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أكـاديـمـي
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رد: l|][Ξ¯▪ Last Year 1st Semester ▪¯Ξ][|
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) – in England Uncommon for his witty humor Made fun of societies notion using for the purpose of educating and changing. His plays tended to show the accepted attitude, then demolished that attitude while showing his own solutions . Arms and the Man (1894) – about love and war and honor . Mrs. Warren’s Profession – prostitution . Major Barbara (1905) – a munitions manufacturer gives more to the world (jobs, etc.) while the Salvation Army only prolongs of the status quo . Pygmalion (1913) – shows the transforming of a flower girl into a society woman, and exposes the phoniness of society. The musical My Fair Lady was based on this play . Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) – in Russia Chekhov is known more for poetic expiration and symbolism, compelling psychological reality, people trapped in social situations, hope in hopeless situations. He claimed that he wrote comedies; others think they are sad and tragic. Characters in Chekhov’s plays seem to have a fate that is a direct result of what they are. His plays have an illusion of plotlessness . *The Seagull (1898) . *Three Sisters (1900) – we did the show here last year; about three sisters who want to move to Moscow but never do . The Cherry Orchard (1902) .*
Ghosts is one of Henrik Ibsen's most haunting plays, though not necessarily for the reasons that shocked the public sensibility when it was first produced. Despite the headline-grabbing representation of venereal disease and the references to free love outside of marriage, the most important element to the modern eyes is that of a middle-aged woman, who is trapped by her past and the ideas that have been imposed upon her gender.
Like Ibsen's other great portrayal of social malaise and gender subjugation, A Doll's House, Ghosts is a damning indictment of the antiquated notions that kept women in their place during Ibsen's time. More heart-breaking than Nora, Ghosts features a mother and widow, who fights against society's preconceptions and bigotries in order to do the best for her son.
The play opens with an argument between a roughly spoken worker, Jakob Engstrand, and his daughter, Regina, who is a maid working for aging widow, Mrs. Alving. Regina thinks she is too good for her father, and she shoos Engstrand out of the house. On his way out, he meets Pastor Manders, who has come to talk about the orphanage that is being built in the name of Mrs. Alving's dead husband. The community believes that Captain Alving was an upright and moral man, but Mrs. Alving explains to Manders that the captain was really a philanderer and a drunk.
An illicit relationship with the household maid resulted in the birth of a baby girl, Regina, who was given away to Engstrand to raise as his own. When Regina was old enough to work, Mrs. Alving took her in as her maid. Manders is also glad to see Mrs. Alving's son, Osvald, who is an artist--recently returned from living on the continent. At the end of the first act Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders hear noises from the kitchen, where Osvald is propositioning his half sister. Mrs. Alving tries to tell Osvald about Regina and his father, but before she can Osvald tells her that he is sick and that the French doctor told him that his illness is due to the sins of his father – a notion that Osvald could not countenance because of the good things he has heard about Captain Alving.
Mrs. Alving struggles to tell her son the truth about his father, but then news arrives that the orphanage is burning to the ground. Although the fire is clearly Engstrand's fault, the canny scoundrel convinces Pastor Manders that he is to blame, and ropes him into a dodgy business that he is planning.
After they leave together, Mrs. Alving finally tells Osvald and Regina that they are brother and sister. Osvald admits that he wanted Regina because she would be able to look after him; and Regina demonstrates her true character. When she realizes that she can't marry Osvald, she storms out of the house.
With Regina gone, Osvald turns to his mother, and asks her to administer morphine to him if he loses his mind. Mrs. Alving hardly knows how to respond, but then the sun comes up. Osvald asks his mother to give him the sun, and we come to see that Osvald has slipped into madness. In the final moments of the play, Mrs. Alving is on stage. And, we are unsure (as is she) whether she will go abide by her son's final wishes.
The beauty of Ghosts rests in the new realism that Ibsen brought to the dramatic genre, and in the stark, clear nature of its thinking. In Ghosts, Ibsen attacks the old morality--specifically sexual propriety. But, he still offers human understanding to those people still tied to ideas from which they cannot or will not release themselves. These are the ghosts of which Ibsen speaks: the dead-but-not-departed morals and ideas that still hold people under their spell. These are the ghosts from which Mrs. Alving desperately tries to escape.
Brilliant, vital and enormously intelligent, Ghosts is one of the most memorable plays in modern literature. Decried when it was first written, it has grown to be one of the great classics that theatre revisits time-and-again. So vibrant--Ghosts still feels alive and valid today.
