The problems of Ibsen's social dramas are consistent throughout all his works. Georg Brandes, a contemporary critic, said of Ibsen, as early as the 1860s, that "his progress from one work to the other is not due to a rich variety of themes and ideas, but on the contrary to a perpetual scrutiny of the same general questions, regarded from different points of view." Hedda Gabler, with its emphasis on individual psychology, is a close scrutiny of a woman like Nora Helmer or Mrs. Alving, who searches for personal meaning in a society which denies freedom of expression.
Professor Koht sums up the dramatist's investigations:
"The thing which filled [Ibsen's] mind was the individual man, and he measured the worth of a community according as it helped or hindered a man in being himself. He had an ideal standard which he placed upon the community and it was from this measuring that his social criticism proceeded."
Secondary to, and in connection with, his idea that the individual is of supreme importance, Ibsen believed that the final personal tragedy comes from a denial of love. Thus, Hedda Gabler is doomed to a dissatisfied life because she too is unable to love.
In an age where nations were striving for independence, Ibsen's sense of democracy was politically prophetic. He believed not that "right" was the prerogative of the mass majority, but that it resided among the educated minority. In the development and enrichment of the individual, he saw the only hope of a really cultured and enlightened society.
Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, theater remained a vehicle of entertainment. Insights into the human condition were merely incidental factors in the dramatist's art. Ibsen, however, contributed a new significance to drama which changed the development of modern theater. Discovering dramatic material in everyday situations was the beginning of a realism that novelists as different as Zola and Flaubert were already exploiting. With Ibsen, the stage became a pulpit, and the dramatist exhorting his audience to reassess the values of society became the minister of a new social responsibility.
