Heather Elise Hamilton

Ibsen''s Eschatology: Durkheim''s Suicides in Ibsen''s Prose Corpus Heather Elise Hamilton

Emile Durkheim and Henrik Ibsen were both products ofthe intellectual milieu that saw the birth ofsociology and the advent of an intellectual interestin the individual. Suicide, that most taboo oftopics, was examined in the work of both thinkers,and both concluded independently that it was the gorysymptom of societies that failed to balance the needsof the community and the individual. Durkheim?stheories about the three social causes of suicide canbe effectively applied to the suicides (both symbolicand literal) in Ibsen?s prose corpus. The connectionbetween the two iconic thinkers, separated ingeographical distance but not in ideologies, revealsthat the tides of European thought had becomefundamentally concerned with exploring the balancebetween a person?s fierce need for individuality, anda society?s desperate need for internal cohesion.