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Realism
Derek Miller
Realism is a style that originated in the nineteenth century. Henrik Ibsen,
though he did not invent realism, played a central role in establishing its
power in the theatre, where realism grew so dominant as to become a
neutral or non-style. Realism holds that the world should be understood in
its real, observable, particular truth and that art can and must represent the
world as it is. As Ibsen explained to a director of An Enemy of the People in
, the play must present ‘above all, truthfulness to nature – the illusion
that everything is real and that one is sitting and watching something that
is actually taking place in real life’. All art, of course, seeks to express
essential truths about the world and the human condition, but realism
expresses those things only by showing the world itself. To achieve its
verisimilitude, realism stages familiar aspects of daily life. Realist dramas
take place in middle-class domestic spaces (e.g. Dr Stockmann’s living
room and office); its characters speak in vernacular prose; its plots turn on
quotidian problems such as money or sexual affairs. Realism communicates artistic truths by representing reality. Ibsen’s realism is evident both
in how he crafted and staged his plays and in what those plays are about.
We will thus consider realism as a set of representational practices and as a
particular way of thinking about the world.
Towards Realism in the Theatre
Ibsen’s early career in the theatre, like that of other members of his generation, was dominated by a style best labelled ‘Romantic’. Romantic drama
itself had aimed to move theatre into closer contact with the real world than
its predecessor, classicism, which was highly formal and presentational. But
Romantic theatre – whether in epic tragedies or domestic melodramas –
retained many of classicism’s methods and themes, particularly its focus on
the heroic triumph of good over evil. Ibsen’s early plays fit well into this style,
as in the mingling of high political and moral drama in Lady Inger of Ostrat
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and The Vikings at Helgeland. Those plays offered audiences clear moral
conflicts and shallow but clearly delineated characters. Romantic drama also
relied on old-fashioned plot devices: coincidences, long-lost children, misidentifications. Authors such as Eugène Scribe used these devices with
supreme craft in the pièce bien faite (well-made play), which surpassed
classicism in its superior internal logic and structure, and influenced many
of Ibsen’s plots. Realism, however, extended Scribe’s method by further
integrating plot and character, while rejecting Romanticism’s moral clarity
in favour of ambiguity and psychological complexity.
Ibsen’s realist phase began with Pillars of the Community and continued
through his final works, though his style is often mixed. Some of his earlier
plays share characteristics with the fully fledged realist dramas. (For example, The League of Youth is written in colloquial prose dialogue.) And many
of his later plays present a more heightened version of reality than a strictly
realist approach might require. But, fundamentally, his last dozen plays
provide a rich – and extremely influential – example of how theatre can
and should attempt to depict real life.
By the time Ibsen wrote his realist dramas, realism had been well
established and debated, particularly in France, where the first great wave
of realist art appeared in the novel. Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, and Gustave
Flaubert all wrote novels of contemporary domestic life, thick with psychological insights and cluttered with the trappings of bourgeois respectability.
While realism’s triumph now seems inevitable, many contemporary
reviewers used the term pejoratively. To a generation raised on an art
praising lofty ideals, realism’s obsession with everyday life in all its physical
specificity seemed vulgar and sordid. Some of this perceived sordidness was a
function of the plays’ subject matter, exemplified in Ibsen’s oeuvre by the
incestuous and syphilitic Alving family in Ghosts, which revolted some critics
and audiences. But even admirers noted something unpleasant about the
sheer ordinariness of Ibsen’s theatrical worlds. Henry James cited Ibsen’s
‘recurrent ugliness of surface’, which, even more than the plays’ political
content, served as ‘proof of [Ibsen’s] fidelity to the real’. Thus Ibsen’s
theatre diverged from Romantic drama in the complexity and domesticity
of its plots, while also looking and sounding significantly different from its
predecessors in its pursuit of verisimilitude on stage.
Realism As Technique
We can locate Ibsen’s realist style most precisely in his approach to
dialogue, his visual sensibility (including his use of objects) and his rich
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characterization. Consider dialogue. Two of Ibsen’s great middle period
epics (Peer Gynt and Brand) were written primarily in verse. They marked
the work of a mature dramatist and poet, but also one committed to a high
literary style. The dramas that followed were all in prose. His prose plays
not only discarded rhyme and metre, they also mostly eliminated the
technical apparatus of heroic verse drama such as asides and monologues.
