Ibsen 1828 - 1906 (78)
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
QUOTES
MRS. ALVING. Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was as though ghosts rose up before me. But I almost think we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that "walks" in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
MANDERS. Aha—here we have the fruits of your reading. And pretty fruits they are, upon my word! Oh, those horrible, revolutionary, free-thinking books!
MRS. ALVING. You are mistaken, my dear Pastor. It was you yourself who set me thinking; and I thank you for it with all my heart.
MANDERS. I!
MRS. ALVING. Yes—when you forced me under the yoke of what you called duty and obligation; when you lauded as right and proper what my whole soul rebelled against as something loathsome. It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrines. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing ravelled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.
At the age of fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school and become a pharmacist's assistant. He began to read and write in order to escape from the life of a child running errands. At the age of 18, he had a child with a maid, who he later acknowledged but never met. From that period of time, he stopped all contact with his family, probably due to his illegitimate child. He never again met his father and only once his mother. He only had contact with one of his sisters.
In 1848-1849, he wrote poems for various revolutionary movements in Europe. In 1850, he moved to Christiania (today Oslo) with the aim of studying at the university. He failed in his attempts to study ancient Greek and arithmetic but participated in university life for a while by helping to write and publish the student newspaper. In 1851, he moved to Bergen, where he found work at the theater as a writer, director, dramatist, and producer. In 1852, he wrote the first theatrical work that he signed with his name, "St. John's Night," a romantic comedy. Over the following six years, he wrote six more plays for that theater, as stipulated in his contract.
In 1858, he returned to Christiania and became the artistic director of the City Theater. In the same year, he married and had a son. In 1862, the Norwegian theater closed, leaving him unemployed and in a difficult economic situation. Frustrated by life in Norway, he migrated to Sorrento, Italy, in 1864. Two years later, he published the poetic drama "Brand," which established him as a poet. In 1871, he published a collection of poems for which he received an award. In 1873, he completed the historical drama "Emperor and Galileo," which he considered his most important work.
In 1879, he wrote "A Doll's House," which caused a big scandal as it described how the freedom of the individual is ruined by social conventions. In 1881, "Ghosts" shocked society by using the problem of an outbreak of disease to describe the moral illness that is inherited from one generation to another. In the following years, he continued to deal with social and ethical issues in works such as "An Enemy of the People" (1882), "The Wild Duck" (1884), and "Rosmersholm" (1886). After spending 27 years abroad, mainly in Italy and Germany, he returned, famous and rich, to his country in 1895. He bought an expensive house opposite the palace in Oslo and wrote his last work, "When We Dead Awaken," subtitled "A Dramatic Epilogue."
In 1900, he suffered a stroke, and in 1901, a second stroke left him almost paralyzed. He lived with many health problems until his death in 1906.