whole affair with Rebecca when he says, “I had no right to such happiness (his longing for Rebecca) _____it was a sin against Beata.”50 Another motive behind his proposal of marriage with Rebecca was his inability to reconcile himself with Beata’s death so he tries to forget the nagging and haunting memories by uniting with Rebecca in matrimonial alliance. Otherwise, before the exposition of the mystery of Beata’s death that weighed his soul guilt ridden, he never thought of making her his life partner but used her consciously or unconsciously as a commodity. Apparently he seems to be influenced by Rebecca as Kroll also has doubts with insinuation about Rebecca but his whole efforts in the direction of new life is motivated by his endeavour to drown his self-guilt in the pleasurable company of Rebecca, which she has preserved in the self-deception, enwrapped in the cover of “pure comradeship” as he says that after their marriage Beata “will be out of the saga_____completely_____for ever and ever.”51 On the other hand suffering from the pangs of self-guilt, as she holds herself responsible for driving Beata to suicide, she rejects his marriage proposal for which she was yearning for a long time. Such kind of reversal in her attitude baffles Rosmer. At last both of them decide to end their lives by jumping together into the mill race the way Beata did.

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In the play Rebecca West undergoes a gradual but drastic transformation in her character, personality and situation_____from a dauntless Amazon type of woman, having strong sinews, views and unflinching determination to a broken and self- sacrificing woman confined to the folds of a man who is obsessed with traditions of patriarchal ideology. Initially she is represented as a Machiavellian woman with firmness of determination, sureness of direction and ruthlessness of pursuance. She came to Rosmersholm “with a hidden design” to lead Rosmer on to complete freedom by extricating him from “gloomy insurmountable barrier” between him and his independent identity in the form of dead ideals long-held by the Rosmers. With the sharpness of mind, she drove Beata to the realisation (who was already pushed in to a corner existence) that her living together with Rosmer will jeopardise his future missionary eminence. Her “devious ways” adopted to drive Beata to commit suicide baffles Rosmer and even practical minded Kroll who makes a disparaging comment on her by calling her a “wily schemer.” She dragged Rosmer under her influence. At Kroll’s challenge she seems to lose his earlier moorings. He desperately needs her support and solace. But Rebecca remains unflinching and does not betray any sign of disturbance and restlessness at Kroll’s insinuation. She seems to have possessed Rosmer in such a way that at times he seems to do nothing without her help even Kroll calls her an “emancipated woman.” But Rebecca is in illusion when she thinks that she will lead Rosmer to the track of complete freedom and emancipation. Actually Rosmer, although he calls their relationship as “pure comradeship”, has been hiding a fleshly motive in remaining under the mesmerizing power of young and charming Rebecca ever since his former wife was alive as he himself confesses at last, “Even while Beata was alive, all my thoughts were for you. It was you alone I longed for. It was when you were by my side that I felt the calm gladness of utter content.”52

Besides this Rebecca forgets that she was struggling in the mists of patriarchal rules and traditions for which the Rosmersholm is recognised from generation to generation. During the process of her efforts to make Rosmer an emancipated man, she herself passes through a metamorphosis in which her unflinching and fearless will- power, her volition to choose her own course of life, are all replaced by a helpless and powerless sense of women’s self-sacrifice. Rebecca is shackled in the very chain she has been trying to break for a long time. She decides to stay on at Rosmersholm because she began to cherish a “wild and uncontrollable passion” for Rosmer but to

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her great dismay she does not find a lover or a husband in Rosmer whose “spirit is deeply rooted in his ancestory”53 and its conventional patriarchal morality. Instead of influencing him, in which she seems to succeed initially, she gradually begins to accept Rosmer’s views of life that ennobles one but it kills and annihilates the wellspring of spontaneity and happiness as she recognises in the end: “The Rosmer’s view of life ennobles. But_____ (shaking her head) but_____but_____but it kills happiness.”54 She tells Rosmer that her conscience, once robust and free, has been taken over by a sickly, guilt-ridden one. She has lost her identity and sense of selfhood as she complains:

For a moment, yes. I had forgotten myself. It was my old buoyant will that was struggling to be free. But it has no energy left now_____no power of endurance.” It was because of “the Rosmer’s view of life_____or your view of life, at any rate______that has infected my will . . . And made it sick. Enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before.55

The fact is that she commits suicide under the pressure of Rosmer to prove her womanly love for a man. Ibsen seems to prove his thesis that the imposition of their own ideals or principles on another human being, particularly women, how noble or sublime these ideals may be; is not only the violation of his or her personality but also the negation of her very sense of selfhood and identity. Ibsen has shown in this play in a detailed and convincing manner how Rosmer sets himself up the supreme power and in what manner he violates and even crushes Rebecca’s personality and ultimately asserts his orthodox patriarchal mind set and attitude by imposing his absolute authority on Rebecca and depriving her of her right to choose. In this regard G. B. Shaw very aptly remarks that Rebecca’s prostration to the Rosmersholm view of life has, “denied her right to live and be happy from the first, and now at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blindness.”56

It is impossible for Rebecca to extricate herself from the fell-clutches of Rosmer who himself is bound to the Rosmersholm, the strong-hold of older discipline and strictness of the patriarchal system of the whole lineage. It has been the symbol of the crippling limitations and of the negation of life. All his ancestors have been the representatives of the patriarchal system of society. Rosmer’s home is overwhelmed

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with the patriarchal atmosphere. Pointing to the portraits hanging on the walls Kroll exclaims:

Rosmer of Rosmersholm_____clergymen and soldiers; government officials of high place and trust; gentlemen to the fingers-tips, every man of them_____a family that for nearly two centuries has held its place as the first in the district. (Lays his hand on Rosmer’s shoulder). Rosmer_____you owe it to your self and to the tradition of your race to take your share in guarding all that has hitherto been held sacred in our society.57

The whole race of Rosmersholm has created nothing but gloom and oppressiveness up to now. For a time being he boasts of realising his “imperative duty to spread a little light and gladness where the Rosmer family has been a centre of darkness and oppression.”58 But with his feeble courage and paralysing will power and with the instigator, Rector Kroll, pulling him back to his ancestral heritage, it is impossible for Rosmer to raise himself over and above the level of patriarchal thinking. He has got Rebecca enmeshed in the web of his traditions. Having once come under Rosmer’s dominance, she finds herself crippled enough to emerge from her marginalised position. Rosmersholm, the old manor, with its long history of patriarchal honour, prestige and sacrifice, she exclaims, has ultimately overpowered and hence crippled her. She admits:

Rosmersholm has broken me . . . Broken me utterly and hopelessly._____I had a free and fearless will when I came here. Now I have bent my neck under a strange law._____From this day forth, I feel as if I had no courage for anything in the world.59

Rebecca leaves no stone unturned to help Rosmer to come out from his conservative level of thinking and the prejudice of the patriarchal system and to look the world with broad perspective but her efforts are thwarted by another male character, Rector Kroll who reminds Rosmer constantly of the long history of patriarchal traditions and conventions of Rosmersholm and does not let him get out of prejudice and bias of patriarchal way of thinking:

But you have a duty towards the traditions of your race, Rosmer! Remember that! Rosmersholm has, so to speak, radiated morality and

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order from time immemorial—yes, and respectful conformity to all that is accepted and sanctioned by the best people. The whole district has taken its stamp from Rosmersholm. It would lead to deplorable, irremediable confusion if it were known that you have broken with what I may call the heredity idea of the house of Rosmer. 60

But it seems more sounding that it is not so much kroll but Rosmer himself who does not intend to shake off the patriarchal traditions of Rosmersholm. It seems more true that Rosmer only boasts of undertaking the act of ennobling people only to hold Rebecca linger at his house as his mistress because instead of ennobling any person, he is responsible of leaving his wife Beata in lurch and ultimately leading her and even Rebecca to death after she rejects his marriage proposal. The reason behind her rejection of Rosmer’s marriage, although it was at first Rebecca’s plan to get Rosmer as her husband, lies in the despair created through the depressing and humiliating patriarchal environment of Rosmersholm as she says:

Because Rosmersholm has sapped my strength. My old fearless will has had its wings clipped here. It is crippled! The time is past when I had courage for anything in the world. I have lost the power of action, Rosmer.61

Durbach’s perceptive remark in this connection is worth-quoting:

Rebecca’s ‘shriek of joy’ which, in its tonal ironies, recalls Clytemnestra’s ambivalent yell as she welcomes home her husband to the bath, the jacket and the axe . . . It is the cry so intense and so abhorrent in its triumph that Rebecca, as if responding to its echo, hears despair in the very throat of joy. Motives stand revealed in such shocking clarity that in her next breath, she immediately cancels all hopes of freedom, joy and passion by refusing her most ardently sought-after goal.62

Initially Rosmer seems to have freed himself from the dead conventions and traditions of his patriarchal ancestry, the falsity of which becomes apparent later in the play. G. W. Knight has aptly remarked:

Rosmer is an ex-pastor descended from an honoured family whose ancestors have been ecclesiastics or soldiers; and though this ancestry

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itself suggests a Renaissance inclusiveness, it is one that has lost all tension and slackened into convention and respectability.63

Rebecca is not the single woman character, who ended her span of life in a marginalised condition, but Beata, Rosmer’s earlier wife, had also suffered due to his indifferent and apathetic attitude towards her, and as she was relegated to a marginalised situation in her own house she committed suicide. She led an isolated, cornered and cabined life. She didn’t enjoy reciprocal love, affection and passionate response from her husband. Throughout Act I her act of committing suicide remained a mystery. The real reason behind Beata’s death is revealed in Act III by Kroll. He considers the affairs at Rosmersholm as not going well and holds Rebecca responsible for it. He, being convinced of Rebecca’s pernicious influence on Rosmer, questions Rosmer’s conviction about the real cause of Beata’s death. Actually being engrossed in fake ideals and in young and charming Rebecca, Rosmer didn’t try to probe into her heart and mind and didn’t pay due attention to her. Rosmer took for granted that Beata was “unhappy, irresponsible invalid”64 and it was this insanity of her mind that drove her to the mishap. According to Rosmer she had “wild frenzies of passion which she expected me to return”65 and her “causeless, consuming self-reproach during the last few years”66 had completely distracted her mind. But this state of her mind was probably due to her recognition that she will remain childless throughout her life and perhaps thought that a childless woman has no right to live in this patriarchal society. Rosmer’s conviction on Beata’s insanity, which he considers the real cause of her death, is totally refuted by Kroll both on the basis of the doctor’s point of view and also on the basis of the information he received from Beata herself. He informs Rosmer that before her death she came to him twice:

To pour forth all her anguish and despair . . . that poor, overstrung, tortured Beate put an end to her life in order that you might live happily_____live freely, and_____after your own heart . . . (the latter half of her utterance said to Kroll) “I have not long to live; for Johannes must marry Rebecca at once.67

This statement of Kroll shocks Rosmer to the extent of rendering him “almost speechless.” Kroll didn’t warn Rosmer of her plans of committing suicide because she had already told Rosmer indirectly that she was going to die very soon. Rosmer’s attempt to escape from the responsibility of Beata’s death, and her suffering fails. It

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was Rosmer and his patriarchal mentality that was responsible for Beata’s sufferings and her ultimate suicide because he relegated her to such a cornered and isolated life that she found herself dislocated and totally marginalised. He deprived her of her right of participating in the commonly shared social activities. Being cut off from the mainstream of the society, she committed suicide in utter disappointment and frustration. On the realisation of what a lonely and dislocated life she might have been living in utter isolation, Rosmer himself exclaims:

Oh, what a battle she must have fought! And alone too, Rebecca; desperate and quite alone! ______and then, at last, that heart-breaking, accusing victory_____in the mill-race.68

He still thinks that Beata would have misinterpreted their relationship and avoided the reality, although later in the play, he confesses to Rebecca, “Even while Beata was alive, all my thoughts were for you. It was you alone I longed for. It was when you were by my side that I felt the calm gladness of utter content.”69

This confession of Rosmer shows that, despite having his wife, he pursued Rebecca for the contentment of his baser physical desire because perhaps Rebecca was younger and physically more charming, that is why, most probably he simulated to be under her influence only to utilise her to fulfil his baser desire. After knowing that she can’t bear a child Beata wrote a letter to Peter Moetensgaard. This letter which Mrs. Helseth, the house keeper, carried on the behest of her lady, brought into broad day light all the heredity, familial conventional constriction and morbidity prevalent in the Rosmersholm and the district, and the enclosed fjord itself is not conducive to cheerfulness:

MADAM HELSETH. Ah. Miss, little children don’t cry at Rosmersholm.

REBECCA. [Looks at her]. Don’t cry?

MADAM HELSETH. No. As long as people can remember, children have never been known to cry in this house.

REBECCA. That’s very strange.

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MADAM HELSETH. Yes; isn’t? But it runs in the family. And then there’s another strange thing. When they grow up, they never laugh. Never, as long as they live.

REBECCA. Why, how extraordinary______

MADAM HELSETH. Have you ever once heard or seen the Pastor laugh, Miss?

REBECCA. No______now that I think of it, I almost believe you are right. But I don’t think any one laughs in this part of the country.

MADAM HELSETH. No, they don’t. They said it began at Rosmersholm. And then I suppose it spread round about, as if it was catching-like.70

Such kind of depressing atmosphere and strict discipline is indicative of the fact that Rosmersholm has remained the centre of patriarchal dictatorship; authority and monopoly, where children and women are not allowed even to laugh. Their lives were devoid of any merriment, joy and recreation of any sort. They were thus deprived of their rights of free-choice and volition. Beata, who was left alone, was herself a helpless creature in such a depressing patriarchal atmosphere of Rosmersholm. Above all she was convinced that a childless woman has no right to live in society, and even if she lives, she will have no companion to share her emotions and feelings, not to say, of her problems. Harold Clurman understood Beata’s typical problematic situation as he aptly remarks:

Frustrated in her avid sexual appetite, Beata had got into her head that as a childless wife, she had no right to remain: she had persuaded herself it was her duty to make room for another.71

Both Rebecca and Beata have lost their true identity, self-hood and very existence as free thinking human beings due to Rosmer’s indifferent and passionless attitude towards both of them. Their condition is like that of Hedda Gabler who committed suicide due to the indifferent attitude of Tesman, her husband in Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler (1890), “The pedantic indifference of George Tesman is as fatal to Hedda as the almost saintly austerity of Rosmer is to Rebecca. The end of each is self slaughter.”72

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But his saintly austerity seems to be feigned and simulated under the mesmerizing effect of the charming-looking Rebecca as he himself confesses to Rebecca that “even while Beata was alive, all my thoughts were for you.” He found satisfaction and contentment in Rebecca’s beauty although he knew that it was a sin against Beata but now finding Rebecca slipping from his hold, he forced her to commit suicide in order to prove her love for him and snatched away her right to live freely and independently.

When We Dead Awaken (1899)

The play When We Dead Awaken presents yet another type of exploitation of women. It is about the misuse of women by the male artist and thinker in order to fulfill his ambition and desires. It is also about women’s slow struggle and awakening about this utilisation of their blooming physique and about their ultimate frustration and hopelessness with the extinction of their soul within them. Ibsen’s female characters, ever since Hjordis, a fierce and independent female protagonist of the play, Vikings in Helgeland (1858), have struggled against their inferior status assigned to them by the patriarchal society. Some of them have been depicted as emerging from their marginalised position while others were crushed in the process of their struggle. The female characters of this play, Irene and Maia, represent the latter type.

The play is the delineation of the annihilation of the precious lives of both the female characters, Irene and Maia, by a male artist, Arnold Rubek, who in the blind pursuance of his vocational idealism, has raked the charming, young and graceful Irene for his art and put the lively life of his wife, Maia, into boredom and uselessness. In other words Arnold Rubek exploits the charming physique of the model Irene for his statue and when he has “no use for her,”73 he deserts her all alone and marries another woman Maia, but when he fails to adjust with her, he wishes to have Irene once again in his life. In his life women are only the instruments of reaching his destination in art.

The setting of Act I is “an open, park-like place with a fountain, groups of fine old trees, and shrubberies,”74 outside the Bath Hotel at a spa over-looking a fjord. Arnold Rubek and his wife, Maia’s sitting and enjoying breakfast, reading newspaper

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and drinking “champagne and seltzer-water on the table,”75 give a general idea of light heartedness and relaxation in their lives. But this apparent contentment happens to be unreal as both of them are “quite young, with a vivacious expression and lively, mocking eyes, yet with a suggestion of fatigue . . . deep sigh.”76 Their phatic communication rather than a meaningful verbal interaction indicates a sense of ennui and boredom in their lives.

The couple’s conversation proceeds from the phatic level to the retrospective delineation that informs the reader that they have been married for four years and have been away from their home spending their time as if they have no fruitful occupation in their lives. Neither of them is content with each other, particularly Maia, an adventurous loving wife, who experiences loneliness, isolation and disorientation in the company of his artist husband because he, instead of filling the emptiness of her life, has lost interest in life and work as Maia says, “You have begun to wander about without a moment’s peace. You cannot rest anywhere_____neither at home nor abroad. You have become quite misanthropic of late.”77

This kind of attitude of Rubek, after he has finished his great artistic work, a statue entitled the ‘Resurrection Day’ which brought to him an international fame and enough wealth, has left Maia quite alone and created in her a sense of not belonging to anybody or to anything. Finding herself rudderless and hopeless in the conjugal knot with Rubek, she, herself young and having natural tendencies towards the mundane joys of normal human life, is automatically attracted towards Squire Ulfheim, a bear- slayer who is crude but robust and strong bodied, a lover of the open air, high mountains and fleshly pleasures, pulsating with all the physical vitality, for which Maia has been craving for a long time. On the other hand Maia has been deprived of her natural human urges of joy and pleasure by her husband and so now she departs to climb the high mountains with Ulfheim to find, “all the glory of the world,”78 a never- fulfilled promise made by Arnold Rubek, her husband.

In Act II the conversation between Maia and Rubek further reveals the incompatibility in their matrimonial relationship. Maia is aware of the fact that Rubek is really fed up with their constant companionship. She does not find any meaningful vitality in Arnold Rubek as she says:

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But there has come such an expression of fatigue, of utter weariness, in your eyes_____when you deign, once in a while, to cast a glance at me . . . Little by little this evil look has come into your eyes. It seems almost as though you were nursing some dark plot against me.79

He is not interested even in her romantic frolics. Actually Rubek deprives her of her right of true companionship and partnership as husband and wife. He does not share his thoughts and feelings with her. Thus while living with him, she feels as if she were quite alone and completely marginalised as she says:

You are not a particularly sociable man, Rubek. You like to keep yourself to yourself and think your own thoughts. And of course I can’t talk properly to you about your affairs. I know nothing about art and that sort of thing______[ With an impatient gesture.] And care very little either, for that matter! 80

After separating from Irene, he married Maia for the satisfaction of his fleshly urges and used her as long as it pleased to him but now he requires another one who, besides giving him physical satisfaction, could also help and support him in his pursuit of personal ambition and interest as he confesses:

What I now feel so keenly_____and a painfully_____that I require, is to have someone about me who really and truly stands close to me_____What I need is the companionship of another person who can, as it were, complete me_____supply what is wanting in me____be one with me in all my striving.81

He further confesses that he has accepted her only “as a sort of makeshift.” But now he has no use of her because, as he says:

I have grown tired_____intolerably tired and fretted and unstrung______in this life with you! . . . And you are not at all to blame in this matter; ______that I willingly admit. It is simply and solely I myself, who have once more undergone a revolution _____82

At last Maia is compelled to leave Rubek. She glides up to the mountains, singing a song of freedom and joy, thereby revealing the long suppressed and unfulfilled yearning for emancipation:

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I am free! I am free! I am free! No more life in the prison for me! I am free as a bird! I am free! 83

She believes that she has “awakened now at last” but later on she finds that escaping from the prison of a man, her husband, she falls in the fell-clutches of another man, Ulfheim who is “ a sort of monster.... a kind of a wood demon”84 with his external wild ugliness and overwhelmingly strong beastly sensuality. Initially she protests against his sexual proposal but ultimately accepts him because she has no other option but to accept him as all roads to return to Professor Arnold Rubek were closed. Ulfheim was no match for her nor was any expectation that he would change himself into a civilised human being. So the only option left with Maia was to efface her own personality and identity if she had to live with him. The other female character, whose marginalised condition is more pathetic and appalling as she is a worse victim of male’s exploitation of female, is Irene. Irene appears on the scene rather late in Act I as a strange lady that Rubek has seen walking alone during the night at the Bath Hotel in spa where Rubek and his wife Maia were spending their time away from their home. Both of them recognise each other immediately. She is the model who posed herself completely nude for his painting ‘Resurrection Day’, but after its completion, when he has no use of her, he abandoned her to wander alone. Having been abandoned by Rubek, Irene could not find anyone or any place on earth for her permanent settlement. She ultimately became dislocated, lonely and helpless, wandering here and there aimlessly, selling her body for her livelihood. She says: I have posed on the turntable in the variety-shows. Posed as a naked statue in living pictures. Raked in heaps of money. That was more than I could do with you; you had none._____And then I turned the heads of all sorts of men. That, too, was more than I could do with you, Arnold. You kept yourself better in hand.85 She calls herself a “dead” entity undergoing a mental treatment which borders nearly on insanity. She faced all kinds of tortures and humiliations in the mental asylum: I was dead for many years. They came and bound me_____laced my arms together behind my back______. Then they lowered me into a grave-vault, with iron bars before the loop-hole. And with padded walls______so that no one on the earth above could hear the grave-shrieks______.86

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As their conversation progresses, we come to know, through Ibsen’s usual technique of retrospective narration that in her youth Irene had an immaculate beauty that she exposed in “frank, utter nakedness” to be recreated into his ‘Resurrection Day’. She served Rubek “so bravely_____so gladly and ungrudgingly . . . with all the pulsing blood of my youth,”87 falling at his feet, with the expectation that Rubek would give an appropriate place with him by making her his life-partner. But Rubek was so much “sick with the desire to achieve the great work of my life . . . ‘The Resurrection Day”88 that the work of art was of primary importance and the life of human being, and particularly that of woman, secondary for him as he declares that “The work of art first_____then the human being.”89 Her pent up indignation at him overflows the surface and she accuses him that for the sake of his vocational idealism, he “did wrong to my (Irene) innermost, inborn nature” of the woman who “exposed myself wholly and unreservedly to your gaze______[More softly.] And never once did you touch me.”90 Rubek tries to give excuses in favour of his idealism which ruined her entire life: I was sick with the desire to achieve the great work of my life. [Losing himself in recollection.] It was to be called “The Resurrection Day”_____figured in the likeness of a young woman, awakening from the sleep of death_____ . . . It was to be the awakening of the noblest, purest, most ideal woman the world ever saw. Then I found you. You were what I required in every respect. And you consented so willingly______so gladly. You denounced home and kindred______and went with me . . . I came to look on you as a thing hallowed, not to be touched save in adoring thoughts. In those days I was still young, Irene. And the superstition took hold of me that if I touched you, if I desired you with my senses, my soul would be profaned, so that I should be unable to accomplish what I was striving for._____And I still think that there was some truth in that.91 From the above confession of Rubek, the real motive behind his not touching her is evident_____his desire was to fulfil his personal ambition, even though at the cost of the extinction of a female’s body and soul. He was actually forcing her into the mould of the pure woman for which she was his model. The moment his work was finished, she became useless for him and he denounced her without taking into consideration the situation she might have been pushed in. Now she has no place to go as she had already denounced her home and relatives for Rubek.

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In Act II he expresses his desire to have her again, not because he loves her or she loves him but because he feels that after separating from Irene his creative energy has extinguished and now he is in a dire need of having her as he says, “someone about me who really and truly stands close to me” and who might “complete me_____supply what is wanting in me____be one with me in all my striving.”92 He was in need of someone who might stimulate his sleeping senses. He looks to Irene as the fountainhead of all his inspirations but Irene has nothing except hatred for him as she says: It was rather hatred . . . for you_____for the artist who had so lightly and carelessly taken a warm-blooded body, a young human life, and worn the soul out of it_____because you needed it for a work of art.”93 Irene’s situation is really pathetic. She belongs to none in the world. She married twice but could not find solace anywhere. She suffers not only from the emotional starvation and the waste of life but also from such a harrowing and ignoble situation that she denied to herself even the womanly right of motherhood. She no longer herself in the category of a human being as she used to be, as she says: But I was a human being______then! And I, too, had a life to live,______and a human destiny to fulfil. And all that, look you, I let slip______gave it all up in order to make myself your bondwoman_____Oh, it was self- murder_____a deadly sin against myself. [Half whispering.] And that sin I can never expatiate! . . . I should have borne children in the world_____many children_____real children______not such children as are hidden away in grave-vaults. That was my vocation. I ought never to have served you ______poet.94 Irene was nothing for Rubek but a mere “happy episode” to be done with and then forgotten about. In Act III Rubek realises his guilt and accepts his role in the destruction of Irene’s life. He regrets over his two fold crimes he had committed in the blind adherence to his vocational idealism; one against himself (abnegation of his natural, normal joy of life) and the other against Irene which led to her wretched, irreversible, irreparable and pathetically complete marginalised situation. But the realisation on his part comes too late to ameliorate Irene’s marginalised situation. He proposes Irene to come with him in his villa but Irene declines the idea as she does not think herself worth-living with him. The following conversation between Rubek and Irene shows

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the pathetic and irreversible situation of Irene, the remorseful attitude of Rubek and its futility in connecting Irene to the normal way of life: IRENE.

I have stood the turn-table______naked______and made a show of myself to many hundreds of men _____after you.

PROFESSOR RUBEK

It was I that drove you to the turn-table _____blind as I then was _____ I, who placed the dead clay-image above the happiness of life _____of love.

IRENE.

[looking down] Too late_____too late! . . . The desire for life is dead in me, Arnold. Now I have arisen. And I look for you. And I find you. _____And then I see that you and life lie dead______as I have lain . . . The young woman of your Resurrection Day can see all life lying on its bier.95

A woman is not infinitely replenishable. At last both of them are buried under an avalanche falling at a terrible speed from the top of the mountains. In Ibsen’s plays Irene is not a single female character who has been sacrificed on the altar of the male’s ambition and his pseudo-idealism. In Rosmersholm, John Gabriel Borkman and The Vikings at Helgeleland, etc., male’s indifferent and dispassionate attitude, a general characteristic of the man of patriarchal mentality in general and in Ibsen’s plays in particular, towards the female’s love and affection, led their female counterparts to the frustrated and marginalised situation. Taking in view the marginalised situation of women from the Palaeolithic period to the modern time, G. B. Shaw rightly says:

Is the cultured gifted man less hardened, less selfish towards the women, than the paleolithic man? Is the woman less sacrificed, less enslaved, less dead spiritually in the one case than in the other? Modern culture, except when it has rotted into mere cynicism, shrieks that the question is an insult. The stone age, anticipating Ibsen’s reply, guffaws heartily and says, “Bravo, Ibsen!” Ibsen’s reply is that the sacrifice of the woman of the stone age to fruitful passions which she herself shares is as nothing compared to the wasting of the modern woman’s soul to

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gratify the imagination and stimulate the genius of the modern artist, poet, and philosopher. He shews us that no degradation ever devised or permitted is as disastrous as this degradation; that through it women die into luxuries for men, and yet can kill them; that men and women are becoming conscious of this; and that what remains to be seen as perhaps the most interesting of all imminent social development is what will happen “when we dead awaken”.96

Irene is the glaring example of the material commodification that women have been made by man in the patriarchal society in various forms i.e. “as a model, and whose soul has died within her because he could never see that she was not only model, but woman.”97

Thus, these three plays Ghosts, Rosmersholm and When We Dead Awaken deal with the marginalisation of their female protagonists; Mrs. Alvig, Rebecca West and Irene respectvely. It is not because they didn’t make any effort for their emancipation that they are subjected to the marginalisd situation. But despite their efforts they could not free themselves entirely from the shackles of the patriarchal social conventions and were somehow crushed in the process. After being deprived of her lover Mrs. Alving remains silent and submissive with his lecherous and voluptuous husband throughout her life and in the end of the play she is left alone crying over her dying son. Rebecca West also asserted her emancipated view of life against Rosmer’s conventional morality. But by the end of the play her ideology fails before Rosmer’s patriarchal view of the world. She has to embrace death with him under his persuasion. Irene has also to commit suicide with Rubek after her life long exploitation by Rubek. Besides these leading female characters who make some futile efforts for their emancipation, other women also had to lead marginalised life because they comparatively accepted their marginalised situation passively.

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References

1. Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex (1949), quoted in Patricia Waugh’s Literary Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 319.

2. Tyson, L. critical theory today, A User-Friendly Guide, sec. Ed. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1999. p. 92.

3. Cherry, C. “The Role of Gender in Metamorphoses and the Book of Genesis”, 14 Sept, 2007. Web. 22 Aug., 2009.

.

4. Ibid.

5. Oilson, Tillie. “Silences,” in Feminist Literary Theory. London: Virago, 1980. p. 5.

6. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women, quoted in Cora Kaplan’s Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. London: Virago, 1986. pp. 37-38.

7. Ibid. p. 38.

8. Dickenson, Emily, quoted in Cora Kaplan’s Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. London: Virago, 1986. p. 82.

9. MacFarlane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Cambridge: CUP, 1990. p. 143.

10. Ibid. p. 201.

11. Sprinchorn, E, ed. Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. p. 337.

12. Mayer, Michael. Ibsen on File. London: Methuen, 1985. p. 449.

13. Downs, B, W. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background. Cambridge: University Press, 1946. p. 161.

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14. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1972. p. 104.

15. Sprinchorn, E. Letters and Speeches. op. cit. p. 288.

16. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 209.

17. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Trans. and ed. William Archer. London: Gerald Duckworth & Com., Ltd. 3 Henrietta Street, 1961. p. 103.

18. Ibid, p. 128.

19. Ibid, p. 137.

20. Ibid, p. 130.

21. Ibid, p. 170.

22. Ibid, pp. 127-28.

23. Ibid, p. 128.

24. Shaw, G. B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. p. 8.

25. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. op. cit. p. 151.