Ibsen’s realist dialogue avoids, too, the pomposity found in the historical
plays. When critic and translator Edmund Gosse suggested that Ibsen’s last
epic, the ‘world historical drama’ Emperor and Galilean, should have been
written in verse, Ibsen countered that only prose allowed him to situate the
tragedy among real human beings. In the modern tragedies, Ibsen’s realist
prose is a modern vernacular speech recognizably like the language of
everyday middle-class Norwegians. (That language, of course, was lexically
Danish, inflected by Norwegian vocabulary and idioms and with a marked
pronunciation.) True, Ibsen’s writing still retained a distinctly theatrical
quality; his dialogue is often poetic and always carefully crafted. In IngaStina Ewbank’s description, ‘Ibsen’s language takes us under the photographic surface of realism’ and exposes the plays’ ‘spiritual’ landscapes.
But his language is also true dialogue: characters do not make grand
pronouncements, but fight and plead with and seduce each other just as
people do.
While realist dialogue sounds like people speaking, realist characters also
live in a far more physically detailed stage space than that occupied by their
Classical or Romantic predecessors. Alexandre Dumas fils La Dame aux
Camélias, for example, is set in nebulous non-spaces: a room in the house
of Camille, a room in a country house. Ibsen’s rooms are specific places:
The grand former gallery on the first floor of the Rentheim house. The
walls are covered with old tapestries depicting hunting scenes, shepherds
and shepherdesses, all in faded, bleached-out colours . . . A large carved oak
writing table covered with books and papers . . . A sofa with a table and
chairs. The furniture is all in the stiff Empire style.
The precise trappings of bourgeois domesticity furnish these stage directions, each chosen, in production, to mimic the style that one finds in
one’s own home. And those trappings are not simply decoration, they have
meaning: the faded tapestries indicate John Gabriel Borkman’s former
glory; the ‘stiff’ furniture style mimics Borkman’s own rigidity.
Stage properties performed a similar signifying function. If a Romantic
drama relied on a prop, as in Scribe’s Le verre d’eau, the prop served as a
simple device to advance the plot. Ibsen’s props reveal character. When
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Nora Helmer hides her macaroons or Hedda Tesman mocks her husband’s
slippers, the characters’ relationship to the props illuminates behaviour and
psychology. The physical world of Ibsen’s realism was thus thick with
meaningful objects, objects that anticipate and, in some sense, make
inevitable the tragedies to come (e.g. Hedda’s pistols).
Realist dialogue and scenery and props all helped, fundamentally, to
create more richly realistic characters. Ibsen’s characters have deep, complex psychologies. Depth does not mean, as it did in many melodramas,
simply a guilty secret. (For instance, Mathias in The Bells hides the murder
he committed many years ago). An Ibsen heroine’s past is not simply
hidden, but inscrutable even to herself. To perform these roles actors
developed new techniques, particularly new relationships to the play text.
‘The [Ibsen] actor had to detect past events which could only be revealed
through words . . . and then he had to convey the relationship between
that past text and the present action demanded by it,’ explains Gay Gibson
Cima. Understanding an Ibsen character required studying not only one’s
own lines, but the entire play. As Ibsen advised Sophie Reimers as she
prepared to play Rebekka West, ‘carefully take note of what the other
characters say about Rebekka’ and ‘see the character’s position in, and in
relation to, the whole work’. Ibsen was explaining, in other words, that
character in his plays arises from the thick entanglement of plot, dialogue
and environment that defined the realist technique.
Realism As Idea
Ibsen’s realism represented the lives of the contemporary European middle
class, the bourgeoisie. Prior to realism, modern life was primarily a proper
setting for stage comedy, but not for tragedy. Ibsen made the middle-class
domestic space tragic. It bears underlining that the real world Ibsen built
on stage assumed that his audience would recognize their homes in his
stage sets, their problems in his characters’ troubles. Directors pursuing
Ibsen’s realism observed scenic details scrupulously. For instance, one critic
admired Konstantin Stanislavski’s production of Ghosts for providing a
perfect study of ‘a typical family home in the far North – with all its
curiosities, down to the arrangement of the rooms and their furnishings’.
Audiences saw themselves in the plays, recognized their furniture, their
habits, their tastes. The conflicts in Ibsen’s realist dramas hinge on humansized difficulties: a lack of money (due to illness or poor investment); a
sexual affair; thwarted ambition. No affairs of state arise, as they did in his
earlier, Romantic dramas. Audiences did not need to extend their
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imaginations to identify with the problems of Ibsen’s characters. And the
realist performance style, which put characters in places like their own
homes, speaking a language like the one they spoke every day, enhanced
that sense of identification.
Even as Ibsen’s dramas presented a recognizable simulacrum of the
world in which his audience lived, his plays also took up reality as a theme.
Many characters undergo a process of disillusionment that leads them to
confront the true, often tragic reality of their lives. Nora Helmer exemplifies the disillusionment common to Ibsen’s protagonists when she
realizes that Torvald will not heroically sacrifice himself for her, as she
imagines herself to have done for him. A Doll’s House, in some sense, thus
hinges on Nora’s discovery that she is not in an ideal play, but in fact lives
in a real world, a world without heroes, a world she does not understand.
