Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society: Hypocritical Morality of Society by Farah Jamal Published in Impressions, Editor Dr. Abha Shukla Kaushik, VOL. II, Issue I, January 2008 hp://impressions.org.in/jan08/ar_farahj.html The plays for which Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, is well-known throughout the world are the naturalistic studies of contemporary life. He began with romantic historical verse plays and gradually took upon himself the task of exposing the makeshift morality of his contemporaries in private and public life of the society. He was never, after early years, content to contemplate the world as it is with the strange Shakespearian balance of eager affection, sympathy and non-critical detachment. His sympathies threw him headlong into criticism. He buried the poet in him and became the strong singer of the immorality of the age. Ibsen was preoccupied with the problems of personal and social morality spread over the world. The Pillars of Society (1877) initiates almost with enthusiasm the social plays which concentrate upon this theme. The Pillars of Society, finished in 1877, cost Ibsen two years of unremitting labour and several re-writings. He laboured over The Pillars of Society from 1875 to 1877, the longest period he had devoted to any play except Emperor and Galilean. The result is a play whose thought is so profound and clear, whose craftsmanship is so natural and easy, that it puts to shame alike the emptiness of the contemporary writing and the turgidity of the serious British drama of the next two decades. The Pillars of Society is build on a fairly simple irony: that those who appear as ‘pillars of society’ are not pillars at all and those who appear as rebels or even criminals are in fact the true carriers of the spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom. It attacks respectable hypocrites and is a trumpet blast calling society to account. The title is bold advertisement of Ibsen’s serious satirical purpose. He operates it like a battering ram that pounds and pounds away at the thick wall of cant and hypocrisy with which society has surrounded itself fully. The Pillars of Society is the history of Karsten Bernick, a ‘pillar of society’ who, in pursuance of the duty of maintaining the respectability of his father’s firm of shipbuilders, has averted a disgraceful exposure by allowing another man to bear the discredit not only of a love-affair in which he himself had been the sinner, but of a theft which was never committed at all having been