What Does a Doll Represent in a Doll's House
Analysis of Henrik Ibsen'south A Doll's House
Whether one reads A Doll's House as a technical revolution in mod theater, the modern tragedy, the offset feminist play since the Greeks, a Hegelian allegory of the spirit's historical evolution, or a Kierkegaardian leap from aesthetic into ethical life, the deep structure of the play equally a modern myth of self-transformation ensures it perennial importance every bit a work that honors the vitality of the human spirit in women and men.
—Errol Durbach, A Doll's House: Ibsen'south Myth of Transformation
More than than one literary historian has identified the precise moment when modernistic drama began: December 4, 1879, with the publication of Ibsen's Etdukkehjem (A Doll's Business firm), or, more dramatically at the explosive climax of the first performance in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879, with the slamming of the door every bit Nora Helmer shockingly leaves her comfortable home, respectable spousal relationship, hubby, and children for an uncertain future of self-discovery. Nora'south shattering exit ushered in a new dramatic era, legitimizing the exploration of fundamental social problems as a serious concern for the modern theater, while sounding the opening nail in the modern sexual revolution. As Henrik Ibsen'due south biographer Michael Meyer has observed, "No play had ever before contributed so momentously to the social argue, or been so widely and furiously discussed among people who were not normally interested in theatrical or fifty-fifty creative matter." A gimmicky reviewer of the play too alleged: "When Nora slammed the door shut on her marriage, walls shook in a thousand homes."
Ibsen ready in motion a transformation of drama as distinctive in the history of the theater every bit the one that occurred in 5th-century b.c. Athens or Elizabethan London. Like the great Athenian dramatists and William Shakespeare, Ibsen fundamentally redefined drama and ready a standard that later playwrights have had to absorb or challenge. The stage that he inherited had largely ceased to function as a serious medium for the deepest consideration of human themes and values. After Ibsen drama was restored every bit an important truth-telling vehicle for a comprehensive criticism of life. A Doll's Business firm anatomized on phase for the first time the social, psychological, emotional, and moral truths beneath the placid surface of a conventional, respectable wedlock while creating a new, psychologically complex modern heroine, who nonetheless manages to stupor and unsettle audiences more than than a century later. A Doll's House is, therefore, 1 of the footing-breaking modern literary texts that established in central ways the responsibility and cost of women's liberation and gender equality. According to critic Evert Sprinchorn, Nora is "the richest, most circuitous" female dramatic grapheme since Shakespeare's heroines, and equally feminist critic Kate Millett has argued in Sexual Politics, Ibsen was the first dramatist since the Greeks to claiming the myth of male authorization. "In Aeschylus' dramatization of the myth," Millett asserts, "one is permitted to see patriarchy confront matriarchy, derange information technology through the noesis of paternity, and come off triumphant. Until Ibsen'southward Nora slammed the door announcing the sexual revolution, this triumph went nearly uncontested."
The momentum that propelled Ibsen's daring artistic and social revolt was sustained principally by his outsider status, as an exile both at home and abroad. His terminal deathbed discussion was "Tvertimod!" (On the contrary!), a fitting epitaph and description of his artistic and intellectual mindset. Born in Skien, Norway, a logging boondocks southwest of Oslo, Ibsen endured a lone and impoverished childhood, peculiarly subsequently the bankruptcy of his businessman male parent when Ibsen was eight. At xv, he was sent to Grimstad every bit an apothecary'southward amateur, where he lived for six years in an attic room on meager pay, sustained by reading romantic verse, sagas, and folk ballads. He later recalled feeling "on a war footing with the lilliputian community where I felt I was being suppressed by my situation and by circumstances in full general." His first play, Cataline, was a historical drama featuring a revolutionary hero who reflects Ibsen's ain alienation. "Cataline was written," the playwright later recalled, "in a piffling provincial town, where it was impossible for me to requite expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down upon me the ill will of all the respectable citizens who could not enter into that world which I was wrestling with lonely."
Largely self-educated, Ibsen failed the university entrance examination to pursue medical training and instead pursued a career in the theater. In 1851 he began a 13-year stage apprenticeship in Bergen and Oslo, doing everything from sweeping the stage to directing, stage managing, and writing mostly verse dramas based on Norwegian legends and historical subjects. The experience gave him a solid knowledge of the phase conventions of the day, particularly of the and then-called well-made play of the popular French playwright Augustin Eugène Scribe and his many imitators, with its emphasis on a complicated, bogus plot based on secrets, suspense, and surprises. Ibsen would transform the conventions of the well-made play into the modern problem play, exploring controversial social and homo questions that had never earlier been dramatized. Although his stage experience in Norway was marked chiefly by failure, Ibsen's apprenticeship was a crucial testing ground for perfecting his craft and providing him with the skills to mountain the assault on theatrical conventions and moral complacency in his mature work.
