 |
| Penguin Classics UK edition, 2005 |
NORA: It's true, Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion. If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it. He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house –––
The Play: On 21 December 1879 a recently published Norwegian play titled Et Dukkehejm
[A Doll's House] premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in Copenhagen.
Opening just a few days before Christmas –– that most traditional of
'family' holidays –– the play scandalized its first night audience by
offering it an unflinching depiction of a dysfunctional modern marriage
in which a supposedly scatterbrained young wife is dominated and morally
betrayed by her hypocritical and patronizing older husband.
What
the play's first night audience found so confronting was not the
situation itself –– a situation many no doubt would have recognized as being identical or
at least reflective of their own marriages –– as much as the
wife's unexpected and, for the time, unimaginable response to it.
After spending her life, married and otherwise, obediently accepting the
idea of male superiority (and secretly resenting the men in her life
for forcing her to be subservient to them), Nora Helmer decides to walk
out on her husband Torvald and their three small children –– clearly the
behaviour, in the eyes of a paternalistic and misogynistic society, of a
woman suffering from some form of chronic mental illness.
Yet
Nora is anything but deranged. When the play begins she is shown as a
sweet and dutiful young housewife, arms laden with parcels
after returning home from a shopping expedition, grateful that she and
Torvald finally have enough money, after years of strict economizing, to
allow them to splurge on expensive Christmas gifts for their friends and family.
Torvald's initial response to his wife's extravagance is to tease her
about it, calling her his 'little featherbrain' when she suggests
they can always borrow money to pay their household bills until he
begins earning the high salary he is due to receive in the New Year as
the recently promoted manager of the local bank. 'But seriously, Nora,' he tells her before their terminally ill friend Dr Rank arrives to speak with him, 'you
know what I think about that sort of thing… There's something
constrained, something ugly even, about a home that's founded on
borrowing and debt.'
Debt –– financial, social and moral –– is one of the central themes of A Doll's House.
Nora, it turns out, illegally borrowed money from an old school friend
of her husband's, a man named Krogstad, to pay for a trip to Italy –– a
trip that had to be taken to save Torvald's life after he became
seriously ill as the result of stress and overwork. Torvald knows
nothing of this loan, believing the money for their journey was given to
Nora by her father shortly before her father's death –– a belief which allows
him to fire Krogstad who, after experiencing several personal and
financial setbacks of his own, has become one of his employees.
Krogstad's
crime was to forge a customer's signature on a document –– a crime the
self-righteous Torvald finds morally repugnant, never guessing that it's
a crime his 'own little skylark' could ever conceive of, let
alone be capable of committing. (Under Norwegian law of the time, no
woman was permitted to sign her name to a loan agreement without at
least one male relative serving as her 'sponsor' and co-signatory.)
Rather than worry her father with such an unpleasant business while he
was dying, Nora forged his signature on the document Krogstad gave her,
unwittingly placing herself in an ideal position to be blackmailed.
 |
| Dover Thrift US edition, c 1970 |
The
choice that Krogstad offers Nora is a simple one –– intercede with her
husband on his behalf to ensure he retains his position at the bank or
have him tell Torvald the truth about the money and what she did to
obtain it. Terrified of being exposed as a liar and a fraud, Nora
pleads with her husband not to dismiss Krogstad and give his job to her
poor, recently widowed friend Kristina Linde, only to have her pleas
fall on deaf ears. Nora, her husband says, should not concern herself
with such matters. She should focus on the ball they're planning to
attend together on Christmas night, where he expects her to perform the tarantella,
an energetic peasant dance she learned during the idyllic time they
spent on the Italian island of Capri while he was convalescing.
When
Nora pushes him, begging him again to reconsider his decision, Torvald
explains that it is impossible because, while he might 'at a pinch' have been able to forgive Krogstad's 'moral failings,'
he cannot forgive him for undermining his authority by addressing him
by his first name in front of his other subordinates. When Nora accuses
him of being petty and childish, Torvald responds by asking their maid
to take a letter to Krogstad which, to her horror, turns out to contain
her blackmailer's termination notice.
Having
received this letter, Krogstad soon reappears at the Helmer home where
he once again threatens Nora with exposure, this time demanding that she
gain him a promotion in addition to having him reinstated. 'Inside a year,' he predicts, 'I shall be the Manager's right-hand man. It'll be Nils Krogstad who runs the bank, not Torvald Helmer.'
