Henrik Ibsen - Biography

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen, born in 1828 to a middle class merchant who often experienced monetary problems, grew up dissatisfied with the world around him. For example he believed that the needs of the individual was greater than the needs of the society. Although at the beginning of his life he wanted to be an artist or a physician, he eventually decided to go into playwriting, writing Catiline and The Burial Mound when he was around 20. The Burial Mound was played three times but wasn’t really noticed, and neither was Catiline. Still, his playwriting career had started. After writing a few dozen plays in Norway, mostly about Norwegian folklore and history, and not attracting very large audiences he decided to move abroad, and focus his plays on the more complicated aspects of human nature and society. He wrote abroad for the next 27 years.

He started his abroad trips with a play that brought him a much larger audience than any of his plays back at home: Brand, 1865, was about a priest who felt he had to combat the ungodly society he lived in. After losing his family he failed and was buried in an avalanche. Liking where this was going, he wrote two other plays along the same rebellious lines; Peer Gynt in 1867 about a rebellious, wasteful youth and The Emperor and the Galilean in 1873 about Julian, a pagan emperor of Christian Rome. After The Emperor and the Galilean he began to write plays that stressed more on modern day society, like A Doll’s House in 1879 and The Wild Duck in 1884. His subjects got more frightening and touchy, for example Ghosts, 1881, which included philandering and syphilis, and Hedda Gabler, 1890, about a neurotic woman.

Many of these plays focus on problems with society and the individual. A Doll’s House focuses on the oppressed place of women in society while other plays like Brand and The Wild Duck attacked the mix of political idealism and weakness in society. Because of this he was sometimes criticized as being too conservative, although in The Enemy of the People he attacked both the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism at the same time. It appears that many of his earliest works were influenced by Henrik Wergeland, although after brand he began to pay closer attention to other philosophers and playwrights such as Kierkegaard. Bjornsterne Bjornson was also no doubt a big influence on his plays.