A crit­i­cal essay: How do nine­teenth cen­tury com­posers bring the plight of the indi­vid­ual to the con­scious­ness of their responders?

Because I haven’t got time to come up with con­tent solely for this web­site at the minute. 1645 words.

Nine­teenth cen­tury com­posers bring the plight of the indi­vid­ual to the responder’s aware­ness through their por­trayal of such char­ac­ters in a way that appeals to the respon­der either through the use of empa­thy, or, in the case of other works, through the use of a rising/falling con­flict model in con­junc­tion with elu­cida­tory dia­logue to elicit a response from the responder.

Hen­rik Ibsen’s play Ghosts uses the lat­ter model, mak­ing use of clever expo­si­tions pre­sented by char­ac­ter in order to force read­ers to ques­tion the soci­ety in which they find them­selves, and their roles as indi­vid­u­als within that frame­work. An encom­pass­ing work, Ghosts has been crit­i­cised as being “a lit­tle bare, hard, aus­tere”, in which Ibsen has con­formed too much to the pro­saic ideal and sti­fled his poetic nature – and, in this, become an author who “cares more for ideas and doc­trine than for human beings.” Iron­i­cally, it is this por­trayal of such ideas and doc­trine that, for many, makes this work one of over­whelm­ing humanity.

The model employed by Ibsen here ren­ders char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion super­flu­ous – his char­ac­ters are not bound to a sin­gle per­son, to a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, but are seen to rep­re­sent any num­ber of peo­ple indi­vid­u­ally within human­ity. Hav­ing said this, Ibsen’s works do not gen­er­ally sup­port the notion of a uni­ver­sal com­mon human­ity in which beliefs are shared, draw­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the “out­posts”, the rul­ing classes, and the “com­pact majority” – and there is no rea­son to sup­pose he devi­ates from this under­stand­ing in Ghosts.

Rather than being a character-driven book, in which empa­thy is used to endear a pro­tag­o­nist to the respon­der, Ibsen’s char­ac­ters are some­what flat and unde­vel­oped, although in their behav­iours, estab­lished through dia­logue and stage direc­tions, as well as their inter­ac­tions, they are por­trayed as being in con­flict. Pas­tor Man­ders embod­ies the oppres­sive, hyp­o­crit­i­cal nature of reli­gion – he is more con­cerned for the appease­ment of those who would crit­i­cise his lack of faith than he is for the prac­ti­cal­ity of insur­ance – a prac­ti­cal­ity he recog­nises, but advises against for “the attacks that would assuredly be made upon me in cer­tain papers and periodicals”.

The gulli­bil­ity of this char­ac­ter with regard to Jacob Engstrand’s nature is not sim­ply that, but rather a reflec­tion of the blind­ness of reli­gion to many aspects of indi­vid­ual natures within soci­ety as a whole – Ibsen com­ments on the irrel­e­vance of reli­gion in the lim­ited char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of Man­ders, and then fur­ther delin­eates this irrel­e­vance through the con­flict intro­duced between var­i­ous char­ac­ters and this figure.

Yet Man­ders is not sim­ply the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the church. Within Ibsen’s model of soci­ety, Man­ders wields a rul­ing influ­ence from which the “com­pact major­ity” draw their val­ues and belief sys­tems. The cri­tique is not only one of the reli­gious estab­lish­ment, but is inclu­sive of the state and legal sys­tems – some­thing reflected in the injus­tices por­trayed in A Doll’s House. The accu­sa­tion levied against such insti­tu­tions is one of aloof­ness – Ibsen pro­poses such insti­tu­tions are dis­tant from the indi­vid­ual, and can­not ade­quately com­pre­hend their needs. The epit­ome of this is his sup­port of euthana­sia in the clos­ing scene of the play – a some­thing wholly unac­cept­able within that soci­ety, and sim­i­larly open to ques­tion in this age. Ibsen argues in favour of this, the clos­ing scene of the play being emo­tive in its stark nature and elo­quent stage direc­tions. The work con­cludes almost poet­i­cally, with Oswald mind­lessly repeat­ing a phrase, as his mother, Mrs. Alv­ing, grows hys­ter­i­cal at what he has asked her to do – and the respon­der can empathise with both fig­ures, nei­ther of which have been under­stood by the estab­lish­ment. In estab­lish­ing such a dichotomy between the state and the indi­vid­ual, the plight of the indi­vid­ual in a col­lec­tive sense – that is, human­ity as a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als – is brought to the con­scious­ness of the responder.

Empa­thy is lim­ited as a result of (delib­er­ately) restricted char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, but Ibsen’s pur­pose is still achieved in this work, though per­haps with­out the nuance of his other works. An Enemy of the Peo­ple, also by Ibsen, draws a dis­tinc­tion not between the state and the indi­vid­ual, but rather between those on the “out­posts” and the com­mon peo­ple. It is not, how­ever, solely a work of philo­soph­i­cal self-gratification.

In this instance, the denun­ci­a­tion is instead of the fail­ure of soci­ety as a whole to hear any mes­sage con­tra­dic­tory to its desires, irre­spec­tive of what evils this may require, and sim­i­larly with­out regard for the sus­tain­abil­ity of such a stance. The pol­lu­tion, Dr. Thomas Stock­mann argues, is not sim­ply of the baths, but of soci­ety. He declares at a pub­lic meet­ing that he has dis­cov­ered “all the sources of our moral life are poi­soned and that the whole fab­ric of our civic com­mu­nity is founded on the pes­tif­er­ous soil of falsehood.”

