A Doll’s House
As he grew older and well known, fan mail came from the sort of young woman who yearned to attach herself to a famous man. Ibsen answered with more than the usual inanity; he met some of the girls. But again he was guarded; he didn’t trust them too far and took a lot of it out in love notes.
Emilie Bardach, the most important of these young girls, said her joy in life was taking men away from their wives. Ibsen was floored by this degree of ruthlessness. The “May sun in the September of his life” was a demon. Her demonism interested him, but in the end he could say, “She didn’t get me, but I got her for my writing.” Emilie was partly the model for the “inspiring” Hilda who attaches herself to the aging architect in The Master Builder.
She sent Ibsen a photograph of herself signed, “The Princess of Orangia,” a pet name used in the play. The great man was greatly annoyed. That was overstepping. The photograph was burned.
A Doll’s House was naturally taken up by the women’s rights movement.
At first this was agreeable, but Ibsen couldn’t in the end resist a put-down.
He made an address before the Norwegian Society for Women’s Rights and said he didn’t know what those rights were. He cared only for freedom for all men.
The plays are about writing, disguised as architecture or sculpture (ambition for greatness), about provincial narrowness and hypocrisy, bourgeois marriage, money, hereditary taints of all kinds — from syphilis to the tendency to get into debt.
He had obviously learned all he needed from Grimstad: bankruptcy, anger, the torments inside the little parlors of Christiania. And there was a large, steady poetic and dramatic energy that kept him going day after day, year after year.
There has been recently an accretion of interest in the women characters in Ibsen: in the plight of Mrs. Alving, the chaos of Hedda Gabler, the ambition of Rebecca West. These are all dramatically interesting portraits, but world literature offers more complex and richly imagined women. What newly strikes us about Ibsen may be just what we had a decade or so ago thought was stodgy about him – he sees women not only as individual characters and destinies caught up in dramatic conflicts but also as a “problem.” He seems alone, so far as I can remember, in suggesting that he has given thought to the bare fact of being born a woman. To be female:
What does it mean?
He worried about the raw canvas upon which the details of character were painted. First you are a woman and then you are restless, destructive, self-sacrificing, whatever you happen to be.
No doubt there is some Scandinavian texture in all this, some socialistic brooding, something to do with the masterful Thoresen women in his wife’s family, with his wife herself.
Women seemed very strong to him, unpredictable; they set his literary imagination on fire and so he needed them, but he didn’t want to be engulfed, drowned by new passions. He was not domestic and liked living in hotels and hired places in Italy or Germany, summering in cottages by a lake, writing, not necessarily needing the whole sweep of the feminine plan of house, permanence for possessions, roots.
What can A Doll’s House be for us? Nora’s leaving her husband can scarcely rivet our attention. The only thing more common and unremarkable would be her husband’s leaving her. The last line, the historic “speech,” is in the famous stage direction that ends the play. “From below is heard the reverberations of a heavy door closing.” The door is the door of self-determination. We have some idea why it is at last opened, but why had it, before, been closed?
A Doll’s House is about money, about the way it turns locks. Here is the plot once more. Nora Helmer is the charming young mother of three children. She has been married for eight years. When we first meet her she is full of claims to happiness, but it is rather swiftly revealed that strenuous days and nights lie in the past. Still the marriage has life in it and Nora thinks she is happy. Indeed she is on the brink of being happier — things have taken a good turn
Mrs. Linde is a confidante, a device, rather thinly sketched, but in her outlines of practicality and heavy duties she is an interesting contrast to Nora. Mrs. Linde has come to town to get a job. Money has had its way with her since birth. Her father died and she gradually had to look after her mother and her younger brothers. She married at last, seeking minimal security, forgoing love. But ill luck dogged her still. Her husband died but not before his business fell into trouble. He left her without money and even without “a sorrow or a longing to remember.” It had been a complete blank— and no pension at the end of it. She survived. Mrs. Linde is steadfast if somewhat depressed. She has always worked.
At this point Nora starts to reveal the real plot of the play. Hearing of Mrs. Linde’s troubles, of her lifelong sacrifices, Nora cannot resist admitting the troubles she, the happy, lucky young wife, has known. She has got herself into a mess on behalf of those she loves and she is proud of her steady, if unconventional, efforts to extricate herself. Nora too has made decisions, borne burdensome consequences. Yes, she has a husband and “three of the loveliest children,” but she has had to find ways, she has had to work – “light fancy work…crochet and embroidery and things of that sort” — and copying late at night. Her secret is that she took on nothing less than the responsibility of saving her husband’s life.