Nora insists that her husband will never agree to this but Krogstad
holds all the power now and, what is more, has no compunction about using
it to destroy her unless she accedes to his demands. He tells Nora that
he has written her husband his own letter –– a letter he drops in their
locked mailbox as he leaves the house. But Krogstad, whose own life has
been filled with enough trouble to understand and even sympathize to
some degree with the damning position his attitude has placed Nora
in, allows himself to be talked out of going through with his plan by
her friend (and, it turns out, his former sweetheart) Kristina.
Krogstad offers to retrieve his letter, only to have Kristina reject the
idea on the grounds that Torvald has a right to know what his wife did
behind his back even if she did it, as she has so frequently insisted, in
order to save his life.
Torvald, aroused by Nora's spirited (if desperation-fuelled) performance of the tarantella
at the ball, brings her home early so he can have sex with her, only to
have this plan foiled by the arrival of their fellow ball guest Dr
Rank. Eventually, however, he reads Krogstad's letter while Nora, her
options non-existent as she perceives it, decides she must commit
suicide because her actions have disgraced her husband and will make a
laughingstock of him at the bank and throughout the town.
 |
| Penguin Classics UK edition, c 1990 |
With Rank gone –– and never to be seen again after confessing that he is not far from death –– Torvald lets fly at his wife. 'You've completely wrecked my happiness,' he tells her, 'you've
ruined my whole future!… I'm in the power of a man without scruples; he
can do what he likes with me –– ask what he wants of me –– order me
about as he pleases, and I dare not refuse. And I'm brought so
pitifully low all because of a shiftless woman!' Their marriage, he insists, can only be a marriage maintained for appearances' sake from this point on. 'You
shall remain here in my house –– that goes without saying –– but I
shall not allow you to bring up the children… I shouldn't dare trust you
with them.' Moments after making these grim pronouncements, a
messenger arrives, bearing a letter for Nora which, when Torvald
snatches it from her hand and opens it, turns out to contain the loan
document, sent by Krogstad, bearing the forged signature of Nora's dead
father. Torvald is delighted and quickly changes his tune after burning
this incriminating piece of evidence in the stove, telling Nora he
forgives her while she, calm and self-possessed in spite of everything,
removes her peasant costume to once again reveal herself as his 'poor, frightened, helpless little darling.'
But
Nora is no longer the person she was before the evening began. The
silly girl she was when she arrived home a few days earlier, arms
weighed down with Christmas presents, has been replaced by a wiser if
sadder woman who confesses that she has never been happy with her overbearing husband,
only 'gay' in order to please him and maintain the illusion that theirs has been a contented and mutually satisfying marriage. 'For eight whole years,' she tells the shocked Torvald, '––
no, longer than that –– ever since we first met, we've never exchanged a
serious word on any serious subject… we've never sat down in earnest
together to get to the bottom of a single thing.' Torvald is astonished, unable to realize, or even comprehend, that his wife, his 'darling little skylark'
can finally see him for what he is: a spiteful, petty-minded
narcissist incapable of caring for anyone but himself and a man, for
this and other reasons, whose wife she no longer wishes to be. Torvald,
for his part, feels wounded and betrayed by her statements, reminding
Nora that she has a duty to him and their children, only to be told that
her primary duty, as she views it, is to be true to herself. 'I believe that before everything else,' she adds, 'I'm
a human being –– just as much as you are… or at any rate I shall try to
become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you,
Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be
satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in
books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.'
Torvald begs her not to leave, to at least let him write to her
occasionally, but Nora refuses and, after suggesting that her coming
back to him would be 'the greatest miracle of all,' walks out of the house, slamming its door behind her as she goes.
With
that single courageous act, that one decisive slamming of a door,
Henrik Ibsen virtually invented modern literary realism as we understand
the term today. Not only did A Doll's House horrify and disturb
contemporary audiences –– so much so that Ibsen was forced to write an
alternative, more 'hopeful' ending before the play could be performed in
Germany –– it also paved the way for almost every other controversial
yet similarly transcendent work of literature which followed it,
including James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and North American playwright Eugene O'Neill's two towering dramatic masterpieces The Iceman Cometh (1940, first performed 1946) and Long Day's Journey Into Night
(1941, first performed 1956). The play continues to resonate with
audiences because it addresses dilemmas that remain fundamental to the
human condition –– to grow up or remain a child, to face reality or
foolishly deny it, to educate yourself or live in the kind of ignorance
that, while it may feel blissful for a time, can only end in a delayed
but extremely painful awakening to the truth. Nora is more than every
woman who has ever been repressed, exploited and betrayed by her
husband, just as Torvald is more than every man who considers it his
right to treat his wife as his personal plaything, his 'doll' or puppet to
be cossetted and patronized according to his whims. They are oppressed
and oppressor, victim and tyrant, locked in a struggle for control and
self-determination that remains as old as time itself.
