Question 1:  Identify some of the forms intolerance can take, and discuss how its effects on both the victims and the intolerant are presented in at least two of the works you have studied.

Paper 2 Exemplar

Both Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen were introduced to their respective audiences during times of great social change, but also times of great intolerance.  Fugard’s work targeted the South African apartheid regime and its role in the subjugation of black in society showing how its fundamentally racist narrative erodes a friendship between Harold, a young white man, and his two black servants, Sam and Willie.  Hedda Gabler on the other hand tackled the increasing frustration and dissatisfaction of Victorian women in subordinate and constricting roles.  His anti-heroine, Hedda Gabler, is vindictive in her disdain towards the limitations that enchain her and the individuals who entrench her struggle for authentic self-realization.  Both Fugard and Ibsen illustrate the complexities of the intolerances of their times, blurring the dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, in the hopes of conveying the need for progressive social change.  The dramatists achieve this by the effective utilization of dramatic foils and triangular relationships, internal conflicts, and resonant motifs and symbolic props within their plays. 

In Hedda Gabler the Scandinavian audience is asked to sympathize with the protagonist’s existential struggle, namely her unhappiness in traditional wife-mother roles and her entrapment in a system that discriminates against ambitious women.  Ibsen invites the audience to identify with Hedda’s victimization by setting up a triangular relationship between Tesman, Lovborg, and Hedda.  Tesman, an inexhaustible pedantic and scholar, is characterized as inoffensively mediocre and complacent in his wife’s suffering.  Lovborg is then arguably his dramatic foil, being ambitious but prone to vices like alcohol which detract from his talent.  Both men are competing for a professorship, and unknowingly, for Hedda’s approval.  Tesman contests the position with his work on medieval handicrafts, possibly symbolic of his naïve trust and nostalgia in outdates family lifestyles and structures.  Juxtaposed with Lovborg’s manuscript, with is “about the future,” Tesman’s book appears regressive and ingenuous to achieving social inclusion and progression.  This is especially important as Lovborg’s manuscript acts as a motif throughout the play of Hedda’s liberation, a looks towards a braver, more equitable future (the contents of which are kept deliberately vague by Ibsen).  This extreme divide is only further compounded when we see Tesman and Lovborg interact with Hedda – Tesman commenting excitedly about how Hedda has “filled out beautifully,” hinting at his wife’s prospective pregnancy, but completely ignorant of her pain and fear of being trapped in a loveless marriage and motherhood.  Lovborg on the other hand is much more empathetic and similar to Hedda, expressing his explicit disappointment at how she “could just give [herself] away” to an undeserving man and surrender to the reality of her limitations.  This difference in the sensitivities of the men to the plight of Hedda, perhaps an allegory to the plight of many Victorian women, is orchestrated in order for Ibsen to demonstrate how interacting with the two extremes affects Hedda’s beliefs.  Through Hedda’s fierce contempt of her husband because of his blindness and naivety, we see how intolerance through mere complacency and ignorance not only affects women, but also their relationships with men.  In this case, Ibsen depicts how the intolerant lead to their own downfall – in this case, Tesman losing his wife to suicide.    

Fugard, like Ibsen, also builds a triangular relationship with two apexes being that of Sam and Harold’s father.  Their differences lie in their emotional and spiritual connection with Harold; Harold’s father is not only a physical cripple, but he is also and emotional one, being unable to give Harold the affection and strength he needs growing up.  Sam is seen, on the other hand, to support Harold throughout his childhood, helping him carry his drunken father home and taking it upon himself to ensure that Harold grew up without the internalized shame of his father’s condition (symbolized by the kite flying).  They are also at two ends of an ideological spectrum – Harold’s father shoehorning his son into adopting bigoted beliefs about blacks and his own white privilege while Sam envisions a “world without collisions,” a world of racial equality and happiness.  As the audience sees the dark forces of intolerance and racism at work, Sam attempts to save Harold from it while his father works at imbuing those values.  Harold is caught in the middle, at a dramatic tipping point in his coming-of-age where he must either choose to join Sam and Willie in fraternity or continue to perpetuate the foundations of apartheid.  This conflict culminates in Harold spitting in Sam’s face after he has espoused his father’s values, demonstrating how Harold is a perpetrator of racism, unable to his profound and genuine friendship with Sam due to his emotional ties with his father.  Harold confesses that he still “loves him,” creating tension between Harold’s loyalty to his friend.  Fugard demonstrates how racism degrades the realization of human connection due to the intolerance that trickles down to younger generations. 

