A doll's house - context and critical quotes

Question 1

Ibsen “notes for a modern tragedy” 1879

Answer 1

‘There are two kind of moral laws, two kinds of conscience, one for men and one, quite different, for women. They don’t understand each other, but in practical life, woman is judged by masculine law, as though she weren’t a woman, but a man.”

Question 2

At time of writing genesis - Ibsen was travelling around Italy with wife Suzannah, in self imposed exile from conservative homeland norway.

Question 3

How successful

Answer 3

Sold out opening night, most successful play ever published in Scandinavia

Question 4

A doll’s house was second social problem play

Answer 4

Naturalist plays.

Question 5

What is Naturalism?

Answer 5

Ibsen in letter to August Strindberg, 1883:
“The play’s effect is dependent, to a large degree, on the audience members thinking that they sit and listen and watch something which is happening out there in real life…”

Naturalism is truth to life, reality effect
comes from 18th century philosophy: “a secular non-religious approach to life” Denied anything supernatural or divine. The world is only made up of things we can see and hear. Paul Thiry.
1867 Naturalism became a literary term : Émile Zola

Question 6

What else did Zola argue for?

Answer 6

Determinism: Idea that people are determined by their genetics and their environment. Inspired by Darwin’s theories of evolution.

Question 7

What does naturalism overlap with?

Answer 7

Realism. Both try and represent life objectively in writing, e.g Charles Dickens, George Elliot.

Question 8

What is the difference between naturalism and realism?

Answer 8

Naturalism, unlike realism is always contemporary in its setting and naturalism specifically applies the discoveries and methodologies of science to literature. In naturalism, unlike realism writers are interested in how genetics, psychology and environment all determine character. Elements of Realism include the focus of social issues, struggles of everyday life, truths of everyday life, and focus on mostly middle- and lower-class people.

Question 9

What inspired Ibsen to write the plot of A doll’s House?

Answer 9

Contemporary events, inspired by story of Laura Keiler who Ibsen nicknamed the “skylark.”
Peterson’s husband Victor Keeler developed TB and Drs. said he would die without a trip to a warmer climate. Laura forged a cheque to cover loans, when bank found out Laura was forced to tell Victor who went mad, had her incarcerated in an insane asylum for a month, threatened to divorce her and wouldn’t let her see her children for another two years. Events played out while Ibsen was writing A doll’s house, Laura was distressed by association with play, partly as revealed forgery but also because she never wanted to leave her children but was forced to.

Question 10

When did first performance take place?

Answer 10

21st December 1879, Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre

Question 11

How was play received?

Answer 11

Highly successful but also highly controversial.

Question 12

Fredrik Peterson, jan 1880, prof of theology.

Answer 12

“Society needs divine ideality, needs faith in the idea of the good and the beautiful to survive.”

“One does not leave the play in the uplifted mood which already in the time of the Greeks was regarded as an absolute requirement for any artistic or poetic work.

Question 13

What did August Strindberg write about the effect of A doll’s House on marriage?

Answer 13

“Marriage was revealed as being a far from divine institution, people stopped regarding it as an absolute provider of bliss, and divorce between incompatible parties came at last to be conceivably as justifiable.”

Question 14

What did the conservative critic say about A doll’s House despite its naturalism?

Answer 14

“We do not honestly believe that those theroies as expressed in “The Doll’s House” would ever find favour with the great body of english playgoers.

Question 15

How did A doll’s House disrupt melodrama?

Answer 15

Dominant theatrical form in 19th cent was melodrama, highly charged, sensational plots with stock characters who clearly embodied either vice or virtue. Strong musical element, spectacular visuals and climactic endings that resolve convoluted plots. Today melodrama is usually a pejorative term to define hyperbolic acting, but in 19th cent they were usually radical plays, often depicting working class oppression with spectacular visual effects. Acting was highly gestural and legible - emotion externalised. Huge audiences, intense performances.
Ibsen’s interest in subtext was also revolutionary as characters were supposed to be easily read.

Question 16

Eric Beogh on naturalism of play, 1879

Answer 16

“It is beyond memory since a play so simple in its action and so everyday in its dress mad such an impression of artistic master… never for a moment was the dagger of tragedy raised.”

Question 17

What did Ibsen say about the interiority of his characters?

Answer 17

Interiority revealed through “seemingly easy but concealing conversations.” Made roles attractive for actors especially female actors.

Question 18

Elizabeth Robbins on acting in Ibsen’s plays.

Answer 18

.no drama has ever meant so much to the women of the stage as Henrik Ibsen’s.

Question 19

Julie Hollidge, Stage directions:

Answer 19

Nora is consistently centre stage, dominating the action, even before change of heart - extremely unusual at time.

