Choose a brand (Our brand for the topic is Purell Hand Sanitizer

Choose a brand (“Our brand for the topic is “Purell Hand
Sanitizer”) from the list below to research and develop a
marketing plan. You should be able to find information from
business media, such as The Wall Street Journal, Business
Week, Fortune, Advertising Age, or Forbes. Start with the
recommended publications above. Other information may be
obtained from the company’s website, and from the business
section of daily newspapers. You may also look for the product
in stores or visit the business for additional information. This
is particularly helpful for understanding the competition, the
pricing, and distribution strategies. Use multiple sources
because some may be biased (for example, the company website
probably avoids any negative information about the brand).
I expect a minimum of twelve current articles (2018 –
present), not including the company website, as background for
your paper. If you are not sure about the meaning of the terms
in the outline below, consult your textbook to make sure you
understand what you are saying about the brand. Although
many students start their searches with Wikipedia for
background information, Wikipedia is NEVER appropriate as a
citation in college level work.
The major part of the assignment will focus on what the
company is or has been doing. Part four concludes with your
recommendations to change something about the way the
product should be marketed. The actual paper should be written
in paragraphs, ie, not simply an outline with bullets. Go
to http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ if you
need writing help, especially for an explanation of how to cite
your sources using APA format.
This is the only section from the plan we are doing.
III. Current Marketing Mix
a. Product
b. Pricing strategy

c. Place or distribution
d. Promotional campaign
All references must be cited, using the APA format.
"First and Foremost a Human Being":
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in
A Doll's House'
TORIL MOI
INTRODUCTION
A DolFs House is the first full-blown example of Ibsen's
modernism.
It contains a devastating critique of idealism entwined with a
turn to the
everyday, a celebration of theatre combined with a fierce
analysis of
everyday theatricality (A DoWs House is teeming with
metatheatrical
elements) and a preoccupation with the conditions of love in
modernity.
In A Doll's House, Ibsen mobilizes all these features in a
contemporary
setting and in relation to a fundamentally modern theme:
namely,
the situation of women in the family and society.̂ The result is
a play that
calls for a radical transformation [forvandling], not just, or not
even primarily, of laws and institutions, but of human beings
and their

ideas of love.
This article explores three major themes in A DoWs House:
idealism,
theatre, and gender. Although idealist aesthetic norms were a
primary
concern for many of the play's first critics, contemporary
literary scholars
have barely raised the subject.̂ In this article, I use the term
"idealism"
to mean "idealist aesthetics," defined broadly as the idea that
the task
of art is to create beauty, combined with the belief that beauty,
truth,
and goodness are one. Taking questions of beauty to be
questions of
morality and truth, idealist aesthetics thus seemlessly merge
aesthetics
This article is a slightly edited version of chapter seven of Toril
Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the
Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, to be published
by Oxford University Press
in July 2006. A Norwegian version, Ibsens modernisme,
translated by Agnete 0ye, was
published by Pax Forlag in Oslo in May 2006. Printed with
permission.
Modern Drama, 49:3 (Fall 2006) 256
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 257
and ethics. Although the earliest versions of idealist aesthetics
had

been espoused by Romantic radicals such as Friedrich Schiller,
Madame de Stael, and - a little later - Shelley, by the time of A
DoWs
House, the Romantic movement was long dead; yet idealist
aesthetics
lived on, albeit in increasingly tired and exhausted forms, which
often
were aligned with conservative and moralistic social forces. Not
surprisingly, then, in the wake of the radical Danish intellectual
Georg
Brandes's fiery call for a modern literature in his 1871-72
lectures
on Hovedstromninger i Europeisk litteratur, idealism was
increasingly
coming under attack, and - as I show in my book Henrik Ibsen
and the
Birth of Modernism - Ibsen's works were the linchpin of the
burgeoning
modernist opposition to idealism."*
The moment of A Doll's House marks a clear shift in the
increasingly
intense cultural battle between idealists and emerging
modernists in
Europe. Idealist responses to A DolPs House were embattled in
a way that
idealist responses to Love's Comedy and Emperor and Galilean
were not.^
In this article, I will show that defenders of Ibsen's realism
nevertheless
come across as less sophisticated than their idealist opponents.
In fact,
by propagating the idea that A DoWs House was to be
understood as a
"slice of life," Ibsen's first admirers entirely missed his pro-
theatricalism,

his metatheatrical insistence that what we are seeing is theatre.
Around
1880, then, neither Ibsen's enemies nor his friends were in a
position truly
to grasp the scope of his aesthetic achievement.
But idealism was not just an important element in the reception
of
A DolFs House. It is also embedded in the play, most strikingly
in the
character of Torvald Helmer, a card-carrying idealist aesthete if
ever
there was one. Moreover, Helmer's idealism and Nora's
unthinking
echoing of it make them theatricalize both themselves and each
other,
most strikingly by taking themselves to be starring in various
idealist
scenarios of female sacrifice and male rescue.
Ibsen's critique of idealism is the condition of possibility for his
revolutionary analysis of gender in modernity. In this respect,
the key line
of the play is Nora's claim to be "first and foremost a human
being
(359)"^ Nora's struggle for recognition as a human being is
rightly
considered an exemplary case of women's struggle for political
and social
rights.^ But Nora claims her humanity only after explicitly
rejecting
two other identities: namely, "doll" and "wife and mother." In
order to
show what these refusals mean, I first consider the signification
of
the figure of the doll. "The human body is the best picture of

the human
soul," Ludwig Wittgenstein writes (152). What happens if we
take Nora's
body dancing the tarantella to be a picture of her soul? Starting
from
this question, I show that the tarantella scene is revolutionary
both in its
258 TORIL MOI
handling of theatre and theatricality and in its understanding of
different
ways of looking at a performing woman's body,
I read Nora's refusal to define herself as a wife and mother as a
rejection of Hegel's theory of women's role in the family and
society.
Read in this light, A DolPs House becomes an astoundingly
radical play
about women's historical transition from being generic family
members
(wife, sister, daughter, mother) to becoming individuals (Nor a,
Rebecca,
Ellida, Hedda), I do not mean to say that Ibsen set out to
illustrate Hegel,
(No claim would have annoyed him more,) I mean, rather, that
Hegel
happens to be the great theorist of the traditional, patriarchal,
and sexist
family structure that A Doll's House sets out to investigate.
There is no
need to posit any knowledge on Ibsen's part of Hegel's theory of
women
and the family: we only need to assume that Ibsen saw the

situation
of women in the family at least as clearly as Hegel did, and that,
unlike Hegel, he saw it as something that would have to change
if women
were to have a chance at the pursuit of happiness in modern
society.
If, as Rita Felski has claimed, modernist literature represents
women as
outside history and, in particular, as outside the modern, then
Ibsen's
modernism is a glorious exception, not just because A DolFs
House is
about Nora's painful entrance into modernity but because all his
modern
plays contain women who are as radically engaged in the
problems of
modern life as the men who surround them (see Felski 30),
IDEALIST AND REALIST RESPONSES TO A DOLL'S HOUSE
A DolFs House was published on 4 December 1879 in
Copenhagen, The
first performance took place at the Royal Theatre in
Copenhagen on
21 December 1879, with Betty Hennings as Nora, In 1873, Arne
Garborg's idealist reading of Emperor and Galilean was written
in a
situation in which alternative aesthetic points of view were
unavailable.
Six years later, this had changed, Norwegian and Danish
reviews of the
book and the world premiere show that A DolPs House was
received
in a cultural moment when the war between idealists and
realists was
already raging.

On 9 and 10 January 1880, Aftenbladet in Kristiania published
two
articles on A Doll's House, which come across as exemplary
instances
of belated and embattled idealism,, The author was Fredrik
Petersen
(1839-1903), a professor of theology at the University of
Kristiania and
thus a typical representative of the alliance between idealist
aesthetics,
established religion, and conservative social views that
characterized the
opponents of Ibsen in the 1880s and 1890s, (It is no coincidence
that
the character of Pastor Manders in Ghosts personifies precisely
this
social and political constellation,)
Explicitly fusing Christianity and idealist aesthetics, Petersen's
analysis
is based on the idea that "[sjociety needs divine ideality, needs
faith in the
idea of the good and the beautiful to survive." The glaring flaw
of
A DolPs House, therefore, is the absence of reconciliation:
"And yet one
does not leave this play in the uplifted mood which already in
the time of
the Greeks was regarded as an absolute requirement for any
artistic or
poetic work. Having seen something profoundly ugly [noget

saare
Uskjont] we are left only with a distressing [pinlig] feeling,
which is the
inevitable consequence when there is no reconciliation to
demonstrate
the ultimate victory of the ideal."* According to Petersen, the
defining
characteristic of realism in general was the refusal of
reconciliation
and uplift.
Why was the sense of uplift so important to idealist critics?^
Starting
from the premise that art is a "a child of humankind's creative
capacity in
its highest ideality, the aspect in which human beings are most
like God,"
Petersen insists that anything that is to be called a work of art
has to bear
the "creative, idealizing stamp of the human spirit." Pointedly
contrast-
ing such idealization to "mere reproduction," he expresses
himself in
terms that recall Schiller but also the discussion between
George Sand
and Balzac: "The ideality of art is beauty, because beauty is the
natural
external expression of the good. Even when art represents
ugliness
[det Uskjonne], it is not real but idealized ugliness" (Peterson).
Reconciliation enables the reader and spectator to leave the
work with
"ideality awakened in his soul," and this, precisely, is what
triggers the
sense of uplift. Art is thus crucially important in the world
because

it empowers and ennobles us.
According to Petersen, realism is the antithesis of true art. By
deliberately withholding reconciliation, realism demonstrates
that it has
lost all faith in the "divine ideality's power in life." In this way,
realism
is aligned with scepticism and secularism. This is significant,
for the
culture war that broke out over the Scandinavian "modern
break-
through" was articulated as a battle between Christian idealists
and
freethinking realists, led by the Jewish Georg' Brandes.
Although he was the most interesting and most articulate,
Petersen
was not the only idealist to respond to A DoWs House. Other
critics, too,
lamented the play's lack of reconciliation. In Denmark, M.V.
Brun,
reviewing the play in Folkets Avis on 24 December 1879, even
claimed
that the absence of reconciliation between the spouses was
entirely
unnatural, running against common psychological sense. Once
Nora
understood that she had committed a crime, the natural thing for
her to do would be to "throw herself into her husband's arms
and
say, 'I have erred, but I have erred without knowing it, and out
of
love for you, save me!' and her husband would then have
forgiven and