26. Ibid, p. 152.

27. Ibid, p. 163.

28. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. p. 51.

29. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 113.

30. Ibid, p. 114.

31. Ibid, pp. 115-16.

32. Ibid, pp. 124-25.

33. Ibid, pp. 125-26.

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34. Ibid, p. 115.

35. Ibid, p. 122.

36. Ibid, p. 133.

37. Ibid, p. 133.

38. Ibid, p. 134.

39. Ibid, p. 134.

40. Ibid, p. 134.

41. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. pp. 378-79.

42. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 136.

43. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. pp. 193-94.

44. Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover

Publications, inc., 1954. p. 372.

45. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 136.

46. Clurman, Harold. Ibsen, op. cit. p. 144.

47. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 285.

48. Ibid, p. 289.

49. Ibid, p. 295.

50. Ibid, p. 338.

51. Ibid, p. 330.

52. Ibid, p. 338.

53. Ibid, p. 356.

54. Ibid, p. 357.

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55. Ibid, p. 357.

56. Shaw, G. B. The quintessence of Ibsenism, op. cit. p. 105.

57. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. pp. 296-97.

58. Ibid, p. 318.

59. Ibid, pp. 353-54.

60. Ibid, p. 318.

61. Ibid, p. 356.

62. Durbach, Errol. Ibsen: The Romantic. London: Macmillian, 1982. p. 182.

63. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. Op. cit. pp.58-59.

64. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 313.

65. Ibid, p. 314.

66. Ibid, p. 314.

67. Ibid, pp. 314-15.

68. Ibid, pp. 327-28.

69. Ibid, p. 338.

70. Ibid, p. 335.

71. Clurman, H. Ibsen. Op. cit. p. 147.

72. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. p. 173.

73. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Op. cit. p. 338.

74. Ibid, p. 327.

75. Ibid, p. 327.

76. Ibid, pp. 327-28.

77. Ibid, p. 335.

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78. Ibid, p. 341.

79. Ibid, p. 386.

80. Ibid, p. 391.

81. Ibid, p. 393.

82. Ibid, p. 399.

83. Ibid, p. 428.

84. Ibid, p. 436.

85. Ibid, p. 363.

86. Ibid, pp. 367-68.

87. Ibid, pp. 369-70.

88. Ibid, p. 371.

89. Ibid, p. 371.

90. Ibid, p. 370.

91. Ibid, pp. 371-72.

92. Ibid, p. 393.

93. Ibid, p. 410.

94. Ibid, p. 419.

95. Ibid, pp.453-54.

96. Shaw, G. B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Op. cit. p. 139.

97. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. p. 395.

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Chapter III

Gender-Based Marginality

(Emerging Image of Women)

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This chapter deals not only with the issues of women’s marginalisation but also their emerging self-awareness during the 19th century in Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House (1879), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890). In these plays Ibsen has rebelled against the perpetuation of the worn-out and empty traditions, so treasured by the conventional society, and explored the nature of the 19th century women whose desire to link themselves with the mainstream society brought them in conflict with the role assigned to them by that patriarchal society. These plays trace both the constrained social position of women and the emerging messianic consciousness among them. They share themes of choice, marriage, responsibility and freedom. The female characters of these plays have been represented not only as ‘caged women’ but also as full-fledged women, who having recognised their marginalised situation, have successfully struggled against the constrained social factors contributing to their marginalisation. They endeavour to break down the old division of the world into male and female where female section of society has to perform the household drudgery confined in the four walls of the house while male members remain domineering figures and take all decisions both in public as well as domestic spheres. All the three leading female characters, Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House), Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) and Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler), are initially trapped in the intricacies of the male-dominated world but they protested against the patriarchal system of society and finally chose their own way of life because they had messianic consciousness in them. They have at last decided to become responsible and emancipated human beings who are no longer dependent on their male counterparts but on their own.

The play, A Doll’s House is about the marginalization of its female protagonist Nora and her struggle for self-realisation. In search of emancipation she leaves her husband and children behind with the recognition that before all else her first duty is to herself. Like Nora, Ellida Wangel, the central character of the play The Lady from the Sea, does not desert her husband, children and home. She stays back with her husband forever. But her decision to live with her husband is not influenced by her husband or any other outward force. She decides to stay back with him only when she is made free to choose any of the men, husband or lover. It is the decision taken by her free will. She herself determines to take all the responsibility of the household. She

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represents the view that the freedom combined with responsibility leads to the right direction. Thus the play depicts both Ellida’s marginalisation and her emerging image as an independent entity. Hedda Gabler is basically a psychological play. It is the high water-mark in the life of Ibsen as a creative writer. Psychologically Hedda Gabler, the protagonist of the play, has been represented as a case of perverted feminity who has a destructive nature not only for others but for herself as well. But actually Hedda is entangled in a patriarchal system that does not peep into her psychology. Her situation reflects the intention of patriarchy; the intention to sacrifice to its own self-interest, the freedom and individual expression of its most gifted members. Her life is quite empty having no role to play. But she also, like Nora and Ellida, takes her decision by her own free will and, instead of bowing before a man, Judge Brack who wants to exploit her sexually, breaks all the shackles of constraints by committing suicide in a manly manner.

A Doll’s House (1879)

The play, A Doll’s House reflects Nora’s personal experience of being conscious of her marginalised situation. Her struggle to recognise her identity as to who she is and what she stands for is related to her marginalisation. At last she is disillusioned when she realises that she lives in a male-dominated society where women are relegated to the background receiving only negative attention. By the end of the play, she developed the courage of flouting the patriarchal norms and traditions into the winds. In his preliminary notes to A Doll’s House Ibsen had already pointed out that in this play he was going to present the ideological differences between the world of man and that of woman:

There are two kinds of spiritual laws, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another altogether different in women. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man’s law as though she were not the woman but a man . . . A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day which is an exclusively masculine society.1

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Man’s world is the world of all sorts of cruelties, hard-heartedness, logical reasoning, abstract and strict laws, legal rights and conventional patriarchal duties while women’s world is that of compassion, compromise, emotions and human values. Nora, the protagonist of the play, forges a letter with the sole intention of saving her husband’s life thinking that human life is above all laws that are formed for their convenience and safeguard but her husband, Torvald Helmer, judges everything from man’s point of view and in his world to forge a name, with any intention, is a heinous crime and therefore she should suffer for his patriarchal attitude.

Apart from being inspired by the current women’s movement, Ibsen was directly and profoundly influenced to write this play by the real happenings in the life of his protégée, Laura Kieler, who was a successful Norwegian writer. Ibsen called her “the lark”, the first trait in common with Nora. In 1876 both Laura and her husband, Victor Kieler went to meet Ibsen in Munich. Ibsen was much impressed by their happy relationship. He called their ménage a “doll’s house”. Later when Victor was seriously struck with tuberculosis, his doctor advised him a tour to a warmer climate. They were too poor to afford the expenses so Laura incurred the debt through a forgery without his permission as he had a phobia against borrowing money. When Victor recovered from illness and came to know about the forgery, he demanded a legal separation from her for the crime. She was then sent to an asylum for treatment of her insanity. Being shocked by her misfortune he says:

She has committed a crime and she is proud of it, because she did it for love for her husband and to save his life. But the husband with his conventional view of honour, stands on the side of the law and looks at the affair with male eyes.2

The similarity between the life Laura and that of Nora is too close to be ignored. Even Laura reproached Ibsen for the exploitation of her personal tragedy in his play. No doubt Ibsen took the story of Laura’s life but his craftsmanship infused life and vigour in the bare happenings of her life and made it his own.

The setting and the locale of all three acts of the play is the Helmer’s “room, comfortably and tastefully, but not expensively, furnished.”3 From the very beginning it is noticed that Nora Helmer, the protagonist of the play, has to go through the ordeal of sufferings and humiliations due to the man-made system of society. She is treated

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like a pet bird. Torvald Helmer addresses her using humiliating words as “twittering lark,” “squirrel,” “featherbrain,” “little spendthrift” and so on. It becomes evident at the very outset how much Nora, like all other women, is dependent on her husband for everything. She implores him for some money only when she finds him in a cheerful mood. He offers her money like alms, making her realise that she has no money of her own, “It’s sweet little lark, but it gets through a lot of money. No one would believe how much it costs a man to keep such a little bird as you.”4 Whenever she goes out of home, she has to give an account of what she did and where she went in his absence. Threatening her with his finger he asks her:

Hasn’t the little sweet tooth been playing pranks to-day?

Didn’t she just look in at the confectioner’s?

Not to sip a little jelly?

Hasn’t she even nibbled a macaroon or two? 5 Women are socially programmed in a way that they themselves think that they are fit for nothing serious. Even Nora’s close friend, Mrs. Linden who has come to visit Torvald in search of some settled employment, thinks that Nora is just a child and she has nothing to do with the troubles and anxieties of the real world. Nora realises it and tells Mrs. Linden that “You’re like the rest. You all think I’m fit for nothing really serious . . .”6 This kind of general feeling among women creates inferiority complex and discourages them in practical life. This is one of the underlying traits of the marginalised people. Nora also shares these traits. She is afraid of doing or saying anything boldly before her husband. She can’t eat macaroons before her husband because they are forbidden for her by him. Torvald does not like seeing niddle work so she forbids Mrs. Linden sewing before her husband. She can’t speak loudly when Torvald is present there. When she confides her secret to Mrs. Linden of borrowing the money to save his husband without his permission, she is afraid of her husband as an animal is frightened before a butcher and therefore appeals her not to talk about it to anybody. She says, “Hush! Not so loud. Only think, if Torvald were to hear! He mustn’t_____not for worlds! No one must know about it. Christiana_____no one but you.”7

Nora is helpless and frustrated like a caged bird in the presence of her husband. All her decision-making potentialities are curbed by Torvald. Whenever she tries to

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exercise her decision power independently, she is discouraged and shockingly humiliated by him. He has monopoly both over the domestic and public matters. This is why Nora didn’t disclose the fact of incurring the debt because, as she tells Mrs. Linden that when he was lying seriously ill in the bed, she once mentioned of borrowing the money to save his own life, but he was stormed with rage not only because he was against the practice of borrowing the money but because as he himself confesses that, “it was his duty as a husband not to yield to my whims and fancies_____so he called them.”8 Torvald was deeply-rooted in the conviction that it would be against the patriarchal norms and values to concede to a woman’s proposal whether she is his wife or any other woman. He considers them inferior beings who don’t deserve to be shared in important matters. Another reason for not confessing her guilt till now is that she thinks that this exposition would break up their years long conjugal relationship not because she has committed the heinous crime but because as she herself says:

How painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly self-respect, to know that he owed anything to me! It would upset the relation between us; our beautiful, happy home would never be again what it is.9

Thus in a patriarchal society a woman has no importance; she is utilised as doll, a plaything for the entertainment of man. That Nora is just a plaything, an inanimate material commodity for the recreation of Torvald, is evident when Mrs. Linden asks Nora whether she would never reveal to Helmer the secret of borrowing the money and Nora, very thoughtfully and half-smilingly confesses:

Yes, some time perhaps_____many, many years hence, when I’m not so pretty. You mustn’t laugh at me! Of course I mean when Torvald is not so much in love with me as he is now; when it does not amuse him any longer to see me dancing about, and dressing up and acting. Then it might be well to have something in reserve.10

Act II also opens in the same room of the Helmers with the conversation between Nora and Anna, the nurse of the Helmers’ children. She had to leave her children after her separation from her husband against whom she complains, “That wicked man did nothing for me.”11 With the appearance of Mrs. Linden Nora is

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engaged with her and their conversation reflects that Torvald had treated Nora as his sole property. He loves the charming and beautiful physique of her wife. He has nothing to do with her tastes, likes and dislikes. She tells Mrs. Linden that:

He wants to have me all himself, as he says. When we were first married, he was almost jealous if I even mentioned any of my old friends at home; so naturally I gave up doing it.12

That Nora’s decision and appeal has no significance for Torvald is seen in the dismissal of Nils Krogstad from the post of a clerk in the bank of which Torvald has been appointed the manager. He has been Torvald’s old school fellow whose coarse jokes and rashness he does not like. This is the man from whom Nora borrowed money by committing forgery. Now when Krogstad pressurises Nora (in Act I) to persuade Torvald not to dismiss him otherwise he would expose her forgery, she puts good word for Krogstad to maintain his post. But he can’t alter his resolution not so much that Krogstad is incompetent for his post but primarily because she pleads his cause and:

It’s already known at the Bank that I intend to dismiss Krogstad. If it were now reported that the new manager let himself be turned round his wife’s little finger______.13Actually he loves his fake prestige even at the cost of his wife.

Nora feels lonely and isolated in her home. She confides her hidden longings and fullness of her heart to Dr. Rank, their family doctor and Torvald’s close friend. She is afraid of doing or saying anything that does not suit his whims. Act II closes with the heightened anxiety of Nora as Krogstad, after having been dismissed by Torvald, has dropped a letter into the mail box of Torvald with a note that explains the forgery of Nora.

Act III also shows the same possessiveness of Torvald about Nora. Torvald thinks that Nora has been made for him only as he says about her, “loveliness that is mine, mine only, wholly and entirely mine?”14 But the action of the play reflects that he can’t jeopardise his cosy and easy-going life and the manly self-respect for her sake. Although to persuade her to entertain him fully, he boasts in a hyperbolic manner, “Nora, I often wish some danger might threaten you, that I might risk body and soul, and everything, everything for your dear sake.”15 But shortly after the

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disclosure of her involvement in forging a name, his expression of hyperbolic love for Nora discloses the position and status Nora has in his heart. Instead of giving a thought to save her life, he calls her with different bad names, “A hypocrite, a liar,_____worse, worse_____a criminal . . . ” who has “no religion, nor morality, no sense of duty” and “an unprincipled woman.”16

But when the second letter from Krogstad clears Nora from all the charges, he cries, “I am saved! Nora, I am saved!”17 and resumes his former position. He now contrives to make her realise that she is helpless and rudderless without the support of the protector, a man. He tries to pacify her to keep under his control by saying, “Only lean on me; I will counsel you, and guide you. I should be no true man if this very womanly helplessness did not make you doubly dear in my eyes.”18

Actually like all other men he feels pride at her helplessness because this is the way by which a man dominates a woman easily. Nora leads the life of a marginalised slave whom the master should always provide proper guidance and if the slave is prone to any transgression, he can reprove him and then forgive at his will. This feeling of forgiveness gives him a sense of superiority. Nora’s master, her husband, berates her for any misdemeanour and repeats the word forgiveness for the satisfaction of his superiority and dominance:

Here you are safe; here I can shelter you like a hunted dove whom I have saved from the claws of the hawk . . . There is something indescribably sweet and soothing to a man in having forgiven his wife_____honestly forgiven her, from the bottom of his heart. She becomes his property in a double sense. She is as though born again; she has become, so to speak, at once his wife and his child.19

The fact is that Torvald is programmed socially in such a way as he thinks that a woman should only be petted and dotted with the romantic caress. He never discusses with her any serious and important matter. On the other hand she has to respect every decision taken by him. He always talks about how lovely she looks to him. If we go into the depth of the matter, we find that he never loves her. For most of the time he either embraces her and admires her youthful beauty or admonishes her for any misconduct. Finally when Torvald’s hypocrisy has developed in her a messianic

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consciousness, she, sitting in front of her husband for the first time, raises the curtain from the reality of her position in the household:

We have been married eight years. Does it not strike you that this is the first time we two, you and I, man and wife, have talked together seriously? . . . During eight whole years and more_____ever since the day we first met_____we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.20

Just as one feels rejoiced and exalted at having expensive and attention striking material commodity at his disposal, in the same way Torvald feels lucky in having such a charming wife at his disposal. Nora reveals his actual feelings, “You have never loved me. You only thought it amusing to be in love with me.”21 Now Nora realises that she was so much mesmerised in the intricacies of the male-dominated social system that she has lost her identity and real existence in the sense that she has no likes or dislikes, no taste, no recreation, no desire, no need of her own. She has shaped and cast her whole personality in accordance with Torvald Helmer’s likes and dislikes. Everything that is abhorrent and loathsome to him is also the same for her. If she does anything that Torvald does not like, she does it secretly as if she were committing a serious crime for which she would be punished or most probably ousted from the house if caught red-handed. She set everything in the house according to the taste of Torvald and at one place she even says that it gives her pleasure, “to have things tasteful and pretty in the house, exactly as Torvald likes it.”22 Through the character of Nora, Ibsen seems to portray the overall image and position of women-folk in the society. They are appropriated to efface their identity and personality or to cast it in accordance with the whims and fancies of their husband, not only according to their husband’s but to their father’s and brothers’ also who are considered to be the source of their survival before their marriage in the patriarchal society.

Society is not considered the ambit of their thought. They are kept aloof from the bare realities of the society which teach a person the practical aspect of the world. Nora is cabined in the prison of the romantic atmosphere of his home where she spends her time in the domestic drudgery, in looking after the children and catering to her husband all the time. She has no idea of world outside the four walls of her house, not because she is unable to understand the world but because she is programmed to think that she is not the part of the society. Dr. Rank, a regular visitor in their home,

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once very contemptuously asks her whether she has any idea of what “society” is, her reply is, “What do I care for your society?’23

Exquisite art of Henrik Ibsen lies in depicting an individual to represent the entire section of society to which the character belongs. Nora is really a typical character who represents very successfully the marginalised condition of women folk from their fathers’ home to their husbands where they take their last breath. The first lesson of the patriarchal traditions, norms and values is inculcated in their tender minds in their fathers’ home. This kind of upbringing has an everlasting repercussion on the lives of these women. Nora’s father, himself a rake, treated her just like a doll. She had no connection with the outer world of free creatures. In fact, “The world at large from which she was thus shut off hardly existed for her hence everyone but those in her immediate circle are only strangers.”24

Since her childhood she wants to breathe freely in a society that hears the calls of every one without any discrimination of gender but her sense of freedom was hampered. She craves to pour out the fullness of her heart to somebody who can hear what is fermenting within her soul. She tells Dr, Rank:

When I was a girl, of course, I loved papa best. But it always delighted me to steal into the servant’s room. In the first place, they never lectured me, and, in the second, it was such fun to hear them talk.25

When she entered Torvald’s home as his wife, she faced worse situation. She had gone straight from her father’s tight control at home to that of her husband taking along Anna, her nurse maid to underline the fact that she has never reached maturity. She has never developed a sense of self-dependence. Now it is at her husband’s home that she is disillusioned and becomes aware of her marginalised situation both at the home of her father and that of her husband:

While I was at home with father, he used to tell me all his opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others I said nothing about them, because he wouldn’t have liked it. He used to call me his doll-child, and played with me I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your (Torvald’s) house . . .

She further clarifies:

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I mean I passed from father’s hands to yours. You arranged everything according to your taste; and I got the same tastes as you; or I pretended to . . . I don’t know which both ways, perhaps; sometimes one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it now, I seem to have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong. It is your fault that my life has come to nothing.26

By now Nora fully comprehends Torvald’s mind set. She understands that Torvald is deeply rooted in the traditions of the patriarchal system .When he does not understand; she determines to desert her husband and their children. Torvald calls her unreasonable and ungrateful wife. At his great surprise she replies that she has never been happy in his house. She has been a thing of merry-making and a source of entertainment for others. Even now Torvald thinks that being a man, it is his duty and right to educate and train his wife to be obedient and submissive. But now she denounces the sanctity of the age long institution of marriage and questions her relation to an alien society which recognises only man’s world. She does not bother about what the people would say about her for flouting the holiest duties towards her husband and her children. She understands that these so called holiest duties are nothing but the creation of men for their own convenience. Women are bound to their marginalised condition by the trammels of these traditional duties and rites. She recognises that the greatest and the holiest duties of a person are towards her own self. The following argument between Torvald and Nora, when she has finally decided to desert his household, reflects Torvald’s traditional patriarchal attitude and the messianic consciousness in Nora:

Helmer. This is monstrous! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this way?

Nora. What do you consider my holiest duties?

Helmer. Do I need to tell you that? Your duties to your husband and your children.

Nora. I have other duties equally sacred.

Helmer. Impossible! What duties do you mean?

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Nora. My duties towards myself.

Helmer. Before all else you are a wife and mother.

Nora. That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are______or at least that I should try to become one. I know that most people agree with you, Torvald, and that they say in books. But henceforth I can’t be satisfied with what most people say, and what is in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to get clear about them.27

Torvald persuades her to stay back in the name of religion but Nora understands that the religion has been interpreted by men and hence is tilted in their favour. Most of the authoritative personalities of religion have been or are males, not females. When Torvald asks her if she has no religion, she replies:I know nothing but what Pastor Hansen told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I get away from all this and stand alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see whether what he taught me is right, or, at any rate, whether it is right for me.28

In this regard G. B. Shaw, considering the typical situation of a woman, projected in Nora by Ibsen, rightly says, “Unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law and to everyone but herself, she can’t emancipate herself” 29

John Gassner rightly points out about the suppression of Nora in Torvald’s house and the necessity of consciousness to desert her husband and children:

In A Doll’s House he addressed himself to woman’s place in the home, to which he attributed all her limitations. According to her creator, Nora was a failure as a personality because she had never been allowed to develop one. First her father sheltered her, then her husband; and neither of these men had allowed her any opportunities to acquire a broad education or even to master the elementary realities of the social world. ....Then suddenly the complications that ensued from her ignorance awakened her to the necessity of learning something about the world at large. This she could only do if she left her husband who had locked her in a “doll’s house” where she was expected to be pretty and playful, submissive and mindless.30

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Ibsen infused in Nora the courage of undertaking an innovative step. She threw down the gauntlet and the people sticking blindly to the age old patriarchal traditions of not allowing women to have an independent and free status, hurled poisonous abuses upon Nora. She was lambasted for taking audacious step of jilting her husband and children. She was denigrated as an immoral being. This is so because Nora doesn’t simply follow the beaten path of patriarchal system but dares go against the current ideals that were actually spoiling the lives of women by compelling them to relinquish to the situation of the time passively. The play explored and opened new horizons for the forthcoming playwrights and audience. It created combustion in the theatrical world through its revolutionary and innovative ideas. It crumbled down the sanctity of the institution of marriage pointing out its shortcomings and the restriction imposed by it on women. Its heroine, Nora, ushered in a new era in which the possibilities of women’s emancipation were openly and frankly explored and debated among the thoughtful people. It blew the bugle of freedom and equality. According to Michael Egan:

Ibsen’s drama is, in short, a plea for woman’s right______not for her right to vote and prescribe medicine, but for her right to exist as a responsible member of society, ‘a being breathing thoughtful breath,’ the compliment and equal of man.31

A Doll’s House was actually much ahead of its time, not facile to be comprehended by the conservative minds. The questions raised by Ibsen on the predicament of women’s marginalised position were not going to be accepted by them. Only a very few after Ibsen could grasp the potential outputs of his plays in general and of A Doll’s House in particular:

For an audience composed of persons who think deeply on such questions as the position of the married women in the family, and on the finer shades of the problem how women should be educated for the responsibilities of marriage, few plays can be more attractive. Those who have read the play beforehand are also able to grasp the whole effort that Ibsen has made and appreciate the literary art as point succeeds point in the characters of husband and wife. But those who go to the theatre to while away a couple of hours and to be amused A Doll’s House is not the play they want.32

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Halvdan Koht, one of the Norwegian biographers of Ibsen, said about the bomb-shell effect of the play on the social conventions of the time. Edmund Gosse provides a very fair comparison between the role of women in history and the drastically changed role initiated by Nora in A Doll’s House:

In the dramas and romances of modern Scandinavia, and especially in those of Ibsen and Bjornson, the function of women had been clearly defined. She was to be the helper, the comforter, the inspirer, the guerdon of man in his struggle towards loftier forms of existence. When man fell on the upward path, woman’s hand was to be stretched to raise him; when man went wandering away on the ill and savage courses, woman was to wait patiently over her spinning wheel, ready to welcome and to pardon the returning prodigal; when the eyes of man grew weary in watching for the morning-star, it rays were to flash through the crystal tears of women. But in A Doll’s House he confronted his audience with a new conception. Woman was no longer to be the shadow following man, or if you will, a skin-leka attending man, but an independent entity, with purposes and moral function of her own. Ibsen’s favourite theory of the domination of the individual had hitherto been confined to one sex; here he carries it over boldly to the other.33

The Lady from the Sea (1888)

Like A Doll’s House, the play The Lady from the Sea (1888) deals with the marginalisation and the subsequent messianic consciousness in the female protagonist Ellida Wangel. Like Nora, Ellida Wangel also became conscious of her marginalised position in her husband’s home and therefore declared to be an independent entity. The play is a fantasy play, as delicate as a fairy tale with the little sea-maiden, of Hans Anderson’s imagination.

While depicting the character of his female protagonist, Ellida Wangel, Ibsen had two models in his mind: Camilla Collett, a very strong and dauntless lady, fighting for women’s emancipation, who is considered to be the champion of women’s cause, and Anna Magdalene Thoresen, another bold lady, step mother of his wife and a well-

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known authoress who had crossed a mysterious love affair with an Icelander just like Ellida who was attracted towards a seaman. In his early drafts of the play Ibsen called his protagonist, Thora which suggests that he was directly influenced by Magdalene Thoresen. Ellida’s habit of taking daily sea bath by swimming in the fjords also reminds Thoresen’s habit of taking sea bath daily even in her seventies. Like Thoresen she is not of a passive mind ready to accept anything against her will. She is a young woman full of an aimless and unbridled yearning. She wants the freedom of the open and boundless sea. The dangers and the mystery of the unknown and the far-away preoccupy her adventurous spirit. That is why she is called “mermaid”. Her magnetic fascination for the sea and its boundless magnitude and demonic energy has a noticeable symbolic significance. Actually she is bored and feels chained in the corner of her husband’s house founded on the patriarchal norms and values where women are supposed not to step out of the threshold of their home. When she appears on the scene for the first time she exclaims, “Heavens! The water here is never fresh. It is so tepid and lifeless. Ugh! The fjord water here is sick.”34

The play was set in a remote town of Northern Norway amid the wilds of the fjords and the sea. The play opens in Dr. Wangel’s house. Ellida Wangel, the protagonist of the play, is the daughter of a light house keeper. She is married to Dr. Wangel, a “middle aged” widower who is much older than her, and already has two daughters, Hilde and Bollete, by her first wife. Ellida appears to be a very strange character whose mind and heart remains outside the home. Her husband also does not help her to mix up with other members of the household. He makes her feel isolated even in her home. He offers her no privilege, no duty and no responsibility to perform. The only child born to her expires only after four or five months of his birth. Since then she suffers a mysterious depression and helplessness. The strangeness and the uniqueness of her character are reflected in her habit, “a plunge into the sea is a sheer delight to her.”35 She is quite indifferent to the household and the atmosphere around her. Although as a dutiful wife she loves her husband without any infidelity yet she experiences a strange and “the irresistible home-sickness for the sea,”36and its creatures as Arnholm, a schoolmaster, points out, “You have a peculiar relation to the sea and to everything that belongs to it.”37 How much loathsome attitude she has for Dr. Wangel’s house is revealed in her conversation with Arnholm, “We don’t decorate like this every day, you may be sure. Ugh! How suffocating it is under this roof.”38 We

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can easily discern that Ellida leads a marginalised life even in her own home. She even confessed to her husband that her thoughts were somewhere else.

Act II discloses the fact of her disappointment and dislocation in her home. Ellida is entangled in a bewildered situation dividing herself between two men whose thoughts and ways of living are poles apart. She is married to Dr. Wangel and loves him out of duty as a wife but the memories of the seaman, a sailor, with whom she fell in a mysterious love, are never effaced from her memory. She experiences a peculiar disappointment and depression after the death of her baby particularly because the child’s eyes were like those of the sailor. Whenever Dr. Wangel proposes her a visit to the sea, the idea makes her tremble. She frankly confesses her affair with the seaman to her husband. She tells him that one day, before her marriage, her lover, the sailor, whose name, as he told Ellida, was ‘Friman’. He visited Ellida and told her that he had stabbed his captain in self-defence and was forced to leave. He took their rings (Ellida’s and his own) and threw them along with a key ring into the depth of the sea and told that they were married to the sea and departed for America.

Later in Act III, Friman returns to claim Ellida. She is frightened when he implores her to accompany him. Dr. Wangel tells him that he would not let her go with him and he would defend her against him by exercising his power and privilege as a husband. Both of them claim their rights over Ellida making her an object of bargaining. Ellida’s sense of existence as a human being is aroused. As in Act V, she tells her husband that he can keep her with him by force and power but he can’t get hold of her desires and thoughts. First the stranger and then her husband offer her the freedom of choice. Both of them are bowed down before her strong will power and determination. Dr. Wangel tells her that she can choose to remain with him or to accompany the sailor with full freedom. Ellida didn’t expect such kind of transformation in the attitude of her husband who was deeply rooted in the patriarchal conventions. She was taken aback to hear this and seeks an explanation whether he meant that by heart. He replies that he did that for the sake of true love he has been nourishing in his heart for her. Ellida is now free to choose any of the two men exercising her own free will. She finally decides to stay back with her husband willingly without any compulsion, what so ever, and the sailor leaves for good. Actually the freedom for which she has been craving for since long is ultimately achieved. She tells Arnholm that she has now become a land creature and she no

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longer longs for the boundless seas because she has now found the boundless freedom on the land itself. She now agrees with Ballested and Dr. Wangel that human beings can acclimatise themselves in prefect freedom and responsibility.

