Henrik Ibsen : A Doll's House 9781847600592

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Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House S. H. Siddall

‘‘Ibsen seemed to belong … to another world” For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

Publication Data © S. H. Siddall, 2008 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks LLP Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-059-2

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House

S. H. Siddall

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008

Contents The Author 1. Ibsen’s Life as a Playwright 2. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 1 2.1 Christmas Spending 2.2 Excavating the Past: Nora and Kristine 2.3 Dr. Rank ‘at home’ 2.4 Work and Play 2.5 Krogstad’s Blackmail 2.6 Torvald’s Christmas Sermon 3. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 2 3.1 Motherhood 3.2 What is Dr. Rank’s role? 3.3 Seducing Torvald 3.4 Dr. Rank Misjudges 3.5 Further Pressure from Krogstad 3.6 Miracles 3.7 The Tarantella 4. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 3 4.1 Kristine and Krogstad 4.2 After the Party 4.3 ‘Thank you for the light’ 4.4 The Damaging Letter 4.5 ‘I am Saved’ 4.6 Nora’s Truth 4.7 Alternative Endings

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5. Overview 5. 1 Christmas 5.2 Home and Beyond 5.3 Structure 8. A Feminist Playwright? 9. Ibsen and Shaw 10. Ibsen and Archer 11. Theatre as Ibsen Found it 12. A Doll’s House: Afterlife on Stage Conclusion Further Reading

The Author Stephen Siddall was Head of English at The Leys School in Cambridge for 31 years and has taught Shakespeare courses for university students and for the University of Cambridge International Summer School in Shakespeare. Between 1988 and 2005 he directed 15 Renaissance classic plays for The Arts Theatre, Cambridge and, more recently A Doll’s House and Waiting for Godot for the Horseshoe Theatre Company. He has also directed for BBC television and for the (open air) Pendley Shakespeare Festival. For Cambridge University Press he has written a student guide for Macbeth (2002), Shakespeare on Stage (2008) and Landscape and Literature (to be published in 2009)

1. Ibsen’s Life as a Playwright 1891 saw the publication of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. It was written by George Bernard Shaw, the most famous and controversial playwright in England. After Ibsen’s death in 1906 Shaw revised the book several times, he wrote an obituary, several reviews and many articles about Ibsen’s value and reputation as a great Norwegian who had become an even greater European. In 1911, Shaw declared that Ibsen ‘seemed to belong not merely to another country and another order but to another world’. Ibsen would have enjoyed at least two aspects of Shaw’s praise: he was unique and he didn’t belong. Future fame could hardly have been expected in his early life. He was born in Skien, a small Norwegian town, in 1828 into a family that was comfortable in his early years. Then his father lost money and they suffered hard times. At the age of 18 Ibsen became apprentice to an apothecary and fathered an illegitimate son, whose existence he tried to conceal and who played no part in his life afterwards. In his adolescent years he even held serious doubts about his own legitimacy. He was a bookish outsider when young, sometimes mocked and always introverted and solitary as he struggled with the shame of his father’s fall from prosperity. In 1850 he moved to Christiania (now Oslo) to study medicine, but failed to enter the university. But by this time he had begun to write: social commentary and satire for a magazine, but also his first play, Catiline (or sometimes Catalina), a large-scale historical tragedy in verse. His progress was rapid and in the following year, 1851, he was appointed playwright-in-residence at the main theatre in Bergen. Five years later he moved to a similar post at Christiania. This ten year period became for him a time of intense learning about theatre traditions, stagecraft and play-writing, with a focus on Scandinavian subjects, especially Norwegian art and culture. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thorensen and their son Sigurd was born the following year. Suzannah recognised Ibsen’s talent and dedication (perhaps more than he recognised her support) and she dedicated her life to serving him. In 1862 the theatre was suffering financial problems, which led to conflict with the theatre board. Ibsen left and in 1864 he was given a grant to travel to Italy. He chose a long exile of 27 years away from Norway, with only very occasional visits home.

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He found that travelling away from his roots stimulated in him a creativity that both evoked his homeland and also encouraged a critique of it. As his fame developed, especially in Germany, so he cultivated its opposite: the solitary man’s grumpy and truculent dislike of celebrity. Ibsen was never a comfortable man or playwright. When Max Beerbohm wrote his obituary in the Saturday Review (26th May 1906), he commented on Ibsen’s propensity for making enemies: He was indeed a perfect type of the artist. There is something impressive, something magnificent and noble, in the spectacle of his absorption in himself—the impregnability of that rock on which his art was founded. But, as we know, other men, not less great than Ibsen, have managed to be human … Innate in us is the desire to love those whom we venerate. To this desire, Ibsen, the very venerable, does not pander. In Norway there was no doubt about Ibsen’s status. In 1873 Oskar II at his coronation at Trondheim as king of the Swedish/Norwegian union did him a very rare honour: he was made a Knight of the Order of St. Olaf for his ‘services to literature’. In 1874 students in Christiania held a torchlight procession in his honour at the opening of the new theatre season. At this stage in his career he was a poet and a dramatist of large-scale historical plays, to which he added the evocative pair in verse that took his reputation to a new level: Brand in 1866, the bleak story of an uncompromising priest, and Peer Gynt in 1867, a comic picaresque account of another search for fulfilment. This play includes the memorably symbolic moment where Peer strips away the layers of an onion to discover its core, but finds instead that the layers eventually peter out into nothing. Ibsen identifies neither with the austere Brand nor the self-indulgent Peer, but the notion of a search or spiritual journey was central to both his life and his art: ‘In every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification.’ These early plays assured his reputation; his equally memorable social realist plays were still to come. In 1877 Ibsen had to face the news of his father’s death. He had not been home, nor had he met his father for many years, while the rest of the family dealt with obligations which he might have been expected to share. A letter written to his uncle comes near to acknowledging a sense of guilt: ‘Obviously in the eyes of outsiders it looks as though I have deliberately cut myself off from my family once and for all, and wilfully made myself a stranger.’ What follows is Ibsen’s attempt to set this feeling against his strong belief that an artistic vocation takes priority over normal duties and morality:

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During my last visit to Norway I had a strong desire to visit Skien and my relatives in particular; but I felt a strong antipathy to the thought of any closer contact with certain dominant spiritual tendencies there, for which I have no sympathy at all, and over which a disagreement could easily have called forth unpleasantness or at least created an uncomfortable atmosphere which I would rather avoid … I doubt whether in the long run I could be happy or work in Norway. My living conditions here, in the atmosphere of the outside world, where there is freedom of thought, and people take a broad view of things, are much to be preferred. On the other hand, living like this demands many sacrifices of many different sorts. This last sentence may feel like a devious way of evading the question of ‘sacrifice’. Perhaps he would have sacrificed more by remaining close to his family? How much of a sacrifice is it to follow one’s own artistic conviction? There are no simple answers (probably not for him either), and it is certainly true that his father’s death brought to the surface moral issues that he might have preferred to keep hidden. Issues connected with concealment and exposure would dominate his future writing. Ibsen was always alert to the social and political world around him, and it must have been clear that the era of romantic nationalism was coming to an end. Capitalist expansion was changing Europe; in 1872 Norway began a great development in railway building, which generally accompanies a new professionalism in any community. In the 1870s Ibsen was travelling throughout Europe, especially in Italy and Germany. Pillars of Society in 1877 started him on a new approach, writing plays which evoke and dissect middle-class life through close observation. Brand and Peer Gynt had been timeless plays set in the world of imagination: what followed were stories of private relationships in naturalistic settings. A Doll’s House appeared in 1879, then in the 1880s he wrote Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm and The Lady from the Sea. He wrote these plays in prose rather than verse, but firmly believed that he was still a poet in the theatre. His view of poetry (and that of his more perceptive commentators) was that the play’s meaning extends beyond its ostensible theme and its naturalistically observed situation. His writing is ‘poetic’ in its intuitively felt subtext that includes echoes of language and motif that extend the play’s imaginative range towards a deeper truth that has metaphysical connotations beyond its particular situation. For him ‘poetic’ was not a synonym for decorative or lyrical. In 1891 when Ghosts was widely attacked for its apparent  Quoted by Robert Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography, (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996) pp. 224–226

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narrow ugliness, Ibsen’s irritable reply was that ‘the definition of poetry will have to be changed in Norway to conform to my play’. A Doll’s House came to him as a memory of real-life events very close to home. In 1872 a young woman, Laura Petersen, became a close friend of the Ibsen family after writing her first novel Brand’s Daughters. Ibsen used to call her his ‘skylark’ and she became almost the daughter they never had. In 1873 she married a Danish schoolmaster, Victor Kieler. When he became ill with tuberculosis his doctor prescribed restorative travel to Switzerland and Italy, for which Laura paid by secretly taking out a loan. On their return they called on the Ibsens in Munich, where Laura told her story to Suzannah and her problems with paying back the loan. To contribute towards the repayment, Laura aimed to make money as a writer and asked Ibsen to make a public recommendation of her new book. He refused, believing that she was squandering her artistic talents on writing that was rushed and irresponsibly slapdash. Instead he urged her to confide in her husband: ‘In a family in which the husband is alive it can never be necessary for the wife to—as you are doing—drain her own spiritual blood’. Ibsen, always the paternalist, believed that Victor would act with the chivalry that, in the play, Nora expected from Torvald. He would cope with the problem and ‘he must inevitably feel it his duty and his responsibility to shepherd your talent’. Laura forged a cheque to repay the loan, then—with the problem exacerbated— she confessed her folly and crime. Her husband was outraged, insisted on a separation, and condemned her as an unfit mother. She had a nervous breakdown and her implacable husband had her committed for four weeks to an asylum for the insane. The painful story ended two years later when Laura returned to her husband. This situation provided Ibsen with the core of his story, though in writing his play, he softened and complicated the marriage relationship and completely altered the story’s conclusion. When Ibsen recalled this story he was living in Amalfi in the Hotel Luna, a converted Franciscan monastery with a view over the Gulf of Salerno. He was writing with the freedom of sun and space around him, an atmosphere utterly different from the enclosed space in the play: the Helmers’ house at Christmas. He worked so rapidly that he had completed his first draft between 25th May and 3rd August. Before writing his plays he always made detailed notes and absorbed himself totally in the characters and their situations. One day he told his wife that he had seen Nora in the street: ‘She was wearing a simple blue dress’. He was absorbed by Nora in his art; just so, ten years later in 1889, he became entranced by two young women in his real life. Helene Raff and Emilie Bardach

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became inspirations for his last plays. Indeed, The Master Builder (1892) is based on a comparable situation: Solness, the architect, is deeply affected by a chance meeting with the spirited, enigmatic Hilde Wangel. There followed his final plays: Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkmann (1896) and When we Dead Awaken (1899) all concentrate on old age facing death but also relating spiritually to youth. While Ibsen was writing these plays it seems that intellectually and imaginatively he had grown apart from his wife Suzannah who had so carefully cultivated his reputation. He died in 1906 and she survived him by eight years.

2. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 1 Note: In the commentaries which follow all quotations from the play are taken from James McFarlane’s translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World Classics Series, first published 1981).

2.1 Christmas Spending The play will occupy three days of Christmas. The background of holiday and celebration, anticipated in the play’s opening moments, makes a subdued ironic comment on the story of Helmer and Nora, which will travel from apparent gaiety, through anxiety, to recrimination and then disaster, reaching a type of painful revelation. A revelation may be a type of ‘miracle’. Ibsen will give special significance to this word: Nora will propose it and Torvald will adopt it for the last line of the play. At Christmas the word ‘miracle’ recalls God’s gift of a child, though at the end of this particular Christmas Nora will be preparing to leave her own children. In her use of ‘miracle’ she refers to something rare and difficult, a state that may never happen: a new, mature and understanding relationship between husband and wife. But the play opens with apparent harmony and confidence. Nora’s awkward past and troubled future are not yet available to the audience, though if we are familiar with Ibsen’s methods we may expect the surface of his writing to hide doubts and secrets. He will unearth fragments of the past; as they reach the surface of the present they will begin to shape the future. Even the first line is a happily playful version of concealment: ‘Hide the Christmas tree away, Helene. The children mustn’t see it until this evening when it’s decorated.’ The Helmers’ Christmas is much concerned with money. Nora appears to have bought freely for Christmas: she gives the porter an over-generous tip and she banters with Torvald about borrowing and spending. He has just achieved a higher salary and is serious and responsible about money, but in calling her a ‘spendthrift’ he clearly enjoys her naivety and perhaps feels some erotic satisfaction about rebuking her for it: My pretty little pet is very sweet, but it runs away with an awful lot of money. It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet.

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‘It’ is his patronising way of being playful. ‘It’ appears to by-pass gender, but in fact gender in A Doll’s House is crucial to the play’s meaning. Gender is simplified in order to define the marital roles: men work and women play; the husband is responsible and well-informed, while the wife as a grown-up child decorates his life charmingly. Torvald has weathered the problems of financial hardship so that at this Christmas he can enjoy the rewards of his discipline and rapidly realizing ambition. He plans to celebrate with ‘some good wine’ he has ordered and Nora, as his ‘skylark’ and ‘squirrel’, will seduce him with song and movement. Ibsen just touches on a darker issue—the question of heredity. Torvald gently accuses her of being ‘just like your father’. When the past bears on the present action of Ibsen’s stories (as in Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler) the pressure comes not just from events, but also from traits that are inherited. Torvald sees himself as the responsible man (a modern knight) who rescued Nora from a feckless father. In his view both father and daughter always looked for money but couldn’t keep it and never knew how it had gone. Torvald, a lawyer and banker as well as husband, feels himself superbly qualified to be his wife’s teacher, but in the crisis of Act 3 he bitterly confesses failure when he implies that inherited corruption can never be erased even by their eight years of marriage. Nora’s frailty with money will be seen then not as delightful naivety but as the symptom of a fundamental problem: ‘No religion, no morals, no sense of duty.’ A ‘spendthrift’ may be a mean man’s word for a person with generous impulses. An audience will warm to Nora’s first few minutes on stage as she plans for everyone’s Christmas pleasure: there will be presents, a decorated tree and the domestic enclosure (typical of Ibsen’s middle and late plays) will be like a nest and a refuge from the cold and harsh world that is never shown but can be imagined outside. It is unthinkable in these opening moments that the play will end with Nora choosing to leave the familiar warmth and step into a cold unknown. For now why shouldn’t she be generous to herself too? Her private stock of macaroons indulges both a sweet tooth and a nascent impulse to defy Torvald’s orders. He disapproves of macaroons and therefore, as his child and his pet, she mustn’t have them. When he asks what she would like for Christmas, she flirts and prevaricates for a while then replies: ‘You could always give me money, Torvald.’ The request is serious, even desperate (for reasons soon to be revealed) but it must appear charmingly childlike. If he is persuaded to submit to her charm, ‘Then I’d wrap the money up in some pretty gilt paper and hang it on the Christmas tree. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ In fact Nora’s degree of calculation in pretending to be a child may be far more subtle than Torvald’s narrow straightforwardness.

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A basic question for the actress and director at this stage is to consider whether or not Nora is conscious of role-playing the wife that Torvald wants and thinks he has. Some productions stake all on a sudden later moment when she realises the truth. Others find more psychological truth in a woman whose motives and behaviour are more confused. Nora may be more mature even than she knows; she may instinctively guess that all relationships are built on deceit, of self and others, and that complicated co-existence depends upon it. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 succinctly accepts this view with cheerful irony: Therefore I lie with her, and she with me And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be. Ibsen’s stance on this type of compromise is hard to discover. Some of his characters live by lies, others are dedicated truth-tellers. Perhaps it is best to assume that the playwright loses himself in his characters and, for the sake of his art, welcomes their variety, ambivalence and inconsistency. To label Ibsen as a sort of moral fundamentalist, and then apply this judgement to his plays, is likely to oversimplify and flatten what he can offer to an audience. 2.2 Excavating the Past: Nora and Kristine The opening section displayed the surface of the Helmers’ marriage. Now Ibsen digs into the past and exposes two contrasting truths. Nora appears to be feckless but years ago she took an almost masculine initiative in borrowing money and since then she has secretly struggled with the consequences that lie beneath her apparently happy marriage. Kristine is an independent young widow but confesses her loneliness at having no husband or children to love. Nora is wealthy (and often proclaims it with tactless exuberance): Kristine is poorly dressed, a little withdrawn and desperate for paid employment. In this section they share their accounts of how they reached their current circumstances. Through their dialogue Ibsen provides the backstories, which inform audiences and help actors to develop depth of character. Nonetheless, the length of this exposition may feel daunting to the two actors when they read it for the first time. It may remind us that, when young, Ibsen entered a very traditional type of theatre: patches of clumping exposition; stagey moments of emotional high drama; clear categorising of characters into heroes and villains; wholesome moral direction; unambiguous conclusions. His debts to this Norwegian past as well as his departures from it built

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his huge significance as a bridge from the Victorian theatre to the greater experiment and freedom which began the twentieth century. But their dialogue offers more than story-telling: there are psychological insights too. With Torvald Nora has had to perform as his ‘skylark’ and ‘squirrel’; with Kristine she can stop performing and relax into something that approaches confession. However, she withholds the crucial information that it was Krogstad who lent the money. When he appears later with his demands, her high spirits now with Kristine will be remembered with a retrospective irony. At the moment Nora is full of optimism: she is proud of her achievement, and briefly annoyed that Kristine assumes she is immature. Just as Kristine has a right to be proud of working hard for her old mother, Nora claims credit for having saved Torvald’s life. It was assumed that her father had given the money for his recuperative holiday in Italy, but Nora, stung by the assumption that she is fit only for leisure and charm, reveals part of the story of how she borrowed the money. She is excited at finally getting the chance to show that she was enterprising and it is a telling feature of her marriage that she has had to keep Torvald in the dark: Torvald is a man with a good deal of pride—it would be terribly embarrassing and humiliating for him if he thought he owed anything to me. It would spoil everything between us. Kristine’s responses during this section make her, to some extent, the audience’s representative on stage. It is clear that she has misgivings about Nora’s actions and the lack of openness in the marriage. She makes tactful enquiries, but Nora seems too full of adrenalin to take a sober view of Kristine’s hints. Nora also seems sure that Helmer’s new salary will make her secret savings and careful thrift unnecessary. Perhaps her optimism gains a rather unworthy pleasure from her seeing her friend’s circumstances so low: by contrast Kristine looks dowdy, strained and old. And looks are almost everything for a woman. Torvald takes this narrow view as soon as he sees her: he will be ready to use Kristine to demonstrate his power as an employer but quick to dismiss her as a woman not worth noticing. Being noticed—or rather, being admired—may be thought an advantage, even a type of freedom. Nora’s situation may persuade us otherwise. The comfortable room at Christmas traps Nora in her ‘doll’s house’, a confined space for performance rather than individual identity. Indeed a feminist interpretation may judge it as a type of prostitution. Ibsen plants a hint towards this reading when Nora tells Kristine of how  See the section below on ‘Theatre as Ibsen found it ‘.