In 1864 Ibsen began a self-imposed exile from Kingdom of norway that would last 27 years. He traveled first to Italian republic, where he was joined by his married woman, Susannah, whom he had married in 1858, and his son. The family unit divided its fourth dimension betwixt Italy and Frg. The experience was liberating for Ibsen; he felt that he had "escaped from darkness into calorie-free," releasing the productive energy with which he composed the succession of plays that brought him worldwide fame. His first of import works, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were poetic dramas, very much in the romantic fashion of the individual'due south disharmonize with experience and the gap between heroic assertion and achievement, between sobering reality and blind idealism. Pillars of Society (1877) shows him experimenting with ways of introducing these cardinal themes into a play reflecting modernistic life, the beginning in a series of realistic dramas that redefined the conventions and subjects of the mod theater.
The commencement inklings of his next play, A Doll's Business firm, are glimpsed in Ibsen's journal under the heading "Notes for a Modern Tragedy":
At that place are two kinds of moral laws, two kinds of conscience, one for men and ane, quite different, for women. They don't understand each other; only in practical life, adult female is judged by masculine constabulary, every bit though she weren't a woman but a human.
The wife in the play ends past having no thought what is right and what is incorrect; natural feelings on the i manus and belief in dominance on the other pb her to utter lark. . . .
Moral conflict. Weighed downwardly and dislocated by her trust in authority, she loses faith in her ain morality, and in her fitness to bring up her children. Bitterness. A female parent in modernistic society, like certain insects, retires and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race. Love of life, of home, of hubby and children and family. Now and then, as women do, she shrugs off her thoughts. Suddenly anguish and fearfulness return. Everything must be borne lone. The catastrophe approaches, mercilessly, inevitably. Despair, conflict, and defeat.
To tell his modern tragedy based on gender relations, Ibsen takes his audience on an unprecedented, intimate bout of a contemporary, respectable marriage. Set during the Christmas holidays, A Doll'south House begins with Nora Helmer completing the finishing touches on the family'due south celebrations. Her husband, Torvald, has recently been named a bank manager, promising an terminate to the family's former straitened financial circumstances, and Nora is determined to celebrate the vacation with her married man and iii children in style. Despite Torvald's disapproval of her indulgences, he relents, giving her the coin she desires, softened by Nora's childish play-acting, which gratifies his sense of what is expected of his "distraction" and "squirrel." Below the surface of this manifestly charming domestic scene is a potentially damning and destructive secret. Seven years before Nora had saved the life of her critically sick married man by secretly borrowing the coin needed for a rest cure in Italy. Knowing that Torvald would be besides proud to borrow coin himself, Nora forged her dying father's name on the loan she received from Krogstad, a banking associate of Torvald.
The crisis comes when Nora'due south old schoolfriend Christina Linde arrives in need of a job. At Nora's urging Torvald aids her friend by giving her Krogstad's position at the bank. Learning that he is to be dismissed, Krogstad threatens to expose Nora'southward forgery unless she is able to persuade Torvald to reinstate him. Nora fails to convince Torvald to relent, and after receiving his dismissal detect, Krogstad sends Torvald a letter disclosing the details of the forgery. The incriminating letter remains in the Helmers' mailbox like a ticking time-bomb equally Nora tries to distract Torvald from reading it and Christina attempts to convince Krogstad to withdraw his accusation. Torvald eventu-ally reads the letter following the couple's return from a Christmas brawl and explodes in recriminations against his wife, calling her a liar and a criminal, unfit to be his wife and his children'southward mother. "Now you've wrecked all my happiness—ruined my whole future," Torvald insists. "Oh, information technology'south awful to recollect of. I'thou in a cheap little grafter'south easily; he can practice anything he wants with me, inquire me for anything, play with me similar a puppet—and I tin't breathe a word. I'll exist swept downwardly miserably into the depths on account of a featherbrained woman." Torvald's reaction reveals that his formerly expressed high moral rectitude is hypocritical and self-serving. He shows himself worried more than about appearances than true morality, caring nigh his reputation rather than his wife. However, when Krogstad'southward 2nd letter arrives in which he announces his intention of pursuing the matter no further, Torvald joyfully informs Nora that he is "saved" and that Nora should forget all that he has said, assuming that the normal relation betwixt himself and his "frightened little songbird" can be resumed. Nora, however, shocks Torvald with her reaction.