Since her childhood Ellida has been kept away from the mainstream of the society where all participate in the social activities and which keeps the social beings together. But Ellida is so much ignorant of the social norms and rites that even after her marriage she didn’t understand the social formalities of divorce or any other legal proceedings leading to divorce. She simply wanted to get free from her marginalised position in his house. When Dr. Wangel mentions about their legal separation, she very innocently says:

My dear, you don’t understand me at all! It’s not formalities like these that I care about. Such outward things don’t really matter, I think. What I want is that we should release each other, of our own free will . . . What I beg and implore of you, Wangel, is the most important. Set me free! Give me back my complete freedom!”39

In spite of the fact that Dr. Wangel and Ellida have been living together for six years, still Ellida experiences marginalised situation in his home because of her isolation as Dr. Wangel has assigned her no responsibility of the household. He never tries to fill the emptiness of her life. All the management of the household is handled by his elder daughter, Bollete. Ellida has no hand in running the household. She lives there as an outsider. Commenting on the deplorable situation of Ellida in the house G.B. Shaw rightly says:

She has no responsibility, no care, and no trouble. In other words, she is an idle, helpless, utterly dependent article of luxury. A man turns red at the thought of being such a thing; but he thoughtlessly accepts a pretty and fragile-looking woman in the same position as a charming natural picture. The lady from the sea feels an indefinite want in her life.40

Like other members of the household she is never allowed to participate in the activities of the house. He never tries to know the difficulties and problems that Ellida faces in her own house. When he admits that he could not understand her completely, Ellida retorts, “And that is why you must set me free! Free me from every bond to

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you______and yours. I am not what you took me for.”41 In utter helplessness and frustration she says:

And so I have nothing to help me to resist. Here, at home, there is not one single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel. The children are no mine_____their hearts, I mean______never have been. When I go, if I do go, either with him to-night, or to Skjoldviken to-morrow, I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give about anything whatsoever. I am absolutely rootless in your house______I have been absolutely outside everything from the very first.42

When Wangel says that she herself didn’t want to have anything at her disposal, she says, “No, no, I didn’t. I neither wanted nor didn’t want it. I simply left things just as I found them the day I came here. It is you, and no one else, who wanted it.”43 Now like Torvald Helmer in A Doll’s House, Wangel tries to persuade her to stay back with him but there is no force that can bind her to him. There is nothing which she could call her own, “nothing to draw me towards what should have been the strongest possession of us both.”44

Many conservatives like Ailling Lyngstrand, deeply rooted in the age old traditions of patriarchy, hold the view that women have no respect and honour of their own. They owe their respect to their husband. Like Lyngstrand, Wangel also holds the same conventional attitude about women’s dependence on man. Ellida implores him again and again to grant her freedom but he is naturalised to the patriarchal system of society in such a way that he, like Torvald, thinks that it is his duty and right to hold his wife under restraint in his house whether she wants to live there or not as Dr. Wangel himself says, “I exercise my right and my duty to protect you.”45 Ellida remains frightened in the house of Dr. Wangel. He knows very well that apparently there is no reason for it yet he never endeavours to peep into her soul as to where the real terror lies.

Ibsen usually deals with the problem of the institution of marriage in his plays. It is the main contributing factor in the marginalisation of women. In The Lady from the Sea he once again takes it up to show its role in the marginalization of Ellida. If the couple are not wedded with their mutual consent, it becomes a kind of prison for

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the dissenting party and generally women are forced to marry against their consent. It often pushes them to the margin of the society. Even if a woman is married with her consent, it depends upon her husband whether he lets her live in freedom or in prison. Here Ellida didn’t marry Wangel out of her free will. She regrets, “And it’s quite natural that it could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.”46 When Wangel complains that he didn’t force her to enter the marriage contract and he alone is not to be blamed, Ellida admits that she herself is also no less responsible for her misfortune than her husband. Ellida’s crime lies in being untrue to herself by contracting a marriage of convenience:

Ellida. Yes, we are (lying); or at least we suppressed the truth. For the truth_____the pure and simple truth is_____that you came out there and bought me.

Wangel. Bought_____did you say bought!

Ellida. Oh, I wasn’t a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain. Sold myself to you.

Wangel. (looks at her full of pain). Ellida, have you really the heart to call it that?

Ellida. But is there any other name for it? You could no longer bear the emptiness of your house. You were on the look-out for a new wife.

Wangel. And a new mother for the children, Ellida.

Ellida. Yes. That too, perhaps, as well, although you didn’t in the least know if I were fit to be a mother to them. Why, you had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted, and so______

Wangel. Yes, you can call it what you like.

Ellida. And I, on my side_____why, I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was perfectly natural I should accept the bargain, when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.47

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It is clear that Ellida didn’t accept him by her choice although she was of the view that “Better the meanest work_____better the poorest life_____but from one’s own choice.”48 She further clarifies the situation when he says, “But I did not come to your house out of my own free will. That is the whole thing.”49 Their marriage was “really no marriage”, but it was a kind of contract. The moment Ellida entered the marriage bond, the process of her marginalisation began. She is relegated to the background in the household management and is consequently deprived of active participation in the social ceremonies and responsibilities in which other members of the family actively participate. Many critics hold Ellida responsible for entering the marriage contract by herself. But it must be kept in mind that first, she was alone, helpless and confused, and had no other option but to choose Wangel for a secure and comfortable life, and secondly, it is possible that like almost all patriarchal men, her father or the men around her, might not have let her listen to the practical lesson of the world. Being ignorant of the patriarchal ways of life she might not have achieved the required maturity and adequate self-dependence to make her decision. That is why she was unable to understand herself and to apprehend the consequences that might follow after the marriage. According to Ibsen a true marriage is not the work of a priest or a judge but it is the mutual surrender of two independently yet harmoniously developed personalities.

Considering Ellida an incompetent and inferior being for any proper judgement Dr. Wangel claims that he must exercise his right and power as a husband in protecting and guiding her. That is why he deprives her of any duty and responsibility. It is invariably the encroachment and violation of her freedom and individual personality. He didn’t require a life-partner or a companion but someone who could look after his children and could satisfy his emotional appetite. It is actually the patriarchal contrivance that women, whether consciously or unconsciously, having been deprived of responsibility and the cares of the practical world can conveniently be relegated to the margin of the society. But in later 19th century women were gradually emerging from the ignorance of their marginalisation to the recognition of their true place in the society. Seemingly Ellida is possessed by the sea with all its accompanying symbolism but in fact she is constantly obsessed with the idea of freedom. She ultimately puts her husband’s mundane values to test against her longing and dreams of being free. When the stranger returns, she declines her husband’s help

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and protection for making choice for herself because she thinks that choice must be free from any external compulsion. Again and again Ellida demands her absolute freedom. Initially he seems to be unflinching in his decision and says that he would make the choice and judgement on her behalf. But then the deep seated desire to raise herself from her marginalised condition becomes stronger in her heart. She is not going to surrender before her husband’s patriarchal persuasions. When both Ellida and her husband are waiting for the stranger to come, Dr. Wangel persuades Ellida to speak to the stranger on her behalf but now she is not prepared to make any compromise. She declares, “I must speak to him myself. I must make my choice of my own free will, you see.”50 At this Dr. Wangel asserts his patriarchal authority, “You have no choice, Ellida. You have no right to choose______no right without my permission.”51

This attitude of Dr. Wangel makes Ellida assert her self-respect and her sense of identity as a human being. She now expresses her dislike for his traditional views regarding the power and right of a husband:

You can never prevent the choice, neither you nor anyone else. You can forbid me to go away with him_____if I should choose to do that. You can keep me here by force_____against my will. That you can do. But that I should choose, choose from my very soul_____choose him, and not you_____in case I had to choose that way_____this you cannot prevent.52

Again when the stranger returns and offers her the option to exercise her free will, Dr. Wangel insists upon his right to choose for his wife but Ellida again asserts her individuality:

You can indeed keep me here! You have the means and the power to do it. And you intend to do it. But my mind______all my thoughts, all the longings and desires of my soul______you cannot bind these! They will rush and express out into the unknown that I was created for, and that you have kept from me! 53

At last when Dr. Wangel fully understands that Ellida can’t be held in check and she is gradually slipping out of his hand and is gradually emerging as an independent individual capable of taking her decision without his interference, he has

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to relinquish his patriarchal attitude and comes back to the humanitarian consideration and allows her to take her decision freely. He says:

Now you can choose your path in perfect_____perfect freedom . . . But now_____now you are completely free of me and mine. Now your own true life may resume its real bent again, for now you can choose of your own free will, and on your own responsibility, Ellida.54

Ellida is astonished to hear such words from her husband. This is the thing that she has been craving for since long. She never expected such a drastic transformation in his husband’s conventional attitude. Consequently an unexpected transformation also takes place in Ellida’s attitude. She now decides to stay back with him. This restoration by Wangel of her freedom and responsibility, the two contributing factors in linking her to the other members of the family belonging to the mainstream society, has brought about a positive change in her mind and decision. The mystery, why she wanted to get away from Dr. Wangel and seek refuge in the open and boundless sea, its creatures and Friman, is now unfolded. In this regard G.W. Knight rightly points out that “The sea as expanse symbolises freedom.”55 Now when she has gained freedom, the sea and the stranger seem to have no magic power over her any longer, Friman is now no more than a dead man. When Wangel says that her mind is like the sea “it ebbs and flows”, she replies, “Ah, don’t you understand that the change came_____was bound to come when I could choose in freedom?”56 Now Wangel is no longer confused and comes to know that Ellida was actually yearning to live a free and independent life, the life that brings her back to the mainstream society. He admits:

I am beginning to understand you little by little. You think and conceive in pictures______in visible figures. Your longing and aching for the sea, your attraction towards this strange man, these were expression of an awakening and growing desire for freedom_____nothing else.57

There is a difference of opinions amongst the critics about Ellida’s true emancipation and liberty. Some of them believe that Ellida has lost her right of freedom by surrendering herself to Dr. Wangel, her husband because it is generally believed that liberty for Ellida meant the boundless self-assertion, the freedom of the sea creatures and the sea itself. But it should be borne in mind that at this turning point in their relationship freedom assumed the meaning of personal responsibility. The

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question that arises is whether true emancipation lies in boundless self-assertion or in adopting responsibility, or in the harmonious combination of both, which Ellida adopts. The play presents Ibsen’s central doctrine that without responsibility there can be no valid meaning in freedom. Ellida is one of the best examples of this doctrine of Ibsen. Wangel no longer treats her wife as his sole possession but as a free human being. In fact freedom combined with responsibility brings about the change in Ellida.

In The Lady from the Sea Ibsen does not simply present only Ellida’s marginality and her emergence but he also presents the marginalised position and the consequent consciousness in case of Dr. Wangel’s elder daughter, Bollete who undergoes almost the same situation. Initially Dr. Wangel had promised to send her for higher studies but after the death of his wife, all the management of the household came under her supervision. She has also to take care of her younger sister Hilde. Now Dr. Wangel changes his mind. The arrival of Arnholm, her earlier tutor, already in his middle age, provides her a ray of hope. Undoubtedly Bollete loves her father and sister but she can’t sacrifice her individuality and her whole life for the sake of others because after all, like Nora, she too has duty towards herself. Bollete’s marriage of convenience with her tutor is meant for her self-development because Arnholm had promised her to fulfil all her hopes and dreams of higher education. Like Ellida, she too shapes to acclimatise herself as a free yet responsible individual. Thus Dr. Wangel, with his conventional patriarchal bent of mind, is responsible for the marginalised condition of both these women. For his self-interest and benefit he keeps his wife away from all duties and responsibilities so that she remains ignorant and unaware of the ways of the world and thus remains unable to recognise her marginalised situation. On the other hand, he imposes the responsibility of the entire management of the house upon his daughter against her will and keeps her so much busy that she doesn’t have enough time to think about herself. But finally both these ladies are enlightened. It is their self-realisation that leads them to their emancipation.

Hedda Gabler (1890)

When the play, Hedda Gabler was first published in 1890, it received more uniformly negative response than any of Ibsen’s plays. Many critics, including some

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of Scandinavians, resented against the play because they thought that Ibsen was condemning the entire society by presenting Hedda Gabler, its protagonist, who, in spite of being a woman, does not accept the conventional duties and responsibilities assigned to a wife and mother by the bourgeois patriarchal society. They were alarmed by the depressing atmosphere which the dramatist had created in the play. Although in his notes to the play Ibsen had already stated his purpose that it will deal with something which is against all conventions and against all those traditional beliefs that are acceptable to conscious minds.

When Ibsen was living in Munich, a woman named Alverg, who committed suicide by swallowing poison, left a deep impression upon his mind. The character of Ibsen’s protagonist, Hedda Gabler, bears a remarkable similarity with that of Alverg. The dramatic action of the play represents the final days of the life of Hedda. When the play opens, Hedda has been living a secluded life for the last two days making a futile effort to live a life that she most despises. At last the play reaches its catastrophe by the death of its protagonist, Hedda Gabler, through suicide.

The play takes place about thirty years before its date of composition. Ibsen himself remarked that it was the time when women were not allowed to play any role apart from marriage and motherhood where they were kept protected and safe confined to their home. This protection provided by men kept them away from the realities of life. Hedda experiences the same situation. She shuns everything that is painful and ugly. But Ibsen didn’t tread the beaten path. He inspired women to rise from their marginalised position. In this play, to use G. W. Knight’s words, “We recognise a typical Ibsen set up: a breaking-free from conventional restriction, advanced thoughts and a woman-inspirer acting on a man of ability if not genius.”58

The entire play takes place in Tesman’s room and in a smaller room adjacent to it in a villa in a prestigious western district of Christiana (now Oslo), Norway. George Tesman and Hedda Gabler are newlyweds. They have just returned from their six months honeymoon. Hedda is the daughter of an aristocrat general and is hard to please. Tesman is an aspiring young academician, reliable but not brilliant. Since the beginning of the play it is commonly held that Hedda is pregnant to which she denies with contempt. It is noticeable from the very beginning that Hedda feels restlessness because she is unable to fit herself in the environment of Tesman’s house. She

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despises and protests against the traditions and values of the patriarchal society which leads a woman to a marginal situation as has been correctly observed by Harold Clurman:

One may also remark a stage direction which has Hedda pace about the room, clench her hand as though in depression______a nervous trait very much like, though sharper than, Ellida’s restlessness in The Lady from the Sea.59

Actually Hedda is married to the world she is not accustomed to. The conversation between George Tesman and Juliana, George’s maiden aunt, reveals that it is a morality play in which virtue wins over the evil. In spite of being asked by her husband to be kind Hedda behaves in a rude manner with Aunt Juliana who is the paragon of self-sacrificing womanhood. She had devoted her whole life in supporting and raising a male relative, George Tesman. It becomes apparent that Hedda is not going to sacrifice her individuality in serving others. That is why she is abhorrent to the sacrificing nature of Aunt Juliana for others, particularly for a male. That is why she does not appreciate her visit to her home. She is totally indifferent to the marital duties and responsibilities. Hedda, as an embodiment of an emancipated woman, reflects a revolting nature against the conventional mind set-up by denying that she was pregnant.

It is generally believed that Ibsen has consciously projected in Nora and Hedda Gabler a messianic consciousness. Both of them surpass the expected roles of women in the bourgeois class. Both of them are larger than anyone else in their respective play, and are certainly more interesting. The men are all weak and never attract our attention. Tesman, though an aspirant for professorship, is actually a parasite tied to her Aunt’s apron. Loevorg can’t control himself and is a kind of vagabond and Judge Brack is a corrupt and mean character who has an evil eye over the attractive personality of young Hedda. Ibsen seems to show that in the patriarchal system of society such mean, weak and worthless men are destined to rule, suppress and dominate strong willed women like Hedda, only because she is a woman. Both Nora and Hedda can peep through the hollowness of the patriarchal society. They come to the realisation that all women are being considered stereotypes which result in their marginalisation. This is also the reason that Hedda adopts such a contemptuous

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attitude towards other female characters in the play because all of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, help in the process of their own marginalisation by making sacrifices for the sake of the men folk. Thea Elvsted, Hedda’s old school mate and Aunt Juliana represent the women who have surrendered before the patriarchal system and mindset by which women are destined to hold the subordinate position in the society. They have accepted their socially imposed feminine roles and derive satisfaction from their marginalised position. Thea Elvsted has left her home and children and devoted, rather wasted her life in supporting Loevorg in his work. At last she is left alone. Juliana has raised George Tesman who becomes a promising academician. He has now grown up into an independent entity. She also takes into her wings her invalid sister. In fact both of them have been admired by many critics for their self-sacrificing nature but actually they have no self, no existence, and no identity of their own. They are just domestic angels in their house; on the other hand, there is Hedda who does not want to live for anyone except for herself. Unlike them Hedda is unable to make adjustment in her marginalised position. The enforced conformity for Hedda is a curse as has rightly been observed by G. B. Shaw:

Hedda, deprived of her lover, now finds that a life of conformity without faith involves something more terrible than the utmost ostracism: to wit, boredom. This scourge, unknown among revolutionists, is the curse which makes the security of respectability as dust in the balance against the unflagging interest of rebellion.60

Hedda Gabblers’ role, behaviour and character have been variously interpreted. She is considered as loveless and cold hearted woman in the play. She is unable to love anyone, including her husband and two admirers. She is devoid of the milk of human kindness. In fact the play Hedda Gabler is “the study of a malicious woman of evil instincts, jealous, treacherous, and cold-hearted.”61 She does not accept motherhood and motherly duties, “What a hopeless specimen of degeneracy is Hedda Gabler! A vicious, heartless, cowardly, unmoral, mischief-making vixen.”62 All these debilitating comments against Hedda are due to the fact that she is not ready to perform the duties of a wife and a mother, and is incapable of loving anyone. She is not interested in any member of the family. She burns the manuscript of the book which Loevorg and Thea had worked on together. Her actions, which are revolutionary and destructive, have a symbolic significance. In most of the cases it has

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been seen that when the constructive and creative potentialities are repressed and curbed, they generally turn into destructive mode. Hedda’s passion and power can only manifest themselves destructively. Her talent and capacity don’t get a chance to be executed. She resolutely changes the fates of others in order to fulfil her dream of freedom and independence. Hedda always feels lonely at Tesman’s house because her husband is always engrossed in his study leaving no responsibility to Hedda to engross in. Before her marriage, when she lived with her father, she has been a girl interested in outdoor sports like riding and shooting but after her marriage and especially after her honeymoon, she expresses boredom in the company of one and the same person as she complains to Judge Brack:

Hedda. Yes, you can surely understand it!_____To go for six whole months without ever meeting a soul who knew anything of our circle, or could talk about the kind things we are interested in.

Brack. Yes, yes– I should feel that deprivation.

Hedda. And then, what I found most intolerable of all–______

Brack. Well?

Hedda. ____was being everlasting ly in the company of____one and the same person______

Brack. (with a nod of assent). Morning, noon, and night, yes___at all possible times and seasons.

Hedda. I said ‘‘everlastingly.’’

Brack. Just so. I should have thought, with our excellent Tesmann, one could_____

Hedda. Tesman is_____a specialist, my dear judge.

Brack. Undeniably.

Hedda. And specialists are not at all amusing to travel with. Not in the long run at any rate.

Brack. Not even_____the specialist one happens to love?

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Hedda. Faugh_____don’t use that sickening word! 63

The process of her marginalisation and her struggle against this situation starts with her marriage. One reason behind her restlessness in his house is the absence of true love and understanding between wife and husband. Both of them get married only on one mutual understanding that they both like the same house to live in. But this cannot be an appropriate basis for their permanent marriage bond and therefore no longer remains a source of their happiness. Tesman loves her because she is physically so charming and attractive that not only her husband but almost all the male characters in the play are charmed by her bewitching aristocratic look. Tesman does not try to understand her likes and dislikes. He never endeavours to know what is there in the recess of her mind and heart, that she wants an independent life. Tesman never takes her opinion on any matter. She loses her independent entity and even her utility when she notices that her own husband tries to rewrite Loevorg’s lost book through his notes with the help of another lady, Mrs. Elvsted. When Hedda asks him whether she can help him in any way, he denies her support with disdain. He asks Judge Brack to have a company with her. She thinks that she is of no use for her husband who desires her physically, not as a life-partner.

On the other hand Judge Brack, a corrupt and mean fellow, takes all opportunities to exploit Hedda sexually as he knows the secret of Hedda’s pistol by which Loevorg committed suicide. He persuades her to be his mistress. Third male character Loevorg also has an evil eye over her youthful personality. Hedda is haunted by the sinister advances of all the male characters in the play. She ultimately realises that everyone, including her husband, wants her for his physical satisfaction. She feels suffocated and depressed in this patriarchal society dominated by men who give no consideration to women’s free thinking and self-existence. Hedda craves desperately for freedom and independence. Her angry and jealous attitude towards Thea and her ruthless manipulation of her husband and Loevorg, her former admirer, leads her down a destructive path that ends abruptly with her tragic demise. In spite of all this Hedda does not accept the power and dominance of others over herself. When she realises the sinister advances of Judge Brack who tries to hold her in his power and control, she says:

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I am in your power none the less. Subject to your will and your demands. A slave, a slave then! (Rises impetuously) No, I cannot endure the thought of that. Never.”64

Actually she is stranded in adverse circumstances of a stuffy middle class society which does not offer free rein to her desire of freedom:

Hedda Gabler is the psychological study of a woman. A fascinate, tragic, hateful woman; a woman of the world-well bred, of subtle intellect, cultivated, exquisite_____The two motivating factors in the pattern of Hedda’s behaviour are her environment_____the stuffy middle class atmosphere in which she finds herself trapped_____and her pregnant condition which her fastidious, twisted nature finds unbearably offensive. In different circumstances______Hedda might have been quite different person.65

Ibsen has provided enough information in the play that Hedda’s problem, her depressing and marginalised condition in Tesman’s house, is linked to her special background. The environment of her father’s house and that of her husband’s is quite opposite. She has led a quite free and unrestricted life with her father, a general; a man of action whose dauntless spirit and unrestricted activities haunt her mind. Her father taught her riding and shooting, the skills symbolic of the military man. She enjoys something of the general’s prerogative, the shaping of destiny of men. Then how it could be possible for Hedda, in whose veins the blood of a general is flowing, to allow others to shape her own destiny. But she forgets that she is living in a society that is deeply rooted in the traditions and values of patriarchy from which she can’t escape easily and where women are supposed not to rule but to be ruled by the men folk. Unable to recognise her individuality, she remains enslaved to a standard of social conventionality in the forbidden world where women have no freedom of expression. The only person who introduces her with a sense of individuality with his unfettered and creative way of life is Loevorg. His action stems from the voice of his heart and soul, not from any outward force. Hedda is much impressed by his independent individuality. But like all other male characters in the play he also makes a serious demand from her (sexual partnership) but Hedda incessantly strives to preserve her individuality intact, kicks his demands as much like of Judge Brack. Thus all the powerful instincts inherent in Hedda are tried to be suppressed and repressed but

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Hedda, as pointed out by G. B. Shaw, continues her struggle against the social constraints:

Hedda is curious about the side of life which is forbidden to her, and in which powerful instincts, absolutely ignored and condemned in her circle, steal their satisfaction.66

In spite of being fully conscious of her marginalised situation, General Gabler’s daughter, Hedda wants to rule in man’s world. Like all other people she is desirous of possessing the power and control as she says, “I want for once in my life to have power to mould human destiny.”67 She is actually unwomanly woman without any tender feeling for any one. But unfortunately she is married to a passive man. When she is unable to assume her female sexual role, she shuns by playing out the masculine one in her imagination. She demands that Loevorg initiates her into the masculine rites. Since her appearance in the play she has expressed her contempt to her pregnancy. She has rejected the traditional role of a wife and mother resulting in frustration and a sense of emptiness which she calls a deadly boredom. Ibsen’s intention of shaping Hedda as an unwomanly woman, in the male-dominated system of the society, is evident in conferring the play the present title:

The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife. It was not really my intention to deal in this play with so called problems. What I principally wanted was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies, conditions and principles of the present day.68

Hedda’s activities, attitudes and intentions don’t match with those of the women who have accepted their traditional sub-ordinate position in the bourgeois society. Her rejection of motherhood is the indicative of her non-conformist attitude with the marginalised condition of women folk in general. She is always interested in daring and courageous action as she says, “It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world_____a deed of spontaneous beauty.”69 She observes that in society men enjoy the superior position by pushing women to the backdrop. She can’t help a man in any way because she herself craves to assign the masculine role to herself. Her jealous attitude towards others is also due to

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the fact that she is envious of the male superiority. She burns Loevorg’s manuscript, is devoid of having any emotional side for her husband. She gives no positive response to the amorous advances of both of her admirers, Loevorg and Brack.

Ibsen has deliberately depicted in Hedda Gabler the darker side of patriarchal society that demands scarifice of freedom of women’s individual expression. It crushes down the self-expression of Hedda as a woman. It admires and approves of Aunt Juliana’s self-sacrifice and George’s mediocrity and elevates to the position of authority men like Judge Brack, a manipulator and selfish individual, who tries to avail himself of all opportunities to persuade Hedda for sexual liaison. Ibsen has given universality to Hedda’s problem. Hedda’s problem has become the problem of every woman in every city and village in a society created and dominated by men. Even Hedda’s marriage was executed under the compulsion of patriarchal society’s rules and traditions. Actually when the play was written, women were expected to be married by certain age. Hedda was also expected to be married by the age she turned thirty. Hedda thought that her marriage with Tesman was a mistake but she married him not because she cherished an emotional feeling for him but because she was reaching the age of thirty. She did what society thought was right, not what she felt was right. But after her marriage with Tesman, she couldn’t make adjustment with him in his house. Like Nora, she had to take decision for making her choice independently. Generally women in most of the advanced countries were deprived of participating in the world outside their houses. Although Hedda also has strong craving for freedom but she has no personal resources to realise her goal. She has no positive influence on the world, nor even in her house, so she developed a negative and destructive attitude not only towards others but to herself as well. Her indifferent attitude towards his husband having no emotional attachment, abhorring her pregnancy, burning and destroying Loevorg’s creative product and finally embracing suicide are all perverted attempts to satisfy her craving for an emancipated life. Ibsen has expressed his resentment and protest against the double standards of the society by presenting before audience the catastrophic end of a helpless and frustrated woman. Hedda finds no proper means for the expression of her frustration, so her frustration bursts in the form of destructive attitude leading to her suicide. Hedda destroys everything that is bourgeois and therefore, she can’t accept. With its stress on the psychology of an individual, the play is the depiction of a woman who strives constantly to find personal

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meaning in a world that denies freedom of expression. In spite of her best effort, Hedda finds nothing but desperation and boredom. To use G. W. Knight’s words “She is in a state of boredom swirling with unharnessed energies, ‘raising her arms and clenching her hands as if in desperation.”70

Like other female characters of Ibsen namely Nora and Mrs. Alving, Hedda Gabler also undergoes the same ordeal of social inhibition and women’s depressing conditions. Like Nora, she has a craving for freedom and like Mrs. Alving she experiences the dissatisfaction with the social inhibition. Her personal demands are not appropriately channelized. Lacking Nora’s courage she is incessantly torn between her aimless desire for emancipation and her commitment to standards of social appearance. She has protested against the duties assigned to wives and mothers by the society. This is why; she is unable to involve herself emotionally with her husband and her admirers, Loevorg and Judge Brack. Thus her craving for freedom remains unfulfilled. In this regard she lags behind Nora, who having recognised her needs and desires, left her husband and children behind in search of her personal identity and worth through the first-hand experience of the world because she thinks that before everything else she has duties to herself. But Hedda does not have that amount of courage which Nora had. She, therefore, calls Ejlert’s act of suicide beautiful because she thought he had the courage of making his own choice, it was something which she had been longing for. She appreciates the act of courage but she herself hesitates in taking any drastic step because social inhibition or restriction has clipped her wings. She is unable to assert herself in any positive way, she only had the desperate boldness to do away with herself as Harold Clurman says, “If Nora may be said to have flapped her wings to escape the marital and social cage, Hedda is a Nora with clipped wings.’’71 She ultimately turns out to be a destructive virago; she is in protest against all the socially conforming individuals. No doubt Hedda lacks Nora’s daring spirit but her craving for free life, although aimless one, comes on the surface when Judge Brack tries to blackmail her regarding her involvement in Ejlert’s suicidal case and she very successfully frustrates his prospects of exercising control and dominance over when she as she says:

I am in your power none the less. Subject to your will and your demands. A slave, a slave then! (Rises impetuously) No, I cannot endure the thought of that. Never.”72

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In spite of having lack of Nora’s courage, she, with her protest against the patriarchal traditions regarding the subordinate position of women, represents the image of the woman rising from their marginal situation. Joan Templeton has observed similarities between the characters of Hedda Gabler and that of Hjordis in The Vikings in Helgeland. Hedda Gabler, once an arms-bearer and horse-rider, married to a passive man and stranded in the depressing environment of Tesman’s house, is no better than an “eagle in a cage”, a phrase coined by Hjordis for herself to show her typical situation in her husband’s house.

But at last her death by committing suicide proves her strength of executing an independent and dauntless action. It is her ultimate mode of self-expression. Comparing Nora and Hedda Gabler, Crystal Cherry rightly says:

Although accomplished in different ways, the main female characters from each play decide to take their life choices in their own hands and step outside of the box society has made for them.”73

John Gassner too has faithfully analysed Hedda’s character and her relation to Ibsen’s other women characters who are awakened from their lethargic and marginalised position:

Ibsen created a masterpiece in Hedda Gabler. Here explanations are unnecessary, Hedda being a crystal-clear example of a maladjusted woman. She has sisters in every city, for she belongs to the widely dispersed sorority of moderately comfortable women whose restlessness and envy arise from their false standards of happiness, as well as from their egotism and uselessness. No doubt she existed in the past, but her specific type is undeniably modern. Unlike the women of the older middle class who had their noses to the grindstone of the hearth, who reared children and ran their home, the Heddas described by Ibsen are rootless. Ibsen had envisaged emancipated women who could erect the home on new foundations, who would rear a generation of broad-minded individuals, and who would achieve economic independence if necessary. Hedda and her kind were of different breed, since they relieved of the old responsibilities without assuming new ones and were endowed with desires for a richer life without having learned that it must be won strenuously.74

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These three plays, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler and The Lady from the Sea, along with other realistic social plays of Ibsen, focus on women’s role and their marginalised situation and consequent messianic consciousness among them, in the bourgeois patriarchal society with which Ibsen was well-acquainted in Europe, and especially in Norway and Denmark, during the later part of the 19th century. These plays, underlying revolutionary, innovative and realistic approach, alarmed the then conservative authorities who blindly adhered to the traditional roles and status for women, which kept them, confined only to their households, with their husband, and other male members as the sole decision-makers; and barred them from the equal participation in the mainstream. So Ibsen was bitterly denounced. Such kind of reaction against the champion of the suppressed and the marginalised women exposes the limits of social tolerance during that period. It also proves that drama can help enact social changes and transformation for betterment. It will not be an exaggeration to admit that the impact of such writings is now quite visible in the society of our own times.

