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The family serves as a bridge between the individual and the society.To be more exact, the individual stays and functions within the family and the family within the society. The treatment of the family relation-ship has received little attention from the critics. As a socially-conscious playwright, Ibsen has probed into the nature of the family and consequently has broken the ideal image of it as a means of reconstructing it as an enduring human insitution.My thesis aims at a study of the family relationship based on Ibsen's three plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. The family is seen as the basic unit in human society pertaining to sexual relationship, child bearing, socialization, child training and the relating of the individual to the other institution alized aspects of society. The plays are examined mainly from a psychological and sociological perspective. Chapter One considers the purpose of this thesis , the definition, the nature of the problem plays and the presentational aspec ts of the plays. Chapter Two discusses the family relationships in A Doll's Ho use. It centers on the plays's concern with redefining the selves of the members of the familyand its consequences. Chapter Three deals with the exorcising of the ghostsof the past so that Mrs. Alving at the end of the play could face the reality of her situation. In Chapter Four, the family relationship in Hedda Gabler would be the main subject. The issue of the destructiveness and suicide leads to the damaging of the relationship. The recreating theintellectual offspring of Lovborg suggests that the man's creativity couldtriumph over destructive and death. Chapter Five is the conclusion. Familyis the arena in which human relationships are worked out. These relation-ships hope to provide the means of individual growth and social reconstruction as we see developed in these plays.
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