TORIL MOI
saved her" (Brun). Throughout the play, Brun writes, the
spectator still
hopes that Nora will confess and that her confession will be
followed by
reconciliation. The audience is, therefore, completely
unprepared for
the "revolting break-up" in the third act, which he considers
"hideous."
Indeed, A DolFs House exhibits "such screaming dissonances
that no
beautiful harmony capable of resolving them exists."
Socialists and radicals, on the other hand, praised the play
without
reservations, but also without aesthetic sophistication. In the
Danish
newspaper Social-Demokraten, the owner of the signature "I-n"
treated
the play as a completely realistic, political treatise: "Our own
life,
our own everyday life has here been placed on stage and
condemned!
We have never in dramatic or poetic form seen a better, more
powerful
intervention in the question of women's liberation!" In the
radical
Norwegian paper Dagbladet, Erik VuUum uses idealist terms to
laud the
play's aesthetic perfection (he speaks of its "clarity and artistic
harmony"
and used beauty as his highest term of praise), a practice that he
obviously considers entirely compatible with political praise for
Ibsen's

radical social thought.
. In January 1880, the feminist novelist Amalie Skram published
a brilliant commentary on A DolFs House in Dagbladet. It is a
tremendously insightful, sympathetic, and passionate defence of
Nora's actions, as well as a clear-eyed registration of the play's
radical
challenge to the social order. Strikingly combining feminism
and
idealism, Skram completely identifies with Nora's idealist
fantasies:
"Like lightning an insight strikes in Nora's soul: too base, his
soul cannot
understand, let alone nourish, the kind of love that accepts all
blame,
yes, even offers up its life. [He rages] at the hypocrite, liar,
criminal,
yet the inner, essential truth is that she has risked everything to
save his
life" (309). Skram's conclusion practically repeats Schiller's
idea that
modern poets must either lament the absence of the ideal or
glorify its
presence: "Marriage is judged here. Its high and holy idea has
fied away
from earth. The poet can only expose the caricature that has
been put
in its place, or admonish us by pointing upward" (313).
Around 1880, then, the idealists still monopolized the concepts
required for a serious discussion of art and aesthetics. Even in
its
belated, moralizing form, idealism had intellectual power.
Petersen's
review of A DolFs House gives voice to a highly articulate and
sophisticated theory of art, derived from German idealism and

infused
with Lutheran Christianity.
Cultural modernizers, on the other hand, either treated art as if
it were
life, or simply combined idealist aesthetic concepts (the ideal,
beauty,
harmony) with radical politics. In so far as they saw A DolFs
House as
an impressive political tract, a slice of life on stage, they did
Ibsen
a disservice, for their reactions helped to cement the impression
that
Ibsen's realism was nothing but the unselfconscious presentation
of real
life. Although the idealists did not yet know it, they were
doomed to
historical oblivion. Paradoxically, then, the victorious realists
laid the
foundations for the still widespread belief that Ibsen's
contemporary
plays are nothing but unselfconscious and boring realism. Both
his
opponents and supporters, moreover, completely missed the
self-
conscious and pro-theatrical use of theatre in A DolFs House. In
this
respect, Ibsen's own practice far outstripped the aesthetic
categories
of his audience.

Late in his life, Ibsen always adamantly declared that he never
wrote
with politics or social philosophy in mind. Surely these claims
should
be understood as a reaction against the reductive and, as it were,
over-
politicizing reception of his plays, which dominated the 1880s
and the
1890S. The most famous instance of such a denial is his speech
at the
gala evening organized in his honour by Norsk
Kvindesagsforening
[the Norwegian Association for the Cause of Women] in 1898:
"I have
been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than one
generally
appears inclined to believe. [I] must decline the honour
consciously
to have worked for the cause of women. I am not even quite
clear
what the cause of women really is. For me it has appeared to be
the
cause of human beings . . . My task has been to portray human
beings"
(Ibsen, "Ved norsk" 417).
HELMER S SENSE OF BEAUTY
Throughout A DolPs House Torvald Helmer is represented as an
aesthetic
idealist. I am not the first to notice this. In 1880, the great
Danish writer
Herman Bang criticized Emil Poulsen, the actor who played
Helmer in
the first production, for making his character insufficiently
refined.

Helmer, Bang writes, quoting most of the relevant passages in
support, is
a "completely aesthetic nature," in fact, an "aesthetically
inclined egoist"
("Et dukkehjem").'° This is a fine perception: Helmer is an
egoist and
a rather brutal and petty-minded one, too. Astute contemporary
readers
and theatregoers were perfectly capable of noticing the veiled
critique
of idealism produced by this juxtaposition of idealism and
egoism.
We should note, however, that Bang never calls Helmer an
idealist;
the word he uses is always "aesthete."" This seems to me to
confirm
what the newspaper reception of A DolFs House also shows;
namely,
that in 1880, there was still only one way to be an aesthete and
that was
the idealist way. To be a realist was to be radical, political,
committed,
another register of experience altogether.
262 TORIL MOI
Torvald Helmer, then, prides himself on his sense of beauty.
"Nobody
has such a refined taste as you," Nora says to him (306). He
enjoys seeing
Nora beautifully dressed, but he "can't stand seeing tailoring"
(314).
He prefers women to embroider, for knitting "can never be
anything but

ugly [uskont]" (344). In these lines, Helmer also manifests his
social class:
knitting is ugly because it is useful, embroidery is beautiful
because it is
a pastime for leisured ladies. Helmer's sense of beauty,
moreover, admits
no separation between ethics and aesthetics. He has never
wanted
to "deal with business matters that are not fine and pretty
[smukke]"
(280-81). His love for the good and the beautiful makes him
despise
people like Krogstad who have sinned against the ideal.
Blighted by guilt
and crime, they are doomed to bring the pestilential infection of
lies
and hypocrisy into their own families, and the result is ugliness:
HELMER. Just think how such a guilt-ridden human being must
lie and pretend
and be a hypocrite to all and sundry, how he must wear a mask
even with his
closest family, yes, even with his own wife and his own
children. And the
children, Nora, that's just the most horrible thing.
NORA. Why?
HELMER. Because such a stinking circle of lies brings
infection and bacteria into
the life of a whole home. Every breath that the children take in
such a house is
filled with the germs of something ugly. (307).
Sickness, pollution, infection, pestilence: these are the motifs
that
regularly turned up in idealist attacks on Ibsen's later plays.

Helmer
also draws on idealism's characteristically anti-theatrical
language:
hypocrisy, pretence, mask. "No play-acting!" Helmer says to
Nora as
she is on her way to drown herself (351). Then he calls her a
hypocrite,
a liar, and a criminal (see 352).
The macaroons are forbidden in the name of beauty too, for
Helmer is
worried that Nora will destroy her pretty teeth. Nora, therefore,
eats
them only in the presence of Dr. Rank or when she is alone. At
one
moment, when she is alone with Dr. Rank, she munches some
forbidden
macaroons and then announces that she is dying to take into her
mouth
some "ugly" swear words. Given Helmer's incessant harping on
beauty,
it is no wonder that the swear words Nora wants to say are "Dod
og pine
[Death and pain]," and that she says them to Dr. Rank (293).
Helmer's refinement cannot deal with death and pain. Dr. Rank
makes
it perfectly clear that Helmer is unwanted at the deathbed of his
best
friend: "Helmer, with his refined nature, has an intense sense of
disgust
for everything that is hideous. I don't want him in my sick
room,"
Dr. Rank says when he tells Nora that he will die within a
month (320).
No wonder, then, that Helmer's first reaction to the news of

Rank's
impending death is purely aesthetic: "With his suffering and his
loneliness, he provided as it were a cloudy background to our
sunlit
happiness" (274). Helmer speaks like a painter, or perhaps even
like
a painter of theatre decor: all he can think of is surface effects.
When
prodded by Nora, Helmer is even capable of giving up sex at the
thought
of something ugly. When she questions whether they really
should have
sex just after learning about Rank's impending death, he
acquiesces,
for "something ugly has come between us; thoughts of death and
decay.
We must try to free ourselves from them" (350).
For Helmer, beauty is freedom; freedom is beauty. Right at the
beginning of Act One he warns Nora against borrowing money:
"No
debt! Never borrow! There is something unfree, and therefore
also
something ugly [usk0nt] about a home founded on borrowing
and debt"
(274). If Helmer had not thought of debt as ugly and unfree, he
might
not have objected to borrowing money for the trip to Italy.
Helmer's constant display of his sense of beauty, then, is
responsible

for what he calls the "bottomless hideousness" uncovered by
Krogstad's
letter (352). His refined aesthetic sense does not prevent him
from
proposing that their life together should now be lived in the
mode of
theatre: "[a]nd in so far as you and I are concerned, it has to
.look as
if everything between us remains just as it was. But of course
only
before the eyes of the world" (353). The irony is that just when
Nora
is finally ready to "take off the masquerade costume," Helmer is
more
than willing to put it on (355).
IDEALISM AND THEATRICALITY: MELODRAMAS OF
SACRIFICE AND RESCUE
Both Nora and Helmer spend most of the play theatricalizing
themselves
by acting out their own cliche idealist scripts. Nora's fantasies
are
variations on the idealist figure of the noble and pure woman
who
sacrifices all for love. First, she casts herself as a pure and
selfiess heroine
who has saved her husband's life. Her secret is the source of her
identity,
the foundation of her sense of worth, and makes it easy for her
to act the
part of Helmer's chirping songbird and playful squirrel. That
she has
aestheticized her secret - turned it into a thing of beauty - is
also clear,
for when Krogstad threatens to reveal their dealings to Helmer,

