If you are revising Ibsen's A Doll's House, you might find this brief guide helpful. It analyses some of the play's most important motifs, as well as examining the context in which the play was written and first received.
1. Note how Nora starts to question the authority of Church and state late in the play, extrapolating from the way that she has challenged her domestic experience of Torvald's patriarchal dominance to draw sceptical conclusions about religion and the law.
Key quotations:
* 'I do not exactly know what religion is...'
* 'I will see if what the clergyman says is true, or at any events if it is true for me.'
* 'I find it impossible to convince myself that the law is right'.
She embraces a moral position where she no longer believes in truth as an absolute value but now regards the dogma that she has been taught throughout her life as an instrument of patriarchal power.
You can usefully connect this to the etymology of the name Torvald which derives from that of the Norse god, Thor, the hammer-wielding deity who associated with strength, storms and fertility. To what extent is Torvald associated with these qualities?
2. Nora uses the word 'vidunderlig' (or variations thereof) on fourteen occasions. It can mean either 'wonderful' or 'miraculous'. The way translators interpret this word affects our interpretation of the play.
Torvald uses the word once, in the play's last line.
Why does Nora no longer believe in miracles at the end of the play? What does this suggest about her narrative arc?
Does Torvald use the word to refer to a religious miracle?
3. Some contemporary reviews were sceptical about the play's use of ambiguity and unresolved conflict, devices often employed in naturalistic dramas.
This excerpt is taken from a review of A Doll's House from the newspaper Faedrelandet, published in December 1879:
'… [Ibsen] has very often a problem finding an ending, which at once satisfies himself and the audience … he is easily tempted to put the effect above the truth which he thought to portray in all of the preceding action with great success.'
This review seems to suggest that Nora's departure deviates from the 'truth'. This is fair comment to the extent that few women took such a bold step in renouncing their husbands like this. However, does her exit in Act Three reflect an emotional 'truth' which many contemporary women suppressed for the sake of maintaining the appearance of dutiful wives and mothers?
M.V. Brun, critic for Folkets Avid, wrote on December 24th, 1879:
“... we still become anxious and ask ourselves 'how is this going to end?'... we still hope for a confession and a resultant conciliating solution, but we are utterly unprepared for the distressing break-up we witness in the third act...”
Similarly, the review from Faedrelandet complained that audiences do not leave the play feeling 'joyful, happy and buoyed'. It stated that the play depicts 'no one at all who stands on a higher and more assured level than this mutually guilty married couple.'
(The critic's use of 'mutually guilty' is curious: does the play encourage us to apportion blame evenly between Nora and Torvald?)
Note also the expectation here that the audience should feel 'happy' upon leaving the theatre. This can be usefully cross-referenced with Nora's assertion that she was never happy in her marriage but merely 'gay'. Can superficially carefree feelings serve as a distraction from the fundamental unfairness of one's situation? Nora claims as much.
This review also claims that Nora's repression of her secret is not credible and describes her secrecy as an act of 'cowardice' which 'she fails to conquer'. Speaking personally, I think Ibsen encourages us to feel more sympathetically disposed towards her, outlining her motivations for her behaviour in careful detail.
Faedrelandet also objected to the play's implications about the institution of marriage. It alleged that A Doll's House 'targeted one of the institutions by which society is supported', portraying marriage as 'an arrangement which, instead of educating the individuals... corrupts them.' The critic claims that the play grants its characters 'a moral right to immediately dissolve [a marriage] if it no longer satisfies them'. According to the review, marriage is an institution 'legal in the whole civilised world'.
What is most interesting here to me is the way that the critic extrapolates from the specific situation examined in the play to consider the universal social implications of Nora's behaviour. In effect, it asks 'what if every woman were to question the status of her marriage as Nora does'? It assumes that the play is being didactic, i.e. that it's trying to teach us a moral lesson.
4. In the exam, you are expected to show understanding of the context in which Ibsen's drama was received.
Some of his fellow authors found Ibsen's directness refreshing although not all of the following quotations refer directly to A Doll's House.
The novelist Henry James said that Ibsen's plays 'made things wonderfully plain', that he leads 'his audience inexorably into the rougher road' and that his plays cause us 'to know more about ourselves.'
James enjoyed the uncompromising quality of Ibsen's drama which deals with 'the individual caught in the fact'; 'he squeezes the attention till he almost hurts it, yet with never a conciliatory stroke.'
He praised Ibsen's lack of humour, too; 'nothing is more interesting to see how he makes up his world without a joke.'
James also noted that Ibsen would not enjoy widespread acclaim in the world of British theatre which, at the time, was preoccupied by the fashions for farce and melodrama: 'he is not pleasant enough, nor light enough, nor casual enough... we shall never take him to our hearts.'
George Bernard Shaw, an Irish-born socialist playwright, contrasted Ibsen's drama with the 'well-made play', a genre of drama whose plots consisted of a basic three-part structure involving an exposition in Act One, the development of a situation in Act Two and the 'unravelling' of the action in Act Three. Shaw noted that, instead of 'unravelling', Ibsen gives us 'discussion', a distinction which emphasises the way that Ibsen's plays encourage the audience to debate issues of social importance.