Because so many of Ibsen’s plots hinge on such disillusionment, Ibsen
became identified as an anti-Idealist, pro-realist philosopher. Irish critic
and playwright Bernard Shaw, in his influential essays on Ibsen published
as The Quintessence of Ibsenism, played an outsized role in defining Ibsen’s
philosophical realism. Ibsen, in Shaw’s reading, insists on characters whose
‘conduct must justify itself by its effect upon life and not by its conformity
to any rule or ideal’. To be an Ibsenite realist, you must negotiate each
situation as a unique moral challenge, rather than make decisions based
upon a given set of expectations or rules for behaviour.
Realism’s meaning on stage also intersected with late-nineteenthcentury liberal politics, particularly through the closely related artistic
movement known as naturalism. Critics describe Ibsen as both a realist
and a naturalist; the two categories overlap significantly and are not reliably
distinguishable. It may be useful to think of realism as a particular
theatrical strategy encompassing those staging techniques noted above,
and of naturalism as a set of political ideas that realist theatre often (but
not always) helped to convey. Naturalism, as defined most fully by Émile
Zola, dramatizes the array of structural forces that constrain people’s ability
to control their lives. In showing those constraints, theatre should strive to
present the world objectively, as a journalist might. Realism was thus a
superb vehicle for naturalism’s worldview. Naturalism bore the influence
of three major nineteenth-century intellectual paradigms: Charles
Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Auguste Comte’s Positivist sociology and
Karl Marx’s economic theories. Ibsen’s engagement with these ideas
appears throughout the plays. A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler present
women struggling against a patriarchal social system. Osvald’s venereal
disease in Ghosts and Hedvig’s blindness in The Wild Duck exemplify
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naturalist theatre’s thematization of biological heredity. And almost every
Ibsen plot since Pillars of the Community hinges on money, from Nora
Helmer’s desperate attempts to repay a loan to John Gabriel Borkman’s
illicit financial speculation. Ibsen’s realism was deeply engaged with portraying, in an objective, realistic manner, the set of social forces that
determined the course of modern life.
It may be useful to demonstrate how realism, as a dramatic technique
and as an idea, actually works in an Ibsen play. The Wild Duck is about
Gregers Werle, who wishes to reveal to his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal the
true paternity of Hjalmar’s daughter, Hedvig. Everyone else in the play
insists that Gregers leave Hjalmar and his family to live with their illusions.
With tragic irony, Gregers’s insistence that Hjalmar confront reality leads
ultimately to Hedvig’s death. Thus Ibsen suggests that illusions, too, serve
a useful purpose; reality is not an unalloyed good. The play is, of course,
set in a realistic apartment, but one that includes a large attic space that is,
itself, a kind of realist stage set of a forest. And Hjalmar’s profession as a
photographer requires him both to represent reality (the photographic
image) and to distort that reality with necessary illusions (the ‘touching
up’ that the family undertakes to improve their photographs). These
examples only begin to describe how The Wild Duck stages, in its plot,
its setting, and its characters, the uneasy battle between reality and illusion.
Realism beyond Ibsen
For all his influence as a realist, Ibsen was far from original or alone in his
use of realism. The French novel, as noted above, had established realism
as a successful style by the s. Theatres such as the Prince of Wales in
London and the Meiningen Ensemble were innovators in staging practices
including the use of three-dimensional domestic scenery and motion-filled
crowd scenes filled with individual characters, respectively. (The
Meiningen company produced Ibsen’s own The Pretenders in Berlin in
, presumably encouraging his theatrical imagination in a more realist
direction.) Playwrights such as Alexandre Dumas fils pushed drama to
address serious social concerns. Ibsen’s fellow playwright and critic
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson notably predated Ibsen in his fascination with
realism, praising French dramatists in  for their ‘current of
naturalism . . . striving for truth’. And Bjørnson’s hugely successful play
A Bankruptcy anticipated Pillars of the Community and represented an
important embrace of realist staging and themes. Critic Georg Brandes
advocated vocally for realism just as Ibsen’s own realist dramas appeared,
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buttressing the playwrights’ efforts. Thus no single aspect of Ibsen’s
realism was entirely novel or unexpected by the time it arrived on
European stages in the late s, nor was Ibsen its sole practitioner
or advocate.
Yet Ibsen stands out as the exemplary realist in the theatre. His status
derives in part from his ability to synthesize realism’s multiple representational techniques with more subtlety and sophistication than did his predecessors and competitors. But he also, for a confluence of reasons, achieved
greater, more international, and more lasting success than, say, Bjørnson.
