35
A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen
(1828-1906)
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Introduction
•
A Doll’s House premiered on December 21, 1879 in Copenhagen,
•
Two weeks before the production, A Doll’s House was printed in book
form and sold 8,000 copies within two weeks.
•
A Doll’s House was a hit in Scandinavian countries, but it would not be
•
A Doll’s House opened in London in 1889 after a ban against its
•
The play was adapted for film several times. The two most famous
were both released in 1972. One directed by Joseph Losey, starring
Jane Fonda, David Warner, and Trevor Howard, and the other directed
by Patrick Garland, starring Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins, and
Ralph Richardson.
Denmark.
produced in other parts of Europe until two years after its premiere.
production had been lifted. It opened in New York in 1894.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Controversy
•
When it was first staged, A Doll’s House was controversial, even scandalous, as it
questioned the conventional roles of the husband and wife in the sacred institution of
marriage, arguing, it seemed, for the liberation of women.
•
Many saw Nora’s act of leaving her family as a selfish abandonment of her duties as
wife and mother.
• Others argued that her embarkation on a journey of self-discovery would not only make
her a more independent and stronger individual but also a better mother.
•
Ibsen said that he was arguing not for women’s rights but for justice for all humanity.
• For the play’s German debut, Ibsen was forced to write an alternative ending, one in
which Nora looks at her children before she is about to leave, collapses to the floor, and
decides to remain. Ibsen later called the ending a “barbaric outrage.”
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
The Author – Henrik Ibsen
• Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien, Norway,
a small town, in 1828.
• His childhood was not easy. The family became
impoverished when he was six and the family business
failed. His father became depressed and alcoholic.
Eventually, his mother left his father.
• As a teenager, he worked as an apprentice to an
apothecary and considered studying medicine.
Instead, he decided to devote himself to writing and
working in the theater.
• By his early twenties, Ibsen earned a living by writing and directing plays in
various Norwegian cities. He became the director of the Norwegian Theatre
in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Ibsen continued…
• In 1858, he became the creative director at
the National Theater in Christiania (later,
renamed Oslo). He married a year later.
• He once told a friend that to understand
him one needed to understand the severe
northern Norwegian landscape, in which
the winters left people isolated and
inclined to introspection and perhaps
brooding. Many thought Ibsen cold and
aloof.
Henrik Ibsen´s home in Norway
• In 1864, Ibsen left Norway for virtually a twenty-seven year exile. However, all
his plays would be set in Norway.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Ibsen continued…
• He once commented, “Never have I seen my homeland so fully, so clearly, and
at such close range, as I did in my absence when I was far away from it.”
• Ibsen returned permanently to Norway 1891, where he was celebrated as a
national treasure, honored by theater-goers, scholars, and royalty. He had
been the first Norwegian author to gain widespread acclaim outside his native
country.
• Ibsen’s health deteriorated after a series of strokes in 1900. He died in 1906,
leaving a profound mark on the world theater.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
“After Shakespeare,
without hesitation, I put
Ibsen first.”
― Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936),
Italian dramatist and novelist
and the winner of the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1934.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Ibsen’s as Dramatist
•
While his reputation might have waned over the years,
Ibsen’s achievement is still widely acclaimed. His plays
continue to be performed, read, celebrated, and
discussed.
•
Ibsen was a prolific playwright who wrote histories
(Emperor and Galilean, 1873, e.g.), verse dramas (Peer
Gynt, 1867), experimental dramas (The Master Builder,
1892), philosophical dramas (When We Dead Awaken,
1899), and more.
Title page in the manuscript
of When We Dead Awaken
Title page in the manuscript of
The Master Builder
•
However, he is best known for his plays of social
commentary and psychological realism, like A Doll’s
House, Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882),
The Wild Duck (1894), and Hedda Gabler (1890), among
others.
•
Through these and other plays, his influence on the
development of the modern theater cannot be
underestimated. He has been referred to as the “Father
of Modern Drama.”
Title page in the
manuscript of Ghosts
Title page in the manuscript
of Hedda Gabler
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Realism in the Theater
•
The movement toward Realism in the theater began in Europe in the second half of the
nineteenth century through playwrights like Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George
Bernard Shaw. A Doll’s House played a significant role in the movement. Realism
reached America later, finding its fullest expression in Eugene O’Neill.
•
Realism began as a reaction to the excessively contrived, sentimental, and didactic
melodramas that dominated drama in nineteenth-century Europe and America.
•
Realists take a mimetic approach to theater, striving to create the illusion of everyday
life on stage, with the audience’s eavesdropping on a slice of life.
• Realists tend to depict the middle, lower, and lower-middle classes: their work, family
life, language, dress, and problems.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Realism in the Theater continued…
• Realists prefer contemporary settings.
• In a direct response to melodrama, realists strive to create complex characters,
to make internal conflict as dramatic as external conflict.
• They prefer the open ending, which does not resolve all the play’s questions
and sometimes leaves in doubt the future of the protagonist. The resolution or
denouement is generally short in realistic dramas and virtually non-existent
sometimes. Do we know, for instance, what happens to Nora once she leaves
her home?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Well-Made Play
• While Ibsen’s use of realist techniques and his frank discussion of social issues
were innovative, he drew his form for A Doll’s House and other plays from the
nineteenth-century “well-made” play.