Question 20

Ending of Ibsen’s plays

Answer 20

Again unlike melodrama, his plays do not end with cleared resolutions, “a doll’s house ends with more questions than it answers” - Prof. Sophie Duncan

Question 21

How did Ibsen’s plays disrupt and also draw on wider canon of 18th cent drama?

Answer 21

Reveal clear through line from melodramas, domestic dramas and French well-made plays.
Lots of melodramatic tropes: revelations and secrets, a fatal letter which is concealed and then revealed, a woman with a past and a villainous blackmailer. Play also has a set piece full of music and dancing in tarantella sequence, act 2, Nora’s hair also comes tumbling down as dancing - in melodrama loose dishevelled hair signalled woman’s sexual availability, madness or both.
Nora also wants to behave like melodramatic heroine, love before legality and expecting Torvald to perform miracle where he will sacrifice himself for her heroically. or she will equally make sacrifice for him. Torvald also wishes to behave as a hero. Results savagely undermine these conventions, although play is dominated by melodramatic tropes.
Play is metatheatrical until Torvald tells Nora to stop being theatrical.

Question 22

Kinds of people in first 1889 production in England and how they might have identified with characters.

Answer 22

Ibsen’s plays populated by middle-class characters, audience was usually compromised of middle-class professionals like in his plays and their wives. Audiences would’ve recognised middle-class, bourgeois drawing room set that Ibsen carefully described in act 1 stage directions. Thus, not only was Ibsen important to actresses he was also significant to women theatregoers in late 19th cent. Majority of his plays premiered as matinees, where women outnumber male audience members 12:1. Middle class women as working class women were at work

Question 23

Arthur Symons on characters of Ibsen’s plays.

Answer 23

“the people one meets in the city, one’s lawyer, one’s banker, the men one hears discussing stocks and shares.

Question 24

A..B Walkley on women and theatre

Answer 24

Without womankind the modern drama would cease to exist.”
No playwright was seen as more modern than ibsen.

Question 25

When was term “new woman” coined and by whom?

Answer 25

Sarah Grand, 1894. After A doll’s House but very much associated with Ibsenism.

Question 26

What were the characteristics of the new woman?

Answer 26

Typically middle-class, intellectual, rebellious, politically active and independent. The conservative press caricatured as masculine and unfashionable.

Question 27

Hugh Suttfield on audience for Ghosts, 1891

Answer 27

“The unwomanly women, the unsexed females, and the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats.” levelled at the new woman.

Question 28

Clement Scott’s review of the A doll’s House in 1889 reflecting conservative views on marriage in the period.

Answer 28

Nora is Torvald’s “baby-wife” a “restless, illogical, fractious and babyish little wife.” Echoing Torvald’s own language when desribing Nora in act 3 as he concludes that a husband forgiving his wife means that “she has become his property in a double sense, she is now not only his wife but also his child. From now on that is what you shall be to me, my poor helpless, bewildered, little creature.” Nora recognises that he is perpetuating behaviour initiated by her own father. “I passed from Papa’s into yours.” “I feel the same about Torvald as i did about Papa.”

Question 29

Torvald about Nora’s plan to leave: “madness…blindness…monstrous..” Tells us she is “ill…feverish…and almost out of her mind.`’

Answer 29

`lexis of ilness and disability reflects late Victorian tendency to pathologise women’s rebellion as abnormal and unhealthy, reducing everything to hormones and hysteria.
Which is something else seen in the play when Rank a man of Medicine joins Torvald in reducing Nora’s behaviour to her hormones asking whether or not she’s behaving oddly because she’s pregnant.

Question 30

How do Nora’s views on marriage change from act 2 to end of act 3?

Answer 30

In act 2 Nora is willing to sacrifice her life to protect her husband’s honour, in end of act 3 she has come to view marriage as an economic transaction, not worth giving up her life for: “I performed tricks for you and you gave me food and drink.”

Question 31

Mona Caird, 1888, a radical victorian writer also writing about marriage:

Answer 31

“common respectable marriage - upon which the safety of all societal existence is supposed to rest [was] the worst, because the most hypocritical, form of woman - purchase.”
“The economical independence of women is the first condition of free marriage, she ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter.” Nora by the end of the play wants to achieve economical independence, even in act 1 she reflects that “It was great fun though, sitting there working and earning money.”

Question 32

How did 1880s and 1890s offer new opportunities to (middle-class) women?

Answer 32

Professional and social opportunities offered. Oxford and Cambridge had new women’s colleges, women only clubs in London. Middle-class, metropolitan women attended matinees unchaperoned, shopped in new department stores, ate in wome’s staffed ABC teashops 1884 > and Dorothy restaurants. And of course joined movements fighting for women’s suffrage.

