Are Women Still Regarded as the ‘Minor Sex’?: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House and Tom
Stoppard’s The Real Thing
Mehmet TAKKAÇ*
It has explicitly been seen in almost all the known history of the world that men have
had a tendency to regard women as the ‘minor sex’ or the ‘weaker sex’. T he most obvious
reason for this is the desire to hold the power in the family and the society at large. Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll House and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing focus on the reflections of this
concept presenting thoughts on the way men regard women. The core issue in these plays of
both playwrights is that men find it difficult to accept the fact that women are as equal as men
in family and social life. The traditional conception of women by men, as reflected by these
playwrights, does not lead to the acceptance of mutual equivalence.
This paper takes into consideration the similarity of the viewpoints of these writers on
the issues of ‘love’, ‘marriage’ and ‘confidence’ as factors determining the nature of relations
between couples suggested in the above-mentioned plays. In this respect, the way husbands
look at their wives, wives’ response to the attitudes of their husbands and how all this affects
the nature of the relationship between couples will taken in for questioning. Ibsen puts
forward in his play, A Doll House, that the traditional attitude of men to women did not
change even a bit at the end of the eighteenth century. Men were still not ready to see women
as their equals in every respect. Torvald Helmer’s approach to Nora in the play is a clear sign
of this assumption. Torvald, as a husband, is ready to meet all the needs of his wife and make
life comfortable for her as much as he can, and he likes his wife to be his little squirrel and
skylark. However, when it comes to respecting his wife’s thoughts as an individual sharing
the whole life of the family with him, he is devoid of the virtue to evaluate the nature of
things in a family context. This is an obvious reflection of the thought that women are seen as
the representatives of the weaker sex.
A Doll House “centres round the two personalities of husband and wife” (Lucas, 1962:
131) and focuses on family life pointing out that the traditional male-oriented control of
things does not necessarily satisfy the spiritual expectations of women. That the wife is called
“my little lark” (43) by the husband indicates in plain terms that the husband sees his wife as
one of the things he possesses and controls. At the beginning of the play, the traditional status
of husband and wife is so readily accepted, and Nora is so happy because her husband meets
her needs and she devotes her life to him.
Ibsen reflects the relationship between husband and wife stressing the point that the
husband sees himself as the only authority to make decisions on everything related with the
life of the family. The wife does not have a chance to do some things, including the one she
has done to save her husband’s life, by herself. Therefore, Nora has to keep how she had to
borrow money to spend for her husband’s health in secrecy. She is a character strong enough
to sacrifice some things of her own to keep her family sound and safe at a time when a “wife
cannot borrow without her husband’s consent” (53), but she naturally wants to be appraised
for the things she has done for her family in general and her husband in particular. To save her
sick husband’s life, she does not hesitate to forge “her father’s signature. To her eyes, with a
woman’s common sense directness, a feigned signature seems in such circumstances a pure
formality: for her father would of course have signed, had he not been at death’s door”
(Lucas, 1962: 135). This conveys the message that she is the spokeswoman of those who
deeply believe that the family is established with a union of two people deciding to spend the
*
Atatürk University, Kazim Karabekir Faculty of Education, Department of Foreign Languages
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rest of their lives supporting each other when one is in need of help. She explains the gravity
of this case to Krogstad, who threatens to introduce the paper proving her illegal action in
court:
This I refuse to believe. A daughter hasn’t a right to protect her dying father from anxiety and
care? A wife hasn’t a right to save her husband’s life? I don’t know much about laws, but I’m
sure that somewhere in the books these things are allowed. (67)
In fact, Nora feels that she can overcome the threats coming from outside forces and
wants her husband to understand her. However, her husband blames her for what she did for
him even though she does not want to show Krogstad as a culprit:
NORA: … But tell me, was it really such a crime that this Krogstad committed?
HELMER: Forgery. Do you have any idea what that means?
NORA: Couldn’t he have done it out of need?
HELMER: Yes, or thoughtlessness, like so many others. I’m not so heartless that I’d condemn
a man categorically for just one mistake. (69-70)
This dialogue shows that Nora cannot feel and see that her husband appreciates her.
She knows that her husband loves her, but she heartily believes that only love cannot make a
couple go on their lives in a family and eventually leaves her husband, saying that their
“living together could be a true marriage” (114). This is, in a sense, “a synthesis of contraries
that could reconcile the genuinely sustaining possibilities of the doll’s house with the
emancipation of human spirit from the repressive implications of its operation. The play ends
with an interchange of roles: the erstwhile ‘doll’ steps into the world of the ‘not-doll’”
(Durbach, 1991: 104)
Ending the play with such a conclusion, the playwright demonstrates that what
happens in the play is a cause and effect relationship, and must not be seen as an unnatural
action of a wife who is supposed to be an inseparable part of a whole, called ‘family’. But this
is not an unconstructive action intended to destroy the family institut ion. Thus it would be
misleading “to regard A Doll House as a militant blow against the institution of marriage".