“A Doll’s House” and many other of Ibsen’s plays deal with the lives and anxieties of the bourgeoisie, a class of people who, though not born of royalty or aristocracy, ascended to social and financial well-being through education and/or employment. Ibsen himself was born into a bourgeois family---his father was a well-to-do merchant who ran a general store---so he had an insider’s look at the bourgeois lifestyle, and was able to inject an astounding (and, to some critics at the time, offensive)amount of realism into his plays, especially “A Doll’s House.” This realism was crucial to Ibsen’s goal of creating a play that challenged toxic societal norms, or in other words a “social problem” play. Quite the opposite of escapism, a social problem play deals first-hand with realistic situations in an attempt to expose and analyze a perceived problem with society. As Jens-Morten Hanssen puts it, a problem play displays these four characteristics:
-They make problems in society the subject of debate.
-They have a socio-critical perspective.
-The action is in a contemporary setting.
-They present everyday people and situations.
Clearly “A Doll’s House” embodies these traits. To understand fully why Ibsen was one of the most revolutionary and influential playwrights of his time is to understand that, instead of viewing the theater going experience as a mere leisure-time activity, Ibsen believed it could be a soul-searching, society changing event. And while “A Doll’s House” did not change society in one fell seismic shift, the fervent reaction the play received indicates that the pot was most definitely stirred.
By taking a close look at the Victorian society, attention should be drawn to the significance of woman characters. These women that Ibsen created did not think and act in ways that were shocking to society in which they lived in. These actions might seem normal today because women have came so far since the 1800's, but for the society in which they lived ,these women were so different ,so daring that even some women of the time were distressed over the characterization these plays challenged the cultural norms of the time in regards to women and Ibsen's personal relationships with women in real life contributed to these characterizations . This gave him a different prescriptive on issues that women were facing and these same issues still effect women today. The feminist themes are including:
1- Money: men have the money and give it to the women in the form of allowance or they must ask for more if they need it, making on their own was considered scandalous
2- Dominance and power : the woman does what the man says and what he wants even if she disagrees because compliance is better than upsetting the man
3- Work: refers to a skill that the woman enjoys and wants to do but is not one of her duties, therefore, it is considered unimportant
4- Desires: refers to some thing that the woman wants for herself that is not one of her duties
5- Role :refers to all things that are expected of women ;their duties according to society
6- Children :refers to woman's feeling about reproduction and children, and the that women have no say in the matter
7- Body-image: refers to the way that men see women in that the body and woman's beauty are her most important traits and also women using this image to get what they need or want from men
8- Property :women are men's possession
9- Intellect women are not smart so, they have no need for knowledge or education and do not understand the things that men must deal with on a regular basis
10- Rebellion: refers to incidents n women do not confirm to the other nine categories and choose instead of rebel.
By looking at the actual text of the play, it appears clearly that the prevalence of feminist themes in the dialogue of the sentences it can be determined if Henrik Ibsen was tending to put feminist themes and problems in the play and therefore, whether or not he him self was a feminist becomes a mute point .feminism is defined in the Websters Dictionary : as the theory of political , economic ,and social quality of the sexes.
The main conflict in “A Doll’s House” revolves around money. Nora secretly owes Krogstad a large sum from trying to save her husband’s life with a trip to the warmer climate of the south. She doesn’t want Torvald to find out because it would hurt his pride---to borrow money is bad enough in Torvald’s eyes, to have his wife borrow money behind his back is unthinkable. Torvald would not borrow even to protect his own well-being, which is Ibsen’s comment on the stubborn pride and commitment to saving face that the middle class of this era displayed. Obviously at the end of the play Torvald is not able to save any face---Nora leaves him and he’s left wondering what Nora meant when she said that only “the most wonderful thing of all” could repair their marriage. In “A Doll’s House,” Ibsen challenged the bourgeois mindset of the time with regards to both money and male/female relationships.
A Doll's House has had dozens of problems propounded for it. We have heard them -- after the theatre: "Did Nora do right to leave her husband?" "Was their marriage an ideal one?" "Is a marriage that is not ideal a real marriage?" "Ought Nora to have deceived her husband?" "Was she justified in forging the note?" "Is one ever justified in breaking a law?" "Was Nora's conduct ideal?" "Does Ibsen believe in marriage without mutual trust?" "Ought married women to eat candy?"
The real problem of the play is perhaps a little more concrete than any of these and more universal than all of them. The conception of a problem play as one in which some problem of modern life is discussed by the characters and worked out in the plot is foreign to Ibsen, as to all great artists. His plays deal with situations and characters from modern life and are, in so far, allied to the problem play. But they do not present problems, in the ordinary sense of the word, nor do they solve them.
