St Martin's College - Department of English
HENRIK IBSEN: A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879)
Guidelines for study
Social realism
Ibsen is commonly referred to as a realist dramatist in contrast to Edward Bond,
whose dramatic method is predominantly anti-realist and draws on Bertolt Brecht's
model of 'epic theatre'. In particular, A Doll's House belongs to a group of plays
within Ibsen's oeuvre which are known as social problem plays or, to use Bjorn
Hemmer's phrase, realistic problem drama. Hemmer's chapter on these plays, part
of which is reproduced for you, will help you to come to terms with the nature of
Ibsen's realism and see it as something that is rooted in the cultural and intellectual
context of the period.
Amongst other things, he emphasises the way Ibsen addresses contemporary social
issues through the depiction of socially representative types and how, through a
focus on the domestic life of individual families, he launches a full-scale assault on
the structure and values of Victorian bourgeois society as a whole. And it is the
women - in A Doll's House and Ghosts at least - who are shown as challenging the
dominant ideologies of their society.
A Doll's House, then, is a play about marriage as a 'social problem', but it is also
about the institutionalised power structures operative within bourgeois society that
affected financial affairs and employment as well as the issue of gender relations,
of which marriage is merely one aspect of the problem.
But is it adequate simply to read the play within a framework of social realism?
Ibsen himself was at pains to emphasise that his plays were concerned with much
more than just social issues. He wrote of Hedda Gabler, but the remark is equally
applicable to A Doll's House:
My intention in this play has not really been to treat so-called social problems. The main
thing for me has been to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies
against the background of certain prevailing social conditions and views.
(quoted in James McFarlane (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen 1994, 203)
Beyond social realism
Ibsen's drama evolved away from an emphasis on external social realities towards a
more internal, visionary, psychological reality. His plays become more overtly
symbolic as he explores 'the unconscious life of the soul' (Knut Hamsun) or the
intensely spiritual inner lives of his protagonists. For James Joyce, reviewing
Ibsen's last play When We Dead Awaken in 1900, Ibsen's drama was one of 'soulcrisis' offering a theatre of momentous epiphany, a perception of some illuminating
truth arising out of dialectical conflict.
The question that needs to be asked is how far can this kind of reading be applied to
the much earlier A Doll's House? Act 3 certainly gives us a dialectical conflict in
the confrontation between Nora and Torvald and their diametrically opposed points
of view, and Nora is also brought to a point of illuminating realisation which
precipitates her decision to leave. But just how complex and profound is the
exploration of Nora's inner life in this play? How successfully does it delineate her
soul-crisis, her spiritual inner life, and what are the factors - both external and
internal - that contribute to this crisis?
Ibsen predates Freud, but the complex characterisation in some of his later plays
(e.g. Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder) undoubtedly anticipates
some of Freud's conclusions about the workings of the subconscious. Freud wrote a
famous essay on Rosmersholm in which he showed that the contradictory
behaviour of the central character, Rebecca West, derived from the unconscious
repression of incest with her own father, demonstrating how the play was a clear
illustration of his own subsequently conceived theory.
To what extent do you read Nora's behaviour in A Doll's House as governed by
subconscious motives, and contradictory impulses? Is a psychoanalytic approach to
her personality fruitful or appropriate? The scene in which she flirts with Dr Rank
using the silk stockings would be an interesting starting point for this line of
enquiry, but there are a number of other points in the text where a similar approach
could be taken. In choosing to read the play in this way you will need to be
especially alert to the subtext, to what is unspoken or unacknowledged and lies
beneath the spoken dialogue, and to visual and gestural detail, the unspoken
information that is conveyed through stage directions, costume, set-design, decor,
properties, lighting etc - all the elements that combine to form the sign language, or
semiotics, of the theatre.
Stagecraft and structure
The last half-century of textual criticism has firmly established Ibsen as a theatre-poet
extending the resources of language through stagecraft, through the semiotics of gesture,
and through performance. Nora dances meaning into existence in A Doll's House.
(McFarlane (ed) 1994, 242)
Ibsen himself declared that he was more of a poet and less of a social philosopher
than many of his contemporary critics held him to be, and it is worth noting that he
began writing poetry and that his early plays were in verse. But in what sense can
his prose plays like A Doll's House be described as dramatic poetry? One answer to
this would be to say through their meticulous crafting and the highly intricate way
in which the spoken text is integrated with visual and symbolic detail and a
language of gesture and physical movement to form a densely patterned theatre text
in which a repeated phrase or a visual moment acquires a kind of poetic resonance
or intensity. The plays work on a level of verbal and visual metaphor. Take the
Christmas tree, for example, which functions as 'a symbol of family happiness and
security' (John Northam) and which was an emblem of social status in 1870s
Norway. Austin Quigley argues that the tree functions as part of an extensive
network of related visual and verbal motifs and relates to what might be termed the
mask-versus-face theme of the play:
The Christmas tree ..is dressed and then stripped - which links it with the later fancy-dress
ball and the costume Nora first dons and later discards. The tree is also to be hidden until it
is dressed, so that the children do not see it in its non-dressed form. The 'real' tree for the
children is to be the dressed tree, not its unadorned version. And this links the notion of
dress and costume to that of deception and masquerade, which in turn links with Nora's
deception of Torvald about borrowing money and Dr Rank's disguising for twenty long
years his true feelings for Nora. This, in turn, makes us aware that some kinds of deception,
like hiding the unadorned Christmas tree, can be for potentially good purposes. The
ambivalent value thus attributed to deception later interacts with Nora's lying in general,
with her role playing for a variety of purposes, and with Mrs Linde's unhappy solution of
honesty as the best policy in improving Nora's and Torvald's relationship..... And the
ambivalent values of this home will, we suspect, enable us to link the unadorned Christmas
tree, framed in the doorway at the beginning of the play, with the figure of Nora, no longer
in fancy dress, passing through the same doorway at the end of the play.
