Henrik Ibsen

Reviewed by: Henrik Ibsen: The Man and The Mask by Ivo de Figueiredo, and: Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: Philosophi Cal Perspective ed. by Kristin Gjesdal David Krasner HENRIK IBSEN: THE MAN AND THE MASK. By Ivo de Figueiredo. Translated by Robert Ferguson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019; pp. 704. IBSEN'S HEDDA GABLER: PHILOSOPHI CAL PERSPECTIVE. Edited by Kristin Gjesdal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp. 272. The nineteen-century novelist Gustave Flaubert allegedly said of his eponymous main character Madam Bovery, "Madame Bovery, c'est moi." One could say the same of Henrik Ibsen and his protagonist, Hedda Gabler: both author and character are compelling, elusive, inscrutable, and incorrigible—and Hedda, like Ibsen, is vague about her motivations. Published in late 1890 and first produced in Germany in early 1891, Hedda Gabler's main character is the daughter of a general, marries beneath her to a pedant college professor, becomes enmeshed in a failed scheme, and dies by suicide. Her raison d'être is, however, obtuse. Ibsen also was aloof throughout his life, keeping the sources of his ideas close to the vest. Born into a middle-class merchant family, his father lost his fortune while Ibsen was young; he aspired to be a poet but found his way into dramatic literature; and during the second half of the nineteenth century, he became Europe's most influential dramatist. Ivo de Figueiredo's detailed biography of Ibsen, translated and condensed by Robert Ferguson from de Figueiredo's even more extensive two-volume Norwegian original, traces the playwright's rise from obscurity to become a European and eventually international icon of drama. The biography chronicles the author's life, particularly his relationships to his wife, his son, and the critic Georg Brandes; his creative development; and his rise to fame, as well as illuminating the political, social, and cultural zeitgeist that influenced Ibsen's latenineteenth-century European experience. Kristin Gjesdal, meanwhile, has collected ten essays from philosophers, literary scholars, and theatre historians who unpack Ibsen's Hedda Gabler through the lens of a range of philosophers (Nietzsche, Adorno, Plato, Hegel, and Kierkegaard) and philosophies (existentialism, nihilism, language, freedom, action, boredom, and aesthetics). Both books offer stimulating research and ideas, adding to Ibsen studies in general and to the study of Hedda Gabler in particular—which, A Doll's House notwithstanding, is his most frequently produced play. There are several reasons for Hedda Gabler's popularity: it is economically written and tightly drawn, with rapid-fire stichomythic dialogue that ricochets [End Page 438] with liveliness and modernity; its unity of form reflects the best of neoclassicism; and its protagonist has attracted a who's who of actresses attempting to perform this complex character. Hedda's existential ennui compels performers and audiences alike to consider what editor Gjesdal calls the play's "how to" of human happiness: how to live with "the gains and curses of modern life"; how to "inhabit the role of a modern woman"; how to live with "lost hopes and expectations gone sour"; how to reconcile the "burdens of the past"; and how to "inhabit the impossibility of being human in the way we once imagined genuine humanity would look" (3). To the well-known biographies of Ibsen—by Halvdan Koht (in Norwegian), Michael Meyers, and de Figueiredo's translator Robert Ferguson—de Figueiredo adds greater detail, probing the minutia of Ibsen's life and times. According to de Figueiredo, Ibsen lived slavishly to routine, was reserved in public, frequently imbibed (though the author denies Ibsen was an alcoholic), wore his medals ostentatiously, was monkish in his isolation, irascible, eccentric, petulant, formal, occasionally ingratiating, and enjoyed the company of young women. Ibsen found his artistic footing in the recesses of human conflict, exploring love, business, society, history, gender, and ultimately a passion for freedom. Throughout his life, Ibsen had a love/hate relationship with his homeland Norway, assuming the role of a European dramatist but returning home to participate in Norway's literary and political life. Frequently compared to his Norwegian literary rival Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Ibsen "made his real literary breakthrough with Brand," de Figueiredo asserts, and "announced himself as a new kind of

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