Nora
replies, on the point of tears: "This secret, which is my joy and
my pride,
he is to learn about it in such an ugly and coarse way, - and
learn it from
When she realizes that, her secret in fact is a crime, she feels
besmirched by ugliness. To save her sense of self-worth, she
mobilizes
the plainly melodramatic fantasy of det vidunderlige (literally,
"the wonderful thing"; often translated, somewhat too
religiously.
264 TORIL MOI
as "the miracle," or - better - as "something glorious"). Nora
imagines
that once Helmer learns about her crime, he will generousl y and
heroically offer to rescue her by sacrificing himself. In an even
higher
and nobler spirit of self-sacrifice, she will refuse his sacrifice
and drown
herself rather than let him sully his honour for her sake. This is
debased
idealism, a melodramatic scenario of the kind that routinely
played in
nineteenth-century boulevard theatres.
That. the figure of the pure and self-sacrificing woman had
become
no more than a well-worn cliche by the time Ibsen wrote A
Doll's House
is made clear in Krogstad's suspicious reaction to Mrs. Linde's
offer of

marriage: "I don't believe in this. It is nothing but a high-strung
woman's
sense of nobility, driving her to sacrifice herself (340). Insofar
as
Mrs. Linde and Krogstad are counterpoints to Nora and Helmer,
it is not
least because they refuse to build their marriage on theatrical
cliches.
Helmer, of course, is also fantasizing. First of all, he thinks of
himself
as extremely manly, even heroic. Nora is perfectly aware of
this: "Torvald
with his masculine pride - how embarrassing and humiliating
would it
not be for him to know that he owed me anything" (287).
Helmer's sense
of masculinity depends on Nora's performances of helpless,
childlike
femininity: "I wouldn't be a man, if just this feminine
helplessness did
not make you twice as attractive in my eyes" (354). As cliche
and
theatrical as Nora's, his fantasies are more frankly sexual,
although
they represent sexuality in idealist terms (probably to avoid
acknowl-
edging what the idealists considered to be mere animal lust).
After the
masked ball, for example, Helmer reveals that he has a fantasy
about ravishing his virginal child-woman - but only after the
wedding:
"[I] imagine... that you are my young bride, that we have just
come from
the wedding, that I am bringing you into my house for the first
time - that

for the first time I am alone with you - completely alone with
your young,
trembling, delightful beauty! (346).
Helmer also thinks of himself as the dashing hero coming to the
rescue of the pure woman: "You know what, Nora - often I wish
that
some imminent danger threatened you, so that I could risk life
and
blood, everything, everything for your sake" (350). When Nora
takes him
literally and urges him to read his letters, the result is a
savagely ironic
demolition of idealist stage conventions and a reminder that
people
who claim to live by idealist cliches are liable to theatricalize
themselves
and others.
The most destructive expression of Helmer's fantasies comes
just
as he has finished reading Krogstad's second letter, realizes that
he is
saved, and suddenly becomes all forgiveness. When Nora says
she will
"take off her masquerade costume," Helmer completely
mishears
her tone and launches into a horrendously self-aggrandizing
monologue.
The stage directions indicate that he is supposed to speak
through

the open door, with Nora offstage, changing her clothes. By
placing
Helmer alone onstage, Ibsen stresses the distancing, estranging
effect
of his self-theatricalization: "Oh, you don't know a real man's
heart,
Nora. For a man there is something indescribably sweet and
satisfying
in knowing that he has forgiven his wife - that he truly has
forgiven her
with his whole heart. It is as if she has doubly become his
property; as
if he has brought her into the world again; as if she has become
his wife
and his child as well. This is what you will be for me from now
on, you
little bewildered, helpless creature" (355). This discourse on
forgiveness
is surely what Gregers Werle had in mind when he urged
Hjalmar
Ekdal nobly to forgive Gina. This is the moment where the
idealist
reconciliation ought to be, and Ibsen undermines it completely
by having
Nora coming back onstage in her hverdagskjole [everyday
dress].
At this point, with Nora in her everyday dress and Helmer still
in his evening clothes, the famous conversation that completely
destroyed idealist expectations begins. Ibsen's masterly
exploration
of the relationship among theatricality, melodrama, and debased
idealism here reaches its logical end and high point, for Nora
cuts
straight to the chase. Requesting - or rather, ordering - Helmer
to sit

down to talk, she says,
NORA. Sit down. This will take a long time. I have a lot to talk
to you about.
HELMER {sits at the table directly opposite her). You make me
anxious, Nora.
And I don't understand you.
NORA. No, that's just it. You don't understand me. And I have
never
understood you either - until tonight. (356)
There is a clear acknowledgment here that both Nora and
Helmer have
been blinded by their self-theatricalizing fantasies. Without
letting
Helmer off the hook, Nora acknowledges that she has
contributed to
this outcome: "I have earned my living by doing tricks for you,
Torvald.
But you wanted it that way" (357).
Nora's recognition of her own participation in their games of
concealment should make us pause. So far, I have written about
Nora's and Helmer's theatricalization of themselves and each
other in
a way that might give rise to the idea that the two of them are,
as it were,
pure performers. But their fantasies reveal them as much as they
conceal them. Because they are fantasies of rescuing the other,
of doing
something heroic for the sake of love, they reveal that Nora and
Helmer
love each other as well as they can. They just cannot do any
better.
Had they known what they were doing when they performed
their

masquerades, they would have stopped doing it."" By showing
us their
266 TORIL MOI
theatrical marriage, Ibsen did not mean to turn these two decent
people into villains but to make us think about the way we
theatricalize
ourselves and others in everyday life.
If to grow up is to choose finitude, as Stanley Cavell puts it,
then it is
clear that neither Nora nor Helmer have been grown-ups until
this point
{Claim 464). They have, rather, been like children playing
house together.
In the final conversation, their performances of adult
masculinity and
femininity come across as mere impersonations. But perhaps
they are not
children, or not just children, but dolls: after all, the play in
which they
appear is called A DoWs House.^^
THE DOLL AS A LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL
FIGURE: CORINNE AND NORA
We have arrived, then, at the figure of the doll. When Nora tries
to
explain her experience of life and marriage, this is the figure
she uses
to describe her past self. Her father, she says, "called me his
doll-child

and played with me the way I played with my dolls" (357). And
Helmer
has done the same thing: "But our home has been nothing but
a play-house. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I
was
Papa's doll-child" (358)."* She herself has carried on the
tradition:
"And the children, in turn, have been my dolls" (358). Nora
leaves, then,
because she no longer wants anything to do with this doll-life.
The figure of the doll is the most important metaphor in A
Doll's
House. In …
The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
Author(s): Joan Templeton
Source: PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 28-40
Published by: Modern Language Association
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JOAN TEMPLETON
The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
A Doll House' is no more about women's rights than
Shakespeare's Richard HI is about the divine right of kings,
or Ghosts about syphilis.. . . Its theme is the need of
every individual to find out the kind of person he or she
is and to strive to become that person.
(M. Meyer 457)
J BSEN HAS BEEN resoundingly saved from
feminism, or, as it was called in his day, "the
woman question." His rescuers customarily

cite a statement the dramatist made on 26 May 1898
at a seventieth-birthday banquet given in his honor
by the Norwegian Women's Rights League:
I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honor of
having consciously worked for the women's rights move-
ment. ... True enough, it is desirable to solve the
woman problem, along with all the others; but that has
not been the whole purpose. My task has been the
description of humanity. (Ibsen, Letters 337)
Ibsen's champions like to take this disavowal as a
precise reference to his purpose in writing A Doll
House twenty years earlier, his "original intention,"
according to Maurice Valency (151). Ibsen's bi-
ographer Michael Meyer urges all reviewers of Doll
House revivals to learn Ibsen's speech by heart
(774), and James McFarlane, editor of The Oxford
Ibsen, includes it in his explanatory material on A
Doll House, under "Some Pronouncements of the
Author," as though Ibsen had been speaking of the
play (456). Whatever propaganda feminists may
have made of A Doll House, Ibsen, it is argued,
never meant to write a play about the highly topi-

cal subject of women's rights; Nora's conflict
represents something other than, or something
more than, woman's. In an article commemorating
the half century of Ibsen's death, R. M. Adams ex-
plains, "A Doll House represents a woman imbued
with the idea of becoming a person, but it proposes
nothing categorical about women becoming peo-
ple; in fact, its real theme has nothing to do with the
sexes" (416). Over twenty years later, after feminism
had resurfaced as an international movement, Ei-
nar Haugen, the doyen of American Scandinavian
studies, insisted that "Ibsen's Nora is not just a
woman arguing for female liberation; she is much
more. She embodies the comedy as well as the
tragedy of modern life" (vii). In the Modern Lan-
guage Association's Approaches to Teaching A Doll
House, the editor speaks disparagingly of "reduc-
tionist views of [A Doll House] as a feminist
drama." Summarizing a "major theme" in the vol-
ume as "the need for a broad view of the play and
a condemnation of a static approach," she warns

that discussions of the play's "connection with fem-
inism" have value only if they are monitored,
"properly channeled and kept firmly linked to Ib-
sen's text" (Shafer, Introduction 32).
Removing the woman question from A Doll
House is presented as part of a corrective effort to
free Ibsen from his erroneous reputation as a writer
of thesis plays, a wrongheaded notion usually
blamed on Shaw, who, it is claimed, mistakenly saw
Ibsen as the nineteenth century's greatest iconoclast
and offered that misreading to the public as The
Quintessence of Ibsenism. Ibsen, it is now de
rigueur to explain, did not stoop to "issues." He was
a poet of the truth of the human soul. That Nora's
exit from her dollhouse has long been the principal
international symbol for women's issues, including
many that far exceed the confines of her small
world,2 is irrelevant to the essential meaning of A
Doll House, a play, in Richard Gilman's phrase,
"pitched beyond sexual difference" (65). Ibsen, ex-

plains Robert Brustein, "was completely indiffer-
ent to [the woman question] except as a metaphor
for individual freedom" (105). Discussing the rela-
tion of A Doll House to feminism, Halvdan Koht,
author of the definitive Norwegian Ibsen life, says
in summary, "Little by little the topical controversy
died away; what remained was the work of art, with
its demand for truth in every human relation" (323).
Thus, it turns out, the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the
women's rights movement is not really about
women at all. "Fiddle-faddle," pronounced R. M.
Adams, dismissing feminist claims for the play
(416). Like angels, Nora has no sex. Ibsen meant her
to be Everyman.3
The Demon in the House
[Nora is] a daughter of Eve. [A]n irresistibly be-
witching piece of femininity. [Her] charge that in
28
2018 00:44:41 UTC