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at her wit’s end she ‘used to sit here and pretend that some rich old gentleman had fallen in love with me’. In her dream he died and when his will was opened these words were seen: ‘My entire fortune is to be paid over, immediately and in cash, to charming Mrs. Nora Helmer.’ Even this dream, for her own private solace, is a type of performance. Meanwhile Dr. Rank is in the study with Torvald. Kristine will jump to the conclusion that he is the rich old man who lent her money, and this mistake will prompt Nora in Act 2 to flirt with him and begin to ask a very special favour. In this way too the mistakes of the past are not left behind; Ibsen brings them lightly into play in Act 1 and then lets them grow into serious problems for the future. Nora is on stage almost throughout; much of the play’s interest springs from her different ‘performances’ of self for an audience of three very different men, in contrast to her crucial friendship with Kristine, the only other woman in the play. In writing A Doll’s House Ibsen left behind his large-cast plays (most recently Brand and Peer Gynt) and began a series of chamber pieces, each with a small cast. These required more scenes of just two characters on stage, leading not so much to a debating chamber for issues (as critics have thought more typical of Shaw’s plays) but to developing emotional antennae and the richness of a subtext that enables a complicated mixture of exposure and concealment. 2.3 Dr. Rank ‘at home’ The dialogue between Nora and Kristine contained more exposure than concealment: what follows is the opposite. At first Krogstad appears briefly. The maid has led him into the sitting room rather than the study, which is the male preserve for business discussions. His ‘invasion’ of the female area is disconcerting, but the women conceal from each other the real reasons for their alarm: it was Krogstad who lent Nora the money and he once had a love-affair with Kristine. These facts are for the moment concealed from the audience too. Krogstad is also at a loss: he is apprehensive about his imminent meeting with Torvald (who will sack him from the bank) and he knows nothing of Kristine being in town, or indeed in this room—she is hidden from his view during this brief moment. These different anxieties keep the audience puzzled and on edge, so there is some relief when Dr. Rank breezes in full of charm and confidence. But he too deals in concealment. There is just a hint in this scene that he suffers from an incurable illness and that his apparent energy (with a good deal of witty cynicism) is a way of covering loneliness and fear. We can imagine his home as a bleak and silent prison: being naturally sociable, he feels ‘at home’ with the Helmers,

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where he can be a best friend for Torvald and play games of mutual flirtation with Nora. Their real feelings for each other are hidden and different productions of the play assume different truths. In some Rank is an elderly decadent engaged in a rather seedy relationship with Nora; in others there is real depth to their innocent affection. Rank makes an amusing virtue of being unconventional; this is part of his appeal for Nora. As doctor he should care about the health of his patients but he cynically mocks them for wanting to live as long as possible. He lies to Kristine about her name being often mentioned in the house, then teases her about searching for work as a cure for being rather run down. As Nora’s confidant and special friend, he can entertainingly cut out Torvald. At first this is through light comedy with the macaroons. ‘I thought they were forbidden here,’ he says, then shares in the rule-breaking as he and Nora enjoy them. For Nora he is a delightful escape, a sort of Lord of Misrule: enjoying leisure with him, she can mock Torvald’s serious busy-ness. But she also plays at (and probably feels) childish delight at Torvald’s new position giving him power over people. Rank in this scene is serious about just one topic: Krogstad’s moral corruption. We know that Nora knows Krogstad, we know too that he is a widower with several children and in serious need of employment. In this context Rank’s sweeping criticism seems sudden and savage, especially as in other respects Rank seems amusingly permissive. For him Krogstad is ‘rotten to the core’ and Rank expresses a right-wing anger that society can permit and even encourage such people. Rank’s own hidden physical decay is thus related to a moral sickness, also hidden. His resentment about the one may have caused his contempt for the other. The play has been running for little more than 20 minutes but it is already evident that what we see on the surface and in this room is as nothing compared with the small and large secrets, the hidden truths and even the little harmless lies that punctuate the play’s progressing narrative. 2.4 Work and Play Nora’s independence with the macaroons leads her to another little act of defiance behind Torvald’s back. Rank encourages her to be an irresponsible child with a naughty word. ‘Damn’, she performs, and just at that moment Torvald comes in from his study. This time he is not the indulgent husband but the briskly decisive businessman. Immediately he has the chance to perform this role to an audience of three: Nora pleads with him to appoint Kristina to a position with the bank. Her pleading is a type

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of performance, with Rank and Kristine watching. Torvald now interviews Kristine while Rank and Nora watch in happy collusion as he offers the job. Nora is happy because child-like wheedling has succeeded for her friend; Torvald is happy because he has performed the role of magnanimous boss to an admiring audience. Kristine is relieved to have a job and Rank is the amused outsider watching everyone’s pleasures and deceits. Torvald knows that he has just dismissed Krogstad, but no-one (audience or other characters) is in a position to appreciate the ironic connection: that Kristine, still with a residue of feeling for Krogstad, has been given good fortune at his expense, and that Krogstad now has motive and opportunity for blackmailing Nora. What follows should be brisk and complicated: hats, scarves, briefcases, overlapping talk, noise, brisk exits—and, simultaneously, the entry of children. Business collides with domesticity. Torvald makes the masculine point: ‘Come along, Mrs. Linde. The place now becomes unbearable for anyone except mothers.’ Where does this comment leave the childless Kristine? For a brief time Ibsen shows Nora in another relationship. Anne-Marie has brought in the children from the snowy outdoors, not cold and threatening for them, but an exciting space to have fun and run free. There could be a hint of jealousy as Nora sees them with Anne-Marie, but the scene also establishes the nanny as maternal and entirely suitable for bringing up children, as she brought up Nora herself. The dialogue of mother and children is confused and overlapping. Most productions encourage lively improvisation here, but Ibsen also suggests two half-subliminal topics: the ‘great big dog’ that came running after the children may connect with Nora’s anxiety about what is pursuing her; the scene ends with a game of hide-and-seek that is interrupted by Krogstad, who has found out Nora’s hiding-place, perhaps on her hands and knees as a play-victim for the children. Some productions cut out the children’s appearance or reduce them to off-stage voices. But their presence helps to sharpen the issues of Anne-Marie’s value and Nora’s decision to leave in Act 3. They also combine Christmas with playtime. The appearance of Act 1 is dominated by the tree and presents. Christmas preparation justifies Nora’s reversion to childhood herself; she is as much a companion as a mother to her children. Nineteenth century Norway, like Victorian England, was often more formal in parent-child behaviour. Indeed, the presence of a nanny as substitute for mother was far more frequent then than now. Nora’s playfulness would seem a little unconventional. Is she being herself when allowed to be a child with her children? Or does it cover an anxiety about her identity and relationships? Darker productions of the play incline to the latter.

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2.5 Krogstad’s Blackmail Krogstad arrives silently at the most happy, spontaneous and domestic moment in the play. His presence is sinister as it would be in any thriller. In some productions he arrives early and hovers for some time in the doorway unseen by Nora and her children. He looks like a villain in a conventional nineteenth century melodrama. And Ibsen encourages something of this interpretation right up to his last line in the scene: ‘if I’m pitched out a second time, you’re going to keep me company’. The scene provides the audience with the vital last instalment of Nora’s exposition: the details of her contract with Krogstad. This needs to be clearly explained and Ibsen makes it sound natural by ensuring that Nora’s evasions compel Krogstad to speak and explain in impersonal lawyer’s language. Nora feels uncomfortable and assumes the role not as Krogstad’s debtor but the bank-manager’s wife: How dare you cross-examine me like this, Mr. Krogstad? You, one of my husband’s subordinates? He is a lawyer by profession and understands that adopting a superior status can be a sign of weakness and anxiety. Besides, detached language has become a habitual shell for him as a defence against ill-fortune and the emotional misery that can follow. By contrast, Torvald (also a lawyer) has been successful and is clearly on the way up to wealth and social prestige. But there are times too when Torvald can sound like Krogstad, when he needs to show male competence as being superior to female emotion. When Nora was speaking to Kristine about her successful enterprise with money she sounded full of self-esteem. When the same story, but with greater detail, is recounted by the lawyer her confidence is uprooted. She has to acknowledge the precise facts of the IOU, the date of her father’s death, the date of the signing and the significance of forgery. Krogstad is not interested in whether or not the money is paid in full: he needs to keep his job and he believes he can use Nora’s crime to ensure that Torvald is persuaded. In the male context of law Nora’s defence can be swept aside by Krogstad now and later by Torvald in Act 3: Isn’t a daughter entitled to try to save her father from worry and anxiety on his deathbed? Isn’t a wife entitled to save her husband’s life? But a theatre audience will find the disagreement less clear-cut. Does law always coincide with natural morality? Is feeling always to be eclipsed by reason? And who

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—the husband or wife-and-daughter—is the provider and guardian? The husband makes the money, buys the house, protects the weak from harm and gives orders to his family. But in this case the woman has eased her father on his deathbed and saved her husband’s life by giving him the means to recuperate in Italy. Where in all this are maturity and self-sacrifice to be found? And are forgery and concealment always deplorable (as Torvald believes when he lectures Nora in a few moments when Krogstad has left)? A director may want a malevolent Krogstad—his language can easily support this view. Others may see him as vulnerable and driven by desperation to perform harder and more callous than he feels. He is not looking for a new job: he simply wants to keep the one he has. He is not looking for extra money beyond a competence to look after his children: his chief motive is to recover some of his lost reputation. By contrast fortune favours Torvald; for him wealth and reputation go hand-in-hand. In a way, the higher one’s social prestige, the further one has to fall. And probity in business, especially in handling money, is a man’s most delicate area of reputation. Krogstad knows this well: when he blackmails Nora to use her influence to have him reinstated, Torvald is his real target. The fundamental irony is that Krogstad’s crime, which made Rank declare him to be ‘rotten to the core’ is forgery—exactly the crime that Nora committed to get the money for the Italian trip. Nora knows this connection well, and so Krogstad’s case to her is unanswerable, but it also makes him curiously sympathetic when in Act 2 he will visit her a second time. They can be seen together as fellow-victims of a society that is far readier to judge than to understand. 2.6 Torvald’s Christmas Sermon Torvald returns earlier than expected. In the street he has seen Krogstad leave the house. When he asks Nora if anyone has been visiting she lies and so he quickly traps and then cross-examines her, finding out that Krogstad has been using Nora to get himself reinstated. His lawyer’s victory leads him further in a male display of knowledge, control and competence. Nora’s defeat (and her need to deflect Krogstad’s blackmail) leads her to perform the dependent, ignorant little song-bird. The act ends with role-playing on both parts so extreme as to imply a sense of sexual foreplay. Torvald’s self-image is of a man who knows the world. As a lawyer he has seen the most depraved behaviour, its psychological consequences and how corruption at the heart of a family immediately infects the children. Mothers, not fathers, are at

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the domestic heart of every family, and so Nora infers from this lecture that though her crime is the same as Krogstad’s the family consequences will be worse. Torvald sits with his briefcase and formal papers: Nora is nervously active around the tree and its decorations. He even takes charge of what she might wear for the Sternborg’s fancy-dress party the next day, and may find time to buy a present for her and wrap it in special paper. These are domestic Christmas matters, Nora’s territory, but Torvald feels that his taking charge here is a sign of showing forgiveness after Nora’s lapse. Krogstad has given Nora his lawyer’s treatment of her particular forgery: Torvald has now given her his more broadly philosophical take on the issues of law and morality. He has made his statement about the ways of the world and given her enough brisk attention, so now he can retire to the study for proper man’s work on his bank papers. His disciplined and focused concentration permit barely a pause, even for Christmas. Ibsen’s training in traditional theatre taught him the value of powerful emotion and narrative anticipation at the end of an act. Nora refuses to let Ann-Marie bring in the children, then shuts herself alone in the room: Nora (pale with terror): Corrupt my children … ! Poison my home? (Short pause; she throws back her head) It’s not true! It could never, never be true! How she responds to Torvald’s lecture is, for the moment, unresolved. She doesn’t question his knowledge or judgement in general, but she is sure of her own feelings, especially her love for the children. She doesn’t feel like a mother who could corrupt them. An audience will probably feel that she will try to resolve the immediate problem: Krogstad must have his job back, but Torvald must never know the full story. Torvald’s behaviour in this short scene must make both parts of her hope seem extremely unlikely. These three characters are bound together at the centre of the action, but, knowing the tight construction of Ibsen’s ‘chamber’ plays, we may expect Kristine and Dr. Rank will have roles to play beyond their current positions as sympathetic observers.

3. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 2 3.1 Motherhood Most households on Christmas Day are full of happy disorder and easy companionship. But here Nora is alone with a stripped Christmas tree and scattered bits of wrapping paper. Torvald is at the bank, collecting papers for more scrutiny; the children are playing in another room, puzzled that they can’t be with their mother. Nora is restless, waiting for Krogstad’s letter, sometimes about to go out, then realising that the world stops for Christmas. Anne-Marie brings in a box of costumes so that Nora can find something for the party. The costumes are depressingly torn and disordered, much like Nora’s state of mind. They need to be repaired so that Nora, despite her mood, can be the star performer in her fancy dress, when everyone will be celebrating Christmas behind their masks and assumed roles. Ibsen is skilfully building the tension towards crisis and painful exposure to coincide ironically with an offstage party that both conceals identity and celebrates Christmas joy. Anne-Marie has been through her own troubles and provides a calming influence, but Nora can’t discuss financial problems with her; this discussion must wait until Kristine arrives. The point of this scene is to reflect on mothers and children, this time with children absent. Men too are in the background: Torvald is out, and AnneMarie’s man, the father of her illegitimate child, was worse than useless: ‘Because he didn’t help, the rotter.’ It is possible that if Torvald were to know Nora’s full story he would cast her out to fend for herself alone. Act 2 begins by reflecting on the potentially bleak position of women if not supported by men in conventional households. Kristine too has to cope by herself. There is no mention of Nora’s mother— we are simply told that Anne-Marie, having handed over her own child to be fostered by strangers, has become Nora’s substitute mother. Now she is mothering Nora’s children and could continue in this role if they were to lose Nora, just as she had lost her own mother. These relationships have a bearing on how an audience responds to Nora’s decision at the end of Act 3. It is important that the presence and issues of children appear strongly in the brief

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moments Ibsen provides for them. To some extent Anne-Marie in this scene helps Nora to deal with her anxiety about the children, but she can’t support Nora in her adult relationship with Torvald. Their last lines indicate her limits. Nora reverts to a little girl’s language: ‘Tomorrow I’ll let you see how pretty I’m going to look.’ And Anne-Marie contributes in the familiar reassuring way: ‘Ah, there’ll be no-one at the ball as pretty as my Nora.’ 3.2 What is Dr. Rank’s role? Anne-Marie is able to give Nora a generalised emotional support, based on their long relationship: Kristine, arriving unexpectedly, gives practical and moral advice. Immediately she takes charge of the torn dress and the audience has a visual impression of their relationship. Kristine sits patiently sewing at the vulgar costume (a gaudy outfit for Nora to appear as a Neapolitan fisher-girl) and talking conventional good sense about Dr. Rank. Nora is all nervous movement around her. The dress is replacing the Christmas tree: it needs to be repaired now that the tree is stripped. The coloured wrapping papers, now empty of their presents, may be read, like the dress (and the tree as it was in Act 1), as symbols of performance and surface values. Kristine’s role is crucial, but different productions offer various shades of interpretation. In one obvious sense she is a typical influence found in many of Ibsen’s plays: an outsider and truth-teller who brings stern moral discipline to the play’s central problem to remove deception and compromise. She believes that the lies that have gathered over eight years must be faced and confessed; Nora must explain the situation to Torvald and not enter into another layer of concealment by using Dr. Rank. But also Kristine can’t help being aware of life’s unfairness: her own blameless life has led to loneliness and poverty, whereas Nora’s wealth, prettiness and general high spirits have very shaky moral foundations. An actress’s interpretation of Kristine may try to merge a desire to do good with a certain satisfaction in seeing Nora suffer for a while. Their main topic is Dr. Rank and the unconventional part he plays in the family. Kristine, dowdy and strained, can hardly approve of a cynical bon viveur and he tends to overlook her. She is critical of him and his apparent relationship with Nora: ‘But how can a man of his position want to pester you like this?’ Kristine knows how a conformist and censorious world would judge the impropriety of the situation, paying no attention to individual needs or circumstances. Rank’s circumstances are complicated by what he has inherited: this may well