Nora, profoundly disillusioned by Torvald's response to Krogstad's letter, a response bereft of the sympathy and heroic self-sacrifice she had hoped for, orders Torvald to sit down down for a serious talk, the first in their married life, in which she reviews their human relationship. "I've been your doll-wife hither, but equally at domicile I was Papa'southward doll-child," Nora explains. "And in plow the children take been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you played with me, merely as they thought it fun when I played with them. That'south been our marriage, Torvald." Nora has acted out the 19th-century ideal of the submissive, unthinking, dutiful daughter and wife, and it has taken Torvald'southward reaction to shatter the illusion and to strength an illumination. Nora explains:
When the big fear was over—and it wasn't from whatsoever threat against me, only for what might damage you lot—when all the danger was past, for yous it was just as if zilch had happened. I was exactly the same, your lilliputian lark, your doll, that y'all'd have to handle with double intendance now that I'd turned out then brittle and frail. Torvald—in that instant it dawned on me that I've been living hither with a stranger.
Nora tells Torvald that she no longer loves him considering he is not the man she thought he was, that he was incapable of heroic action on her behalf. When Torvald insists that "no human being would sacrifice his award for love," Nora replies: "Millions of women have done just that."
Nora finally resists the claims Torvald mounts in response that she must honor her duties as a wife and mother, stating,
I don't believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I'm a human being, no less than you—or anyhow, I ought to endeavour to get one. I know the majority thinks y'all're right, Torvald, and plenty of books agree with you, too. But I can't keep believing what the bulk says, or what'southward written in books. I have to think over these things myself and try to sympathise them.
The finality of Nora's decision to forgo her assigned role as wife and mother for the actuality of selfhood is marked by the sound of the door slamming and her leave into the wider earth, leaving Torvald to survey the wreckage of their marriage.
Ibsen leaves his audience and readers to consider sobering truths: that married women are the decorative playthings and servants of their husbands who require their submissiveness, that a human's potency in the abode should non go unchallenged, and that the prime number duty of anyone is to arrive at an accurate human identity, not to accept the role determined by social conventions. That Nora would be willing to sacrifice everything, fifty-fifty her children, to go her own person proved to be, and remains, the controversial shock of A Doll's Firm, provoking standing debate over Nora's motivations and justifications. The first edition of 8,000 copies of the play quickly sold out, and the play was and then heatedly debated in Scandinavia in 1879 that, as critic Frances Lord observes, "many a social invitation in Stockholm during that wintertime diameter the words, 'You are requested not to mention Ibsen's Doll's House!" Ibsen was obliged to supply an alternative ending for the first German production when the famous leading lady Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to perform the office of Nora, stating that "I would never leave my children!" Ibsen provided what he would phone call a "barbaric outrage," an catastrophe in which Nora'due south departure is halted at the doorway of her children'southward bedroom. The play served equally a catalyst for an ongoing debate over feminism and women's rights. In 1898 Ibsen was honored past the Norwegian Club for Women'due south Rights and toasted as the "creator of Nora." Always the contrarian, Ibsen rejected the notion that A Doll's Business firm champions the cause of women's rights:
I take been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people generally tend to suppose. I thanks for your toast, simply must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for women'southward rights. I am not fifty-fifty quite sure what women's rights really are. To me it has been a question of man rights. And if you read my books advisedly you will realize that. Of course information technology is incidentally desirable to solve the problem of women; but that has not been my whole object. My task has been the portrayal of man beings.
Despite Ibsen's disclaimer that A Doll's House should be appreciated as more than a piece of gender propaganda, that information technology deals with universal truths of human being identity, it is nevertheless the example that Ibsen'southward drama is ane of the milestones of the sexual revolution, sounding themes and advancing the crusade of women's autonomy and liberation that echoes Mary Wollstonecraft'south A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and anticipates subsequent works such as Kate Chopin'southward The Enkindling, Virginia Woolf's A Room of 1'south Own and Betty Friedan'south The Feminine Mystique.
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Assay of Henrik Ibsen's Plays
Categories: Drama Criticism, Feminism, Literary Criticism, Literature
Source: https://literariness.org/2020/07/27/analysis-of-henrik-ibsens-a-dolls-house/
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