Joan Templeton 29
all the years of their marriage they have never exchanged
one serious word about serious things is incorrect: she has
quite forgotten how seriously Torvald lectured her on the
subjects of forgery and lying less than three days ago.
(Weigand 27, 64-65)
The a priori dismissal of women's rights as the
subject of A Doll House is a gentlemanly backlash,
a refusal to acknowledge the existence of a tiresome
reality, "the hoary problem of women's rights," as
Michael Meyer has it (457); the issue is decidedly
vieuxjeu, and its importance has been greatly ex-
aggerated. In Ibsen's timeless world of Everyman,
questions of gender can only be tedious intrusions.
But for over a hundred years, Nora has been un-
der direct siege as exhibiting the most perfidious
characteristics of her sex; the original outcry of the
1880s is swollen now to a mighty chorus of blame.
She is denounced as an irrational and frivolous nar-
cissist; an "abnormal" woman, a "hysteric"; a vain,

unloving egoist who abandons her family in a
paroxysm of selfishness. The proponents of the last
view would seem to think Ibsen had in mind a
housewife Medea, whose cruelty to husband and
children he tailored down to fit the framed, domes-
tic world of realist drama.
The first attacks were launched against Nora on
moral grounds and against Ibsen, ostensibly, on
"literary" ones. The outraged reviewers of the pre-
miere claimed that A Doll House did not have to be
taken as a serious statement about women's rights
because the heroine of act 3 is an incomprehensi-
ble transformation of the heroine of acts 1 and 2.
This reasoning provided an ideal way to dismiss
Nora altogether; nothing she said needed to be
taken seriously, and her door slamming could be
written off as silly theatrics (Marker and Marker
85-87).
The argument for the two Noras, which still re-

mains popular,4 has had its most determined de-
fender in the Norwegian scholar Else H0st, who
argues that Ibsen's carefree, charming "lark" could
never have become the "newly fledged feminist." In
any case it is the "childish, expectant, ecstatic,
broken-hearted Nora" who makes A Doll House
immortal (28; my trans.); the other one, the unfeel-
ing woman of act 3 who coldly analyzes the flaws
in her marriage, is psychologically unconvincing
and wholly unsympathetic.
The most unrelenting attempt on record to
trivialize Ibsen's protagonist, and a favorite source
for Nora's later detractors, is Hermann Weigand's.5
In a classic 1925 study, Weigand labors through
forty-nine pages to demonstrate that Ibsen con-
ceived of Nora as a silly, lovable female. At the be-
ginning, Weigand confesses, he was, like all men,
momentarily shaken by the play: "Having had the
misfortune to be born of the male sex, we slink away
in shame, vowing to mend our ways." The
chastened critic's remorse is short-lived, however, as

a "clear male voice, irreverently breaking the si-
lence," stuns with its critical acumen: "'The mean-
ing of the final scene,' the voice says, 'is epitomized
by Nora's remark: "Yes, Torvald. Now I have
changed my dress." "' With this epiphany as guide,
Weigand spends the night poring over the "little vol-
ume." Dawn arrives, bringing with it the return of
"masculine self-respect" (26-27). For there is only
one explanation for the revolt of "this winsome lit-
tle woman" (52) and her childish door slamming:
Ibsen meant A Doll House as comedy. Nora's er-
ratic behavior at the curtain's fall leaves us laugh-
ing heartily, for there is no doubt that she will return
home to "revert, imperceptibly, to her role of song-
bird and charmer" (68). After all, since Nora is
an irresistibly bewitching piece of femininity, an extrava-
gant poet and romancer, utterly lacking in sense of fact,
and endowed with a natural gift for play-acting which
makes her instinctively dramatize her experiences: how
can the settlement fail of a fundamentally comic appeal?

(64)
The most popular way to render Nora inconse-
quential has been to attack her morality; whatever
the vocabulary used, the arguments have remained
much the same for over a century. Oswald Craw-
ford, writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1891,
scolded that while Nora may be "charming as doll-
women may be charming," she is "unprincipled"
(732). A half century later, after Freudianism had
produced a widely accepted "clinical" language of
disapproval, Nora could be called "abnormal."
Mary McCarthy lists Nora as one of the "neurotic"
women whom Ibsen, she curiously claims, was the
first playwright to put on stage (80). For Maurice
Valency, Nora is a case study of female hysteria, a
willful, unwomanly woman: "Nora is a carefully
studied example of what we have come to know as
the hysterical personality-bright, unstable, impul-
sive, romantic, quite immune from feelings of guilt,
and, at bottom, not especially feminine" (151-52).
More recent assaults on Nora have argued that
her forgery to obtain the money to save her hus-
2018 00:44:41 UTC

30 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
band's life proves her irresponsibility and egotism.
Brian Johnston condemns Nora's love as "unintel-
ligent" and her crime as "a trivial act which
nevertheless turns to evil because it refused to take
the universal ethical realm into consideration at all"
(97); Ibsen uses Torvald's famous pet names for
Nora-lark, squirrel-to give her a "strong 'animal'
identity" and to underscore her inability to under-
stand the ethical issues faced by human beings (97).
Evert Sprinchorn argues that Nora had only to ask
her husband's kindly friends (entirely missing from
the play) for the necessary money: " . . . any other
woman would have done so. But Nora knew that if
she turned to one of Torvald's friends for help, she
would have had to share her role of savior with
someone else" (124).
Even Nora's sweet tooth is evidence of her unwor-

thiness, as we see her "surreptitiously devouring the
forbidden [by her husband] macaroons," even
"brazenly offer[ing] macaroons to Doctor Rank,
and finally lying in her denial that the macaroons
are hers"; eating macaroons in secret suggests that
"Nora is deceitful and manipulative from the start"
and that her exit thus "reflects only a petulant
woman's irresponsibility" (Schlueter 64-65). As she
eats the cookies, Nora adds insult to injury by
declaring her hidden wish to say "death and dam-
nation" in front of her husband, thus revealing, ac-
cording to Brian Downs, of Christ's College,
Cambridge, "something a trifle febrile and mor-
bid" in her nature (Downs 130).
Much has been made of Nora's relationship with
Doctor Rank, the surest proof, it is argued, of her
dishonesty. Nora is revealed as la belle dame sans
merci when she "suggestively queries Rank whether
a pair of silk stockings will fit her" (Schlueter 65);
she "flirts cruelly with [him] and toys with his af-
fection for her, drawing him on to find out how
strong her hold over him actually is" (Sprinchorn
124).
Nora's detractors have often been, from the first,

her husband's defenders. In an argument that
claims to rescue Nora and Torvald from "the cam-
paign for the liberation of women" so that they "be-
come vivid and disturbingly real." Evert Sprinchorn
pleads that Torvald "has given Nora all the mate-
rial things and all the sexual attention that any
young wife could reasonably desire. He loves beau-
tiful things, and not least his pretty wife" (121).
Nora is incapable of appreciating her husband be-
cause she "is not a normal woman. She is compul-
sive, highly imaginative, and very much inclined to
go to extremes." Since it is she who has acquired the
money to save his life, Torvald, and not Nora, is
really the "wife in the family," although he "has
regarded himself as the breadwinner . . . the main
support of his wife and children, as any decent hus-
band would like to regard himself" (122). In another
defense, John Chamberlain argues that Torvald
deserves our sympathy because he is no "mere com-
mon or garden chauvinist." If Nora were less the ac-
tress Weigand has proved her to be, "the woman in
her might observe what the embarrassingly naive

feminist overlooks or ignores, namely, the indica-
tions that Torvald, for all his faults, is taking her at
least as seriously as he can-and perhaps even as
seriously as she deserves" (85).
All female, or no woman at all, Nora loses either
way. Frivolous, deceitful, or unwomanly, she quali-
fies neither as a heroine nor as a spokeswoman for
feminism. Her famous exit embodies only "the
latest and shallowest notion of emancipated
womanhood, abandoning her family to go out into
the world in search of 'her true identity"' (Freed-
man 4). And in any case, it is only naive Nora who
believes she might make a life for herself; "the au-
dience," argues an essayist in College English, "can
see most clearly how Nora is exchanging a practi-
cal doll's role for an impractical one" (Pearce 343).
We are back to the high condescension of the Vic-
torians and Edward Dowden:
Inquiries should be set on foot to ascertain whether a
manuscript may not lurk in some house in Christiania
[Oslo] entitled Nora Helmer's Reflections in Solitude; it
would be a document of singular interest, and probably
would conclude with the words, "Tomorrow I return to
Torvald; have been exactly one week away; shall insist on
a free woman's right to unlimited macaroons as test of

his reform." (248)
In the first heady days of A Doll House Nora was
rendered powerless by substituted denouements and
sequels that sent her home to her husband. Now
Nora's critics take the high-handed position that all
the fuss was unnecessary, since Nora is not a femi-
nist heroine. And yet in the twentieth-century case
against her, whether Nora is judged childish, "neu-
rotic," or unprincipled and whether her accuser's
tone is one of witty derision, clinical sobriety, or
moral earnestness, the purpose behind the verdict
remains that of Nora's frightened contemporaries:
to destroy her credibility and power as a represen-
tative of women. The demon in the house, the mod-
2018 00:44:41 UTC
Joan Templeton 31
ern "half-woman," as Strindberg called her in the
preface to Miss Julie, who, "now that she has been
discovered has begun to make a noise" (65), must
be silenced, her heretical forces destroyed, so that
A Doll House can emerge a safe classic, rescued
from feminism, and Ibsen can assume his place in
the pantheon of true artists, unsullied by the
''woman question" and the topical taint of history.

The High Claims of Art and Tautology:
"Beyond Feminism" to Men
Nora: I don't believe in that anymore. (193)
Nora: Det tror jeg ikke lenger pa. (111)
The universalist critics of A Doll House make the
familiar claim that the work can be no more about
women than men because the interests of both are
the same "human" ones; sex is irrelevant, and thus
gender nonexistent, in the literary search for the
self, which transcends and obliterates mere biolog-
ical and social determinations. Faced with a text in
which the protagonist rejects the nonself she
describes as a doll, the plaything of her father and
husband, we must take care not to let feminism, the
proper concern of pamphlets or, perhaps, thesis
plays, get in the way of art: "Ibsen's case is stronger,
not weaker, if we don't let the tragedy disappear in
polemics about women's rights" (Reinert 62).
Nora's drama can be poetry only if it goes "beyond"
feminism.

