The reason why Henrik Ibsen has been referred to as the "father" of modern drama is due to the series of contemporary dramas, with A Doll's House in 1879, Ghosts in 1881 and Hedda Gabler in 1890 being the best known. They have a concentrated plot that takes place over the course of a few days, in one room and involves a few people.
The important question therefore becomes, when Ibsen has clearly cut out everything and everyone who is not necessary in these dramas, why are anyone other than those who are usually perceived as the main characters then included in the plot? And not only that, why are these apparent supporting characters the ones who remain in the end?
It is therefore interesting that no Ibsen scholars have asked this question, but they have assumed that in Ibsen's modern dramas, too, the characters who represent the upper class are the heroes, as would have been the case in the classical tragedies.
The heroes, those who remain and represent the future in Ibsen's contemporary dramas, are therefore those who have been perceived as the supporting characters, the completely ordinary people.
But Ibsen's modern dramas must be read and interpreted in the light of the modern drama he himself had experienced, namely that the upper class had fallen or decayed and that this opened the way for other, ordinary people to take over their social roles and positions. The heroes, those who remain and represent the future in Ibsen's contemporary dramas, are therefore those who have been perceived as the supporting characters, the ordinary people, while those who represent the old upper class and have been perceived as the heroes suffer defeat. But is this defeat truly heroic – as it was in the classical tragedies?
To start with Nora in A Doll's House , who is interpreted as a heroine, an icon of women's liberation because she leaves her husband and children and slams the front door behind her. But who is she? Few or no one has really gone into what is directly and indirectly told about her through the various conversations in the drama. She is the daughter of a civil servant who has committed embezzlement, but the young lawyer Helmer, who was sent by the state to investigate the case, managed to hush up the case and as a "reward" he got Nora. This means that Helmer, even though he himself claims it, was not at all an incorruptible civil servant.
The next important point in the prehistory is Helmer's illness, which the doctors - in the majority - according to Nora claimed could only be cured by him travelling to southern countries. What kind of illness is it? Those who have even asked this question have assumed that it was tuberculosis. But can one have tuberculosis without even noticing it? Because Helmer has not noticed any illness. He claims, however, that they travelled to Italy because Nora had insisted on travelling there. And then comes the big and unanswered question, how on earth could Helmer, who had investigated Nora's father's finances, believe that it was Nora's father who had guaranteed the expenses for the journey? If he had funds, it was in any case funds that he had embezzled and which Helmer was supposed to have confiscated on behalf of the state.
In short, Nora's story is not credible. To really emphasize the improbability of Helmer's illness story, his best friend Doctor Rank is clearly not one of the many doctors who diagnosed Helmer. Doctor Rank visits every day and talks to Helmer at length – about everything but Helmer's illness. The one who is fatally wounded is not Helmer, but Doctor Rank.
Nora is therefore no heroine. She is a spoiled civil servant's daughter – and like other spoiled children, she has no other solution to problems than to run away from home, but to what end? When Nora leaves her husband and children and slams the front door behind her, where does she go or can she go? And what can she become, with no education and very limited work experience with copying some documents?
It will either be a senseless suicide in the "black cold water" - or a slightly shameful retreat to the warmth of Helmer's living rooms.
Opposing the "heroine" Nora in all analyses of the drama is the "villain" Krogstad, who is the one who has the decisive evidence against Nora, her forged signature on the paper where her father had guaranteed the expenses for the trip to Italy. Krogstad can trap both her and Helmer if he presents this evidence. Why doesn't he do so, but on the contrary sends the document back to Helmer?
The answer lies in a scene in A Doll's House that almost all Ibsen scholars have ignored.
The answer lies in a scene in A Doll's House that almost all Ibsen scholars have ignored. While the masquerade ball is taking place upstairs, the two supporting characters, Krogstad and Nora's friend, Mrs. Linde, meet in the Helmer family's living room – because the room Mrs. Linde rented did not have its own entrance. No one has asked why Ibsen, who has reduced the plot to the bare essentials, allows two supporting characters, two ordinary people, to take up so much space and space in the plot? Mrs. Linde is barely mentioned in most analyses of A Doll's House . But she is the real heroine of the plot and the conversation between Mrs. Linde and Krogstad, which almost no Ibsen scholars mention, is the most important and radical in A Doll's House .