Such bla­tancy is not wholly unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of Ibsen, his career being one of the more con­tro­ver­sial of the great nine­teenth cen­tury play­wrights – undoubt­edly also as a result of his pop­u­lar­ity. Yet the point remains as an ostracised indi­vid­ual shouts his dis­il­lu­sion­ment and cha­grin with soci­ety in this play, a point com­mon to each of his five prose plays, com­posed from 1877, and termed by Ibsen the “drama of ideas”.

The con­text in which it was writ­ten must also be con­sid­ered, quite apart from the period in time in which these works were com­posed. Ibsen’s plays were per­formed to audi­ences all across Europe, and resis­tance to these works var­ied from active cen­sor­ship in Prus­sia (uni­fied Ger­many) and Eng­land, to pas­sive cen­sor­ship – the play was eigh­teen months old before a the­atre agreed to pro­duce it – to pub­lic and media crit­i­cism. Ibsen’s plays attacked many aspects of the estab­lish­ment, and, by his own acknowl­edge­ment, point to nihilism as an inher­ent human con­di­tion for many peo­ple, lead­ing to their tur­moil dur­ing the play, and sub­se­quent social demise (or, more opti­misti­cally, their eman­ci­pa­tion) at its conclusion.

France was per­haps one of the more lib­eral nations in Europe at this time, with the Enlight­en­ment of the eigh­teenth cen­tury per­haps hav­ing the most effect upon their state. The sub­se­quent rev­o­lu­tions that had swept across France had cre­ated a per­va­sive pro­gres­sive mood, but there remained a soci­etal struc­ture rather in accor­dance with Ibsen’s por­trayal of it, albeit with the addi­tion of a mid­dle class sup­port­ive of more lib­eral ideals. This notion of ‘class’ was, for many of the French peo­ple, a rem­nant of a time past which numer­ous rev­o­lu­tions had failed to abol­ish – or, more accu­rately, class dis­tinc­tions. Artists such as Gus­tave Courbet crit­i­cised this con­tin­u­ing soci­etal rift towards the mid­dle of the cen­tury, through the por­trayal of alms-giving. His work was not unique in this theme, with other artists such as Bon­vin and Pils cre­at­ing works depict­ing the same action in the same year, but Courbet’s The Vil­lage Maid­ens Giv­ing Alms to a Guardian of Cat­tle (or The Vil­lage Maid­ens, 1852.) is unique in the man­ner it por­trays such an act. The work is “an unvar­nished, enor­mous and most unwel­come reminder of class dis­tinc­tions in the provinces – a reminder that all was not smil­ing peas­antry and reas­sur­ing folk­lore in Franche-Comté, but that there too, the petty bour­geoisie was set­ting itself apart from the, now threat­en­ing, pro­le­tariat – and fur­ther­more, with the artist’s own sis­ters, clad in con­tem­po­rary bon­nets and dresses, rather than regional folk cos­tume, play­ing the role of mon­eyed ben­e­fi­cience.”¹ This was, for the middle-classes of Paris, a rather unwel­come reflec­tion of them­selves that they sought to avoid recog­ni­tion of.

The theme of such char­ity is con­tin­ued in another of Courbet’s works, Beggar’s Alms (1868), which por­trays a beg­gar grant­ing a young boy a coin – sig­nif­i­cant, rel­a­tive to the beggar’s means. The plight of the indi­vid­ual in both these works is por­trayed as being of lit­tle con­se­quence in an uncar­ing soci­ety – the poor are required to care for the poor, as an indif­fer­ent bour­geoisie con­tin­ues life unburdened.

Bur­den­ing of the indi­vid­ual is another theme com­mon to many works of the nine­teenth cen­tury crit­i­cal of soci­ety, a key exam­ple of this being Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The pro­tag­o­nist of this text, Tess Durbey­field (or d’Urberville), bears the sin of a man who goes on unhin­dered by his act, unaware of its con­se­quence, until he again meets Tess some years later, lead­ing to his demise. Her mar­riage to Angel Clare is an unqual­i­fied fail­ure, despite her con­tin­u­ing devo­tion to him until, finally, under the weight of her des­per­a­tion, hope of his return elapses and she is com­pelled to reside with Alec d’Urberville in order to sup­port her mother and siblings.

With­out a hus­band, Tess d’Urberville is ‘incomplete’ – she is inca­pable, in the soci­ety in which she finds her­self, of liv­ing inde­pen­dently, as a result of the expec­ta­tions placed upon her. Soci­ety has caused this cir­cum­stance through the patri­ar­chal expec­ta­tion of ‘purity’ falling solely upon a woman with no means of recourse – Alec d’Urberville may be viewed as a motif of oppres­sion rather than an actual char­ac­ter, as his per­sona is devel­oped by its ele­ments, rather than explicit char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. Con­versely, Angel Clare is exten­sively devel­oped so he is endeared in the mind of the respon­der, such that he exists as an indi­vid­ual as does Tess – his indi­vid­ual actions being guided by his own fail­ure to meet society’s expec­ta­tions (his lack of reli­gious con­vic­tions), but he remains in con­flict with this as he leaves Tess whom it is quite clear he loves from his uncon­scious actions on the first night of their marriage.

Ulti­mately, Hardy’s protagonist’s plight is the tragic con­se­quence of a sin against her held by soci­ety to be a fault of her own. The respon­der is brought to value the pro­tag­o­nist as an indi­vid­ual in such a con­flict through Hardy’s endear­ing por­trayal of her in accor­dance with the first model out­lined at the begin­ning of this crit­i­cal essay, and it is thus that an aware­ness of her plight is raised.

¹ Nochlin, L. Real­ism. Pen­guin, 1971. Page 124.