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References:

1. Downs, Brian W. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946. p. 161.

2. Orton, Graham and W. J. MacFarlane., ed. . Trans. MacFarlane. London: Oxford University Press, 1960-77. p.347.

3. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. Trans. and ed. William Archer. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd. Henrietta Street, 1950. p. 17.

4. Ibid. p. 22.

5. Ibid. p. 23.

6. Ibid. p. 29.

7. Ibid. p. 30.

8. Ibid. p. 31.

9. Ibid. p. 32.

10. Ibid. p. 32.

11. Ibid. p. 50.

12. Ibid. p. 52.

13. Ibid. p. 56.

14. Ibid. p. 79.

15. Ibid. p. 84.

16. Ibid. p. 85.

17. Ibid. p. 86.

18. Ibid. p. 87.

19. Ibid. p. 88.

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20. Ibid. p. 89.

21. Ibid. p. 89.

22. Ibid. p. 33.

23. Ibid. p. 36.

24. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. p. 116.

25. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. op. cit. p. 63.

26. Ibid. p. 89.

27. Ibid. p. 91.

28. Ibid. p. 91.

29. Shaw, G. B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. p.56.

30. Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications,

inc., 1954. p. 3.

31. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p.70.

32. Ibid. p. 30.

33. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p.84.

34. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea trans. and ed. R. Farquharson Sharp, -Avelling and Linda Hannas. London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1958. p.175.

35. Ibid. p. 174.

36. Ibid. p. 190.

37. Ibid. p. 175.

38. Ibid. p. 175.

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39. Ibid. p. 223.

40. Shaw, G. B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Op. cit. p. 106.

41. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea. op. cit. pp. 224-225.

42. Ibid. p. 228.

43. Ibid. pp. 228-229.

44. Ibid. p. 229.

45. Ibid. p. 225.

46. Ibid. p. 221.

47. Ibid. pp. 222-222.

48. Ibid. p. 222.

49. Ibid. p. 222.

50. Ibid. p. 228.

51. Ibid. p. 228.

52. Ibid. p. 228.

53. Ibid. p. 239.

54. Ibid. p. 239.

55. Shaw, G.B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. op. cit. p. 73.

56. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea. op. cit. p. 240.

57. Ibid. p. 240.

58. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. op. cit. p. 64.

59. Clurman, H. Ibsen. op. cit. p. 158.

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60. Shaw, G.B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. op. cit. p. 110.

61. Egan, Michael. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 223.

62. Peter Gill. “Playwright and Theatre Director, Ibsen, Ibsen and Hedda Gabler”. The Ledger, Philadelphia, February13, 1904. 2008. Web.12 Jan., 2012.

63. Ibsen, Henrik. Seven Famous Plays. ed. William Archer. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd. 3 Henrietta Street, 1950. p. 405.

64. Ibid. p. 460.

65. Peter Gill. “Playwright and Theatre Director, Ibsen, Ibsen and Hedda.” Gabler.Gallienne, Eva Le. Ed. Introduction to Modern Library College Edition--- Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen. 2008. Web. 12 Jan. 2012.

66. Shaw, G.B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. op. cit. p. 109.

67. Ibsen, H. Seven Famous Plays. op. cit. p. 428.

68. Sprinchorn, Evert. Letters and Speeches. op. cit. p. 297.

69. Ibsen, H. Seven Famous Plays. op. cit. p. 456.

70. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. op. cit. p. 63.

71. Clurman, H. Ibsen. op. cit. p. 164.

72. Ibsen. H. Seven Famous Plays. op. cit. p. 460.

73. Cherry, Cr. “Ibsen’s Women: Feminism or Realism?” 20 Sep., 2007. Web. 29 July, 2009.

.

74- Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications, inc., 1954. p. 377.

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Chapter IV

Socio-Political Marginality

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Socio-political marginality refers to the disparity between the privileged and the underprivileged people in the socio-political matters of a society. When a group or an individual does not share equal rights, powers and opportunities in the socio- political system, in comparison with those who are in possession of all political powers and opportunities, the deprived individual or group is considered to be socio-politically marginalised. Like all other social phenomena, politics is also hierarchically structured in which some are appointed, fairly or unfairly, on the higher rank, they dominate the political affairs and enjoy the presumptuous powers and authority while there are certain others who are in subordinate position, they, in spite of their efforts, are ignored and excluded from the mainstream of the socio-political system on one pretext or the other. Sometimes the dominant peope, keeping in mind their vested interest, encourage the sub-ordinate people to adopt their ideology and some of their attitudes which are ultimately useful for them (the dominant people). When the people in the subordinate position protests against the ways of dominant individual or group, they are suppressed by force and relegated to the margins of the socio-political opportunities. But as a whole they don’t permit the marginalised (or the underprivileged) people to share in the power and opportunity which constitute their dominance. Some kind of “. . . resistance (is) offered by a superior stratum to the enjoyment by an inferior one, of their powers, privileges and opportunities,”1to keep the subordinate individual or group to the marginalised situation so that they (the marginalised), in case they don’t accept their ideology and ways of living and working, might not create obstacles in their way. The unequal sharing of powers and opportunities and the discrimination and disparity in their ideology and ways of working create a kind of barrier between the dominant and the sub-ordinate group. These barriers keep the underprivileged to their marginalised position. Sometimes the non-political matter leads to the political issues and the individuals in subordinate position are undermined, ignored and treated unfairly even for their just cause:

The barrier between the strata restricts in many ways the individual’s full participation in the life of the larger community. Or, put in another way, a resistance is offered by the members of the non-marginal and dominant group, to his entry into the group and the enjoyment of its

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privileges. This resistance takes the form of legal and or customary discrimination and has its origin in the attitudes of the members of the non-marginal group towards those who are excluded.2

Henrik Ibsen has been commonly acclaimed as an iconoclast, a champion of radical ideas, a reformer and a diagnosist of socio-political ills rampant in the contemporary society. Although keenly interested in politics, he was not an active member of any political party. He didn’t believe in any political party for the amelioration of the social evils. He didn’t want to jeopardise his independent and free spirit by being governed by any party discipline. Ibsen was actually obsessed with the concerns of still greater consequences than an active participation in the political affairs of the state. To fulfil the ego’s call, was the first priority for him. So he could not endanger his moral and intellectual integrity and his power of self-determination by any prolonged participation in practical politics. In order to protect his conscience and conviction, he maintained safer distance from the fuss and wrangle of politics. He believed in endless struggle for liberty on individual level, not on that of any political party, government and state. But it didn’t mean that he was totally aloof from the political concerns of his time. He was a committed nationalist who expressed his nationalist views in the Norwegian sagas, Vikings, and in praising the political heroes. He has supported the Norwegian national movement and favoured the cause of the Scandinavian union. Actually, at heart, he sided with the political freedom as with the freedom of conscience in any form and, therefore, he favoured many of the demands of the liberals. But Ibsen, a man of unrestrained spirit and broad perspective, did not give a blind and whole hearted acquiescence to all the views and policies of the Liberal Party which, as a matter of fact, arrayed itself against him. Consequently, he was stigmatised as a conservative by the radicals while the conservative considered him, as he really was, to be a radical of a deepest dye. Brian W. Downs better sums up the matter:

In so far as radicalism and the cry for political liberty meant anything to him personally, they always implied the emancipation of the individual from the restraint of magistrates and majorities.3

The plots of most of his plays revolve around the domestic and social life and activities of the middle class families and the individuals’ struggle for independence and emancipation. He expressed his political views for the first time in a less known

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play or an opera, Norma or A Politician’s Love which was published anonymously in 1851. The League of Youth (1869), Ibsen’s first open venture in prose-realistic comedy, was also a slashing attack on political hypocrisy of the liberal pro-tem, Stensgard. Ibsen’s next play on this theme was An Enemy of the People (1882). It was also directed against the tyranny of the liberals in intellectual matters and reveals the socio-political marginalisation of its protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, under the pressure of the dominant authorities in the local politics.

The League of Youth (1869)

Before The League of Youth Ibsen wrote an operatic satire, Norma or A Politician’s Love (1851) on similar political lines. He was shocked to discover how easily the supporters of the oppressed classes change their attitudes and loyalties when they come in power and position.

The locale and setting of the play, The League of Youth (1869) is “the neighbourhood of the iron-works, not far from a market town in Southern Norway.”4 The play marks the transitional phase in Ibsen’s dramatic career, namely the beginning of the realistic prose plays. John Gassner rightly says:

The first fruits of the new style appeared in The League of Youth . . . Here was no fantastication on the subject of compromise, but a realistic exposure of local politics.5

Harold Clurman has also expressed the same views when she says that The League of Youth is, “a topical play, it attacks phony liberalism and thus pleased conservatives, unaware that its target is politics and politicians in general.”6 In the play the entire political community has been represented as the “blackguards” and “as a clique of dishonest place-seekers.”7 Among them is one Stensgard, a lawyer, who being an ambitious young man, hopes for a political career in a small Norwegian town. He has been lambasted by various names such as an opportunist, a morally reprehensible, a demagogue etc. He is a marginalised character in the sense that besides being a scoundrel he is also a fool, and is duped by the other more experienced but crooked politicians like Doctor Fieldbo, a physician at the

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Chamberlain’s works, Mons Monsen, of Stonelee, Bastian Monsen, his son, Ringdal, the manager of the iron-works, Anders Lundestad, a landowner, and Daniel Heire. At last he finds no woman to marry him and no one to support him (although for his own mistakes); he has to leave the town all alone and retires to the place from where he had come. In Act V, through Ibsen’s usual technique of retrospective narration, we come to know through Fieldbo that he had come to the town for a political career from very humble parents:

His father was a mere rag of a man, a withered weed, a nobody. He kept a little huckster’s shop, and eked things out with pawn-broking; or rather his wife did for him. She was a coarse-grained woman, the most unwomanly I ever knew. She had her husband declared incapable; she had not an ounce of heart in her. And in that home Stensgard passed his childhood. Then he went to the grammar-school, “He shall go to college,” said his mother; “I’ll make a smart solicitor of him.” Squalor at home, high-pressure at school; soul, temperament, will, talents, all pulling in different ways_____what could it lead to but disintegration of character? 8

The play opens on “The Seventeenth of May,” The Norwegian Independence Day. All the higher politicians of the town Lundestad, Ringdal, Monsen and his son, Bastian; and Aslaksen, a humble printer and Stensgard, a new comer to the town are gathered at “Chamberlain’s grounds” where “a popular fete with music and dancing” is going on. Here we come to know that Chamberlain Bratsberg and Lundestad are the most influential political personalities of the town. They run the entire political system of the town for their benefits. Their subordinates flatter them and live in a marginalised situation. Apparently The Chamberlain Bratsberg does no wrong to anybody but he is deeply rooted in old traditions of family honour and prestige, and he always tries to maintain his high social position in the local political affairs and in the family as well. Actually it is his colleague, Lundestad who keeps all the political matters of the town in his hand. He leaves no stone unturned to push his subordinates and others, who are devoid of appropriate social or political resources, to the margin of the society. Monsen tells to Stensgard that:

It’s not the Chamberlain himself that keeps everything under his thumb. No, sir_____old Lundestad is the man that stands behind and drives the

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sledge . . . To be sure, he professed Liberalism in his young days, when he was still at the foot of the ladder. And then he inherited his seat in parliament from his father.9

They discuss the local political situation of the town where the position, the titles and “everything runs in families.” Here there is nothing but position and money that matters. In this social gathering we have Daniel Heire whose social position and status was once that of an aristocrat because:

Twenty years ago I was worth no end of money. My father left me a great fortune . . . They called him Gold Hans. He was a shipowner: made heaps of money in the blockade time; had his windows–frames and door–posts gilded; he could afford it . . . When my father was in his glory, things were going down-hill with the old Chamberlain . . . 10

But after the downfall of his father’s fortune Daniel Heire “happened then to be in temporary difficulties, which afterwards became permanent”11 and his social position began to dwindle and now he spends his time among the people whose seats are also taken forcefully because they are reserved for the Chamberlain and his party. This shows that social position is a shifting phenomenon that changes with the change in fortune of a person. He is now in a marginal situation in comparison with his former social position and the position of the Chamberlain and the party. That the society is hierarchically structured in an unjust way is evident from the fact that here the high posts are bestowed upon those who have either some political influence or who are nears and dears of the senior politicians or who are wealthy. Daniel Heire further clarifies the dichotomy in the distribution of the covetous posts:

It’s shameful the way things go on. Only last New Year, when the managership of the Savings Bank fell vacant, what must they do but give Monsen the go-by, and choose an individual that knew______[coughs]_____that knew how to keep his purse-strings drawn______which our princely host obviously does not. Wherever there’s a post of confidence going, it’s always the same! . . . ” it is always conferred upon “some one that enjoys the confidence_____of the people in power.12

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The senior politicians never encourage young men ‘full of simlpe-minded confidence’ to enter politics, and if they somhow enter, they would not help them rise to important position. Addressing to Stensgard, who has come to make his political career in the local politics and is hindered in his efforts, Daniel Heire says:

Here is a young man at the outset of his career; full of simple-minded confidence, he seeks out the experienced man–of–the–world and knocks at his door; turns to him, who has brought his ship to port, to beg for_____. . . The man-of-the-world shuts the door in his face; is not at home; never is at home when it’s his duty to be_____. . . Not at home! He, who goes about professing that he is always at home to reputable people! 13

This is why Stensgard makes a fiery political speech attacking Chamberlain Bratsberg, the owner of iron-works and his crooked colleague i.e. Lundestad who wants to reinforce his way as a politician in local politics. The dominant politicians Lundestad etc. suppress the rights of expression of the common citizens. Addressing to a public meeting comprised of the commonalty of the town, Stensgard says:

They deny you the right of speech! You hear it_____they want to gag you! Away with this tyranny! I won’t stand here declaiming to a flock of dumb animals. I will talk; but you shall talk too. We will talk to each other, from the heart! . . . I have seen great and brilliant possibilities among the masses; but I have seen, too, a spirit of corruption brooding over the germs of promise and bringing them to nought. I have seen ardent and trustful youth rush yearning forth_____and I have seen the door shut in its face.14

He further warns people of the evil effects of the old and worn out authoritative government on the young people aspiring for new achievements and success. He invokes them to join together to form a radical party, ‘A League of Youth’ to root out the existing authorities:There hovers in the air an Influence, a Spectre from the dead and rotten past, which spreads darkness and oppression where there should be nothing but buoyancy and light. We must lay that Spectre; down with it! . . . we are young! The time belongs to us; but we also belong to the time. Our right is our duty!15 Act II opens in “A garden-room at the Chamberlain’s, elegantly furnished, with a piano, flowers, and rare plants,”16 that shows the luxurious and royal life style of the higher politicians of the

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town. On the other hand, there is one Aslaksen; a humble printer who also once belonged to the company of the dominant authorities of the town when Daniel Heire took him from the printing-house and sent him to college. But later when Daniel Heire ruined himself, he was once again forced back to the printing-house where he has to live in a marginalised condition working under the pressure of the dominant politicians of the town. Consequently a day comes when the high positioned men of the town are, on the one hand, celebrating with drinking and merry-making and, on the other hand, like Daniel Heire, Aslaksen, along with his colleagues, is also sitting in the corner of ‘Chamberlain’s ground’ because the seats of the main ground are reserved for the Chamberlain, Lundestad and their party. While addressing to the party of the higher authorities Aslaksen says to Fieldbo:

You hear them in there, clinking glasses and drinking healths? Well, I too have sat at that table in my day, dressed in purple and fine linen, like the best of them_____! That was just the thing for me, that was_____for me, that had read so much and had thirsted so long to have my share in all the good things of life. Well, well; how long was Jeppe in Paradise? Smash, crash! Down you go_____and my fine fortunes fell to pie . . . After getting out of your class you can’t get into it again. They took the ground from under my feet, and shoved me out on the slippery ice_____and then they abuse me because I stumble. 17

His deplorable condition is revealed when Stensgard denies of publishing his speech against the Chamberlain Bratsberg by which he (Aslaksen) expected to earn some money. He (Aslaksen) says to Stensgaard, “But I’ll fight like a lion if you try to take my poor crust out of my mouth. Little you know what sort of a home mine is: a bedridden wife, a crippled child ______’’18

Stensgard has cancelled his intention of publishing his speech because he is a welcome guest in Bratsberg’s home as Bratsberg is already led by Fieldbo to believe that the attack in the speech of Stensgard was directed against his rival and opponent, Mons Monsen, a landowner of Stonelee. Stensgard has been courting Monsen’s daughter, Ragna but he is so much fascinated by the pomp and show of Chamberlain’s mansion that he plans to marry his daughter Thora instead of Ragna. He wants to lead a life like all wealthy and high positioned politicians because:

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Here there are fine manners; life moves gracefully here; the very floors seem laid to be trodden only by lacquered shoes. Here the arm-chairs are deep and the ladies sink exquisitely into them. Here conversation moves lightly and elegantly, like a game at battledore; here no blunders come plumping in to make an awkward silence. Oh, Fieldbo______here I feel for the first time what distinction means! Yes, we have indeed an aristocracy of our own; a little circle; an aristocracy of culture; and to it I will belong. Don’t you yourself feel the refining influence of this place? Don’t you feel that wealth here loses its grossness? When, I think of Monsen’s money, I seem to see piles of fetid bank-notes and greasy mortgages _____but here it is shimmering silver! 19

This is the comfortable and luxurious life of Bratsberg, the Chamberlain, who has sole authority over the town’s politics and commercial resources, although Chamberlain Bratsberg has been represented as a benevolent and good fellow. Stensgard is duped by Lundestad, another landowner. Actually “it’s not the Chamberlain himself that keeps everything under his thumb.....old Lundestad is the man that stands behind and drives the sledge.”20 He provokes him against Monsen. He makes him realise the difference between his own high position, standard and his affiliation to the forces that control the entire town and Stensgard’s inferior and subordinate position and his party’s committment to the common men, the men who live on the margin of the society. He says:

The Chamberlain’s party, my party, would not vote for him. Of course “my party” is a figure of speech; I mean the men of property, the old families, who are settled on their own land and belong to it . . . We, have, on the one hand, certain men or families who are in possession of the common civic advantages_____I mean property, independence, and power. That is the party I belong to. On the other hand, we have the mass of our younger fellow citizens who want to share in these advantages. That is your party. But that party you will quite naturally and properly pass out of when you get into power_____to say nothing of taking up a solid position as a man of property . . . 21

It is this changing attitude of the politicians in power, whether they are liberals or radicals, that Ibsen abhors most. They forget the common and poor people who are

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further relegated to the margin of the society. Monsen rightly complains to the Chamberlain that nobody realises the problems of these people:

Do you know anything of life in that class, Chamberlain? Have you ever realised what the men have to endure who toil for you deep in the forests, and along the river-reaches, while you sit comfortably at home and fatten on the profits? Can you blame such a man for struggling to rise in the world? 22

Stensgard is also eager to rise and come out of his humble position at any cost. Once coming in touch with influential people of the town and instigated by Lundestad he does not want to return to his former acquaintances who are the poor and politically marginalised people and consequently belong to some inferior position. When Doctor Fieldbo advises Stensgard to “put Miss Bratsberg out of your head” because she is the daughter of Chamberlain Bratsberg, the highest authority of the town and her social status is higher than that of his and to return to the woman for marriage who belongs to his social position, he (Stensgard) says:

I cannot. I must extricate myself from these sordid surroundings. I can’t go on living in this hugger-mugger way. Here have I got to be hail- fellow-well-met with Dick, Tom, and Harry; to whisper in corners with them, to hob-nob with them, to laugh at their beery witticisms; to be hand in glove with hobbledehoys and unlicked cubs. How can I keep my love of the people untarnished in the midst of all this? I feel as if all the electricity went out of my words. I have no elbow-room, no fresh air to breathe. Oh, a longing comes over me at times for exquisite women. I want something that brings beauty with it! I lie here in a sort of turbid eddy, while out there the clear blue current sweeps past me ______.23

The incidents of the play introduce us with another form of marginalisation, that is, the political and commercial marginalisation of women. They are not allowed to participate in the political, commercial and any other public affairs. Erik Bratsberg has withdrawn a huge sum of money from the bank by putting his father’s signature on the cheque to invest that money in some risky business enterprises with Monsen. He is going to be ruined. When he requests his father to help him, his wife happens to hear their conversation. On her inquiry about the matter she is rebuked by them and is

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ordered to “go into the drawing room again”24 because it is not the business of women to intervene in the discussion of men. She is stormed with rage when her husband says to her, “We must bear the blow together.” At their surprise she replies “The blow? Bear it together? (With a cry.) Do you think I am fit for that, now . . . I will not “bear” anything!”25 They are shocked when she tells them about the marginalised situation they have pushed their women in, consciously or unconsciously. She complains to her husband and her father-in-law, Bratsberg:

Oh, how cruel you have been to me! Shamefully . . . all of you! It was my part always to accept______never to give. I have been like a pauper among you. You never came and demanded a sacrifice of me; I was not fit to bear to anything. I hate you! I loathe you! . . . How I have thirsted for a single drop of your troubles, your anxieties! But when I begged for it you only laughed me off. You have dressed me up like a doll; you have played with me as you would play with a child. Oh, what joy it would have been to me to take my share in your burdens! How I longed, how I yearned, for a large, and high, and strenuous part in life! . . . 26

The Chamberlain has been represented as a benevolent and good fellow. He has tried to maintain peace and happiness but has, consciously or unconsciously, suppressed the independent existence of women of his household under the influence of his traditional attitude for the family honour and prestige. When his son is found involved in the financial forgery, he thinks that their “peace and happiness (has) gone!” The conversations between Fieldbo and The Chamberlain reveal the hollowness and traditional authoritative attitude of Bratsberg towards his son, women, and his subordinates:

Fieldbo.

There are higher things than peace and happiness. Your happiness has been illusion. Yes, I must speak frankly to you: in that, as in many other things, you have built on a hollow foundation. You have been shortsighted and overweening, Chamberlain!

The Chamberlain.

[Stops short.] I?

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Fieldbo.

Yes, you! You have plumed yourself on your family honour; but when has that honour been tried? Are you sure it would have stood the test?

The Chamberlain.

You can spare your sermons, Doctor. Do you think I have not learnt a lesson from the events of these days?

Fieldbo.

I daresay you have; but prove it, by showing greater tolerance and clearer insight. You reproach your son; but what you have done for him? You have taken care to develop his faculties but not to form his character. You have lectured him on what he owed to the honour of his family; but you have not guided and moulded him so that honour became to him an irresistible instinct.27

When Stensgard finds that Bratsberg’s son Erik is involved in a forgery, he turns to Ragna again, but when it is found that Ragna’s father Monsen is also involved in the scandal, he turns to a rich widow Madame Rundholmen. Later when it is discovered that only Monsen and not Erik Bratsberg is involved in the forgery, he once again turns his attention to Thora but by now she has lost interest in him, and Madame Rundholmen, misled by a love letter is engaged to Monsen’s son, Bastian. At last Stensgard is left without any marriage prospects and almost all the influential people of the town are turned against him. He is quite alone, isolated and marginalised in the community he wanted to associate himself. He is forced to leave the town and retires to the darkness of the world from where he had once come. Besides being an opportunist and an ambitious person, who commits many mistakes, Stensgard is too inexperienced in the game of politics to reach his destination in the face of more crooked and more experienced politicians. People take advantage of his “ignorance of the situation” and his “impulsiveness and confiding disposition.” Basically Stensgard is not a very bad fellow. But he is over ambitious and flamboyant speaker, the qualities which are exploited by the authorities in order to finally ruin him.

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His marginalised situation reminds us of Malvolio’s condition in Shakespeare’s famous romantic comedy, Twelfth Night. Malvolio is also duped by other comic characters ___Sir Toby Belch, Maria etc. He is badly treated and be-fooled due to his foolishness and his ambitious nature. He is also a marginalised character in the sense that at last he is left quite alone and even Olivia, whom he expected to marry, has no soft spot in her heart for him. He has no real friends and companions although Sir Toby Belch and his accomplices assure him of their friendships and co-operation. They are actually befooling him. Stensgard also has no real and true friends although like Sir Toby Belch and his accomplices in Twelfth Night, Aslaksen, Lundestad, Monsen and Fieldbo and others in The League of Youth also assure Stensgard of their friendships and cooperation. But at last he is left alone, isolated and marginalised in the town and therefore leaves the town for good.

An Enemy of the People (1882)

After The League of Youth, it was An Enemy of the People, a prose realistic play, in which Ibsen expressed more fervently and realistically his socio-political views. Like Stensgard of the preceding play, Dr. Stockmann, around whom the whole action of the play revolves, is stranded in the hypocritical and corrupt political system. Like Stensgard he is also left alone, isolated and completely marginaliged in the end of the play. But unlike Stensgard, Dr. Stockmann is a brave and honest man.

The whole play focuses on the ways in which an individual can be ostracised by the persons holding high postition and authority in the political system. Dr. Stockmann struggles to support the right things and speak truth in the face of extreme socio-political intolerance. He is, therefore, misfit in the socio-political system of the society dominated by the crooked and corrupt politicians. His right intentions for the welfare of the society and his potentialities are at last crushed and suppressed by the dominant leaders. His colleagues and well-wishers, except Morten Kill, his father-in- law, come under the thumb of the higher authorities. He, along with his wife and three children, is completly marginalised. Unlike Ibsen’s other plays, An Enemy of the People is devoid of obscurity and any symbolical representation. It is an explicit exposition of the meanness and self-interest of the higher politicians and their

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followers, and the exploitation and ultimate marginalisation of an individual who stands for truthfulness and righteousness against the will of his seniors:

There are, in The Enemy of the People, no allegorical references to aerial harps, no illusions to symbolical vine-leaves; the motives of the characters are clear and their actions are those of sane people. It is not a cheerful story that the dramatist has chosen to tell, but his selection of an unpleasant theme is justified by its evident purpose, which is to show to what depths of meanness people will descend when they allow themselves to be influenced exclusively by reasons of self-interest. In another of its aspects the play is a scathing satire on the limitations of the parochial mind . . . 28

The locale of the play is the coastal town in southern Norway. The action of Act I is set in “Dr. Stockmann’s sitting room; simply but neatly decorated and furnished.”29 Mrs. Stockmann welcomes Billing, who is on the staff of the paper, ‘The People’s Messenger’, to the dining table. Meanwhile Dr. Stockmann’s elder brother, Burgomaster, who is the chief of the police and also the chairman of the Baths committee, enters “wearing an over-coat and an official gold-laced cap, and carrying a stick.”30 followed by Hovstad, editor of the ‘People’s Messenger’. Their conversation turns to the Baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and Burgomaster, in which a large amount of public and private money has been invested. They discuss the socio-political and economic contentment of the people of the Baths as Burgomaster says that:

A fine spirit of mutual tolerance prevails in our town_____an excellent public spirit. And that is because we have a great common interest that holds us together_____an interest in which all right-minded citizens are equally concerned______31

The later development of the play exposes Burgomaster’s concerns for the welfare of the people to be unreal and hypocritical. Hovstad’s suggestion, that Baths were originally Dr. Stockmann’s idea, shocks the mayor, which shows the lack of mutual understanding and some political and ideological clash between the two brothers that comes to the surface with the arrival of Dr. Stockmann, along with his two sons and a guest Captain Horster. Dr. Stockmann appears in a very “glorious spirits”. Seeing the party on the dining table he exclaims:

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I feel so unspeakably happy in the midst of all this growing, germinating life. Isn’t it a marvellous time we live in! It seems as though a whole new world were springing up around us.”32

His present comfortable life creates a sense of jealousy and irritation in his brother, Burgomaster who has always lived in all luxuries and is now the master of the whole Baths as its mayor. But Dr. Stockmann is now so happy and satisfied with his humble job as a medical officer of the Baths because now he has no longer to live in the far North, where he has been living for a long time, cut off from the mainstream society, without resources which are necessary for leading a complete life as he himself says:

But I who had to vegetate all those years in that little hole in the north, hardly ever seeing a soul that could speak a stimulating word to me______all this affects me as if I had suddenly dropped into the heart of some teeming metropolis.33

In comparison with his earlier marginalised life, that he led in the far North, the life in this small town, the Baths, seems as if he were living in a metropolitan city because “there’s a life here____there’s promise____there’s an infinity of things to work and strive for; and that is the main point” and there he had to live “on starvation wages . . . ”34 After having been lived in such darkness for a long time, his pent up desire for freedom, open life and his yearning for a sense of belonging to the people of the world is reflected during luncheon meeting where many of his friends enjoy food and drinking. He pours out his heart felt desire to associate himself with his friends and relatives when he says, “After living so long out of the world, I find it a necessity of life to have bright, cheerful, freedom-loving, hard-working young fellows around me . . . ”35 In their conversation Burgomaster continues reminding Dr. Stockmann about his subordinate position and his own “superior magistracy”. The attitude of the dominant stratum in Burgomaster comes to the surface when he inquires about the article Dr. Stockmann is going to publish in the ‘People’s Messenger’ and Dr. Stockmann, thinking it his right of not revealing his personal secret, tries to avoid his order. Burgomaster is upset, and feels insulted that his subordinate is in defiance to a “chairman of the Baths committee.” The following conversation between Burgomaster and Dr. Stockmann exposes the domineering and authoritative attitude of Burgomaster and the suppressed and subordinate position of Dr. Stockmann:

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Burgomaster.

God forbid! I am not in the habit of “getting my back up,” as you express it. But I must absolutely insist that all arrangements shall be made and carried out in a businesslike manner, and through the properly constituted authorities. I cannot be a party to crooked or underhand courses.

Dr. Stockmann.

Have I ever been given to crooked or underhand courses?

Burgomaster.

