Ibsen and Degeneration : Familial Decay and the Fall of Civilization

Henrik Ibsen’s plays were written at a critical juncture in late-19th-century European culture. Appearing at a time when notions of evolution and heredity were commonplace themes in literature and the arts, Ibsenian drama highlights the creative potential offered by contemporary evolutionary thought. In his plays, Ibsen explores variations on the theme of degeneration, imagining how families can become affected by ill-health or other forms of “weakness” that lead to the extinction of the family line. Ibsen and Degeneration looks at the recurrence of ideas of degeneration in three of Ibsen’s plays: In Ghosts, it is the motif of syphilis, highly shocking to Ibsen’s contemporaries, which serves as an allegory of degeneration. In Rosmersholm, degeneration is reconfigured as an overcultivation that eventually makes a family unfit for life. In Hedda Gabler, meanwhile, Hedda, having been for all practical purposes raised as a man, has come to think of herself as one, a circumstance which informs her final decision to end her life – her final degeneration. By reading these three plays from a fresh perspective, Ibsen and Degeneration sheds new light on some of Ibsen’s most enduring contributions to world drama.

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Henrik Johnsson is Professor of Nordic Literature at Østfold University College, Norway. He holds a PhD in the history of literature from Stockholm University. He is the author of two monographs on the oeuvre of August Strindberg – Strindberg and Horror: Horror Motifs and the Theme of Identity in the Works of August Strindberg (2009) and The Infinite Coherence: August Strindberg’s Occult Science (2015). He is coeditor with Tessel M. Bauduin of the anthology The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema (2018). His current research explores the intersection of horror and desire in Nordic Gothic fiction.