Suez Modernism: Transportation, History, and Ibsen's Stylistic Shift

Abstract

In the fall of 1869, Henrik Ibsen represented Norway at the ceremonies marking the inauguration of the Suez Canal. As a seafaring nation with a robust shipping economy, Norway had strong interests in the success of this unprecedented engineering feat whereby 98 miles of inland desert was cut away, creating an unbroken passageway between European ports with access to the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern ports beyond the Red Sea. Ibsen, ever flattered by official forms of recognition, was happy to attend, finding himself in the company of other cultural luminaries, such as Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola among the 1600 guests in attendance (Farnie 1969, 83–87). Aside from his diary and a few poems, Ibsen wrote very little that explicitly addressed the Canal and his experiences in Egypt. Shortly thereafter, however, he completed his monumental Emperor and Galilean (1873) and sketched out notes for Pillars of Society (1877), plays that would mark a stylistic break with the poetic dramas of his early career and set the template for the realistic prose plays that announced the arrival of modern drama. Although critics have traditionally understood Ibsen’s stylistic shift to have been prompted by his intense intellectual exchange with the Danish critic Georg Brandes (see, e.g., Styan 1981, 19), I argue that it was also prompted by his experiences in Egypt. After all, Brandes’s Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (1871), with its imperative to address the social problems of the day, explains only the shift in subject matter that distinguishes Ibsen’s late from his early plays. It does not account for the development of his modernist dramatic form. Recent critics have attributed Ibsen’s stylistic shift to his break with idealist esthetics, finding both narrative and formal evidence to Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 136–166, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904