 |
| HENRIK IBSEN, c 1866 |
The Writer:
Like many a clear-eyed realist before and after him, Henrik Ibsen (20
March 1828 – 23 May 1906) began his career as something of a fabulist,
reinterpreting Nordic myths and fairy tales in verse plays like The Vikings of Helgeland (1857) and the popular epic Peer Gynt (1867). It wasn't until 1869, with the performance of his first prose play The League of Youth, that Ibsen began to develop the realistic style for which he remains best known today.
Success
did not come to Ibsen quickly or easily. Although his parents, Knud
Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, were members of two of the wealthiest
shipping families in the southern Norwegian port town of Skien, his
father suffered disastrous business reverses when the future playwright was
around seven years old which resulted in the family losing a substantial
part of its fortune. Forced to sell their city home to pay his debts,
Knud Ibsen moved his family to Venstøp, its much smaller summer home on
the outskirts of town. It was in Skien that the future playwright
attended school, doing so only sporadically until the age of fifteen
when, with his father now legally declared bankrupt and no longer able
to support him, he moved to the even smaller town of Grimstad where he began to study in earnest for the university entrance exam that he hoped would one day allow
him to obtain a medical degree.
In
October 1846 the eighteen year old Ibsen fathered an illegitimate child
by a servant girl named Else Jendstatter –– a son he was legally
obligated to support until the boy, who was christened Hans Jacob
Henriksen, became a teenager. It was also during his stay in Grimstad,
before he went to Kristiana (now known as Oslo) to re-sit the university
matriculation exam he had previously failed, that he wrote his first
poems, began painting and produced his first work for the stage, a blank
verse drama titled Catiline set in Ancient Rome. This play was
published in April 1850 under the pseudonym 'Brynjolf Bjarme' in a small
private edition funded by his friend, benefactor and staunchest
supporter Ole Schulerud. (Like all of Ibsen's plays, Catiline was written in Danish which was the common written language of both Denmark and Norway.)
A second one-act verse play, titled The Burial Mound
and published under the same pseudonym, was performed later that year
in Kristiana but received little attention from the critics or the
Norwegian capital's theater-going public. By this time Ibsen –– whose
feelings about obtaining a medical degree had always been ambivalent at
best, an ambivalance reinforced by his continual failure to pass his
matriculation exam and increased interest in supporting radical
causes –– had given up on his plan to become a physician to devote
himself full-time to writing. Having earned a small reputation as a
satirist and poet of unfulfilled promise, he was approached by Ole Bull,
an internationally renowned violin virtuoso, and offered the job of
director, producer and 'play provider' at his newly opened Norwegian
Theatre in the western city of Bergen. (This was the first theatre in
Norway to feature specifically Norwegian works performed by exclusively
Norwegian actors, making it a very important job at the time.) Apart from an 'educational visit' to Germany in 1852
which introduced him to the work of Shakespeare, Ibsen would remain in
Bergen until 1858, writing and publishing five more verse plays based on
Nordic myths, before returning to the capital to become creative
director of the well-established and well-attended Kristiana Theatre –– a
post that unfortunately did not empower him to move beyond the light
comedies and pastoral romances that were the prevailing theatrical
fashion throughout Scandinavia and much of Europe at the time.
In
June 1858 the playwright married Suzannah Thoresen, an
artistically-minded young woman he had met in Bergen following the minor
commercial success of his sixth play The Feast at Solhaug (1855)
and had been engaged to since January 1856. Their only child, a son
named Sigurd, was born in December 1859. (Sigurd Ibsen would go on to
serve as Prime Minister of Norway between 1903-1905 and became
instrumental in gaining his country its long desired independence from
Sweden.) Ibsen, along with Suzannah and Sigurd, relocated to Italy in
1864 –– a trip that marked the end of a four year 'dark period' that saw
him lose his job, begin to drink heavily and struggle to write, all the
while supported by his wife who remained, as she did throughout his
life, his most consistent source of encouragement.
 |
| Cygnet Theatre UK, 2013 |
The
trip to Italy began a period of self-imposed exile from his homeland
that would endure for the next twenty-seven years and see Ibsen firmly
establish himself as one of the world's most daring and controversial
dramatists. It was during his time abroad –– a period which saw him go
from obscure regional playwright to major theatrical force in Germany ––
that he produced Brand (1865), his popular 'mythic' satire Peer Gynt (1867, with incidental music composed by his fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg), The League of Youth (1869), Emperor and Galilean
(1873, a play based on the life of Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate
which he personally considered to be his most important achievement) and
what were to be his earliest experiments in the stark
theatrical realism that soon became his trademark –– The Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll's House (1879).