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be financial security, but his significant inheritance is syphilis, then an incurable disease, a result of his father’s dissolute life. Like Oswald in Ghosts, Rank must deal with anticipating a painful decline and premature death, the punishment for immoral behaviour that is not his own. Again, in his case too, life is unfair. When he next appears Rank will himself develop his view on this unfairness, but for now Ibsen is content merely to hint at the issue, using it to give Nora the chance to refer to medical problems and so disprove Kristine’s patronising view that she is ignorant of the world. Though their friendship makes both women eager to help each other, there is also a competitive edge. From her experience Kristine urges Nora to stop ‘all this business with Dr. Rank’, but when she expresses the obvious conclusion that Nora’s rich admirer is a reality and not a figure from her day-dreams, Nora jumps on Kristine’s mistake about Rank and uses it to invalidate the wider advice she is being given. Eventually Kristine’s persistence pays off and she senses a further concealment: ‘Something has happened to you since yesterday morning. Nora, what is it?’ This could be the moment for Nora to confess Krogstad’s visit but the chance disappears as Torvald enters. Ibsen’s skilful stagecraft, here as elsewhere, includes a fine judgement about how to balance exposure and concealment of his narrative details. He is master at turning the raw material of story into a shaped and controlled plot. Knowledge withheld increases frustration (in both audience and characters) so that tension builds towards the end of the act. 3.3 Seducing Torvald Kristine has to be bundled away to hide in a small room like an inconvenient servant, but she warns, ‘I’m not leaving until we’ve thrashed this thing out.’ She intends to learn the full truth and urge Nora to bring it all into the open. Torvald continues from his previous scene with Nora: he is busy with papers, but finds time to remember her dress and to congratulate himself for being so capable in all aspects of life, business and domestic. Nora is desperate for Krogstad to keep his job at the bank, but she knows that straying into Torvald’s male business territory will irritate him deeply (though he has found no difficulty in trespassing into her female domain of presents, dresses and parties). She tries to seduce him into acquiescence, with ‘squirrel’, ‘skylark’, ‘elfin child’ and ‘moonlight dance’. But the seduction soon becomes a humiliating failure as he quickly realises that she has not obeyed him in dropping the Krogstad business and

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that she is trying to manipulate him. An audience may remember how he now rejects these sexual advances when, in Act 3, they return from the party. Then the roles will be reversed: she will be weary and he will be fired with drink and erotic desire. When she rejects him, however gently, he will try to assert his rights as a husband. Here Torvald finds Nora not simply disobedient—but ungrateful too. One of his first acts on becoming manager was to assert moral values in preparing to dismiss Krogstad; his next was to please Nora by appointing her friend Kristine in his place. Even that decision had its dangers because Torvald is extremely sensitive about his image in public. He believes that men in business are weakened and damaged, not helped, if a woman contributes anything to his decisions: ‘If it ever got around that the new manager had been talked over by his wife … ’ Ibsen never shows Torvald at work in the bank; even his study, though tantalisingly close, is just out of view. But we are given enough hints to be able to imagine his behaviour with colleagues: distant stiff rectitude, and hyper-sensitive awareness towards possible slights. Here he gives one example of Krogstad breaching protocol: it appears that he treats Torvald as an equal, using his Christian name. Torvald intends this example to be conclusive and miscalculates that Nora will be shocked at this apparent slight to her husband’s status. This is Torvald the aesthete, offended by trivial appearances. In Act 3 his concern with appearances will be more shocking, when he suggests that they live the surface of a marriage to satisfy propriety, but in reality they will both accept that the marriage is dead. At this Act 2 moment Nora miscalculates by laughing at his small-mindedness. Torvald, the lawyer, can deal with arguments, but not with mockery: What’s that you say? Petty? Do you think I’m petty? Nora’s laughter has destroyed her whole plan to persuade him. He immediately orders the maid to deliver Krogstad’s letter of dismissal. Torvald’s pique has replaced his judgement as he feels the need to assert himself as a man of action. For the scene to end here would leave both characters angry and flustered. But Ibsen, as so often, prefers an ironic contrast and adds half a page in which the behaviour of both characters alters. Nora is shocked into terrified near-silence. Torvald can’t know the real reason or the full story of what Krogstad may reveal to the press; he assumes she is alarmed purely on his behalf, that he may have to suffer spiteful comments. His image both at home and in the business world demands that he can easily weather such puny squalls of fortune. He is now no longer touchy, but full of calm, complacent magnanimity; once more he plays the roles of forgiving master and protector of the weak.

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Nora now knows that she can never persuade Torvald and, if she is to continue to conceal the story of her forgery, that there is only one possible solution. At this point the doorbell rings and Dr. Rank comes to visit. 3.4 Dr. Rank Misjudges An audience now clearly sees two stories running in parallel. Dr. Rank has come to tell Nora that he is nearing his crisis: he is himself both doctor and patient and his dispassionate investigation has showed that his illness is incurable and that he must face a ghastly decline and death. An event in the past, his father’s irresponsible behaviour, causes him present anxiety and future suffering. Nora’s past event, the deal with Krogstad, has also placed her in a trap—more moral than physical in her case—and her crisis is imminent. A recurring lesson in Ibsen’s plays is that the past will never lie down and die; it rises like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth to torment those who appear to have survived. Dr. Rank too is a performer. Faced with this horror, and doomed to suffer alone, he masks his anxiety and sense of life’s unfairness with grim humour: Yes, really the whole thing’s nothing but a huge joke. My poor innocent spine must do penance for my father’s gay subaltern life. Whatever he may think and feel in his lonely bachelor house, he comes to the Helmers to entertain and be entertained by Nora. There is something exhibitionist about the way he talks: his image of his ‘internal economy’ being ‘bankrupt’, of ‘rotting up there in the churchyard’, of the black cross on the visiting card, which will announce to Nora that he is about to die. As a performer herself (and a woman) she may appreciate these types of wit. More to the point, it is she, and not Torvald, who is the privileged listener; Rank’s relationship with her is more deep, subtle and ambiguous than it is with Torvald, his ‘best friend’. He makes the point that ‘Helmer is a sensitive soul; he loathes anything that’s ugly.’ Nora and the audience will understand this comment in ways that Rank can’t be expected to understand. Rank’s position in the Helmers’ household is highly unconventional, an odd state of affairs considering how proper and alert to damaging gossip Torvald is in other matters. Its element of risk adds spice to his feelings for Nora with their unacknowledged eroticism. In particular, he needs to feel specially privileged with her; hence his performance of resigned acceptance that ‘when you are gone you are soon forgotten.’ However, he has noticed that Kristine now appears to be a privileged confidante. His position is no longer exclusive and it must be irritating that her boring good sense

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is to replace his lively panache when he has gone. Rank’s situation with the Helmers compares interestingly with Judge Brack and Hedda in the darker, more threatening Hedda Gabler. There the play ends with Brack using blackmail (like Krogstad) to remain, as he puts it, ‘cock of the walk’ (like Rank), while the husband toils away with papers in another room. Rank’s relationship with Nora is softer than Brack’s with Hedda. Ibsen’s stage direction now instructs the light to dim gradually for their scene on the sofa. This scene has caused difficulty with those critics who find Nora’s behaviour deplorable and exploitative. The scene is more muted, gentle and erotic than any of her scenes with her husband. In part this is to prepare for Rank’s declaration at the end, in part it should be seen as the melancholy after-effect of his joking about disease and death. From the costume box she takes a pair of silk stockings to tease and excite Rank; the box had also contained the tarantella costume which, in Act 3, will help to arouse Torvald. Ibsen’s direction is for her to hit him lightly across the ear with the stockings. In some productions she blindfolds him, in others she draws the stocking over her arm and teases him with this new ‘leg’. The scene can be seedy and salacious, close to prostitution: a desperate woman tries to seduce a dying man. At another extreme of interpretation it may be the most tender moment of the play between the two people who have a deeper friendship than that between any others in the play. Nora is about to lose the one person who tolerates and enjoys her frailties, who loves her and understands. In the dim light Nora leads in to the risky proposition, planted by Kristine. She is about to ask for ‘a tremendous favour’ and the audience understands that she will confess all her anxieties, ask for financial rescue, and that Rank will be able to perform the role of understanding husband which Torvald will almost certainly refuse. In her tentative preamble she pays a special tribute to Torvald, perhaps to forestall any sense of disloyalty in what will follow. But she can get no further because Rank uses her words to compete (in effect) with Torvald. He too would gladly give his life for her sake—in fact, he declares his love. Until now their friendship has depended on what can’t be spoken. Part of the excitement and the enigma has sprung from the fact that neither quite knows the depth of feeling in the other; maybe, even, each of them has chosen to be vague about his/her own feelings. Rank has broken a private and necessary taboo. Perhaps too Nora is already preparing a new role for Torvald to play, adding a fantasy heroism on top of the shallow romance which he is living by. Rank’s declaration will feel to her

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like an intrusion; it would be disloyal to countenance it. Nora can’t continue with her proposal and calls for the maid to bring in the lamp. A muted light was needed for this risky exploration; now full light brings propriety and even a degree of formality in their relationship. The sense of crisis and loss is given further focus by their awkward silence with each other, which has to last for a long time—as long as it takes for the maid to bring in the lamp and go through the business of lighting it. ‘Oh, how could you be so clumsy, Dr. Rank?’ she bursts out, realising that there have suddenly been two losses: she can’t now ask him for money to pay off Krogstad, and also her friendship with Rank has lost its ease and freedom in these the last days of his life. Nora tries to restore their friendship but Rank veers between threatening to leave and never come back (soon, we realise, the decision about departure will be out of his control) and requiring some analysis of what she feels. Normally Rank would pride himself on sophistication, certainly not on the clumsiness he now shows. Nora is at first defensive: ‘I always think it’s tremendous fun having you.’ When again he tries to compete with Torvald for affection she makes one of her most perceptive comments in the play: Well, you see there are those people you love and those people you’d almost rather be with. How their scene ends depends on the tone of the production. Perhaps he leaves with some reassurance that she is deeply fond of him. But she also lies again: when the maid enters with a card (Krogstad has just arrived) she improvises an idea about a new costume. Rank knows this detail is a lie; maybe she also lies about her feelings for him? He may leave in a state of cold disdain. Whatever emotional colouring an individual production aims for, this is the last time Rank and Nora will have private time together. 3.5 Further Pressure from Krogstad The core of the previous scene (with Rank and Nora together on the sofa) seemed on the surface to be relaxed and timeless, though within Nora the underlying tension and urgency to solve her problem is increasing with each encounter. When Krogstad enters his urgency is also evident. He has arrived the back way and appears in his hat and coat. He has been dismissed and his need to be reinstated is as strong for him as is Nora’s to prevent her husband from knowing all. His plan is that Torvald will invent

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a new job for him, one that will allow him to rise to the top of the bank’s hierarchy; he will then promise not to make a public disclosure of Nora’s forgery but will retain her IOU note as an insurance against possible problems in the future. At first his words are urgent, demanding and harsh, but more sensitive signs are evident too. He points out that they are fellow-victims. As they skirt round the issue of suicide, she is shocked by the probing way he refers to her state of mind: ‘How did you know I was thinking of that?’ He replies: ‘Most of us think of that to begin with.’ His ‘most of us’ invites Nora to join him as one of society’s outcasts. From his own bleak experience he knows that suicide is an option for the desperate. Also she knows that her husband and children are likely to suffer, but she has thought little that he also has children and that they will suffer if their father is cast back into the gutter. More: ‘if you happen to be thinking of running away … … or anything worse.’ When she seems to find courage to defy him, he offers her some of the play’s most frighteningly evocative descriptions: Under the ice, maybe? Down in the cold, black water? Then being washed up in the spring, bloated, hairless, unrecognisable … Is he sympathising with her? The words may seem too lingering and graphic for that. Is he trying out a gentle, even erotic, type of sadism, playing with her hair as he pictures her hairless? However the lines are felt and performed, her suicide will be no use to him, since he regards her beauty and sex-appeal as the best possible ways of persuading Torvald into compliance. He also points out that suicide, like any death or disaster, is not an ending: the results still linger on and her reputation would still be in his hands. She can’t save Torvald by a grand self-sacrifice; her past will affect the future of others if Krogstad decides to reveal the truth. Nora has to realise that both life and death are, equally, traps for her. The letter that will explain everything and that is addressed to Torvald is in his hands. He leaves, threatening that he will let Torvald have it. For a moment there is silence outside the door. Nora interprets it: He’s going. He hasn’t left the letter. No, no that would be impossible. What’s he doing? He’s stopped outside. He’s not going down the stairs. Has he changed his mind? Is he … ? Escape is still a very fragile possibility for her. For our understanding of Krogstad, it is important that we can imagine him on the other side of the door torn between conscience and practical necessity. Then she hears his letter drop in the locked letter-box and she knows that her trap

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has fully sprung. Ibsen’s language and stage-directions here may seem close to the traditions of Victorian melodrama and the loaded situation may remind us of many twentieth century thrillers. Ibsen’s techniques include an inherited stagecraft but he uses it to serve his modernity: a greater moral and emotional depth, which in this play gathers weight as he nears the end of Act 2. 3.6 Miracles Kristine enters with the mended dress. Her reassurance seems to make the dress a simple problem, easily solved, and implies that Nora could do the same with her potentially torn marriage. But Kristine now has to hear another part of the past: the fact that Nora forged a signature. This clearly shocks her, but there are offstage pressures because Torvald is in his study with Rank; they will soon enter and then it will be a short step for him to find the letter in the box. Time is pressing too, preventing thoughtful or expansive discussion; there can be no more long scenes like their first in Act 1 when Kristine arrived. Nora speaks rapidly and mysteriously what seem like her last words. Kristine ‘must testify’ as at an inquest. Because of her nerves Nora’s intentions may be discounted, so she wants a calm truth-teller to speak for her afterwards so that her reputation is not damaged: ‘I’m not out of my mind; I’m quite sane now.’ As she nears her crisis when the truth will be revealed she also anticipates the ‘truth’ of a ‘miracle’. A miracle reaches beyond accepted and current possibilities and into new life in new worlds, as at Christmas or Easter. In Nora’s case the miracle may be through birth or through death. The marriage could be reborn gloriously if she were to confess all to Torvald and he were to take the risk of accepting responsibility. Alternatively, the death would be her suicide through which she would sacrifice herself for the sake of a blameless family living on afterwards. It is not clear which course Nora intends. It is certain that she doesn’t anticipate the third route, the one that she will actually take at the end of the play. The ‘miracle’ is too enigmatic for Kristine to understand. There is no time for explanation, only for a more practical possibility. Here Kristine makes a revelation about Krogstad, which surprises Nora: ‘There was a time when he would have done anything for me.’ Kristine hurries off to use this old relationship to try to save her friend, much as Nora has just tried to use Rank. There is no time for the audience to wonder how he will take this calculated appeal, because Torvald is knocking at the locked door of his study.

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3.7 The Tarantella For Torvald the locked door was another of Nora’s games; when he is allowed to come out he expects ‘a marvellous transformation’—Nora in her costume for the tarantella, but this will be merely a decorative display and not the miracle that their marriage needs. He promises to devote the evening totally to her, but then suddenly he remembers to look outside to see if any letters have arrived. Nora panics and demands that he rehearse her immediately in the dance ready for tomorrow’s party. Rank offers to play the piano so that Torvald can be free to watch and direct the performance. This is a symbolic moment: it will be Rank’s final service for her, not the one she was about to propose to him, but it will have the ironic effect of a requiem for both of them and a potential moment of contact beyond words. They can share it together excluding the others. But Nora is too overwrought to see it like this and she dances crudely and too fast. Helmer is shocked and his criticism has an irony that is beyond his understanding: ‘But my dear, darling Nora, you are dancing as though your life depended on it.’ The tarantella is named after Taranto in southern Italy, where the Helmers went for Torvald’s recuperation holiday. The word is associated with the large local wolf spider or ‘tarantula’. Its bite was considered fatal and, traditionally, could be cured only by frenetic dancing. The legend had two interpretations: (a) the woman must dance the most joyful dance of her life or else she would die; (b) the dancer will experience the most joyous dance of her life just before her death. Nora’s wild version of it may recall these beliefs. The dance serves two further functions. It buys time by distracting Torvald from the letter and herself from her problems. Another interpretation connects the dance with Krogstad. His last visit led her towards suicide and threatened Torvald’s position in charge of the bank with the intention of replacing Torvald himself. As type of demon or spider, he has introduced a type of poison into Nora. When she dances it out of herself, she also begins to cleanse her system of her debilitating doll-life. Torvald knows nothing of these complications. All he sees is a type of generalised madness; in Act 3 when he refers back to her performance at the party he makes his limited aesthete’s comment about its going beyond decorum. Nora is already far beyond these superficialities; she is reacting to unspecified and dangerous changes to come, and so her dancing is intense and weirdly joyless. Kristine returns and adds herself to the onstage audience. She knows more than the men about why Nora has launched herself into the dance. Torvald comes close: he

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guesses about there being a letter but he can know nothing of its content or implications. Rank wonders if Nora may be pregnant. Torvald is so clear in his denial that we may wonder about their sexual relations. In their ignorance they humour her strange mood even to the extent of her demanding champagne and the forbidden macaroons. Nora seems to be elated with despair. Her energy at the end of Act 2 may be seen as an anguished celebration of her life in front of an audience and a preparation for lonely suicide. The men go in to dinner and there is a snatched moment of contact between Kristine and Nora. A different playwright might have used it to push the plot onwards with further information. Ibsen, the master of delay and careful timing, gives nothing away; Krogstad has left town. No-one knows even if he will agree to meet Kristine.

