Contribution of Henrik Ibsen to Classic and Modern Literature - Essay Example

?Contribution of Henrik Ibsen to ic and Modern Literature Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a major Norwegian playwright, theatre director and a poet. He was the founder of modern theater and his plays performed all over the world, has set the tone for the modern era of drama. Many different forms of writing prevailed during the 19th century. Poetry, Novels, Romantic Literature, Naturalism, Realism and Transcendalism were some of the characteristics of this time. Romance Novels also gained popularity during this time. This paper aims to discuss the works and contributions as well as criticisms of Ibsen in the light of contemporary and modern literature. The key features of the Henrik Ibsen’s writings that add richness to his creativity have the elements of idealism, skepticism, self-theatricalization of everyday life. In his works love has many a times been portrayed with as an element that is being destroyed by theatricality and skepticism. Marriage has often been found to be a central theme of Ibsen’s contribution to literature. The situation of women in everyday life has a key social component in his question of modernity. The relationship between idealism and skepticism has also raised a point of question in the minds of the playwright. A common feature of Ibsen’s contribution deal with the theme of writing which it is often seen that protagonists never seem to find their way back to the everyday life. For example: In The Wild Duck, the situation of women though not a modern theme has been a major concern. Among Ibsen’s contemporary plays, most of them have a concern with the difficulty of finding a way to honor the dreams of freedom and the creative elements of revolutionary romanticism, although by eliminating the part of idealist aesthetics. At the most optimistic level, Ibsen talks of expression of love and freedom, more so in the context of ordinary human relationships. At his most pessimism those relationships often comes out as the desperation of meaninglessness and loss. However, at all times, Ibsen sees that both the longing for the romantic (absolute) and the disappointed, skepticism recoil from that longing is existentially destructive. Ibsen’s theatrical congruence ultimately emerges as an exploration of the conditions of love, where the expressions of genuine feelings increasingly come across the theatrical. The most fundamental question of the mature Ibsen, that keeps coming back in his major plays, is that, how can love prevail in the world where one no longer trusts the power of language to convey the meanings, where the search for absolute truth and absolute faith just ends up with a stint of absolute despair. It is this question that resonates even more powerfully today, than in Ibsen’s time. That is simply the reason as to why Ibsen’s works are critical to our understanding of modernity, and as to why they still matter so intensely in the modern day age (Moi, 2006, 9-14). A Doll’s House is said to be Ibsen’s first fully modernist play. This particular play is crucial in understanding a woman’s role in marriage and family. Also in the famous tarantella scene, Ibsen clearly shows us how a play can be the only antidote to theatricality. The play asks the most pertinent question in regard to modernity on how two individuals can build a relationship based on faith and love (Moi, 2006, 12). A Doll’s House and “Ghosts” complemented each other. Hedda Gabbler composed in around 1890 also belongs to the same written volume. These works were regarded as remarkable feminist works of the time. After the passing of almost hundred years, it is time that the world has come to a definite opinion concerning Henrik Ibsen’s contribution and position in the history of letters. However, it has not yet been possible to fully exploit the full faiths out of the atmosphere by which this great historian playwright’s works were enveloped be revealed. Henrik was born in the little town of Skien, in March 20, 1828. His experience of childhood was somber. Since, the time of childhood, Ibsen had an uncomfortable life and he often felt like a little outsider to the life around him. He had that “apart” temperament which cannot be correctly defined as a “happy” one. In fact, his way of happiness was to shut himself up with his picture-books, to play his own games, and draw and paint for himself, as his way of life didn’t get well with his playmates. The boy as a child has been said to have suffered from the sense of disgrace and loss after a brief spell of prosperous childhood, as there was bankruptcy when he was just eight years of age. The accounting six years, from Ibsen’s twenty-fourth year to the thirtieth year Ibsen spent controlling the fortunes of a living theater in Bergen, which can be cited as the best possible apprenticeship that any dramatist would feel fortunate to experience. The significant features of which have come up vividly in his style. Before Ibsen left Bergen he had already taken a great step forward in completing the tragedy of The Warriors of Hedgeland, which is cited to be his first revolutionary achievement. It was in fact his first contribution to the movement that subsequently came to be defined by the term ‘naturalism’ as a challenge to the romantic outlook on life and poetry in the general sense of the meaning. Though he began the drama in verse it ultimately turned into prose. His critics used to accuse of his advantage of his works. However, it was deplored that, he might have willfully departed from the conventional writing of a Nibelungen drama, bearing similarities with the great German dramas of Hebbel and Wagner. But, the fact was that, it was not an intentionally driven creation by Ibsen (Robertson, 1935, 147-148, 159-160). Much later, at around 1990, one scholar noted that Henrik Ibsen was one of the most under-reads of the great writers of the past. For a classic writer of his stature, it was surprising to find no such remarkable full-length studies related to his works and contributions in the English literature. Quite significantly, there are absolutely none of the current documents of literary criticisms. Outside Norway, no major literary theorists have written at length on Ibsen since 1969 by Raymond Williams. Intellectuals have started to explain plays of Ibsen as old-fashioned and boring after the World War II. In 1952, Raymond Williams credited the work of Henrik Ibsen in “Drama from Ibsen to Elliot” by crediting and defining his skill of romantic drama out of a fashionable naturalist theater. However, contrary to the belief again, in an essay by Mary McCarthy written in 1956, who reviewed theater in New York for over two decades, considered Ibsen’s works to be highly over-rated. According to McCarthy, Ibsen’s major fault was not his naturalism or his realism of thoughtfulness, but his exaggerated symbolism as well as hollow emotional manipulation. Naturalism, realism, romantic drama and melodramatic theatricality had started to become negative aesthetic terms, by the 1950s and all these elements of expression had a distinct place in most of the creations of Ibsen. If Ibsen is to become alive and challenging again, it is important that we free ourselves from this particular case of idealism and the effect of this aesthetics. The “autonomy of aesthetics”, can be interpreted in two very different ways. One, it can mean that art must be free from socio-political and religious interventions. Two, that art, must take fundamentally art as its point of flow rather than just the “reflection” or “representation” of reality, as its matter of subjective analysis. While the first interpretation is not actually culture-phobic, the second opinion points out to its nature. The fundamental ‘doctrine’ of autonomy is culture-phobic for the various ideologues of modernism. Therefore, the concept of culture is the true enemy for the creation of art and as such if one opens a door to the same “culture” everything included under the term of cultural studies pours in and leaves pure art and literature irredeemably distorted (Moi, 2006, 18-21). Therefore, in conclusion, it can be said that, Ibsen has handled the historical facts, his contemporary culture and society very freely. In this respect he has not followed any other contemporary writers, who believed historical tragedy must respect history. For Ibsen the dramatist, history did mean no more than what we happen to see in reality, that is to have meant for Ibsen, the lyric poet. It was only the starting point that set forth the world of his fancies and thoughts. Also, from the age of Reformation, Henrik Ibsen turned to the saga period. In Ibsen’s piece of literary creations there are no runes or mysterious powers that have answers to the questions (Jaeger, 1890, 99-100, 105). . References Moi, Toril, (2006). Henrik Ibsen and the birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, John George, (1935). Essays and Addresses on Literature. USA: Library of Congress Catalog Card Number-68-26471. Jaeger, Henrik Bernhard, (1890). Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1888: A Critical Biography. USA: Library of Congress Catalog Card Number- 70-180033. Read More