Ibsen's Drama

This text argues that in his late plays Ibsen struggled with, and finally repudiated the Aristotelian ideas of reality and change that held sway over the earlier part of his career, and more generally over nineteenth-century drama and culture. The first chapter analyzes Aristotle's Poetics, which centers on the classical relation of catharsis, rational agency, and intelligible change in human affairs. The second chapter presents Nietzsche's transformation of those topics into a modernist poetics and a modernist agenda for living. The rest of the book analyzes Ghosts, Rosmersholm and The Master Builder, and relates Ibsen's formal, intellectual and cultural innovations in these plays to Nietzsche's assault on the Aristotelian humanism that Victorian Europe valued so highly. Through his Nietzschean subversion of the popular forms of Victorian theatre - melodrama, problem play, Magdalene play, professional intrigue and remarriage plot - and the culture they represent, Ibsen struggled messianically to reveal how life could pass, heroically, from right action to tragic joy.