The first point to make here is that the argument
in itself is a fine example of "begging the question":
the overwhelmingly deductive reasoning, while
never laid out, is that since true art cannot be about
feminism and since A Doll House is true art, then
A Doll House cannot be about feminism. The con-
clusion rests on the assumption that "women's
rights" (along with, one must suppose, all other
struggles for human rights in which biological or
social identity figures prominently) is too limited to
be the stuff of literature. The "state" of being a fem-
inist is viewed as an uninteresting given, something
a woman is, not something she becomes, a condi-
tion suitable to flat characters in flat-heeled shoes
and outside the realm of art, which treats univer-
sal questions of human life, whose nature is com-
plex and evolutionary. Restricted to works as
predictable as propaganda, "feminist" heroines
must spring from their creators' heads fully armed
with pamphlets.
Second, implicit in the argument that would res-
cue A Doll House from feminist "ideology" is an
emphatic gender-determined ideology whose base
is startlingly tautological . Women's rights, it is
claimed, is not a fit subject for tragedy or poetry,
because it is insufficiently representative to be
generally and thus literarily human. Now, if this is
so, the explanation can only be that men, who al-

ready possess the rights women seek, are excluded
from the female struggle, which is, precisely, a
struggle for equality with them. In other words, be-
cause the sexes do not share inequality, woman's de-
sire to be equal cannot be representative. The
nonsense of the tautology is doubled when this
reasoning is applied to the literary text; for if the life
of a female protagonist is worthy of our critical and
moral attention only insofar as it is unrelated to
women's inferior status, and if the text itself is art
only to the extent that what the heroine is seeking
transcends her sexual identity, then what happens
to her is significant only to the extent that it can
happen to a man as well. Whatever is universal is
male. This means that Nora Helmer and such other
famous nineteenth-century heroines as Emma
Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, and
Dorothea Brooke could just as well be men-except
for their sex, of course. And, as Dorothy Sayers re-
minds us in her essay "The Human-Not-Quite-
Human," women are, after all, "more like men than
anything else in the world" (142). But to say that
Nora Helmer stands for the individual in search of
his or her self, besides being a singularly unhelpful
and platitudinous generalization, is wrong, if not
absurd. For it means that Nora's conflict has essen-
tially nothing to do with her identity as a
nineteenth-century married woman, a married
woman, or a woman. Yet both Nora and A Doll
House are unimaginable otherwise.

If this point needs illustrating, let us examine the
popular argument by analogy that A Doll House is
"no more about women's rights than Ghosts [is]
about syphilis" (besides M. Meyer 457, see Adams
415-16 and Le Gallienne xxiv). We will remove from
Ghosts the dated disease that penicillin has made
merely topical (at least in the medical sense) and as-
sign Captain Alving and his son, Oswald, another
fatal malady-say, tuberculosis. Both the horror
and the marvelous aptness of the venereal disease,
one of Ibsen's grim jokes, are lost (Helene Alving
fled the man she loved to return to "love" the one
she loathed, and the diseased Oswald is the conse-
quence), but the end is the same: the child inherits
2018 00:44:41 UTC
32 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
the father's doom. Now let us remove the "woman
problem" from A Doll House; let us give Nora Hel-
mer the same rights as Torvald Helmer, and let him
consider her his equal. What is left of the play? The
only honest response is nothing, for if we emanci-
pate Nora, free her from the dollhouse, there is no

play; or, rather, there is the resolution of the play,
the confrontation between husband and wife and
the exit that follows, the only crisis and denouement
that could properly conclude the action. As Ibsen
explained, "I might honestly say that it was for the
sake of the last scene that the whole play was writ-
ten" (Letters 300).
And to read the scene is to meet with a compen-
dium of everything that early modern feminism
denounced about woman's state. When Nora ac-
cuses her father and husband of having committed
a great sin against her by treating her as if she were
a playmate, she provides a textbook illustration of
Wollstonecraft's major charge in the Vindication,
that women are brought up to be "pleasing at the
expense of every solid virtue" as if they were "gen-
tle, domestic brutes" (Goulianos 142). When she
describes herself as a doll wife who has lived "by
doing tricks" (191; "a gj0re kunster" 110), she is a
flawless example of Margaret Fuller's charge that
man "wants no woman, but only a girl to play ball

with" (Rossi 167). When she realizes that she is unfit
to do anything in life and announces her remedy-
"I have to try to educate myself" (192; "Jeg ma se
a oppdra meg selv" 111)-she expresses nineteenth-
century feminism's universally agreed-upon base
for women's emancipation; in telling Torvald she
does not know how to be his wife, she might be
paraphrasing Harriet Martineau in "On Female
Education," which argues the necessity of rearing
women to be "companions to men instead of play-
things or servants" (Rossi 186). And finally, when
Nora discovers that she has duties higher than those
of a "wife and mother" (193; "hustru og mor" 111),
obligations she names as "duties to myself" (193;
"pliktene imot meg selv" 111), she is voicing the
most basic of feminist principles: that women no
less than men possess a moral and intellectual na-
ture and have not only a right but a duty to develop
it: "the grand end of their exertions should be to un-
fold their own faculties" (Wollstonecraft; qtd. in
Goulianos 149).

Ibsen's contemporaries, the sophisticated as well
as the crude, recognized A Doll House as the
clearest and most substantial expression of the
"twoman question" that had yet appeared. In Eu-
rope and America, from the 1880s on, the articles
poured forth: "Der Noratypus," "Ibsen und die
Frauenfragen," "Ibsen et la femme," "La represen-
tation feministe et sociale d'Ibsen," "A Prophet of
the New Womanhood," "Ibsen as a Pioneer of the
Woman Movement." These are a small sampling of
titles from scholars and journalists who agreed with
their more famous contemporaries Lou Andreas
Salome, Alla Nazimova, Georg Brandes, and Au-
gust Strindberg, along with every other writer on
Ibsen, whether in the important dailies and week-
lies or in the highbrow and lowbrow reviews, that
the theme of A Doll House was the subjection of
women by men.6
Havelock Ellis, filled with a young man's dreams

and inspired by Nora, proclaimed that she held out
nothing less than "the promise of a new social or-
der." In 1890, eleven years after Betty Hennings as
Nora first slammed the shakey backdrop door in
Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, he summarized what
A Doll 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, free-
dom to work, and political enfranchisement-nothing in
short but the bare ordinary rights of an adult human crea-
ture in a civilized state. (9)
Profoundly disturbing in its day, A Doll House re-
mains so still because, in James Huneker's succinct
analysis, it is "the plea for woman as a human be-
ing, neither more nor less than man, which the dra-
matist made" (275).
Wishful Reading: The Critic, the Heroine,
and Her Master's Voice
Torvald: You stay right here and give me a reckoning. You
understand what you've done? Answer! You understand?

(A Doll House 187)
Torvald: Her blir du og star meg til regnskap. Forstar du
hva du har gjort? Svar meg! Forstar du det?
(Et Dukkehjem 108)
It is easy to answer Nora's zealous critics, who
seem almost willfully wrong; being silly or "frivo-
lous" is, after all, essential to the role of addle-
brained doll that Nora plays in the marriage. And
how frivolous was it to save Torvald's life? Nora's
critics conveniently forget the bottom line of Nora's
2018 00:44:41 UTC
Joan Templeton 33
"crime": Torvald would have died if Nora had not
forged. Phobic about borrowing, the gravely ill hus-
band refuses to take out a loan and so must be saved
in spite of himself. That Nora's lifesaving deed was
a crime is the very foundation of Ibsen's conflict be-
tween law and love; a good case could be made for
Nora as a bourgeois Antigone in her stalwart defi-
ance of the world: "A wife hasn't a right to save her
husband's life? I don't know much about laws. .

I did it out of love" (149; "Skulle ikke en hustru ha
rett til 'a redde sin manns liv? Jeg kjenner ikke lo-
vene sa noye.. . Jeg gjorde det jo av kjoerlighet"
84). The argument that Nora is not sufficiently ap-
preciative of her husband's fond attentions is per-
haps best countered by quoting Veblen; noting the
common complaint against the new woman, that
she "is petted by her husband . . . [and] sur-
rounded by the most numerous and delicate atten-
tions [yet] she is not satisfied," he points out that
the "things which typically are cited as advantages"
are precisely those that make up woman's grievance
(357-58). As for the secret macaroon eating, it
hardly seems a moral issue, and in any case this
household convention dramatizes the modus
vivendi of the Helmer marriage, in which Nora is
expected to practice cookie-jar trickeries in the
game between the strong, wise, put-upon husband
and the weak, childlike wife. The argument that Ib-
sen blackens Nora in the famous silk-stocking scene
with Doctor Rank, which so dismayed Eva Le Gal-
lienne that she simply omitted it from her transla-
tion, seems both prudish and resolutely determined
to ignore Ibsen's purposes. Nora, without reflect-

ing on the significance of her feeling, quite naturally
prefers the company of the understanding and
amusing doctor to that …
NYU Press
Chapter Title: A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler
Book Title: Imagined Human Beings
Book Subtitle: A Psychological Approach to Character and
Conflict in Literature
Book Author(s): Bernard J. Paris
Published by: NYU Press. (1997)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qffv8.6

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike
4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
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Human Beings
2018 00:49:52 UTC
PART I I
Characters an d
Relationships
2018 00:49:52 UTC
2018 00:49:52 UTC
3
A DolVs House an d
Hedda Gabler

The firs t perso n t o loo k a t literatur e fro m a Horneya n per
-
spective wa s Kare n Horne y herself . Sh e taugh t course s a t
th e Ne w
School fo r Socia l Researc h tha t wer e focuse d o n literar y
works , an d sh e
frequently use d literatur e fo r illustrativ e purpose s i n he r
writings . A n
admirer o f Henri k Ibsen , sh e cite d hi s work s mor e ofte n
tha n thos e o f
any othe r author . Thi s i s not surprising , fo r Ibse n i s the
greates t psycho -
logical dramatis t nex t t o Shakespeare , an d ther e i s a
remarkable congru -
ence betwee n hi s play s an d he r theory . Man y o f Ibsen' s
character s see m
to hav e steppe d fro m th e page s o f Our Inner Conflicts an
d Neurosis and
Human Growth. I coul d easil y devot e a boo k t o a Horneya
n stud y o f
Ibsen, bu t I shal l confin e mysel f her e t o tw o o f hi s mos t
famou s an d
enigmatic characters , Nor a Helme r an d Hedd a Gabler . A t th
e cente r o f
Ibsen's plays , ther e i s ofte n a relationship , th e
psychodynamic s o f whic h
are portraye d wit h remarkabl e subtlety . I shal l analyz e
Nora' s relation -
ship with he r husband , Torvald , an d Hedda' s wit h Ejler t
Lovborg .
Although Horne y initiall y devote d hersel f t o th e stud y o f
feminin e
psychology, sh e stoppe d writin g o n thi s topi c i n th e mid-1
9 30s an d

developed a theor y tha t sh e regarde d a s gender-neutral . Sh
e di d no t se e
any defensiv e strategie s a s essentiall y masculin e o r feminin
e bu t fel t tha t
all wer e employe d b y member s o f bot h sexes . Th e greate r
incidenc e o f
self-effacement i n wome n an d aggressio n i n me n i s a
product , sh e felt ,
of culture . Horney' s positio n i s borne ou t b y the stud y o f
literature . Self -
effacement i s mor e commo n i n femal e character s an d
aggressio n i n
males, bu t ther e ar e man y aggressiv e wome n an d self-
effacin g men .
One o f th e majo r objective s o f women' s liberatio n
movement s ha s
been t o fre e wome n fro m th e cultura l deman d fo r self-
effacemen t an d t o
establish thei r righ t t o ful l huma n development . A t th e
themati c level ,
this seem s t o b e wha t A Doll's House i s about . I n th e
first tw o act s o f
the play , Nor a Helme r i s a strikin g exampl e o f feminin e
compliance ,
39 This content downloaded from 206.224.223.236 on Sun, 04
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40 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
while i n th e las t ac t sh e rebel s agains t he r doll -lik e rol e
an d assert s he r

claim t o ful l humanity .
Indeed, the most difficul t thin g t o understan d abou t Nor a i s
the spee d
of he r transformatio n fro m a submissive , self-sacrificin g
woma n wh o
lives onl y fo r lov e an d famil y int o a self-assertiv e perso n
wh o reject s al l
responsibility t o he r husban d an d childre n i n th e nam e o f
he r dut y t o
herself. A t th e en d Nor a seem s s o differen t fro m he r
earlie r sel f tha t
some hav e fel t tha t Ibse n sacrifice d consisten t
characterizatio n t o hi s
thematic concerns . Nor a learn s tha t sh e ha s bee n unjustl y
treate d b y a
male-dominated societ y an d tha t sh e must rebe l agains t th e
conventiona l
view o f he r natur e i f sh e i s t o realiz e herself . "Yo u an d
Fathe r hav e
done m e a grea t wrong, " sh e tell s Torvald . "You'v e
prevente d m e fro m
becoming a rea l person " (ac t 3). 1 Sh e decide s tha t sh e
mus t leav e hom e
if sh e i s to hav e a chanc e o f discoverin g wha t sh e reall y
think s an d wh o
she reall y is . Nora' s speeche s ar e stirring , bu t ha s Ibse n
pu t word s int o
her mout h tha t ar e inconsisten t wit h he r previousl y draw n
character ? I s
her transformatio n psychologicall y plausible ? How , exactly ,
doe s he r
disillusionment wit h Torval d produc e he r amazin g turnabout
? Ca n a
woman wh o intende d t o drow n hersel f nea r th e beginnin g
o f th e las t ac t

become a s stron g a person a s Nora seem s to b e a t th e end ?
I believe tha t Nor a i s a well-drawn mimeti c characte r whos e
transfor -
mation i s intelligibl e i f w e understan d he r defensiv e
strategie s an d th e
nature o f he r relationshi p wit h he r husband . Sh e neve r
become s a mer e
mouthpiece bu t remain s a n inwardl y motivate d character ,
ful l o f incon -
sistencies an d blin d spot s tha t ar e psychologicall y realistic .
Her transfor -
mation i s plausibl e whe n w e recogniz e tha t wit h th e
collaps e o f he r
predominant solution , he r previousl y represse d tendencie s
emerge .
Nora experience s genuin e growt h a t th e en d o f th e play ,
but sh e i s no t
as clear-heade d a s sh e think s sh e is . Sh e fail s t o see , fo r
example , tha t
she ha s als o participate d i n th e creatio n o f he r destructiv e
relationshi p
with he r husban d an d tha t Torval d ha s bee n n o mor e o f a
rea l perso n
for he r tha n sh e ha s bee n fo r him . Sh e inform s Torval d
tha t sh e mus t
leave hom e becaus e h e ha s no t treate d he r a s a rea l
person , bu t sh e als o
says tha t sh e stoppe d lovin g hi m whe n th e wonderfu l thin
g di d no t
happen. I f Torval d ha d behave d heroicall y o n th e receip t o
f Krogstad' s
letter, Nor a woul d hav e bee n delighted , bu t suc h behavio r
o n hi s par t
would no t hav e show n respec t fo r he r a s a person . Nor a

seem s unawar e
of this , an d o f muc h els e besides . Sh e say s tha t sh e ha s
neve r bee n mor e
sure o f herself , bu t sh e i s ful l o f self-doubt , an d he r fligh
t fro m Torval d
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 4 1
and he r childre n i s compulsive . Turnin g agains t he r faile d
self-effacin g
solution, Nor a i s no w drive n b y defensiv e need s fo r
aggressio n an d
withdrawal, a s wel l a s b y he r newl y awakene d desir e fo r
self-actualiza -
tion.
Nora initiall y develop s int o a predominantl y self-effacin g
perso n no t
only becaus e o f th e attitude s towar d wome n i n he r societ y
bu t als o
because o f th e particula r condition s o f he r childhood . Sh e
ha s n o
mother, an d he r fathe r i s a domineerin g ma n wh o want s he
r t o remai n a
"doll-child" an d wh o woul d b e "displeased " i f sh e expresse
d an y idea s
contrary t o hi s ow n (ac t 3) . Nora canno t affor d t o rebel ;
sh e i s strongl y
attached t o he r fathe r an d doe s he r utmos t t o pleas e him .
Sh e retains th e

childlike playfulnes s an d docilit y tha t h e finds s o charmin
g an d eithe r
adopts hi s opinion s o r remain s silent . I t seem s l ikel y tha t
th e absenc e o f
a mothe r increase s he r dependenc e o n he r father ; sh e ha s
n o on e els e t o
turn t o fo r lov e an d protection . Moreover , sh e ha s n o
mode l o f matur e
womanhood t o emulate , an d sh e acquire s fe w skill s o n
whic h t o bas e
her self-esteem . Whe n sh e become s a mothe r herself , sh e
depend s o n he r
old nurse , Anne-Marie , t o car e fo r he r children , who m sh e
treat s a s
playmates. Nora' s fathe r reward s he r complianc e wit h
fondnes s an d
indulgence, an d sh e grow s u p feelin g tha t th e wa y t o gai n
safety , love ,
and approva l i s to pleas e a powerful male .
In Torval d Helmer , Nor a finds a ma n wh o i s muc h lik e he
r father ,
and sh e relate s t o hi m i n a simila r way . Sh e i s conten t t
o b e hi s "lark, "
his "squirrel, " hi s "doll-baby, " hi s "littl e featherbrain, " hi s
"craz y littl e
thing" (ac t 1) . Nora doe s no t fee l demeane d b y thes e
epithets , a s we fee l
her t o be , althoug h a t a n unconsciou s leve l the y ar e
destructive . Sh e
lives, a s sh e says , "b y performin g tricks " fo r Torvald , an d
sh e i s prou d
of he r abilit y t o kee p him charmed . Fo r Torval d ther e i s
"somethin g ver y
endearing abou t a woman' s helplessness " (ac t 3) , an d Nor a
i s a t grea t

pains t o concea l th e fac t tha t sh e ha s save d hi s lif e an d
almos t pai d of f a
large loa n b y he r ow n efforts : "Torval d coul d neve r bea r t
o thin k o f
owing anythin g t o me ! I t woul d hur t hi s self-respect—woun
d hi s pride .
It would rui n everythin g betwee n us. " It is important t o Nora
t o preserv e
Torvald's feelin g o f mastery , fo r thi s i s th e pric e o f hi s
lov e an d protec -
tion. Sh e i s keepin g he r heroi c effor t "i n reserve, "
however , fo r th e da y
when sh e i s "n o longe r s o prett y an d attractiv e . . . whe n
i t n o longe r
amuses hi m t o se e [her ] danc e an d dress-u p an d ac t fo r
him " (ac t 1) .
In th e meantime , i t give s he r "somethin g t o b e prou d an d
happ y
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42 I A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
about." Sh e i s prou d partl y becaus e "workin g lik e tha t an d
earnin g
money" ha s give n he r a feelin g o f strength , ha s mad e he r
"fee l almos t
like a man " (ac t i ) , bu t mostl y becaus e i t fulfill s he r nee
d t o b e goo d
and loving . Lik e Mrs . Linde , an d mos t wome n i n he r
culture , Nor a

glorifies sacrificin g sel f fo r others , an d sh e reveal s he r
secre t onl y whe n
Mrs. Lind e make s he r fee l inferio r b y contrastin g Nora' s
eas y lif e wit h
her ow n nobl e suffering .
Nora als o ha s need s fo r powe r an d mastery , whic h sh e
fulfill s i n a
typically self-effacin g wa y b y identifyin g wit h Torvald . Sh
e exult s i n th e
fact tha t "al l th e employee s a t th e Ban k [will ] b e
dependen t o n Torval d
now": "Wha t fu n t o thin k tha t we—tha t Torvald—ha s suc h
powe r
over s o man y people " (ac t i ) . Sh e bristle s whe n Krogsta d
speak s disre -
spectfully o f he r husban d becaus e sh e participates i n
Torvald's glory , an d
any threa t t o hi s statu s i s a threa t t o he r own . He r
identificatio n i s s o
intense tha t sh e i s read y t o commi t suicid e t o preserv e he
r husband' s
high position .
Nora begin s t o thin k o f suicid e a s soo n a s Krogsta d
threaten s t o
reveal tha t sh e ha s obtaine d a loa n fro m hi m b y forgin g
he r father' s
signature. Sh e become s panic-stricke n when , ignorin g he r
pleas , Torval d
dismisses Krogstad , sayin g tha t h e will bea r "th e whol e
burden " o f an y
retaliation. "He' d d o i t too ! He' d d o it—i n spit e o f
anything! " sh e
exclaims t o Dr . Rank . "Bu t h e mustn't—never , never !
Anythin g bu t

that!" (ac t 2) . Nora i s convinced tha t Torval d love s he r s o
"deeply " an d
"intensely" tha t "h e wouldn' t hesitat e fo r a momen t t o giv
e u p hi s lif e
for [her ] sake. " Sh e think s tha t on e wa y o f savin g hi m
woul d b e t o pa y
off he r debt , thereb y securin g th e incriminatin g papers . Sh
e consider s
asking Dr . Ran k fo r th e money , bu t whe n Ran k declare s hi
s love , sh e
can accep t nothin g fro m him , eve n thoug h th e alternativ e i
s s o terrible .
Apparently, he r romanticis m i s s o intens e tha t sh e woul d
rathe r commi t
suicide tha n tain t he r devotio n t o Torvald . Sh e i s afrai d t
o kil l herself ,
however, unti l Krogsta d boast s tha t withi n a yea r h e wil l
b e Torvald' s
"right han d man . It'l l b e Nils Krogstad , no t Torval d Helmer
, who'l l ru n
the Join t Stoc k Bank. " " I hav e th e courag e fo r i t now, "
Nor a declare s
(act 2) .
Nora's relationshi p wit h he r husban d i s base d o n a bargai n
sh e ha s
made i n he r ow n mind . Sh e wil l b e a charming , obliging ,
self-sacrificin g
wife, an d Torval d wil l lov e an d protec t her . Nor a delight s
i n bein g
babied, coddled , an d indulged . Everythin g Torval d doe s fo r
he r show s
how valuabl e sh e i s t o hi m an d assure s he r tha t sh e wil l
b e take n car e

2018 00:49:52 UTC
of. Sh e does not min d bein g weak a s long a s his strengt h i s
at he r service .
She control s hi m throug h he r dependency . Whe n h e become
s directo r o f
the bank , sh e doe s no t regre t th e fac t tha t sh e wil l n o
longe r hav e t o
earn mone y secretl y bu t i s overjoyed tha t ther e will b e "n o
mor e trouble !
N o mor e worry ! I'l l b e abl e t o pla y an d rom p abou t wit h
th e children "
(act 1) . Sh e doe s expec t t o b e rewarde d fo r he r year s o f
devotion ,
however. Som e day , somehow , Torval d i s goin g t o mak e a
magnificen t
sacrifice fo r her , an d the n sh e wil l se e ho w stron g an d
nobl e h e i s an d
how muc h h e love s her . Thi s i s the "wonderfu l thing " tha t
wil l validat e
her bargai n an d mak e he r drea m o f glor y com e true .
Nora i s certain tha t whe n Torval d open s Krogstad' s
threatenin g letter ,
the wonderfu l thin g wil l happen . Torval d i s to o brave , to o
nobl e t o
submit t o Krogstad' s demands . I n orde r t o protec t he r fro
m prosecution ,
he will tak e responsibilit y fo r th e forger y o n himself . In
Nora' s romanti c
fantasy Torval d i s her knigh t an d sh e i s his lady . Just befor

e h e reads th e
letter, h e tell s her : "D o yo u kno w something , Nora . I ofte
n wis h yo u
were i n som e grea t danger—s o I coul d ris k bod y an d
soul—m y whol e
life—everything, everythin g fo r you r sake " (ac t 3) . Torvald'
s equall y
romantic versio n o f thei r relationshi p reinforce s Nora's . Sh
e believe s hi s
professions an d i s convince d tha t h e wil l sacrific e himsel f
fo r her . Nor a
wants th e wonderfu l thin g t o happen , bu t sh e i s terrifie d o
f i t a s well ,
for Torval d wil l becom e a socia l outcast , lik e Krogstad . H
e wil l los e hi s
power an d position , an d lif e wil l becom e unbearabl y blea k
an d mean . A
ruined Torval d coul d satisf y neithe r Nora' s complian t need s
fo r car e an d
protection no r he r expansiv e need s fo r powe r an d glory .
The severit y o f Nora' s neurosi s i s clearl y reveale d b y he r
determina -
tion t o kil l herself . B y committing suicid e sh e wil l preven t
Torval d fro m
taking th e blam e o n himself . He r heroi c sacrific e wil l
forestal l his . In -
stead o f havin g t o endur e guil t an d self-hat e fo r havin g
ruine d Torvald ,
she wil l sav e hi s caree r a s sh e ha d earlie r save d hi s life .
Th e rewar d wil l
be hi s undyin g gratitud e an d devotion . Sh e wil l b e
enshrine d foreve r i n
his memor y an d wil l no t hav e t o fea r th e los s o f hi s lov
e whe n sh e i s n o
longer s o attractive . He r suicid e wil l secur e Nor a fro m th e

ravage s o f
time an d th e vicissitude s o f fortune . Sh e will di e i n ful l
possessio n o f th e
two thing s sh e values most , Torvald' s lov e an d hi s glory .
In a relationshi p o f morbi d dependency , suc h a s tha t
betwee n Nor a
and Torvald , ther e i s a turnin g point , say s Horney , fo r th
e self-effacin g
partner, "a s th e stak e sh e i s gamblin g fo r fail s t o
materialize " (1950 ,
252). Th e turnin g poin t fo r Nor a come s wit h Torvald' s
reaction s t o
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44 I A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
Krogstad's letter . H e neithe r praise s he r fo r havin g earne d
s o muc h
money an d save d hi s lif e no r offer s t o tak e th e blam e fo r
he r forger y o n
himself. Instea d h e call s he r a hypocrite , a liar , an d a
crimina l an d tell s
her tha t sh e "won' t b e allowe d t o brin g u p th e children "
(ac t 3) . "Al l
thought o f happiness " betwee n the m i s over . Sh e ha s pu t
hi m i n Krogs -
tad's power , an d h e "mus t find som e wa y t o appeas e him.
" I f w e hav e
understood wha t ha s bee n goin g o n i n Nor a u p t o thi s
moment , w e ca n

see wh y Torvald' s reaction s hav e suc h a tremendou s impac
t upo n her .
Her drea m ha s bee n shattered ; he r imag e o f Torvald , he r
bargain , he r
hopes ar e al l explode d illusions . He r sens e o f injustic e i s
overwhelming ,
since sh e ha s bee n read y t o di e fo r him , an d h e i s thinkin
g onl y o f
himself. Enraged , sh e feel s no w tha t sh e doe s no t lov e
Torval d an d
that h e ha s neve r love d her . Nothin g h e say s coul d possibl
y repai r th e
relationship; sh e ha s los t al l fait h i n hi s assurance s an d
regard s hi m wit h
contempt.
With th e collaps e o f he r self-effacin g solution , hithert o
represse d
trends i n Nora' s personalit y begi n t o emerge . Al l th e tim e
sh e wa s
submitting t o Torval d an d he r father , sh e wa s unconsciousl
y resentin g
their constraint s an d hatin g the m fo r makin g he r self-
abandonmen t th e
price o f thei r love . Sh e rebelle d i n smal l ways , suc h a s
sneakin g maca -
roons, an d wa s awar e o f a desir e t o say , i n fron t o f
Torvald , "Damn ! —
damn!—damn i t all! " (ac t 1) . Now tha t ther e i s n o priz e t
o b e wo n b y
compliance, sh e canno t bea r th e though t o f continuin g t o b
e treate d i n
degrading, patronizin g ways . No r ca n sh e repres s he r
resentmen t an y
longer. Sh e accuse s bot h Torval d an d he r fathe r o f havin g
grievousl y

wronged he r an d seem s t o wan t Torval d t o suffer . Whe n h
e say s tha t h e
"can't endur e th e thought " o f partin g wit h her , sh e replies :
"Al l th e
more reaso n i t shoul d happen " (ac t 3) .
Torvald i s not th e onl y objec t o f Nora' s rage ; she i s angry
wit h hersel f
and ful l o f self-hate . He r self-effacin g sid e is horrified a t
th e though t tha t
she ha s bee n "livin g her e fo r eigh t year s wit h a stranger "
an d tha t sh e
has "born e hi m thre e children" : " I can' t bea r t o thin k abou
t it ! I coul d
tear mysel f t o pieces! " (ac t 3) . B y leavin g immediatel y sh
e remove s
herself fro m sexua l temptatio n an d restore s he r prid e i n
hersel f a s a
woman wh o i s intimat e onl y wit h a ma n sh e loves . Sh e
see s he r bargai n
in a ne w light , an d now , t o avoi d feelin g tha t sh e ha s sol
d herself , sh e
must rejec t Torvald' s help : " I can' t accep t anythin g fro m
strangers. "
Torvald's attac k o n he r mora l characte r exacerbate s he r
doubt s abou t
her fitness a s a mother .
2018 00:49:52 UTC

