Author(s): Heather Elise Hamilton
Format: Paperback
No. of Pages: 284
Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller e.K.
Language: English
Date Published: 2013-10-25
Dimensions: 154.94 x 226.06 x 22.86mm
Publication City/Country: Germany
Edition:
Illustrations: black & white illustrations

Emile Durkheim and Henrik Ibsen were both products of
the intellectual milieu that saw the birth of
sociology and the advent of an intellectual interest
in the individual. Suicide, that most taboo of
topics, was examined in the work of both thinkers,
and both concluded independently that it was the gory
symptom of societies that failed to balance the needs
of the community and the individual. Durkheim’s
theories about the three social causes of suicide can
be effectively applied to the suicides (both symbolic
and literal) in Ibsen’s prose corpus. The connection
between the two iconic thinkers, separated in
geographical distance but not in ideologies, reveals
that the tides of European thought had become
fundamentally concerned with exploring the balance
between a person’s fierce need for individuality, and
a society’s desperate need for internal cohesion.