The next generation of serious and influential dramatists then learned from
(and often praised) Ibsen. Bernard Shaw not only wrote extensively and
effusively about Ibsen, but also composed fundamentally Ibsenite plays
throughout much of his long career, even setting an act of The Philanderer
in a fictional ‘Ibsen Club’ that celebrates breaking social norms. One early
assessment of leading naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann notes that
‘the influence of Ibsen upon Hauptmann is so evident, that scarcely any
critic of Hauptmann fails to mention it’. Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman
and Arthur Miller all carried forward, in some way, Ibsen’s theatrical project
as they built a major dramatic tradition in the United States. To the extent
that Ibsen remains (with Anton Chekhov) the major writer of realism, all
domestic dramas – with their living rooms and props, their rich character
psychologies, their complex family histories that reveal social transgressions –
are essentially Ibsenite.
Ibsen beyond Realism
And yet, for all his fame as the great dramatist of bourgeois realism, there
remains something ineffably strange, irrefutably unreal about Ibsen’s work.
Brandes noted that the worlds Ibsen built on stage, despite their solidity,
shimmered with a lingering uncertainty: ‘behind everything we feel Ibsen’s
undermining scepticism with regard to the existing and accepted order of
things’. This uncertainty arises partly from Ibsen’s symbolist tendencies,
which grow increasingly evident in the later plays. (As Brandes wrote after
The Master Builder’s premiere, ‘naturalism and symbolism have been
harmonious partners’ in Ibsen’s plays from nearly the start of his career’.)
These symbolist techniques create provocative tensions with the realist
environment the characters occupied. According to some writers, the
representational habits of realism even conflicted with the later plays’
mystical energies. For example, critics complained about early productions
of John Gabriel Borkman in which the realist sets, both interior and
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exterior, conveyed ‘none of the [play’s] suggestive atmospheric power’.
That sense of atmosphere pervades all of Ibsen’s work like a Dickensian
London fog – felt more strongly in plays such as The Lady from the Sea,
Little Eyolf or When We Dead Awaken, but present even in the stiflingly
isolated Tesman household.
The hint of unreality that undergirds, and occasionally threatens to
undo, Ibsen’s realism originates, perhaps, in the theatricality of the real
world Ibsen captured so brilliantly. More than any other realist playwright,
Ibsen crafted characters who understand that how they live, the style of
their lives, defines who they are. This is one key aspect of the bourgeois
tragedy: a relentless demand to perform bourgeois life. And thus no matter
how real the world Ibsen put on stage, how precise the characterizations,
how colloquial the speech, that fictional world always demonstrated that
the real world in which his audiences lived was, itself, a kind of illusion.
Ibsen may as well have been writing about his own bourgeois life as about
the stage when, on the eve of his great realist breakthrough, he explained
that ‘The illusion I wished to produce was that of reality.’
Notes
. Henrik Ibsen, Letter to H. Schrøder,  December , quoted in Michael
Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., ),
p. .
. Henry James, ‘Henrik Ibsen’, in Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York:
Harper & Brothers, ), p. .
. Henrik Ibsen, Letter to E. Gosse,  January , in John Nilsen Laurvik
and Mary Morison (trans.), Letters of Henrik Ibsen (New York: Fox, Duffield;
Company, ).
. Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Ibsen’s Dramatic Language as a Link between His
“Realism” and His “Symbolism”’, in Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen,
vol. , ed. Daniel Haakonsen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, –), p. .
. Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman, in The Master Builder and Other Plays,
trans. Barbara Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, ed. Tore Rem (New
York: Penguin, ), p. .
. Gay Gibson Cima, ‘Discovering Signs: The Emergence of the Critical Actor
in Ibsen’, Theatre Journal : (), p. .
. Ibsen, Letter to S. Reimers,  March , in Ibsen on Theatre, ed. Frode
Helland and Julie Holledge, trans. May-Brit Akerholt (London: Nick Hern
Books, ), p. .
. Quoted in Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art:
A Performance Study of the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ), p. .
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. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Now Completed to the Death of
Ibsen (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., ), p. .
. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, essay in Morgenbladet,  December , quoted in
Meyer, Ibsen, pp. –.
. Millicent Stebbins, ‘The Influence of Ibsen upon Hauptmann’, MA thesis,
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (), p. .
. George Brandes, Henrik Ibsen; Björnstjerne Björnson, trans. Jessie Muir,
revised ed. (London: William Heinemann, ), p. .
. Quoted in Meyer, Ibsen, p. .
. Alfred Polgar, reviewing Otto Brahm’s production, quoted in Marker and
Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art, p. .
. Ibsen, Letter to E. Gosse,  January , in Letters of Henrik Ibsen.
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