(3 of 3)
"Suburban Lady Macbeth." In the earlier, social plays, Ibsen's drama was the drama of contemporary issues: the characters are living ideas. Dr. Stock-mann, the idealist who heroically fights to improve his community in An Enemy of the People, reappears in The Wild Duck as Gregers Werle, a pre-Freudian busybody who demonstrates that helping people face their problems is often just a bland way of destroying them. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Nora, the relatively innocent victim of male chauvinism in A Doll's House, is re-examined as Hedda, a modern woman whose frustrated need to assert individuality transforms her into a "suburban Lady Macbeth."
After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene of Ibsen's last play, climbs to the top of a mountain and is received into the everlasting snows.
Ibsen himself spent the last six years of his life, unable to write, staring out of his window in Christiania. "Leave that to me," he snapped at a visitor who asked how he felt about God. And one day, when a nurse announced that he was feeling better, the old curmudgeon found the ultimate putdown. "On the contrary!" he said, and died. · Brad Darrach