The Critique of Normalcy: Ibsen and the Vision of Middle Class Existence
After the French Revolution and during the period of industrialization and the increase of commerce in the 19th Century, the concept of the nuclear family and home grew as both an aspiration and an achievement for an ever-growing number of people. While the problems of poverty, both urban and rural, persisted, the ideal of a self-sufficient family unit and home became a more public and powerful goal for modern existence. The Victorian Era in England with its echoes in the United States and the rest of Europe, promoted a sense of public propriety and moral rectitude based on concepts of self-sufficiency and orderly family patterns. Middle-class existence, now a nearly universal expectation in Western societies, rests on three major principles: a sufficient income from work, a public respectability that can be seen by others and a regularization of personal family relationships both marital and parental. The middle-class household evolves as both an economic and an emotional unit that aspires to sustainability and stability. As our contemporary society shows however, the concept of the regularized nuclear family has many vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Consequently, there is an ongoing tension between the expectations of an externally observable normalcy and the inconsistencies and unfulfilled desires of individuals. The growing premium in the Western tradition on individual identity is thus caught between practical and expected public behaviors and private complexities and unfulfilled desires.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1901?) was the great dramatic poet of the clash between personal need and external social forces. After a number of years as a dramatist of Norwegian historical themes, Ibsen left his native Norway to lead an ex-partite life in Italy and Germany in 1865(?). Beginning with his realistic prose dramas in 1877, Ibsen adapted the style of realistic dramatic presentation to an imaging and an x-raying of middle-class existence. His second play in this remarkable sequence was A Doll House (1879). This play depicts a version of the ideal of middle-class marriage, but exposes with painful immediacy, the vulnerability of any social form that is not based on honesty and equality. Famously, A Doll House portrays the decent but limited male expectations of Torvald Helmer who has achieved public and financial success in law and banking. His wife, Nora, begins as a version of the proper, if apparently, somewhat silly corporate wife. The play centers on the conflict between legalistic propriety and economic and psychological crisis. Both money and sex are revealed in this play to be structured, repressed and misunderstood in terms of public propriety. In terms of human reality, the core of the play exposes the falsification of Nora’s existence as she attempts to accommodate herself to her husband’s views of business and law and to sustain the ambiguity of economic need. Nora had secured a loan to fund a trip for her husband’s health, but had forged her dying father’s name on the promissory note. She is blackmailed by the man who arranged the loan and has recently been fired from his position by Nora’s husband. Nora’s crisis over her mixed motivations in relation to the loan and her husband’s health involves the transgression of most publically approved models of female behavior in her middle-class world. For Nora and the audience, A Doll House reveals that she has been cast into an artificial role as the proper and appealing young wife to Dorval at the expense of her own individuality, complexity and existence. At this level, A Doll House is a powerful feminist statement from the imagination of a man.
Ibsen studies and reveals the contours of the external components of middle-class existence: a job, sufficient income, a publicly approved marital and sexual relationship and a hierarchy of recognition and authority that is largely patriarchal. In exposing Nora’s complexities and even inconsistencies, Ibsen articulates the incompleteness and failings of the middle-class images of his day. While clearly our contemporary society has made significant evolutionary progress in articulating middle-class values, a remarkable number of insights from Ibsen continue to illuminate unresolved conflicts in our social forms today.
Ibsen is particularly revelatory in his portrayal of the centrality of economic forces and public law and standards as areas of tension, pain and danger in family and social patterns. For instance, the blackmailer, Nils Krogstad, has a checkered economic and personal history, but his crisis in terms of daily existence and moral understanding centers on the loss of his job. As Ibsen shows in many of his plays, work is not just a mechanism, but a part of identity and meaning in individual life. Krogstad’s blackmailing of Nora to influence her husband to re-hire him, while morally ambiguous and even distasteful, is rooted in realities of personal worth and the sustaining of a practical life. This parallels the more prominent theme of the question of Nora’s needs to find the reality of her existence and identity in spite of the public expectations of her middle-class society.
A Doll House was revolutionary in its day and maintains a good deal of its original shock value as it exposes the shortcomings of personal relationships, the role of money and work and the emotion and existential issues involved in daily life. The play ends with Torvald’s remorse over his denunciation of Nora’s legal transgressions with the forgery, and appealing to her to remain in their marriage. Nora rejects his plea, claiming that she would only return if they could have “a true marriage.” Nora now dressed in common street clothes, rejects Torvald’s offer, leaves the house and the play ends with the notorious sound of the woman slamming the door.
