Art is the name we give to all acts that kindle our imagination and help us present a clearer picture of the otherwise hazy truth. Art has always held up a mirror to society, often showing the realities of the lives we lead folded within the aesthetics and colours.
A Doll’s House, a three-act play by Henrik Ibsen, is an example of this gleaming silver reflection. Published in 1879, in a time when the first wave of feminism was hitting the shore, the Norwegian playwright’s work brought about extensive debates about ‘The Woman Question’. Irrespective of the claims made regarding Ibsen's belief in feminism and whether he intended for his work to be associated with the movement, the drama brought about a discourse ranging from the critique of the protagonist to discussions of gender in art. An analysis of these debates and their implications along with the alterations of the ending of the play, much to the author’s dislike, show us the nature of the narratives that the play set out.
Premiering at the Royal Theatre in Denmark, A Doll’s House is a tale spread over three scenes about the protagonist Nora, an ideal 19th Century wife, and her realizations. Nora is married to Torvald, a man on his path to a promotion in a bank, and they both have three children together. Nora is visited by her friend Kristine Linde, who is in need of a job and hopes for help from Torvald, which she receives as she replaces a man known as Krogstad at the bank. During their interaction about the same, Kristine while talking about the hardships of her life, tells Nora that she is like a child. Nora, who does not take this remark in a good light goes on to reveal that she illegally borrowed money from by forging her father’s signature post his death, as women did not have the freedom to do economic acts like signing cheques without their
husbands. She says she borrowed the money to be able to pay for a trip to Italy for Torvald’s health and had been paying it back over the years by working in secret. It is later revealed that Nora borrowed the money from Krogstad who chooses to threaten her with the revelation of this fact to her husband if she did not convince him for the reinstatement of his job at the bank. Nora fails to convince her husband and Krogstad puts a letter with the details of Nora’s crime in Torvald’s letterbox. Nora, knowing how afraid her husband is of borrowing money and debt, begins to contemplate ending her life. A rekindling of the previous love affair of Krogstad and Kristine convinces the former to remove his letter from the box, yet Kristine believes that Torvald must know the truth. After discovering the letter, Torvald goes into a fit of rage and tells Nora that thanks to her, he is at the mercy of Krogstad’s instruments. A letter is delivered to Nora during this exchange that Torvald demands to read and takes from her. He exclaims that he is safe as Krogstad has returned the incriminating bond. He tells her that he forgives her. Yet Nora is struck with the realization that her husband is not the strong man she thought he was, and that he loves himself more than he does Nora. After a heated confrontation about Nora’s realizations of her husband’s condescending treatment of her, and him viewing her as play doll, she storms out of the house and says she has a greater responsibility to herself than as his wife or as the mother of her children.
Throughout the play, there are references of Nora not being considered Torvald’s equal. He refers to her as a child and ‘squirrel’. The first wave of feminism had demands that resonate in the play. They demanded better marriages, the right to work, suffrage and the recognition of women as people who have right to explore their own wants and needs.
The play was heavily criticized, the first criticism being that Nora was an irrational woman. They dismissed it as a serious statement of women’s rights as they claimed that the woman in the third act is an inconceivable transformation from the one in the first and second. Hermann Weigand goes on to iterate that the play is actually a comedy instead. This nature of critique refuses to understand the domestic problems that women faced (or face) and instead write it off as Nora’s character flaws. A part of this critique is also rendering Nora inconsequential by attacking her morals.
Critiques like John Chamberlain expect readers to cut Torvald slack as he took Nora as seriously as she deserved to be taken. A few like Brian Downs go on to critique her sweet tooth (she is seen eating and hiding macaroons throughout the play) calling it morbid and unladylike. Even women like Mary Mcarthy considered Nora ‘neurotic’ and ‘hyper’.
The second critique comes from Universalists, who believe that art cannot be gendered and that it transcends the questions of the sexes, and so the drama is a narrative on the general human being and not the question of women in particular.
These ideas and debates essentially stand as proof of the extensive reasoning they were ready to provide to avoid recognizing the issues faced by women, and the kind of misogyny that the women of these times had internalized. Yet, these critiques brought about a discourse and allowed for these discussions to span over newspapers, pamphlets and theaters. As Joan Templeton quotes Havelock Ellis, summarizing what 'A Doll’s House' meant to the progressives of Ibsen's time: “The great wave of emancipation which is now sweeping across the civilized world means nominally nothing more than that women should have the right to education, freedom to work, and political enfranchisement-nothing in short but the bare ordinary rights of an adult human creature in a civilized state.”
When Nora accuses her father and husband of having committed a great sin against her by treating her as if she were a plaything, when she describes herself as a doll wife who has lived "by doing tricks", one can easily draw parallels to the contemporary feminist movement and the expectations of the same.
Ibsen’s main inspiration for the play had been journalist Laura Petersen Kieler, whose life closely resembled that of Nora’s with the same motives and actions. Her husband went on to get a legal separation on the grounds of her being an ‘unfit mother’ and caused her much pain in her life, a fact Ibsen sympathized with. Women like Ibsen’s friend Camilla Collett and his wife Suzannah, pushed forth the narratives of women’s rights, which was reflected in his writing as well as his actions.
In 1884, Ibsen, with H. E. Berner, president of the Norwegian Women's Rights League, and with other writers, signed a petition to the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, for a bill, establishing separate property rights for married women. Ibsen claimed that the Storting should not be interested in men's opinions: "To consult men in such a matter is like asking wolves if they desire better for protection for the sheep".
Ibsen’s German agent forced him to change the ending, wherein Nora stays at home, after looking at children, and being reduced to tears at their sight. In another alternative ending, which comes with the Britain adaptation of the play as ‘Breaking the Butterfly’, Nora gets the incriminating letter stolen and the play ends on this happy note. The controversy of the changing endings ranges from an actress being uncomfortable with the thought of leaving her children, to people’s lack of acceptance of a woman walking out on her husband, or her household. It is reflective of the thoughts of the societies which viewed this play, and the extent of the nuances related to the feminist movement that they were ready to accept.
A Doll’s House addresses numerous issues that lay at the heart of the first wave of feminism. It also brought about a major chunk of the discussion and deliberation about the issues faced by women in the 19th century. The play was as a kick-starter for the wheels of many progressive minds that viewed the representation as a question about the rights of women. The feminist movement is based on the principle that ‘Personal is Political’ and the play helped further the rhetoric of the same.
The modern day feminist movement has progressed far and to the possible zenith of Ibsen’s imagination. The next goal is to achieve the horizon of every commoner’s vision of an equal society and sail these stormy seas with grit and resolve.
Sources:
Ø Templeton, Joan. “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen” https://www.jstor.org/stable/462329
Ø Mahajan, Sneh. “Issues in Twentieth-Century World History”
Ø Rosenberg, Marvin. "Ibsen versus Ibsen: Or, Two Versions of A
Doll House."