Henrik Ibsen 1879
doll’s house from real world
Taking over the ideals of Victorian marriage, changing the concept of
idealized woman being the Angel in the House, ‘a woman’s pleasure is to
please’ – 14th century
Sarah Grand’s New Woman, ‘unattractively masculine’ -People’s Paper
Denmark, New Woman criticized the gender double standard – 19th
century
- ‘marriage as a transaction, ‘I passed from papa’s hands into
yours’, ‘I’ve been your doll-wife just like I’ve been papa’s doll-
child’, she has become his property in double sense
- economic basis of their marriage – ‘I performed trick for you, and
you gave me food and drink’, ‘squirrel’, ‘songbird’, ‘an expensive
pet for a man to keep’
- Mrs Line and Krogstadt vow to work together in their marriage yet
it falls into the traditional roles – ‘I needed someone to care for’,
she needs ‘someone to be a mother to’, ‘I need someone to work
for’
- To Linde work was ‘the greatest joy of her life’ to support her
mother but she finds ‘no joy to work just for oneself’, ‘no one to
care for’
- Christine Linde shows Christian values just like the linden tree – a
symbol of marital love and perfect wife
- Anne-Marie left her own daughter to take care of Nora, no choice
for women
- ‘no man can be expected to sacrifice his honour’ but ‘millions of
women have done it’
- To Nora a marriage based on freedom and equality would be
‘miracle of miracles’
- Nora must pass through many doors to go outside – separation of
Laura Kieler – saved husband by taking him southern via taking a loan she
was unable to repay so she forged a cheque and when husband found out
she was divorced as a criminal and denied access to children for two years
Edmund Gosse – the marriage is ‘intensely patriarchal’
Elements of melodrama – 19th century’s main theatrical form, stock
characters, externalizing all emotions, climatic endings that resolved plots
- not in ADH -> Dr Sophie Duncan: ‘it ends with more questions
than it answers’)
- ADH relies on melodramatic tropes: secrets and revelation,
villainous blackmailer, a fatal letter
Well-made play – artificial plot, climactic endings where plot comes clear,
often with happy endings
Neapolitan fisher girl – tarantella sequence, her hair ‘came loose and fell
over her shoulders’ – a symbol of sexual availability
Toril Moi: ‘Nora and Torvald star in various idealist scenarios of female
sacrifice and male rescue’
- Nora would kill herself in a reciprocal sacrifice to prevent Helmer
from finding out about the forged signature and loan, yet Helmer
casts himself as a melodramatic hero despite not doing any action
for Nora, but Dr Rank does
- ‘often I wish some terrible danger might threaten you, so that I
could offer my life and my blood, everything for your sake
Nora’s purpose is to help women’s collective liberation
Naturalist and realist play – Ibsen was interested in interiority - Rank’s ‘suffering and loneliness seemed to provide a kind of dark
background to the happy sunlight of our marriage’ – Helmer after
- Emile Zola’s approach to characters, they are ‘products of their
Rank’s death
environment’
- ‘I would not be true man if your feminine helplessness did not
- Realist drama showing scenes from everyday life
make you doubly attractive in my eyes’
- Naturalist drama often approaches taboo subjects
- Helmer is ‘so proud of being a man’ it would be ‘so painful and
Access to money is highly gendered humiliating for him to know that he owed anything to me’ -Nora

- ‘a wife can’t borrow money without a husband’s consent’ Setting at Christmas – heightens patriarchal ideals of a family,
- Nora has fantasies about ‘rich old gentleman’ transgression becomes taboo
- ‘everything to my beloved Mrs Nora Helmer in cash’ by Dr Rank
To People’s Paper Copenhagen ‘no woman would ever act like Nora’,
- Working is ‘almost like being a man’
German actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to perform Nora
- Nora, Christine, and Anne-Marie all sacrifice themselves to work
because she would never leave her own children
for others
English premieres were mostly performed as ‘matinees’ because
Rank’s illness indicates parental ability to destroy their children via
bourgeoisie women who did not work went to see them
heredity, and the sexual double standard, to Nora ‘all your father’s
recklessness and instability he has handed on to you’ Ibsen wrote the play not only for the cause of women but ‘for the cause
of human beings’
- ‘all young criminals are the children of mothers who are
constitutional liars’, at the end Helmer calls Nora ‘mad’, ‘out of Modernist drama – introduces rejection of old forms
her mind’ – rebellious women are presented as hysteric
- Krogstadt is ‘poisoning his children with his lies and pretences’,
‘moral cripple’

Helmer is fragile, he’s blind to social realities due to his aesthetic

preferences

- Embroidery is ‘much prettier’ than knitting Line does because

she’s ‘all huddled up’
- Helmer’s fantasy of Nora as a virginal bride ‘young and trembling
and beautiful’, ‘most treasured possession’