Did A Doll’s House’s Messages about Gender Equality Stem from

Ibsen’s Betrayal and Loss of the Women He Loved?

by Rochelle Zappia

When Henrik Ibsen spoke at a banquet given in his honor by the Norwegian League for

Women’s Rights, he insisted that he was not even sure what the women’s rights movement was.1

Nevertheless, his drama A Doll’s House fervently advocates a married woman’s right to manage

her own finances, to be treated as a rational human being, and even to leave a husband who no

longer deserves her love and respect. The main action of the play is based on Ibsen’s concern

over unjust social conditions and on the heartbreaking experiences of his protégée and friend

Laura Kieler. However, Ibsen’s ending, in which Nora leaves the condescending, cowardly

Torvald to fulfill her duty to herself, could have been shaped by his own wife’s temporary

departure from their home and by his betrayal and consequent loss of his first love, whom he had

played with like a doll.

Seeds of A Doll’s House in Ibsen’s First Social Play

Ibsen’s idea of a wife yearning to be an equal partner rather than a petted plaything initially

appears in The League of Youth (1869), his first realistic drama.2 When Selma is asked to help

1
Ibsen to the Norwegian League for Women’s Rights in Christiania, May 26, 1898, in Ibsen: Letters and Speeches,
ed. Evert Sprinchorn (New York, 1964), 337, quoted in “Ibsen,” Montclair State University: College of Humanities
and Social Sciences, accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~nielsenw/ibsen.html.

2
A. E. Zucker, Ibsen: The Master Builder (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1929; New York: Octagon Books,
1973), 158–59. Citations refer to the Octagon edition.
her husband cope with the loss of his money, home, and inheritance, she refuses, exclaiming,

How I’ve longed to share your troubles! But if ever I asked about anything I was sent
about my business with a clever joke. You dressed me like a doll, and played with me as
they play with a child. . . . And it’s only now—when Erik has nothing else—that I’m
good enough.3
One may doubt Selma’s sincerity in refusing to help Erik because he had treated her like a doll

before he was ruined. However, Ibsen’s critic and friend Georg Brandes, who had introduced

him to The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, suggested that he expand the essence of

Selma’s protest into a full-length play about a woman who longs to share her husband’s work

and cares instead of being toyed with like a doll. Shortly afterward Ibsen became a mentor to

Laura Kieler (then Laura Petersen), whose future financial and marital problems would be almost

mirrored in A Doll’s House.

The Crumbling of a Real Life “Doll’s House”

Ibsen first became acquainted with Laura when she sent him a copy of her newly published

Brand’s Daughters, which answered the superhuman moral demands of his Brand by portraying

two daughters of the preacher as the true models of Christian devotion. Impressed by Laura’s

talent, Ibsen arranged to meet her face-to-face in Copenhagen and later invited her to visit him

and his family in Dresden. After Ibsen and his wife had formed a close friendship with this

attractive, lively young woman, he called her a “lark,”4 a term of endearment that Torvald often

3
Henrik Ibsen, The League of Youth (1869), in A Doll’s House and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (London: Penguin
Books, 1965), 93.

4
Halvdan Koht, Life of Ibsen, trans. and ed. Einar Haugen and A. E. Santaniello (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971),
314.
2
addresses to Nora. Years later Laura claimed Ibsen had first used the term “a doll’s house” in

reference to her marriage.5

But Laura, like Nora, could not remain a doll. Victor Kieler developed tuberculosis, and his

doctors warned Laura that he would die unless he moved to a warmer climate for a while.

Without her husband’s knowledge, Laura borrowed money to pay for a trip to Italy, having a

male friend cosign for the loan.

The trip cured Victor’s illness, but Laura found herself unable to comply with her creditors’

demands for repayment. She had planned to earn the money she needed through her writing, but

she had been unable to get anything published. The friend who had cosigned with Laura could

not help her because he had started to have financial difficulties of his own.

Laura was afraid to tell Victor, who exploded over mere household expenses, that she owed a

large sum of money. So she sent Ibsen’s wife a novel she had penned hastily and a letter begging

her to persuade Ibsen to have it published. Ibsen refused, insisting that the book was a rush job

and inferior to Laura’s previous writings. He wrote to Laura, advising her to tell Victor the truth.

Instead Laura tried to get the money she needed by forging a check. But the bank detected her

forgery, so she finally had to tell her husband the whole story of the secret debt she had incurred

to save his life.

Instead of helping Laura settle the matter, Victor treated her like a criminal and decided she was
5
Ibid., 318.
3
an unfit wife and mother. When this caused Laura to have a nervous breakdown, he had her

committed to a mental hospital and obtained a legal separation from her so that he could remove

their children from her care. Laura was released from the asylum after a month. She eventually

got back together with Victor despite his rejection and mistreatment.

Criticisms of a Male-Dominated Legal System

In the fall of 1878, two months after receiving a letter from Victor Kieler stating that he had been

“forced” to commit his wife to an insane asylum, Ibsen started working on A Doll’s House. He

made the play reflect not only Laura’s ordeal but also her warm-hearted belief that good

intentions justify some illegal actions.6 In his notes for A Doll’s House, Ibsen wrote:

There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another,
altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; [sic] but in practical
life the woman is judged by man’s law, as though she were not a woman but a man. . . . A
woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively
masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges
feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.7
In order to dramatize this injustice more effectively, Ibsen changed a key element in Laura’s

story. While Laura forged a check to avoid telling her husband about her secret debt, Nora had

forged a male cosigner’s name on her loan application in order to obtain her loan without telling

her dying father that her husband was dangerously ill.

6
Zucker, Ibsen: The Master Builder, 160.

7
Henrik Ibsen, “Notes for A Doll’s House” (1878), in C. Innes, A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre (NY: Routledge,
2000), 70, quoted in “Ibsen,” Montclair State University: College of Humanities and Social Sciences, accessed
March 6, 2012, http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~nielsenw/ibsen.html.
4
Nora’s natural instincts tell her she was right to save Torvald’s life without alarming her gravely

ill father, even though this involved forging her father’s signature on a legal document. But

Krogstad, a male lawyer, tells her that the law “is not concerned with motives” and that whether

it is “stupid or not,” it is the law that she will be judged by if he exposes her forgery in court.8

When Nora eventually recognizes that the law can interfere with a woman’s right to shield her

dying father from anxiety or to save her husband’s life, she can no longer believe that the law is

right.

Ibsen used Nora’s plight to illustrate both the arbitrary nature of the legal system and the

detrimental effects of laws which prevented married women from handling their own financial

affairs without male support. In Krogstad’s first conversation with Nora, he reminds her that she

had been required to use her father (or another man) as a surety for the money she was

borrowing. This indicates that Nora would never have committed a forgery if she could have

procured the loan she desperately needed without a male cosigner.

In 1884, five years after the first performance of A Doll’s House, Ibsen supported a petition in

favor of the married women’s property bill, which gave Norwegian wives “the right to exercise

fully independent legal capacity”9 when it was passed in 1888. To explain why women rather

8
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879), in A Doll’s House and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (London: Penguin Books,
1965), 175.

9
“Gender Equality,” edited from Kristin Natvig Aas’s entry in Aschehoug and Gyldendal's Norwegian Encyclopedia,
Norway: The Official Site in the United States, accessed March 3, 2012,
http://www.norway.org/aboutnorway/society/Equal-Opportunities/gender.
5
than men should be consulted about this bill, Ibsen remarked that “to consult men in such a

matter is like asking wolves if they desire better protection for the sheep.”10

Ibsen’s Failure to Defend His Own “Doll”

A Doll’s House demonstrates that affectionate but controlling husbands gave their wives little

protection from the harshness of the outside world. As A. E. Zucker writes, this play shows a

woman “living apparently under the protection of chivalry which . . . fail[s] to operate at the . . .

critical moments when [her husband is] tested.” Zucker also points out that Ibsen used Torvald

Helmer to satirize not only “the ‘superior’ husband,” but also his own former attitudes and

behavior.11

At the age of twenty-five, when Ibsen was theater poet and stage-manager of the Norwegian

