Ibsen’s Symbolic Act: A Political Reading of Ibsen’s First Three Plays Written After Returning to Norway

In this thesis, I spotlight a marked shift in the financial status of Henrik Ibsen’s female and male characters in the three plays written after he returned to Norway. Within Ibsen’s contemporary prose plays, from Pillar of Society (1877) to Hedda Gabler (1890), the male protagonists always had financial independence, whereas female characters were not financially privileged. Ibsen, however, disturbed this pattern and established a new discourse in order to criticize bourgeois hegemony and patriarchal ideology by endowing his female characters with financial independence. With regard to Marxist and Feminist theories, hence, this research investigates the social, political, and ideological ramifications of this transition in the context of late-nineteenth-century capitalism. As a result, I apply Fredric Jameson’s theory to construe the endings of The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), and John Gabriel Borkman (1896) as Ibsen’s symbolic act by which he consciously resolves the insoluble conflicts in his bourgeois society