Henrik Ibsen


       Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was one of those late 19th century literary figures who firmly declared that literature should be a tool for the betterment of society. Implicit in this attitude is the presumption that the writer knows what is best for the people. Aesthetics as an end in itself was dismissed by Ibsen, an attitude described by Chesterton as 'splendidly consistent, splendidly fierce, and splendidly wrong.' Because Ibsen's work attacks bourgeois middle class life and values he was very popular in the social upheavals that marked the twentieth century, although his popularity has waned somewhat with the more pragmatic lifesyles of the early 21st century.
       The Ibsen play most pertinent to American life, and most often peformed in the U. S., is probably An Enemy of the People about a physician in a Scandinavian resort community who discovers that the natural baths which are the economic lifeblood of the town are contaminated and may be a threat to the health of the bathers. When the community leaders grasped the prohibitive cost of rectifying the situation they questioned the findings of the good doctor. When Dr. Stockmann refuses to recant he is shouted down at a town meeting, becomes an outcast, and his home is vandalized. This rather simplistic indictment of democratic capitalism found a very receptive audience in the idealistic would-be social reformers of the early and middle twentieth century and was expertly used by those who used these reformers to further their own ends.
       Peer Gynt has a more universal message. The story follows the adventures of a rogue who commits a crime as a young man and flees the country to escape punishment. He lives a vagabond life making and losing money and returns to his home country as an old man to feel the wasteful emptiness of his life of self-indulgence. Some have noted a loosely autobiographical purport to this play. Ibsen, feeling unappreciated in his home country of Norway, left the country as a young man and wandered through Europe for 27 years fitfully supporting his wife and child. He returned to Norway in 1891 a national hero and was said to have spent the last years of his life regretting having sacrificed personal relationships for his work.
       One of the most intriguing aspects of Ibsen's work is the wide divergence of interpetations. Although An Enemy of the People is pretty straightforward, my analysis of Peer Gynt is diametrically opposed by many commentators.