Despite its ambivalent position regarding its characters' behaviour, A Doll's House proved popular with English political radicals: Shaw played the part of Krogstad in a reading of the play staged in London in 1886; the part of Nora was played by Eleanor Marx, a prominent member of the radical Socialist League and the daughter of Karl Marx.
5. The play is set during a transitional point in the history of women's rights, echoed in the mixture of prospect and retrospect often contemplated at Christmas (note the symbolism of the Christmas tree representing hope and happiness and the extinguishing of its lights representing the onset of fear or uncertainty).
Ibsen's presentation of Nora has some features in common with the archetype of the New Woman as discussed and mocked in the British press (although I'm unsure how much cultural currency this archetype enjoyed in Norway):
'NORA: It was a tremendous pleasure to sit there working and earning money. It was like being a man.'
Early in the play, while talking to her children's nurse, Nora asks 'Do you think they would forget their mother if she went away altogether?' and contemplates the prospect of the nurse fulfilling the role of their mother in her absence. Is this evidence of an unconscious impulse to free herself from her role as a mother and housewife?
The rejection of a woman's culturally-ordained role as a wife and mother was one of the defining features of the archetype of the New Woman.
6. Although we can see signs of Nora's resentment of Torvald early in the play, do not be tempted to overstate her proto-feminist credentials. For example, the presents that she buys for her children conform to traditional gendered archetypes – 'a new suit for Ivar, and a sword; and a horse and a trumpet for Bob, and a doll and a dolly's bedstead for Emmy...' (We can see an echo of the play's title in this last gift - is Nora subconsciously priming her daughter for her role as a future mother?)
However, a burgeoning disenchantment with women's cultural position can be seen in her observation that her maid, Anne, 'deserves something better' than her Christmas gift of a handkerchief.
7. The play yields interesting proto-feminist interpretations but Ibsen himself was more ambivalent regarding the movement for female empowerment than we might instinctively believe.
In 1878, he wrote 'Note for a Modern Tragedy', a blueprint of the ideas which he would realise in A Doll's House. In this text, he wrote that 'a woman cannot be herself in modern society. It is an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess female conduct from a male standpoint... A mother in modern society, like certain insects, retires and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race.'
However, when he addressed the Norwegian Association of Women's Rights, he expressed a measure of ambivalence about the contribution of his plays to their struggle.
'Whatever I had written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe... I must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the Women's Rights Movement. I am not even quite clear as to just what this Women's Rights Movement really is... It is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others... My task has been the description of humanity.'
In the same speech, he also warned readers against the intentional fallacy, i.e. the mistaken assumption that works of fiction tell us about their writers' beliefs or intentions. He emphasised the role that readers' preconceptions play in determining a text's meaning:
'The reader will read his [note Ibsen's choice of possessive pronoun!] own feelings and sentiments into the work of the poet. These are then attributed to the poet, but incorrectly so... every reader remoulds the work beautifully and neatly, each according to his own personality. Not only are those who write, but also those who read, poets. They are collaborators.'
Nora's struggle is often interpreted as striking a blow for womankind against women's patriarchal relegation to the status of housewives. However, Ibsen said this to the members of the Association of Women's Rights:
'The task always before my mind has been to advance our country and to give people a higher standard. To achieve this, two factors are important. It is for the mothers, by strenuous and sustained labour, to awaken a conscious feeling of culture and discipline... It is the women who shall solve the human problem. As mothers, they shall solve it...'
Does this imply that Ibsen himself regarded Nora's flight from her home as a dereliction of her duty as a mother? It certainly seems to suggest that Ibsen believed, to some extent, in the idea of 'separate spheres' - the notion that men and women should fulfil different social roles.
8. The motif of recurrent traits features prominently in the play and its connection to ideas of fatherhood and patriarchy is worth considering.
When Torvald is scolding Nora in the play's final scene, he blames her character on her father's influence, telling her that 'all your father's principle has come out in you... How am I punished for having winked at what he did!'
Another image of recurrence is seen when we learn that Dr Rank has tuberculosis in his spine, an illness which Kristine suggests is a consequence of his father's sexual 'excesses'.
In the light of this, although it is tempting to read Nora's closing of the door as a final gesture of feminist liberation and defiance, the play refuses to offer us that certainty. Nora is leaving her home for a wider world in which independent women are treated with scorn and scepticism and will enjoy little structural or economic power. Does Ibsen's use of the trope of recurrence invite us to consider the possibility that Nora's exit need not be final and that she herself cannot escape the influence of patriarchal culture? Typically of naturalistic drama, the play does not rule out this possibility.
I hope that you have found this resource useful. I am always interested in receiving feedback on my material. If you have any queries or thoughts about what I have written, please let me know. Equally, if you would like any tuition, please contact me at swlondontutor@yahoo.com.
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