A Study Of The Ethical Identity And Ethical Choice Of Henrik Ibsen’s Dramatic Characters

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is recognized as the "father of modern drama." His work has generated a profound and continuous impact on the worldwide reform and development of theater since the nineteenth century.Ibsen scholars believe there are three chronologically evolving stages of Ibsen’s dramatic writing.He starts with romantic verse drama,then focuses on realistic drama and turns to symbolic drama in the end.Truth and freedom are two major literary topics of Romanticism in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe.Ibsen also shows an ardent and consistent interest in these two themes throughout his whole writing career.Although Ibsen shifts his theatrical styles at several points of his life,such as from verse to prose and from epic heroes to common people,he has never completed the exploration on the significance of truth and freedom.It is noteworthy that Ibsen pursues these two themes in his drama while at the same time raising ethical questions.After he abandons writing in verse,Ibsen endeavors to create realistic characters,make them converse in everyday language and restore real life scene on stage,which position his dramatic characters in a realistic ethical environment.They come across ethical dilemmas shaped by family,societal,political,economic and religious conditions.Through the struggles of his characters,which often turn out to be failures,Ibsen questions how individuals achieve truth and freedom under the contemporary moral and ethical conventions.This dissertation studies the ethical identity and ethical choice of Ibsen’s dramatic characters in eight plays,in an attempt to reveal the ethical message in Ibsen’s drama.Chapter I analyzes the relation of ethical choice and ethical environment in A Doll’s House and Ghosts.The plot of both plays is centered around female characters,namely,Nora and Mrs.Alving.The family crisis of forgery disembodies Nora’s beliefs and awakens her ethical consciousness.She rejects her identity as a doll in a conventional marriage and family.It is crystallized that male characters,including Helmer and Krogstad,are the dolls manipulated by the corrupted social ideal.In Ghosts,Ibsen uses naturalistic dramatic techniques to highlight the constraints imposed on people by the ethical environment in which they live.Mrs.Alving is granted no outlet but to stay in her desperate marriage.She is both the victim and the director of her own family tragedy.By comparing the different ethical decisions made by Nora and Mrs.Alving,this chapter shows how Ibsen harshly criticizes the distorted and hypocritical moral values of the Victorian bourgeoisie.Chapter II discusses ethical choice and free will.In The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler,marital and family identity confines the female characters Ellida and Hedda.Ellida has the conflicting marital status as both Wanger’s wife and Stranger’s fiancee.The two male characters,respectively,exhibit the controlling power of rational will and free will upon Ellida,which corresponds to the metaphoric settings of the land as rational will and the sea as free will.Hedda Gabler is entrapped by her identity as Tesman’s wife,while she endeavors to stay General Gabler’s daughter,for this identity grants her freedom.The two plays in question reflect the human history of civilization in the background.The two female characters exploit free will,death and ethical choice to pursue freedom.This chapter shows the dialectical relation of ethics and freedom implied by the different natures of the two kinds of freedom Ellida and Hedda achieve.Chapter Ⅲ is a cdose reading of An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck,dealing with the justification of the personal pursuit of truth and freedom.Stockmann from An Enemy of the People and Gregs from The Wild Duck believe in truth and freedom as their mission.Stockmann is ostracized as "an enemy of the people" for not compromising scientific truth.He is Ibsen’s spokesmen to pinpoint that free thinking is morality,which is the fundamental principle of democracy.Stockmann’s double,Gregs,also claims to be seeking for truth,but his selfish motive drives Hedvig to kill herself and dismantles the Ekdals’s existential faith.The pair of Stockmann and Gregs shows that the personal pursuit of truth and freedom is an ethical choice rather than unconditional moral righteousness.Chapter IV examines ethical choice and the reconstruction of ethical order.Ibsen exiles himself on the European continent for half of his life.He experiences the radical social and economic change after the Industrial Revolution.Highly aware of the transforming world,Ibsen observes his homeland through a critical perspective.The plays Pillars of Society and Rosmersholm are written after long intervals of Ibsen living abroad.Pillars of Society is the beginning of Ibsen’s realistic drama cycle,which presents the ethical clash between the tolerant new society embodied by America and the conventional lockstep of the Norwegian town.In Rosmersholm,Ibsen employs Gothic effects to demonstrate how ethical conventions exert strong but subtle power on people’s psychology.The main characters of both plays attempt to reform the ethical order of their society.They all grope for truth and freedom as the pillars of the new moral values.Henrik Ibsen paints realistic life pictures with precise characterization,acute observations on his contemporary morals,and thought-provoking ethical questions.In Ibsen’s context,truth and freedom are a consistent and dynamic process.Ibsen values the individual moral self-perfection in this process.