Helmer, when they were first married, had lost his health in the struggle to survive in the harsh commercial climate of Norway. We have no reason to doubt that he might have died without a trip south, to the sun. The bitter Norwegian winters, the coughs, the lung disease, the bronchial threats are perfectly convincing. “How lucky you had the money to spend,” the penny-worn Mrs. Linde says about their year in Italy.
Of course they hadn’t the money to spend. Nora, without telling her husband, who would have certainly refused or vetoed the idea, had borrowed the money from the disgraced moneylender, Krogstad. This man had been a schoolmate of Helmer’s, an admirer of Mrs. Linde’s, a small-town embarrassment to himself and his family because he had at some time been guilty of forgery, had not actually been sentenced, but had lived on — forced into usury — with a small post in Helmer’s bank and no position in society.
Nora turned to Krogstad for her secret negotiations on the money for the year in Italy; she also forged her dying father’s name to the note because she didn’t know what else to do. But they had their year in the sun, her husband is well, and she has been scrupulously paying back the loan with interest all these years, doing “fancy work,” and saving pennies from her household money.
Mrs. Linde speaks of being alone and childless and Nora cries out, “So utterly alone. How dreadful that must be!” And yet when Mrs. Linde faces her present situation, her mother dead, the boys raised and on their own, Nora suddenly says, “How free you must feel!” Mrs. Linde finds only “an inexpressable emptiness.” She has no one to live for and yet “you have to be always on the strain.” This woman has had a hard life of lonely work.
She is thoroughly capable, even shows a talent for business, and Helmer is easily able to offer her a job in his bank.
Still, Mrs. Linde is a paradox, the sort of puzzle at the very heart of this play. She is capable and hard-working, but she is not independent. Nora is impractical and inexperienced, loves “beautiful gloves,” and wants the house to be nice — she is also intrinsically independent and free-spirited. In the end she leaves her husband and her children in order to find herself, but it is not the final gesture that makes her free. Anna Karenina left her husband and her son, but she was tragically dependent, driven finally by the torments of love to a devastating jealousy and to suicide.
Mrs. Linde, with her business experience, is prudent and conventional like Helmer.
She tells Nora, “A wife can’t borrow without her husband’s consent.” Nora thinks that is nonsense, a technicality. (In this conclusion she shows herself prophetic of modern American practice.) She is not, like Krogstad, dishonest and self-pitying. Instead she seems to enjoy the triumph of the borrowing and the struggle to repay. She has nothing but the most honorable intentions toward the money and the interest. Krogstad is a true forger, always wanting to make a leap without taking the consequences.
He whines about his reputation. “All paths barred.” It is strongly suggested that he would have been more respected if he had gone to jail. Instead he has somehow edged out of that but has not been able to push away the cloud over his name.
No one understands vice better than Ibsen. He knows what a Krogstad is like. The outcast does not care about reality, but only about fancy. Krogstad holds Nora’s fate in his hands; the fact that she has almost repaid the money does not impress him. He knows about the forging of her father’s name.
Helmer finds out about the borrowing and the forgery. He flies into a rage and nowhere shows the “miracle” of understanding or of male chivalry
Nora had pretended to expect. He thinks she’s a treacherous little idiot who can tear down in a moment of folly all a man has built up by his most painful efforts. When he sees that it may not all be revealed, that they can get by with it, his fury abates. But Nora has suffered a moral disappointment. Helmer is not only a donkey, but a coward as well. She makes her decision to leave him and her children because she feels she has been deceiving herself about marriage and happiness and must now learn what life is really about.
The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the bright woman — with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of “heaps of money” — can be a suitable candidate for liberation. No, that role should by rights belong to the depressed, child-less, loveless Mrs. Linde and her lonely drudgery.
The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. And Nora never for a moment trusted Helmer. If she had done so she would long ago have told him about her troubles.
Nora kept her secret because she took pride in having assumed responsibility for her husband’s life. She also kept quiet out of a lack of faith in her husband’s spirit, a thorough knowledge of his conventionality and fear.
Even as he is opening the letter that tells of the borrowing and forgery, before he knows, she thinks, Goodbye, my little ones. Of course her worst fears are true. Helmer behaves very badly, saying I told you so, and babbling on about her being her father’s daughter.
Had Nora stayed with him, we can imagine a rather full store of grievance would be in the closet.
At the least Helmer would be eternally joking about her foolishness and looking into his wallet at night.
It is difficult to play Nora on the stage. Not that the role is demanding in the usual ways, but rather because of the intellectual and emotional distance this spirited young wife must travel. It is common to link the early Nora and the late Nora by an undercurrent of hysteria in the beginning of the play — a preparation of the ground by a sprinkling of overly bright notes, a little breathlessness and hurry. Hysterical worry will not connect the two Noras.
