Yet, the people who'd come to watch the play somehow missed out on (what to me were) two major aspects of the play -- the time (1880) and the pyschological interplay. Instead, the audience was shaking its heads in denigration when the actor playing the husband mouthed his dialogues and nodding in approval when the actress mouthed hers. The audience was judging the characters by the morals and mores of our time, reducing the complex structure of the plot to a simple morality play. It was disheartening.
It is actually the symptom of a wider disease -- feminism has been reduced to formulaic sayings. The audience was so sure that its beliefs were right that those beliefs were being held unexamined.
Society in the 1880s would have nodded in approval at the husband's arguments and been shocked by the wife's. Society now nods in approval at the wife's. We do Ibsen an injustice either way.
