Eventfulness in the Representations of Events: Revisiting Lona Hessel in Henrik Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society

Eventfulness in the Representations of Events: Revisiting Lona Hessel in Henrik Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society

Henrik Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society (1877) predated the New Woman phenomenon of the fin de siecle, yet its heroine, Lona Hessel, has often been seen as a New Woman figure who voices and embodies Ibsen’s ideals of truth and freedom, culminating in her closing declaration:“The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—they are the pillars of society”(119). This essay rereads Lona by examining several barely noticed but critical events in the text, arguing that Ibsen employs the eventfulness (i.e., the deeper significance) of these events to uncover an unrepresented version of Lona, one marked by moral untruths and feminist deficiencies beneath her surface representations. The essay contends that Lona serves as Ibsen’s contra- and ad hoc mouthpiece, a satirical specimen who can voice reason but fails to act in accordance with it, and that, by granting her the final line, Ibsen subtly prompts his readers and audiences to discreetly parse the meanings of truth and freedom. The essay suggests that Ibsen’s representations of the events concerning the feminist Lona mirrored the liminal stance he held towards the Woman Question, a state of conceptual flux influenced by the events he encountered while writing the play in the 1870s.