4. Reading A Doll’s House: Act 3 4.1 Kristine and Krogstad Ibsen’s technique of delay teases the audience further. Act 3 opens with Kristine and soon with Krogstad. It is rare to have a scene without Nora. It would seem natural for Kristine to play safe and meet Krogstad in some other place, but Ibsen’s tight, enclosed unity of action demands that everything take place in the Helmers’ room. Even the dance is held nearby in the same building; the sounds of happy celebration can be heard throughout this dialogue. There is great risk in Krogstad, ‘rotten to the core’, visiting Torvald’s house on a Christmas midnight when Torvald and Rank may walk through the door at any moment. Kristine waits for Krogstad, unsure about whether or not he will respond to her note. Her prepared excuse for being there herself is given later: ‘I did so want to see Nora all dressed up. ’ The still period before Krogstad enters offers much that is new for the audience to reflect on. The room looks different: the furniture has been moved and a dim light glows from a lamp on the table. Kristine sits alone, trying to read but too anxious to concentrate. The music and laughter from the party, faintly heard from above, emphasise her drab isolation, which will soon be given more visual impact when Torvald and Nora arrive in their colour and style. It is the dead of night, a time of thought and anxiety for adults. There are dangerous and difficult decisions to come that will determine what happens in the morning light—and for all the days to come. Both Kristine and Krogstad have had bitter experiences that make them wary, suspicious of sentiment and unwilling to expect much from life and other people. But Kristine knows that she must find a way to reach out to Krogstad and break through his defensive shell. He is understandably suspicious and prickly. For him meeting in this room is distasteful and he sneers at the idea of the privileged Helmers dancing upstairs. He shows hostility to Kristine and in their opening dialogue we are given a final stretch of exposition: years ago it was she who broke up their relationship because of her duties to a sick mother and young brothers and his lack of financial prospects. This was clearly Krogstad’s first disaster and he feels that her action then began the wreckage of his life that followed.

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Her approach to him is not coloured with sentiment. That is not in her nature and, in any case, would not be the way to reach him. Using his image of a shipwreck, she talks of two victims having more chance than one. They could join their puny forces to become survivors in a harsh world. She is entirely practical and her words can seem almost shockingly unromantic. But as an adult she also knows that a child’s view of the world is unrealistic and that idealism is a dangerous luxury. For her, life and relationships have to be based on sensible compromise. If she and Krogstad come together for a second time, it will not be like their youthful love; both have been too bruised to expect the past to return as it was. This small-cast play explores one central marriage: Torvald and Nora. But this scene offers an illuminating counterpoint and is strikingly different from anything else in the play. As the Helmers’ apparently blissful marriage is about to fall apart because of false expectations and misguided role-playing, Kristine and Krogstad come together on the basis of clear-eyed realism. Kristine shows great courage in taking such a risk; she combines an independent spirit with acknowledging that she will be unfulfilled as a woman if she has no-one to care for. At the end of the scene Ibsen creates an extra twist. When their discussion moves on to the Helmers it suddenly occurs to Krogstad that Kristine may be using him (and pretending affection) in order to rescue Nora: Is that how things are? You want to save your friend at any price? Tell me straight. Is that it? She partially accepts this as an early motive, but then surprises him—and perhaps the audience too—by not wanting him to ask for his letter back. She doesn’t intend to save Nora from pain, because pain and truth must often accompany each other. Kristine’s whole life, including this scene, has been based on telling the truth. Now she feels that Nora must be truthful too, and this means that Torvald must read Krogstad’s letter. It’s quite incredible the things I’ve witnessed in this house in the last twentyfour hours. Helmer must know everything. This unhappy secret must come out. Those two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on. Ibsen stresses the value of risk: for Nora when Torvald reads the letter; for Kristine in her approach to Krogstad; for Krogstad in coming to the Helmer’s house. The last two have proved successful. The shipwrecked survivors will live and work for each other. Krogstad hurries away to write his second letter, though for moment he keeps his intention to himself: ‘But one thing I can do, and I’ll do it at once.’

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4.2 After the Party Torvald arrives with Nora, he intends to go to bed with her as soon as possible and so is irritated at seeing Kristine still there. The scene that follows is visually powerful, and comic too in ways which often make audiences cringe with embarrassment. Torvald uses Kristine (‘a frightful bore’, as he describes her later) to act as an audience and dowdy contrast to Nora in her gaudy costume and perhaps heavy make-up. He is drunk, loud and coarse, while Nora has quietly shrunk within herself, strikingly different from her last appearance and from what the costume invites her to be. Torvald comes close to inviting Kristine to act as pornographer’s accomplice in appreciating Nora’s beauty and describing the impact of her dance upstairs. Nora is being used as a sexual possession, but is too listless to offer much protest. For Torvald women should be decorative performers and men their controlling directors. He describes Nora as if she were a fantasy heroine in an old-fashioned stage play or a novel: I took my lovely little Capri girl—my capricious little Capri girl, I might say—by the arm, whisked her once round the room, a curtsey all round, and then—as they say in novels—the beautiful vision vanished. An exit should always be effective, Mrs Linde. The champagne has encouraged Torvald to be associate performer as well as director, and perhaps he relives the scene as well as describing it. His swirling cloak gives him the air of magician; he is in black and she in bright colour, but he is animated while she is passive. Kristine watches quietly and an audience can easily guess at her thoughts. Torvald makes a brief exit, which gives her the chance to speak to Nora about the letter. All she gets from her is dull, obstinate despair. When Torvald returns he tries to direct Kristine in the aesthetics of being a woman. He points to her knitting and explains that it is inferior to embroidery because the actions are ugly and limit the chances of a woman being decorative for a man to look at. For an audience there is an appalled fascination in watching the unintended comedy of Torvald’s behaviour, the way his confidence, fuelled with alcohol, leads him so far from the truth about himself and the state of his marriage. When eventually he comes to read Krogstad’s letter his shock and anger will be predictable, and an audience may worry about the degree of Kristine’s risk in wanting Nora to confess all to him. But she may well feel that a breakdown in their relations will be preferable to this humiliating state of affairs.

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What follows is gentler, though still dominated by Torvald. His talk becomes a type of sexual foreplay. He evokes the quietness of the house and relives his fantasy of how at a party he behaves distantly as though they are secretly in love and when it’s time to go ‘I pretend that we are just leaving our wedding, that I’m taking you to our new home for the first time.’ In real life he may feel some justification: his new job gives them a new start free of financial pressures and a reason for her to be especially grateful to him. If she makes hint of protest he becomes more excited: ‘You still have the tarantella in your blood.’ And when she really breaks away from his advances, there is a hint that violence could follow his gentler pressure: ‘Am I not your husband?’ That legal fact is the basis for all his chauvinist confidence. But, as with several other scenes, Ibsen uses a new arrival to cut off possible development. Rank knocks at the door and there is half-comic frustration for Torvald as sex is thwarted by a second intruder. But Rank is a close friend and so can’t be bundled away so readily. 4.3 ‘Thank you for the light’ An audience will guess that Rank has just left the last party of his life, a fact which he soon confirms to Nora. But he resolutely intends to keep on living for the moment: he too has drunk a good deal of fine champagne and he flirts with Nora in his familiar urbane and teasing style. Many productions express his manner in his dress: elegant and perhaps a little disordered, a splash of bold and defiant colour; perhaps he is still wearing, for a moment, an appropriate mask from the party. There is a paradoxical difference between his day and Torvald’s. Rank has worked hard on his scientific experiments and is enjoying the reward of evening leisure, whereas Torvald has, unusually for him, done no work in the day and is soon to find that it will end in disaster. The whole scene contains poignant irony. Torvald, with his self-image of worldly wisdom, knows nothing of the semi-coded messages that pass between Rank and Nora. Rank remains cheerful throughout, while Nora struggles with the knowledge that she is seeing Rank for the last time, without having the chance to speak lovingly to him after the misunderstandings of their previous scene. For Torvald Rank is in the way, preventing him from sex with Nora; for Nora Torvald is blocking her chance to say a proper farewell to her dying friend. The conclusion of Rank’s tests is ‘certainty’ for himself, the ‘best possible’ result. Nora can’t yet say this for herself, nor will there be certainty for her at the end of the play when the tests for her and Torvald will have been experienced. Nora pretends

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that there will be more parties for them to enjoy with Rank: ‘Tell me, what shall we two go as next time?’ Rank’s reply means little to Torvald: ‘At the next masquerade, I shall be invisible.’ But Nora is chilled and silenced by it. The conversation seems to end, presumably with Nora and Rank together and unable to communicate further and with Torvald relaxing and waiting at some distance apart from them. The scene ends with a symbolic moment contrived by Rank with a typical sense of theatre, a personal flourish, which also justifies Ibsen’s own sense of theatre in giving him a telling exit from the play. He asks Helmer for an expensive cigar, ‘one of the dark Havanas’. In performance it takes some time for him to receive and prepare the cigar, and then for Nora to ask and to give him a light. Virtually no words are spoken but the moment is eloquent. Normally the male host would look after the guest and his cigar, but when Nora does it there is erotic significance, a sexual frisson that can only be fantasy, as it always has been. She is physically very close to him and, while he holds the cigar, she gives him the fragile light of a match, which may represent the transience of life and is also her final service to guide him to his death. As he leaves, Torvald gives him a casual and conventional farewell: ‘Goodbye, my dear fellow.’ Nora’s ‘Sleep well, Dr. Rank’ means far more, as does her final anxious plea: ‘Wish me the same.’ Rank’s last words are ‘Thank you for the light.’ Torvald will think he refers to her lighting the cigar. Nora and the audience know that he thanks her for bringing warmth and love to the life of a lonely bachelor and that he has forgiven her for her recoiling at that moment in Act 2 when the unspoken love was becoming too overt for her. There is great poignancy in the fact that he will never know what she was about to ask him and how easily and willingly he could have helped her. 4.4 The Damaging Letter Torvald dismisses Rank and his comments with the ironic remark: ‘He’s had a lot to drink.’ A question for actor and director is bound to be raised: what does Torvald think about an older man who is so obviously attracted to Nora? Some productions have seen tension here; in others Torvald feels perfectly comfortable because of Rank’s age, and believing that his feelings must be fantasy and play-acting. Just as at the party Torvald felt some personal status in seeing how Nora attracted general admiration, so throughout their lives Rank’ attentions to Nora have given the same assurance that Torvald has married a prize possession. At last he goes to the letter-box and finds it quite full, but notices that a broken

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hair-pin has been scratching at the lock. Evading to the last, Nora pretends that one of the children must have been tampering there. Torvald has Krogstad’s letter in his hand, but still Ibsen manages to delay the moment of discovery. Rank’s visiting cards with the black cross are also there. Torvald hits on the truth without intending to: ‘It’s just as if he were announcing his own death.’ Nora deals privately with her grief. Just as Rank judged discreetly in making his announcement without words, so Nora feels that silence conveys her true feeling and acknowledges Rank’s dignity. Torvald, on the other hand, makes pronouncements of grief and loss. A production that takes every opportunity to disparage Torvald will probably use his words as conventional and rather mawkish in their sentiments, after which he proposes sex with Nora as a way of proving himself a man and reinforcing his good fortune as a contrast to Rank’s lonely death. A different interpretation will present Torvald as genuinely shocked, sympathetic towards his old friend and saddened for Nora’s loss too. He accepts her feeling that separate beds would be more appropriate, and she surprisingly now insists that he read his letters. Perhaps Rank’s imminent death has persuaded her that everything is transient and that her own catastrophe can’t be avoided. Torvald then goes to his room with the letters. Ibsen now borrows a technique from Greek tragedy in choosing to withhold the moment of disaster from the audience, who are invited to imagine it happening offstage. What we actually see is Nora alone preparing to leave the house for her lonely suicide. She still wears her party costume but that was her old life and so she wraps over it a large black cloak. Dress should match a character’s status and fortunes, which was also why Rank suggested the black cloak of invisibility for his next party. Perhaps Nora feels at her closest to Rank at this moment, but she also remembers Krogstad’s description of ‘that black, icy water’ and grieves for her children. Torvald bursts out of the study just as Nora is about to leave the house. What follows is rapid and brutal. He ignores the truth of her defence: ‘I loved you more than anything in the world’. This was why eight years ago she borrowed the money and forged her father’s signature, but he dismisses her love as a paltry excuse. His rush of anger suddenly forces her into a new understanding: she is realising not what she has done but who her husband really is. From this point she watches him, saying almost nothing, and hearing what is, in effect, a monologue. Presumably Torvald is a success in law and banking because of his clear analytic brain, his control and judgement. The actor here has to decide whether or not these qualities are evident in his attack on Nora. Or do his words contain not just anger but

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elements of sad incomprehension too? Or it may be that his fear of adverse publicity and buried resentments are producing what is simply a torrent of brutal words. For Nora—and perhaps for an audience too—he reveals more about himself than about her, though he feels himself to be entirely occupied in making judgements on her. He always likes to be in control but he speaks here about all that lies beyond his control: Nora’s dealings with Krogstad; the irresponsibility of Nora’s father that has continued into the daughter’s life; Krogstad’s power to wreck his business career; even the possibility that gossip might link him with Nora as accomplice in the crime. He lets slip an interesting priority of values when attacking father and daughter: ‘No religion, no morals, no sense of duty … .’ The last obligation, ‘duty’ seems to carry the most weight. Perhaps he implies that conforming to what society expects (and what he as husband, expects from a wife) is more significant than the substance of religion and moral conduct. In the end decisiveness is an acknowledged male virtue. Women may vary and prevaricate, but, as a man, Torvald prides himself on cutting through words and taking clear action. Sometimes, though, it may be anger rather than clear judgement that gives him the adrenalin to make a decision, as it was in Act 2 when her word ‘petty’ hurried him into sending the letter of dismissal to Krogstad. Now he feels he must do something significant. His first decision is comic in being so petty: ‘Take that shawl off.’ He requires obedience from her. It is almost as if it doesn’t matter what trivial or irrelevant action he requires of her, so long as she displays obedience. His next decision is an impossible solution to their problem: Nora must live in the house as though nothing has changed, but she must never come into contact with the children. Torvald clearly gives this decision no serious thought. It is as though his instinctive regard for the appearance of marital propriety makes him ignore what the real nature of such coexistence would be like. For him appearance is far more important than truth. 4.5 ‘I am Saved’ The unexpected sound of the doorbell at the dead of night makes Torvald panic. It may be Krogstad and so Nora must hide. But it is only the maid in her nightdress holding a letter—from Krogstad. It is addressed to Nora, but in his current mood Torvald allows no rights to Nora, not even the reading of her own letter. When he reads of Krogstad’s regret and apologies he feels immense relief: ‘I am saved!’ ‘I’, not ‘you’ or ‘we.’ Nora’s welfare, even Nora herself, has no relevance for him.

