The Chronotopic Dynamics of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society: The Triumph of Industrialism, or How Drama Becomes History

This essay aims to bring a socio-historical perspective to the current critical assessment of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society, which has been largely confined to the ethical and the cultural. Combining a Bakhtinian, chronotopic analysis with a Bakhtinian / New Historicist understanding of literary texts as inevitably or deliberately informed by historical processes, the essay argues that the socio-economic/socio-historical plot in the play is the larger, as well as more determining, dramatic component and force. It posits that industrial capitalism and technological modernization are the intertwined dynamics that propel the drama from beginning to end, forming its central axis of plot in the shape of the railroad enterprise.