Her panic is a fleeting thing, based upon reality. It has to do with the pressing practical problem of the odious Krogstad’s determination to use Nora for his own dishonest purposes.
f the play were written today, Nora would have left Helmer long ago. They are ill-matched. She has a gift for life and a fundamental common sense made falsely to appear giddy and girlish by the empty, dead conventionality of Helmer.
An exchange about debt: Helmer says, Suppose a catastrophe happened to a man and his family was left with a coffin of unpaid bills; Nora answers, “If anything so dreadful happened, it would be all the same to me whether I was in debt or not.” She shows this sort of undercutting intelligence and genuineness throughout the play. Her mind has always been free and original; she is liberated by her intelligence and high spirits.
Strange that Helmer should want a doll’s house and yet be so hostile to details of domestic creation. Over and over he leaves the stage with an air of insufferable self-love when there is anything to do with sewing or household affairs. In one scene he mocks the arm movements of a woman knitting. He flees from the presence of the children when they come in from
of insufferable self-love when there is anything to do with sewing or household affairs. In one scene he mocks the arm movements of a woman knitting. He flees from the presence of the children when they come in from the cold outside, saying, “Only mothers can endure such a temperature.” Nora’s children — this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen’s day one actress refused the part saying, “I could never abandon my children.” Nora’s love for the children seems real. The nurse points out that they are used to being with their mother more than is usual. Helmer, again lecturing about heredity, says lying mothers produce criminal children. Nora shudders, remembering her interest payments. The nurse she will finally leave the children with is the one who has raised her, but still the step is a grave one. In one of the most striking bits of dialogue between husband and wife, Helmer says, …no man sacrifices his honor, not even for one he loves.” “Millions of women have done so,” Nora replies.
When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, “Millions of men have done so,” and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior.
Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, assent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart.
Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man’s practice, if not his stated beliet, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.
In William Archer’s Preface to A Doll’s House he had the idea that the woman who served as the model for Nora had actually, in real life, borrowed the money to redecorate her house! There is something beguiling in this thought, something of Nora Helmer in it. The real case was a dismal and more complicated one. The borrowing woman was an intellectual, a sort of writer, who had some literary correspondence with Ibsen. A meeting was arranged and the biographer, Halvdan Koht, says that “she was hardly what he [Ibsen] expected, but young, pretty and vivacious.” She was invited to Dresden, and Ibsen called her “the lark.” Some years later the lark married and borrowed money secretly to take her husband south for his health. She had trouble paying the money back and the Ibsens urged her to confess to her husband. She confessed and he, in fury, demanded a divorce.
The poor wife suffered a nervous breakdown, was sent to an asylum. “In this catastrophe the marriage was dissolved.”
Ibsen has not made Nora a writer, but he has, if we look carefully, made her extremely intelligent. She is the most sympathetic of all his heroines. There is nothing bitter, ruthless, or self-destructive in her. She has the amiability and endurance that are the clues to moral courage. Nora is gracious and fair-minded. Even when she is leaving Helmer, she thanks him for being kind to her. With Dr. Rank, the family friend, who is in love with her, she is honest and her flirtation has none of the heavy cynicism of Hedda Gabler’s relation with her family friend, Judge Brack, and none of the bitter ambitiousness of Rebecca’s relationship with Rosmer.
Nora is not after anything and we cannot imagine her in nihilistic pursuit of an architect (The Master Builder) or the sculptor (When We Dead Awaken). Nora’s freedom rests upon her affectionate nature.
The habit is to play Nora too lightly in the beginning and too heavily in the end. The person who has been charming in Acts 1 and 2 puts on a dowdy traveling suit in Act 3 and is suddenly standing before you as a spinster governess. If the play is to make sense, the woman who has decided to leave her husband must be the very same woman we have known before. We may well predict that she will soon be laughing and chattering again and eating her macaroons in peace, telling her friends — she is going back to her hometown – what a stick Helmer turned out to be. Otherwise her freedom is worth nothing. Nora’s liberation is not a transformation, but an acknowledgment of error, of having married the wrong man. Her real problem is money — at the beginning and at the end. What will she live on?What kind of work will she do? Will she get her children back? Who will be her next husband? When the curtain goes down it is only the end of Volume One.
Because Nora is free and whole she does not present the puzzling tangle of deceit and subterfuge, suppressed rage and dishonesty, that are so peculiar a tendency in the women in Ibsen’s other realistic plays. A Doll’s House is a comedy, a happy ending — except for the matter of the children.