The problem of A Doll's House, for instance, is not concerned with the marriage relations of Nora and Helmer, but with the character of Nora. The question whether she had a right to forge the note that saved her husband's life is of far less importance than the fact that she is what she is, and that as she is, she will face life and find herself. In so far as this is a problem, it might be the problem of any playwright, from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw.
The play questioned a woman's place in society, and asserted that a woman's self was more important than her role as wife and mother, was unheard of. Government and church officials were outraged. Some people even blamed Ibsen for the rising divorce rate! When some theaters in Germany refused to perform the play the way it was written, Ibsen was forced to write an alternate ending in which the heroine's rebellion collapses. Despite the harsh criticism of A Doll's House, the play became the talk of Europe. It was soon translated into many languages and performed all over the world. The furor over Ibsen's realistic plays helped him to become an international figure. Some writers like Tolstoy thought Ibsen's plays too common and talky; but the English author George Bernard Shaw considered Ibsen to be more important than Shakespeare.
No matter what individual viewers thought about its merits, in A Doll's House, Ibsen had developed a new kind of drama, called a "problem play" because it examines modern social and moral problems. The heroes and heroines of problem plays belonged to the middle or lower class, and the plays dealt with the controversial problems of modern society. This seems commonplace today, as popular entertainment has been dealing with controversial topics for years. Until Ibsen's day, however, it just wasn't done. Many of the most important plays written in our day, like Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, have their roots in the problem play.
Ibsen's Realistic Period (1877 to 1890) earned him a place as a theater giant. Not only did he introduce controversial subjects, everyday heroes, and modern language, he resurrected and modernized the "retrospective" plot, which had been popular with the ancient Greek playwrights. In a retrospective play, like A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, the major events have taken place before the curtain goes up. The play concerns the way the characters deal with these past events.
A Doll's House was published on December 4, 1879, and first performed in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879. The work was considered a publishing event, and the play's initial printing of 8,000 copies quickly sold out. The play was so controversial that Ibsen was forced to write a second ending that he called "a barbaric outrage" to be used only when necessary. The controversy centered around Nora's decision to abandon her children, and in the second ending, she decides that the children need her more than she needs her freedom. Ibsen believed that women were best suited to be mothers and wives, but at the same time, he had an eye for injustice, and Helmer's demeaning treatment of Nora was a common problem. Although he would later be embraced by feminists, Ibsen was no champion of women's rights; he only dealt with the problem of women's rights as a facet of the realism within his play. His intention was not to solve this issue but to illuminate it. Although Ibsen's depiction of Nora realistically illustrates the issues facing women, his decision in Act III to have her abandon her marriage and children was lambasted by critics as unrealistic, since according to them, no "real" woman would ever make that choice.
That Ibsen offered no real solution to Nora's dilemma inflamed critics and readers alike who were then left to debate the ending ceaselessly. This play established a new genre of modern drama; prior to A Doll's House, contemporary plays were usually historical romances or contrived comedy of manners. Ibsen is known as the "father of modern drama" because he elevated theatre from entertainment to a forum for exposing social problems. Ibsen broke away from the romantic tradition with his realistic portrayals of individual characters and his focus on psychological concerns as he sought to portray the real world, especially the position of women in society.
Halvard Solness is a master builder and self-taught architect who is married to Aline, a woman above his station. Through an ambitious career he has built himself up to be a man of power in his home town, and it is hinted that he founded his success on an incident in which his wife's childhood home burned down to the ground. Aline has never got over the loss of her childhood home and the death of her newborn twins soon after. Latterly she has also been worried about her husband's mental health, as she confides to their family doctor and friend, Dr. Herdal. Solness has three employees: Ragnar Brovik, his father Knut Brovik who as a younger man trained Solness in his work and is now an ailing, bitter old man, and Kaja Fosli, who is engaged to Ragnar but deeply and unhappily in love with Solness. When Solness finds out that Ragnar wants to set up in business on his own, he is unwilling to help Ragnar, whom he tries to get Kaja to marry, in order to keep them both in his own employment. Solness has an unexpected visit by a young woman, Hilde Wangel, whom he met ten years earlier at a ceremony to celebrate the completion of the roofing of a church tower he had built in her home town. She tells him that on that occasion he had kissed her and promised to return in ten years' time to offer her a "kingdom", which she has now come to claim.
Solness has just built a new house, with a high tower, for Aline and himself, and Hilde dares him to climb to the top of the tower, carrying the celebratory wreath, as he had done before, although he is obviously afraid of heights. As he reaches the top she waves a white shawl and calls out in triumph, but the master builder falls to his death.
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