Savannah Lee

Thank you for clarifying why you like Lawrence :-)
However, here's the reason I hated Lady Chatterley: She makes a commitment to her husband, and then, when he comes home from war handicapped and incapable of sex, she just fucks around. That, to me, is unacceptable. Didn't she hear about the "for better, for worse"-part? Could she not at least have talked to him about it? She continues to enjoy his money and position, while cheating. She could at least have divorsed him first, but no, she wants to have her cake and eat it, too. That is so spoiled and dishonest.
I, by the way, think Ibsens Nora is a wuss also. Leaving is the easy way out.

Thanks, Ulla! Sorry for the X-Treme Delay in approving your comment. Life sometimes upsets the bloggy applecart but good.

I appreciate your point about Connie's behavior. It raises an interesting issue of context. You mention Ibsen's Nora. At that time, leaving was the *hard* way out. That kind of thing simply wasn't done. She was consigning herself to a lifetime as an outcast from respectable society. And she left because she realized, finally and utterly, that Torvald didn't love her the way she did him. He wouldn't sacrifice himself for her. (He also didn't respect her.)

Today, of course, a couple facing difficulties like Connie and her husband, or Nora and Torvald, could/would sit and talk things over. What's fascinating about those earlier works is that you truly get the sense that *that wasn't an option*. I truly believe that if someone sat those couples down and said "Tell each other how you feel and start to work it out," they would stare in incomprehension. I think that, for the most part, a relationship simply was what it was back then, and it was not seen as possible to change or fix it by talking. I think that, in some ways, THAT is the biggest difference between the present and the past.

I think you are wrong - you are right, of course, that the power dynamic was very different, but they do not even try. Nora behaves like an irresponsible child, and her husband cannot respect her - that is not so strange. Love really is beside the point, but to these child-women, it seems to be the only point.
Real women, of course, were not like that, even then. These fictional women are created by men who wanted women to be seen as irresponsible.

Now you've got me interested to read "A Doll's House" again :)

The way I remember it, you're exactly right--and that's Ibsen's point. If I remember correctly, Nora *says* "I've been your doll, living a doll's life in a doll's house." The whole point is *exactly* that she's "an irresponsible child." She was never taught to be anything else. She has totally unrealistic ideas about life, love and how the world works *because* her social class trained her to be nothing but an ornament. Ibsen was trying to show that this has serious, negative consequences. He was arguing that women should be educated so that they would not become complete idiots like Nora.

That's how I remember it, at any rate.

Ibsen was an interesting guy. I am one of probably three people outside of Scandinavia who read "Peer Gynt" voluntarily and thought it was awesome. (Though I never had the vaguest clue how to pronounce it until my Finnish roommate saw my copy and exclaimed, "Oh, you have PAIR-gay-unt!" I was like, "Huh?" She pointed at the title and repeated, "PAIR-gay-unt!")

But anyhow: Ibsen was an interesting guy. My favorite work of his is probably "Ghosts," and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

I wrote a 15-page essay way back on the women i Ibsens plays - A Dolls House not among them as far as I remember. None of them made much of an impression. Ghosts I haven't read.
But do you really believe all these male authors were really feminists? You're on to something, definitely, but surely, even if the authors really believe society "made" women irresponsible, they would still be hapless victims and weak-minded, if you see what I mean - not an attractive role, or fair to the majority of real women, who, at the time, often shouldered some responsibility.
No, you're right. Madame Bovary is a good example. She does great evil because she hasn't been given a moral or intellektual compas. Horrifying.
Peer Gynt is pronounced like "peer" (meaning equal) and Gynt exactly as the first syllable in Günther (the barrista in Friends).

I think Henrik Ibsen was a feminist *given his times*. A 19th century feminist is necessarily going to be a very different animal from a 21st century one. I think he was heading in the right direction.

Also, at least in "A Doll's House," he was speaking about women of a certain social class. Having no need to work, they were raised to be ornaments. Working-class women did work, whether in the home or outside of it.

I understand that it's insulting to imagine that upper-class 19th-century women, as a group, could be ruined by lack of education, opportunity and responsibility. But that's exactly why oppression is evil--it destroys people's potential. People who are inadequately educated, trained, and developed, *become* inadequate themselves. It doesn't mean they're inherently weak-minded or hapless. It means they were denied the lifetime of training necessary to develop their tough-mindedness and strength. Without practice, skills don't form.

As for Peer Gynt, my friend must have been saying it in Finnish :)

Finnish is very, very different from the other scandinavian languages, but the Fins (??) speak Swedish as a second language. Ibsen, of course, was Norwegian, and in his time Norway and Denmark were very close language-wise and culturally.

Since you asked, it's "Finns" :)

Yeah, Finnish is by no means part of the Big Germanic Family O' Languages.

So do Danes read Ibsen in the original Norwegian?

To the extent that we read Ibsen at all, yes. It's no problem.
In our equivalent of middle school and high school the law requires that we read texts from Norway and Sweden in the original. Sweden and Norway belonged to Denmark not so long ago, so it's our literary history, too.