a blog by Peter Leonard
Franco Moretti of Stanford University delivered the Keynote address [online here, at least for now] at the 2009 International Ibsen Studies conference, a talk based on a chapter of his upcoming book on the bourgeois in European literature. “Ibsen’s world: shipbuilders, industrialists, financiers, merchants, bankers, developers, administrators, judges, managers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, pastors, journalists, photographers, designers, accountants, clerks, printers … No other writer has focused so single-mindedly on the bourgeois universe,” he claims. Moretti is interested in the legal and moral grey-areas in Ibsen’s works, the undefined terrain of behavior unscrupulous if not wholly forbidden.
In these unequal, unfair relationships, Moretti finds evidence of Ibsen’s ability to observe, process and portray the inequitable relations given cover by the social and legal apparatus of the19th century middle-class, and in so doing Moretti positions Ibsen’s realistic plays as a lens into the inequities governing European society: “…that’s what capitalism does all the time: it takes a variety of profoundly unfair relationships, and gives them the sanction of legality: unequal exchange becomes legal exchange. Victorian narrative — even at its best — cannot digest this contradiction. Ibsen can. He can look at the European bourgeoisie, without feeling the symbolic need to either demonize or redeem it.”