At any rate you have an ingrained propensity to taking your own course. And that, in a well-ordered community, is almost as inadmissible. The individual must sub-ordinate himself to society, or, more precisely, to the authorities whose business it is to watch over the welfare of the society.36

After the departure of Burgomaster, all members, Hovstad, Billing, Horster and Dr. Stockmann, talk about the forthcoming election in Baths. Meanwhile Petra, Dr. Stockmann’s daughter, enters after her night school class. She hands over a letter to Dr. Stockmann, which he takes with him in his study room. The conversation turns to the discussion on paganism and the hypocrisy prevailing in the society. Petra also shares her father’s fervent beliefs in truth and freedom as is evinced from her discussion with the newspaper men. She is depressed at the crushing and suffocating atmosphere of the society and complains:

There’s no end of hypocrisy both at home and at school. At home you must hold your tongue, and at school you have to stand up and tell lies to the children.37

Meanwhile Dr. Stockmann comes in waving the letter that contains a report from the lab according to which the waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the waters causing serious illness amongst the tourists. Dr. Stockmann further informs that if the higher authorities had followed his advice about how to build the drains in the first place, there would have been no risk and danger to the lives of townsmen and the tourists. But as he belongs to the lower section of the political

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stratum, the higher authorities running the administration of the Baths didn’t pay any attention to his sane advice. All those present are very enthusiastic and praise Dr. Stockmann for saving the town but the Doctor humbly says:

After all, I have done no more than my duty . . . I can’t tell you how happy I am_____! Oh, what a blessing it is to feel that you have deserved well of your native town and your fellow citizens.”38

This utterance shows his patriotic feeling as well as his desire of belonging to his townsmen. But the irony of the situation is what the later development of the play shows____Dr. Stockmann, who is so much devoted to his native citizens, is ultimately stigmatized as the enemy of the people, and is forced to live a cornered and isolated life.

The setting of Act II is also Dr. Stockmann’s sitting room. Mrs. Stockmann gives him a letter that was sent to Burgomaster to inform him about the contaminated water of the Baths. The letter has now been returned with the notice that he (Burgomaster) himself will come to meet him (Dr. Stockmann) personally. With the arrival of Morten Kill, the conversation proceeds towards the possible response to Dr. Stockmann’s discovery by the higher authorities or the big politicians. Mr. Kill anticipates that the authorities controlling the Baths’ administration will not accept Dr. Stockmann’s findings as he says to him, “You may be made a fool of before you know where you are.”39 He is dead sure of it because he himself has been once a victim of the immense power and injust attitude of the big politicians as he says, “They wanted to be so much cleverer than we old fellows. They hounded me out of the Town Council. Yes; I tell you they hounded me out like a dog, that they did.”40 He is very excited at the prospects of making “the Burgomaster and his gang eat humble pie” by Dr. Stockmann. With the arrival of Hovstad, the conversation concentrates on the pollution, discrimination and the authoritative attitude of the bureaucrats who had made other memebers of town only marginalised figures:

All the affairs of the town have gradually drifted into the hands of a pack of bureaucrats . . . those who are not are the friends and adherents of those who are. We are entirely under the thumb of a ring of wealthy men, men of old family and position in the town.41

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Hovstad further tells that “When I took over the People’s Messenger, I was determined to break up the ring of obstinate old blockheads who held everything in their hands”42 but he could not do so because of the disastrous consequences for their paper, but now “We must explode the tradition of official inability. That rubbish must be got rid of, like every other superstition.”43 In spite of his awareness about the dominance of few politicians over the whole political affair and its devastating consequences, leading to the marginalization of the subordinates; he, with his press, cannot go against the big politicians and therefore, in the end, he also becomes against Dr. Stockmann. Aslaksen is the printer of the People’s Messenger, chairman of the ‘House Owners’ Association’ and an active worker for the ‘Temperance Society.’ He, like Hovstad, prefers his business to anything else. He convinces Dr. Stockmann of his whole hearted co-operation by emphasising that:

You may find it no such bad thing to have us small middle-class men at your back. We form what you may call a compact majority in the town_____when we really make up our minds, that’s to say. And it’s always well to have the majority with you, Doctor . . . I know the local authorities very well______the powers that be are not over ready to adopt suggestions from outsiders. So I think it wouldn’t be amiss if we make some sort of a demonstration . . . Of course with great moderation, Doctor. I always insist upon moderation; for moderation is a citizen’s first virtue . . . 44

But with all this apparent support and sympathy with the Doctor, he also warns him “to give no offence to the authorities and parties in power.”45 Dr. Stockmann, being an innocent idealist, is unable to understand the political tactics and craftiness. He is confused as to why the higher authorities will go against his proposal which is so “simple and self-evident”. After Aslaksen’s departure, Hovstad calls him “weak- kneed, half-hearted cowardice . . . one of those who are sunk in the swamp.”46 The Doctor is again confused as to whom to believe. Burgomaster comes and there is an exchange of hot words between the two brothers. Burgomaster is upset that Doctor has conducted the investigation without his permission. He is concerned about the colossal expenses and the duration of two years in implementing the suggested repairs as mentioned in the Doctor’s report. So he forces Dr. Stockmann to hush up the matter so that “not a word, not a whisper, of this unfortunate business must come to the public

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ears.”47 But the Doctor is not ready to succumb to the fraud that Burgomaster is suggesting. Now Burgomaster loses his self-controll and showers all possible slanders on the Doctor to humiliate him. He calls him “an amazingly reckless man” and threatens him with dire consequences. He reminds him of his “helping hand” in Doctor’s posting as a medical officer in Baths. But actually he was motivated to this help by self-interest; to put the Doctor under his control in a subordinate position. He now tries to suppress his rights of free-thinking and free expression. The following argument between Burgomaster and Dr. Stockmann gives a general idea of the authoritative and orthodox attitude of the big politicians to keep the public unaware of their craftiness and ways of exploitations, and the subordinate and marginalised position of the under-privileged who have to suffer only humiliations:

Burgomaster.

Indeed, I was in some measure forced to act as I did_____for my own sake. I always hoped I should be able to keep you a little in check, if I helped to improve your pecuniary position.

Dr. Stockmann.

What! So it was only for your own sake . . . !

Burgomaster.

In some measure, I say. It is painful for a man in an official position, when his nearest relative goes and compromises himself time after time...... Yours is a turbulent, unruly, rebellious spirit. And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print every possible or impossible occasion......

Dr Stockmann.

Isn’t it a citizen’s duty, when he has conceived a new idea, to communicate it to the public!

Burgomaster.

Oh, the public has no need for new ideas. The public gets on best with the good old recognised ideas it has already.48

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Thus anticipating dangers to his complacent authoritative position in politics and in the society, Burgomaster tries to suppress Dr. Stockmann’s right of speech and free-thinking. He accuses the Doctor of his defiant attitude towards the higher authorities:

You have no conception how much you injure yourself by your officiousness. You complain of the authorities, ay, of the Government itself_____you cry them down and maintain that you have been slighted, persecuted . . . You want to make an onslaught on your superiors______that is an old habit of yours. You cannot endure any authority over you; you look askance at any one who holds a higher post than your own; you regard him as a personal enemy . . . 49

Burgomaster asserts that while acting in a subordinate-position, Dr. Stockmann has no individual right. It is the hierarchical system of the society in which, as Burgomaster says, “as a subordinate official of the Baths, you (the Doctor) have no right to express any conviction at issue with that of your superiors.”50 He has to remain under the complete control of the dominant authorities. Burgomaster wants to put him under his thumb as he says, “I, your chief; and when I issue an order you have simply to obey.”51 He threatens him to dismiss from his job if he takes any offensive steps against his seniors and therefore, orders him to confess publicly that his statement about his findings were false.

Thus Burgomaster, taking advantages of his higher position in the local politics, leaves no stone unturned to confiscate Dr. Stockmann’s individual right of living freely and independently. Ibsen was not at all in favour of extinction of the individual identity for the sake of society or the community. In fact he appears to propound his thesis of the individual rights through his marginal figures.

The setting of Act III is “the editor’s room of the ‘People’s Messenger”. Hovstad and Billing are enthusiastic about the Doctor’s report through which they think:

We’ll keep on hammering away, blow after blow, till the whole officialdom comes crashing down. As I sat in there reading that article, I seemed to hear the revolution thundering afar . . . we’ll din it into the pubic day by day that the Burgomaster is incompetent in every respect,

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and that all responsible positions in the town, the whole municipal government in short, must be entrusted to men of liberal ideas.52

Dr. Stockmann enters and informs them that he has been harassed and “threatened with all sorts of things. I was to be robbed of my clearest rights as a human being______”53 Dr. Stockmann struggles to maintain his right as a human being and determines that “the whole community must be purged, disinfected...”54After his departure, Billing and Hovstad agree that the Doctor should be used for their interest. They want to use him as a firebrand. Aslaksen is clearly in favour of the local authorities on the ground that if the local authorities are turned out of their place, another equally selfish and incompetent pack of politicians might be enthroned in power who might be more dangerous for their present positions in the town so his (Aslaksen’s) “reason inclines somewhat towards the authorities______the local ones.”55 Hovstad’s hypocritical nature becomes clear when Petra, Dr. Stockmann’ daughter, arrives with his article and refuses to translate it as it contradicts the opinions for which the ‘People’s Messenger’ stands. But she thanks him for the support which extended to her father, but Hovstad, to her great surprise and shock, makes his intention clear that it was for her sake that he was co-operating with her father, and threatens her to accept his proposal. Petra leaves disgusted. Burgomaster turns all members of the ‘People’s Messenger’ in his favour with his influential position in the local politics. All of them are now against Dr. Stockmann whom they were earlier supporting as a compact majority because they all now think about their family and not for the general good.

In Act II Burgomaster was against Dr. Stockmann while Dr. Stockmann had the staff of the People’s Messenger in his support forming the compact majority, but in Act III all of them come under the pressure of the higher politicians and authorities. They leave the Doctor alone, particularly when they learn that the Burgomaster, the chairman of the Board of Directors, along with the influential citizens of the town, is all determined to hush up the truth. Thus Dr. Stockmann is left alone and isolated with his family. He finds himself marginalised in his own circle.

The setting of Act IV is “A large old-fashioned room in Captain Horster’s house,” full of “large assemblage of all classes of townsfolk.”56 Threatened by the authorities and repudiated by the People’s Messenger, Dr. Stockmann secures a hall

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where he might hold a public meeting. Considering himself as a free-born citizen, he has full faith in the constitutional equality of the citizens. He is unflinching to preserve his right of free-expression. But to his great dismay the doors of every house are closed on him. The only person who still favours him is his old friend Horster in whose house he tries to hold the meeting to expose the hypocrisy of the higher authorities and its destructive consequences for the masses. But here also Burgomaster and his gang of the People’s Messenger are already present to check Dr. Stockmann’s right of free- expression and to excite the mob against him. Here also he finds that the constitutional right of equality is under the control of the higher politicians who dominate the society. Once again Dr. Stockmann narrates his past marginalised condition in the far north where he “was imprisoned in a horrible hole, far away in the north....among the people scattered here and there in the stony wilderness.”57 Then he pounces on “the colossal stupidity of the higher authorities . . .

They are like goats in a young plantation: they do harm at every point; they block the path of a free man wherever he turns______and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals . . . these laggards, these relics of a decaying order of thought, are diligently cutting their own throats . . . 58

These big politicians don’t entertain free-spirit among the common people lest their own complacent dominion should be exposed and disturbed. So they endeavour to crush the free atmosphere in their area to keep their dominion safe. During his speech Dr. Stockmann is constantly interrupted and even hissed by the Burgomaster and his gang, who are actually the men of orthodox thinking and dominate the whole town. They are afraid lest Dr. Stockmann should tell the common people about the ways how they are being dominated and exploited by the higher authorities and the senior politicians. At last they succeed to turn the ignorant and vulgar mob against Dr. Stockmann. In utter frustration and helplessness, he proclaims:

And it is not the people of that sort that constitute the real danger to society; it is not they who are most active in poisoning the sources of our spiritual life and making a plague-spot of the ground beneath our feet; it is not they who are the most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our society . . . The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom in our midst is the compact majority. Yes, it’s the confounded, compact,

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liberal majority______that, and nothing else! . . . For it’s this very majority that robs me of my freedom, and wants to forbid me to speak the truth.59

On Hovstad’s response that “The majority always has right on its side,” Dr. Stockmann reasserts and justifies his point in favour of the minority. He says that the individuality of the people in minority is generally ignored and crushed, and they are marginalised among the majority, in spite of their valuable contribution to the amelioration of the society, while people in majority have always dominated the society and enjoyed the power and privileges. That is why, people in minority have always rebelled against the tyranny, and the direct and indirect ways of exploitations by the people in majority. With his truthfulness and straightforwardness Dr. Stockmann finds himself in minority among the crooked and fraudulent politicians and authorities and says:

The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. But how in the devil’s name can it ever be right for the fools to rule over the wise men? . . . The majority has might______unhappily_____but right it has not. It is I, and the few, the individuals, that are in the right. The minority is always right.60

He further clarifies his point that he does not advocate aristocracy but the free- thinking minority. They are, “the individuals among us, who have made all the new, germinating truths their own . . . fight for truths that are too lately born into the world’s consciousness to have won over the majority.”61

He is not against the masses, but against the ignorance prevailing among them and their unwillingness to accept the truth. Addressing to them he tries to awaken their lethargic spirit and sleeping conscience. He warns them against their exploitations by the people in power. They are actually made fools and exploited by the big politicians, higher authorities and their accomplices, for their own self interest. Addressing the masses he makes them aware that the majority in power, “is leading you shamefully by the nose, when it tells you that you, the masses, the crowd, are the true pith of the

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people. I tell you that’s only a newspaper lie. The masses are nothing but the raw material that must be fashioned into a People.”62

Actually dominant group of the society has the rein of these masses in their hands and they mislead them. And whosoever rebels against their authoritative and tyrannical ways of ruling over the masses, is vandalised as the enemy of the people and is pushed to the margin of the society. In this regard G. W. Knight justifiably says:

Ibsen insisted that men like Dr. Stockmann who fight for advance will always be in a “minority” and always ten years ahead of their contemporaries; and himself he saw as “a solitary franc-tireur” on the “outposts” of the civilisation.63 Dr. Stockmann loves his native town and its people so much that he “would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.”64

Hovstad declares Dr. Stockmann to be an enemy of the people. Dr. Stockmann is sure that ‘the country,’ which is founded on the lie and which ignores the separate and individual existence of a person, particularly the person who gives the message of truthfulness and awareness, is sure to perish soon. Dr. Stockmann, who appears to be the Messiah of the common people, the people who are living on the margin of the society and who are unaware of their own exploitation and marginalisation; is driven out of the place, hooted and jeered by the mob. The whole assembly goes against him and he scarcely manages to escape with his family to his house. But In spite of all this, he performs his duty of a responsible citizen, as he informs the people that the majority can’t tolerate the revolutionary changes in the social system that is hierarchically structutred, and the voice of the minority for the revolutionary changes in the social structure goes unheard because they are in a marginalised situation. G. B. Shaw is right when he says, ”The pioneer is a tiny minority of the force he heads; and so, though it is easy to be in a minority and yet be wrong, it is absolutely impossible to be in the majority and yet be right as to the newest social prospects."65

Thus Ibsen illustrates his point as to how the dominant group of the society represented by the influential politician, Burgomaster and his flatterers, the newspapermen, manipulate to silence the voice of the Doctor which is the voice of truth. In this regards Clement Scott is right when he says, “Truth is great, and will prevail,’ says the classical adage. But Ibsen, in the case under discussion, elects to

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show us Truth crushed down and bowing her head beneath the yoke of Fraud and Deception.”66

The setting of Act V is, “Dr. Stockmann’s study.” Everything in his house is destroyed in the vandalism of the people. He is left alone and helpless. He is boycotted by the grocer, the baker and even by the candle-stick maker. The landlord sends a notice to the Stockmanns to move out of the house because he can’t endanger his reputation by letting such a rebel stay as a tenant in his house. Although both the grocer and the butcher are sorry, they have to safeguard their business. Petra is also dismissed from her job although she was considered to be an excellent teacher simply because her supervisor received threats from the higher authorities. Even his pupils are expelled out of their school. The only supporter of Dr. Stockmann, Captain Horster, is also dismissed from his captaincy. The Doctor is also dismissed from his post as a medical officer. Now he, along with his family, is utterly cut off from the outer world. He finds no place in the town with the exception of Horster’s for refuge. Almost all the people in the town are under the pressure of the dominant stratum, comprising of the higher authorities and their associates. The landlord has to send the notice not because he wanted to move the Stockmanns out of the house but because as Dr. Stockmann says:

He daren’t do otherwise, he says. He is very unwilling to do it; but he daren’t do otherwise_____on account of his fellow citizens_____out of respect for public opinion_____is in a dependent position_____doesn’t dare to offend certain influential men______67

Thus Dr. Stockmann faces all kinds of difficulties and exploitations. Externally he is being deserted by everyone and internally the words, “an enemy of the people”, a stigma on his truthfulness, injur his heart and soul. He says:

A bad name may act like a pin-scratch in the lung. And that confounded word______I can’t get rid of it, it has sunk deep into my heart; and there it lies gnawing and sucking like an acid. And no magnesia can cure it.68

Dr. Stockmann is sure that these are the dominant people or the party leaders of the town who are creating havoc in his life and in the society as a whole, and relegate him and other common people to a marginalised position whether they recognise it or not. He desperately says that:

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Party-programmes wring the necks of all young and living truths; that consideration of expediency turn justice and morality upside down, until life here becomes simply unlivable . . . It’s the party-leaders that must be exterminated. For a party-leader is just like a wolf, you see_____like a ravening wolf; he must devour a certain number of smaller animals a year, if he’s to exist at all. Just look at Hovstad and Aslaksen! How many small animals they polish off_____or at least mangle and maim, so that they’re fit for nothing else but to be house-owners and subscribers to the People’s Messenger!69

At last he is left alone but he does not lose courage. He says, “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”70 Understanding the tyrannical and hypocritical nature of the dominant group of the politicians who contribute to the marginalisation of Dr Stockmann, the man of “firm will and undeviating conscientiousness. . . the unselfish man of science who seeks to be a friend to the community and is howled at as a foe,”71 G. B. Shaw says:

Feeling the disadvantage of appearing in their true character as a conspiracy of interested rogues against an honest man, they pose as society, as The People, as Democracy, as the solid Liberal Majority, and other imposing abstractions, the doctor, in attacking them, of course q`being thereby made an enemy of The People, a danger to Society, a traitor to Democracy, an apostate from the great Liberal party, and so on.72

Thus both the plays, The League of Youth and An Enemy of the People expose the currupt socio-political system of the local town which is full of crooked politicians. If any person from the common folk or the subordinate stratum aspires to make his career in the socio-political field, the people already established on the higher position and weilding the command of the political field, don’t let the new aspirant from the commanlty rise to any satisfactory position. They don’t let the common people or their subordinates lead an honest life. They push them to the margin of the society. Stensgard is deceived and befooled by the more experienced politicians of the town. Stensgard is an opportunist and ambitious person but the punishment of ostracism pushes him to the darkness of the world. His future prospects of a politician are thwarted. Dr. Stockmann faces the worse situation at the hands of the higher

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authorities. He, along with his family, is also pushed to his former marginalised position, rather to a worse situation. Thus both Stensgard and Dr. Stockmann had aspired to rise from their deplorable condition but their hopes are at last thwarted and they are crushed and suppressed by the dominant political stratum.

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References:

1. Dickie-Clarke, H. F. The Marginal Situation: A Sociological Study of a Coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 31. 2. Ibid. p. 24. 3. Downs, B. W. Ibsen: Intellectual Background. Cambridge: University Press, 1946. p. 6. 4. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol.4. Trans. and ed. William Archer. London: William Heinman, 1919. p. 2. 5. Gassner, J. Masters of the Drama, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications, inc; 1954. p. 366. 6. Clurman, H. Ibsen. London: Macmillan, 1977. p. 91. 7. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. p. 31. 8. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. op. cit. p. 194. 9. Ibid. p. 9. 10. Ibid. pp. 13-14. 11. Ibid. p. 15. 12. Ibid. pp. 16-17. 13. Ibid. pp. 20-21. 14. Ibid. pp. 25-26. 15. Ibid. pp. 26-27. 16. Ibid. p. 47. 17. Ibid. pp. 50-51. 18. Ibid. pp. 79-80. 19. Ibid. p. 71. 20. Ibid. p. 9. 21. Ibid. pp. 82-85. 22. Ibid. p. 117. 23. Ibid. pp. 148-49. 24. Ibid. p. 128. 25. Ibid. p. 129. 26. Ibid. pp. 129-30. 27. Ibid. p. 193.

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28. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. pp. 298-99. 29. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. op. cit. p. 3. 30. Ibid. p. 4. 31. Ibid. pp. 6-7. 32. Ibid. p. 12. 33. Ibid. p. 12. 34. Ibid. p. 13. 35. Ibid. p. 15. 36. Ibid. pp. 16-17. 37. Ibid. p. 27. 38. Ibid. pp. 35-36. 39. Ibid. p. 40. 40. Ibid. p. 41. 41. Ibid. p. 45. 42. Ibid. p. 46. 43. Ibid. p. 47. 44. Ibid. pp. 49-50. 45. Ibid. p. 51. 46. Ibid. p. 53. 47. Ibid. p. 62. 48. Ibid. pp. 63-64. 49. Ibid. pp. 65-66. 50. Ibid. p. 67. 51. Ibid. p. 68. 52. Ibid. pp. 77-78. 53. Ibid. p. 81. 54. Ibid. p. 82. 55. Ibid. p. 87. 56. Ibid. p. 117. 57. Ibid. p. 130. 58. Ibid. pp. 131-133. 59. Ibid. pp. 133-34. 60. Ibid. p. 134.

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61. Ibid. p. 135. 62. Ibid. p. 138. 63. Ibid. p. 138. 64. Ibid. p. 143. 65. Ibid. p. 95. 66. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 300. 67. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. op. cit. p. 152. 68. Ibid. p. 159. 69. Ibid. p. 184. 70. Ibid. p. 188. 71. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 301. 72. Shaw, G. B. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. p. 94.

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Chapter V

Economic-Marginality

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The concept of economic-marginality refers to the unequal distribution of economic resources among the people of a given community or society. In other words economic marginality is a process which is related to economic structure of the society in which economically marginalised people are likely to have meagre involvement. They lag behind in their access to the resources of income in comparison to those who have dominance over the mainstream economic system. When they, in spite of their struggle, are unable to have access to economic resources for essential and vital needs which are required to lead a normal life, they find themselves isolated and excluded from the normal social life desired by all. Thus they are unable to maintain the average social standard. The economic-marginality ultimately results in poverty, dependence leading to inferiority complex besides isolation and social marginalisation. Economically marginalised people are also gradually excluded from other fields of social significance such as politics, social ceremonies and other kinds of social affairs:

Economic underprivilege goes along with generalised underprivilege which in turn leads to withdrawal and isolation from involvement in politics as one aspect of a wider inability to participate in the culture in other ways as well.1

Charlesworth while giving an account of working class life in England discusses the ways in which economically marginalised people’s social position is affected:

It is the economic changes and the social conditions they ushered in that have consigned these people to a life of marginality which, naturally enough, manifests itself in their comportment, manner and style.2

Peter Leonard defines the economically marginalised people as remaining outside, “the major arena of capitalist productive and or reproductive activity” and as such experiencing “involuntary social marginality.”3

Ibsen himself experienced economic crisis and a kind of social exclusion due to his penury during the early period of his life. Actually Ibsen was a descent of one of the oldest and distinguished families of Norway including the Paus family. His

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father belonged to a family of skippers from Bergen. He founded his business in Skien and became a prosperous merchant. Thus Ibsen led a luxurious life during the first seven years of his life. But his father’s speculation in salt and timber, and his extravagant way of living without any effort to earn more money for the preservation of the family fortune, led to the depletion of all he had. Knud Ibsen did not care about the loss of the fortune because it was not earned by him but was brought by Ibsen’s mother in dowry from her affluent parents. When the investment failed, he began to mortgage the family property and within no time they became totally bankrupt as early as 1835:

And the mortgages were not mere trifles: his possessions, house, property and warehouses and all ‘his chattels, furniture, cattle, farm tools, etc., with no exception’ were pledged. His other creditors followed the State’s lead and the auctioneer’s hammer fell with regular blows on to everything he possessed.4

Ibsen recalled very pathetically how his father’s friends broke all connections with him and the ‘Altenburg Manor’ that was famous for the dinners and festivities. The Ibsens were left alone and there was a total change in their status in the society. This misfortune left a great impression upon the life of Henrik Ibsen. He became “insolent too_____especially when anyone mentioned his fatal demotion in society. ...he was near to no one, at home or in the world outside.”5 He remained cut off from the mainstream of society for a long time until his financial condition became sound. At the age of fifteen, his education was discontinued due to the financial crisis in the family. He was obliged to work at this tender age for three years at a chemist’s shop in Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist because in this profession the apprentices received free board and lodging, as his parents were unable to afford even a shilling:

His parents had not even been able to fit him out with clothes other than the ‘frock-coat’ type of confirmation suit, which must have attracted attention in Grimstad on the few occasions he showed himself out of doors...... They say that the suit was not replaced, becoming more and more worn and shiny, till he looked like ‘a tiled stove’...... His position, if anything, grew worse with the years. When eventually, after three years in Grimstad, he acquired a friend, Christopher Due, Due

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was astonished at his hardiness; for he possessed neither underclothes nor socks.6

In Grimstad he was regarded as an outsider and both his meals and wages were insufficient and the place where he was kept in his employer’s home was appallingly cold. He led an utterly wretched life with only an occasional free Sunday. During his childhood, particularly after their financial bankruptcy and in Grimstad, Ibsen led a poor and lonely life as is pointed out by Hans Heiberg:

He was deeply lonely, a brooder, an outsider_____a ‘nasty fellow’, a ‘prickly creature’ as the local people called him . . . Not only in childhood, but for many years afterwards, his life was plagued with incessant failures, insults, humiliations and money troubles, and if he had died before he was thirty-six he would have been remembered as a talented playwright defeated by external opposition.7

Thus Ibsen had suffered a lot due to his financial wretchedness. This is perhaps one of the reasons that he remained aloof, leading a kind of marginalised life both at home and in Grimstad, without sufficient connection with the people of the world for a long time. He remained in such a deplorable condition just because of his poverty, as he wrote in his letter to his uncle, Christian Paus in 1877 that he could neither see nor even write to his parents for many years during his stay in a foreign land because he was unable to help them financially, he says:

From my fourteenth year I was thrown upon my own resources. It has been a long, hard struggle to reach my present position. I seldom wrote home during all these years of struggle because I could offer no assistance of any kind to my parents. It seemed useless to write when I could not be of any real and practical use. I went on hoping that my circumstances would improve. The improvement was very long in coming, and did not come until fairly recently.8

He could not attend the funeral ceremony of his parents due to his penury. That is why he could better understand the pathetic condition of the people who are deprived of the proper economic resources and are, therefore, ignored and humiliated in the society. In the plays Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck, Ibsen takes up the problem of economic marginalisation for scrutiny. Some of the characters in these

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plays have to suffer due to the lack of economic resources. They are ignored and humiliated due to their penury. He has also presented the economically dominant section of the society or the capitalist class. They leave no stone unturned to exploite and humiliate the economically deprived people.

The Pillars of Society (1877)

The play Pillars of Society, according to Brian W. Downs, is “the criticism of commercial morality, the feminist argument was only slightly developed there and relegated to fuller treatment in its successor, A Doll’s House.”9 The play deals prominently with the commercialisation and its devastating impact upon society, particularly women. Here women’s marginalised condition is not so much due to the gender discrimination in the society as it is due to the unequal distribution of the economic resources. The men of capitalistic mentality, who are always eager to make more and more money, are one of the major sources of the economic marginality. The wealthy and rich persons or the capitalist class of the society are always guided by the monetary considerations and are therefore, concerned only with the ways of how to gain the money through fair or foul means. They are very happy “when it’s a question of keeping the purse-string tight______; everything here ends in paltry material calculations.”10 There is a fierce competition here of accumulating more and more wealth. In this process the have-nots or the economically marginalised people are crushed and are not allowed to enter the mainstream of society. Leo Lowenthal says, “Competition has now entered a new field, private life. In Pillars of Society, Consul Bernick can conduct his financial transaction successfully only at the price of slandering his brother-in-law and suppressing his love for his future sister-in-law.”11 This competition for economic and commercial success results in the marginalisation of those who are financially in a subordinate position.

The play is a departure from poetry in favour of prose in which he has adopted the realistic approach to deal with the contemporary problems of a small town-society as is rightly observed by G. W. Knight:

Henceforth poetic fantasies and historic vistas are replaced by small- town society and domestic circles, always in Norway . . . His people are

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shown as constricted, as stifled, as imprisoned;” because of various reasons, “it may be some general corruption in society” or economic corruption prevalent in the society.12

Ever since the commercialisation, the mainstream of society is really dominated by the rich and corrupt businessmen like Consul Bernick and his business partners who have the sole authority over the economy of the town. Ibsen remained faithful to the Norwegian scene but the problems such as the marginalisation of the people who have no or less access to the economic resources are of universal concern.

In this play Ibsen has represented the businessmen and their associates by Consul Bernick and his business partners Rummel, Vigeland and Sandstad. They are the wealthy and influential men of the town. Mrs. Bernick, Miss Bernick (Martha), Consul’s sister, Miss Hessel (Lona), Mrs. Bernick’s elder sister, Dina Dorf, a young girl living in Consul’s house, Krap, Consul’s chief clerk and Aune, Consul’s foreman shipbuilder etc. are other characters who are under the pressure and dominance of these wealthy businessmen, particularly Consul Bernick, the chief of them. The marginalised condition of the municipal workers, due to the introduction of the new machines and due to the exploitations through the indirect and crafty ways of the ambitious and greedy businessmen, has also been represented as a sub-theme of the play.