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The total egotism in his relief then gives way to the hypocrisy of his ‘forgiveness’. Now he pays her elaborate and patronising attention. For him she is a child, not an adult woman. One of the clearest statements of his misguided values appears in what he must feel to be his most loving assurance: No, no, you just lean on me, I shall give you all the advice and guidance you need. I wouldn’t be a proper man if I didn’t find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless. In the theatre this line almost always produces a gasp of astonished laughter. Perhaps the response in 1879 would have been more complicated. The modern director and actor have to tread carefully in this section. Laughter—of the right type —is not necessarily a sign that the scene is being trivialised. But it can be far too easy to caricature Torvald’s extreme switch from anger to reassurance, and to welcome the crudest responses instead of encouraging the audience to enter into the believable predicaments of both characters. If Torvald is utterly deplorable, with no redeeming qualities, then we may start to wonder about Nora herself: after all she has been married to him for eight years, has clearly loved him, and has borne him three children. Again, though in his altered mood, Torvald speaks what is a virtual monologue. Nora goes into the spare room to take off her costume. It must seem to her—and to the audience—that the tarantella costume appears increasingly inappropriate. A few minutes earlier he barked at her: ‘Stop play-acting’. She decides to remove all signs of frivolity and to dress in clothes that will match her more serious intentions. In fact, when she reappears she may be dressed very like Kristine, whose life has contained no glamour or frivolity. While she is offstage Torvald continues to talk —ostensibly to her but, since she is not visible, his words will seem even more like verbose, self-indulgent musing. He returns to one of their familiar images: she was his ‘skylark’ and so he plays with the image of birds: Here you can find refuge. Here I shall hold you like a hunted dove I have rescued unscathed from the cruel talons of the hawk and soothe your poor beating heart. His new relaxation allows him to theorise about the passage of time, the very different natures of men and women and the great beauty of forgiveness. He repeats himself and talks expansively, the words perhaps supported visually by his spreading himself in an armchair with a drink in his hand. He doesn’t see what she is doing and probably doesn’t see her quiet return to the

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room. Ibsen’s stagecraft has linked the totally credible length of his speech to the practical need to give Nora the time to change. If she returns well before he sees her then there can be powerful irony in her still presence behind his relaxed monologue. This may remind an audience of Krogstad’s first appearance in Act 1 while Nora was playing with her children. 4.6 Nora’s Truth First of all Torvald is surprised at the sight of her clothes: ‘You’ve changed your things?’ Her reply, slightly correcting his question: ‘Yes, Torvald, I’ve changed’ lets the audience know that the full degree of her change will be very hard for Torvald to grasp. She knows it too and takes charge of the dialogue to begin her careful analysis of their marriage. Her request, ‘Sit down’, though simple, sounds sufficiently unfamiliar for Torvald to feel threatened: ‘You frighten me, Nora. I don’t understand you.’ Again her reply indicates that a very basic and broader type of understanding will be needed for what follows. She needs to survey her past and she does him the justice of trying to share all her thoughts with him, as far as possible without rancour or recrimination. She knows that he believes men to be capable of rational thought and women to be driven by emotion and she tries to ensure that her manner is clear and grave so that these gender prejudices may have no weight. But it is hardly surprising that he will revert to them, and during the scene he accuses her of being tired, hysterical, exaggerating, ungrateful, delirious, ill, and, of course, ‘talking like a child’. For him a wife is a type of grown-up child, and this is Nora’s first area of concern. She is careful to include her early life and not to begin simply with their marriage. She feels wronged by the two men who believed they loved her deeply: her father as well as Torvald. They both turned the houses where she lived into play-rooms; she was a kept child-doll who had to have fun and, in return, she would entertain the men. ‘Haven’t you been happy here?’ Torvald asks. But she needs to be serious and thoughtful about the word ‘happy’, which carries far more depth than the mere comfort that has been created for her life. ‘Fun’, ‘gaiety’, ’cheerfulness’ would describe her situation more accurately. Similarly, when he refers to ‘love’ she corrects him by pointing to the shallowness of his feeling: ‘You only thought how nice it was to be in love with me.’ In taking her situation seriously, Nora is trying to be accurate about language so that she can be accurate about the conditions of their marriage and make sure that

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Torvald understands. The way they speak to each other reverses what an audience saw in Act 1 where he was the precise lawyer and she improvised charmingly. Now he struggles with whatever words he hopes may have some impact on her, while she remains calm and focused. Torvald acknowledges ‘some truth in what you say’. Maybe this is self-conscious tact so that he can start to reassert himself, maybe he half believes it. ‘Play-time is over; now comes the time for lessons.’ He expects to teach her, so that she will teach the children and the traditional hierarchy can be restored. Again, the unfamiliar lawyer in her catches him out: ‘Didn’t you say yourself … that you couldn’t trust me with that job?’ He flounders and tries to retract. She pushes rapidly through his confusion and makes her real point about education: ‘I must take steps to educate myself … If I’m ever to reach any real understanding of myself and the things around me, I must learn to stand alone.’ Her plans are very radical. They sound decisive even for nowadays; they were shockingly extreme for 1879. She intends to leave home, husband—and children. She needs to question the basis for each of Torvald’s three criteria: religion, morals, duty. She refuses now to give automatic acceptance to what she learned from three influential men: her father, her husband and ‘what Pastor Hansen said when I was confirmed’. She dismisses the importance of gossip or even scandal and plans to examine who has the right principles—herself or society. Only when she has found her new self will she consider returning—and then only if Torvald has changed enough to be the right new husband for a new Nora. When he uses the most extreme language, ‘You are betraying your most sacred duty’, she examines the words carefully and asserts that she has a duty to herself before her duty as a wife and mother. This is an uncompromising position for her to take and should not be automatically accepted even by audiences today. Many will believe that a mother has a duty to her children more pressing than that to a husband. At the very least her stance should provoke thought rather than flag-waving delight merely because it sounds radical and because Torvald has been so wrong. A production’s way of presenting Torvald becomes crucial in this scene, interestingly the one where he listens the most and talks the least. It is possible to play him as a far more deplorable character than Krogstad. Though he has committed no crime nor offended against any of society’s views, he may be played as an extreme mixture of bully and fool. But perhaps an actor should fight against the ease of falling into this stereotype and look for redeeming traits and arguments: the way society has conditioned him—and most people; his intention to be kind and loving; his conscientious

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work for his wife and children; his sense of duty; the fact that Nora’s decision seems to be so sudden. For some critics Torvald’s respectability is a more damaging flaw than if he had been a rake or a drunkard. In moments of extreme pressure he tries sarcasm: ‘I suppose you have some moral sense? Or tell me—perhaps you don’t.’ Often the best way to neutralise a sarcastic question is to pretend that the speaker’s intention was in fact serious and straight. Here Nora thinks honestly about ‘moral sense’. It is a complicated philosophical issue and can’t be answered with a glib ‘yes’ or ‘no’. She confesses that she feels confused about ‘such things’ and that different people (like herself and Torvald) hold different views. Perhaps she is not consciously deflecting sarcasm; perhaps she doesn’t even notice Torvald’s manner when he asks the question. Whatever the actress decides, her honest uncertainty makes her appear much stronger than Torvald’s certainty about almost everything. Even his final gambit, intended to trap her emotionally, fails to work: ‘Then only one explanation is possible … You don’t love me any more.’ She simply agrees in a ‘calm and collected’ way. To answer why and how this has happened, she has to focus now on Torvald’s standards and behaviour. She returns to the miracles. The first failed to occur because she just failed to leave the house for her sacrifice of suicide. It is the second that she describes to Torvald. It would have been a glorious miracle if his love for her had urged him to defy Krogstad’s threats. To do this he would have risked some damaging publicity and also compromising many of his stated beliefs. This would have been painful, but love could have made the risk worthwhile, even inevitable. Nora had hoped for this miracle; she says she expected it, though an audience may well doubt if she ever felt that degree of optimism. Perhaps, in the interests of celebrating ‘miracle’, Nora is overstating when she puts it so passionately. Her analysis has removed all arguments from him. He has little to say apart from fragments of question and pleading. She feels the need for some cold language and practical action. When he suggests that she wait until the morning she refuses to spend the night in a ‘stranger’s’ house. She gives back his wedding ring and requires him to return hers. She puts the keys on the table and reminds him that the maids are competent. She forbids all future communication between them. Finally she leaves and the play ends (visually) with Torvald alone, and (aurally) with the sound of the outer door slamming shut. Ever since Ibsen wrote the play this sound effect has been celebrated as one of the most powerful and significant in all drama. In the play’s final moments the words ‘change’, ‘stranger’ and ‘miracles’ predominate; ‘miracle’ appears seven times in nine lines. The words are both simple

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and elusive in their meaning. They help to provoke thoughts about separation and the great differences between illusion and reality, about idealism thoughtlessly assumed and ideals that need pain and determination to achieve. Even though the closing of the door sounds decisive, the director and actor have choices. Does Torvald slump in despair, knowing that his marriage is over? Or does his last word—‘miracles’—suggest enlightenment and hope? 4.7 Alternative Endings These ‘messages’ were hard for audiences, theatres and even actresses to accept. One problem is the worrying attitude towards marriage. Is Ibsen subverting the basis of social and domestic morality? Another is the apparent suddenness of Nora’s change; is Ibsen’s chosen ending psychologically unprepared and unbelievable? Ibsen’s notes indicate that he changed his plan for the ending. At the beginning of Act 3 it seems that one of two possible endings will occur. The rather melodramatic theatre tradition from which Ibsen grew would probably give Nora a tragic suicide, a sort of chamber and middle-class version of Hardy’s Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a woman whose love defied male laws and conventions. Alternatively the miracle of Torvald’s forgiveness would match Nora’s dedication to him and their restored love would end the play with a sentimental glow. Almost certainly Ibsen had not anticipated what he actually wrote: Nora’s taking charge, explaining her views and leaving her family. Ibsen submitted to pressure in Germany and reluctantly wrote an alternative ending. Later he regretted it and described it as a ‘barbaric outrage’ that he had inflicted on his play. This ending begins three lines before the authentic ending: NORA … .where we could make a real marriage out of our lives together. Goodbye. (begins to go) HELMER: Go then! (seizes her arm) But first you shall see your children for the last time! NORA: Let me go! I will not see them! I cannot! HELMER: (draws her over to the door, left) You shall see them. (opens the door and says softly) Look, there they are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they wake up and call for their mother, they will be – motherless. NORA: (trembling) Motherless … ! HELMER: As you once were.

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NORA: Motherless! (struggles with herself, lets her travelling bag fall, and says) Oh, this is a sin against myself, but I cannot leave them. (half sinks down by the door.) HELMER: (joyfully, but softly) Nora! (the curtain falls) In a third version there is an extra scene. Nora is a guest of the married couple Kristina and Krogstad. Torvald arrives to plead with her: ‘Have you then quite forgiven me?’ He produces a bag of macaroons and places one in her mouth. Nora celebrates her softened and newly responsive husband: ‘The miracle of miracles.’ These mawkish alternatives may astonish readers and audiences of today. Our image of Ibsen is of a stern, uncompromising and solitary moralist, whose sense of rectitude seems to relish opposition. But there was evidently a more pragmatic side to him that wanted approval, even if that meant his pandering to old-fashioned tastes.

5. Overview .

5. 1 Christmas Christmas is a paradoxical time. Normal busy life stops for the holiday, the streets are empty and the focus of human lives is thrown on to the workings of their families; it is also the bleakest of seasons for lonely people. In life generally, as well as in this play, Christmas makes people put aside for a while the complicated, absorbing trappings of living, which can distract them from more basic truths. They are suddenly forced to examine identities and relationships. This can be painfully disillusioning as well as cause for celebration. However, the significance of Christmas itself is to celebrate, not to lament. Christmas and its pagan equivalents are supposed to defy the dead time of the year and to reinvigorate the world with hope and with the warmth of human fellowship. Christmas celebrates the birth of a child, a promise that helps Christians to challenge the apparent finality of death. Though the Christian Christmas and its origin the pagan ‘yule’ are both times for celebration, there are differences too. ‘Yule’ is what Nora and Torvald plan to experience: a period of worldly display, with a tree, presents colourfully wrapped, fun for the children, a party with costume and champagne for the adults, all supported by Torvald’s rise in salary. For Christians, the promise of rebirth at Christmas is spiritual and the celebration is coloured by the knowledge of guilt, sorrow and sacrifice that must be part of the process. It is significant that Act 1 introduces three outsiders to the Helmers’ household, each bringing some of these painful elements: Rank is terminally ill, Krogstad is a criminal and Kristine has based her life on self-denying sacrifice. ‘Krist-ine’ is well named for this Christian story; she rescues Krogstad from his darker self and theirs is the marriage that survives the end of the play. Nora’s ‘hope’ that ends A Doll’s House is coloured with anxiety and darkness, so that the Christmas context may feel almost ironic. Nora has taken a first step towards her rebirth, though her success is not assured. In doing so she has to abandon her children, though as a shadowy counterpoint to her action Kristine will move towards being a (step)mother—to Krogstad’s children. These final events occur at the dead of night so that we never see the possibly optimistic light of a new morning. The dark-

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ness is made darker still by the imminent death of Dr. Rank. 5.2 Home and Beyond Ibsen’s play-writing career has sometimes been described as falling into three sections: spacious, historical plays followed by poetic mystery in Peer Gynt and Brand; then the enclosed chamber dramas of his middle period; finally, a return to poetic suggestion in the less naturalistic final plays. But perhaps these stages should be seen not as divisions but as harmonising into a broader and overarching philosophy that gives coherence to his works as a whole. One of Ibsen’s many paradoxes lies in his views of enclosure and freedom. The family home is the setting for A Doll’s House and for the plays that followed it in the 1880s. Home ought to be relaxed and supportive, a place where an individual can express himself—or ‘herself’, as the focus often is with Ibsen. However, these homes turn out to be enclosing, limiting, often tainted by past crimes and secret guilt. Sometimes the home is a microcosm of society, both of them afflicted by intolerant conformism. In these smothering contexts an individual can’t find spiritual freedom. By contrast, Ibsen’s vision opens out to a view of a greater world beyond, owing much to the landscape of his home, dominated by sea and mountains, and owing even more to a sense of the numinous in Scandinavian myth and ballad. As a poet, Ibsen had often written about the mythical roots of his homeland. This interest coincided with a growing Norwegian search for national identity, especially to be found in its folk culture. As a young playwright dealing with this and with large historical issues, Ibsen had used verse suggestively to explore beyond literal events and characters. But Ibsen rarely writes from a settled point of view: a sense of anxiety pervades his work, often through characters who are engaged in a quest for spiritual fulfilment. Ibsen had renounced his traditional Christian faith but remained convinced that a spiritual dimension exists beyond or beneath the surface of social life. He continued to write about this from Peer Gynt in his early career to When We Dead Awaken towards the end. The paradox between comfortable enclosure and alarming space may be seen in Nora, who plans to step first into the dark simplicity of suicide and eventually into the dark complication of the world beyond her home through which she may gain

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her education. She finds herself poised on a critical edge between apprehension and personal revelation. The play’s setting and Ibsen’s naturalistic approach may appear to block out any mythic or mysterious world but Nora’s stirrings of something deeper are present in that playfulness that seems constricting and designed purely to appeal to her husband’s fancies. She is his ‘skylark’ and ‘squirrel’ and she promises to beguile him: ‘I’d pretend I was an elfin child and dance a moonlight dance for you, Torvald.’ The Italian tarantella she performs on stage is a very different experience from the elfin dance but it also makes contact with a passionate world beyond the doll’s house prison. Torvald, as audience and aesthetic controller, feels himself to be part of Nora’s more expressive life, but he can touch no more than its surface. If anyone reaches more deeply towards Nora, it is not her husband nor, arguably, the sensible Kristine, but Dr. Rank. In the play’s early draft Rank was little more than a witty commentator. As Ibsen deepened his role he became closer to Nora in their apprehension of death. There is an edge of frustration for both of them and the audience, since Rank knows nothing about Nora’s thoughts of suicide. Therefore their apprehensions can’t exactly be shared. But Rank shares a special intimacy with Nora and their final dialogue together in Act 3 bypasses her husband. It is then ironic that after Rank’s exit Torvald speaks of him as an outsider providing a contrast to their marriage together: ‘His suffering and his loneliness seemed almost to provide a background of dark cloud to the sunshine of our lives.’ Like Nora, Rank gives a touch of theatricality to his intimations of what lies outside the comfortable prison. He dresses with panache for his final party and the black crosses act as a code shared only with Nora. When he steps into the darkness he can be seen as Nora’s mentor. Both are engaged ultimately in something deeply serious, a journey that they have both masked with performances that always seemed to others to be frivolous play and wit. The contrast between home and beyond may be part of a deeper philosophical view: the tension (in Ibsen’s middle period, especially) between his spiritual vision of an ideal freedom and his need to express it in socially recognisable ways, rather than in writing plays that could run the danger of remaining simply as dramatised abstractions. Ibsen was not only an early modernist in theatre: he was also an heir of the European Romantic movement. He was brought up in the middle of a drab century  ‘Modernism’ describes a new scientific and experimental way of looking at the world and the arts, influenced by recent technological progress. (For a brief definition of the term, see http://www.english.uga.edu/~232/voc/Modernism.voc.html).  Romanticism developed in the late 18th century, reacting against both scientific rationalism and the

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for theatre; Schiller was before him and the avant garde movements in theatre came soon after. Part of his genius was to bridge 1800 with 1900. Ghosts from the early 1800s helped to create his expansive vision as a playwright. And within his plays his characters too face ghosts from their individual pasts and they must assimilate them before they can achieve liberation. 5.3 Structure In the Preface to his Collected Plays (Cresset Press, 1957) the playwright Arthur Miller praised Ibsen for his dynamic skill in relating past events to present circumstances: It is therefore wrong to imagine that because his first and sometimes his second acts devote so much time to studied revelation of antecedent material, his view is static compared to our own. In truth it is profoundly dynamic, for that enormous past was always heavily documented to the end that the present be comprehended with wholeness, as a moment in a flow of time, and not—as with so many plays—as a situation without roots. A Doll’s House does more than merely describe a marriage at a particular time and place. It is far from being a static play. Ibsen creates dynamism through the various processes of change that often cross and run counter to each other. All these movements are based on the five main characters. Each character has an individual journey but also each can be seen to pair with another in terms of plot, theme or character contrast: Torvald and Nora; Nora and Kristine; Kristine and Krogstad; Krogstad and Torvald, Rank and Nora. The central action involves three characters —Nora, Torvald and Krogstad—and how their actions committed in the past bear on the crises they experience in the present. Kristine and Rank are, in a sense, observers from the outside, but they also relate closely to the main three and become involved in their lives. The main situation (of the loan and the forged signature) and how they react to it compels all five into radical transformations. The seemingly happy marriage of the Helmers collapses into separation, leaving the confident Torvald enfeebled in distress and the once-dependent Nora stepping into the unknown to discover herself. Kristine and Krogstad move from their separate lives of loneliness into a mutual and supportive understanding. Rank, who appears to be a carefree bachelor and confidently industrial revolution. It valued strong individual emotion against social conformity.  Quoted in Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. James McFarlane, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 227

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worldly-wise, is the only one who knows nothing of the loan; he moves from the warmth of his friends’ house to the pain of a lonely death. The basic story is simple but Ibsen’s plot which shapes this raw material gains its power and interest from how and when the material is revealed—to particular characters and to the audience. Here are some examples of these revelations:  Torvald knows little until he reads Krogstad’s first letter in Act 3. Much of the play’s irony depends on his ignorance alongside his complete confidence in his authority and ability to make decisions.  Krogstad knows everything and shares the knowledge with Nora. Much of the play’s tension depends on whether or not Nora can persuade Torvald save his job. This is the only way she could persuade Krogstad to keep the knowledge hidden.  Nora knows everything (except perhaps the criminal significance of the forgery, which Krogstad explains in Act 1). However, until her most frantic moment at the end of Act 2, she doesn’t know of Kristine’s hold over Krogstad.  Kristine, in Act 1, learns, with the audience, about the creditable aspects of Nora’s initiatives in saving Torvald – i.e. she remains ignorant of the embarrassing aspects: who lent her the money and the deception through forgery. It is late Act 2 before she learns of these crucial facts.  Dr. Rank knows none of these circumstances, not even Nora’s need for money, though in Act 2 she comes close to revealing something when she nearly asks him for a great favour. Like Torvald, his ignorance doesn’t diminish his confidence, and he is very clear about what he thinks of the other characters.  Dr. Rank shares only with Nora the knowledge of his illness. The results of his tests and the cards with the black cross are reserved until Act 3. Ibsen reveals them, through Nora to Torvald, to coincide with his sexual advances and just before he reads the damaging letter. These revelations drive the plot, affect characters’ motivation and condition how they will behave. When the knowledge of some characters combines with the ignorance of others, Ibsen can create moments of irony which sharpen many dramatic encounters. These may be poignant (as with Nora and Rank in Act 2), or tense (when Torvald lectures Nora on forgery in Act 1); or embarrassing (as when Torvald is forgiving Nora so effusively when he feels ‘saved’); or grimly amusing (Rank’s plans for the next masquerade).