The play was published more than ninety years ago and we have found out very little we could add. In the case of grating marriages the children are still there, a matter of improvisation, resistant to fixed principles.
Fortunately some of Ibsen’s more far-out heroines — Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West, and Irene — are childless and this makes their suicides and falling off a mountain easier on the moral sensibilities of the audience.
The Master Builder
The triangle in The Master Builder is more straightforward than the hesitations and longing of Rosmersholm.
The aging builder finds himself surrounded by the willful, destructive young Hilda. The girl has attached herself to the distinguished man for a bit of sadistic teasing. Solness, the architect, is tormented, failing, and yet too vain to suspect the dangers of the young girl. He has, up to her entrance, been busy trying to emasculate his younger competitors, and this in itself is always a large, emotional drama for an artist. Solness is, as Shaw says, “a very fascinating man whom nobody, himself least of all, could suspect of having shot his bolt and being already dead.”
The architect’s wife, Mrs. Solness, is dejection and depression itself, immobilized gloom, supposedly somehow sacrificed to the Moloch ambition. This we are not quite obliged to agree to because Ibsen has not made her appealing enough, not been able to imagine just what an artist’s wife, or the wife of a man of great ambition, can do except be jealous, suspicious, and ill.
The victim grows, as a plant grows leaves, the foliage of dejection.
Depression is boring, suspicion is deforming, ill health is repetitive. Our sympathies fall away and we can scarcely blame the husband who will naturally, in the gloom, want light. It is interesting that in Ibsen’s plays the wives are as likely as the husbands to want the diversion of the young woman who comes into the house. Two is not a perfect number, and the childless, miserable wife fascinated Ibsen.
Hilda, in The Master Builder, actually occupies the empty nursery on her visit of darkness. It is her role to inspire the declining builder. “Higher and higher!” calls the awful young girl. She waves her white shawl at the giddy architect who has scaled the rafters and he falls to his death.
Rosmersholm
Heaven is not likely to send a desperate, strong-willed woman of thirty an interesting, unmarried man. No, it will send her someone’s husband and tell her to dispose of the wife as best she can.
Of course, Beata was on the right track. Fear and rejection had told her all she needed to know. She saw that Rebecca meant to “have” him; they had closed their feelings to any claims of her own and it was all confused in her poor husband’s mind with radicalism, atheism, and a delightful new friendship.
Beata’s character and her predicament, as it comes to us from the description of others, make her a plausible possibility for suicide. Rebecca’s ruthlessness and Rosmer’s dimness are an overwhelming force.
But in Ibsen things are never simple. When Rosmer at last faces his wife’s jealousy, her anguish over his love for Rebecca, these new conditions, this new understanding
But in Ibsen things are never simple. When Rosmer at last faces his wife’s jealousy, her anguish over his love for Rebecca, these new conditions, this new understanding of his own past, have the most peculiar effect upon him. He is immediately caught up in a fascination, even a sort of triumphant admiration of his wife’s suffering.
With a sudden flood of imaginative comprehension he puts himself in her place, goes through every step of her agony. “Oh, what a battle she must have fought! And alone too, Rebecca; desperate and quite alone! – and then, at last, this heartbreaking, accusing victory in the mill race!” He is deeply impressed by the ultimate quality of his wife’s love, by the grandeur of her sacrifice of her own life.
What can compare with this? he asks himself.
Rebecca urges him to forget the dead, to live, to move away from the past. But it is no use. Rosmer now announces himself fascinated by destruction, not by life. He and Rebecca have moved into darkness. They have begun to distrust and to dislike each other. Ashes are in their throats.
Rosmer is frightened of Rebecca and in a Norwegian madness of his own asks her to match Beata’s love. Together they throw themselves in the millstream. Even if the suicide is not entirely convincing, there is no life left in their love. But they do not die from guilt, but from the uselessness of it all, from the emptiness, from self-hatred.
Ibsen withholds full approval and sympathy for Rebecca, just as Tolstoy withholds it from Anna. They do not believe women should live by the will, accountable only to desire. The heroines become distorted, destructive; a strange hysterical emptiness begins to cut them off from natural feelings.
When Anna has a child by Vronsky she finds that “however hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers.” The kind of love she has for Vronsky is outside the scope of family life — for that even Karenin is better.
When Rebecca agrees to kill herself in the millstream it is not expiation but a furious disappointment in Rosmer and disgust with herself. Rosmer is perhaps ready for death, since he has fallen back in love with Beata, or with her love for him.
hexafu 