• The well-made play is a carefully crafted work, neat in structure and obviously
contrived in its numerous plot twists and turns.
• The emphasis is on plot not character development. The first act of a well-made
play introduces the problem; the second act complicates it, and the third
resolves it.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Well-Made Play continued…
• The characters tend to be types, the overly concerned parent, the straying child,
the corrupt businessman. Characters are uncomplicated and easily identified as
hero and villain, good guy and bad guy.
• The well-made play relies on standard devices: exposition conveyed through
gossipy servants, plot complications from lost or forged documents, and
resolutions from the entrance of an absent family member or the recovery of
letters and documents.
• The most famous author of well-made plays was Eugène Scribe (1791-1861)
who wrote hundreds of plays, several of which Ibsen directed.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Ibsen as Individualist
• While his politics and radicalism were
indefinite, Ibsen was a staunch advocate for
individual freedoms and rights. “I think
that all of us have nothing other or better to
do than in spirit and sincerity to realize
ourselves. That, to my mind, is the real
liberalism.”
• He once said that the state “is the curse of
the individual.”
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Ibsen and Writing Plays
• “Always I proceed from the individual; the
stage-setting, the dramatic ensemble, all that
comes naturally and causes me no worry, once I
feel sure of the individual in every aspect of his
humanity. I must penetrate to the last wrinkle
of his soul.”
• Ibsen made at least three major drafts of his
plays. In the first, he said that he knew the
characters like people on a railway journey; in
the second, he knew them as one knows
someone after four weeks at the same spa, and
in the third, as intimate friends.
Henrik Ibsen paa Verdens-Theatret : 1898
Caricature by Alfred Schmidt in Hver 8. Dag.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Marriage in A Doll’s House
•
A Doll’s House raises many questions about the institution of marriage, questions which
•
In the opening scene, Torvald treats his wife as a child, addressing her with nauseating
pet names, forbidding her sweets, and educating her, so he thinks, with moralistic
platitudes: “No debt, no borrowing. There can be no freedom or beauty about a home
life that depends on borrowing and debt.”
many nineteenth-century audiences found disturbing.
• Soon afterwards, we see that Nora is not as submissive as Helmer thinks or as we first
thought: She lies to him about eating candy and she keeps secrets. What does this
suggest about Nora?
•
What is your impression of the Helmer marriage after Act One?
• Does your impression change as the play proceeds? Why or why not?
•
The play suggests that marriage should be conceived as a partnership of equals.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Nora Helmer
•
At first, Nora appears to be a conventional, nineteenth-century middle-class housewife.
She cares for her children and buys them gender conventional Christmas presents,
supervises the running of the home, and accepts her husband’s authority. Willingly
subservient to her husband, she accepts his seemingly demeaning pet names for her.
•
Soon, however, we realize that Nora holds secrets, that she lies to her husband, and that
she is capable of manipulating him. Nora commits minor acts of subversion that
foreshadow her much larger rebellion at the end of the play.
•
In Act One, we discover that Nora is capable of great courage, sacrifice, responsibility, and
decisiveness. She saved her husband’s life through forgery, using the money for a
necessary trip to the warmer climates of Italy. She has worked diligently to repay the
loan.
• Through the forgery, Ibsen raises a question with social implication: Why couldn’t Nora or
a woman in her position secure a legal loan?
•
Similarly, why does Nora not have a key to the family’s mailbox?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Nora continued …
• After Torvald’s response to her forgery, Nora
transforms. No longer a flighty, submissive
housewife or a panicky suicidal criminal, she
becomes coldly rational, perceptive, defiant,
and, perhaps most importantly, autonomous.
•
Shaped by first her father and then her husband, Nora has developed according to their image
and precepts, which follow social convention. Nora has been more of a doll or a puppet than an
individual.
•
Nora realizes that she must venture on a journey of self-discovery. To be a good mother, she
must first establish her own identity and individuality.
•
Nora’s decision to leave represents a triumph of the individual over social convention and a
personal past.
•
Do you consider Nora’s action at the end to be brave? Necessary? Selfish? Cruel?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Does Nora return to her family?
• Ibsen was asked several times. Once, he said, “Certainly, she does.”
• But, on another occasion, he responded, “How do I know? It is possible that
she returns to her husband and children, but also possible that she becomes an
artiste in a traveling circus.”
• The play, of course, keeps the ending open. We cannot say with any certainty
what the future holds for Nora or her family.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Torvald Helmer
• Torvald is not an attractive character. He is domineering, egocentric,
condescending, arrogant, and thrifty. He may be successful at work, but he is
also moralistic, explosive, and status-conscious.
• Torvald does not change by the end of the play, but he does seem capable of
changing in the near future. He understands that Nora has just left him, a
possibility he could not have imagined until it occurred.
• Nora’s leaving has jolted Torvald and could lead to his transformation.