The entire action of the play takes place in a large garden room in Consul Bernick’s house, in a small Norwegian seaport. When the play opens, we find Consul Bernick at the height of his career; the richest, the most powerful and respected citizen of the community. He has dominated the entire town through his absolute authority over the economy of the town. The people, whether they are men or women, are under the control of Bernick and his business partners. He can check even the freedom of expression if it is directed against his ambition and business plans. Everything in the town belongs to him. Even the gardens in the town were “Karsten Bernick’s Gift,’ as the inscription over their entrances describe, “Yes; everything here seems to be your work”. He has “splendid ships too” and he has “built a new school-house; and they owe both the gas- and the water-works to” him.13

In the beginning a sub-theme is introduced in the struggle between Consul Bernick and Aune, the foreman shipbuilder in the company of Bernick. Aune

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represents the proletariat class and Bernick represents the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. The battle between them is symbolised as the battle between the poor and the rich, and according to Marxist ideology the real battle lies not between the opposite religions, races, ethnicity or gender but,

Between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” between the bourgeoisie_____those who control the world’s natural, economic, and human resources_____the proletariat, the majority of the global population who live in substandard conditions and who have always performed the manual labor the mining, the factory work, the ditch digging, the railroad building_____that fills the coffers of the rich.14

Aune is also the chairman of the Workers’ Association or as he says “the foreman of the Industrial Society”. Consul Bernick has introduced “new machines” into the shipyard. Aune is against the implementation of the new machines that would surely render many manual workers unemployed and poverty stricken. They would find themselves in a marginalised position in the absence of proper economic resources. Actually when, in the beginning of the industrialisation, the new and high technically advanced machines were introduced, many labours were left unemployed because, first these unskilled workers were unable to handle these new machines, secondly a single machine would replace many manual workers. Thus multitude of workers were thrown out of their jobs and remained unemployed in the absence of any ultimate source of income. Aune expects the same situation among his workers if the new machines were allowed to be installed. But Consul Bernick does not care for the interest of workers, who are for him just “a narrow circle”. Aune belongs to the working class or the proletariat and he is, therefore, quite aware of the financial crises prevalent among the working class. But his voice of resistance against the implementation of these automatic machines is suppressed by the dominant capitalist class which is represented by Consul Bernick, Rummel, Vigeland and Sandstad. When Aune expresses his desire of performing duty and responsibility for the welfare of the proletariats, he is threatened and is strictly instructed to perform his duty towards “the society called Bernick and Co. for by it we all live.”15 The opening conversation between Krap, the Consul’s clerk and Aune reflects the latter’s helplessness at the hand of the capitalists:

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Krap.

(Bernick) commissioned me to tell you this: You must stop these Saturday lectures to the workmen.

Aune.

Indeed? I sort of thought my free time was my own to______.

Krap.

Not to make the men useless in work-time. Last Saturday you must needs hold forth about the harm that will be done to the workmen by our machines and new method of work. What makes you to do that?

Aune.

I do it to support society.

Krap.

That’s an odd notion! The Consul says you are undermining the society.

Aune.

My “society” is not the Consul’s “society,” Mr. Krap! Seeing as I’m the foreman of the Industrial Society, I have to______

Krap.

Your first duty is as foreman of Consul Bernick’s shipyard. Your first duty is to the society called Bernick and Co., for by it we all live._____Well, now you know what the Consul Bernick wanted to say to you.16

Although Bernick runs “the Society for the Moral Regeneration of the Lapsed and Lost”17 he is all against the working class people who find it difficult to meet both ends together. His clash with the proletariat continues in Act II too. He tries in every possible way to suppress Aune, the representative of the proletariats, in the name of progress. Aune has genuine concerns and love for his poor working class people who,

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if the new machines are introduced, would be compelled to live on the edge of starvation. They would be unable to maintain their average living standard without appropriate income opportunities. The following conversation between Aune and Consul Bernick shows a proletariat’s depression and hopelessness in case of the installation of the new machines and a capitalist’s authoritative, callous and despotic attitude towards working class:

Bernick.

No, for your own narrow circle, for the working class. Oh, I know all about your agitations! You make speeches; you stir people up; but when it comes to a tangible piece of progress, as in the case of machines, you will have nothing to do with it; you are afraid.

Aune.

Yes, I’m afraid, Consul; I’m afraid for the hundreds of poor folks as the machines’ll take the bread out of their mouths. You talk a deal of duty towards Society, Consul, but it seems to me as Society has duties of its own as well. What business has science and capital to bring all these new- fangled inventions into the field before Society has turned out a breed of men that can use them?

Bernick.

You read and think too much, Aune; it does you no good; that is what makes you dissatisfied with your position.

Aune.

It’s not that, Consul; but I can’t bear to see one good workman after another packed off to starve for the sake of these machines.18

Consul Bernick, a hypocritical capitalist, is concerned only with his good name and earning more and more money. Any how he wants to maintain the pseudo- respectability of his high position as the richest man of the community. He is afraid of being exposed by the “newspapermen” for giving his whole attention to the Palm Tree, his ship, to earn wealth:

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These wretched newspapermen are covertly carping at us for giving our whole attention to the Palm Tree. And I, whose mission it is to set an example to my fellow citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I won’t bear it. I cannot have my name bespattered in this way . . . I need all the respect and goodwill of my fellow citizens, I have great undertaking in hand, as you have probably heard; and if evil-disposed persons should succeed in shaking people’s unqualified confidence in me, it may involve me in the most serious difficulties. I must silence these carping and spiteful scribblers at any cost; 19

Bernick wants to earn money even at the cost of the human lives. He threatens Aune to dismiss him from the job if he doesn’t obey him in the matter of introducing the new machines and sending the ‘Indian Girl’, another ship of Bernick, to America. Actually the ‘Indian Girl’ requires a lot of time for repairing. If it is sent with insufficient repairing, it might sink in the sea. But Bernick orders, or rather forces Aune to send the ‘Indian Girl’ the next day. He does not care for the possible loss of the human lives. When Aune expresses his inability to carry out his order of an impossible work with the present team of workers, Bernick threatens Aune to do away with them along with Aune, whose father and grand-father have “worked in the shipyard all their lives;”20 Consul Bernick fails to anticipate the unfortunate condition into which he was pushing the workers. But Aune, who is himself a workman, understands the harrowing experiences a workman has to suffer in the society, particularly in a capitalist society. That is why he implores Bernick to understand the devastating consequences of the dismissed workmen:

Consul Bernick, have you rightly bethought what it means to turn to an old workman away? You say he can look about for another job. Ay, ay, maybe he can______but is that everything? Ah, you should just see what it looks like in a turned-off workman’s house, the night when he comes home and puts his tool-chest behind the door.21

Aune is well aware of how a workman runs his whole family with his meagre income, and if he is dismissed from his work, everybody finds faults with him, not with the employer. His poor and destitute condition reflects the wretched condition of all proletariats, particularly when they are unemployed. When Bernick intends to dismiss Aune, his goodness does not let him find fault with his master:

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So much the worse, Consul; for that means as my folks at home won’t put the blame on you. They won’t say nothing to me, for they durstn’t, but they’ll look at me when I’m not noticing, as much as to say: Certain sure, it must ‘a’ been his fault. You see, it’s that as I can’t abear God knows, I’m a poor man, but I’ve always used to be the first in my own house. My bit of a home is in a manner of speaking a little community, Consul Bernick. That little community I’ve been able to support and hold together because my wife believed in me. And now the whole thing is to fall to pieces.22But Consul Bernick exploits the manual workers and is always ready to sacrifice their interests for the benefit of the capitalist class, the leading part of the society. According to capitalist’s dictum, “the less must fall before the greater; the part must, in heaven’s name, be sacrificed to the whole.”23

At last when Aune, being afraid of his dismissal, condescends to his orders, Bernick is proud of himself that he has “made that stiff neck bend.”24 He feels contended in forcing others, particularly the proletariats to bow before him. As Bernick and other capitalists have sole authority over the “little circle” town, they don’t entertain the entry of the foreigners, particularly the free thinking Americans to disturb their complacent authority on the town. They are annoyed with Lona Hessel, Johan and others who have returned from America because they, with their free spirit, might protest against the suffocating social atmosphere created by these capitalists for their benefit. Lona Hessel knows Bernick’s reality and very sneeringly she hits at his hypocritical nature and position in the society where the proletariats are ignorant of the evil designs of these wealthy capitalists:

You are the richest and most influential man in the town; they have to bow before your will, all of them, because you are held to be a man without stain or flaw_____your home is model, your life is a model. But all this magnificence, and you yourself along with it, stand on a trembling quicksand. A moment may come, a word may be spoken______and, if you do not save yourself in time, you and all your grandeur go to the bottom.25

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The helpless and marginalised condition of the proletariats is further stated in Act III in the person of Aune, who once again appeals on the scene to plead Bernick not to sail ‘Indian Girl’ as it is not in a sound position and requires a thorough repairing. But Bernick once again threatens him of his dismissal. Aune thinks that if he is dismissed from his job, he will be unable to help and support his family and the poor working men. He is totally dependent on Consul Bernick for his livelihood. Being helpless and hopeless, he expresses his genuine concerns for the deplorable and wretched condition of his family and the workmen without his support and proper economic resources. To Bernick’s threat to dismiss Aune, he says:

Then to-morrow I should have lost the place that rightly belongs to me in my home and family______lost my influence among the workmen______lost all my chances of helping them as are lowly and down-trodden? 26

Actually Consul Bernick now wants ‘The Indian Girl’ to sink because he wants Johan Tonnesen to die so that he might not expose his scandal. He tries to preserve his name, status and position as the most influential and richest man of the community even at the cost of human life. This is the doctrine of all capitalists. Doctor Rorlund, a schoolmaster is the well-wisher of Consul Bernick. But he is unaware of the greedy and hypocritical nature of consul Bernick and other capitalists of his own town. Refering to the capitalists of other nations he says that, for the capitalists of “corrupt and unscrupulous communities...... a human life counts for” nothing.27 He further clarifies the situation:

hey think no more of staking life than of staking capital. But we, I hope, look at things from an entirely different moral standpoint. Think of our exemplary shipowners! Name a single merchant here among here among us who, for the sake of paltry profit, would sacrifice one human life! And then think of those scoundrels in the great communities who enrich themselves by sending out one unseaworthy ship after another______28

Rorlund thinks that the capitalist class of their town is different from that of the other countries. But they are almost the same wherever they live. They dominate the society and push the proletariats to the margin of the society.

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Other indirect way of exploitation of the poor and helpless people of the town by the capitalists is seen in Bernick’s organisation of the society for the “Lapsed and Lost” where a number of ladies are gathered in the home of the Bernicks. They are apparently devoted to the charitable work like sewing for the poverty stricken classes, the “unhappy sufferers.” This benevolent act of Bernick outwardly shows the kind heartedness and the sympathetic attitude of the rich Consul Bernick towards the proletariats but it is these people whose blood Consul Bernick and his accomplices suck. These rich men manage to keep these have-nots in the marginalised position by offering them the loaves of charity so that they might not protest against their indirect and covert ways of exploitations. Consul Bernick has appointed Rorlund, a schoolmaster of hidebound, self-righteous and narrow mind, to train them as devoted and self-sacrificing women by preaching them the lesson of duty, purity, morality, submissiveness, obedience and sacrifice, and thereby to keep them busy in the charitable work, quite ignorant of the world outside so that they might not discern their hidden hypocrisy, and the charitable work would send a good message to the community, particularly in the proletariat class, and thus they would not protest against these capitalists. In Bernick’s community “women are content with a modest and unobtrusive position.”29 When the person like Martha, Bernick’s sister, expresses her desire of free life from the suffocating atmosphere of home, where they are always taught of remaining faithful to their standard of morality and womanliness, they are silenced by reminding the comfortable and luxurious life they are living in the house. Bernick has managed to engage everybody in the home in the activities that produce no income but only increase his importance. The following conversation between Martha and Rorlund, who is a kind of agent appointed by the capitalist, Consul Bernick, shows the deliberate scheme of Bernick to keep them all ignorant of their foul ways of earning money:

Martha.

Often, when I am pent up in the schoolroom, I wish I were far out upon the stormy sea.

Rorlund.

Yes, yes; that is temptation, my dear Miss Bernick. You must bar the door against such unquiet guest. The stormy sea_____of course you

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do not mean that literally; you mean the great billowing world, where so many go to wreck. And do you really find so much to attract you in the life you hear rushing and surging outside? Just look out into the street! Look at the people in the sweltering sunshine, toiling and moiling over their paltry affairs! Ours, surely, is the better part, sitting here in the pleasant shade, and turning our backs towards the quarter from which disturbance might arise.30

In the name of propriety and morality Bernick manipulates to keep the people, particularly the women-folk, in darkness about the ways of the world while he himself keeps on earning more and more money by hook or crook. He has maintained a tight discipline over his community so that the elements of free spirit might not enter his “little circle”. Addressing to the foreigners, the Americans who are considered the embodiment of independence and emancipation, Bernick says:

Oh, come; one must not be too hard upon the foreigners; these people are naturally devoid of the deep-rooted sense of propriety that keeps us within the right limits. Let them do as they please; it cannot affect us. All these unseemliness, this rebellion against good taste and good manners, fortunately finds no echo, if I may say so, in our society.31

Miss Lona Hessel, the elder sister of Mrs. Bernick, has been the victim of and is now in a destitute and marginalised position due to Bernick’s capitalistic mentality and hence his thirst for wealth and riches. She belongs to The Tonnesens who were orphans. She was once in love with Consul Bernick who was supposed to be “a polished young man-of the-world______a perfect gentleman_____the darling of all the ladies_____”32 But when Bernick returned from Paris, he proposed Betty Tonnesen (Mrs. Bernick), Lona’s younger sister because as Lona Hessel tells that “she was to have all our aunt’s money, and I nothing”33 Of course Bernick loved Lona and not Betty but he married Betty for her wealth which, he thought, would make his financial condition stable and stronger. He himself confesses, “I did not love Betty then; it was for no new fancy that I broke with you. It was entirely for the sake of money.”34 Out of frustration and helplessness, Lona had to leave her native place and go off to America without anybody to help her financially along with her younger brother Johan Tonnesen who was also totally unaware of the ways of the world. She had to lead her life in an utter marginalised situation. She is totally isolated and cut off from her

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family while living in America all alone. She has to wander here and there for her livelihood. Mrs. Rummel informs about her marginalised condition in America when she says, “Of course the family hears nothing from her now; but everyone in town knows that she has sung for money in taverns over there.”35 She has undergone the crushing circumstances in the absence of proper employment and money. Lona herself says, “It’s true I have turned my hand to all sorts of things, and made a fool of myself in many ways.”36 They were quite empty-handed there and “began life over there with only our four bare paws_____”37 They found themselves dislocated and disoriented in the foreign land. The harrowing circumstances under which both Johan and Lona Hessel found themselves, in the early phase of their life in America, has been expressed through Johan‘s utterance to Bernick:

The first few years over there, when we were desperately poor_____oh, how she worked! And when I had a long illness, and could earn nothing, and couldn’t keep her from doing it, she took to singing songs in the cafes; gave lectures that people laughed at; wrote a book she has both laughed and cried over since_____and all to keep my soul and body together. Last winter, when I saw her pining for home, and thought how she had toiled and slaved for me.38

When she, along with Johan Tonnesen returns home after a long time, nobody welcomes them. Everybody closes his doors on them. Actually Bernick has created disgraceful rumours about them in his community. Dr. Rorlund warns the ladies not to come in contact with them. When they appear before Bernick’s home, all the inmates present there draw the curtains, “The ladies take their places at the table; Rorlund shuts the garden door and draws the curtain over it and over the windows; it becomes half dark in the room.”39

Wherever they go, everybody turns back against them. They are now totally marginalised in their own community. Dr. Rorlund even questions Lona Hessel’s presence in the society when he asks, “What you will do in our society?”40 as if they don’t belong to the community.

It is not Lona Hessel alone who is relegated to a marginalised situation but Bernick’s wife, Betty, his sister, Martha and Dina Dorf, the daughter of the actress, Madam Dorf with whom he once had a liaison, and then left her in lurch, lead a

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marginalised life due to Bernick’s over ambition and greed for wealth and riches. Being engrossed in the accumulation of more and more wealth, he does not think that women have anything to do with business matters. All of them, according to Bernick, deserve to be kept confined in the narrow walls of the house. When Dina Dorf is forced to marry Rorlund against her will and choice, because she loves Johan Tonnesen, Martha, Bernick’s sister, appeals Dina to break off all conventions that limit and check the prospect of life:

Oh, how we suffer here, under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina! Marry him. Show that it is possible to set this use-and-wont at defiance! . . . Now go to your happiness, my dear child_____over the sea. Oh, how often have I sat in the school-room and longed to be over there! It must be beautiful there; the heaven is wider; the clouds sail higher than here; larger, freer air sweeps over the heads of the people_____.41

Lona Hessel who has returned from the freer atmosphere of America understands the exploitation meted out to his sister Betty by the greedy Consul Bernick. She complains to Bernick:

You have never shared your life-work with her. Because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you. Because you have allowed her to go on pining under the weight of the shame you had cast upon those nearest her.42

Throughout his life Consul Bernick poses to the benefactor and well-wisher of the community and he makes the people believe that he plans the railway line for their welfare and to enhance prosperity in the community as a whole but actually he buys up the public land secretly along the railway line for his own profit. He sends the unseaworthy, rotten ship, on a voyage to New York, although he is assured by one of his workers that the ship is sure to go down. In spite of all this he is respected and is paid homage as:

The clear-sighted, indefatigable, unselfish, nay, self-sacrificing citizen, who has taken the initiative in an undertaking which, we are credibly assured, will give a powerful impetus to the temporal prosperity and wellbeing of this community. . . Well-appointed ships sail from your

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wharves, and fly our flag on the furthest seas. A large and prosperous body of workmen looks up to you as to a father. By calling into existence new branches of industry, you have brought comfort into hundreds of homes. In other words_____you are in an eminent sense the pillar and cornerstone of this community.43

Consul Bernick is able to maintain this high and domineering position in the society on the basis of his sound business and wealth which he has accumulated through unfair means. Consul Bernick, Vigeland, Sandstad and Rummel, the major capitalist figures of the community, have dragged the whole community under their sub-ordination and control. Unfortunately all these capitalists, who avail themselves of all economic resources and opportunities, are also considered as the “Pillars of Society.”

Bernick also now seems to realise that his influential position as the richest man of the community is founded upon the “falsehood and hollowness,” but he is not ready to break off “this show and imposture”, it could be possible only in the last act of the play when he accepts his guilt and scandal before the crowd. When Rorlund welcomes Gernick on the stage with a glowing ‘Panegyric’, he says:

I do not deserve it; for untill today I have not been disinterested in my dealings. If I have not always striven for pecuniary profit, at least I am now conscious that a desire, a craving, for power, influence, and respect has been the motive of most of my actions.44

He confesses that all his partners are guilty of purchasing the public property secretly on the lower rate so that they might sell on higher prices when the railway line will be laid there. Further he informs that it was not Johan Tonnesen who is considered till now to be guilty in sex scandal Madam Dorf but it was, Bernick confesses, “I who sinned.” At last it is commonly agreed that the capitalists are not the pillars of the society but “the spirit of truth and freedom_____these are the Pillars of Society”45 G. W. Knight rightly says:

Bernick is shocked into self-recognition; and now, even though the ship turns out to be safe and Olaf is restored, he establishes an honest relation with the community by publicly confessing his guilt before again offering it his services. He sees women like Lona Hessel as the

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true “pillars of society.” She however insists rather on “Truth” and “Freedom.46

Although Bernick leaves no stone unturned to make Lona Hessel an alien to her own community and she has to suffer a lot due to his greedy and ambitious nature but it is she who has awakened in him a sense of guilt:

It will be sufficient to recall that the play turns upon the gradual awakening of a man’s conscience through the medium of one whom he has hitherto regarded as an outcast of the narrow-minded little community in which he poses as immaculate Consul.47

Thus, the play shows that the unequal distribution of economic resources creates dichotomy and differences in the society. The rich persons like Consul Bernick and his business associates hold the front of the society and the poor people like the municipal workers and women like Lona Hessel lie at the hind of the society and wring under their exploitation. They are forced to lead a marginalised life.

The Wild Duck (1884)

Besides other issues the play The Wild Duck, like The Pillars of Society, also incorporates the issue of marginalisation of men and women due to their economic backwardness. Like Aune, Lona Hessel and Johan Tonnesen the Ekdals have to lead poverty-stricken life and face a variety of problems, exploitations and humiliation due to their penury. Apparently the central theme of the play is the claim of the ideal and the illusion of life, the illusions which a man requires to flee a reality too difficult to bear. Gregers Werle, the son of Haakon Werle, a prosperous merchant and manufacturer, claims the importance of ideal. He preaches about forgiveness, redemption, confession and sacrifices although he brings disaster and complete downfall of the household of the poor Ekdals through these principles. The Ekdals, after being bankrupt, are lost in the dreamland, the life of illusion. The Ekdals, once at the pitch of economic prosperity, are now living the life of utter destitute satisfying themselves only in the life of illusions. They are now cut off from their former social circle. On the other hand there are the wealthy and rich Werles who avail themselves of all opportunities, social, political and economical. As this Chapter deals with economic marginality, I will concentrate on the marginalised condition of the Ekdals

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due to their economic downfall and bankruptcy, and the dominant position of the Werles due to their economic prosperity. This is the reason that the penury-stricken Ekdals maintain their existence only by taking the recourse of illusions. They have no time to think about the ideals to which the rich Werles give so much importance and lead the already economically suppressed Ekdals’ household to the final disaster and consequently push them to the margin of the society. There is a lot of difference between the poor and the rich in regard to their living standards and social position in the society.

In the beginning, we are introduced to the easy and comfortable life of the rich and the capitalists. The play opens in the wealthy, prosperous and highly positioned,

Haakon Werle’s study_____well and comfortably appointed. There are well-fitted bookcases and handsomely upholstered furniture . . . the inner room can be seen, beautifully furnished and brilliantly lit by lamps and branched candlesticks.”48

Pettersen, Jensen and several others are the servants in his household to carry out his order. Werle and his party are celebrating the return of his son Gregers from abroad after a long time. They are drinking and merry-making. Suddenly the poor old Ekdal, dressed in a threadbare “shabby overcoat with a high collar and woollen mittens” and wearing a “dingy reddish-brown...wig”49enters. Through Ibsen’s usual method of retrospective narration we learn, as explained by Pettersen, that this poor and wretched Ekdal was once an army officer and a partner in business with old Werle at the Hoidal works. He was sent to prison over the scandal of woods. The later development of the play reveals that it was old Werle who was guilty of the scandal but he passed the scandal onto old Ekdal. Now old Ekdal along with his son, his daughter-in-law and grand-daughter, is living in a shabby house in a very destitute condition. Due to his penury he is no longer considered in the Werle’s social circle. Werle has now offered him an “odd job of copying to do sometimes”50 Not only old Ekdal but his son Hjalmar is also considered an unwanted intruder in the circle of the wealthy and high positioned townfolk. Werle’s son, Gregers and Hjalmar have been close friends and now on Gregers’ return Hjalmar is also present in his welcome party. But Werle doesn’t like the presence of Hjalmar Ekdal at the dining table. Glancing at Hjalmar with disgust he whispers to his son that “we were thirteen at table_____we’re

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usually twelve.”51 Hjalmar, who has overheard the conversation between the son and the father, is deeply shocked and feels dejected at his poverty otherwise his father was once equal in social status to Werle when he was his business partner. But after their bankruptcy they are marginalised in their own social circle. He remarks to Gregers, “you shouldn’t have asked me”52 to the dinner since he is outside Haakon Werle’s circle. Then Hjalmar narrates his family’s life after his father’s disgrace and penury:

All about the terrible and tragic misfortune which I and my family have had to bear since you and I last met . . . ? Of course, my poor unhappy father lives with me now_____he hasn’t another soul in the world to cling to. Oh, it’s so painful for me to talk about it.53

This incident shows how the economic factors contribute to the marginalisation of those who are no longer rich. Like Hjalmar and old Ekdal the economically deprived people have to face humiliations and isolation in the society. Bernard Shaw in Major Barbara states that povery is cause of all evils and ills in the world, it creates slavery, dependence, disease, crime and prostitution etc. All these factors also are also highlighted by Ibsen. The economic downfall pushes the whole Ekdal family to an isolated dark corner of the society where even their best friends desert or are forced to desert them alone. Hjalmar had to leave the university due to the lack of money and since then they are leading the secluded and destitute life cut off from their former social circle. The whole course of their life has undergone a drastic change as Hjalmar tells Gregers:

Hjalmar.

It felt a bit strange at first, I admit_____it was such a completely different life. But then, of course, all the circumstances were different . . . My father’s hopeless ruin . . . and the shame and degradation of it, Gregers______

Gregers.

(Touched): Yes_____yes, I know.

Hjalmar.

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Naturally, I couldn’t go on with my studies. There wasn’t a shilling to spare_____on the contrary, we were up to our eye in debt_____mostly to your father, I believe.

Gregers.

H’m . . .

Hjalmar.

And so it seemed best to make a clean break with the old life. As a matter of fact, it was largely on your father’s advice that I did; and since he was so generously concerned to help me______

Gregers.

My father was?

Hjalmar.

Surely you knew that? Where else could I have got the money to study photography, equip a studio and go into business? It costs a tidy bit, you know . . . 54

Actually he owes everything in his house to Werle. It was Werle who got him married to Gina. But Werle had a motive behind all this. Apparently it was a help but actually Werle was utilising him for his self-interest. Hjalmar’s wife Gina worked in Werle’s household during the last year of Mrs. Werle’s illness. It is later revealed that taking the advantage of her poverty and helplessness Werle forced her to have a sexual intercourse with him. So in order to get rid of her and her illegitimate child, he arranged her marriage with Hjalmar about which Hjalmar was quite unaware until the moment Gregers tells her the reality. Thus, Werle takes the advantage of poverty and wretched condition of both Gina and Hjalmar. He uses them according to his convenience.

Poor people are intolerable and unbearable in the company of the rich. They have to face humiliations and contempt. They are considered to be outsider among the prosperous people whom the society recognises as the decent and refined humanity. When old Ekdal crosses the threshold, where Werle along with his rich folks of the community is celebrating a party, Werle feels disgusted:

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Werle registers annoyance and disgust. The talk and laughter suddenly cease. Hjalmar starts on seeing his father, quickly puts down his glass, and turns away to the fireplace.”55

The poor old Ekdal is treated as if he were not a human being but a disturbing element belonging to some different world. Even his own son is reluctant to recognise him. Poor old Ekdal exits apologetically. Francis Bacon’s views about the status of the poor relations in the company of the rich people deserve mention here:

A Poor Relation_____is the most irrelevant thing in nature_____a piece of impertinent corresponding,_____an odious approximation,_____haunting conscience_____a preposterous shadow lengthening in a perpetually recurring mortification,_____a drain on your purse,_____a more intolerable dun upon your pride,_____a drawback upon success,_____a rebuke to your rising,_____a stain in your blood,_____a blot in your scutcheon,_____a rent in your garment,_____death’s head at your banquet,____a Agathocles pot,_____a Mordecai in your gate,_____a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path_____a frog in your chamber,_____a fly in your ointment,______a mot in your eye,_____a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends,_____the one thing not needful. The hail in your harvest,_____the ounce of sour in a p ound of sweet.56

When Gregers and his father are alone, he (Gregers) asks how the Ekdals were ruined. He suspects his father’s hand in passing the forestry scandal onto old Ekdal. He even suspects his father’s interest in Gina as the past liaison with her, as he was informed by his mother when she was in her deathbed. He blames him of ruining the lives of both his mother and Gina. He says:

And who was to blame for mother’s state of mind? Only you and your______! The last of them was that woman you palmed off on to Hjalmar Ekdal, after you’d done with her . . . Ach!57

Werle seduced Gina because he was a rich and high positioned man and Gina was only a maid servant in his household. Dspite her utmost efforts she failed to check his amoral advances because she was poor and helpless and her bed ridden mother was dependent on her. Later on when she became useless for him he handed her over to poor Hjalmar. This is the fate of the poor people almost in every corner of the world.

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Poor people like Gina and Hjalmar are often exploited and then cast away out of their circle by the rich and the powerful.

The remaining four acts take place in Hjalmar Ekdal’s apartment, a studio which they use as their living room also. Ekdal’s household reflects the poor and wretched condition of the inmates. The whole space is littered with photographic tools and apparatus revealing the shabbiness and gloom of their household. Gina tabulates the day’s expenses and is shocked at the shortage of money. So she plans to rent their extra room. Hjalmar is followed by Gregers to his house. Gregers is really shocked to see the suffocating life that the Ekdals are living and to see how such a sportsman as old Ekdal was before his financial crisis, is living in such a stuffy and small house. Old Ekdal invites Gregers to have a look into the garret which shows the Ekdal’s deplorable financial condition because for their satisfaction the Ekdals have filled it “with odd nooks and corners” infested with chickens, rabbits and a wild duck in a basket. Even these petty things are not their own but they are grateful for all these things to the rich Werle who has been instrumental behind their economic marginalisation.

Actually Gregers has left his father and his house and has come to stay there. But Gina knows that Gregers is not accustomed to live in such a wretched condition in which they are living. In spite of being warned by Gina that “it’s nothing like the sort of room you’d be accustomed to.”58 Gregers insists to take the spare room on rent. After his departure Gina is afraid that Werle might suspect that Hjalmar is the cause of the separation between the father and his son. All the monetary help from Werle might be stopped. The following conversation between Hjalmar and Gina reveals the helplessness and frustration among the poor and some awareness as well among the coming generation represented by Hjalmar:

Gina.

And now Mr. Werle may get it into his head that you’re at the bottom of it . . .

Hjalmar.

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I can’t help it if he does. Oh, I don’t say that Mr. Werle hasn’t occasionally rendered me considerable assistance______but that doesn’t make me dependent upon him for the rest of my days.

Gina.

That’s all very well, Hjalmar: but supposing he goes and vents it on Grandpa, and makes it suffer for it? So as he loses what little bit of extra he gets from Graaberg . . .

Hjalmar.

