tragedy and heroism in modern european drama
Answers
The movement toward naturalism in fiction in the latter decades of the 19th century did much to purge both the novel and the drama of the sentimentality and evasiveness that had so long emasculated them. In Norway Henrik Ibsen incorporated in his plays the smug and narrow ambitiousness of his society. The hypocrisy of overbearing men and women replace, in their fashion, the higher powers of the old tragedy. His major tragic theme is the futility, leading to catastrophe, of the idealist’s effort to create a new and better social order. The “problem play”—one devoted to a particular social issue—is saved in his hand from the flatness of a sociological treatise by a sense of doom, a pattern of retribution, reminiscent of the ancient Greeks. In Pillars of Society (1877), The Wild Duck (published 1884), Rosmersholm (published 1886), and The Master Builder (published 1892), for example, one sacrifice is expiated by another.