Masculine hegemony in a selection of Henrik Ibsen's plays

In the past, men and masculinity were considered as a matter of course and incontrovertible issue. But since the late 1980s, more attention has been paid to critical studies of men and masculinity. Changes in women roles and family paterns due to fundamental and effective changes in industrial societies, have raised questions about the nature of masculinity and its changing role in society. This has been discussed in other fields of humanities, including dramatic literature, especially, about the plays of some important playwrights, such as Henrik Ibsen. The content of masculinity and femininity and relationship between male and female characters in his plays need to be studied. The male heroes created by him, want to achieve their goals and in this process, they do not hesitate to dominate others, especially women and most of them, do this hegemonically. This makes it more important to study and analyze the element of masculinity in his plays. Some of the sociologists, such as Robert William Connell, have proposed a comprehensive theory of gender and masculinity. Connell regarded gender and masculinity as constructed concepts. The values, social expectations and stereotypes of gender roles determine the “masculinity” and “femininity”, rather than biological sex. In his definition of hegemonic masculinity, Connell points out that this type of masculinity is the normative pattern of masculinity, which shows the most confirmed current pattern of being a man by the culture of a society. Accordingly, this review aims to analyze a number of Ibsen’s plays based on sociological definition of masculinity. One of the main questions of this research is to identify the amount of hegemonic masculinity characteristics, related to pivotal male characters in selection of Ibsen’s plays, from Brand (1866) to When We Dead Awaken (1899). We also explore and analyze the recognition of the hegemonic male characters of Ibsen’s plays and. In this paper, firstly, the traits of hegemonic masculinity in nineteenth century – the age that Ibsen has written his plays - were identified based on sociologists’ definition such as Connell and the dominant patterns of manhood in this century which presented by some sociologists such as Kimmel and Giddens in their research. These traits have been categorized in twenty nine divided features. Then, by using categorical content analysis method, these traits were counted as variable and mentioned characters were counted as analysis units. The rate of hegemonic masculinity characteristics was identified for each examined character by counting the repetition of these variables for each due to his behavior, speech and dramatic events which had been demonstrated either by examined characters and other characters’ descriptions and reflections. Then, the pivotal male characters with high rate hegemonic masculinity characteristics and the most hegemonic of them were recognized by comparing and contrasting them together. Findings demonstrated noticeable differences between different characters and indicated that Ibsen has created the most hegemonic male characters of his plays in a certain period of his life. Finally, it was included that this trend attributed to variations in Ibsen’s attitudes and social changes.