Assignment 5

HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906)

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was a master at setting up and playing out the conflicts that are the heart of great drama. His great plays–A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892)–continue to remind playgoers of his gift for asking questions to which they are still seeking answers. His central characters are often in rebellion against the dominant middle-class morality. He knew well the prosperous middle class of shopkeepers, industrialists, bank managers, and doctors who were as he ironically called them in the title of his first play The Pillars of the Community (1877). He attacked their self-righteousness–their beliefs that they stood for morality and law and order. In his plays, present prosperity often had its roots in shady business deals or the betrayal of friends. For all its genteel trappings, the bourgeois society was shown as ruthlessly competitive; the strong prospered while the weak went under. On the fringe of proper well-to-do society were poor relations, business failures, and misfits who lived in genteel poverty, embittered by their lot. Ibsen’s focus on real-life issues has given his plays continued timeliness and strength.

In his major plays Ibsen dramatizes human beings, especially women, breaking free from restrictions and inhibitions and trying to establish their individuality and freedom–freedom of self, inquiry, pursuit of truth, artistic dedication, and above all, the freedom of love. In attempting to achieve these goals, Ibsen’s dramatic characters find internal opposition in self-interest, self indulgence, and self-denial, and external opposition in the personal, social, political influences and manipulations of others. Because the plays are designed to be realistic, Ibsen’s characters fall short of their goals. At best they achieve a respite in their combat or begin a quest in new directions. They always make great sacrifices, sometimes losing life itself.

Ibsen’s most memorable characters were women who were in rebellion against the role reserved for them in a man’s world. They talked back to the domineering men in their lives; they rebelled against the stereotype of the woman whose duty was to husband and family. They refused to be the “little woman” who was humored and condescended to and never entrusted with real responsibility. A woman in the nineteenth century could not borrow funds without a man’s co-signature, and Nora in A Doll’s House had to violate the law to obtain the money to restore her husband’s health. For its time, the play was most spectacular and provocative since it questioned the institution of marriage during an age when marriage for was life.

“A Doll’s House” (pp. 423-81)

A Doll’s House marks the beginning of Ibsen’s successful realist series of dramas during which he explored the ordinary lives of small-town people, in this case what he called “a modern tragedy.” It also marked the beginning of the modern drama. Like most of his later plays, this drama reflects Ibsen’s interest in individuals struggling for an authentic identity in the face of tyrannical social conventions. This conflict often results in his characters’ being divided between a sense of duty to themselves and their responsibilities to others. Here are portrayed the tensions of a middle-class marriage in which a wife, Nora, struggles to step beyond the limited identity imposed on her by her husband and society. Although the Helmers’s pleasant apartment seems an unlikely setting for the fierce conflicts that develop, the issues raised in the play are unmistakably real. A Doll’s House affirms the necessity to reject hypocrisy, complacency, cowardice, and stifling conventions if life is to have dignity and meaning.

The portrait of a wife in what seems to be an ideal marriage is rapidly and skillfully sketched in the opening of the first act. Bubbling with happiness, Nora’s first thoughts are of children and husband. She is a mother but also a child indulged by an amused and tolerant father, as her first dialogue with Helmer reveals. When Helmer reproaches Nora for spending too much money, we not only see a predictable quality of a middle-class housewife but also learn that the Helmers are at a typically middle-class stage in their lives. Helmer is about to get the big new job that will put them on easy street. With the arrival of Nora’s old friend Christine, we learn something of her past (as a rich and spoiled child) and, with Krogstad’s first appearance, of the forgery that will destroy her marriage, though not in the way she fears.

By the end of Act 1, the portrait of Nora is full and ominous. She is a thorough prisoner of that wifely identity that comes with middle-class marriage (though, as the references to her father indicate, it is an identity that her entire life has trained her for). The coy and kittenish child/wife, she cannot forbear exulting in her good fortune even though her old friend has had a life of hard work and unhappiness. A forger herself, Nora is nonetheless haughty and unsympathetic to the desperate Krogstad. What is most vivid in her mind at the end of this act is not the plight of either Christine or Krogstad, or even her own plight contained in the latter’s threat, but rather the impending party.

The direction of the action is effectively foreshadowed by the opening stage direction of Act 2. The bright and centrally placed Christmas tree of Act 1 is now in a corner “stripped of its ornaments and with burnt-down candle-ends on its dishevelled branches.” As in Act 1, there is an early dialogue between Nora and Helmer in Act 2. But in contrast to the opening act, Nora is preoccupied and increasingly somber. Nora, the hapless victim, watches as her best efforts to avert disaster–at this point keeping the knowledge of her forgery from Helmer–fail in the face of Krogstad’s desperation and her husband’s insufferable moralism. The role of the giddy child/wife is now counterpointed by her growing premonitions of disaster and death (underscored by the more prominent role of the dying and morbid Dr. Rank).

