New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
688 pp. $45 (hardcover).

Author’s note: This review contains spoilers for Henrik Ibsen’s Brand, A Doll’s House, and Ghosts.

A Henrik Ibsen play has the power to haunt an audience long after the curtain has fallen, as if an explosion of intelligence continues to reverberate through the hallways of the theater. A genius at constructing plots to convey abstract ideas, the Norwegian playwright built a career that carried him from the bold, melodramatic heights of Brand (1865), to the darkest depths of spiritual crimes in Ghosts (1881), to the enigmatic and ethereal realms of The Master Builder (1892). His greatest works pose some of the hardest questions literature has ever asked about integrity, sacrifice, the value of the self, and the dangers of mobocracy. But as Vassar College professor emeritus Evert Sprinchorn explains in his superb overview, Ibsen’s plays should also be understood in the context of their time and the experiences of their author.

That’s not always easy. Ibsen was famously unpleasant, even misanthropic, with a streak of vanity that led him to connive for awards from European royalty. He sometimes even wore his medals while sitting around the house (226). And he had a tendency toward feuds and rivalries, which a century and a half later seem like petty distractions. Yet he also was a man of devout principles. When he hated, he hated with all his heart—and nothing disgusted him more than cowardice, hypocrisy, and compromise. At the same time, he grasped the subtleties of people’s motives so profoundly that his works often reveal layers of sympathy and understanding.

That explains why his plays sometimes seem to stand at polar opposites from each other. At first glance, nothing could be more unlike his early masterpiece Brand—a vaunting romantic verse play—than his quiet, realistic parlor drama A Doll’s House. Brand is the story of a fanatical priest at war with the idea of moderation, whose motto is “all or nothing.” Over the course of the play, he repudiates his mother, scares off his lukewarm followers, and drives his wife, Agnes, to suicide by demanding that she sacrifice everything, including life, for God. The play’s intensity is relentless. “[God]’s first commandment, Brand, is: Be humane,” says one character. “Humane!” Brand scoffs. “Was God humane toward Jesus Christ?”1 At last, Brand climbs a mountain he calls his Ice Church, where he kills a hawk that symbolizes compromise—an act that triggers an avalanche that buries him while a divine voice intones the closing line: “He is the God of Love.”2

Brand is so single-minded about his faith that he strikes modern readers as a lunatic, and some have suspected Ibsen of satire, suggesting that he meant the final line to signal his rejection of asceticism. Considering that the author was “an atheistic existentialist,” this might seem plausible, but Brand was meant in earnest (94). It is not really about religion but about living for a principle. The last line indicates that the avalanche is not a punishment but a divine reward. What’s disquieting about Brand is not his fixation per se but his mysticism and his demand for self-obliteration. Yet these were not the play’s true themes. “I could have found an equally satisfactory expression for the feelings that impelled me,” Ibsen later said, “if instead of Brand, I had written of Galileo” (94).

Brand helped make Ibsen a celebrity, but it came at the dawn of an age in which the question of how far one is prepared to go in the name of principle would take on startling new dimensions. Nineteenth-century Europe was riven by political and economic strife as industrial expansion, the revolutions of 1848, and fin-de-siècle reactionary movements seesawed back and forth. Ibsen watched these phenomena from a perspective he characterized as a blend of anarchism and aristocracy. His politics, in short, were incoherent. “The state must be abolished!” he cried, but he applauded the 1871 communist uprising in France and denounced “mild prating about ‘the rights of man’” (181, 211). But the key to this paradox was that, more than anything else, he dreaded mediocrity, which he associated with a lack of conviction. He longed to see people stand for principle, even if he was a little fuzzy about which specific principle. He could not abide “the rule of the mob,” writes Sprinchorn, “the reduction of all things that mattered to the lowest common denominator,” an idea he expressed most vividly in An Enemy of the People in 1882 (180).

That play, however, came only after he managed one of the most remarkable transformations of any writer in history. In the 1870s, dramatists began shifting toward realism, a trend introduced to Norway by one of Ibsen’s rivals in 1875. Realist plays avoided poetry, stilted performances, allegorical themes, and mythological settings, instead presenting dialogue in prose, with natural gestures, set in actual cities and circumstances. That might seem ill-suited for a writer who won renown for allegorical verse dramas, but in 1879 he published A Doll’s House, a realistic, dialogue-heavy play that proved to be one of the greatest works in world literature.