(The Modern Stage and Other Worlds 1985, 99-100)
Thus a whole network of thematic ideas to do with deception, honesty and moral
and social values are brought into play through this dramatic device of the
Christmas tree. The tarantella also functions as a complex visual and verbal
metaphor. Egil Tornqvist writes very interestingly about these sections of the play
in the context of the play's adaptation into film or television. (Transposing Drama:
Studies in Representation 1991; McFarlane (ed) 1994) His following comment
about the different ways in which the Christmas tree signifies meaning according to
whether the play's performance is on stage or on screen is worth quoting in full:
Generally speaking, one may distinguish three broad categories of signifiers (signifiants) of
any stage or screen performance: cultural, medial (i.e. medium-conditioned) and
directorial. The Christmas tree in A Doll's House may serve as a clarifying example. Here
the tree is a cultural signifier both in a spatial and a temporal sense; spatially, since in nonChristian parts of the world it would not connote Christmas; temporally, since we do not
respond any more to the fact that a Christmas tree in the 1870s was a distinct status symbol.
As a medial signifier, the tree will appear differently on stage and screen: on stage it will
constantly be in view and will be seen from about the same distance; on screen it will
appear only incidentally and may be seen from various distances and angles. Precisely
because of its continuing presence, on stage the Christmas tree will necessarily often
appear non-expressive, even redundant, while its relative rarity on the screen will increase
its significance whenever it is seen. As a directorial signifier, finally, the Christmas tree is
awarded special significance in Ibsen's stage directions, which state in Act II: 'In the corner
beside the piano stands the Christmas tree, stripped, bedraggled and with its candles burnt
out.' Ibsen here operates as his own director. He describes where the Christmas tree at that
particular moment is placed and what it looks like. In an actual performance this
information will necessarily be supplemented, since a visual tree is very different from a
verbal one. This will especially be the case in a screen version, where our relationship to
the tree may become a very close one.
(McFarlane (ed) 1994, 209)
Another way in which the text is carefully patterned so that it acquires poetic
resonances is through the interplay of plots: the main plot of Nora's development
away from a stifling marriage and into a form of emancipation is deliberately
played off against the two sub-plots of Mrs Linde and Dr Rank through a series of
parallels and contrasts. This has particular implications for the way in which we
read the, admittedly sensational, ending of the play and the degree of optimism
with which we view Nora's exit into the world as a single woman. As John
Northam has argued, the good intentions of Nora to discover herself as a human
being on her own are, at the very least, put into perspective and qualified by our
knowledge that Christina has, before the start of the play, left a husband she does
not love only to find that it is very hard to find work and make a living as a single
woman with the consequence that when she - very conveniently - comes across a
man whom she was formerly in love with, she is only too happy to renounce her
single status and to devote herself to the care of this man in a rather unemancipated
way claiming that she needs a man and children to give her a sense of meaning in
life. And Nora's decline into despair through the play, as she fails to extricate
herself from her predicament, is parallelled by the physical illness and wasting of
Dr Rank as he awaits his own death. Ibsen's draft notes for the play indicate that his
original intention was to make Nora's destiny a tragic one, and through the echoes
of these two sub-plots, it is by no means clear that Nora's slamming the door at the
end will pave the way for emancipation or fulfilment. The ending of the play is an
open one and the implications for Nora's future are ambivalent.
In fact, the stage focus at the end of the play is on Helmer himself whose
predicament itself may be felt to be tragic. Compare your response to the end of the
play with the, arguably controversial, view taken by Ingmar Bergman after
directing a production of the play in Munich in 1981:
Helmer's tragedy is fully as interesting as the development of Nora. He's a decent man who
is trapped in his role of being the man, the husband. He tries to play his role as well as he
can - because it is the only one he knows and understands ... And then suddenly Nora
stands there in front of him with her coat on and her bag in her hand, intending to go away.
In my production, Helmer has gone to bed and he's undressed ... Then he wakes up ... - and
everything pours out from Nora, who is fully clothed, over Helmer, who is sitting there
naked in his bed. And when she goes away, with her enormous aggression and her
incredible brutality, he collapses completely ... He simply lies down on the bed and cries
like a very small child.
(quoted in Tornqvist 1991, 88)
Feminism and A Doll's House
Joan Templeton's article, 'The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and
Ibsen', is a polemical response to 'masculinist' readings of the play such as
Bergman's. By adopting an approach that is both feminist and also
biographical/cultural materialist in that it draws on contemporary biographical and
documentary material to attest to the seriousness of Ibsen's engagement with the
women's movement and his awareness of the extent of the discrimination against
them, she makes a strong case for seeing the gender issue as absolutely central to A
Doll's House: the fact that Nora is a woman trapped within the ideologies of a
patriarchal society, whose need to escape from her confinement is paramount and
whose success in breaking free still retains the power to shock and to drive critics
who are closet patriarchs (or their allies) into elaborate defensive strategies. The
article is reproduced in full for you on the grounds that it is both provocative and
informative, and offers a strongly argued reading of the play 'as a woman' that
should help to bring your own responses to the text into sharper focus. You might
well want to take issue with some of the detail in the article, if not with its whole
thrust, and seminars should be a useful opportunity to do this.