But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice; when he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House). This play presents a very ordinary family—a bank manager named Torvald Helmer, his ...
Henrik Ibsen, major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of the moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetratin