Contextual points

Question 1

Ibsen, ‘Notes for a Modern Tragedy’, 1879.

Answer 1

“There are two kinds 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

How successful was ‘A Dolls House’?

Answer 2

Most successful play ever published in Scandinavia.

Question 3

What kind of play is ‘A dolls House’?

Answer 3

A social problem play.
Naturalistic play.

Very subtle, and pointedly anti-melodramatic.

Question 4

What is a naturalistic play in Ibsens words?

Answer 4

“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… the spirit and tone of the play will be
understood, respected and reproduced without any
concession to the demand for full ruthless truth to life.”

Ibsen, in a letter written to August Lindberg in 1883

Question 5

what does naturalism mean in 18th century philosophy?

Answer 5

A secular non-religious approach to life.
-Applies scientific methodologies to literature as a way of exploring what defines characters.

Question 6

What is determinism?

Answer 6

-The idea that people are determined by their genetics.

Question 7

What’s the difference between naturalism and realism?

Answer 7

-Naturalism always contemporary in setting.
-Applies discoveries and methodologies of science to literature.
-Writers are interested in depicting how genetics, psychology and environment all determine the character.

Question 8

What contemporary event inspired A dolls house?

Answer 8

-Laura Peterson, friend of Ibsens.
-Husband had tuberculosis, doctors said they had to take a trip to a warmer country.
-Paid with a loan, couldn’t replay.
-Forged a check to clear her debt.
-Husband found out, had her incaserated in insane asylum for two months.
-Would not let her see her children for another two years after.
-Distressed by her assossiation with a dolls house.

Question 9

When was it first performed?
What were the initial reactions?

Answer 9

21st December 1879.

Extremely controversial.

Question 10

What was the dominant theatrical form of drama in the 19th century?

Answer 10

Melodrama.
-Highly charged.
-Sensational plots.
-Characters either embodied vice or virtue.
-Spectacular visuals
-Strong musical element.
-climactic endings resolving convoluted plot.
-All emotion was externalized.

Question 11

Ibsen on characters ‘interiority’

Answer 11

Revealed through “…seemingly easy but concealing conversations.”

Question 12

Which part of the stage does Nora dominate in a dolls house?
To what effect?

Answer 12

Centre stage.
Unusual at the time, shows her as a character of primary importance.

Question 13

Which tropes in ‘A Dolls House’ are Melodramatic?

Answer 13

-Secrets and revelations.
-fatal letter concealed then red.
-Woman with a past.
-Vicious Blackmailer.
-Tarantella music dance - hair falls down, which in melodrama signifies madness, sexuality, or both.
-Nora wants to behave like a melodramatic heroine, buts love before legality.
-Want Torvald to perform miracle, sacrifice himself to save her, she will reciprocate sacrifice (kill herself) - melodramtic.

Question 14

How is Nora a melodramatic character?

Answer 14

-Tarantella music dance - hair falls down, which in melodrama signifies madness, sexuality, or both.
-Nora wants to behave like a melodramatic heroine, buts love before legality.
-Want Torvald to perform miracle, sacrifice himself to save her, she will reciprocate sacrifice (kill herself) - melodramatic.

Question 15

How is Torvald a melodramatic character?

Answer 15

TORVALD:
Do you know, Nora, often I wish some terrible
danger might threaten you, so that I could offer my
life and my blood, everything, for your sake.
- Act 3

-Longs to cast himself as a hero.

Question 16

What stops the play being a melodrama?

Answer 16

-The results of all the theatricality do not end the way melodrama typically does.
Torvald when letter is revealed “Stop being theatrical”

Question 17

Who was the audience of the 1889 production?

Answer 17

Middle class professional men and their wives.
reflected the characters of Ibsens plays:
“the people one meets in the City, one’s lawyer, one’s banker, the men one hears discussing stocks and shares” -Arthur Symons.
Would have recognised the middle-class bourgeoise drawing room described by Ibsen.

Question 18

What is the ‘New Woman’ ?

Answer 18

-Typically middle class
-Intellectual
-Politically active
-Rebellious
-Independent.
-Caricatured as masculine and unfashionable by the conservative press.

Question 19

How did Victorian culture view/paint women’s rebellion?

Answer 19

-Victorian drive to pathologies women’s rebellion as abnormal and unhealthy.

-Reducing everything to hormones and hysteria.

-E.g. Torvald describing Nora’s plan to leave him as: ‘madness, blindness and monstrous’. ‘ill’, ‘feverish’ and ‘almost out of her mind’

Question 20

Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, first printed in the Westminster Review, 1888

Answer 20

“Common respectable marriage - upon which the
safety of all social existence is supposed to rest [was]
the worst, because the most hypocritical, form of
woman-purchase.”
“The economical independence of woman 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.”

Question 21

New professional and social opportunities for women in the 1880s and 90s?

Answer 21

-Oxford and Cambridge had new women’s colleges.
-Woman only restaurants (Dorothy’s)
-Joined women’s sufurage movement.

Question 22

What is the sexual double standard?

Answer 22

-Relatively permissive attitude to male extramarital sex, verses the huge stigma attached to the so called “fallen woman”.
-Victorian society was becoming increasingly aware of this.

Question 23

What Ibsen a feminist?

Answer 23

“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’

Question 24

What significant scientific discoveries inspired Ibsens naturalism?

Answer 24

-Darwins theory of evoloution.
-Evolution was an important part of the literary toolkit of naturalistic writers.
-Darwin said “Natural science’s teaching about evolution is also relevant to life’s spiritual elements.
-Application of scientific issue to modern problems - prominent in Ibsens work.

Question 25

Why was the ending to ‘A Dolls House’ so controversial?

Answer 25

-Clement Scott claimed the denouement was psychologically implausible.
-anathema for a victorian mother to leave her children.

Question 26

Alternate endings and their responses

Answer 26

-Ibsen wrote onehimself.
1880, a famous German actress, wanted to perform - would not accept ending.
-Pirated version probably imminent.
-Ibsen wrote new ending called it ‘barbaric act of violence against the text.’
-Nora is forced by Torvald into their children’s nursery
doorway and sinks brokenly onto the floor, overcome by maternal guilt.
-proved violently unpopular with German audiences.
-There were even riots.
-Similar adapted version appeared in Britain in 1884 - did very badly.

Question 27

Hegel’s 1821 work, Elements of The Philosophy
of Right, what does Hegel argue?

Answer 27

Hegel argued:
-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 - only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity
with himself.
-Women’s law, meanwhile, was based on emotional and subjective family piety.

Question 28

How is Nora a Hegelian woman? Toril Moi’s Hegelian reading.

Answer 28

-Nora move
past this family piety and subjective emotion that’s
governed her childhood and her marriage to leave home to begin her own struggle
with the external world and with herself.

Question 29

Nora’s full name?

Answer 29

-Ibsen told friends that Nora was a pet name for Lenora - meaning Nora is never once addressed by her full adult name once in the play - treated like a child by everyone throughout.

Question 30

A Dolls Life

Answer 30

-notorious theatrical flop.
-By Comden and Green.
-Nora tries a number of occupations - scullery maid, wardrobe assistant, mistress to a wealthy man.
-The returns to talk at the table with Helmer about experiences.
-Closed three days after it opened in 1982 - shows people are uninterested in seeing a woman returned to her societal role - people want change.

Question 31

Figure of nurse in literature?

Answer 31

-figure of confidante in literature.
-E.g. Romeo and Juliet.
-Role of the nurse generally stands for rough common sense.

Question 32

Criminological research in the period?

Answer 32

-Indicated that the young were not corrupted by lying mothers but rather by poverty and homelessness.
Thus Torvalds views are already outdated and new understandings of criminality were growing.

Question 33

What does Torvald mean?

Answer 33

-Viking name - ‘thunder power’ - big strong healthy male.
-further emphasizes his masculinity and power.

Question 34

What is the significance of Ibsen’s use of the word “Doll” in the title?

Answer 34

Ibsen’s play immediately draws attention to girls or women, thus gender was the focus of his play; he made his main character a woman so that he could point out a deep societal problem, namely how women are treated like dolls, or playthings, by the patriarchal society.

Question 35

What do some people argue A Doll’s House is truly concerned with? (Ibsen’s philosophy)

Answer 35

Some interpretations of the play argue that it is not concerned with the plight of women, but rather the universal need to find self-fulfilment in life. They often point to a statement Ibsen made late in his career about not being a feminist, “I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement.” arguing that he was instead a humanist, a speech he rather ungraciously delivered to the Norwegian League of Women’s rights who were giving him a birthday banquet. He explained that his emphasis was on art and poetry, not “propaganda.”

Question 36

Why does Ibsen’s play not “consciously” support the women’s rights movement?

Answer 36

Ibsen wanted to point out a deep societal issue, however, he did not write a prescription and solve a problem; he simply posed a question in the form of a play. Thus, his work is not “propaganda” directly associated with the women’s rights league.

Question 37

What is the question Ibsen poses in his play?

Answer 37

What are women in contemporary life supposed to do; how can they live in a male-dominated world?”

Question 38

How is the play still relevant today?

