Henrik Ibsens Frauen-Gestalten nach seinen sechs Familiendramen is Lou Andreas-Salomé’s critical study of the female characters in six Ibsen plays. Its scope is set by its title: the book concentrates on A Doll’s House (Ein Puppenheim), Ghosts (Gespenster), The Wild Duck (Die Wildente), Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea (Die Frau vom Meere), and Hedda Gabler. It is not a general biography of Ibsen, nor a survey of his whole dramatic output, but a series of psychological portraits built around those six family dramas.
The book’s governing interest is the modern woman’s struggle for self-realization, especially within marriage and family life. Salomé approaches Ibsen’s women not merely as dramatic functions or illustrations of a thesis but as imagined persons whose inner lives can be analyzed in psychological terms. The subtitle’s phrase “psychologische Bilder” indicates the method: the plays provide situations, marriages, conflicts, and moral atmospheres, and Salomé uses them to construct empathetic portraits of female consciousness. She is particularly drawn to the tension between a woman’s social role and her desire to become herself, and to the strategies—open or hidden, successful or destructive—by which these characters seek freedom.
Because the study is organized around the six plays named in the title, each drama gives rise to a distinct case. In A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer’s movement from doll-wife to a woman claiming an independent self is treated as a central example of marriage as both shelter and prison. In Ghosts, Mrs Alving’s life of concealment, duty, and inherited lies is examined as a study in the cost of social respectability and the persistence of the past. In The Wild Duck, the women of the Ekdal household—especially Gina and Hedvig—are considered in relation to illusion, accommodation, and the vulnerable position of women within a family economy of secrets and self-deception. In Rosmersholm, Rebecca West’s will to freedom is explored alongside guilt, erotic influence, and the oppressive moral atmosphere of the Rosmer household. In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida Wangel’s yearning for the open sea and for a life not fully contained by marriage becomes a study of female longing and the possibility of a freer union. In Hedda Gabler, Hedda’s boredom, destructiveness, and frustrated demand for a heroic existence are treated as the extreme limit of the woman who cannot reconcile her inner demands with the ordinary life available to her.
The book is therefore less a set of plot summaries than a sequence of interpretive character studies. Salomé’s emphasis falls on inner conflict: the need for love and recognition, the fear of confinement, the pull of duty, the desire for power or independence, and the difficulty of achieving a self within institutions designed for other ends. Her tone is empathetic rather than moralistic; she writes about literary figures as if they were real women, and this gives the study its distinctive combination of literary criticism and psychological portraiture. The result is a focused analysis of Ibsen’s family dramas as a sustained inquiry into marriage, female identity, and the modern woman’s claim to selfhood.
A further through-line in the book is the distinction between a woman’s outward adaptation and her inward claim to selfhood. Salomé is less concerned with judging whether these figures are right or wrong than with tracing the inner logic of their accommodations and refusals: how love can become dependence, duty can become self-erasure, and the demand for freedom can become destructive or self-destructive. This gives the study its ethical texture—the women are treated as agents even when they are victims, and as victims even when they are destructive.
The book’s significance lies in this method rather than in a programmatic thesis about women’s rights. It reads Ibsen’s family dramas as a connected inquiry into the psychological cost of modern marriage and family life, and it treats the plays’ social problems as inseparable from problems of self-knowledge. Salomé’s portraits therefore occupy a middle ground between literary criticism and psychological case study: they analyze character, illusion, and moral atmosphere, and they make Ibsen’s female figures intelligible as persons struggling with the available forms of love, duty, and independence.
