Against Roland Barthes. Why Ibsen's "A Doll's House" is Not a Feminist Text, but a Humanist one

Cyrus Manasseh

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9783668193048
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Polemic Paper from the year 2016 in the subject Theater Studies, Dance, language: English, abstract: Right from its first performance Ibsen's play has been misunderstood. From early on, "A Doll's House" until recently, (when it began to be used mostly as a vehicle for feminism and what had been called the 'woman question'), has not always been popular and a number of criticisms and misunderstandings have plagued it. Many had commented on the fact that within the society, during the time the play was set, that women were made to stay home and take care of the children and support their husbands and that it would be a travesty if they left all of this in order to pursue self-fulfillment. Yet more recently, its popularity has seemed to have steadily increased. Today, copiously commensurate with Roland Barthes's 1967 dictum and theory that the author is dead, —(heralding the fact that real fixed 'meaning' itself is dead and that texts are constructed out of precariously grouped citations which therefore allow unlimited and arbitrary open-ended interpretations to proliferate in spite of the author of the work's original intent), today's unfitting feminism has taken this up in further attempts to achieve greater power and freedom. The problem is that although Ibsen stated that he wrote the play to reflect humanist issues, in much of today's culture, unfitting feminist interpretations which aim to rewrite the meaning of the play still abound.