Where A Doll House dramatizes the shattering of the public image of middle-class life, Ibsen’s provocative play, The Wild Duck (1884), presents the social, economic, psychological and even mythic labyrinth of compensation and illusion. Ibsen contrasts the lives of the families of two former partners in the lumber industry, Haakon Werle, a rich mill owner who has succeeded through deceitful business practices and Old Ekdal, his disgraced partner. The first act takes place at Werle’s lavish home in the midst of a party, but the remaining four acts center on Old Ekdal’s household in a lower-middle class apartment that houses the Ekdal family, its photographic studio and business and a fantastic loft where the Ekdals keep birds and rabbits in an artificial forest. Where Werle lives a life of external luxury, flawed mainly by his conflict with his willful son and by his own failing eyesight, Old Ekdal’s family lives a marginal material existence enriched by the photographic enterprise that provides income and images for the middle-class, and by a world of arranged nature that serves as a playground both for games of hunting, exploration and as a place of psychological dream and illusion.
In a complex world of family and business relationships, Ibsen poetically and prophetically envisages a version of middle-class life deprived of external meaning, but fantastically nurtured by emotional and spiritual desire and fantasy. The world of the Ekdal family parries economic distress with provisional, emotional, biological and imaginative play. The major crisis of the play emerges when the dissatisfied son of Old Werle, Greggers Welre, decides to bring an unrelenting truthfulness into the world of his friend, the unreliable and self-deluded Hjalmar Ekdal. Hjalmar’s economically and psychologically narrowed life, leads to his own illusions and misperceptions of his worth and his need for the caring of his wife, his daughter and his old father. Where Ekdal basks in his own fantasies of some great invention to ennoble his life and his family’s, the play shows that in spite of his weaknesses, his steady wife, his caring daughter and his secretive father provide both the practical and the emotional support that keeps Hjalmar functioning.
Greggers believes in an ideal of personal and intellectual honesty that he himself cannot attain. So, assessing the weaknesses of Hjalmar’s life, he influences his friend to uncover and act upon disturbing family secrets. The crux of these secrets is the uncertain biological parentage of Hjalmar’s daughter, Hedvig. Hjalmar’s wife had worked for Old Werle and had apparently been seduced or coerced by him into a sexual encounter in the distant past. The specific, literal question would be “Who is the biological father of Hedvig?” Where Greggers expects Hjalmar to heroically embrace his paternal role with Hedvig, Hjalmar’s weakness leads him into doubt, denunciation and erratic emotional demonstration.
In the world of the Ekdals, the compromises and ambiguities of daily life, the illusions of photography, the economic challenged daily life, the unresolved personal history of the members of the family, all contribute to a life that hovers between material necessity and psychological and mythical compensation. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the presentation of the play, is that the Ekdal home shows in the foreground, a living room, sitting room and photography studio, while at the back behind sliding doors, is the fabulous world of the loft. The play takes its title from a duck that was wounded by Old Werle on a hunting expedition, and since it survived in its lame state, Old Werle gave the bird to Old Ekdal who harbors it in the artificial world of the loft-forest. The bird seems to embody the mixed nature of life and human beings that inhabit the play, the world of its freedom and natural existence compromised by its wound and brought down to a living creature in a domestic world of imagination and fantasy. Ibsen explores the human need for significance, imagination and belonging in the wounded family of the Ekdals, and Ibsen seems to pose the question, “What is the basis of human reality and happiness?” Is happiness and economic and social construct or is it the product of imagination and vision that emanate from the human mind and psyche? In certain ways, both the material and imaginative resources of life are needed for human significance, but Ibsen does not provide a clear cut solution to this dilemma.
In The Wild Duck, Ibsen portrays his incisive understanding of the physical and material components of human society and existence, but he also reveals the restless human need for the extraordinary, for the wildness of nature, even in the heart of a desiccated urban landscape. The play is a kind of crossroads of public middle-class desire and private human need for the intensity, beauty and feeling that give life texture and vitality, even when drawn from illusion. That double vision of the literal and the mythic, the material and the visionary, the mundane and the extraordinary, suggest how Ibsen’s drama and particularly The Wild Duck, are roots of both modern art and a modern understanding of the contradictory complexity of human beings.
Where A Doll House dramatizes the shattering of the public image of middle-class life, Ibsen’s provocative play, The Wild Duck (1884), presents the social, economic, psychological and even mythic labyrinth of compensation and illusion. Ibsen contrasts the lives of the families of two former partners in the lumber industry, Haakon Werle, a rich mill owner who has succeeded through deceitful business practices and Old Ekdal, his disgraced partner. The first act takes place at Werle’s lavish home in the midst of a party, but the remaining four acts center on Old Ekdal’s household in a lower-middle class apartment that houses the Ekdal family, its photographic studio and business and a fantastic loft where the Ekdals keep birds and rabbits in an artificial forest. Where Werle lives a life of external luxury, flawed mainly by his conflict with his willful son and by his own failing eyesight, Old Ekdal’s family lives a marginal material existence enriched by the photographic enterprise that provides income and images for the middle-class, and by a world of arranged nature that serves as a playground both for games of hunting, exploration and as a place of psychological dream and illusion.
In a complex world of family and business relationships, Ibsen poetically and prophetically envisages a version of middle-class life deprived of external meaning, but fantastically nurtured by emotional and spiritual desire and fantasy. The world of the Ekdal family parries economic distress with provisional, emotional, biological and imaginative play. The major crisis of the play emerges when the dissatisfied son of Old Werle, Greggers Welre, decides to bring an unrelenting truthfulness into the world of his friend, the unreliable and self-deluded Hjalmar Ekdal. Hjalmar’s economically and psychologically narrowed life, leads to his own illusions and misperceptions of his worth and his need for the caring of his wife, his daughter and his old father. Where Ekdal basks in his own fantasies of some great invention to ennoble his life and his family’s, the play shows that in spite of his weaknesses, his steady wife, his caring daughter and his secretive father provide both the practical and the emotional support that keeps Hjalmar functioning.
Greggers believes in an ideal of personal and intellectual honesty that he himself cannot attain. So, assessing the weaknesses of Hjalmar’s life, he influences his friend to uncover and act upon disturbing family secrets. The crux of these secrets is the uncertain biological parentage of Hjalmar’s daughter, Hedvig. Hjalmar’s wife had worked for Old Werle and had apparently been seduced or coerced by him into a sexual encounter in the distant past. The specific, literal question would be “Who is the biological father of Hedvig?” Where Greggers expects Hjalmar to heroically embrace his paternal role with Hedvig, Hjalmar’s weakness leads him into doubt, denunciation and erratic emotional demonstration.
In the world of the Ekdals, the compromises and ambiguities of daily life, the illusions of photography, the economic challenged daily life, the unresolved personal history of the members of the family, all contribute to a life that hovers between material necessity and psychological and mythical compensation. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the presentation of the play, is that the Ekdal home shows in the foreground, a living room, sitting room and photography studio, while at the back behind sliding doors, is the fabulous world of the loft. The play takes its title from a duck that was wounded by Old Werle on a hunting expedition, and since it survived in its lame state, Old Werle gave the bird to Old Ekdal who harbors it in the artificial world of the loft-forest. The bird seems to embody the mixed nature of life and human beings that inhabit the play, the world of its freedom and natural existence compromised by its wound and brought down to a living creature in a domestic world of imagination and fantasy. Ibsen explores the human need for significance, imagination and belonging in the wounded family of the Ekdals, and Ibsen seems to pose the question, “What is the basis of human reality and happiness?” Is happiness and economic and social construct or is it the product of imagination and vision that emanate from the human mind and psyche? In certain ways, both the material and imaginative resources of life are needed for human significance, but Ibsen does not provide a clear cut solution to this dilemma.
In The Wild Duck, Ibsen portrays his incisive understanding of the physical and material components of human society and existence, but he also reveals the restless human need for the extraordinary, for the wildness of nature, even in the heart of a desiccated urban landscape. The play is a kind of crossroads of public middle-class desire and private human need for the intensity, beauty and feeling that give life texture and vitality, even when drawn from illusion. That double vision of the literal and the mythic, the material and the visionary, the mundane and the extraordinary, suggest how Ibsen’s drama and particularly The Wild Duck, are roots of both modern art and a modern understanding of the contradictory complexity of human beings.
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