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The whole action is framed by two contrasting scenes between husband and wife: Act 1 is full of excitement, impulse and Christmas giving, then exposition and analysis with Nora and Kristine: Act 3 ends with another thorough analysis—of marital problems—and then separation. Act 1 introduces the striking contrast of Dr. Rank and Krogstad in their different relationships with Nora, and also with Torvald; Act 2 brings them in again each for another scene with Nora, but this time more intense and upsetting. The pressure of these two scenes, along with Nora’s snatched moments with Kristine, loads the end of Act 2 with anxiety and a sort of debilitating energy. With the tarantella the play’s tempo is so extreme that Ibsen can only return to a quieter base by giving focus to a story that is new to the play: Kristine and Krogstad. These two characters allow the audience to step aside for once from Nora’s situation, so that we can soon return to it with a fresh view. The offstage party makes us imagine vigour and gaiety, so that Nora, Torvald and Rank can enter looking and behaving differently. They may appear superficially to be in a new situation, though in fact the truth beneath the surface hasn’t changed. It simply moves, merely glimpsed, closer to its resolution. Eventually Ibsen is able to provide the longest unbroken scene in the play, in which Nora brings all of the hidden story to the surface. Torvald, largely ignorant up to this point, hears it all. He slumps and she leaves. But there has been much criticism of its moral basis, particularly in its leanings towards melodrama, as though Ibsen was unable to free himself sufficiently from his mid-century theatre roots. Is Nora’s change in Act 3 sufficiently prepared? (see alternative endings p. 44) Is Krogstad too close to being a pantomime villain then too easily converted at the start of Act 3 by the love of a good woman? Is Dr. Rank’s black cross a too stagey device? Worst of all, there is Torvald. Ibsen’s recent biographer Robert Ferguson believes that ‘as a work of art it fails to surmount the author’s evident contempt for … Torvald Helmer.’ Ibsen clearly didn’t intend the part to be played as a humourless prig. He wanted an actor with ‘elegant and lovable light-heartedness.’ In rehearsal it is very easy for director and actors to wince at his more patronising and chauvinistic lines and allow the interpretation of Torvald to slip into grotesque caricature. But Torvald, though an individual, also represents the bourgeois beliefs of his times and has several virtues that belong to those beliefs, even if their basic assumptions have now become outmoded and disagreeable. He certainly has no cruel intentions, nor is he violent or unfaithful. All his faults spring from a self-centred and narrow outlook and from seeing himself as a responsibly autocratic ‘paterfamilias’. William Archer, Ibsen’s first English translator, was also anxious about Torvald,

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and saw his dramatic and moral value in close connection with Nora. Archer believed that Nora was partly responsible for Torvald’s priggish behaviour and that Ibsen had then unfairly given her so much logic in the final scene that it must seem that he was totally responsible for the marriage breakdown. A possible answer to these criticisms—or, at least, a way of qualifying them—is to see the play more structurally and not wholly in terms of character. In this respect Krogstad can be seen as the character who drives the plot and effects the moral changes. His name, implying crookedness, links him with other devious and threatening characters who lurk on the fringes of Ibsen’s plays. The Norwegian of Ibsen’s prose is very dense and allusive – and many of its features do not translate. Ibsen frequently uses puns or allusive names, often to emphasis an irony playing around a character and their operation in the play. Krogstad is the catalyst for the stages of transformation in Nora. By the end of Act 1 Krogstad’s visit, followed by Torvald’s lecture, have shocked her into understanding realities about the public and social worlds outside the home. Law, finance, probity in business, a man’s image in the world, the horror of scandal – these never appear on stage in the play but they are nonetheless real and powerful, and they force Nora outside the comfort of her doll’s house. When Krogstad visits in Act 2, he establishes a sort of weird affinity with Nora, especially through the prospect of suicide. This shock forces her to look more closely into herself; her frenzied solitude in the tarantella ‘celebrates’ her reaching a second stage of self-knowledge. In Act 3 Krogstad appears again, but not to visit her. And his letters are sent not to her but to Torvald. The result is that she is shocked into understanding the false basis of her marriage and family when she sees Torvald’s behaviour. She receives this new shock and its illumination in virtual silence—then in her absence as she changes her clothes. When she returns she speaks more fully and eloquently than ever. Ibsen’s skill in this whole process is to provide a clear structure that makes the role of Krogstad, the dark figure in the background, a cleansing redeemer for Nora, while the character of Krogstad intended no such effect. There is no point in pursuing the clichéd question of ‘how much did the playwright consciously intend?’ We do know, however, that Ibsen was meticulous in his planning, and also that he wrote his plays to be read as well as to be performed on stage. When read, A Doll’s House reveals much in terms of structure, imagery and  This feature of Ibsen’s work is currently the focus of a new study by Dr. Robert Amundsen which will appear shortly

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motifs that may be no more than subliminal when the play is received in the theatre. Indeed, one famous reading took place in London in 1886 when Eleanor Marx— Karl’s daughter—played Nora, William Morris’s daughter May played Kristine and George Bernard Shaw played the crucial role of Krogstad.

6. A Feminist Playwright? A Doll’s House has often been appropriated by supporters of feminist movements. Nora’s slamming the door has been taken to announce a sexual revolution. Ibsen himself may seem to be writing the play as a campaigning document. In his Notes for a Tragedy for Today (1878) he wrote: A woman cannot be herself in modern society. It is an exclusively masculine society, with laws made by men, and with prosecutors and judges who judge feminine conduct from the masculine standpoint. Early in 1879 he made a speech, often quoted afterwards, at the Scandinavian Circle in Rome. There was a dispute about appointing a female librarian and Ibsen sprang to her defence: Is there anyone is this assembly who dares to claim that our women are inferior to us in culture, intelligence, knowledge or artistic talent? I don’t think many men would dare to suggest that. Then what is it men are afraid of? I hear that it is accepted tradition here that women are such clever intriguers that we keep them out because of this. Well, I have met with a good deal of male intrigue in the course of my life …. What I am afraid of is men with small ambitions and small thoughts, small scruples and small fears, those men who devote all their ideas and all their energies to obtain certain small advantages for their own small and servile selves. Since A Doll’s House was first performed in the same year, it is easy to apply these last lines to Torvald and to other self-satisfied men with narrow vision who appear in his plays. Many critics, including James Joyce, have praised Ibsen’s satire of such men, but he is at his most profound and intuitive in his depiction of women, especially their painful introspection. The actress Elizabeth Robbins, one of the greatest early interpreters of his plays, believed that ‘no dramatist has ever meant so much to the women of the stage as Henrik Ibsen.’ These comments are typical of many that immediately after its first performance  Quoted by Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women, p. 126

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aligned A Doll’s House with feminist reform, and the early stirrings of the movements to give married women property rights and all women the vote. In 1884 Ibsen gave support to this impression when he backed a petition to establish property rights for married women. When other supporters tried to gauge public opinion Ibsen made the sardonic comment: ‘To consult men in such a matter is like asking wolves if they desire better protection for the sheep. ’ A debate for improving women’s position in society was already current in Scandinavia. The critic Georg Brandes, a friend of Ibsen, had translated John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women in 1869, partly as a tribute to Caroline David, a married woman whom he loved. Both she and Brandes opposed the institution of marriage. But Ibsen, as so often a traditionalist, was quick to dissociate himself from Mill’s approach; he was particularly offended by the suggestion that Mill had been over-influenced by his wife. Ibsen criticised Brandes for spending time on Mill when he could have written equally well himself. As Ibsen gained an international reputation his plays became increasingly used to support various social causes, chiefly through characters like Stockman and Petra in An Enemy of the People, Rebecca in Rosmersholm, Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder and—most of all—Nora. Each takes a painful stand against narrow-minded tradition and hypocrisy. However, Ibsen objected to being appropriated in this way: he saw himself as an artist, not a propagandist. He was writing about people, their motivations, thoughts and feelings, rather than about issues. Having created his characters, he felt that he had given them independent life, as independent as he felt himself to be. Throughout his life he considered himself as an outsider, even standing outside those characters in his plays who are themselves outsiders. He complained to William Archer about critics who believed that he used his plays to promote socialist or feminist causes: ‘I write a play with five characters and they insist on putting in a sixth—namely Ibsen.’ His 27 years of travelling and writing away from his own country helped to make him unwilling to belong to any movement, whether orthodox or not. It is typical then that his occasionally cantankerous attitude was expressed at the Norwegian Women’s Union in 1897: I am not a member of the Women’s Union. Whatever I have written, I have not written in the service of any particular viewpoint. I have been more a writer and less a social philosopher than people in general seem willing to admit. I thank you for your toast, but must decline the honour of deliberately having worked in the interests of the women-question. I am not even really

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sure what the women-question is. This speech, of course, doesn’t cleanly or clearly separate him from feminist beliefs. It may spring from irritation at being categorised. He may have wished to be difficult and provocative on this occasion. It may be that by the end of his life he had changed his mind, just as he had changed the tenor of his plays. The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder and Little Eyolf are all more mystical, suggestive and ‘poetic’ than the social realist plays of his middle period. It is certainly true that the issues raised in the course of his plays can’t easily be categorised. His broad commitment is to Truth and Freedom and for each individual to discover their unique identity. His concern for the core of a human being cuts across specific dogmas like Socialism, Feminism, Democracy, even though an individual play may seem to veer in a particular direction. In the dramatic experience of a play an issue rarely leaps out neatly packaged for political campaigning. For example, in A Doll’s House Nora does not use her exit to make a feminist point. In fact we never see her precise action. The sound effect puts us a one remove from what she actually does: ‘The heavy sound of a door being slammed is heard from below.’ The scene that leads up to it is both more truthful and more suggestive. She doesn’t leave the house or her marriage like the leader of a moral movement: she does so with a determination that is also mixed with apprehension, puzzlement, pain and regret. Ibsen has sometimes been linked with the Victorian idea of the New Woman, prominent in the 1890s and especially evident in Shaw’s creation of Vivie in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The New Woman was generally combative, well read and highly intelligent, able to express articulate opinions. Ibsen’s Petra and Rebecca have these qualities, but not Nora, whose views in Act 3 are intuitive and sometimes tentative. She knows herself to be ignorant and steps out into the world to educate herself. Vivie and other New Women are forthright throughout, always impatient with a woman’s stereotypical softness and self-sacrifice because these qualities block their need for self-fulfilment. They remain single because marriage would define (and therefore limit) them in relation to a man. Sometimes they even dress and behave assertively like men. Ibsen may have influenced this movement but he should not be identified with it. A glance at his life shows that he was surrounded by women throughout his life who ministered to his needs and his genius. It is not surprising that he behaved in paternalist ways towards them. And in his plays all his women exist within traditional social structures and none makes a revolutionary stand to destroy them. Nora and Hedda, 

Quoted by Ferguson, p. 415

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two of his most striking heroines, are married, Hedda throughout and Nora right up to the moment in Act 3 when she exchanges her wedding ring for her suitcase. Nora does not reject marriage as such but simply the inequalities and lack of mutual respect that blight her own marriage; it would be a ‘miracle’, but nonetheless a possibility, that a changed Torvald and her newly educated self could make a real marriage together. A woman in traditional society is defined by her role as mother just as much as by her being a wife. Many of Ibsen’s mothers reject this role, either neglecting their children or, like Hedda, struggling in frightened anger against her pregnancy. Ibsen, in his Notes for a Tragedy for Today (1878), makes an uncompromising, even shocking, observation: Oppressed and bewildered by belief in authority, she loses faith in her own moral right and ability to bring up her children. Bitterness. A mother in the society of today, like certain insects, ought to go away and die when she has done her duty towards the continuance of the species. Nora loves her children, but the play raises issues of her fitness to raise them and she suggests that they may be better mothered by a non-biological and professional ‘parent’, Anne-Marie, who also substituted for Nora’s lost mother. This is not necessarily a sudden revelation (as some productions have it), as though Nora, seeing Torvald’s reaction to Krogstad’s first letter, decides in the instant that she is unfulfilled and must leave. There is enough in Acts 1 and 2 for the actress to feel and express frustration. In fact, in the play’s backstory, Nora has already acted independently—like a man, as she puts it to Kristine—by forging the signature and so bypassing the male permission of both father and husband. After taking this ‘male’ initiative she spends her life playing the child-doll, but perhaps her assurances of how happy she is and how she needs her husband to take all the decisions have a slightly hysterical ring. As the pressures close in on her she speaks of madness, implies suicide, and eventually dances the tarantella in a way that goes far beyond the demands of art, for which Torvald assumed the role of tutor. In her dance, with hair flowing free, there is an intense mixture of despair and liberation, which becomes both symbol and precursor of her final exit, in very different costume and with different calmer language to justify it. Both the dance (hysterical) and the exit (rational) can be seen as statements of freedom against constricting motherhood as well as against oppressive marriage. Very few London critics were prepared to examine these issues dispassionately. Clement Scott, writing for The Daily Telegraph in July 1889 attacked what he took in Nora to be the New Woman:

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It is all self, self, self! This is the ideal woman of the new creed; not a woman who is the fountain of love and forgiveness and charity, not the pattern woman we have admired in our mother and our sisters, not the model of unselfishness and charity, but a mass of aggregate conceit and self-sufficiency, who leaves her home and deserts her friendless children because she has herself to look after. It is not easy to decide on Ibsen’s possibly feminist intentions when writing the play. Critics have always concentrated on his own wish to be seen as an artist and not a polemicist. Yet he wrote to Camilla Collett, a friend of the family and an extremely well-known early feminist: The ideas and vision which you have given to the world are not of the sort destined to live a barren life in literature. The real world will seize them and build upon them. That this may happen soon, I, too, wish with all my heart. These words do not sound like those of a man who considered art to be above all worldly concerns. Here Ibsen appears to value words more when they turn into actions which reform the world. Perhaps the best assessment is to acknowledge that he liked to be contrary, he was prepared to change his mind and that he hated to be thought predictable or to be absorbed into any society or set of beliefs. Max Beerbohm commented wryly in The Saturday Review (26th May 1906): Men were ‘up’; so ‘up’ with women. Had Nature placed women in the ascendant, Ibsen would have been the first to tug them down. No dispassionate reader of his plays can fail to see that his sympathy with women is a mere reflex of his antipathy to their lords and masters. Ibsen remained a truculent individualist all his life. When he was on his death-bed and his doctor commented that he was looking better, Ibsen retorted, ‘On the contrary’. Those were his last words.

