A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1879) (improved) Flashcards
Describe Henrik Ibsen’s context of production
1) Henrik Ibsen was born into a wealthy family in Norway in 1828 (the drama is set in the same place). When he first began to write, though, he was quite unsuccessful, rendering him and his wife extremely poor.
2) A Doll’s House is based on the life of a family
friend Laura Kieler, whose actions inspired the story of Nora’s secret debt. When her husband discovered her secret, he divorced her and forced her to be committed to an insane asylum. Ibsen, appalled by this wrote the play as a way of defending her in 1879.
3) Literary period he wrote in was realism (characterized by the use of realistic characters over a complicated plot and the focus of social issues, struggles of everyday life, truths of everyday life, and focus on mostly middle- and lower-class people) and modernism (characterised by self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, realisation that knowledge is not absolute).
Describe the context of reception
1) When it was first performed and for many years
afterwards, A Doll’s House caused quite the scandal for its criticism of 19th-century marriage customs and portrayal of a woman abandoning her family in order to gain a sense of self.
2) Pressured by several theatres and even the actress who was supposed to play Nora in a German production of the play, Ibsen wrote an alternative ending, in which Nora, upon seeing her children, changes her mind and stays with Torvald. He later regretted doing this, calling the adapted ending “a barbaric outrage.”
Outline the historical context of the novel
1) The 1870s were dominated by strict Victorian social codes and laws that severely restricted the rights of all women and married women in particular.
2) Governments throughout Europe used the Napoleonic Code, which prevented women from engaging in financial transactions. Many women who
conducted their own business or earned their own wages and chose not to marry because the laws regarding what married women could do when it came to finances were so limiting.
3) By the beginning of the 20th century, things were beginning to change as the female suffrage movement swept over Europe and the world and women were awarded rights such as the right to own property and the right to vote. However, for most people in the late 1870s, such eventualities were not yet even a distant dream.
Summarise the whole text
Conversely, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is a play written over a century earlier in 1879. Here, the protagonist Nora finds herself trapped in a patriarchal society epitomised by her toxic toxic relationship with her husband Torvald. Ibsen’s modernist play spotlights the suffocating nature of marriage and the role of women at that time in society.
