Vol. 29 No. 3 · 8 February 2007
pages 21-22 | 2349 words
Staging Death
Martin Puchner
- BuyHenrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy by Toril Moi
Oxford, 396 pp, £25.00, August 2006, ISBN 0 19 929587 5
Henrik Ibsen died in 1906, acknowledged as the founder of modern drama. Today, he is the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. It was an unlikely success story. Born in 1828 in an isolated town in Norway, when the country was still dependent on its long-time coloniser Denmark, Ibsen grew up speaking a language known by few and lacking any great dramatic tradition. In order to write himself out of this obscurity, he had to become European, and modern.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 29 No. 5 · 8 March 2007
From Tim Allen
Watching a rerun of The Apartment just after reading Martin Puchner’s piece on Ibsen, I was struck by the parallels between Billy Wilder’s film and A Doll’s House (LRB, 8 February). Both dramas feature a living space and take place over the Christmas period; both are concerned with the hypocrisy of supposedly respectable marriage in a bourgeois world; and both present suicide as an ill-advised way out of a cosily miserable existence. Ibsen is subverting the tradition of 19th-century melodrama; Wilder is doing the same for Hollywood romantic comedy.
Ibsen presents women who appear to be simply wives, mothers, nannies, but turn out to be wage-earners making difficult choices to keep their families off the breadline. Wilder presents the opposite: women who have jobs but whose real power lies in their sexual attractiveness to men with better jobs. Wilder’s insurance company, Consolidated Life, is an unremittingly sexist world: all its executives are male; all its women are either secretaries, switchboard operators or – if they can’t spell – lift operators. Torvald’s bank in A Doll’s House seems positively progressive by comparison: the plot hinges on the same job being sought by a man and a woman; the woman gets it, and the two of them fall implausibly in love. That scenario is almost commonplace in more recent Hollywood comedies, but it would be unthinkable in the world of The Apartment.
Tim Allen
Liverpool