I could find it in my heart to say “All the better if he did”! Isn’t it humiliating enough for a man like me to see his grey-haired old father made an outcast? 59

The disgrace and humiliation that his family has been facing till now is a major concern for Hjalmar. He always thinks how to link his family back to the mainstream of society by improving his financial condition through his invention. In fact he never succeeds in his imaginary invention but it does expose his heartfelt desire to pay off his debt to Werle and finally make himself and his family completely independent and free from the bondage and slavery of the rich Werle. He expresses his mission to Gregers through his invention:

At the very least, I can revive his self respect, by restoring honour and dignity to the name of Ekdal . . . I must save that shipwreck old warrior_____for he was shipwrecked. As soon as those ghastly investigations were made, he began to falter . . . When he was put into prison-grey and under lock and key, then came my own hour of agony. I remember I drew down all the blinds. And when at last I peeped out and saw the sun shining as usual, I couldn’t understand it. And when I saw the people laughing and chattering in the street as usual, I could not understand that, either . . . I felt as one does in a total eclipse_____as if the universe was standing still.60

His father and Hjalmar thought many times to commit suicide out of utter helplessness and frustration. Whenever they faced public, they were embarrassed. They, therefore, decide to remain confined to their house and lead a marginalised life. He tells Gregers:

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You can’t imagine how deeply touching it can be sometimes. For instance_____whenever we have some little family celebration, such as our wedding anniversary, a birthday_____or something of that sort_____in comes the old gentleman splendid in the lieutenant’s uniform of happier days. But he’s only to hear a knock at the door_____he daren’t show himself to strangers, y’know_____and he hurries back into his room as fast as his poor old legs’ll carry him . . . It hurts a son to have to stand by and see things like that.61

In Act IV grim Hjalmar returns home after having learnt through Gregers, who tries to make him free from the life-lie, that his wife, Gina, has been his father’s concubine. He is certain that Hedvig is not Hjalmar’s daughter, but Werle’s illegitimate daughter. The family, already facing the financial crisis, is going to be broken as Hjalmar leaves behind his family and goes out. In Act V an unkempt Hjalmar returns home and is somehow agreed to stay there for sometime. But Hedvig does not bear her father’s sudden indifferent attitude towards her. She commits suicide by a pistol to prove her love for her father. Thus Gregers Werle’s claim of ideal pushes the poor family to a further gulf of sadness and hopelessness. Actually the common and the poor people have also the desire for the luxurious and splendid life enjoyed by the rich and prosperous people but due to the unavailability of sufficient income resources they are unable to fulfil their desires so they are lost in the world of illusions that give them a sort of temporary satisfaction. This is the case with the poor Ekdals’ family which Gregers has shattered by shaking them off the life-illusions when he tells Hjalmar the truth about his wife’s past life. In his “Ibsen’s Treatment of Self-Illusion” the critic Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen rightly says:

The Wild Duck teaches us that truth is by no means an unqualified boon. It takes a strong spirit to endure it. To small, commonplace men, living in mean illusions, the truth may be absolutely destructive. It is better for such people to be permitted to cherish undisturbed their little lies and self-deceptions than to be brought face to face with the terrifying truth, lacking, as they do, both the courage and the strength to grapple with it and to readjust their lives to radically altered conditions.62

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In the end of the play Dr. Relling says, “Oh, life wouldn’t be so bad really, if we could only get rid of those infernal duns, who keep on badgering us poor folk with the claims of the ideal.”63 Thus the play,

has the rare power of appealing to that deeply buried self-consciousness of our own weaknesses which is generally suppressed, though it is always existent. But it is pitiless and pessimistic. The wretched littleness of average humanity is held up in all the nakedness of truth. The moral of the piece is_____ ‘Never rob people of their illusions.64

The play portrays the hierarchical difference between the haves and the have- nots, represented respectively by the chamberlains and the servants, the Werles and the Ekdals. The rich people like the Werles and the chamberlains dominate the society while the poor like the servants and the Ekdals lead a subordinate and marginalised life. They find themselves displaced and dislocated among the wealthy and the high positioned magnates. Hjalmar’s awkwardness among the bantering chamberlains reveals the fact that he is out of place there. The servants and the Ekdals appear social inferiors among the rich chamberlains and the Werles. They are taboo, objects barred from Werles’ threshold. The sudden intrusion of the poor old Ekdal, an abject figure for the country magnates, brings the party to an abrupt halt and elicits an exclamation of “annoyance and disgust.”

Thus both the plays reflect the marginalisation of those who are economically backward. In both these plays the capitalist class_____Consul Bernick and his business associates in The Pillars of Society, and the chamberlains and the Werles in Wild Duck; dominate the society, while the porletariats______the workers in Bernick’s shipyard and Lona Hessel and her younger brother Johan Tonnesen in the former play and the Ekdals in the later; remain on the margin of the society. These capitalists, instead of helping the poor, contribute to their marginalisation. Both the plays reflect the crooked and corrupt practices of the capitalists. They amass wealth and money through unfair means. They have deceived other members and then pushed the weaker section further to the margin of the society. Consul Bernick deceives Lona Hessel, his beloved and marries her younger sister for the sake of money. He also deceives Johan Tonnesen, his brother-in-law and forces him and Lona Hessel to flee to America to live the life of starvation there, and then dominates the entire community. He along with his accomplices amasses much money and property of the town by deceiving

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people. Bernick contributes in the dissemination of scandulous rumours against Lona and Johan and makes them ‘Other’ in the community when they return from America. He does not spare even his workers and threatens them with dire consequences if they go against his will and interest. Elder Werle deceives Old Ekdal by involving him deceitfully in the scandal of timber and since then he has forced the Ekdals to an abject and humiliating situation, treating them as ‘Other’ whenever they dare enter the circle of the rich. At last the entire Ekdal family is collapsed. The poor and working class, in both the plays, is humiliated and exploited by their rich counterparts and is compelled to live in a marginalised situation. Through them Ibsen has represented the universal phenomenon of marginality of the proletariat class and the dominant position of the capitalist class. The same class distinction in Victorian period is asserted by G. B. Shaw when he claimed that “each social class strove to serve its own ends, and the upper and middle-classes won in the struggle while the working-class lost.”65 He tried to turn the eyes of society to these imbalances when he said “workers, ruthlessly exploited by greedy employers, lived in abject poverty and were too ignorant and apathetic to vote intelligently.”66

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References:

1. Dickie-Clark, H. P. Marginal Situation: A Sociological Study of A coloured Group. London: Rutledge and Kegal Paul, 1966. p. 117. 2. Worth, Ch. A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p. 160. 3. Leonard, P. Personality and Ideology: Towards Materialist Understanding of the Individual. London: Macmillan, 1984. p. 181. 4. Heiberg, Hans. Ibsen: A Portrait of the Artist. Trans. Joan Tate, George Allen and Unwin Ltd. London: Ruskin House, Museum Street, 1967. p. 26. 5. Ibid. pp. 28-29. 6. Ibid. p. 32. 7. Ibid. p. 24. 8. Sprinchorn, Evert. Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. p. 171. 9. Downs, Brian W. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background. Cambridge: University Press, 1946. p. 161 10. Ibsen, H. Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol.4. Trans. and ed. William Archer. London: William Heinman, 1919. p. 241. 11. Fjelde, Rolf. A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, Inc; 1965. pp. 141-142. 12. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. p. 48. 13. Ibsen, H. Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. op. cit., p. 290. 14. Tyson, Lois. critical theory today, A User-Friendly Guide, sec. Ed. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1999. p. 54 15. Ibsen, H. Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. op. cit., p. 231. 16. Ibid. pp. 230-31. 17. Ibid. p. 271. 18. Ibid. p. 280. 19. Ibid. pp. 281-82. 20. Ibid. p. 282. 21. Ibid. p. 283. 22. Ibid. p. 284. 23. Ibid. p. 284.

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24. Ibid. p. 285. 25. Ibid. p. 319. 26. Ibid. p. 350. 27. Ibid. p. 358. 28. Ibid. p. 358. 29. Ibid. p. 304. 30. Ibid. p. 235. 31. Ibid. p. 267. 32. Ibid. p. 250. 33. Ibid. p. 315. 34. Ibid. p. 315. 35. Ibid. p. 250. 36. Ibid. p. 269. 37. Ibid. p. 292. 38. Ibid. p. 301. 39. Ibid. p. 267. 40. Ibid. p. 273. 41. Ibid. pp. 375-76. 42. Ibid. p. 382. 43. Ibid. pp. 395-96. 44. Ibid. pp. 399-400. 45. Ibid. p. 409. 46. Knight, G. W. Ibsen. p. 49. 47. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. p. 133. 48. The Wild Duck (by) Henrik Ibsen. English Adaption by Max Faber, William Heinemann Ltd. Melbourne : : Toronto, 1957. p. 1. 49. Ibid. p. 2. 50. Ibid. p. 2. 51. Ibid. p. 4. 52. Ibid. p. 4. 53. Ibid. pp. 4-5. 54. Ibid. pp. 5-6. 55. Ibid. p. 11.

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56. Lamb, Charles. Poor Relation, collected in A Book of English Essays. Ed. W. E. Williams, Hormondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962. p. 101. 57. The Wild Duck (by) Henrik Ibsen. English Adaption by Max Faber, William Heinemann Ltd. Melbourne : : Toronto, p. 1957. p. 19. 58. Ibid. p. 39. 59. Ibid. pp. 41-42. 60. Ibid. p. 56. 61. Ibid. p. 57. 62. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. Op. cit. p. 314. 63. The Wild Duck (by) Henrik Ibsen. English Adaption by Max Faber, William Heinemann Ltd. Melbourne : : Toronto, p. 1957. p. 109.

64. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 322.

65. Shaw, George Bernard. Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. (1906). p. 269. Books Google. 8 June 2011.

.

66. Ibid.

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Chapter VI

Other forms of Marginality

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Besides various types of marginality discussed in the foregoing pages, there are some other types or cases of marginality too, found in Ibsen’s plays. They are socio- spatial marginalisation, marginalisation of the physically challenged or the disabled, and the marginalisation of those who once enjoyed all the opportunities and rights of the mainstream society but due to change in their fortune, they lost their earlier position and were pushed to the periphery of the society. That is why marginality is also considered to be a shifting phenomenon. In the following pages I have, therefore, taken up three plays of Ibsen for scrutiny in which the playwright has dealt with these other types of marginality.

Spatial Marginalization

Ibsen’s play Brand (1865), besides dealing with the efforts of a young idealist to save the mankind spiritually, also incorporates socio-spatial marginalization as its sub-theme. He discusses the plight of the people who live in the distant areas away from the mainstream of society where all kinds of socio-economic and political opportunuties are easily available. According to Brodwin and Muller-Boker:

The dimension of spatial marginality is usually linked to the geographical remoteness of an area from major economic centres (location), and refers to areas that are difficult to reach (access) in the absence of appropriate infrastructure and therefore isolated from mainstream development.1

Although the play, Brand has been written with other great purpose, namely the firm determination of a young idealist to save the world or at least the ‘Man’s soul’, Ibsen has also expressed his concern for the marginalised people due to their remoteness from the mainstream society. Although Ibsen spent the major part of his life in the heart of the metropolitan cities of the developed European countries yet he was well aware of the unhappy lot of the people who struggle desperately for their livelihood in remote areas of the far north of Norway. He was painfully aware of the stern and rugged life of the Norwegian landscape. He knew how the peasants of

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Norway struggled desperately for their bread in the fjord and the storm-swept glacier while the people belonging to the officialdom used to live at the centre of socio- economic development. They are engrossed in their material progress of which the peasants and the other tribes, living in the distant areas away from the industrial development, are deprived.

The title of the play Brand is after the name of its character Brand who is the protagonist through which Ibsen has expressed his concern about the spatially marginalised people. Brand sacrifices his mother, wife and a little child for the salvation of these spatially-marginalised souls who live in the valleys and glacier in the far north. Through his mother we know that Brand himself grew up in the dreary place of the glacier. Therefore, he was well aware of their predicaments. He goes through the storm of the glacier to save these people in the remote areas. By this Ibsen has shown the difficult and harsh life which these peasants and tribes in the glacier lead as they have no escape from it. They find it not only difficult but impossible to reach the centres of development. In the absence of resouces for livelihood they are born there, face the fever and fret of life and die.

The action of the play takes place in “a fjord-hamlet on the west coast of Norway”2 Ibsen has introduced at the very outset the hazardous and rugged locale of the place. The setting of Act I is “high up in the mountain snowfields. The mist lies thick and close; it is raining and nearly dark.”3 Through the conversation of Brand and The Peasant and The Son (characters in the play) we come to know the marginalised situation of the inhabitants of the far north glacier:

The Peasant. You’ve got astray! The fog’s so thick, my sight it passes To see a staff’s-length ’fore or back_____

The Son. Father, here’s clefts! The Peasant. And here crevasses! Brand. And not a vestige of the track. The Peasant. [Crying out.] Hold, man! God’s death_____! The very ground Is but a shell! Don’t stamp the snow! Brand.

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[Listening.] I hear the roaring of a fall. The Peasant. A beck has gnawed its way below; Here’s an abyss that none can sound; Twill open and engulf us all! Brand. As I have said, I must go on. The Peasant. That’s past the power of any one. I tell you_____the ground’s a rotten crust___ Hold, hold, man! Death is where it’s trod.4

The Peasant and The Son try to stop Brand to go in a bad weather of snow- storm in the glacier. The Peasant’s daughter is seriously ill, he has no expectation of seeing her again but he is unable to provide her any medical assistance in the glacier. He would “gladly sign away” his “house and ground” to save her child or ‘expire in peace!” but he is even unable to go to see her for the last time because all the paths are blocked due to the snow-storm. There is only “chasm, and flood, and foss” everywhere in the glacier. Brand is shocked to know the helplessness of these people and asks the Peasant:

Hear, peasant; you at first profess’d, Your daughter by the fjordside lying, Had sent you word that she was dying, But could not with a gladsome breast, Untill she saw you, go to rest? 5

It is here that these peasants and tribes are living far away from the integrated system of development. In the absence of appropriate infrastructure in the remote glacier, it is difficult for these poor peasants to reach the major economic centres and therefore, they are isolated from and deprived of the mainstream development. It seems that even God did partiality in making their destiny and is now indifferent to their hard life. Rebuking The Peasant whose wife and children are stranded in the glacier and whose daughter is seriously ill but he is unable to help her, Brand says: Go home. You travel in death’s track, You know not God, God knows not you.6

Entrapped in their sufferings these peasants don’t spare a moment to think about God and religion. When Brand says, “You suffer in God’s service,” The Peasant replies: Nor his nor yours is my affair; My own is hard enough to bear.7

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Brand makes his way to the glacier to help the poor and helpless people. On his way he meets Gerd “A girl of fifteen, running along the crest with stones in her apron.”8 She is going to “a church that’s built of ice and snow.” Brand stops her and warns: Never go there a sudden gust Has often crack’d that hollow crust; A rifle shot, a scream, a whoop_____9

But the girl is reluctant and is ready to face any mishaps that are in the lot of these people lying in the dark and isolated margin of the world. Brand is surprised to see that such a little girl is struggling through the tempest-stricken glacier to reach a church: Of ice and snow! I see the truth! There, amid peak and precipice As I remember from my youth, There yawns a cavernous abyss; “Ice-church” they call’d the place of old; And of it many a tale was told; A frozen tarn has paved the floor; Aloft, in massy-piled blocks, The gather’d snow-drifts slope and soar Arch-like over the yawning rocks.10

Act II opens “by the fjord-side, steep precipices all round. The ancient and tumble-down church stands on a little knoll hard by. A storm is coming on. The country-folk,____men, women, and children,____are gathered in knots, some on the shore, some on the slope.”11 Brand oversees the fjord’s sordid world of human struggle for their survival. Here he observes that people find it difficult to keep their body and soul together. Here Brand notices that the people are going hungery and a mayor distributes “corn and provisions.” A man appears breaking through the crowd and rushes towards the mayor to fill his sack because he has “four_____five____babes of bread bereft.”12 One of his children was dying out of hunger when he left them. This scarcity of food should have been the concern of the mayor but he is happy over the death of a person in a famine-stricken family as it would save food at least for one person. Then a woman appears and she needs the help of a priest to save her husband from damnation, who has killed his own child in a state of overwhelming frustration resulting from the famine in the family. She expresses the deplorable condition of her family: I am undone! I am undone! Stern was thou, God, when I was made!

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...... Three starving babes, and ne’er a crumb, ____ ...... My breast was dry; Man sent no help, and God was dumb; My babe was dying in agony; Cut to the heart, _____his child he slew!–___ ...... At once he knew The horror of his deed of blood! His grief ran brimming like a flood; He struck himself the death-wound too.13 Brand becomes ready to go to help him but the “path goes round the fjord” and the snow-storm is about to set in. Brand is anxious to reach there anyhow but, There’s now no practicable way; The footbridge as I came across Was broken by the foaming foss ...... Down sweeps a blast! See at a stroke. The whole fjord vanishes in smoke! ...... With waves so wild and wind so rough, 14

Brand somehow reaches the glacier and finds the man dead. He finds that the people there are “drudgers day by day” and there is no pastor in this remote area to guide them while there are so many pastors in the developed area. The incessant bad weather forces the people to migrate from these bleak places to somewhere else where they might earn something to keep their body and soul together. The incessant hard life creates dearth of everything. When evil seasons froze the field, And blight on herdsman fell, When want struck down the Man, and ’d The Spirit with its drowsing spell, When there was dearth of beef and brew, ___ Then came a dearth of parsons too.15

There are no welfare societies or any other service centres available there to help them. Comparing between the availability of supporting and co-operating societies in the developed and integrated area, and the absence of facilities in these remote and barren places, Brand says: Who in a cavern would be bound, When broad meads beckon all round? Who’ll sweat to plough the barren land When there are fruitful fields at hand? Who’ll rear his fruitage from the seed When orchards ripen to the skies? Who’ll struggle on with daily need

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When vision gives him wings and eyes? 16

In Act IV a gypsy woman “raggedly dressed” appears before Agnes, Brand’s wife who alone followed Brand through the glacier, and looking at the child’s clothes demands from Agnes these clothes to wrap her own naked child. Agnes offers the only clothes of her deceased child left to her. Both the child and his wife die of hunger and cold. They die without any treatment and any other assistance in this remote barren place. They have no access to welfare societies and medical facilities of the developed towns. The play Brand was designed as a “big poem”. It portrays Brand as the “towering loner” with his inner struggle and his “passionate eloquence”. Brand is propelled by his calling or idealism to serve a stern God. He appears as a prophet for these spatially marginalised people. Inspite of painful sufferings, vicissitudes and disappointments in both his philanthropic mission towards these helpless people and the perfection of his soul, Brand remains true to his calling. Although he received warnings about the hazardous mission of saving the suffering humanity in the glacier, he is not discouraged and continues it at the cost of his family. Brand thinks that these people, living on the margin of the world, are constantly neglected by those who enjoy all kinds of luxuries in major towns and cities. Thus these spatially marginalised people of the remote parts of the world are not only deprived of the basic facilities available in the developed towns and cities but they also live under the constant neglect of the rich people of the urban areas and spend their lives under all sorts of natural hazards.

Marginalization of the Physically Challenged

Besides spatial marginalisation there is yet another section of society which is usually seen in a marginalised situation. They are the physically disabled people. In the play, Little Eyolf (1894) Ibsen has exposed the marginalisation of the physically challenged person through the nine years old boy, Eyolf who is crumbled in one of his feet. Eyolf represents those who are not paid proper attention or are unable to lead a normal life like other people around them. Thus little Eyolf is “the embodiment of remorse.”17 The physically challenged people face all kinds of problems; stereotyping,

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unemployment, inferiority complex and unequal and unjust treatment. They are deprived of their full participation in the day to day social activities. The play, Little Eyolf, revolves around the sufferings of Eyolf due to his lameness. He fails in his efforts to participate in the average activities with the boys of his age who don’t like his company. Even his parents consider him a burden with his crutch.

The entire action of the play takes place in “Allmers’s property, bordering on the fjord, twelve or fourteen miles from Christiana.”18 Little Eyolf is the son of Alfred Allmers who is a “landed proprietor and a man of letters, formerly a tutor” and his wife Mrs Rita Allmers. In the beginning we find Allmers filled with profound and remorseful pity for the poor maimed humanity. He plans to devote his life for the upliftment of poor Eyolf. The unfortunate little Eyolf appears wearings,

A suit cut like a uniform, with gold braid and gilt military buttons. He is lame, and walks with a crutch under his left arm. His leg is shrunken. He is undersized, and looks delicate, but his beautiful intelligent eyes.19

Eyolf’s parents, in a way, were responsible for the boy’s handicap. When he was a small boy, they left him unattended and became busy with their love making. Little Eyolf fell down and became physically handicap. He is now unable to do many things for himself and for them he has to depend on others. He has a strong desire to climb the mountains like his father and he wants to learn swimming because “all the boys down at the beach can swim. I am the only one that can’t.”20 He wants to become a soldier. But he is helpless and above all other boys tease him. They make fun of him. He is quite marginalised and feels himself as ‘other’ in the company of the boys of his age. He realises that he is unable to compete with them in any field of life. This is why he finds himself uncomfortable and incompetible in their company. He spends most of his time at home and with his books. Other boys also don’t accomodate him in their group. The doors of the active world are closed on him. “He has been badly lamed by a fall, and belongs half to the other world already. Every spell that a poet can weave about death is woven round his fate.”21 The conversation between him and his father reveals alienation and feeling of otherness in Eyolf:

Allmers.

No, no books after this. You had better go down to the beach to the other boys.

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Eyolf.

[Shyly.] No, Papa, I won’t go down to the boys to-day.

Allmers.

Why not?

Eyolf.

Oh, because I have these clothes on.

Allmers.

[Knitting his brows.] Do you mean that they make fun of_____of your pretty clothes?

Eyolf.

[Evasively.] No, they daren’t____ for then I would thrash them.

Allmers.

Aha!_____then why______?

Eyolf.

You see, they are so naughty, these boys. And then they say I can never be a soldier.22

His “injury is incurable”. Eyolf is “a type of humanity conceived as passive and suffering, thrust will-less into existence, with boundless aspirations and cruelly limited powers.”23 Up to now Eyolf is left unattended, but now Allmers and his wife are conscious of their previous neglectful attitude towards Eyolf. Altough all their efforts are of no importance for this unfortunate victim yet Allmers plans to alleviate his painful sufferings. Allmers says hopelessly:

I will try to perfect all the rich possibilities that are dawning in his childish soul. I will foster all the noble germs in his nature______make them blossom and bear fruit. [With more and more warmth, rising.]

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And I will do more than that! I will help him to bring his desires into harmony with what lies attainable before him. That is just what at present they are not. All his longings are for things that must for ever remain unattainable ti hm. But I will create consciousness happiness in his mind.24

One day an old mysterious woman, known as the Rate Woman, comes to the house and Little Eyolf is fascinated by the sinister Rate Woman and follows her to the water where he drowns.

Act II shows the crises triggered off in the family after the death of the poor Eyolf. He has slept in the depth of the water. Actually there was so little or rather nothing to bind him to life so he did not even make any effort against the allurement of the death which is nothing for him but an end to his suffering. Both Allmers and Rita are seen repentant and remorseful over their ill treatment of Eyolf when he was alive. They realise that they didn’t give proper attention and support to Eyolf and like the other people they themselves made him a marginalised figure in their own family. Like the accomplices in a crime, both Allmers and Rita blame each other for Eyolf’s marginalisation when he was alive. Allmers whose eyes were already half open is the first to blame Rita for Eyolf’s sufferings. He blames her that she wished that he were not born. She even admits that she wished “That Eyolf should not stand between us____that was what I wished.”25 He even says, “You never really and truly loved him_____never.”26 But the fact is that Allmers also didn’t love Eyolf. When Allmers pretends that he “wanted to make a happy human being of him,” Rita makes it clear that his aim was not formed “out of love for him.”27 Presently they both realise that their recriminations are only a vain attempt to drown the voice of self reproach. Raymond Williams rightly says, “The child Eyolf is crippled as a direct result of Allmers’ betrayal of himself for the “gold, and green forests,” in the person of beautiful Rita.”28 At last both of them have to admit that Eyolf didn’t exist at all for his own sake. Both of them were guilty of his sufferings and his death:

Allmers.

[Looks thoughtfully at her] If it is as you say, then we two have never really possessed our own child.

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Rita.

No. Not in perfect love.

Allmers.

And yet we are sorrowing so bitterly for him.

Rita.

[With sarcasm] Yes, isn’t it curious that we should grieve like this over a little stranger boy?

Allmers.

[With an outburst.] Oh, don’t call him a stranger!

Rita.

[Sadly shaking her head.] We never won the boy, Alfred. Not I_____nor you either . . .

Allmers.

It was your fault that he became______what he was! It was your fault that he could not save himself when he fell into the water . . . It was you that left the helpless child unwatched upon the table . . . Yes, that is true I forgot the child______in your arms! . . . In that hour you condemned little Eyolf to death.

Rita.

[Wildly.] You, too! You, too_____if it is as you say!

Allmers.

Oh, yes_____ call me to account, too_____ if you will. We have sinned, both of us. And so, after all, there was retribution in Eyolf’s death.

Rita.

Retribution?

Allmers.

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[With more self control.] Yes. Judgement upon you and me. Now, as we stand here, we have our deserts. While he lived, we let ourselves shrink away from him in secret, abject remorse. We could not bear to see it_____the thing he had to drag with him______.

Rita.

[Whispers.] The crutch.

Allmers.

Yes, that. And now, what we now call sorrow and heartache______is really the gnawing of conscience, Rita. Nothing else.29

Thus it is not only the other boys or people who hate and don’t let him play or participate in the common social activities but his parents also avoid him and his crutch. He is left alone and rudderless. That is why he is so easily fascinated by that mysterious woman, and drowns himself in utter helplessness. John Gasner rightly says about Eyolf’s parents that, “Their unconscious desire to get rid of their child “Little Eyolf,” whom they considered an impediment to their freedom, had resulted in his death.”30

Alfred Allmers and Rita ask Asta to stay with them and take Eyolf’s place because they, with their guilt-ridden conscience, “cannot go alone through the sorrow and heartache.”31 and in this way, their guilt might somehow be erased. But Asta departs with Borgheim, an engineer. At last Allmers and Rita decide to stay together and plan to help improve the lives of the poor children who live down by the sea. In this way they can atone for their guilt and mistakes they have committed against Eyolf. Both Allmers and Rita are egoistic type of characters. It is their egoistic nature which ultimately leads to the unfortunate death of Eyolf:

The offspring and the victim of these egoisms is Eyolf, “little wounded warrior,” who longs to scale the heights and dive into the depths, but must remain forever chained to the crutch of human infirmity.32

The physically or mentally disabled are facing a lot of hardships in every corner of the world. Barring some formal steps taken by government or other organisations for the welfare of these unfortunate victims, generally people don’t pay adequate attention to them and often avoid them. They remain

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helpless throughout their life. They face humiliations and mental torture everywhere. Life becomes impossible for them, and therefore, they lose their sense of self existence. The conversation between Rita and Allmers shows men’s indifference towards others, particularly the unfortunate persons like the little Eyolf:

Allmers.

Yes, life is pitiless, Rita.

Rita.

Men are heartless. They take no thought______either for the living or for the dead.

Allmers.

There you are right. Life goes its own way______just as if nothing in the world had happened.33

Thus the play Little Eyolf is an instance of the marginalised life of a physically handicaped boy. Ibsen through little Eyolf has introduced the reader to the sufferings and the feeling of inferiority complex with which a physically disabled lives. Surrounded by the crowd of normal men and women, they find themselves alone, dislocated and disoriented in the world. Their sense of selfhood is fractured. They begin to think that they don’t belong to them because they are unable to participate actively in the normal social activities. In fact “Little Eyolf presents a picture of mental and physical disease which happily is not the lot of normal humanity.”34

Shifting Marginalistion

There are certain other people who are neither poor nor disabled nor they have been pushed to live in the remote and difficult regions, yet they are marginalised in the sense that they fall through the net and thereafter fail to find a place in their own social circle. Once they enjoy a presumtuous position in the society but due to some

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misfortune they lose their former position and status. Then they fail to find a social group with which they could feel comfortable. They are certainly marginalized because they don’t feel loved, secured and wanted. Their sense of identity is fractured. John Gabriel Borkman, in the play after his name, is the typical example of this type of marginalization.