The
latter play, which in addition to becoming Ibsen's most notorious work
also became his most successful, was inspired by the life of a friend
named Laura Kieler, a young writer who asked him to help her find a
publisher because she desperately needed money to allow her sick husband
to be treated for tuberculosis –– a lung disease, also known as
'consumption,' which was usually fatal before the invention of antibiotic
drugs made it possible to successfully treat and cure. Desperate to
save her husband's life, Kieler asked Ibsen to advance her the money she
needed to pay for his treatment, thinking she would repay the
playwright from the sales of her books, only to have Ibsen refuse her
proposal, leaving her no choice but to forge a cheque in order to obtain
the necessary funds. Her husband discovered what she had done and had her briefly committed to a mental asylum, initiating divorce proceedings
against her soon afterwards. Although they later reconciled and Laura
went on to find success as a writer of plays and historical novels, she
was forever known as the inspiration for 'Ibsen's Nora' and felt
hampered by it until her death, in her adopted homeland of Denmark, at
the age of eighty-three.
But Laura Kieler was not Ibsen's only inspiration for Nora. 'A woman cannot be herself in modern society,' he noted in 1878 while living in Rome, '[since it is] an
exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors
and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.'
It was these beliefs, as much as the sad story of his would-be protégé,
which inspired the play and helped to make it a revered text among
Suffragettes and other proponents of the Feminist movement after it was
translated into English by critic William Archer and published in London
in 1889.
A Doll's House was followed by the equally controversial Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882) in which the hypocritical conduct of an entire community is placed under the microscope. Ibsen's next work for the stage The Wild Duck
(1884) –– an autobiographical piece concerning a young man who returns
to his hometown after a period of self-imposed exile where he is reunited
with a married friend who, in what had become his signature style, is
shown to be living a life founded on destructive self-deception –– is
often considered to be his greatest play and, despite the undisputed
greatness of later 'psychological' works including Rosmersholm (1886, loosely based on the lives of his parents), The Lady From The Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder
(1892), remains for many his most characteristic achievement. These groundbreaking plays also paved the way for the work of other, equally 'difficult' dramatists including Anton Chekhov and
Eugene O'Neill, allowing them to present audiences with their own, often shocking
visions of damaged human beings struggling to recognize, accept and
overcome their social, personal and moral limitations.
 |
| HENRIK IBSEN, c 1900 |
The
success of these works saw Ibsen elevated to the status of a national
icon, an artist whose reputation made him the ideal candidate to become
his country's international representative in both the theatrical and
the political spheres. In December 1869 he served as Norwegian envoy at the
opening of the Suez Canal, while his seventieth birthday in 1898 saw
widespread celebrations held in his honour throughout his native land.
Neither his fame nor his age prevented him from engaging in a series of
short-lived affairs with a host of women much younger than himself, the
most notorious of which he conducted with an Austrian girl named Emilie
Bardach who spoke openly of their relationship and sought to profit
from her association with the man who, by 1899, had come to be regarded
as 'Norway's greatest tourist attraction.'
Ibsen's final play was When We Dead Awaken,
a dreamlike piece he subtitled a 'A Dramatic Epilogue' which had its
premiere at London's Haymarket Theatre in December 1899. In March of
the following year he suffered a series of debilitating strokes at his
home in Kristiana which caused significant brain damage and robbed him
of the ability to recognize or utilize any form of written language. He
lingered in this unhappy state until 23 May 1906, when, after
displaying some small signs of improvement, he finally died after
uttering what was to be his last-ever word 'Tvertimod!' [On the
contrary!]. By now an iconic figure whose work had been translated into
many different languages and performed all over the world, his loss was
widely mourned by the artistic community in whose eyes he remained one
of the 'founding fathers' of Modernism. After the works of his idol
William Shakespeare, A Doll's House remains the world's most
frequently performed play, its most recent professional production –– featuring the
controversial 'alternative' ending originally presented to German audiences in the early 1880s –– having opened in the UK in June
2015.
Use the link below to visit the website of THE IBSEN SOCIETY OF AMERICA, an academic
organization founded in 1979 for the purpose of studying and preserving
the works of HENRIK IBSEN:
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Last updated 15 February 2021
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