Based on an actual incident involving a friend of his wife, the play opens with the main character, Nora, confiding to a friend that she has secretly been paying the family’s bills by illegally borrowing money without telling her husband, Torvald, and, later, by forging a promissory note. One of Torvald’s employees, Krogstad—who fears Torvald is about to fire him—learns the truth. He blackmails Nora, threatening to publicly reveal her fraud unless she intercedes to prevent his termination. Despite her best efforts, Torvald learns what she’s done, and, enraged, rebukes her as an unworthy wife—only to be interrupted by word that Krogstad will not disclose the story after all. Torvald abruptly changes his tune and forgives Nora for her feminine foolishness.

This is the play’s pivotal moment, as Nora realizes that he never cared what would happen to the family if her crime became known—only what would happen to his own reputation. It dawns on her that her relationship with Torvald has been a fraud all along. “I’ve been your doll-wife, just as I used to be papa’s doll-child,” she tells him in a climactic speech. “That’s all our marriage has been. . . . I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you—or anyway, that I must try to become one.”3 She decides to leave him and her children to make a life of her own.

This climax was so controversial that residents of Copenhagen and Stockholm specifically requested in their Christmas party invitations that guests not discuss the play and ruin the mood (299). Some actresses refused to perform the role unless the final scene were rewritten, something Ibsen was powerless to prevent.

Although A Doll’s House is generally regarded as a feminist play, Sprinchorn notes that it is much deeper than that; its theme is individual integrity, not the status of women specifically. It struck a nerve at the time due to rising concern about women’s rights, but it would work almost as well if the sexes were reversed. Indeed, one hint at the play’s real theme lies in its title, which is better translated as A Doll Home or even A Cocoon, to connote a dwelling occupied not by authentic individuals but by toys who manipulate each other and themselves to suit social convention. Nora’s triumph—as she says—is that she decides to obey these strictures no longer but, instead, to become a genuine human being. By choosing to pursue her own vision of a meaningful life, rather than sacrifice herself further out of conformity to social expectations, Nora becomes an authentic heroine. In that sense, as Sprinchorn observes, “A Doll’s House is Brand all over again” (291).

The controversy around that play spurred Ibsen to write the far darker Ghosts, the main character of which is Helen, a woman who has chosen the path opposite of Nora’s: She stayed in her home despite her late husband’s infidelity and dissipation. The result proved tragic, as he contracted syphilis—and passed it on to their son, Oswald (who catches it from smoking his father’s pipe—possible, though rare). Oswald comes home from abroad and asks his mother to help him commit suicide.

Syphilis was virtually everywhere in Scandinavia when the play appeared—about one in fifty-five young men had it—but was unmentionable in polite society. That made it the perfect symbol for all the insidious evils people were afraid to confront: “the old traditions, the hidebound conventions, transmitted from one generation to the next, which held society in their sinister grip” (308).

And just as A Doll’s House was not just about women, Ghosts was not really about disease, or even the backwardness of authorities, such as Helen’s priest, Manders, who counseled her to remain with her husband and now tells her that “to crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by the spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness? No! We must do our duty.”4

On the contrary, writes Sprinchorn, Oswald’s illness distracts many viewers from the play’s true focus, which is Helen’s realization that by living her life according to the morality of duty and self-sacrifice, she has destroyed everything that matters in her world. Oswald tells her that he has realized—too late—that the purpose of life is joy. Manders misinterprets this as the slogan of a libertine, but it is actually the opposite: a transcendent principle as worthy of devotion as Brand’s integrity was in the earlier play. This aspect of Ghosts is subtle, but it was not missed by one reviewer who concluded that “Ibsen’s teaching in all its repulsiveness” was that “the joy of life is the highest guide to life” (319).

Unfortunately, although Sprinchorn is attuned to this aspect of Ibsen’s darkest play, he fails to examine it in depth. The “ghosts” in question are not just the “old traditions,” as Sprinchorn writes, but religion specifically. Helen invokes “ghosts” directly in reference to the Fifth Commandment:

Helen: . . . surely a child should feel some affection for his father, whatever happens?

Oswald: When a child has nothing to thank his father for? When he has never known him? Do you really cling to that antiquated superstition . . . ? It is one of those beliefs that are put into circulation in the world, and—

Helen: Ghosts of beliefs.

Oswald: Yes, you might call them ghosts.5

This exchange takes on even more profundity if one interprets the absent “father” as a reference to God.