To further the conflict both protagonists encounter in facing the intolerance of their respective society, both playwrights use specific motifs and props in their plays.  Fugard and Ibsen make it clear that the dichotomy between the victims of a system and the intolerant is an imagined one, and the most damaging intolerance is the one adopted by the very individuals who are the most oppressed.  In Ibsen’s work, props and motifs represent a conflict between masculinity and femininity; namely, pistols versus hair.  It is established in the earlier exposition that Hedda is the daughter of General Gabler, a celebrated war hero through which Hedda has inherited her social prestige and power.  She lives her fantasies of control and empowerment vicariously through the proxy power she has received from her father, symbolized through the motif of General Gabler’s pistols.  Hedda fires the guns when she is bored, even taking shots at Judge Brack in the opening of Act 2.  This symbol of masculine power is the one that Hedda has used to define her liberation, especially after being raised in a predominately patriarchal society.  This liberation – if one views it that way – is furthered at the end of the play with Hedda’s suicide.  The pistols have a dual interpretation here: they ultimately end her life and signify her defeat in the male-dominated status quo in society, or they are her final and only exercise in control over her destiny.  The pistols are also juxtaposed with feminine symbols and motifs throughout the play.  Hedda shows a deep-seated hatred for Thea Elvstead’s “unusually fair and full locks,” threatening to burn Thea’s hair which acts as an allegory to feminine empowerment.  The situational irony – we expect Hedda to unite with other women in her struggle for independence instead of antagonizing the very same women who are in the same situation – shows her own intolerance for someone who looks and acts different from her.  This conflict is prevalent throughout the play where Hedda continuously acts against her self-interest, her idealism conflicting tragically with her vindictiveness.  This is seen when she burns Lovborg’s manuscript, a symbol for hope and gender equality, while exclaiming “I’m burning your child, Thea,…with your hair!”  Here, Hedda is a victim and a perpetrator, her acts of intolerance only serving to further enmesh her in her claustrophobic situation that pushes her to commit suicide.  Thea, unlike Hedda, refuses the role of an intolerant woman, who instead strives to “inspire Tesman like [she] did Lovborg” after Hedda’s destruction of the manuscript.  This creative and gentle nurturing force is in contrast to Hedda’s rebellion against the intolerance she thinks exists.  Ibsen uses this character foil to question how to best achieve female empowerment against the intolerance of the age. 

The conflict in Athol Fugard’s work is manifested in the language of violence used throughout the play – and the audience notices this intolerance in not only the words and actions of the characters, but also in the jukebox which acts as a motif.  Throughout Master Harold and the Boys, the characters continue to use language depicting physical violence.  This is inherently ties with their personal encounters with violence: Harold being beaten by his mother after being caught in the servant’s quarters; Sam recounting how blacks are beaten in prison; and Willie who hits his dance partner.  This system of physical violence shades how the characters see the world, Harold even describing social progress as someone “kicking history…to act it going again.”  Intolerance manifests itself in the way the characters view the world.  Harold is hit for associating with black servants, black prisoners are abused, and Willie lacks the education and awareness to understand any other solution to conflict besides physical violence.  This cycle of oppression and violence is juxtaposed with the other prevalent motif in the play: the jukebox.  It is a rare and precious moment of equality when Sam, Willie nor Harold have enough money to play a song and instead talk about the principles behind ballroom dancing as an ideal.  Ballroom dancing, with its liquid gestures and necessity for cooperation between partners, represents that exchange and tolerance between races and is described as “a world without collisions.”  The conflict here is Harold’s inner turmoil to believe in an ideal despite his cynicism and upbringing of bigotry and violence.  This confusion and struggle leads to the ending with him walking out into the rain, expressing hopes for a clearer day but his distrust at his own ability to bring about one.

Both Fugard’s and Ibsen’s work still rings true; around the world discrimination based on race and gender continues and we are still deciding how to best counter it.  Through the use of dramatic foils and motifs.  Fugard and Ibsen remain relevant because they explore the inherent dualistic nature of individuals as both victims and perpetrators of intolerance, and the effect on society.