Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in Stockmannsgården, Skien in Norway on March 20, 1828 to a middle class family, the oldest of five children of merchant Knud Ibsen and his wife, Marichen. However, his father’s business hit difficulties, forcing him to sell everything in 1835 and live in poverty.
In 1844, at age 15, Ibsen left home to become apprentice to an apothecary in Grimstad, where he had his first publication successes with a poem called “In The Autumn” in 1849, and a verse play, Catiline, in 1850.
Beginnings in the Theatre
Ibsen went to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1850 where his first play, The Warrior’s Barrow, was staged. In 1851 he was invited to join the new National Theatre in Bergen, for whom he wrote six plays, directed, designed costumes and kept accounts. It was here that he met his wife, Suzannah.
He moved back to Christiania in 1857 as artistic director of the Christiania Norwegian Theatre, which went bankrupt in 1862. He then became literary adviser to the Danish Christiania Theatre, where he staged his play, The Pretenders, in 1864.
Major Works
Ibsen left Norway in 1864, and over the next 27 years he lived in Rome, Dresden, and Munich. He created his great verse plays Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867), which were written to be read rather than performed.
He then moved on to his naturalist dramas The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890).
After his return to Norway in 1891, he wrote his last four major works: The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).
Controversies: Reactions to A Doll's House and Ghosts
Ibsen's first international success was A Doll's House, written in Rome and Amalfi in 1879. Its first published edition sold out within a month, and it produced debate, controversy and condemnation everywhere it was read or performed.
Written as a condemnation of the position of married women in a male-dominated society, the play centers around Nora, an apparently happily-married wife and mother in a middle class family. She eventually comes to the view that she is just a plaything of her husband with no rights or life of her own and leaves her family.
The most controversial part was the very last moment when the door slammed, indicating that Nora had dared to leave her husband and children. In the first German production, the actress refused to perform this ending; as there was no copyright protection, Ibsen reluctantly wrote an alternative to prevent someone else from butchering his play.
After A Doll's House had run to three editions in three months, Ghosts received so much condemnation, even from some of Ibsen's former admirers, that people were frightened to buy it and bookshops were returning it to the publishers. The play was rejected by several theatres in Europe, but then received its world première in Chicago on 20 May 1882 for an audience of Scandinavian immigrants.
According to Ibsen, "After Nora, Mrs Alving had to come". In Ghosts, Mrs Alving remained with her husband, a respected man of the community who is dead when the play begins, through duty despite his debauchery. As a result, her son Oswald is dying from syphilis inherited from his father and has fallen in love with the servant girl who is, unknown to him, his father's illegitimate daughter and therefore his half-sister.
If it was controversial to show a woman leaving her husband, suggestions of adultery, sexually-transmitted disease and incest were positively obscene. The first production in London in 1891 induced comments in the press such as "an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly", "unutterably offensive", "revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous" and "a piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman".
Death of Ibsen
Ibsen's writing career ended when he had a stroke in 1900 leaving him partially paralyzed, He had a second stroke in 1903 and died on 23 May 1906 at his home in Arbinsgate, Christiania.
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