Peripeteia: Ibsen’s History in Hedda Gabler and the Pretenders

Abstract

If you want to explore the topic of peripeteia or turning points as a literary scholar, you will find a very promising subject in the genre of the history play. For in a history play two types of turning points intersect; one could perhaps find in this crossroad the characteristic that makes a history play a history play. On the one hand, there is the peripeteia which, according to the founding text of drama analysis, structures every play. In Poetics, Aristotle presents the peripeteia as a category for building meaning through narratives. It denotes the turning point in a tragedy, the moment at which it becomes obvious that what was expected in the fictional world depicted on stage will not happen. The turnaround redefines every single element of the story and by this re-definition it shows connections between these elements, connections that were not obvious so far or did not exist before. Only the peripeteia binds all the elements that are represented on the stage, together into a whole: “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end... . A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard” (Aristotle 1951, 145b). If drama as a genre gains its narrative cohesion through the peripeteia, then this is all the truer for the history play. When selecting historical material, the author will search history books for those moments that support the construction of their plot, that is, such moments that have already been canonised as key events in history: turning points or catastrophes, political crises, decisive battles, the signing of an agreement of great significance, reformations or revolutions. Aristotle’s structural peripeteia will