(Durbach, 1991: 92)
The playwright’s approach to this issue may at first sight make one think that Ibsen is
partial in his handling of this matter. However, his following explanation shows beyond doubt
that he looks at the issue of equivalence and women’s rights not as a problem of one sex but
as the problem of the whole humanity.
I am not a member of the Women’s Rights League. Whatever I hav e written has been without
any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more poet and less social
philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe. … I must disclaim the honour of
having consciously worked for the women’s rights movem ent. I am not even quite clear as to
just what this women’s rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of humanity
in general. And if you read my books carefully you will understand this. True enough, it is
desirable to solve the problem of women’s rights, along with all the others; but that has not
been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity. (Ibsen, 1909: 65)
Ibsen places emphasis on the supposition that the change required in men’s attitude to
women is a human necessity. Not being content with the fact that women are regarded as the
minor sex and the power to determine the course of things concerning the family is held by
men, he wants radical changes in this aspect of social life. He contends that this way of life
will inevitably cause women to be selfless individuals if they are not strong enough to start a
life of “lonely freedom” (Durbach, 104). And, as his aforesaid ideas indicate, men cannot and
should not keep this human problem as a merit.
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The particular meaning and significance of the term “family” necessitates that partners
should share a whole and contribute to the making of that whole. But it cannot be said that
just this is happening when a husband thinks that it is a matter of course to keep his letter-box
locked even from his wife (Lucas, 1962: 129-130). Ibsen is of the opinion that women must
be surrogate men participating in each matter concerning the family matters. He criticizes the
way wives are made to obey husbands’ directions as reflected by Nora’s words: “Direct me.
Teach me, the way you always have” (91)
Ibsen’s play indicates that when husband is the dominant member and wife is the
dominated one, it is actually impossible for the wife to actualise herself as a free member of
the family and the society. Thus, in the play he asks the basic question, inseparable from the
making of a modern society: “What will happen at the end of this process?” And he provides
the answer for those who think about the same question: this action of men will naturally
cause a reaction by women who will not agree forever to be looked upon as the minor and
weaker sex. His handling of the theme in the play, in which he suggests that there will be a
time when men will have to bear the consequences of their behaviour, refle cts openly and
convincingly that with the changes in all aspects of life on earth, man’s position in the family
should change too. He notes that wives cannot forever follow what their husbands dictate on
them if they are not persuaded that it is also the right thing in their estimation. A long history
of frustration of women by men’s attitudes towards their lives and existence ultimately creates
new, different and unexpected modes of behaviour by women. Nora is no exception: she at
last sees that the way things operate in the family is not to go on in the way her husband
wants, and expresses her evaluation of her life to her husband: “You don’t understand me.
And I’ve never understood you either-until tonight” (108). Ironically, that night she declares
that she will leave her husband.
In fact, although Ibsen’s play reflects the characteristic situation of his time, his focus
on the issue has not lost its relevance a bit at the present time. There are still, even today,
frustrated women who pine in domestic prisons where they can never actualize themselves.
Nora expresses this sardonically noting that millions of women give up honour for love. There
are still-and long will be -wives kept as pets; just as in the case of Nora Helmer (Lucas, 1962:
130). Having touched upon the issue more than a hundred years ago, Ibsen unquestionably
shows that he is a keen observer of the need to change some long-rooted basic traditions of
life on earth. Although he is not a feminist playwright claiming rights for women in the sense
the forerunners of feminist movement brought to the fore, he even-handedly suggests the
belief that women should occupy in the place they deserve as individuals. For him, the rights
women are supposed to have must be regarded from the viewpoint of human justice, not
feminism. Thus it may be argued that he is neither a feminist playwright nor a supporter of
masculinity. He is simply a humanist who cares for human freedom and human personality.
