The Pillar of Ibsenian Drama: Henrik Ibsen and Pillars of Society, Reconsidered [pp. 359-371]

Abstract

Pillars of Society is the most ignored of the dozen major Ibsen prose plays. Written between 1875 and 1877, it was an immediate success and made Ibsen the champion of radical artists and social reformers throughout Europe. This drama remained part of the standard Ibsen repertory through the first several decades of the twentieth century and was produced a number of times in England and America. But it is rarely presented in English today. Critically the play has fared no better. Pillars of Society was the work that got William Archer excited about Ibsen, and it was the first Ibsen play to be translated into English-by Archer-but a few years after his translation he declared that British theater audiences had grown so advanced and enlightened that the play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. Most modern critics seem to agree, by default if nothing else. To wit: no major critical essay or article on the play has been published in several decades, and even full-length books on Ibsen usually either pass over it entirely or grudgingly accept it as another one in the long bumbling series of Ibsen's apprenticeship plays. Moreover, Pillars of Society is still approached as a problem play in the narrowest definition of that term. From this point of view, the meaning of the play indeed becomes simplistic, i.e., that bourgeois society is hypocritical and its leaders are often corrupt. Far from being an apprenticeship play, however, Pillars of Society is the mature work of a dramatic genius on which he brought all his imaginative powers to bear-the first time, in fact, that Ibsen's manifold creative talents become totally fused in the same work.