The document analyzes the influences of Henrik Ibsen's life experiences and family on his play Peer Gynt. Several characters and plot points in the play are based on Ibsen's own life. Peer Gynt's family mirrors Ibsen's, going from wealth to poverty. Peer also spends many years abroad, as Ibsen himself spent 27 years living overseas. Both Peer and Ibsen married but then left their wives for a long period of time before eventually returning home. The document examines these and other biographical links between the author and his most famous dramatic work.
1. THE EXTRINSIC ELEMENT ANALYSIS
PRESENTED BY:
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1.Putri Nurul Hidayati
2.Herzul Arifin
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2. The playwright’s life experiences are poured in the play
The struggle of Peer Gynt to fight his bad attitude
becomes good attitude and The loyalty of a women to
wait a man in her life.
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3. The Peer Gynt is a five-act play by the Norwegian
dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. He wrote this play in 1867.
It was written in the Bokmål dialect of Norwegian and is
one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays.
Ibsen believed Peer Gynt that the several of the
characters are modelled from Ibsen's own family, notably
his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was
also inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of
Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845.
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4. THE SYNOPSIS
Peer Gynt is the son of the once rich and highly regarded Jon Gynt,
who had become a drunkard and lost all his money, leaving Peer and his
mother Åse to live in poverty. Peer wants to restore what his father had
wrecked, but gets lost in boasting and day-dreams. He is involved in a fight
and carries off the bride, Ingrid of Hægstad, on her wedding-day. He is
outlaned and has to flee from the parish. During his flight he meets three
amorous dairy-maids, the woman clad in green, the daughter of the old man
of the Dovre Mountains, whom he wants to marry, and Bøygen (the great
obstacle).
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5. Solveig, whom Peer met at the Hægstad wedding, and fell in love with,
comes to his cabin in the forest to live with him, but he leaves her and goes on
his travels. He is away for many years, takes part in various occupations and
plays various roles including that of a businessman engaged in shady
enterprises on the coast of Morocco, wanders through the desert, passes the
Memnon and the Sphinx, becomes a Bedouin chief and a prophet, tries to
seduce Anitra, daughter of a Bedouin, and ends up as a guest in the madhouse
in Cairo, where he is hailed as emperor. When at last on his way home as an
old man, he is ship wrecked. Among those on board he has met the Strange
Passenger, who wants to make use of his corpse to find out where dream
shave their seat.
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6. Back home in the parish, he attends a peasant funeral and an
auction where he offers for sale everything from his earlier life. He
also meets the Button-moulder, who maintains that Peer's soul must be
melted down with other faulty goods unless he can explain when and
where in life he has been "himself", and the Lean one, who believes
he cannot be accounted a real sinner who can be sent to hell. Peer, in
ever greater despair, reaches Solveig, who has been waiting for him
in the cabin ever since he left. She tells him that he has always been
himself in her belief, hope and love.
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8. Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828. He was a major 19th-century
Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the
father of modern theater" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. Some of
his most famous plays include Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, and Hedda Gabler. His
drama is the most frequently performed in the world after Shakespeare. Although he
mostly lived in exile in Germany and Italy, Ibsen still regarded as the greatest
Norwegian author of all time. He is regarded as a national symbolism by the people of
Norway, and is one of the most important dramatic in the history of the world.
Henrik Ibsen was as the oldest of five children born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen
Altenburg, a family of relatively wealthy merchant, in a small port town of Skien,
Norway. Hendrik is a descendant of most prominent families in Norway. But soon after
he was born, his family fortunes changed for the worse. His mother turned to religion
for solace, while the condition of his father slumped to experience depression.
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9. The family was through into poverty when Ibsen was 8 because of problems with
his father's business. Nearly all traces of their previous affluence had to be sold off
to cover debts, and the family moved to a rundown farm near town.
At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of
Grimstad (later renamed to Oslo) to become an apprentice pharmacist and began
writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was age 18, he had a son from an earlier
relationship. He had fathered an illegitimate child whose upbringing Ibsen had to
pay for until the boy was in his teens with a maid in 1846 while working as an
apprentice. While he provided some financial support, Ibsen never met the boy.
Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and
Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although
most of his plays are set in Norway—the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived
for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway. His dramas were
shaped by his family background.
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10. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the
university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university
were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit
himself to writing. He spent the next several years employed at Det norske
Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays
as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he published five new
plays. Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the
Christiania Theatre.
He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only
child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. The couple lived in very poor financial
circumstances. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy for a time.
There he wrote Brand, a five-act tragedy about a clergyman. He didn't return to
his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was as a noted, but
controversial, playwright.
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11. In 1868, Ibsen moved to Dresden, Germany where he wrote one of his
most famous works. With Hedda Gabler. Ibsen created one of the
theater's most notorious characters. Hedda, a general's daughter, is a
newlywed who has come to loathe her scholarly husband, but yet she
destroys a former love who stands in her husband's way academically.
The character has sometimes been called the female Hamlet, after
Shakespeare's famous tragic figure.
In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway as a literary hero. He may have left as
a frustrated artist, but he came back as internationally known playwright.
For much of his life, Ibsen had lived an almost reclusive existence. But he
seemed to thrive in the spotlight in his later years, becoming a tourist
attraction of sorts in Christiania. He also enjoyed the events held in his
honor in 1898 to mark his seventieth birthday. Ibsen moved to Munich in
1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars
of Society, first published and performed in 1877.
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12. In 1900, Ibsen had a series of strokes that left him unable to write. He
managed to live for several more years, but he was not fully present
during much of this time. Ibsen died on May 23, 1906. His last words
were "To the contrary!" in Norwegian. Considered a literary titan at
the time of his passing, he received a state funeral from the
Norwegian government.
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14. Ibsen made the influence of his biography and family on his plays. He
often made references to his family in his plays, sometimes by name,
or by modeling characters.
Peer Gynt Drama has the same story with Henrik Ibsen as the writer.
Peer Gynt is Norwegian, Henrik is Norwegian also. The aspects of
Peer Gynt’s life that Henrik tells are like Henrik’s life.
This drama describes Henrik Ibsen’s life in reality. Peer Gynt as the
main character is the character from the writer himself. Based on the
drama above, Peer Gynt is a son of rich family that suddenly failed. It
also happened by Henrik Ibsen.
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15. The portrayal of the Gynt family is known to be based on Henrik Ibsen's
own family and childhood memories; in a letter to Georg Brandes, Ibsen
wrote that his own family and childhood had served "as some kind of
model" for the Gynt family.
In a letter to Peter Hansen, Ibsen confirmed that the character Åse, Peer
Gynt's mother, was based on his own mother, Marichen Altenburg. The
character Jon Gynt is considered to be based on Ibsen's father Knud
Ibsen, who was a rich merchant before he went bankrupt.
Even the name of the Gynt family's ancestor, the prosperous Rasmus Gynt,
is borrowed from the Ibsen's family's earliest known ancestor. Thus, the
character Peer Gynt could be interpreted as being an ironic
representation of Henrik Ibsen himself. There are striking similarities to
Ibsen's own life; Ibsen himself spent 27 years living abroad and was never
able to face his hometown again.
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16. Beside that, peer Gnyt married Solveig. After that, he go to some
places, such as United State, Maroko, Egypt, etc to change his life to
be better. Henrik Ibsen has the same experience as Peer Gynt in his
life. he married Susanna Daae Thoresen and leave her alone.
For many years, Solveig waits Peer Gynt’s coming. After Peer Gynt
gets what he wants and to be a success man, he comes back to his
home. It represents what Henrik Ibsen does.
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