Pedagogical Relation and Gender: Reading Ibsen

Abstract

This essay investigates the intersection between gender and pedagogical relation in Ibsen’s drama, finding in his representation of gender-inflected pedagogical dynamic between men and women the earliest modern prototype of the pedagogical relation between a hegemonic male teacher and a female student that has been frequently dramatized on modern stage. The essay discusses the pedagogues and academics played by fathers, husbands, and male companions in Ibsen’s plays, including Torvald Helmer’s pedagogical impersonation, to demonstrate the cultural complicity between pedagogical authority and patriarchal hegemony. This attempt to trace backward to Ibsen so as to locate the earliest model of the gendered pedagogical relations patterned in modern anglophone plays discovers that they appropriate the gender protocols of a certain formulaic assumption as represented and challenged by Ibsen—that men have a natural claim to pedagogical authority opposite women whose cultural status is associated with that of learners and pupils.