Significantly, he repeats her phrase (“the most wonderful thing of all”) for his
closing words, suggesting that he has not ignored what she has said and that
he will consider her words seriously. This holds out the possibility of change.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Secondary Characters
• Most of the secondary characters are functional. Krogstad, for instance, is
the agent of the necessary conflict between Nora and Torvald. He has
committed the same crime as Nora and has lived the kind of humiliation
exposure will bring her. He becomes transformed by love, perhaps
suggesting a possibility for Torvald’s and Nora’s transformations if their
love for one another is genuine.
• Mrs. Linde’s functions are also clear:
─ She brings out exposition concerning Nora’s efforts to save her husband’s life.
─ As an independent woman who has struggled to survive, she serves as a foil and model for
Nora.
─ She is responsible for the climax of the play and the surfacing of the truth as she stops
Krogstad from retrieving his letter.
─ She points out the theme concerning the need for honesty and openness in marriage: “… they
must have a complete understanding between them, which is impossible with all this
concealment and falsehood going on.”
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Themes
• The two major themes of A Doll’s House might be stated as,
1. The restraints imposed on individual development and selffulfillment by society’s conventions.
2. The effects on individual development of our pasts (including
the influence of parents, upbringing, and genetic inheritance).
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
The Influence of the Past on the Present
• Ibsen works out different facets of this theme through his characters. Dr. Rank,
for instance, has his life cut short as he pays for the sins of his father. Rank
inherited venereal disease from his father – yes, an impossibility, but in
Ibsen’s time many thought the disease could be inherited.
• Nora’s father encouraged her to remain a “little person,” passing her from his
home to her husband’s. More importantly perhaps, she has “inherited” her
father’s “want of principle,” as Torvald calls it: “No religion, no morality, no
sense of duty.” Of course, her and her father’s “want of principle” might not be
so corrupt. We do not know her father’s motivation, but Nora’s forgery saved
Torvald’s life.
• The poor health of Mrs. Linde’s mother forced the daughter into an undesirable
marriage that redirected her life. In addition, because of years spent caring for
her mother, Mrs. Linde has developed a desperate need to be needed, a need to
take care of others.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
The Past continued …
• Krogstad is aware of how his reputation affects his children: “My sons are
growing up; for their sake I must try and win back as much respect as I can in
this town.” Torvald takes an extreme view of Krogstad’s effect on his children,
believing his moral breakdown is infectious: “Each breath the children take in
such a house is full of germs of evil.”
• While we do not hear about his parents or his upbringing, Torvald makes some
strong statements about the moral influence of parents on children: “Almost
everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.”
When he learns of Nora’s forgery, Torvald works out a plan for his wife to live
in the house, but she must not see the children: “I dare not trust them to you.”
• Since Torvald is hardly an admirable character, how should we interpret his
comments? Do you think Ibsen intends for us to consider them as truths?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Symbols
Ibsen uses several symbols in A Doll’s House to reveal character, to
foreshadow events, and to create drama and suspense:
•
Christmas tree: the tree sets the time of year, a time of happiness and birth,
a birth of a new Nora occurs at the end of the play. Like the tree, Nora is
little more than a decoration in her own home.
•
Macaroons: signifies a small rebellion that foreshadows Nora’s larger
rebellion at play’s end. Eating the macaroons and lying about them give
Nora a sense of power over Torvald; the macaroons are a small
representation of her larger “secret.” Note the following lines from Nora:
“It’s perfectly glorious to think that we have – that Torvald has so much
power over so many people. … Dr. Rank, what do you say to a macaroon?”
•
Mending/knitting: Mrs. Linde does the mending of Nora’s costume, but more
significantly she mends Nora’s life by allowing the truth about the loan to
surface. She also mends Krogstad’s life when she declares her love for him.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Symbols continued …
•
Black Crosses: Rank uses two crosses to announce his death. One,
however, symbolizes the death of an old Nora. The cross might also tie in
with the theme of human liberation, as individuals all bear cultural,
societal, and parental influences or crosses that sometimes need to be
lifted before liberation into individuality.
•
Tarantella: a frantic dance, which Nora dances “as if [her] life depended
on it.” It is a parting gift for her husband, for whom she plans on
committing suicide, rather than let him assume the blame for her criminal
act. With its ferocious energy, Nora’s tarantella reflects her agitated
state of mind.
•
Title: The title suggests that all the characters are puppets playing
conventional roles with little free will. They are more like dolls or
puppets than individuals.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
For Further Consideration
•
Who is the villain in the play? (Torvald is too simple a response.) Explain.
•
Does Nora make the right decision to leave her family? Why or why not?
•
Discuss the significance of the title. How would you, as a scenic designer, stage the
play to take maximum advantage of the symbolism implied by the image?
•
Some critics have contended that the play is outdated. That the women’s liberation
movement of the twentieth century has provided more options for women. Do you
agree that the play is outdated? Why or why not?
•
Interpret the events in the play from the point of view of one of the Helmer children
who is now an adult looking back at this significant time in his/her childhood.
•
Write a review of one of the film adaptations of A Doll House. Consider the actress
playing Nora. Did she present a different Nora than you expected? Consider other
character portrayals and issues. For instance, how effective were the liberties that
the film takes with Ibsen’s text?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35