Word: ibsenism
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Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
...world's view of Ibsen has too often been filtered through the bristling eyebrows of Bernard Shaw, who foisted upon Ibsen all of his own social-reformist instincts and his penchant for exposing economically motivated hypocrisy in all of man's social institutions. But Ibsen was not like that. He was Lucifer's child, a moral rebel with a lone eagle complex who believed that the master spirit soars above the common herd of slaves, who mill about in their social bondage of marriages, families, businesses, religions, political parties and national allegiances. A friend who heard Ibsen...
...Ibsen's teen-age disciple, James Joyce, understood him much better than Shaw. As Ibsen had slammed the door on a claustrophobic Norway, Joyce slammed the door on Ireland and uttered his non serviam: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe." Nora's door slam is a crisis of belief, her non serviarn. But is she saving herself or indulging herself? To judge her act, one must imagine the alternatives. In that final scene in which Nora accuses Torvald of never having talked to her seriously about serious things, man and wife...
There are several glaring fallacies in Ibsen's reasoning. One is that a woman who has been married for eight years and borne three children knows absolutely nothing about life. On the contrary, she has learned an enormous amount, precisely about life...
...more serious fallacy is Ibsen's assumption that doing one's own thing takes priority over everything else. True, in his own day he was battling the late 19th century's cant about honor, duty, the family, patriotism and God. Into a stiflingly confining atmosphere, he brought the courageous spirit of free inquiry. Still, in any era, society is a web of which the family forms the central strands. Children must be safeguarded and reared, and a continuity of values preserved. This is what society is about, and it provides order and sustenance for the vast community...