Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (review)

Toril Mio, who is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, mounts an impressive challenge to those who consider Ibsen a "boring old realist." Ibsen's theatre, the author argues to the contrary, "offers an unmatched series of superbly sustained metatheatrical reflections" (2). Although Ibsen's realist plays have dominated the world stage, Moi's claim is that the "ideologues of modernism hate realism" (28) and "apostles of modernist theatricality usually detest Ibsen" (29). The book's objective is to provide an alternative to these negative perceptions by demonstrating "that there is no fundamental opposition between realism and metatheatrical reflection, between theater as illusion and representation, and theater as investigation of theater" (25). Despite problems, the work largely succeeds.

Moi's determination to flesh out Ibsen's metatheatricality yields compelling results. She indicates where this metatheatricality occurs in virtually every play. Yet the argument is underdeveloped owing to the neglect of Lionel Abel, whose coinage of "metatheatre" would have gone a long way toward justifying the application of the term to Ibsen. The book explores nineteenth-century idealism, realism, Romanticism, art theory, and cultural studies in relation to Ibsen. Moi examines visual spectacle, folk art, Lessing's and Diderot's dramatic theories, moral and aesthetic value, language, and philosophy (Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell receive a great deal of attention). Artists William Orchardson, Anne Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Hippolyte Delaroche, Eilif Peterssen, Arnold Böcklin, and the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe are included as having considered similar themes as Ibsen. The book asserts that Romanticism and idealism emerge in Ibsen's plays, as well as Ibsen's growing skepticism toward these movements.

Regrettably problems, primarily turgid prose and shallow performance analysis, mar the book's objectives. Bloviated hiccups such as "it strikes me" and "my own view" are abundant, and prefatory ones such as "I shall show," "I shall discuss," and "I shall consider" appear over a dozen times. "First of all" surfaces often, but there is rarely a follow-up "second." Redundancies—"I shall use Schiller here," "I shall draw on Schiller's," "By turning to Schiller"—come in three successive paragraphs (73–74). And there are contradictions: Ibsen's "most intensely anti-idealist . . . play is Ghosts" (89) and "[n]o play challenged the idealists as deeply as Ghosts" (91), but then "The Wild Duck is Ibsen's most savage and most focused attack on idealism" (143). She contends that "Ibsen's theater ultimately emerges . . . in a world where we no longer trust the power of language to convey our meaning" (14), but then Ibsen's theatre "still has faith in the power of language to express the world and the plight of human beings" (217). Misreading occurs: writing about modern antitheatricalism, Moi says that "[Martin] Puchner's study [on antitheatricalism demonstrates] that while high modernism resisted theater, the avant-garde, including Brecht and Artaud, embraced it" (29). Brecht is one of Puchner's six examples illustrating the avant-garde's skepticism, not its embrace of theatricality. Regarding Nora's chignon coming undone during the tarantella dance, the author says: "Ibsen, I am sure, here deliberately invokes the theatrical convention known as 'back hair,' which in nineteenth-century melodrama handbooks signifies the 'onset of madness'" (238). This is declared with self-confidence, yet the term "back hair" is unsubstantiated. (Martin Meisel's Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England is the one and only secondary source quoted as saying that the release of hair indicates the "onset of madness," but neither Meisel nor anyone else reports evidence of "back hair [in] melodrama handbooks.")

There are dead-end speculations, such as Ibsen's relation to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. Ibsen, the author writes, "was an avid reader of newspapers, might very well have noticed the [Nietzsche] controversy. Or talked to someone who had. Or might not: I know of no evidence one way or the other" (196). The...