Answer 38

The societal problems it exposed in 1879 when it was first published and performed have by no means gone away or been fully resolved. This is a play that clearly dissects conventional bourgeois society, exposing its rigidity and the constraints it places upon character and on each individual life.
The play also points out the prominent issue between parents and their children.
Even more significantly, the dramatic innovations the play presented have left a long legacy on modern dramas in terms of how plays are written, beginning with the most basic element, the plot.

Question 39

Significance of “Modern Tragedy”?

Answer 39

There are no dead bodies littering the stage at the end of A Doll’s House, as in the classics of western drama that have provided a template for what we call tragedy, e.g. Hamlet, King Lear, Oedipus Rex etc…
Ibsen challenges this age-old model of tragedy by bringing it up to date and saying that you don’t need heaps of corpses (or even death) in order to have a tragedy. Women are forced to conform to a system that only recognises masculine modes of being and thinking. “A WOMAN CANNOT BE HERSELF IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY; IT IS AN EXCLUSIVELY MALE SOCIETY with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.” By giving his play the subtitle, “a modern tragedy,” Ibsen is announcing that this unacknowledged but fundamental difference between men and women, with the resulting impoverishment of women’s lives, is the single greatest tragedy of contemporary life. He is also following induction of influential danish critic Georg Brandes that modern literature should “submit problems to debate.”

Question 40

What was the story of Laura Kieler, the real life inspo for Nora.

Answer 40

Nora Helmer was modelled on young friend of Ibsen’s, Laura Kieler. She was an aspiring writer who confided in Ibsen that: -her husband developed tb
-in order to save his life and take him to warmer climate she had to forge a check
-when her husband found out he divorced her and took away her children
-she ended up in a mental asylum for a time.
It is a cruel irony that a play that seeks to remedy the exploitation of women in society should so ruthlessly exploit one unfortunate woman in doing so.

Question 41

Ibsen and feminism

Answer 41

Helped to unleash full force of women’s rights movement and widespread agitation for the vote. His articulation of the double standards “two laws” directly influenced many other contemporary playwrights such as Wilde and shaw.
Ibsen’s life-long interest in the plight of women can be found in many of his plays, his work is, in a sense, one long mediation on women’s issues eg head Ghosts, Hedda Gabler and so on. This ofc utterly refutes denial he made about supporting women’s rights movement in 1898, this can be explained by his fear of being affiliated with any one group, whether feminist, socialist, anarchist etc.. he wanted to be his own man, with his own work.

Question 42

Masculinity and idealism

Answer 42

Ibsen also wrote men plays about men juggling with family demands and all-consuming careers. He often asks the important question, How far does devotion to one’s calling and vocation pre-empt other aspects of life, including family? His plays revolve around sacrifice and compromise.

Ibsen and Idealism:
Ibsen’s plays also show the pitfalls of a too-rigid commitment to idealism, the “all-or-nothing mentality/ He shows the need for such engrained, archaic masculine traits to be stripped away from modern men.

Question 43

What was the original name of the title?

Answer 43

” A Doll Home”, “A Doll’s house is a mistranslation. By using the literary technique Modernist writers call “estrangement” or alienation, Ibsen turns the strange into familiar: he takes a well known cliche and turns it into something similar, but also very different. Whilst “A Doll’s House” suggests a little girl’s plaything, “A Doll’s Home” sounds much more sinister: how the idea of a girl playing with dolls has spread beyond the neat confines of a little house, to pervade the real home - the real life of the characters, and of every woman. And the tragedy is that Nora is living as a doll in her own home and passing the role on, unthinkingly, to her own children.

Question 44

Why do many productions choose not to show the children on stage?

Answer 44

many productions choose only to allude to the children rather than actually show the, as Ibsen’s script mad this possible. For example, the hide-and-seek game in Act 1 could be played entirely without them, with simply Nora alone and “hiding” on stage and speaking to them as if they are in nearby rooms we can’t see. This can send out a powerful message, making a thematic point, by suggesting that through their absence, Nora is already gone from their lives.

Question 45

Why was the part of Nora so popular among contemporary actresses?

Answer 45

The part requires a psychological awareness on the part of actress - at last, there was a depth and backstory to female characters. Anti-melodramatic and subtle.

Question 46

What kind of dramatist was Ibsen?

Answer 46

A contrarian: just when people though they had him pinned down, he surprised them by doing something going against what he’d done before.
-The pillars of society (1877)
-Ghosts (1880)
-An Enemy of. the People (1882) were his first four ‘social problem’ plays, each driving home a message about how important it is to tell the truth, to expose falsehood and illusion.

Question 47

Bird motif links to…

Answer 47

Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792, “A vindication of the rights of women.” She states women are confined in cages as “the feathered race.”