Under increasing pressure, a critical change begins to take place in Nora in Act 2. She confesses the truth to Christine and declares that she, herself, is responsible for the consequences. With that statement, Nora begins her transition from helpless victim to strong human being. And nothing could more powerfully capture the stage Nora has reached than her violent, hysterical dancing at the end of this act. It is a dance of terror as Nora faces the implications of independence and liberation. Helmer’s remark after he stops her dancing, “You have forgotten everything I taught you” is heavy with unconscious irony.

Significantly, the final act, which will end with the breakup of the Helmers’ marriage, opens with a dialogue between Krogstad and Christine in which they decide to marry. It is a dialogue of great thematic importance to the major action. In contrast to the relationship between Nora and Helmer, Krogstad and Christine are frank with one another about their past and, chastened by their difficult lives, recognize that they can fulfill important and real needs for one another. Furthermore, they are agreed that concealment and falsehood have poisoned the Helmers’ marriage. The resolution of the subplot thus makes clear that Ibsen’s attack is not on marriage per se but rather on the kind of marriage the Helmers’ represent.

The opening dialogue of Act 2 occurs while the Helmers are attending the party, the anticipation of which has functioned as an effective structural device in the preceding acts. As much as anything, the preparations for and discussions of the party throughout have served to reveal the kind of marriage the Helmers have. But the mindless wind-up doll of the first act, who so eagerly participated in preparations for her starring role at the party as Helmer’s prized possession, becomes the frantic dancer of Act 2. Now, the party over, Nora signals her new consciousness by rejecting the sexual advances of her husband (whose final argument in the attempt to seduce her is typically, “Am I not your husband?”). It is a moment of brilliant dramaturgy, focusing this climactic moment on an aspect of middle-class marriage that has been only implicit up to now: the sexual exploitation of women.

The Nora who has spent such frantic energy keeping her husband away from the mailbox now calmly suggests that Helmer ought to read his mail. He does, discovers the truth, shamelessly attacks Nora, and retreats when Krogtstad’s saving letter arrives, remaining all the while utterly unaware that he is talking to a human being rather than a doll (the Norwegian-Danish word for doll–dukke– can also mean “puppet” or “marionette”). When, after all this, Nora momentarily leaves the room and Helmer asks what she is doing, Nora replies, with an irony that escapes her husband, “Taking off my fancy dress.” When she reappears she announces her decision to leave. Helmer’s arguments starkly summarize the dehumanizing duties expected of a woman. When his arguments for home, husband, children, and reputation leave Nora untouched, he reminds her of her religious duties. But no arguments from duty or social convention or religious traditionalism can move Nora now. The only meaningful truths are those arrived at by the critical intelligence of an independent “human being.’ Thus, as shocking as it may appear, it is surely right that Nora walk out on everything (children included). We have seen enough of the Helmer household to say confidently that it could not possibly provide her the freedom and breathing space in which to wage successfully the battle for her humanity.

A Doll’s House is replete with *symbolism. The title itself symbolizes the dependent and dehumanized role of the wife within traditional middle-class marriages. The entire Norwegian nation (cold, legal, male) is contrasted suggestively with Italy (warm, emotional, female). Ironically, the break in the Helmers’ marriage is symbolically aligned with events that occur or have occurred in both locations. Other symbols are the Christmas tree, the children’s presents, the death of Dr. Rank, the locked mailbox., the dance, Nora’s black shawl, her change of clothing in Act 3, and the door slam at the play’s end.

For those of us who have grown up in an era of strong liberationist movements among women and insistent demands by minorities for equal rights, not to mention alternative lifestyles, the theme of A Doll’s House may seem rather ordinary, even tame. We need to be reminded that when Ibsen wrote the play, more than a century ago, it generated an explosive response. In writing a play that ends with the wife walking out on her husband and children, Ibsen challenged one of the pillars of middle-class society, because the way in which a society defines its institutions subtly and pervasively permeates the way in which its members define themselves. The sound of the door Nora slams shut at the end of the play reverberates far beyond her house; it becomes an aggressive assertion that the successful bourgeois marriage turns a human being into a doll, an ornamental possession for the social and sexual pleasure of the husband, who does the serious work and thinking the world requires.

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