Henrik Ibsen’s Frauen-Gestalten nach seinen sechs Familien-Dramen is a German-language critical study by Lou Andreas-Salomé devoted to the female characters in six of Ibsen’s domestic plays. Its scope is defined by the subtitle: Ein Puppenheim (A Doll’s House), Gespenster (Ghosts), Die Wildente (The Wild Duck), Rosmersholm, Die Frau von Meere (The Lady from the Sea), and Hedda Gabler. The book is not a biography of Ibsen and does not attempt a survey of his entire dramatic production; it stays with these six “family dramas” and with the women who stand at their centers.
The volume is best described as character criticism. It examines Ibsen’s female figures as psychological and moral subjects rather than as mere illustrations of a social thesis. Its discussions remain within the domestic and marital settings of the six plays, attending to marriage, motherhood, heredity, social expectation, concealment, duty, and the desire for individual freedom. The women are treated in relation to the families and marriages that surround them, but the emphasis falls on their inner lives and on the dramatic situations in which those lives are tested.
The six plays supply the book’s sequence of figures. In Ein Puppenheim the central subject is Nora and her movement from domestic role-playing toward an assertion of selfhood. In Gespenster the study turns to Mrs. Alving and the female figures caught within a family order haunted by inherited lies and conventions. In Die Wildente it considers the women of the Ekdal household, including Gina and Hedvig, within a world of illusion, dependence, and sacrifice. In Rosmersholm the focus falls on Rebecca West and the ethical and psychological crisis produced by the past. In Die Frau von Meere the central figure is Ellida Wangel, whose situation raises questions of choice, freedom, and attachment. The book closes its sequence with Hedda Gabler, whose entrapment and destructive energy form the final female portrait in the study.
Across these discussions, the book treats Ibsen’s women not as isolated portraits but as figures whose tragedies and conflicts arise from the collision between personal claims and the restrictive structures of family and marriage. The title’s “Frauen-Gestalten” signals this emphasis on configurations of womanhood and on dramatic character rather than on abstract argument. The study is concerned with the “woman question” as it appears in Ibsen’s drama, but it approaches that question through the particular women of the six plays. Its scope ends with Hedda Gabler; it does not extend to Ibsen’s later plays or to the author’s own life.
The book’s deeper critical interest lies in the ethical ambivalence of Ibsen’s women. They are neither simply victims of marriage nor simple rebels against it; the study attends to the ways each character is implicated in the order she suffers from, and to the moments when self-knowledge becomes inseparable from loss. Marriage and motherhood are treated as tests of character rather than as institutions to be defended or condemned in the abstract. The “woman question” thus appears as a question of how a person can remain true to herself within obligations she has not freely chosen—and of what happens when truthfulness is postponed, concealed, or demanded too late.
The volume’s significance rests on this combination of psychological portraiture and moral criticism. It offers a sustained early attempt to read Ibsen’s female figures as complex ethical subjects and to make domestic drama the site of modern tragedy. By keeping its focus on the six family plays, it presents Ibsen’s women as a connected gallery of possible responses to confinement, dependence, and the desire for freedom, rather than as scattered examples in a general argument. Its “Frauen-Gestalten” are configurations of womanhood under pressure, and the book’s value lies in the seriousness with which it traces the inner costs of those configurations.
