Henrik Ibsen
A Doll House
Foreword
When the troubled applause died away, and the first audience for Ibsen’s A Doll House rose to their somewhat unsteady feet and filed up the aisles, no one among them could have known that he or she had participated, four days before Christmas of 1879, in the birth of modern drama. The long view is a privilege reserved for posterity, whereas the shaken spectators in Copenhagen’s Royal Theater, still reverberating with the slam of that historic door, had other, more immediate concerns to cope with.
They had been held, for one thing, by a sequence of vivid dramatic images that had drawn them insidiously, moment by moment, scene by scene, to an abrupt, intolerable conclusion. Their heroine had gone from her lilting entrance, a slender, vulnerable creature of macaroons and Christmas toys, to her final departure, a remorsefully independent figure wreathed in a funeral shawl. All that occurred in between remained to tease the mind with questions. How could she do such a thing, leave home and husband and children after eight years of marriage? Was she justified? Would she return the next day? How could her character change so suddenly? And what was that character, to start with? Had they been deceived in their assumptions? Were they perhaps deceived in reality, right now? As they went their many separate ways back to homes grown appreciably more perilous, the audience was induced to ponder the matrix of causes that had shaped the heroine’s past and the network of involvements that wove about her present. And, as they pondered and discussed and argued and brooded, it seemed increasingly apparent to them – in Scandinavia and Germany and England and France and throughout Europe and America – that something incalculable had shifted, had altered, never to be the same again, that, as George Bernard Shaw put it, “Nora’s revolt is the end of a chapter in human history.”
As this reconstruction of the widening circles of contemporary response implies, it is with A Doll House that Ibsen’s dramatic method comes into its ownand its practical success is assured. But Shaw’s highly vocal point in that response makes clear where the emphasis has fallen and where attention has been too narrowly directed. If there is one cliché I could choose to wish away, one stereotype worth shattering to help liberate the living play from the revered Dramatic Classic, it would be the tired notion that this is a feminist play, and that we have done our duty as playgoers when we have followed gallant Nora though her struggle for her rights.
Perhaps the fault lies in the title. There is certainly no sound justification for perpetuating the awkward and blindly traditional misnomer of A Doll’s House: the house is not Nora’s, as the possessive implies; the familiar children’s toy is called a doll house; and one can make a reasonable supposition that Ibsen, intending an ironic modern contrast to the heroic ring of the house of Atreus or Cadmus, at least partially includes Torvald with Nora in the original title, Et Dukkeehjem,for the two of them at the play’s opening are still posing like the little marzipan bride and groom atop the wedding cake.
In the preliminary notes to what he first subtitled “A Modern Tragedy,” Ibsen makes clear from the start his assumption that the fall of the house of Helmer desolates both parties. “There are two kinds of spiritual law,” he writes, “two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether in woman. They do not understand each other . . . .” The superstructure of Torvald’s conscience, his sense of right and wrong, is founded on the formulation: “the most important thing is that I be a success; all else will follow from that.” Nora’s moral sense, on the other hand, is that “the most important thing is that we live in, and out of, the truth of our feelings; all else will follow from that.” What is at stake is nothing less than the respective definitions that the society allows of a man and a woman. And because Ibsen lives in a universe where essences are no longer given a priori, out of a fixed, eternal order, out of some Platonic idea of man and woman, but rather in a flowing process where selves are chiefly designed by the choices they make, the unenlightened struggle of Torvald and Nora to define themselves along separate paths inevitably brings them into conflict. It is crucial, however, to note that whereas the play begins with Nora, and in time Torvald appears, after the action has run its course Nora withdraws, and the play ends with Torvald. The balance is significant. Moreover, the situation of Torvald at the conclusion is, if anything, more pathetic; his bland, commonsensical, self-righteous attempt to establish his authority has failed, and, although Nora has been strengthen by facing up to at least a glimpse of the truth, Torvald has had loved pulled from under his feet while, by the nature of his conventional code, he has hardly an inkling of what he can possibly have done that was wrong.
Once we realize that the crux of the play is not primarily an individual, but a relationship – the modern middle-class perception of marriage – we are in a position to see both why Ibsen did, then, concentrate on the character of Nora and also the skill with which he uses the other relationships of the play to develop and amplify her situation.His interest centers on Nora because, in her own terms, she internalizes the conflict, which Ibsen designates in his notes as “natural feeling on the one hand and belief in authority on the other.” Authority, she believes, is something located outside herself, first in her father, then in Torvald, little realizing that Torvald is likewise and more subtly the puppet of others’ expectations, namely of his co-workers at the bank, and, in a larger sense, of public opinion, of what they will think. Both are dolls – a doll being a thing in a human shape without the hard-won, distinctively human attributes.
In the marvelous design of the action, Ibsen shows Nora painfully acquiring those attributes, in effect recapitulating the development of the race as she moves from, metaphorically, the role of a little animal, a lark, a squirrel, to a new-born human self with something of the tragic sense of life. In the parallel relationship with Krogstad, she discovers a physical embodiment of the horror of degradation ahead of her, since it was “nothing more and nothing worse” that he did which poisoned his home and caused Torvald and society in general to reject him; and simultaneously in the relationship with Rank, crippled in body as she sees herself crippled in conscience, she finds the strength to die alone, if necessary. And, in a carefully modulated antithesis, Krogstad and Mrs. Linde, the two who have known the darkness outside, move into the light, the warmth of the home, together, at the same time that Torvald and Nora move apart, out of the “sunlit happiness” of their union into the harsh instruction of that same darkness. Structurally, the play is a wonder; and thematically, far from being dated, it is only beginning to communicate its relevance.
- Rolf Fjelde