Ibsenism and Feminist Awakenings among Early Modern Chinese Writers
Ibsenism and Feminist Awakenings among Early Modern Chinese Writers

Summary/Abstract: Ibsen is a dramatist, but he has been considered also as a social thinker, and controversially as a feminist. Since A Doll’s House was published in 1879, critics have come to an agreement that Ibsen is both a dramatist and a social thinker, but they cannot come to an agreement whether Ibsen is a feminist. The reason why some critics do not think that Ibsen is a feminist is that Ibsen does not provide a conclusion on Nora’s future. And for this reason, some critics conclude that Ibsen does not seem to have a clear feminist position. Russian Marxist critics, such as Georg Plekhanov, also thought of Ibsen as a half-hearted revolutionary because his plays lack a conclusion on social and feminist issues. However, the feminists at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Emma Goldman, argued that Ibsen is a feminist (Tam 2001: 28–29). In China, the early reception of Ibsen underwent a similar process […]

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