 Quoted by Templeton p. 128  Saturday Review 26th May 1906, quoted by Egan, Ibsen, the Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge), 1972, p. 443–4

7. Ibsen and Shaw On 1st June 1906 an article in the London journal The Clarion began: The greatest dramatic genius of the nineteenth century is dead, leaving most of our critics proud of having mistaken him for a criminal, an imbecile, an ephemeral. However, let that pass. Contemporary journalism, like democracy, is always a better judge of second-rate than of first-rate. Anti-Ibsen has by this time gone the way of anti-Wagner to the dust heap of big blunders by little men. Ibsen had just died and through this obituary article George Bernard Shaw was writing, not for the first time, of his great significance to European and English theatre. Shaw was the most important and controversial playwright in England and for the previous 17 years he had championed Ibsen. It was 1889 when A Doll’s House appeared at The (aptly named) Novelty Theatre in London. Though the acting was widely praised, the material of the play divided critics. Some found Nora’s behaviour unbelievable and the playwright’s view of marriage irresponsible Some were puzzled by the lack of traditional theatricality and the large amount of talk. One reviewer compared it disparagingly to ‘genre painting’ in the history of fine art, but presumably ignoring the way that movement in 17th century Dutch domestic interiors extended the range of European art. Ibsen’s reception in England was very different from the rest of Europe. For a start, his plays appeared only in London, so the controversy was intensely focused, whereas in Germany productions had been staged in several cities, where responses had been more thoughtful and welcoming. In Paris productions of the plays took hold later; when they did Ibsen appealed to more a more liberal and intellectual climate of opinion. Victorian England was conservative and paternalistic. Arbiters of taste and morality felt a duty to protect the public from artists who questioned fundamental values. The theatre, in particular, provided escapist entertainment and rarely ventured into areas that might challenge or alienate audiences. The notion that theatre might be a forum for debate was so eccentric that William Archer (Ibsen’s leading champion in

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England) initially felt that ‘Ibsen on the English stage is impossible.’ However, some tentative steps were made. In 1884 two playwrights, Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, took the basic situation of A Doll’s House and adapted it to fit current taste under a new title Breaking a Butterfly. It was a start, though a depressingly timid encounter with Ibsen’s profound searches into human nature. In fact, when A Doll’s House was properly presented in 1889 and later in the 1890s when the Ibsen controversy was at its height, most audiences were engaged and receptive. It was critics (at least, some of them) who vented most of the sound and fury at what they perceived to be immorality. They believed that Ibsen was poisoning the London stage and using the theatre to subvert established taste and values. In the context of this acrimony it is worth remembering that the play doesn’t seek to promote aggression. Nora doesn’t leave her home as an assured campaigner: she needs a different environment, away from the prison of her doll’s house, so that she can meditate peacefully on how she can be an independent woman in relation to a society that she doesn’t expect to change. Ibsen understood bourgeois society; his own experiences of the admittedly more provincial Norway convinced him that the result of such paternalist protection of the public almost always leads to hypocrisy. In Ghosts Oswald, just returned from Paris, shocks his mother’s prim pastor by referring to how he has seen ‘our model husbands and fathers’ behave when they visit the streets where the artists live. Earlier in the play his mother has also surprised the pastor by the free-thinking book she is reading: That’s the strange thing, Pastor Manders … there’s really nothing new in these books; there’s really nothing there but what most people think and believe already. It’s just that most people either haven’t really considered these things, or won’t admit them. Her words may be read almost as Ibsen’s mission statement. His vocation as a playwright is to allow free rein and public exposure to thoughts that already exist, suppressed beneath the surface of propriety. Within many of his plays a major theme is the need to replace lies with truth by revealing guilt that had been planted in the past. Rosmersholm, Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman are all concerned with stripping away long-acquired surfaces. Ibsen believed that freedom can never be achieved without truth, and truth often depends on painful exposures. But London establishment was not ready to be exposed. Two men in particular led  Ibsen, Ghosts, translated by James McFarlane: Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Oxford University Press, World’s Classics. p. 101

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the attack on Ibsen: Clement Scott, a critic for The Daily Telegraph, and E. F. Smyth Pigott, Examiner of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Pigot held office from 1874 to 1895 and his job of censoring those plays that were deemed unfit for public performance had been established in England since 1737 when Sir Robert Walpole instituted the Stage Licensing Act to prevent performances of plays which were considered seditious, blasphemous or offensive to good taste. In 1737 there was much opposition to the Act on the grounds that it would curtail free speech and public debate as well as protect high-level corruption from the scrutiny of witty playwrights. However, by 1880 the fact of censorship (and its need) was generally accepted. Today this may seem odd since Victorian England was very adventurous in other areas of life: there had been, for example, huge progress in science, industrialisation—and empire-building. Pigott justified his duty in words that were intended to soothe but which emerge as patronising: What is sometimes rather invidiously called a ‘censorship’ is nothing in effect but the friendly and perfectly disinterested action of an adviser who has the permanent interests of the stage at heart. Playwrights and managers wishing to explore new ground were blocked in their enterprises. The only way they could stage these difficult plays was to form groups and societies for private performance. In 1891 J. T. Grein founded his Independent Theatre Society specifically to present Ibsen’s Ghosts, a play which, beyond all others, created the greatest scandal. The play centres on Helene Alving who has been building an orphanage in memory of her dead husband. Captain Alving had been promiscuously unfaithful and the marriage had been a great burden on his wife. She reveals to her pastor that part of her motive is that money spent on the orphanage cannot pass to her son Oswald. She wants him to inherit nothing from his corrupt father. Pastor Manders shares some responsibility since he and Helene were in love but he had urged her to abide by her duty and stay with her husband; when the marriage was irretrievably failing Helene felt unable to leave him because of 19th century pressures on women to avoid scandal. One of Captain Alving’s sexual adventures led to an illegitimate daughter, Regina Engstrand, who is now employed as Mrs. Alving’s maid. Oswald, recently returned from Paris, has fallen in love with Regina, his half-sister. He is suffering from congenital syphilis  Quoted by Richard Findlater: Banned: Theatrical Censorship in Britain, (London: Panther 1968) p. 83

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and is beginning to lose his sight and his mind. Sins committed in the past gather into a terrifying burden on the present, and the play ends with Oswald begging his mother to act for him: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me? I don’t want it! Take it back! Ibsen was always fascinated by the impact of the past on the present, but at this point in his career he was interested too in sexual disease and the possibility of inheriting it. Dr. Rank on the periphery of issues in A Doll’s House seems like a tentative sketch of a problem to be developed into Oswald at the core of Ghosts. However, in neither case does Ibsen put his weight into condemning the sins of the fathers. Mrs. Alving becomes convinced that the pressures of puritan orthodoxy had driven the openness and joy out of her husband and made him into a furtive and seedy profligate. But Pigott and others were outraged both by the topic of syphilis and by Ibsen’s questioning society’s responsibility. No matter that Ibsen disliked the ‘no-holds barred’ philosophy and the compulsion towards the sordid that he found in Zola’s call for naturalism in the theatre. He made the crisp distinction that whereas Zola enters a sewer in order to take a bath, he visits the sewer in order to scour it. But the mere proximity of the sewer was enough for Pigott: I have studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully and all the characters appear to me to be morally deranged. All the heroines are dissatisfied spinsters who look on marriage as a monopoly, or dissatisfied married women in a chronic state of rebellion against not only the condition which nature has imposed upon their sex, but against all the duties and objections of mothers and wives; and as for the men, they are all rascals or imbeciles. When Pigott died in 1895 Shaw responded in support of Ibsen with a typical flourish: It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets, and authors of modern Europe—men like Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoi, and the leaders of our own literature—delivered helpless into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this amiable old gentleman—this despised and incapable old official—most notoriously was.’ Shaw was an appropriate, if sometimes misleading, champion for Ibsen in England.  Quoted by Findlater, p. 84  Quoted by Findlater, p. 85

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Both playwrights took theatre very seriously and deplored its widespread use as a shallow refuge for merely escapist entertainment. They both dramatised difficult situations with challenging issues and risked (or even courted) offending the conventional taste of their audiences. In their own personal conduct both men liked to parade their principles and to disconcert. Shaw, a self-publicist, generally did so with trenchant wit, whereas Ibsen was solitary and was happier to cultivate his reputation for gloomy misanthropy. In 1920 Shaw wrote: ‘Ibsen was the dramatic poet who firmly established tragicomedy as a much deeper and grimmer entertainment than tragedy.’ Both playwrights liked to shock. Indeed Shaw firmly believed that shocks to existing systems are valuable if social progress is to be made and that evolution of all kinds is necessary for the progress of mankind. At their highest levels and at their most cutting edge both tragedy and comedy deliver shocks to their audiences. Both genres are serious, whether they induce laughter or tears. Ibsen may well be described as a tragi-comic playwright, though tending towards the tragic. Shaw is tragi-comic too but with an instinct towards the comic, exposing in witty debate the folly that lies around him. Perhaps Ibsen’s status in England has suffered—or, at least, has been coarsened— by his close association with Shaw. As a playwright Shaw was often inclined to trample over possible nuances of his characters’ behaviour in the interests of widening his issues into public debate: after 1879 Ibsen used issues of public concern to develop character conflict within the confines of a private home. He made no claim for his plays to promote points of view or for his stage to become a forum for debate. But whatever the differences in their approaches, Ibsen would no doubt have agreed with Shaw when he wrote in The Quintessence of Ibsenism: The idealist says, ‘realism means egotism, and egotism means depravity. The realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be free in a world of the living and free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but ‘a good man’, then he is already dead and rotten.’ Both playwrights believed in vigilant open-mindedness and that thoughtless conformity (which may at first sight seem virtuous) is as bad as a thoughtless violation of accepted morality. Merely to follow convention dries up thought; without thought and the enlarged consciousness that follows there can be no real integrity. Shaw proclaimed ‘the importance of always being prepared to act immorally’. 

Quoted by J. L. Wisenthal (ed.), Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ and Related Writings, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1979), p. 123

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Shaw and Ibsen were the two great playwrights of the late nineteenth century, but Shaw was the self-publicising polemicist. Indeed, when he supports Ibsen it is sometimes hard to decide which he valued more: Ibsen’s moral depth and complexity or his own wit and status as a warrior against narrow-minded conformity.

8. Ibsen and Archer William Archer and George Bernard Shaw worked harder than anyone else to bring Ibsen’s plays to England and then to fight the storm of outrage that met this new drama. Shaw’s wit and panache gave him the limelight, particularly as he always relished a battle. Archer’s quieter, steady personality may have seemed out of place in the abrasive public arena, but he was the one more closely attuned to Ibsen’s work. Archer was closely connected with Norway. A branch of his family lived at Larnik on the south coast, which he often visited. In 1873 when he was there he read Love’s Comedy and was deeply struck by Ibsen’s innovative approach. He was responsible for the first Ibsen production in London: Quicksands, in 1880, an alternative title for the play generally known as The Pillars of Society. Archer first met Ibsen in 1881, and then several times throughout the stormy reception of his more challengingly provocative plays, which by then had reached London. Archer was dedicated to new realism as a challenge to the almost moribund Victorian theatre, with its traditional melodramas and sentimental escapism. He put truthful writing and social concerns above spectacle and above values that were merely theatrical. He believed that the playwright ought to be far more significant in the theatre than actor-managers like Henry Irving who dominated London taste and policy. During his long dedication to the cause of Ibsen, Archer wrote about 200 reviews and essays on his work, translated 19 of his plays and took an active part in many of the productions, sometimes as director, often as a consultant. Towards the end of his life (he died in 1924) commentators were inclined to see Archer’s views as old-fashioned, though this may be a sort of back-handed compliment in that his pioneering work 40 years earlier had helped to accelerate the development of theatre in London. But some of these later critics wrote misguidedly about Archer’s support for Ibsen (as they did about Shaw’s): they suggested that Archer’s focus was on the need to bring issues to the British stage, thus implying that Ibsen was a socialist agitator who used the stage as a political platform. Much the same criticism was made about Shaw’s plays.

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Archer defended himself in July 1899: My position, in short, is that in Ibsen’s plays, as in those of any other dramatist who keeps within the bounds of his form, we must look, not for the axioms and demonstrations of a scientific system, but simply for ‘broken lights’ of truth, refracted through character and circumstance.

Archer recognised that Ibsen’s plays of social realism, beginning in 1879 with A Doll’s House and Ghosts, could mislead superficial critics. It was too easy to assume that carefully observed naturalism in the design of the productions and the playwright’s almost scientific scrutiny of human behaviour would lead Ibsen to take partisan positions on the play’s issues. Ibsen always objected to being categorised in this way. Both Archer and Ibsen believed that the plays often contained symbolism and allowed the characters their almost independent lives. Archer believed that even Shaw was getting it wrong when he wrote The Quintessence of Ibsenism: You have throughout reduced the poet’s intentions and the motives of his characters to a diagrammatic definiteness which will tend to strengthen the predisposition, already inveterate in some quarters, to regard Ibsen, not as a poet, but as the showman of a moral waxwork. In fairness to Shaw, his book, like Archer’s essays and reviews, also stressed what is poetic, elusive and unresolved in Ibsen’s plays. Shaw created and cultivated opponents, and it is always convenient for opponents to simplify their antagonist’s point of view. And this is easiest of all when it comes to issues, which can so often be flattened in the interests of diminishing a subtle opponent into seeming to be a crude partisan. In 1905 Archer wrote that Ibsen never could be a systematic political thinker. He was not interested in sorting out the contradictory opinions within his work. However, he was consistent in hating opportunism to the extent of pursuing its opposite. “That a course of action was useless and hopeless was, in his eyes, the best reason for pursuing it.” Perhaps this last comment is slightly tongue-in-cheek. Ibsen was a difficult man to deal with: he enjoyed disconcerting people and cultivated his image of a grumpy controversialist. Though Archer admired Ibsen hugely, he was prepared to criticise him, and this included some aspects of A Doll’s House. His criticism was very different from the general protest that greeted the play. Archer admired the core 

Quoted by Thomas Postlewait, William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays 1889-1919, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), p. 19  Quoted by J. L. Wiesenthal, Shaw and Ibsen, p. 17

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of the play, which he found in Act 3, but thought Ibsen’s stagecraft rather traditional and inclining to the familiar melodrama that he felt needed to be pushed aside. He criticised aspects of Acts 1 and 2; he thought the Christmas tree and the dialogue about it to be sentimental; the tarantella he deplored for being a traditional exhibitionist moment, ‘beloved of romantic playwrights from Lope de Vega onwards and carried to the limits by Victor Hugo’. Archer thought that up to Act 3 Ibsen ‘had been doing, approximately, what theatrical orthodoxy required of him.… But when Nora and Helmer faced each other, one on each side of the table, and set to work to ravel out the skein of their illusions, then one felt oneself face to face with a new thing in drama—an order of experience, at once intellectual and emotional … more exciting and moving than all the artfully arranged situations of the earlier acts.’ Archer also quoted from an interview with the actress Fru Hennings, who had played the part of Nora: ‘When I now play the part the first acts leave me indifferent. Not until the third act am I really interested—but then intensely.’ Archer was also interested in Ibsen’s working methods and he compares Ibsen’s provisional version of A Doll’s House with his final version. In Act 1, for example, Ibsen’s first attempts make no mention of the macaroons, or Nora’s asking for money as her Christmas present, or Torvald’s judging her extravagance to be an inherited fault, and the talk about the tree and presents is very perfunctory. Dr. Rank appears chiefly as a social commentator (Ibsen reserved his ill-health for Act 2) and the dialogue between Nora and Kristine is comparatively short. In the provisional draft Act 2 occurs a week later than Act 1; Rank speaks of his ill-health with Nora and Torvald together and the scene with the silk stockings doesn’t appear. His final version introduces the intense and symbolic tarantella to replace a milder dance/song from Peer Gynt. The final Act 3 gives more point to Torvald’s behaviour by introducing his sexual arousal from the heady effects of wine. Most significantly, on reading Krogstad’s second letter, he declares ‘I am saved’ rather than ‘You are saved’ in the earlier version. Archer summarised the improvements in a telling image: ‘the first version, in short, is like a stained glass window seen from without, the second like the same window from within’. Ibsen had sharpened the drama and removed some flaccid dialogue in favour of far more economic writing. The result is a vivid and powerful play.

