critical views Flashcards
Fredrik Petersen, writing about A Doll’s House in
January 1880.
(Professor of theology)
“Society needs divine ideality, needs faith in the idea of the good and the beautiful to survive.”
August Strindberg, writing about the impact of A
Doll’s House in his book Getting Married (1884)
“Marriage was revealed as being a far from divine
institution, people stopped regarding it as an
automatic provider of absolute bliss, and divorce
between incompatible parties came at last to be
accepted as conceivably justifiable.”
Clement Scott writing in the Daily Telegraph, 8 June1889.
“We do not honestly believe that those theories as expressed in “The Doll’s House” would ever find favor with the great body of English playgoers.”
British journalist Hugh Suttfield writing in 1891 on
the audience for Ibsen’s play Ghosts.
“…the unwomanly women, the unsexed females, and
the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in
petticoats.”
Clements Scotts review of ‘A Dolls House’ 1989.
What line of Torvalds does it reflect (Act 3)?
“Nora is Torvalds baby wife, a reckless illogical, fractious, and babyish little wife.”
TORVALD:
She has become his property in a double sense;
he has, as it were, brought her into the world anew;
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.
- Act 3
Hugh Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s 157, June 1895, about Ibsenite woman.
“The woman of the new Ibsenite neuropathic school
is not only mad, but does her best to drive others
mad too.”
-view of conservatives who objected to the mobility and political tendencies of the New woman.
- Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895)
“The idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking [had]
become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes.”
-Play was perceived as very influential/contaminating.
Clement Scott on Torvald.
“He is sensual and egotistical” and a “conceited prick”
A review of A Doll’s House that appeared in The
Times, 8 June 1889, social science.
“Ibsen holds that the true function of the stage is not
so much to amuse as to instruct, and this view he has
carried out by casting into a dramatic form certain
philosophical theses concerning the education and the rights of women, heredity, and other subjects that may be classed under the comprehensive term of
social science.”
Clement Scott, writing about the 1899 production
at the Novelty Theatre, about the ending.
“The baby wife, who has suddenly and miraculously
developed into a thinking woman, leaves her home,
breaks her marriage oath, refuses to forgive her
husband, abandons 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.”
A. S. Byatt, writing in The Guardian, 2 May 2009, about Nora.
“Every time I read the play I find myself judging Nora
with less and less sympathy.
Michael Meyer, on Ibsen and women’s rights
“A Doll’s House is no more about women’s rights than
Shakespeare’s Richard I is about the divine right of
kings, or Ghosts about syphilis […..] Its theme is the
need of every individual to find out the kind of person
he or she really is, and to strive to become that
person.”
What did one of Ibsen’s biographer’s, Michael Meyers, have to say about Nora?
He found Nora “an irrational and frivolous narcissist,” a view in line with readers who see her as hysterical, vain, abnormal, egotistical, and selfish.” (all terms used in recent years by critics, as Templeton points out in book, Ibsen’s Women).
Templeton on the woman question.
“Ibsen’s most explicit treatment of the woman question.”
Toril Moi on existentialism
Toril Moi suggests the play asks a fundamental existential question, “Is it possible to find meaning in life when one feels that one’s future is shrinking with everyday that passes. This question lies at the heart of the play; it explains Nora’s urgent need to leave. Her departure is necessary for her to discover her true self, and if there is none, to create one, once she has discarded the empty layers of the self that she has inherited and adopted unthinkingly from the society around her. (An idea Ibsen looks at in Peer Gynt, who peels an onion to discover no core).