Opposed to the traditional application that men dominate women, Ibsen does not share
the assumption that women are supposed to be unpractical. In fact, he wholeheartedly thinks
that women should possess the intuitive practicality often shown by the young. He is afraid of
old men’s prudence and of the men with petty considerations and anxieties. He is of the
opinion that such men would want to gain petty advantages for their personalities. And when
it comes to marriage, he honestly accepts as true the postulation that the ideal of marriage is
not for either partner to keep the other as a pet, nor for both to become competitors. His play
puts forward the belief that true marriage is partnership and comradeship (Lucas, 1962: 130131). This shows that the problem of women “is clearly a central, not merely a peripheral
issue in A Doll House”. (1991: 91)
Tom Stoppard, a contemporary British playwright also focuses on the male effort to
make women ‘dolls’; and he reflects this issue in his play, The Real Thing, the content of
which is “love and marriage” (Gussow, 1995: 65) like that of Ibsen’s play. The story of
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Charlotte and Henry in the play reflects the lives of a couple with a focus on the husband’s
being the dominant member in the family. Stoppard lucidly notes that the husband wants his
wife to lead a life within the confines of the dolls’ house, trying to find an answer to the
question whether love and marria ge can ever be truly compatible (Brassel, 1987: 257). In his
effort to bring to the stage such a socially important and arresting issue, he particularly
focuses on the behaviour of the husband, who is the mighty partner.
Believing that “Happiness is … equilibrium” (61) in the family lives of people, the
playwright contends that it is not a point to be neglected by either partner. He reflects this
throughout the play and utilizes the status of characters for his purpose, saying “I’m fairly
brutal about making these characters say what I want to be said” (Gussow, 1995: 56). And his
purpose here is to convince the audience of the fact that there are things that must be said to
present a revealing picture of family life in general. He, in a sense, feels obliged to note
through his characters the underlying problems deteriorating moral values of family life in
general.
The play includes a subtext, a play that opens in a room where an architect husband
sits building a house from a deck of playing cards while awaiting the return of his wife from a
supposed sales trip to Switzerland. Having found her passport in a recipe drawer, the husband
deduces that the trip was a cover for an illicit love affair. When his returning wife enters the
stage, he gives her little or no chance to defend herself except by exiting, suitcase in hand,
“like Ibsen’s Nora who left he illusory “house of dolls” for something more like the real
world” (Kelly, 1994: 145). Such behaviour of the husband suggests that he is not ready or
eager even to listen to the explanation of his wife on such an important marital issue.
The instance in the play that the husband does not trust his wife is a peculiar aspect
resembling Ibsen’s play. Charlotte has supposedly been to an auction sale in Geneva. Max has
found her passport while rifling through her things but begs her pardon for violating her
privacy (Jenkins, 1987: 160). It seems that Stoppard deliberately includes in his play the
violation of the privacy of the wife so as to stress, in plain terms, his personal assessment of
the nature of family life in the modern society. The violation of the privacy of women’s lives
is nothing but an indication of inequality in the mutual stance of partners.
The life in the House of Cards, the sub-play of The Real Thing, begins to fade like an
insubstantial spectacle before the domestic comedy of scene 2, where we learn that
Charlotte’s objection to her role in her husband Henry’s play rests on its failure to be more
like real life. As she tells her co-star Max during a visit to his actress wife, Annie, she feels as
if she were “a victim of Henry’s fantasy-a quiet, faithful bird with an interesting job, and a
recipe drawer, and a stiff upper lip … trembling for him” (20). That is, she is too unlike the
real Charlotte, who, we later discover, has had no fewer than nine affairs during her marriage
to Henry (Kelly, 145). The resemblance between ‘faithful bird’ in this play and ‘skylark’ in A
Doll House reflects the unchanging fundamental nature of men.
In Stoppard's captivating study of love in the play, thought melds seamlessly with
narrative with a focus on the things people can obtain and struggle to obtain in the modern
community. Stoppard's scripts sparkle because he sports with ideas in order to present his
critical approach to the male dominated family life (Wren, 2000: 17-18). The play is intended
to make the audience reconsider what the real thing is in the lives of individuals and of
communities. House of Cards is purposely so named to capture the imagination of the
audience. Inserting the concept of ‘passion’ as a factor determining the continuity or end of
relationships, the writer suggests that passion does not serve the unity of a family, but it
automatically leads to its destruction. He remarks that it is precisely loveliness that gives a
voice to truth in the family. Thus it is a rarefied definition of love in an age that encourages all
cards on the table all the time, but it's one that explains the absence of emotional self-
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revelation in Stoppard's plays (Pochoda: 33-34). The real thing of the play is that in the family
life, the essence of things are missing, just as it is the case in Ibsen’s play. (Gleick, 1999: 70)
The playwright stresses the importance of the missing thing through Henry, who has
“lost that lovin feeling” (25) and has been unfaithful to Charlotte with Annie, the actress wife
of actor Max from House of Cards. In fact, in Henry’s estimation, as he writes in House of
Cards, the inner play of The Real Thing, “lots of women were only good for fetching drinks”
(22), an appraisal which Charlotte will never accept for herself and members of her sex. It
most likely seems from this kind of reflection of men’s attitude to women that the frame playThe Real Thing-is an imitation of the inner play-House of Cards. (146)
House of Cards is not only a subtext the effect of which is a temporary one. It prepares
the essence of discussion about the family crisis. Stoppard’s focus on the lack of mutual trust
of the husband to his wife in the play is, in a sense, “a moral statement more significant than
anything explicit” (Hunter, 1982: 212). This aims to reflect that sex should not be a reason for
holding the power and dire cting everything in the family.