Question 33

Hugh Suttfield on new woman inspired by Ibsen:

Answer 33

“The woman of the new Ibsenite neuropathic school, is not only mad, but does her best to drive others mad too.”

Question 34

Victorian society on double standards

Answer 34

Increasingly conscious of Sexual double standards, the relatively permissive attitude to male extra-marital sex vs huge stigma attached to “fallen woman.” A doll’s House confronts this:
TORVALD: No man can be expected to sacrifice his honour, even for the person he loves.
NORA: Millions of women have done it.

Question 34

Max Nordau on Nora and leaving

Answer 34

“The idiocy of Nora’s high -flown leave - taking has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes.”

Question 34

Ibsen’s philosophy

Answer 34

at an 1898 gala evening organised by Norwegian association for the cause of women. “I must decline the honour consciously to have worked for the cause of women. I am not even quite clear what the cause of women really is…For me it has appeared to be the cause of human beings…My task has been to portray human beings.” Thus he claimed to be a humanist rather than a feminist.
He wanted in his legacy to be seen ultimately as a poet.

Question 34

Critics on feminism

Answer 34

Feminism has been overstressed on scholarship of Ibsen’s plays. I think for Ibsen’s time the word feminist meant radical feminist, believing that women were superior to men, it did not simply mean equality of the sexes, thus i think ibsen was a feminist in that he believed in equality for all human beings, for both of the sexes, he was just not a radical feminist.

Question 34

Clement Scott on Torvald:

Answer 34

Although Scott believed that Torvald was justified in his infantilisation of Nora he called him “sensual” “egotistical” and “a conceited prigg.”

Question 35

Where did Ibsen’s interest in science come from?

Answer 35

Apprenticeship at an apothecary and time as a medical student.
His lifetime coincided with many medical and scientific advances notably Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Evolution was important device for naturalistic writers.

Question 35

Heredity

Answer 35

Key theme of A doll’s house. Rank dying of tb due to father’s promiscuity. Rank’s departure can be seen as inevitability of hereditary diseases. Nora adopts money - spending quality of father and book-ended throughout play will poison her children.
Lexis of infection in act 1 becomes a metaphor for sin

Question 35

Torvald’s sensuality:

Answer 35

He constantly aestheticises everyone and everything around him, especially Nora and even rank. Helmer’s aesthetic preferences blind him to social realities.

Question 35

Ultimately Nora and Helmer are both victims of the society that has created them

Question 36

Darwin’s tehory fo evolution

Answer 36

Believed that evolution could be applied to morality and spirituality. Believed contemporary era was coming to a close and there were bound to be rebirths and new beginnings.

Question 36

Korgstaad and Nora represent two different ideas of what is lawful

Answer 36

Krogstaad represents the law of community and legality
Nora represents law of ethical and emotional obligations to family, as a wife and a daughter

Question 37

the ending - the most controversial part of the play

Answer 37

Halvden Kult it “exploded like a bomb into contemporary life.”

Question 38

Several adaptations altered outcome:

Answer 38

Ibsen was forced to change ending write an alternative where Nora does not leave as German actress - a mother herself - would not play a part where she left her children
Ibsen described this ending as “a barbaric act of violence against the text” very unpopular
all adaptations did very badly

Question 39

Clement Scott on Denouement

Answer 39

“The baby -wife who has suddenly and miraculously delevloped into a thinking woman, leaves her home, breaks her marriage oath, abbandons her innocent children and becomes absolutely inhuman simply because she discovers her husband is an egotist and that she has been a petted little fool.”

Question 40

a.S Byatt, 2009

Answer 40

“Every time I read the play, I find myself judging Nora with less and less sympathy.”

Question 41

Contrast between helmer’s marriage and linde and Krigstad

Answer 41

Linde and Krogstad vow to work together but also assume traditional gender roles.

Question 42

Cyclical behaviour and heredity

Answer 42

Nora was motherless and nurse had to abandon her children to look after Nora.

Question 43

German philosopher Hegel

Answer 43

“women’s roles confined them to the family unit whereas man’s actual substantial life derived from the state, learning and from work.
man’s struggle was with the external world and within himself so that it is only through his division that he fights his way to self -sufficient unity within himself.
Women’s law was based on emotional and subjective family piety.

Question 44

Toril Moi on gender laws

Answer 44

“A doll’s house sees Nora move past this family piety and subjective emotion that’s governed chilhood and marriage and to leave home to begin own struggle with external world and herself. Sees Nora as an Hegelian woman.

Question 45

Feminist critics on play’s ending

Answer 45

Landmark moment in women’s theatre however some people argue that the importance of gender roles has been over-stressed - it is about humanism rather than feminism

Question 46

Idea of Nora as everyman

Answer 46

Underlying this is idea that for Nora to be universal she can’t also be a woman, a female character can only speak to women, however a male character can speak to everyone.