Ibsen AO5 Flashcards
Bernard Shaw, 1890
Ibsen’s message to you is: if you are a member of society, defy it.
Henry Arthur James, 1886
Critical scrutiny of the lives and values of the bourgeois classes, involved a wholesale rejection of the romantic plots that had prevailed
Eleanor Marx
The herald of change
Sally Ledger
Ibsenism sounded the death knell for those Victorian Values
Pastor M J Faerden
The emancipated woman has taken her place at the door
Hattie Morahan, Cracknell’s Nora
The things Ibsen writes mean it ceases to be about a particular milieu and becomes about marriage and money. These are universal anxieties.
Norwegian Newspaper, M.V Brun (The People’s Paper) 1979
snake in a homely paradise
Sandra Saari
embraced an entirely different fundamental premise […] in order to demonstrate the radical transformation of Nora from female to human being.
Alisa Solomon, Redressing the Canon, 1997
Ibsen reveals the artificiality of the well-made play and.. the artificiality of the well-made woman
Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist issue, 1979
Excessive consumption is rooted in troubled relationships
William Archer “Breaking the Butterfly” (2)
“It is this combination of the moralist — or ‘immoralist’, as some would prefer to Say — with the dramatic plot which has given Ibsen his enormous influence in the three Scandinavian kingdoms; and it is this which makes his plays suffer more than any others by transportation across the Channel.(( For the British public will not have didactics at any price, and least of all such didactics as Ibsen’s)). . . . The adapters, or more properly the authors, have felt it needful to ((eliminate all that was satirical or unpleasant)), and in ‘making their work sympathetic they at once made it trivial. I am the last to blame them for doing so. ((Ibsen on the Eliglish stage is impossible.))”
Michael Meyer
Ibsen loves the ‘repulsive’ and the ending is ‘illogical’ and ‘immoral’
Cracknell, 2012
- revolving set like hamster wheel
- tarantella with swooping sinister music
- put on black clothing at the end
- Nora hit Helmer on ‘human being’
- child left on stage crying at the end
Fædrelandet (The Country), Copenhagen, 22 December 1879. (2)
his latest work, its great technical merit and rich psychological interest not withstanding, is a step in the right direction or — on the wrong track.
waited on hand and foot and humoured in every wish by her besotted husband…she romps like a child herself, but who turns out to have committed a very imprudent action
but it is not possible for her to remove the un-feminine from …where she herself has to propose to her old, wronged lover,
M.V. Brun, Folkets Avis (The People’s Paper), Copenhagen, 24 December 1879.
which in the crassest way breaks with the common human qualities to celebrate the untrue, the in every aesthetic, psychological and dramatic respect distressing…who would act as Nora acts, who would leave husband and children and home so she herself first and foremost can become “a human being”?