9. Theatre as Ibsen Found it Most 19th century plays were rehearsed without a director, as we have come to understand the term and the role. The Norwegian theatre which Ibsen inherited and struggled with in his brief appointments as playwright-in-residence at Bergen and Christiania, offered simple entertainment, relying on traditional types of expression and assuming in the audience an easy familiarity with a few genres: melodramas, folk tales, farce and broad historical plays that were often more akin to pageants. There were some touring companies from Denmark, which was more culturally adventurous than Norway. Hints of sophistication came from Paris through translations of the dramatist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), who was proficient in ‘la piece bien faite’, the well-made play. As the term suggests, these plays were efficiently constructed in plot and motivation, but superficial in portraying character and lacking in philosophical depth. The passion and ambition of the Romantic movement had declined into complacent cliché. In Germany some dissatisfied critics felt that nothing authentic had been written since Schiller; in 1880 Zola wrote his Naturalism in the Theatre to protest against the shallowness of public taste and the readiness of playwrights to turn out superficial dramas that did no more than bolster the values of an unthinking, materialist society. Zola wanted theatre to show the complex relationships between characters and their social environments; behaviour and settings needed to be very precisely observed. He wrote: ‘we are in an age of method, of experimental science; we need, above all, precise analysis.’ Ibsen is often associated with this urge towards naturalism, though he would have denied participation in any movement. Critics who look back on the development of modern theatre also compare his influence with that of Konstantin Stanislavski (1865-1938), the pioneering Russian director, and his psychologically probing treatment of Chekhov’s plays. However, it was not until 1898, 21 years after the premiere of A Doll’s House, that he established The Moscow Arts Theatre, which exerted such a powerful influence on European approaches to theatre. Naturalism in the theatre aimed to present authentic people and situations on stage, not Romantic fantasies. Naturalist writers wanted to engage audiences with what was real, not divert them

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down comfortable escapist routes. Through this emerged the theory of the fourth wall. Plays should not seem to be presented: instead, it was as though one wall of a room was removed to allow an audience to look in on the ‘real’ life that was developing there. The proscenium arch and its curtain was this imagined wall, transparent for the audience but solid for the actors. New themes and topics became available to playwrights. They felt less bound to engage with spectacular extremes, and became more interested in what was ordinary: grubby town politics, money, debt, middle-class compromises, sexuality, problems in marriage. From The Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House onwards, Ibsen wrote about all of these subjects. They added to, rather than replaced, the poetic and symbolic elements in his artistic vision. In 1876 Ibsen visited Berlin where Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen with his theatre company was pioneering principles that came close to naturalism. These principles were more radical than the precise archaeological research that Charles Kean and others were already bringing to productions of Shakespeare in England. Instead of performing in front of historically accurate scenery to provide background, actors were integrated into a total and credible setting. The Duke introduced ensemble playing instead of hiring characterless extras to stand around the star actors, and he believed in a long and thoughtful rehearsal process, which required an interpretative director to coordinate and lead. The Duke’s early work did not yet include the themes and issues of naturalism. He aimed instead to bring new methods to traditional plays of heroism and legend, such as Ibsen’s Vikings at Helgeland and The Pretenders. These early plays are Ibsen’s most Germanic, belonging to the shared heritage of northern myth. When The Pillars of Society was to be staged in Norway at the Christiania theatre, Ibsen urged actors to avoid caricature. He wanted ‘an even and steady naturalness.’ This instruction seems to share the Duke’s regard for precision and truth. Such fare needed the simpler skills of a stage manager more than the interpretative decisions of a director. Ibsen found Norwegian habits particularly constricting, since there was little connection with great European playwrights nor with changing theatre practice that was becoming evident in Germany. Ibsen felt stifled by these limitations; hence his 27-year exile from Norway. The state of theatre in England (which, in effect, meant London) was more complicated. On the one hand, established taste in the 1870s was largely hostile to what Ibsen had to offer; where Norway was relatively parochial, England, through industrial development, was becoming a successful imperial power and this material con-

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fidence could inhibit artistic expression, especially if it carried the stigma of being foreign. However, The Great Exhibition in 1851 helped to increase mobility and a sense of adventure. Improved transport, especially with the railway, helped to create a larger play-going public. In 1851 there were 19 London theatres and by 1899 this number had increased to 61. Many of these were built in the West End in the 1860s. Queen Victoria helped to boost the status of theatre, especially through her private theatrical evenings at Windsor. Before Prince Albert’s death in 1861 she also attended London theatres. And in 1897 Henry Irving was the first actor to be knighted after 40 years of tireless performing. None of this was likely to encourage innovation - both the queen and the knight were extremely traditional in their tastes —but at least it gave support to theatre-going. Before 1860 what might audiences expect to see? They would get their money’sworth from a mixture of farce, comedy, pantomime and melodrama sometimes packed into a 5-hour evening, starting at 6.30 – ‘a dog’s dinner’, as it has been disparagingly described. The picture-frame stage encouraged varied spectacular effects. Actors still continued the 18th century tradition of David Garrick and Sarah Siddons of playing for “points”, or moments of acting virtuosity, which had the effect of making the play little more than a vehicle for the star performer. Typically, plays were performed by stock companies, comprising actors who played various types of role and were willing to travel. This brought useful versatility into the training of young actors. But, paradoxically, the theatre’s increasing popularity brought a major disadvantage: managers settled for the financial security of a popular play being given a long run. Thus, actors had fewer opportunities to develop their skills and managements were less prepared to take a risk with a new play, especially if it might challenge conventional tastes. It is perhaps surprising then that three decades, 1880 to 1910, saw a great flowering of new talent in London theatre. A group of outstanding new playwrights, Ibsen, Shaw, Pinero and Wilde, all flourished in these years, at the time when Sir Henry Irving’s long declamatory tradition came to an end. Ibsen was Norwegian, Shaw and Wilde were Irish, and only the Italian-sounding Pinero was English. All were very different from each other; they certainly couldn’t be recognised as constituting a ‘movement’. But their combined effect was to revitalise theatre by giving a fresh impetus to play-writing. The culture of the long running play helped this innovation in a back-handed way. Frustrated innovators were forced to set up small companies. The Dramatic Students was one of the first in 1886, followed by William Poel’s experiments with

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‘authentic’ Shakespeare in the 1890s. Shaw was full of praise for these independent ventures, especially when they championed European writing. Some of Ibsen’s plays had appeared earlier, but they struggled for acceptance, until eventually they could be seen on major West End stages: A Doll’s House appeared at The Novelty in 1889 then moved to Terry’s in 1891. Rosmersholm was played at The Vaudeville in 1891, followed by The Lady from the Sea at Terry’s in the same year.

10. A Doll’s House: Afterlife on Stage Since Ibsen wrote the play in 1879 A Doll’s House has been constantly re-interpreted in large and small theatres, on film and TV throughout the world. It has become one of the most famous European plays and in less than 130 years it has acquired a rich and controversial afterlife. Some critics believe that in reviving the play a company should remain faithful to its 1879 context and to Ibsen’s intentions, though these are often hard to establish. In February 1880 he wrote to Frederick Hegel, his Copenhagen publisher, who was opposed to Ibsen’s idea of writing an artistic autobiography: Naturally I shall not engage in any interpretation of my books; best that the public and the critics be left to puzzle over these as much as they wish—for the time being at least. I would simply and straightforwardly describe the circumstances and conditions under which I have written—all, naturally with the utmost discretion, leaving a wide area open for all sorts of guesswork. This invitation to ‘guesswork’ has encouraged other types of director to explore new interpretations and avant-garde methods of making the play relevant —in both form and content—to their current generation of audiences. The variety of interpretation has generally depended on how directors answer the following questions:  Does the play have a strict feminist agenda?  Does Nora change suddenly from being skittish in Acts 1 & 2 to serious and perceptive in Act 3?  To what extent is the play an ensemble piece? Or is it virtually about one woman surrounded by shadowy satellites?  Does the play require strict fidelity to the received opinions, theatre conventions, set and costumes of 1879?  Does modern dress (or a ‘timeless’ period) release the play or destroy the point of it?  Does the play have enough universal resonance for a company to take a radi Quoted by Ferguson, p. 249

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cal approach—e.g., constructivist — and to strip away the trappings of social realism?  Is the play more about social reform than Nora’s transformation? Can it be treated in epic/montage fashion, keeping the audience at a judicial distance and aiming for types of Brechtian verfremdung or ‘apartness’? Most productions, especially in England, have retained the feel of an authentic Victorian parlour—and dressed the characters accordingly. Sometimes this setting has been dark and claustrophobic, in keeping with the ‘grim Nordic pessimist’ who wrote it—this description, however superficial, has become a common assumption about Ibsen. Others have aimed for a light, bright impression as though the Helmers’ Christmas was to be a time for love and laughter. Ibsen’s stage directions are neutral and invite either treatment: ‘a tastefully but not expensively furnished living room’. The tone of the production is immediately announced by this first sight of the room. Productions that aim for the lighter touch generally convey more irony, as the charming appearance is constantly denied by the disturbing truth below the surface. Many Noras have charmed audiences (as well as Torvald) by playing the mercurial ‘song-bird’ and ‘squirrel’ convincingly, though as early as 1893 Eleonora Duse’s performance was far more restrained, as if she knew the end of the play from the start: ‘not someone playing a carefree game, but a sleepwalker dancing on the edge of an abyss’. One of the darkest performances of Nora appeared in Fassbinder’s 1973 video. This interpretation was designed to show Nora consciously and cynically sharing responsibility for the state of the marriage; behind her, society was conditioning all such relationships. The marriage became a power struggle which Nora won and remained in control of the home. To make his point more forcibly, Fassbinder cut out the children and the scene with Kristine and Krogstad which opens Ibsen’s Act 3. This production took the notion of a play’s ‘afterlife’ close to a borderline that concerns accurate definition of the ‘new’ work rather than the legitimacy of what a director decides to do with the play. One may question how to label some interpretations: ‘A production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’ or ‘A New Play Entitled ?, Freely Derived from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’. For those who see the play as a document of its period, the authentic-looking conditions of 1879 will be important, especially in showing Nora’s predicament in relation to the low status and limited opportunities for women at that time. For others, who see a timeless Ibsen, with poetic and symbolic  A movement that began in Russia after 1919 and continued in 1930s Germany to encourage art and architecture that displayed usefulness and efficiency in support of a socialist state.

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elements behind the social surface, directors may legitimately explore suggestive subtexts in ways that appear much more radical. Michael Zelanak, the founder of the American Ibsen Theatre believed in a minimalist approach: ‘The disservice that the drawing room, tea-cups, wallpaper productions do to Ibsen is that the drama becomes invisible’. The question of whether or not to modernise, to set and dress the play in style current with audiences, is a slightly different issue, but equally suspect to the traditionalists. A review in the Copenhagen Belingske Tidende, (6th March 1936) of the Folketeatret production opposed modernisation: … a modern young woman wrestling in full seriousness with problems and ideas that have been talked out by everyone else almost two generations ago. In this manner A Doll’s House became antiquated theatre, whereas the solution had been to make it historical theatre. The reviewer approved of plays that are performed with a strong period feel: Paradoxical as it may sound, when they are performed in historical costumes … they are lifted above all dependency on period. In the early 1900s nowhere in Europe was more radical than Moscow. Stanislavski’s work at The Moscow Arts Theatre with Chekhov included detailed attention to character and motivation. A more avant garde treatment of Ibsen was offered by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was reacting against Stanislavski’s methods. Vera Kommisarjevskya had already played Nora in 1904, then she joined Meyerhold in 1906 in St. Petersburg; his interpretation of the play abandoned verisimilitude, believing that a mass of surface detail distracts an audience. By stripping down the experience, engaging in allusion and understatement, he felt that an audience would engage their imaginations more actively. When he returned to the play in 1922 his set—a chaotic collection of old furniture and flats leaning against the back wall of the theatre—had the clearly political implication that the Helmers’ bourgeois world was falling apart. Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated production in Munich in 1981, later revived in Sweden in 1989, was re-titled as Nora, and played down the political and social themes so that it could concentrate wholly on the psychological. Nora’s story was detached from specific place and time and was set within the limbo of a red velvetlined box, with high walls and without doors or windows. Furniture and props were reduced virtually to the bare essentials, but Ibsen’s single setting became three rooms in the house: a playpen with toys in Act 1, a table with two facing chairs in Act 2, and a bed in Act 3. These basics symbolised the three stages of Nora’s moves towards

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escape. Her spiritual suffocation was increased by the other characters sitting around the edge of the action, watching as though in a courtroom, and stepping in to confront her. The externals of plot and action, marked in most productions by doors and bells and the maid’s announcements, were all removed so that the effect was like witnessing the theatre of the mind or the sequences in a dream. Bergman’s German production dispensed with the maid, nurse and children; eight years later Bergman returned to Ibsen’s wishes, but simplified the family down to just one child clutching her doll. This child crept in at the back to witness her mother’s departure at the end, so complicating the morality of the family break-up more than in Ibsen’s original script. Neither production began with the joyful anticipation of Christmas. Bergman’s opening was muted in both productions: in 1981 Nora sat immobile and melancholy; in 1989 she was reading a fairy story to her child. Kristine, veiled and dressed in black, was no helpful confidante but a sinister figure of doom; Krogstad, also in black, hovered restlessly around the action before his entries, appearing as both Nora’s tormentor and fellow-victim; only Rank was available to offer tenderness and affection to Nora. The controversial moment in Act 2, where in some productions she tries to seduce Rank was played with black, not flesh-coloured, stockings to indicate their togetherness in imminent death. The final scene, played on and around the bed, was in no sense a debate about marriage issues, but an emotional account of their relationship with Torvald naked and vulnerable, as after his last night of sex with Nora, and she dressed and ready to leave. Her departure was sudden and through an opening that unexpectedly appeared in the wall. By this time, Ibsen’s plays had fully entered the repertoire and were ‘classics’, therefore inviting robust and varied treatment in their 100-year afterlife. A Doll’s House cannot now replicate the impact it made in 1879. Then its content and issues (though not its structural form) were shockingly new. Now directors search for new ways to achieve the spirit of the play, or else they use and adapt what they feel remains of the play to reach a new generation of audiences. When he wrote The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw was so excited about Ibsen’s new significance that he became provocative about the sorts of actors who would be needed: When one of the more specifically Ibsenian parts has to be filled, it is actually safer to entrust it to a novice than to a competent and experienced actor. He was dismissing the predictable categories that Victorian actors and plays provided  Quoted by Wiesenthal, Shaw and Ibsen, appendix to Q1, p. 227

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and that audiences expected: the selfish man is a villain; the self-sacrificing one is a noble hero; the character who sends himself up without realising it is the clown. Shaw felt that these familiar categories were too rigid to accommodate Ibsen’s subtleties and that older actors had grown too encrusted with acquired technique to play him. Shaw was irritated that Sir Henry Irving, the great Shakespearian, never embarked on Ibsen.

Conclusion Writing in The Academy in June 1889, Frederick Wedmore asked of Ibsen, ‘Is he a missionary, or is he an artist?’ Wedmore’s attack is more sophisticated than the angry denunciations from Pigot and Scott (see ‘Ibsen and Shaw’, above), chiefly by virtue of its tone being more calm and dismissive: If Ibsen were an Englishman—engaged in preaching that our women are dolls and our clergymen are humbugs—I should say that he was provincial; I should say that he was suburban. And I should then pass on. But, as it is, there is no doubt little justification for being quite so hard on him. Ibsen is not suburban; he is not even provincial—he is Scandinavian.’ Wedmore’s criticism echoes the opinion that A Doll’s House is no more than a bit of provincial genre painting. Shaw dealt with this reductive sneer. His view was that Ibsen ‘finally decided that there is more tragedy in the next suburban villa than in a whole imaginary Italy of unauthentic Borgias.’ Arthur Miller, in his preface to Death of a Salesman, applauds Ibsen’s practice and Shaw’s opinion, when he argues that Aristotle’s Poetics, accepted for so long as providing a blueprint for tragedy, must now be outdated if it insists that a tragic hero or heroine must be of high social status. And Thomas Hardy too, a contemporary of Ibsen, was writing novels in the 1880s and 1890s that told the tragic stories of ordinary people; his very title Jude the Obscure asserts this widening application of what ‘tragedy’ can mean. Ibsen’s early prose tragedies are all set in middle-class households and he observes the lives of his characters as meticulously as Vermeer or any other great genre painter would. But their struggles extend beyond specific status, place and time. They face disasters, assert their personalities and have their faults and failures ennobled by Ibsen’s sense of humanity that is broader than any localised moral code of good and bad. He was no radical in terms of dramatic form but he had an immense impact on playwrights who followed him. Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian on 2 April, 1978:  Quoted by Egan, Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, p. 108

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My impression is that there is scarcely a dramatist of stature anywhere, under the age of 40, who would profess to be an Ibsenite, technically; equally there is scarcely anyone under 40 who hasn’t been influenced by him thematically. He also influenced the acting profession and on how dramatists write for what used to be called the ‘extras’. There are no ‘bit’ parts in Ibsen, or in Chekhov. Since 1900 actors have recognised that both playwrights require profound thought and delicate nuances for playing even the smaller roles. For them the theatre acts as a sort of laboratory (as Martin Esslin explained in his Anatomy of Drama, 1980) in which human beings in crisis can be closely observed, their emotions shared and their opinions assessed, so that the scientists (i.e. the audiences) may become more aware as human beings themselves. The final words should be those of the two great playwrights who acknowledged their debt to Ibsen. First, Arthur Miller in the introduction to his Collected Plays in 1957: But we could do with more of his basic intention, which was to assert nothing he had not proved, and to cling always to the marvellous spectacle of life forcing one event out of the jaws of the preceding one and to reveal its elemental consistencies with surprise. In other words, I contrast his realism not with the lyrical, which I prize, but with sentimentality, which is always a leak in the dramatic dike. He sought to make a play as weighty and living a fact as the discovery of the steam engine or algebra. This can be scoffed away only at a price, and the price is a living drama. And, finally, George Bernard Shaw, who would rarely give praise where he couldn’t also give it a wittily surprising slant: A Doll’s House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.

 Quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, p. 228  Arthur Miller, Collected Plays, Cresset Press, 1957, Miller’s Preface p. 22  Quoted by Wisenthal, Shaw and Ibsen, p. 49

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Further Reading Egan, Michael, (ed.) Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. (London: Routledge, 1972) Ferguson, Robert, Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996) Johnston, Brian, Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989) Macfarlane, James (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Marker, F. J. & Marker, L. L., Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Postlewait, Thomas, (ed.), William Archer on Ibsen: the Major Essays 1889-1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984) Templeton, Joan, Ibsen’s Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Wisenthal, J. L. (ed.), Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ and Related Writings, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1979

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

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