Discussions Flashcards
The contrast between the Helmer’s marriage and Christine and Krogstad?
-Kristine and Krogstad vow to work together - resume gender roles.
-Christine suggest she needs to be a mother, and that Krogstad’s children must need a mother.
-Effect that this has on our impression of Nora leaving her children (If Christine, an upholder of morality, believes children need a mother)
Working class mother vs middle class mothers.
-Ibsen also exposes the hypocrisy and double standards of this view of motherhood as a class issue.
-Nurse reveals to Nora that she had to give up her children when “I came to nurse my little Nora.”
-However, the nurse is held to no moral judgement for this fact, even when it is seen as appalling of Nora to do the same.
-By showing this class parallel Ibsen exposes the obligation of motherhood in the middleclass as little more than a societal expectation used to uphold reputation, despite the mothers being largely removed from the lives of their children.
Contemporary Approach: Signs and Semiotics - idea.
Christmas tree
Clothing/Capri costume
-Because signs, words, gestures, clothing and codes of manner exist only in arbitrary relationship to what they mean (a cat is only a cat because we commonly agree to call it that) - it means that the relationship between the signifier (word image or action) and signified (meaning conventionally ascribed to it) - can change/slip.
Signs in the play convey different things to different people at different points.
Signs and Semiotics:
Christmas tree
Christmas tree:
-At the start indicates season - set of values to the audience - Christian ideal of family - values and ideas Nora links herself with at the start.
-End of Act 1 - tree symbolizes the way she must continually distract her husband by ‘dressing it’ - just as she ‘dresses’ her own worry in a mask.
-stripped state in Act 1 - it is an image of her exhaustion and vulnerability.
Signs and Semiotics: Clothing/Capri costume
-tension between what Capri dress immediately signifies - clothes of a worker - and what is signifies to Helmer - fancy dress - shows something about his wife and his power over her.
Signs and Semiotics:
Slamming door
-primary meaning - Nora left the building.
-however also a comment of the ‘glimmer of hope’ of ‘greatest miracle of all’ - shuts him off - clear answer/ statement.
Marxist critique of naturalism?
-naturalism - allows audience to be absorbed in the action - watching real life.
-Marxist critics suggest this was dangerous - lulling audience into accpeting the society shown in the play - instead of wanting to change it.
-theatre should constantly call attention to itself - so audience could not identify with the sufferings of the protagonist - but would be alert to the political conditions which caused them.
Marxist criticism: Ibsen’s focus on Nora
-from the perspective of middle class woman.
-We only see other classes as the maid in the Helmer house hold.
-maids functions - says nothing , admits Krogstad to the house, carries secret letters to Nora.
-Nurse briefly has her own story - yet her future is not a concern of the play.
-Nora leaves to become an individual - get a job - become a member of the bourgeoisie.
-Can afford the luxury of personal identity - at the expense of the Nurse and those of her class - continue in a state of servitude.
Marxist Criticism - reification of Nora and Mrs Linde.
-Nora - turned into a commodity - Nora perhaps helmers rewards for helping her financially embarrassed father.
-view her marriage as though she was an object ‘passing out of papa’s hands into yours’.
-helmers nicknames - views Nora as a household pet - yet he is not aware of this reification.
Mrs Linde - aware she has been an object of exchange - sold herself to a rich husband - keep herself and her family.
Masculinity and idealism
Masculinity: Ibsen also wrote 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.
Gender Roles
A Doll’s House doesn’t just point an accusing finger at men, it would not have the staying power if so. Instead, he shows how both women and men unconsciously play roles they seem to be expected to play: the obedient wife, the authoritative husband, the loving mother, the distant father etc…
This play is ultimately about how all of us play roles in life, usually unconsciously and therefore, unquestioningly.
Nora’s role to Torvald
Nora is a sexual object, her husband constantly perceives her in a sexual light, like when he confides to her that he imagines her as his young, virginal bride, “that we are just leaving our wedding, that I am taking you to our new home for the first time…to be alone with you for the first time…quite alone with your young and trembling loveliness!” He desires to turn back time and make her a virgin again, fantasising about her virginity, erasing fact she is a sexually mature woman with three children, with him. The “trembling’ was especially relevant around the “suffer and be still” predicament of young women who were not told what to expect on their wedding night, kept in ignorance, only to be traumatised by painful initiation. Nora is a woman with a history, she is already a mother and a wife, she already has sexual experience. whilst most well-made plays focused on unmarried, inexperienced Ingenués and ended in marriage. Ibsen, instead, shows what happens after marriage and the struggles women face in post-marital life.
Dr Rank’s sexualisation of Nora
The scene between Nora and dr rank’s with the silk stockings shocked audiences at time because of its allusion to naked female body, even if only the legs. Nora had depended on Rank as a friend, trusted him as a man who didn’t need to see her in a sexual way, was going to ask him for help because she knew it wouldn’t involve anything sexual. However when he confesses his love for her, and in doing so sexualises her, he shuts down her one remaining avenue of help.
Heroes and Villains
This “modern tragedy’ is not just about Nora, it is Rank’s, Krogstad’s, mrs Linde’s, Torvald’s tragedy too. One of Ibsen’s great innovations was to blur the lines between heroes and villains, showing how hard it is to distinguish between the two and how human character is made up of both sides. Each character is a victim of society’s upbringing. Thus Ibsen sets up character foils: Nora and mrs Linde, Torvald and krogstad, so that we are constantly weighing one against the other, complicating and deepening the play’s treatment of gender.
What will Nora do next?
Nora has never had a formal education, and her upbringing in a comfortable family has not prepared her for any trade or occupation, just for being married. She can’t be a governess, one of the few “respectable” jobs for a 19th century woman. She can’t teach as she has no education and no particular talents. Just about the only option was prostitution.
Although countless alternative endings and sequels have been attempted, Ibsen was never trying to provide a “one size fits all” remedy for society’s gender imbalance. He set the precedent that so many subsequent dramatists follow: they pose questions, but don’t provide answers.There is no grand declamation here; Ibsen’s stage directions call for a calm, serious tone, no histrionics, no melodrama. This is a private discussion we are witnessing, as though we are the invisible “fourth wall.” Without any resolution or closure that we might expect, we sit there witnessing an intimate conversation. The closing of the door is the only resolution we will get.