For in the conversation, not only do the former lovers Mrs. Linde and Krogstad find each other again. But Krogstad willingly gives up the position he wanted at Helmer's bank to stay home with the children, while Mrs. Linde gets the position at the bank and becomes the family breadwinner. This cohabitation was such a radical utopia of the future in Ibsen's time that it may explain why the audience and critics of the time were unable to grasp that completely ordinary people could be the heroes. But later Ibsen scholars should have seen it.
The interpretations of Hedda Gabler are another example of how Ibsen scholars have collectively looked the wrong way, towards the representatives of the upper class, the general's daughter Hedda Gabler and Eilert Løvborg – and have ignored the two ordinary people, the petty bourgeois Jørgen Tesman and Thea Elvsted.
Many learned seminars have been held and books and theses written about Hedda Gabler and Ejlert Løvborg's philosophy of history. But Hedda and Løvborg never talked about history or philosophy. They sat and pretended to read the same illustrated magazine, while he told of his erotic adventures.
However, it was she who is perceived as the little stupid Thea Elvsted who got Løvborg in order – and helped him write a book that had caused a lot of attention. And it is Thea Elvsted who had written the script and still had all the notes for Løvborg's new book about the future of culture. When Hedda got hold of the manuscript for this book, she tried to read a few pages and just flipped through without clearly understanding any of it before she burned the manuscript in the oven. It is the petty bourgeois Jørgen Tesman and Thea who then sit down and arrange the notes for Løvborg's book and will surely succeed in doing so. To collect and arrange it, Jørgen Tesman can. Ibsen wrote in a note that this was ironic, yes, but it was realistic. That was the way the world was, and that is how he, as a consistent playwright, also describes it.
Those who survive and are the actual heroes of Ibsen's contemporary drama are those we must call "ordinary people." Those who perish are the children and remnants of the patrician class and the civil servant class.
In 1885, Ibsen gave a speech to the workers' march in Trondheim. Here he spoke of the need for a new noble element to enter state life. He was not thinking then of the nobility of birth or the nobility of money, nor of knowledge or abilities or endowments. But he was thinking of the nobility of character, of the will and the nobility of mind. That alone was what could liberate.
This new nobility, Ibsen argued, would come from two groups. It would come from the women and the workers.
It is the women and ordinary people who play the most important roles.
We don't see much of the workers in Ibsen's drama. It is the women and ordinary people who play the most important roles.
Those who represent the upper class in Ibsen's drama have no role to fill or meaning in life – other than to bore themselves to death, like Hedda Gabler, the general's daughter. It is the supporting characters, the representatives of the new class of petty bourgeois who are left as the winners or with the positive solution. For it was Thea Elvsted who got used to Løvborg – not Hedda Gabler. Hedda Gabler, however, gave him one of General Gabler's dueling pistols so that he could shoot himself in the temple and die in beauty. But he died from a stray shot in the abdomen in the dubious Miss Diana's salons. Hedda shoots herself with the other pistol, admittedly heroically, in the temple. While Thea and Tesmann sit and piece together Løvborg's work, a work that will now surely give him the professorship he and Løvborg were supposed to have competed for.
Ibsen's drama must therefore now be re-evaluated and reinterpreted based on the knowledge of his own drama as the son of a patrician from Skien. The time was up for the old upper class and new classes were emerging that took over society from below.
This drama is what Ibsen's drama is about.
Almost all Ibsen scholars have therefore looked the wrong way and believed that the top was the top and that the main characters were the important ones, but it was the other way around. It is the supporting characters who are the important ones – and who point the way forward.
Ibsen scholars have generally also overlooked the fundamental experience Ibsen had from Skien, namely that the old upper class fell and what we can call ordinary people took over.
Those who survive and are the heroes of Ibsen's drama are therefore what we must call "ordinary people." Those who perish are the children and remnants of the patrician class that was doomed to destruction in the real world – and who also perish in Ibsen's fictional world.