The locale and setting of the play John Gabriel Borkman (1896) is a cold “winter evening, at the Manorhouse of the Rentheim family, in the neighbourhood of Christiania.”35Act 1 opens in “Mrs. Borkman’s drawing-room, furnished with old- fashioned, faded splendour” with “a view over the garden; twilight with driving snow.”36 Against such a background of chill, gloom and destitution the play opens where it anticipates its end. Mrs. Borkman, “dressed in a gown of heavy dark silk, which has originally been handsome, but is now somewhat worn and shabby,”37 is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her son, Mr. Erhart, whom she expects to revive the lost glory and prosperity of the family. The family lost it due to a sudden change in Mr. Borkman’s fortune. But instead of Erhart, it is Ella Rentheim, Mrs. Borkman’s sister, who appears on the scene. Their conversation reveals a cold relationship between them and gradually exposes the past events relating to the collapse of the Borkmans that brought a “hateful terrible dishonour! And then the utter ruin too!”38 to the family fortune and the position. Borkman, formerly managing director of a bank, was once rich and high positioned man:

He used to drive about with a four-in-hand as if he were a king. And he had people bowing and scraping to him just as to a king. [With a laugh.] And they always called him by his Christian names______all over the country______as if he had been the king himself. “John Gabriel,” “John Gabriel.” Every one knew what a great man “John Gabriel” was!39

Then he was found guilty of embezzlement and had to serve a term of punishment for misappropriating a huge sum of money. This shameful act, with its consequent ruin of the family, pushed the Borkmans, particularly John Gabriel Borkman, to the marginalised position in the world around and even within his family:

Borkman is a man who has risen by his industrial schemes to a very high social position, from which he has fallen into a penal servitude of

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five years, and a retirement in absolute, humiliating isolation for already eight years more.40

Mrs. Borkman holds her husband exclusively responsible for squandering a lot of money becausse of his “absurdly lavish style” to keep up his social appearance. Since his release from the prison where he has spent five years, he remains isolated living for the rest of his life in a solitary confinement in the annexe of the house which Ella Rentheim, his wife’s sister, has offered him in his present poor condition. Mrs. Borkman has severed her relationship with her husband and now her attitude towards him is that of positive hatred and wild enmity. She is now determined to restore her fortune and social position through her son Erhart, instead of Mr. Borkman. She believs that Erhart will wash the spot cast by the misdemeanour of her husband:

Mrs. Borkman: [Looking steadily and earnestly at her (her sister)]. Erhart has in the first place to make so brilliant a position for himself, that no trace shall be left of the shadow his father has cast upon my name_____and my son’s.41

Being left alone John Gabriel Borkman has been living a terrible life of utter destitution and loneliness, all the time pacing up and down in his solitary room, hearing only the sound of his footsteps for the last eight years ever since he has been released from the prison. Nobody interacts with him and he himself does not speak to anybody in the family. He “generally remained by himself______up there_____and you (Mrs. Borkman) alone down here.”42Their life, particularly Mr. Borkman’s, has become “worse than terrible______almost undurable.” Mrs. Borkman says to Ella Rentheim:

He walks up and down like that_____backwards and forwards_____from morning to night_____day out and day in . . . Always to hear his footsteps up there______from early morning till far into the night. And everything sounds so clear in this house! . . . I often feel as if I had a sick wolf pacing his cage up there in the gallery, right over my head. (Listen and whisper.) Hark! Do you hear! Backwards and forwards, up and down, goes the wolf . . . He has never made any movement towards a change.43

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He has no friends and does not even go out to breathe fresh air, spending all his time, “absolutely by himself.” There is nobody in the world with whom he can share his anxieties, his feelings and emotions. Borkman’s condition of utter loneliness, hopelessness and frustration is occasionally alleviated by his old friend, Foldal’s short visit and his daughter Frida’s playing piano to him. Borkman’s wife, Mrs. Borkman, is engrossed to educate Erhart or rather to impose upon him her ‘mission’ from which her sister Ella Rentheim tries to liberate Erhart. According to Ella her (Mrs. Brokman’s) ‘mission’ is nothing but a dream to escape her real situation of hopelessness. If she had not that dream, she would have fallen into utter despair. Borkman also had once a “mission,” or a dream of getting material success and glory for which as we later know, he sacrificed human considerations which make his present state of destitution and alienation even more pathetic and poignant. Mrs. Borkman is at last left alone when Erhart decides to leave her and her dreams of a mission behind, to go with Mrs Wilton to an evening party at Hinkel’s, a place where relaxation, love, happiness and joy prevail. Act I comes to an end with Mrs. Borkman’s feeling of complete break-down and of utter hopelessness and eternal despair. She is left crying for her son Erhart who does not hear her agonizing call for him. When Erhart leaves her:

[She stands still for a moment, then flings herself down on the floor, writhing in agony and whispering:] Erhart! Erhart______be true to me! Oh, come home and help your mother! For I can bear this life no longer! 44

Thus like John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs. Borkman is also left alone in a complete alienation and dislocation.

John Gabriel Borkman’s present condition of utter hopelessness and isolation has adequately been presented in Act I but he has not yet made appearance on the stage, only his footsteps are heard.

Act II opens with Borkman’s brief dialogue with his friend, Foldal’s daughter, Frida who has been playing “Danse Macabre” to him for some time. She is in a hurry as she has to go to Hinkel’s party to play music to the dance without herself being able to participate in the dance; only to earn little money for her. It is this Hinkel that has been instrumental to bring about destruction on Borkman’s fortune and position and it

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is to this place that his son Erhart has gone to carouse in the party. Actually his son had come to see his mother; he didn’t care a bit for his father. Borkman is seen to observe a great restraint and reticence in his response to everybody leaving him to himself.

Soon after her exit, Vilhelm Foldal, Frida’s father, arrives. “He is a bent and worn man . . . He has a portfolio under his arm . . . ”45 Like Borkman he also suffers from the condition of destitution and alienation. His wife and children, like Borkman’s, have not only written him off but despise him for his failure to make a career by himself. He expresses his loneliness to Borkman:

You can’t think how lonely I feel since Frida left home . . . Frida was the only one who at all understood me. [Shaking his head sadly.] The others don’t understand me a bit . . . If it were only the lack of understanding_____with a little patience, one could manage to wait for that a while yet. [His voice choked with tears.] But there is still something bitterer . . . I have gone through a domestic scene to- night_____just before I started . . . My people at home_____they despise me . . . For children_____well, they have more culture, and therefore they expect more of life . . . I haven’t made much of a career, you see______there is no denying that.46

He is now totally alone and isolated. His only escape for consolation is now in his imagined creativity as he says, “My little world of poetry is very precious to me.”47 His only hope for life lies in his belief that one day his play would be produced. Both Borkman and Foldal are prone to almost the same condition of destitution. Both are deserted and neglected by their children and their wives for the failure in their careers. Both of them satisfy themselves escaping into the dreams of their future success. They make castle in the air. At last both of them are disillusioned. Like Foldal, Borkman’s hope for life too lies in his confidence of his rehabilitation in future. “Waving his hand” and “with rising excitement” he says:

When the hour of my restoration strikes_____when they see that they cannot get on without me_____when they come to me, here in the gallery, and crawl on my feet, and beseech me to take the reins of the bank again_____! The new bank, that they have founded and can’t carry on_____ [Placing himself besides the writing-table in the same attitude as

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before, and striking his breast.] Here I shall stand, and receive them! And it shall be known far and wide, all the country over, what conditions John Gabriel Borkman imposes before he will_____ [Stopping suddenly and staring at Foldal.] You’re looking so doubtfully at me! Perhaps you do not believe that they will come? That they must, must, must come to me some day? Do you not believe it 48

Borkman’s only source of life has been this conviction which, as the final course of the action will reveal, is his illusion, only a romantic dream which is never fufilled throughout his life. He himself confesses, “I am immovably convinced_____I know that they will come. If I had not been certain of that I would have put a bullet through my head long ago.”49 Ever since his release from the prison he has been waiting every minute for the moment of rehabilitation of his former position and prestige. All through his fallen days he has felt like “a Napoleon who has been maimed in his first battle.”50 Borkman’s hope seems to be something like his defensive device to escape his present ignominous and terribly solitary condition of utter deprivation. In the meantime he feels like “a wounded eagle, and look on while others pass me in the race, and take everything away from me, piece by piece!”51 His belief in human values is gradually demolished. Even his close and only friend, Foldal becomes skeptical of Borkman’s dream of future success and calls it a “poetical nonsense.” Actually Foldal has become now a disillusioned man and recognises the loneliness and emptiness of his life as he says, “For I myself have had my doubts, now and then, I may tell you. The horrible doubt that I may have bungled my life for the sake of a delusion.”52 But Borkman still tries to keep himself alive through his illusion. He says, “If you have no faith in yourself, you are on the downward path indeed.”53 Foldal, the only visitor to Borkman, now takes leave of him which further intensifies Borman’s loneliness and his marginalised condition. The conversation between Foldal and Borkman, however, reflects the vacillating situation of Borkman’s mind between dream of rehabilitating his former position on the one hand and utter despair and loneliness on the other hand. .

Act III opens in “Mrs. Borman’s drawing room” where Mrs. Borkman blames Borkman for the loss of their family position and his own marginalised situation for the sake of material consideration. Borkman defends himself boldly against the stigma

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attached to him. No doubt he has committed crime but he has suffered a long trial of loneliness and marginalisation first in the goal and then in his house:

During those five endless years in my cell______and elsewhere_____I had time to think it over. And during the eight years up there in the gallery I have had still more ample time. I have re-tried the whole case_____by myself. Time after time I have re-tried it. I have been my own accuser, my own defender, and my own judge. I have been more impartial than any one else could be_____that I venture to say. I have paced up and down the gallery there, turning every one of my actions upside down and inside out. I have examined them fron all sides as unsparingly, as pitilessly, any lawyer of them all. And the final judgement I have always come to is this: the one person I have sinned against is_____myself . . . I have skulled up there and wasted eight precious years of my life! The very day I was set free, I should have gone forth into the world______out into the steel-hard, dreamless world of reality! I should have begun at the bottom and swung myself up to the heights anew_____higher than ever before_____in spite of all that lay between.54

Thus Borkman’s confession reflects how he suffered alone living in a solitary confinement first in the prisoner’s cell and then in domestic cell. He suffered more than he sinned. He reveals the crushing circumstances of his life. He gives voice to the harrowing and horrible life of the millions of prisoners confined in the solitary cell, revealing his own horrible period of confinement in the cell, “The prisoned millions lay all over the country, deep in the bowels of the earth, calling aloud to me! They shrieked to me to free them! But no one else heard their cry ______I alone had ears for it.”55 About his alienation from the world around him, his wife’s hostility and his son’s apathy to him, Borkman feels that,

No one has understood me! There has been no one alive enough to my needs to be afoot and rouse me_____to ring the morning bell for me_____to call me up to manful work anew. And to impress upon me that I had done nothing inexpiable.56

He claims to have his “inmost assurance rises again triumphant,” but in reality, after the collapse of his position and the negligent attitude of his family members and the rest towards him, he feels uttrely crushed down by his failure and a sense of guilt

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for Ella Rantheim whom he had jilted for the sake of material consideration. His loneliness and marginality have almost paralised his will. Inspite of his claims that “I have awakened” again, he has actually “sunk never to rise again.” Mrs. Borkman is right when she says that Borkman is “dead already” and he should “never dream of life again! Lie quiet where you are.”57

Act IV opens just after “The snowstorm has ceased; but the newly fallen snow lies deep around....The night is dark, with drifting clouds”58 which sustain the gloom which has permeated throughout the scene from the beginning. The virile optimistic Borkman with his hopeful dream of rehabilitation is seen “leaning wearily against the wall of the house.” He finds all his dreams vanished. The “kingdoms” that he had made in his imagination are now demolished and he is now completely broken and exhausted. Throughout his life he remained away from the common social activities. The play ends with Ella’s and Mrs. Borkman’s regrets over the waste of a strong man to which their own coldness contributed considerably. Harold Clurman has aptly remarked in this connection:

Whether induced by the pursuit of holiness, artistic perfection or intellectual eminence, the coldness of heart kills. In this assertion and confession Ibsen pronounces his deepest conviction.”59

Other forms of marginalisation_____gender-based marginality, socio-political and economic marginality____are generally of permanent nature but the marginalisation due to change in fortune as discussed in this chapter is a case of shifting marginality. Thus we see that John Gabreil Borkman once enjoyed the covetuous position for some time when he was rich and was therefore associated with the activities of mainstream society but with the change in his fortune for worse, all his associates and even his family members deserted him, and for the rest of his life he had to live in a corner of an annexe all alone which makes his marginalised position all the more poignant and appalling. After his death the two sisters (his wife and her sister) remain nothing but “shadows”. They say:

We twin sisters______over him we have both loved. We two shadows______over the dead man.60

The play John Gabriel Borkman is therefore a clear instance of shifting marginality.

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References:

1. Gurung, Ghana S. and Michael Kollmair. “Marginality: Concepts and Their Limitations”, IP6 Working Papers Series. North-South Dialogue, 2005. Web. 12 Sep., 2007. . 2. Ibsen, H. Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, trans. and ed. C. H. Herfordd and William Archer, Vol.3. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924. p. 2. 3. Ibid. p. 3. 4. Ibid. p. 4. 5. Ibid. p. 6. 6. Ibid. p. 8. 7. Ibid. p. 9. 8. Ibid. p. 32. 9. Ibid. p. 34. 10. Ibid. p. 34. 11. Ibid. p. 37. 12. Ibid. p. 38. 13. Ibid. pp. 43-44. 14. Ibid. p. 45. 15. Ibid. p. 56. 16. Ibid. p. 56. 17. Williams, R. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. p. 67. 18. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken trans. and ed. William Archer. London: William Heinmann, 1921. p. 2. 19. Ibid. pp. 9-10. 20. Ibid. p. 14. 21. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. p. 334. 22. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol, XI. Op. cit. pp. 17-18.

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23. Archer, William. Introduction to Little Eyolf. p. X. in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume XI. ed. William Archer. London: William Heinmann, 1921. 24. Ibsen, H. The Collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. pp. 35-36. 25. Ibid. p. 88. 26. Ibid. p. 89. 27. Ibid. p. 92. 28. Williams, R. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Op. cit. p. 68. 29. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. pp. 92-95. 30. Gasner, J. Masters of the Drama. 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954. p. 380. 31. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. p. 123. 32. Archer, William. Introduction to Little Eyolf. p. XI, in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume XI ed. William Archer. London. William Heinmann, 1921. 33. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. p. 132. 34. Egan, M. Ibsen: The Critical Heritge. Op. cit. p. 41. 35. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit p. 552. 36. Ibid. p. 556. 37. Ibid. p. 557. 38. Ibid. p. 559. 39. Ibid. p. 560. 40. Egan, M. The Critical Heritage. op. cit. p. 359. 41. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. p. 563. 42. Ibid. p. 564. 43. Ibid. pp. 564-65. 44. Ibid. p. 580. 45. Ibid. p. 583. 46. Ibid. pp. 584-85. 47. Ibid. p. 587. 48. Ibid. p. 586. 49. Ibid. p. 586. 50. Ibid. p. 587. 51. Ibid. p. 587. 52. Ibid. p. 592.

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53. Ibid. p. 592. 54. Ibid. pp. 608-609. 55. Ibid. p. 608. 56. Ibid. p. 609. 57. Ibid. p. 611. 58. Ibid. p. 621. 59. Clurman, H. Ibsen. London: Macmillan, 1977. p. 189. 60. Ibsen, H. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI. Op. cit. p. 634.

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Chapter VII

Conclusion

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A perusal of the select plays of Ibsen, in the foregoing pages, reveals him as a dauntless debunker of the age-old, worn-out ideals and idols of the contemporary European society. His iconoclastic and revolutionary attitude is easily discernable in almost every play in which he has chosen for scrutiny the problematic issues prevalent in the 19th century. In this regard Ibsen was influenced by the famous modern theorist Geoge Brandes who, in his book Main Current in Nineteenth Century Literature (1871), is of the opinion that what keeps a literature alive in our days is the fact that it ‘submits problems to deabate.’ According to him ‘a literature that does not submit problems to deabate loses all meaning’ and for this, he thinks, there is a need to change our whole conception of society. He subtantiates his claim with the examples of some stalwarts in the field of literature like George Sand, Byron, John Stuart Mill, Turgenev Spielhagen and Emile Auglier etc. Ibsen too was not satisfied with the contemporary conditions of the society. In his plays he has taken up for scrutiny the deplorable condition of the marginalised section of society. He tried to restructure the centuries old traditional social order in which the underdogs, particularly the women, have been facing various types of exploitations and humiliations in a male dominated society.

The opening Chapter presents various biographical factors of Ibsen’s life which shaped his dramatic potentialities and moulded his personality as the champion of the underdogs, the marginalised, particularly the women-folk. He himself faced the phase of economic marginalisation when loss in his father’s business and his (father’s) extravagant living standard led the family to the economic depletion. They were disoriented and disconnected from their earlier acquaintances. When Ibsen was fifteen years old, he was also obliged to work in a chemist’s shop where both his wages and meals were skimpy and where, being alone, he could not communicate to anybody. He had seen his mother’s marginalised condition. His father used to beat and abuse her bitterly. Ibsen had also seen the sub-ordinate condition of other women in their household vis-a-vis their male counterparts in the society. Moreover every woman he had been in love was forced by her father to marry, against her consent to another man, and was thus deprived of her prerogative of conjugal choice. But in his wife

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Suzannah he found another aspect of woman’s personality, a kind of messianic consciousness towards her role and rights in the society.

Further a brief survey of moden drama upto Ibsen, and Ibsen’s contribution to the development of modern realistic drama, has been presented in this section. Through his problem plays Ibsen made the theatre a forum of discussion and debate. His contemporaries in English T. W. Robertson, Henry Arthur Jones and Pinero did try to deal with some contemporary problems in their plays but it was Henrik Ibsen whose A Doll’s House (1879) is considered to be the pioneer of modern realistic drama. The formative influences of some of the Danish dramatists like Holberg, Ehlenschlager (1779-1850), Heiberg (1797-1861), and the Norwegian playwrights like Welhaven, P. A. Jensen, Botton Hansen, Landstad and Faye etc. can easily be seen on Ibsen’s genius, particularly in some of his earlier plays. He also got inspiration from Goethe (1749-1832), the rebellious spirit of Schiller (1759-1805) and Scribe’s (1791- 1861) handling of a man erotically attached to two women. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) contempt for modern clergy and his importance of human will and free choice, some of the plays of Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjornson (1832-1910), Camilla Collett’s (1813-1895) A Sherrif’s Daughter and Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) revolt against existing traditional norms and values also influenced him.

The second half of Chapter I deals with the concept of marginality. The concept was first propounded by Robert Park in his book Human Migration and the Marginal Man (1928). His student Stonequist further clarified the concept and descibed some of the characteristics of the marginal man which include feelings of inferiority, irrational temperament and withdrawal tendencies. But their concept was limited to emigration and immigration. Lewin and Hughes widened the scope of marginaly further by including variously disadvantaged persons or groups who do not receive full acceptance in their own culture and society. Further Kerckoff, McCormick and Mann etc. developed the concept more intensively and extensively.

The concept of marginality has been variously defined but the gist of all these definitions is that the marginalised people are ignored, excluded or neglected, and are, therefore, deprived of their rights and full participation in normal social activities on the bases of religion, economy, politics, ethnicity, education, gender, space, culture, and hierarchy etc. They are all prone to exclusion, disorientation, exploitation,

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inequality, suppression, social injustice, spatial segregation leading to deprivation of various opportunities in comparision to the dominant mainstream stratum of the society. They are forced to live almost unnoticed at the periphery. Such an abject situation of existence is called marginalisation. In his plays Ibsen, while dealing with various types of marginalisation, has particularly taken up the gender-based marginalisation of the women folk.

Chapters II deals with the gender-based marginalisation. Gender-based Marginality is a state of discrimination and deprivation of rights and opportunities of women in a patriarchal society. The palys studied in this Chapter deal with the suppression, subjugation and marginalisation of women, who, despite their struggle, could not emerge out of their marginalised situation. The plays Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886) and When We Dead Awaken (1899) incorporate the female characters who, no doubt, rebelled against their marginalised situation but were crushed in the process of their strife. The female protagonist of the play Ghosts Mrs. Alving, brought up as a dutiful and obedient daughter, was married against her choice to a debauch and lecherous Mr. Alving. Being fed up of the ill treatment of her husband, she ran to her former lover Pastor Manders who forced her to follow the sanctity of matrimonial alliance. He forced her to go back, as a dutiful and obedient wife, to her husband forever. Thus throughout her life Mrs. Alving faced different kinds of exploitation and humiliation at the hands of her male counterparts, first her father and then her cruel husband and lover. Female protagonist Rebecca West (Rosmersholm) who is initially considered to be the most emancipated, wilful, independent, free thinking, incarnation of new womanhood and the leading light for all succeeding generations of women folk, is at last infected with the patriarchal views of Rosmer whose authority and political belief she had come to undermine. Finally she puts her lively life at his disposal, commits suicide under the influence of his patriarchal ideological dominion and proves herself as an embodiment of the old ideals of female sacrifice. Another female character Beata, Rosmer’s wife, is relegated to a marginalised situation due to the indifferent and apathetic attitude of her husband. She led a cornered and cabined life. Finding herself isolated and dislocated, she committed suicide. Next play When We Dead Awaken (1899) tells us how a male artist, in the process of pursuing his life-long ambition and desire, has made use of a young woman and also about the fact that the woman, at one point of time, becomes conscious of her

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utilisation by the artist which ultimately leads to her frustration and disappointment with the extinction of her soul within her.

The plays A Doll’s House (1879), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890), taken for scrutiny in Chapter III are about the marginalisation of those women who, after being conscious of their marginalised situation, revolted against it and ultimately emancipated themselves to live as independent individual. Nora, the protagonist of the play A Doll’s House, is treated both by her father and her husband like a caged bird and a doll. At last she is disillusioned when she realises her status in a male domianted society where women are relegated to the background receiving only negative attention. But by the end of the play, she is fully convinced that before all else she has duty to herself as a human being. She leaves her husnad and children behind in order to search for her self identity and thus flouts the age old patriarchal norms and conventions. Unlike Nora, Ellida Wangel, the central female character of the play The Lady from the Sea, does not leave her husband and children behind but decides to stay with him and deserts her lover. Her decision to live with her husband and children is her own without any compulsion and interference of her husband who had already accepted Ellida as an independent individual. Thus the play shows both Ellida’s marginalisation in the beginning and her emerging image as an independent identity by the end of the play. Hedda Gabler, the protagonist of the play Hedda Gabler, has been represented as a woman of destructive nature not only for others but for herself as well. But actually Hedda is stranded in a patriarchal system that does not peep into her psychology. She wants to lead an emancipated life like her father who was a military general. Like Nora and Ellida, she too ultimately takes the decision of her life in her own hand, and instead of bowing before Judge Brack who wants to exploit her sexually, she commits suicide in a manly manner.

In the whole gamut of his plays, ever since his first play Catiline (1850) Ibsen has depicted both kinds of female characters; those who have compromised with their marginalised situation and adopted the traditional submissive role of a woman and those who, being conscious of their marginalised condition, rebelled against it and made themselves free from the shackles of conventional female role. Even in a single play he has portrayed both types of women. For example in Catiline Aurelia, Catiline’s wife, is traditionally submissive, gentle, loving and obedient type of a woman while Furia is terrible with veins of fire, and a strong willed character. In the

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play Vikings in Helgeland (1858) Dagny is a very weak-nerved character while Hiordis is a fierce and independent individual. Thea in Hedda Gabler is a weak and submissive character who has a relation of servitude with her male counterparts, first with Lovborg and then withTesman while Hedda prefers death to the life of servitude to man. Asta and Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf (1894), Aline and Hilda in Master Builder (1892) are respectively weak and strong female characters. Women of first category have adjusted themselves with their traditional marginalised situation while those of second category have rebelled against the traditional norms, values and roles normally prescribed for women for centuries.

The worse situation of gender-based marginalisation is the time when women belonging to an already marginalised section of society, have to face complex situation of double marginalisation. They become easily accessible to violence both within and outside their periphery. Thus Gina in Wild Duck (1884) sufffers due to the situation of economic marginalisation of her parents’ and husband’s family but her marginalised condition is further aggravated when in the household of Haakon Werle she is sexually exploited by her master (Haakon Werle) and then in the house of her husband she is pressed under the load of the entire family. Another striking aspect of marginality is that when even women belonging to the houses of mainstream society have to face the gender-discrimination and exploitation. Selma in the play The League of Youth (1869) is the wife of Erik Bratsberg, the son of Chamberlain Bratsberg who is the influential political personality of the town but Selma complains that they have pushed their women to the marginalised situation within their home and they can’t share any matter with them. Thus everwhere in the male dominated society man holds the central position while woman is the ‘other,’ oppressed, repressed, ignored, disoriented and pushed to the margin of society.

One more aspect of gender- based marginality is that it is a gradually evolving social process to which we all consciously or unconsciously subscribe and practice. It is not necessarily an act of deliberate social exclusion directed solely at the marginalised people. Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler), Irene (When We Dead Awaken) are the victims of gender- based marginalisation, not because their male counterparts____ their father, brother or husband____ intentionally desired to keep them in this abject situation but these men did what the age old patriarchal ideology, which they have unconsciously inherited,

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has taught and trained them to do with women. They are the products of the prevailing patriarchal ideology according to which women are the ‘other’, just the material commodity to be enjoyed and then cast away. Thus Ibsen wanted to emancipate women not from the tyranny of men (who, he knew, were equally the victims of a foolish social system) but from the clutches of patriarchal middle-class morality so as to enable them to live the life of “purpose and will” as independent human beings and as an integral part of the whole social system.

The Chapeter IV deals with the socio-political marginalisation of people in Ibsen’s plays The League of Youth (1869) and The Enemy of the People (1882). Socio-political marginality refers to the situation of hierarchy and disparity between the privileged and the underprivileged people in the socio-political matters. The deprived section is socio-politically marginalised and lives ignored at the periphery. Stensgard, the protagonist of the play, The League of Youth (1869) has come from a very humble parents to the town for political career where he (though himself a scoundrel) is duped by other more experienced but crooked and currupt politicians like Doctor Fieldbo, a physician at the chamberlain’s works, Mons Monsen, of Stonelee, Bastian Monsen, his son, Rindal, the manager of the iron works, Anders Lundestad, a landowner, and Daniel Heire. By the end of the play, he is deserted by all of them and finds no woman to marry him, no one to support him. He leaves the town all alone and retires to the place from where he had come. The play An Enemy of the People (1882) focuses on the ways in which an individual can be ostracised by the higher authorities holding high posts and power in the political field. Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of the play, has come to the Baths, a small town, from the far north where he had been living for a long time, cut off from the mainstream society, doing nothing and living on the edge of starvation. Here his right intentions in the welfare of the society are not accepted by the crooked and currupt politicians of the town, and in the end of the play he, along with his wife and children, is left alone. He is sacked from his post of a Doctor, his house is pelted and demolished and he hardly finds a place in the town to hide himself and his children.

While in Chapter V the instances of economic-marginality in the plays The Pillars of Society (1877) and The Wild Duck (1884) have been taken up. Economic marginality refers to the unequal and unjust distribution of economic resources among the people of a given society or community. The economically marginalised people

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have meagre involvement in the income-resources of the society and are thus pushed to the periphery of economic and social system while the dominant community get hold of the entire economic system. The Pillars of Society is about the commercialistion and its devastating impact upon society. It deals with the disparity between the wealthy and rich capitalist class of the society, represented by Consul Bernick and his business partners Rummel, Vigeland and Sandstad who have control over the economic resources of the town, and the proletariat, represented by Krap, Consul Bernick’s clerk and Aune, Consul’s foreman shipbuilder who are under the presssure and dominance of these wealthy businessmen, particularly Consul Bernick, the chief of them. This capitalist class pushes the proletariats and the poor to the periphery of the society. The next play The Wild Duck reflects the gap between the haves, represented by the rich Werles and the have-nots, represented by the poor Ekdals. The Ekdals were at once at the height of prosperity, but with the change in fortune, are now living in utter destitution, cut off from their former social circle. The rich Werles leave no stone unturned to humiliate the poor Ekdals and to push them to the abject situation of marginalisation.

These types of cases of marginality in the plays of Ibsen show that the dominant class of the society, whether it is economically or politically dominant, does not let the sub-ordinate class to emerge to their equal status and always try to deprive them of their rights and opportunities. A collision and clash between the dominant and the sub-ordinate stratum is, therefore, generally seen in the plays of Ibsen. The people belonging to the later group are crushed in the process. In Ibsen’s plays it is seen that most of the people of the sub-ordinate class come under the pressure of the ruling class and the indivuduals, advocating for them, are ignored, and are further pushed to the marginalised condition. Stensgard (The League of Youth) and Dr. Stockmann (The Enemy of the People), supporting the cause of the marginalised section of the society, are at last deserted and discarded all alone. It shows the lack of adequate awareness among the masses. The economically marginalised individuals, the Ekdals (The Wild Duck) and the proletariats (The Pillars of Society) are not supported and co-operated by anybody. They have to deal with the situation all alone.

While Chapter VI deals with multiple types of marginality in Ibsen’s plays_____spatial marginality, marginalisation of the physically disabled and the shifting marginalisation of the individuals and groups due to a change in fortune. The

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geographial remoteness from the centres of development is called spatial-marginality. While living a luxurious life in the charming Italian landscape, Ibsen was quite aware of the stern and rugged life of the Norwegian peasants in the far north region in comparison to the people belonging to officialdom who live in towns and cities which are the centre of development and therefore, enjoy material prosperity. The Brand (1865), basically written with some other grand purpose, sheds some light on the spatial marginalisation of Norwegian people who struggle desperately for bread and butter in the fjord and the storm-stricken glacier. Brand, the protagonist of the play, goes through the fjord and the storm of glacier to save these people of the remote areas where there is no medical facility or any other welfare societies.

A physically or mentally handicap is usually not considered to be an integral part of the society. More often than not he is ignored. This neglect of a disabled individual ultimately leads to his or her marginalisation. But Ibsen has paid due attention to such cases and has expressed adequate concern about their plight in his play Little Eyolf (1894). The play revolves around the sufferings and pathetic condition of Eyolf, a nine years old child who is clumbed in one of his feet. His marginalisation lies in his desperate efforts to participate in normal social life of average boys of his age. He is neglected by everyone, including his parents. He is totally disappointed and disoriented and finally drowned himself in a pond.

The play John Gabriel Borkman is about the shifting marginality which refers to the reverse situation in the life of a person due to some unfortunate event or wrong decision on the part of the person concerned. When a person, once enjoying a presumtuous position in the society, loses his or her former status due to change in fortune, and is pushed to the margin of the soiety, such a situation is called shifting marginality. After the suspension from the post of the bank manager, John Gabriel Borkman, the protagonist of the play, is confined to the solitary annexe of a house completely cut off from his wife and children. He has to lead his remaining life all alone having nobody to talk to and to share his feelings.

It may, therefore, be safely concluded that Ibsen has very sincerely addressed to the prevailing problems in the 19th century. Although he has taken up for scrutiny various types of marginalisation but his main concern has always been the gender- based marginality. He has discussed this issue threadbare and in its totality in his

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plays. He specially highlighted the struggle of the women-folk in the patriarchal society of the nineteenth century. He knew it very well that it was not an easy struggle. Despite their utmost efforts many women could never emancipate themselves from the clutches of their male counterparts, they suffered and some of them even committed suicide. On the other hand there are women in his plays who fight against the patriarchal system of society and ultimately get emancipated because they had messianic consciousness in them. It is this flame of messianic consciousness which Ibsen’s plays help keep burning with greater force in order to bring about healthy changes in the society where every one, irrespective of his or her sex, social status, caste, creed and religion, may lead an independent and prosperous life.

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