Ghosts proved so controversial that European theaters refused to stage it. Yet when critics compared it to the work of the French naturalist writer Émile Zola, whose novels also featured vulgar subjects, Ibsen got right to the point: The difference, he said, was “that Zola climbs down into the sewers to take a bath, I to clean them” (325). Indeed, where Zola was a naturalist—meaning his artistic aim was the faithful representation of reality, particularly its cruder aspects—Ibsen was a romantic realist, who used realistic settings to tell stories about people who make choices based on principles. It is therefore unfortunate that Sprinchorn sometimes uses these two words interchangeably, which can cause confusion—especially given other passages where he makes clear that Ibsen expressly rejected naturalism—or “appropriated” aspects of it “to further a metaphysical ideal” (543). True naturalism, Ibsen thought, represented the “apotheosis of the flesh” and a betrayal of “Ideals, Idealism, Spirituality, [and] Soulfulness” (440).

The Ghosts scandal inspired An Enemy of the People, a sly comedy about a man whom the public punishes for telling them truths they don’t want to hear. Ibsen followed it with the disquieting symbolic tragicomedy The Wild Duck, which struggles to reconcile the dichotomy first explored in Brand between commitment to truth and the comfort of illusions. It appears to reach the cynical conclusion that, as Sprinchorn puts it, “an insubstantial hope or a fond dream serves humanity better than a bitter truth” (360).

Then, in 1890, Ibsen shifted techniques again, producing a series of symbolic plays, such as the lyrical and semiautobiographical The Master Builder. In it, an aging but idealistic architect is inspired by a young admirer to finish one last great project, which he does—at the price of his life. As with his earlier adoption of realism, this third phase of his career demonstrated an astonishing facility with drama but remained true to the author’s preoccupation with the need for a morality for living on earth.

“One of the most extraordinary features of Ibsen’s works,” Sprinchorn writes, is the way “each play grows out of its predecessor” (348). By examining them in order, he draws out their weightier elements, combining an acute understanding of theater and a thorough grasp of the political, social, and artistic controversies that set the background for Ibsen’s career. Earlier biographers have tried this, notably Michael Meyer in Ibsen (1971) and Ivo de Figueiredo’s two-volume Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask (a one-volume abridgment of which was published in 2019). But Sprinchorn avoids the tedious detail of Meyer’s book and the intimidating heft of Figueiredo’s two volumes. As a result, Ibsen’s Kingdom makes for fine cover-to-cover reading, but it’s also a helpful reference to consult before attending the plays in person.

That is often necessary, because Ibsen’s dramas are no light entertainment. He aimed “to popularize philosophy,” he said, and his philosophy is often brilliant, bold, and true (419). But it is also sometimes misguided, given that, like many romantic artists of his day, he prioritized “the will” over reason, which, along with certain Freudian influences in some of his later plays, sometimes distorted his moral perspective. Sprinchorn, unfortunately, fails to examine these aspects of the plays with a more skeptical eye, the consequence being that some passages, such as his analysis of The Wild Duck, remain unclear. Even in these chapters, however, he provides much fascinating historical and literary context to help the reader understand Ibsen’s thinking. To produce an overview of so prolific and profound an artist—combining a full biography with an astute analysis of the intricate layers of the plays—and to do so in an accessible style that requires no previous familiarity with Ibsen’s writing, is an admirable feat. That Sprinchorn has done this at the age of ninety-seven is even more impressive.

Ibsen’s world is often dark, “present[ing] a bleak picture of human lives falling short of their aims,” as Sprinchorn puts it (475). Yet beneath this foreboding surface lies the radiant idealism of a playwright who seethed at injustices and knew that joy is possible if only we will have the courage to pursue it—but who also understood that such pursuit can be costly. “Honest indignation is the voice of God,” said the poet William Blake—and in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, that voice speaks loudest of all.

Evert Sprinchorn draws out the weightier elements in Henrik Ibsen's plays, combining an acute understanding of theater and a thorough grasp of the political, social, and artistic controversies that set the background for his career.
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Endnotes

1. Henrik Ibsen, Brand, translated by Michael Meyer (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 101.

2. Ibsen, Brand, 157.

3. Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen Plays: Two, translated and edited by Michael Meyer (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 100.

4. Henrik Ibsen, Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Robert Farquharson Sharp (New York: Bantam, 1981), 89.

5. Ibsen, Four Great Plays, 123–24.

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