In Ibsen’s and Stoppard’s plays under scrutiny in this analysis, the houses are not the
places where women can find absolute freedom and respect as equal partners. That is why the
names resemble each other. Ibsen’s house of dolls is Stoppard’s house of cards; both lack the
sound characteristics of the houses of real people in real societies. In both houses the wives
see that their husbands are not the individuals to share a family life together with their lives
forever. T hey understand that husbands see their wives as persons in their control and reflect
the point that husbands want to be not partners but directors who have every privilege as of
right given to their male personalities.
Ibsen indicates that Torvald’s approach to his wife is indicative of the husband’s
control of things in the family life. Stoppard also focuses on the same issue noting in the play
that Henry wants to do exactly the same thing. Both playwrights demonstrate that their male
characters do not know the meaning of love properly. Stoppard professes that his character
cannot reflect this even when writing plays: “I don’t know how to write love. I try to write it
properly, and it just comes out embarrassing. It’s either childish or it’s rude. And the rude bits
are absolutely juvenile” (40). This is indicative of the fact that some essential things are
missing in the husband’s personal relationships with his wife in the family circle, the outcome
of which is destructive as regards the future of the family. The dialogue between Henry and
Charlotte following the above admission of the reality of the case manifests the fact that
women are not content to be regarded as the minor sex, and that they want to discuss their
case as equal partners. The dialogue is about the problems they face in their marriage:
HENRY: It’s a little early in the day for all this.
CHARLOTTE: No, darling, it’s a little late. (21)
Stoppard’s stressing the notion that it is high time to discuss the problem of equality in
the family cir cle in this way reminds the audience of Nora’s response to her husband when
she cannot see that her attitude to the family affairs is not properly appreciated by him: “But
you neither think nor talk like the man I could join myself to. … I’m no wife for you. … I
have the strength to make myself over” (112-113). This demonstrates that women want to
gain self -respect and domestic freedom in order to feel that they are also not toy but real
members of their families.
Stoppard also refers to Ibsen in person in the play so as to attract attention to the
similarity of the conditions women find themselves in through the dialogue between Henry
and Debbie, creating a discussion on Henry’s play House of Cards:
HENRY: It was about self-knowledge through pain.
DEBBIE: No, it was about did she have it off or didn’t she. As if having it off is infidelity.
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HENRY: Most people think it is.
DEBBIE: Most people think not having it off is fidelity. They think all relationships hinge in
the middle. Sex or no sex. What a fantastic range of possibilities. Lile an on/off
switch. Did she or didn’t she. By Henry Ibsen. Why would you want make it such a
crisis?
HENRY: I don’t know, why would I?
DEBBIE: It’s what comes of making such a mystery of it. When I was twelve I was obsessed.
Everything was sex. Latin was sex. (62)
It is obviously seen in this dialogue that the attitude to women has not changed much
in the history of mankind. Both playwrights must have seen this fact and reflected it in their
works. What was experienced by women towards the end of nineteenth century was almost
the same towards the end of the twentieth century. It seems that as husbands men do not want
to lose the traditional power in their hands. In short, Ibsen and Stoppard draw attention to the
traditional order in the world that men want to keep women under their control, in A Doll
House, as their skylarks, squirrels, birds and women are tired of being regarded as the minor
sex, and want to feel that they are equal parts of a whole. Their plays included in this analysis
reveal in plain terms the perception on the part of men that in mutual relations, love is
protection, marriage is domination, and confidence is missing.
Works Cited:
Brassel, Tim. Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1987.
Durbach, Errol. A Doll House: Ibsen’s Myth of Transformation. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1991.
Gleick, Elizabeth, “THE REAL THING”, Time, Vol.153, Issue 3, pp. 70-71, 01/25/99
Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Stoppard. London: Nick Hern Books, 1995.
Hunter, Jim. Tom Stoppard’s Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll House. In Four Major Plays: A Doll House, The Wild Duck, Hedda
Gabbler, The Master Builder, A New Translation with a Foreword by Rolf Fjelde.
New York: Signet Classics, 1965.
______. “Speech at the Festival of the Norwegian Women’s Rights League, Christiana, May
26th, 1898”, Speeches and New Letters, Translated by. Arne Kildal, New York:
Haskell House Publishers Ltd, 1909.
Jenkins, Anthony. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambr idge: Cambridge University Press,
1987.
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