Theater in Bergen, he wooed a fifteen-year-old named Henrikke Holst, buying her pastries and

flowers and calling his courtship of her his “little plan to own a lovely maid.”12 Instead of

conversing with Ibsen as an equal, Rikke laughed merrily at his witticisms and responded to his

poetic flights by “turn[ing] her gleaming brown eyes up toward her black-bearded poet.”13 Their

romance began on a sunny morning when Ibsen was drinking coffee on the Hotel Sontum porch

and Rikke threw him a bouquet of flowers, asking, “Haven’t you any two-shilling-cake for me,

10
“Ibsen and Feminism,” Naeem Educational Organization (NEO): Pakistan’s FIRST English Language Learners’
Community, November 6, 2010, http://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/ibsen-and-feminism.

11
Zucker, Ibsen: The Master Builder, 163.

12
Koht, Life of Ibsen, 82.

13
Zucker, Ibsen: The Master Builder, 58.
6
Ibsen?” He replied, “Sit down and try some, you sweet-tooth.”14 This response foreshadows

Torvald playfully wagging a finger at Nora and asking, “Didn’t Little Sweet-Tooth just look in at

the confectioner’s?”15

Like Torvald, Ibsen lost his beloved pet through an act of cowardly betrayal. He proposed to

Rikke, but she begged him to wait because her father vehemently opposed the match and had

even forbidden her to spend time with the meagerly paid poet. One day, right after Rikke had

told Ibsen about the awful things her father had threatened to do if he ever caught them together

again, they turned around and saw him pursuing them with a furious face, raised arms, and

clenched fists. Terrified, Ibsen ran for his life, leaving Rikke to face her enraged father on her

own. She was deeply disappointed in Ibsen and fell out of love with him. Ibsen was miserable

over losing Rikke and disgusted with his own lack of courage. His lingering shame may have

been reflected in Brand, where Agnes leaves Ejnar because he is not strong enough to risk his

life for another person’s salvation.16

In A Doll’s House, love is destroyed by moral weakness. When Nora warns Torvald that

Krogstad may harm his reputation if he dismisses him from the bank, Torvald assures her he is

“man enough to take it all on [him]self.”17 This leads Nora to dream that Torvald will tell

Krogstad to go ahead and publish her forgery to the whole world and that he will then then step
14
Ibid., 57–58.

15
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 151.

16
Koht, Life of Ibsen, 315.

17
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 190.
7
forward and take all the blame, saying he is the guilty one. When he instead declares that her

“crime” must be concealed at any cost, out of fear for what threatens him rather than her, she

sees he is not the man she had thought him. Once Nora no longer loves Torvald, she realizes that

her home has been nothing but a doll’s house and decides to leave it. Torvald tries to persuade

Nora to stay, assuring her that he can change. She answers, “Perhaps—if your doll is taken away

from you.”18

Suzannah Ibsen’s Lessons in Marital Equality

After learning that a “doll” would stop loving him when she saw he was not “man enough to take

it all on [him]self,”19 Ibsen himself changed enough to accept a wife as an equal. He eventually

courted and married Suzannah Thoresen, an independent woman who wandered in the

Norwegian mountains and had great knowledge of the Norse sagas. When Henrik and Suzannah

Ibsen got married, they formed an artistic pact, or “mutual intelligence,” as well as a marriage

bond.20

Suzannah lived up to her part of the pact by spurring her husband to realize his potential as a

playwright. An avid reader of belles lettres, she informed him of literary works which he should

familiarize himself with. Suzannah also influenced Ibsen to give up his hobby of recreational

painting in order to devote himself completely to his writing. And she discussed his plays with
18
Ibid., 230.

19
Ibid., 190.

20
Astrid Saether, “Suzannah Ibsen’s Life Between Two Covers,” interview by Jens-Morten Hanssen and Benedikte
Berntzen on February 19, 2008, Ibsen.net, February 27, 2008, http://www.ibsen.net/?id=11163880&subid=0.
8
him, showing deep artistic insight and frankly pointing out material that she felt was not his best.

Ibsen used Suzannah as a model for Hjoerdis, the heroine of The Vikings at Helgeland, who tells

her hero, Sigurd, “I will follow thee and fire thee to strife and manly deeds, so that thy name

shall be heard over every land.”21

Suzannah may also have been at least one of Ibsen’s models for a woman who leaves a self-

centered husband out of a sense of duty to herself (Nora). When Suzannah and Ibsen first

married, he was the artistic director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania (now Oslo), where

he gained a substantial income from the ticket sales for The Vikings at Helgeland. However,

Ibsen began to neglect his directing duties because he was becoming bored with super-patriotism

and he felt that his heavily time-consuming theater responsibilities were interfering with his

growth as a playwright. Consequently, the theater moved steadily toward bankruptcy, while the

Ibsens moved from one shabby dwelling to another, pursued by claims for overdue rent and

repayment of loans. In the autumn of 1863, when Ibsen was an “‘aesthetic consultant’”22 to the

rival Christiania Theater, which was producing his play The Pretenders, Suzannah decided she

“had had enough of ‘the pact’” and told her husband, “‘I must take care of myself.’”23 She then

left, with the Ibsens’ three-year-old son, Sigurd, and went to stay with her stepmother in

Copenhagen until Ibsen could join them there late in the winter of 1864. Thus, the last scene in A

Doll’s House may reflect Ibsen’s firsthand knowledge that a devoted helpmate, like a doll-

21
Henrik Ibsen, The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, copyright ed. (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), quoted in Zucker, Ibsen: The Master Builder, 73.

22
“Theatre Director and Slave to Debt, 1857–64,” Ibsen.net, February 3, 2007, http://www.ibsen.net/index.gan?
id=11148090&subid=0.

23
Saether, Suzannah Ibsen’s Life, http://www.ibsen.net/?id=11163880&subid=0.
9
sweetheart, may leave a partner who does not make personal sacrifices to meet her needs.

Ultimate Dissolution of Male-Centered Unions

Ibsen used the rigid, blackmailing Krogstad and the affectionate but condescending Torvald to

criticize the patriarchal society that oppressed the women of his day and ruined the life of his

close friend. However, Torvald’s losing Nora through his unwillingness to give up his honor for

his “doll-wife”24 mirrors Ibsen’s own failure to keep his romance and his marital pact intact by

sacrificing his bodily safety and lofty ambitions. The ending of A Doll’s House dramatizes

Ibsen’s painfully acquired realization that a marriage cannot endure during hard times if it is not

a union between equal partners who are mature enough to face danger and make compromises

for one another.

Bibliography

Davis, Dena Michelle. “‘Only Connect’: A Journey of Teaching Ibsen’s A Doll House to Play

Analysis Students.” Master’s thesis, University of North Texas, 2004.

digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4526/m1/1/high_res_d/thesis.pdf.

Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. 1879. In A Doll’s House and Other Plays. Translated by Peter

Watts. London: Penguin Books, 1965.

24
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 226.
10
—. The League of Youth. 1869. In A Doll’s House and Other Plays. Translated by Peter Watts.

London: Penguin Books, 1965.

Koht, Halvdan. Life of Ibsen. Translated and edited by Einar Haugen and A. E. Santaniello. New

York: Benjamin Blom, 1971.

Saether, Astrid. “Suzannah Ibsen’s Life Between Two Covers.” Interview by Jens-Morten

Hanssen and Benedikte Berntzen on February 19, 2008. Ibsen.net. February 27, 2008.

http://www.ibsen.net/?id=11163880&subid=0.

Templeton, Joan. Ibsen’s Women. Paraphrased in Antohin, Anatoly. “Ibsen Notes.” Ibsen Notes

@ Theatre w/Anatoly, Script Analysis. Last modified 2007. script.vtheatre.net/ibsen.html.

Zucker, A. E. Ibsen: The Master Builder. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1929.

Reprinted by special arrangement with Holt, Rinehart and Winston. New York: Octagon Books,

1973. Citations refer to the Octagon edition.

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