ABSTRACT
The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the monograph. As the study has demonstrated, Henrik Ibsen was deeply indebted to the degeneration discourses prevalent in his time and made degeneration a central theme in his drama. In his plays, he explores variations on the theme of degeneration, imagining how families can become affected by ill-health or other forms of “weakness” that lead to the extinction of the family line. This monograph looks at the recurrence of ideas of degeneration in three of Ibsen’s plays: in Ghosts, it is the motif of syphilis, highly shocking to Ibsen’s contemporaries, that serves as an allegory of degeneration. In Rosmersholm, degeneration is reconfigured as an overcultivation that eventually makes a family unfit for life. In Hedda Gabler, meanwhile, Hedda, having been for all practical purposes raised as a man, has come to think of herself as one, a circumstance that informs her final decision to end her life – her final degeneration. By reading these three plays from a new perspective, the monograph sheds new light on some of Ibsen’s most enduring contributions to world drama.
