Los Angeles herald., 1909-08-08
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N Los Angeles |f1W
IBSENS WOMEN ARE
DISCUSSED IN MAGAZINE

Discussing in the Theatre Magazine
Ibsen and his relation to women, as
shown by his feminine characters,
Amelia Won Ende says:
"Of all the poets of our time, Ibsen
is the most concerned for the spiritual
welfare of the race. He is also the one
least interested in sexual life. Physi-
ology, in one instance, only enters into
the chain of causes and effects which
determine the actions of his characters.
In the life of his women especially, ne
recognizes the fact that the range or
their thoughts and their feelings eX-
! tends beyond the world of the mating
and the maternal instinct. His concep-
tion of womanhood is not bounded by
maternity, nor is his conception of
motherhood limited to physical func-
tion and physical offspring. From ms
isolated seat in the vast theater OF ire
he has seen women with an ideal moth
erly faculty, who had never known
motherhood; he has also seen women
exquisitely feminine but without a
trace of motherliness; nor did he faAl
to see women whose essential qualities
were not feminine as such, and VINO
were still far from sexless. All these
types with their manifold gradationS
were known to him, and he portrayed
them in his works. They form pro
cession of characters of such endless
variety as no other poet has presented,
yet they are homogeneous, for below
the Eternal Feminine he saw in every
woman the Eternal Human; Even IN
his earlier dramas, where the charac-
ters are indigenous to the Morse soil
and to the heroic period of the plot,
and are therefore bound by many con-
Ventions, he does not narrowly dls-
criminate between the sexes, but ad-
mits the latent possibilities or women
When H1ordis in The Vikings of Hell
geland' exclaims What is not possible
| for women!' she opens vistas into the
future. In her desire for power ana
her unscrupulous egotism she is sort
of primeval Rebecca West. Were IL
possible to lay bare all the threads
| that run through his works from nrsc
to last, one might find in Fru Inger OF
Oestrot and in the Margit and Signe OF
The Feast of Solhaug' embryonic pro-
totypes of his later characters. There
Is in the plays of 1bsen not one pas
sage in which he INDUCES In reflections
about the place and the mission OF
woman. He is not dispenser of gem
eralizations draped i'm the cloak or
nhilosophy. But it is not difficult to
see that foremost among his highly IN
dividualized types is always the moth-
er-woman, ministering, consollng, ana
soothing: he portrays her in all the
glory of her power. For even the
Strongest man is but the child of
weak woman, is always her child TO ne
nothered by her even in the hour of
death. From the heights of their i'm
aginary superiority to human relations,
Tbsnn leads even his supermen back to
the homely hut, where life is born of
the love of woman. To the woman he
had once deserted Peer Gynt returns
after the dismal wreck of his sel1sh
dream-life. calls her mother, and like
a child nestles in her arms. Forgiving
the prodigal, Solveig sings him to that
sleep which is to bring eternal rest TO
the ever restless Brand the fanatic,
who has forced his wife into a course
of cruel self-immolation, at the defec-
ton of his ideal also longs for Agnes
and the child he had sacrificed IN his
blindness. The tender pathos of the
character of Solveig, taking back in
her old age the lover of her youth, and
of Agnes renouneing everything thin a;,r,na for
Zach of the dead things that were once
her child's, has not been equaled by
any modern writer"