A goo d dea l o f self-hat e i s generated als o b y Nora' s
emergin g aggres -
sive trends . Sh e perceive s tha t i n man y way s Torval d i s
righ t whe n h e
calls he r a chil d an d tell s he r tha t sh e ha s "n o
understandin g o f th e
society w e liv e in " (ac t 3) . Sh e ha d bee n conten t t o b e a
pampere d
darling wh o wa s unfi t t o cop e wit h th e world , bu t no w sh
e hate s he r
weakness an d i s determine d t o stan d o n he r ow n feet .
Here , too , th e
defense o f he r prid e require s tha t sh e leav e home . Sh e
feels tha t sh e i s of
no us e t o he r childre n partl y becaus e sh e i s s o childlik e
herself . Nor a
defends hersel f agains t he r self-hat e b y puttin g th e whol e
blam e o n
Torvald an d he r fathe r an d b y resolvin g t o becom e
different . Anythin g
that stand s i n th e wa y o f he r determinatio n t o change , an
y clai m o f lov e
or duty , sh e ruthlessly rejects : "Thi s i s something I must do.
"
It seem s likel y tha t Nor a become s aggressive , rathe r tha n
wallowin g
in self-pit y an d despair , becaus e he r earlie r experienc e o f
workin g ha s
given he r a feelin g tha t sh e can ear n mone y lik e a man .
Withou t thi s i n
her background , sh e migh t hav e reacte d quit e differentl y t
o th e collaps e
of he r romance . A s i t is , sh e give s u p he r belie f i n th e
miraculou s powe r
of lov e an d transfer s he r expansiv e prid e fro m Torval d t o

herself . Sh e is
going t o prov e tha t sh e i s a s goo d a s a ma n an d doe s no
t nee d anybod y
to tak e car e o f her ! Sh e ha s ver y littl e sens e o f wha t sh e
i s goin g t o do ,
but sh e mus t escap e th e dependenc y sh e no w s o despises .
He r belie f i n
Torvald seem s t o hav e bee n replace d b y a fait h i n th e
magi c powe r o f
her will .
Aggressive trend s ar e no t th e onl y hithert o suppresse d
component s o f
Nora's personalit y t o surfac e a t th e end . A person livin g i
n a suffocatin g
environment lik e Nora' s i s boun d t o develo p tendencie s
towar d detach -
ment, t o hav e stron g urge s t o ru n away , t o ge t fre e o f th
e constan t
pressure o n he r thought s an d feelings . Nor a insist s tha t sh
e mus t b e
alone if she is to "thin k thing s out " fo r herself . She rejects al
l responsibil -
ity towar d other s an d refuse s Torvald' s hel p partl y becaus e
sh e i s afrai d
of anythin g tha t wil l interfer e wit h he r independence : "Yo
u mustn' t fee l
yourself boun d an y mor e tha n I shall . Ther e mus t b e
complet e freedo m
on bot h sides " (ac t 3) . Torvald want s t o write to her , but
Nora anxiousl y
pleads wit h hi m no t to . Sh e expresse s n o interes t i n hearin
g abou t th e
children an d make s n o effor t t o se e them befor e sh e
departs .

Nora's detachmen t i s no t onl y a respons e t o pas t oppressio
n bu t als o
a defens e agains t presen t conflicts . Sh e ha s t o b e callou s
towar d he r
husband an d children , sh e ha s t o ru n awa y fro m them ,
becaus e the y
threaten t o rous e u p he r self-effacin g side , o f whic h sh e i
s no w afraid .
2018 00:49:52 UTC
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46 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
There i s somethin g decidedl y cold-bloode d abou t Nor a a t
th e end . Sh e
is no t allowin g hersel f t o b e awar e o f th e complexitie s o f
he r situation ,
to fee l a sens e o f loss , or t o experienc e tende r emotions .
Although par t o f Nora' s transformatio n involve s th e adoptio
n o f ne w
defenses, ther e ar e sign s o f genuin e growth . Nor a ha s see
n th e severit y
of he r self-alienatio n an d ha s understoo d som e o f it s
causes . Sh e want s
to find herself , t o discove r he r ow n thought s an d feelings ,
an d t o gro w
from thi s authenti c cente r o f he r being . Sh e see s tha t he r
humanit y ha s
been stunte d an d i s determine d t o becom e a capable ,
functioning , full y
responsible person . He r insistenc e tha t sh e ha s a sacre d

dut y t o hersel f i s
healthy self-assertion .
How fa r Nor a ca n gro w i s a question o n which we can onl y
speculate .
In th e absenc e o f a supportiv e environment , he r prospect s
d o no t see m
promising. It will be very difficult fo r he r to arriv e a t a true
knowledg e o f
herself an d th e worl d aroun d her . Sh e ha s mad e contac t
wit h previousl y
repressed feelings , suc h a s rag e an d th e desir e t o thro w of
f he r bonds ,
but thi s i s no t th e sam e thin g a s gettin g i n touc h wit h he
r rea l self . He r
discovery o f he r self-alienatio n i s a n essentia l first step ,
bu t i t i s difficul t
to se e ho w sh e ca n recogniz e an d relinquis h he r defense s
withou t help ,
and non e i s available . A t th e en d o f th e pla y Nor a i s like
a perso n i n a n
early stag e o f therap y wh o i s s o afrai d o f losin g contac t
wit h he r ne w
perceptions an d s o determine d tha t nothin g shal l interfer e
wit h he r
growth tha t sh e canno t b e worrie d abou t doin g justic e t o
other s o r
caring abou t thei r feelings . I t i s a t thi s stage , o f course ,
tha t man y
marriages brea k up .
If Nora continue d t o grow , there migh t b e a chance fo r he r
marriage , fo r
she would com e t o se e both Torval d an d hersel f mor e
clearly . Sh e woul d
relinquish he r over-simpl e perceptio n o f hi m a s a detestabl

e tyran t o r a
contemptible weaklin g an d recogniz e tha t hi s defense s ha d
comple -
mented her s i n many way s bu t ha d als o bee n i n conflict
wit h them . Nor a
and Torval d hav e ha d suc h a n intensel y romanti c
relationshi p becaus e
they hav e satisfie d eac h other' s neuroti c needs . Nor a neede
d t o merg e
with a powerful , dominan t male , an d Torval d love d bein g
master . Sh e
was excite d b y his strengt h an d h e b y her weaknes s an d
dependency . Sh e
wished t o b e possesse d an d Torval d wa s extremel y
possessive . Sh e
dreamt o f bein g cherishe d an d protecte d an d h e o f rescuin
g he r fro m
peril. Eac h wa s th e cente r o f th e other' s existence . Torval
d wa s a s
emotionally dependen t o n Nor a a s sh e o n him ; a t th e end ,
i t i s h e wh o
2018 00:49:52 UTC
cannot bea r th e though t o f thei r separation . Eac h wa s "i n
love " wit h a n
idealization o f th e othe r rathe r tha n wit h th e rea l person .
When Torvald' s illusor y versio n o f Nor a i s shattered , h e
crie s out ,

"God! Wha t a n awakening! " (ac t 3) . The pla y ha s bee n
buildin g towar d
this moment . W e se e fro m th e beginnin g tha t Nor a an d
Torval d hav e
different attitude s towar d borrowin g money , socia l
responsibility , an d
scrupulousness i n th e managemen t o f thei r affairs . Althoug
h sh e know s
that Torval d i s oppose d t o bein g i n debt , Nor a propose s
tha t the y
borrow o n th e promis e o f hi s ne w jo b i n orde r t o splurg e
fo r Christmas .
When Torval d ask s wha t woul d happe n i f "o n Ne w Year' s
Ev e a til e
blew of f th e roo f an d knocke d m y brain s out, " Nor a replie
s tha t unde r
such circumstance s i t woul d no t matte r i f sh e owe d mone y
(ac t 1) .
"But," Torval d asks , "wha t abou t th e peopl e I' d borrowe d
from? "
"Who care s abou t them? " replie s Nora . "Afte r al l they'r e
jus t strang -
ers." Torval d dismisse s he r respons e a s a joke, but Nor a i s
serious. Whe n
Krogstad ask s i f it had no t occurre d t o he r tha t sh e was no
t bein g hones t
with hi m whe n h e len t he r mone y o n th e basi s o f he r
father' s signature ,
Nora answers : " I reall y couldn' t concer n mysel f wit h that .
Yo u mean t
nothing t o me. "
The Helmer s hav e no t ha d a grea t dea l o f mone y becaus e
a s a lawye r
Torvald ha s refuse d "t o handl e an y case s tha t ar e i n th e
leas t bit —

shady" (ac t 1) . Nor a tell s Mrs . Lind e tha t sh e "agree[s ]
wit h him , o f
course," bu t sh e doe s no t observ e hi s code o f rectitud e
hersel f an d seem s
to fee l tha t h e i s to o strict . Governe d b y th e value s o f he
r self-effacin g
solution, Nor a feel s justifie d i n doin g whateve r i s necessar
y t o car e fo r
the member s o f he r family . Sh e canno t …
Ibsen and Fatherhood
Author(s): Jørgen Lorentzen
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 37, No. 4, Attending to
Media (Autumn, 2006), pp. 817-
836
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057980
Accessed: 04-03-2018 00:47 UTC

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New Literary History
2018 00:47:10 UTC
Ibsen and Fatherhood
j0rgen Lorentzen
Throughout Henrik Ibsen's dramatic works, fatherhood and
issues related to fatherhood occupy a central position. In his
historical and romantic dramas, as well as in his contemporary
dramas, Ibsen writes about fathers, the role of fathers in
relation to
their children, and how adult men are impacted by their
relationship
to their fathers. I can hardly think of a more pervasive motif in
Ibsen's
works than fatherhood.
However, fatherhood is not what most of us associate with
Ibsen's
dramas. Most of us think of women who fight for the right to a
life of
freedom or heroic men who become embroiled in great moral
battles
related to truth, freedom, power, suppression, and bourgeois

double
standards of morality. The reason for this is rather obvious.
Ibsen's dramas
do not explicitly deal with fatherhood. It is not the relationship
between
fathers and their children that comprise the dramatic plot.
Fatherhood
lies in the background, ahead of the drama and underlying the
dramatic
interactions and scenes. Fatherhood is pervasive, yet kept
discreetly in
the background. This makes it even more fascinating to study.
What is
it that leads Ibsen to dramatize so consistently the relationship
between
father and child without fully developing it as a theme? In what
ways are
issues of fatherhood part of the realistic discourse on truth,
freedom, and
other issues under discussion? How and to what degree does he
allow
fatherhood to play a role in his dramatic works, and how does
this play
out in relation to motherhood, family, and masculinity, both
within and
beyond Ibsen's works?
In this article, I will try to show that it is no coincidence that
father
hood is a kind of axis in his dramas. I also want to point out
that Ibsen's
dramatizations of fatherhood are part of a contemporary social
debate
in which fathers and paternal authority are subjected to a
sweeping
critique. The spotlight is placed on the father, both on and off

stage,
and he must explain himself. The role of the father is no longer
taken
for granted.
* Thanks to my colleagues Christian Janss, Kirsten Kalleberg,
and Kristin 0rjasaeter for
their helpful comments during the writing of this article.
New Literary History, 2007, 37: 817-836
2018 00:47:10 UTC
818 NEW literary history
Of course, I am not the first to comment on fatherhood in
Ibsen's
dramas, but I am surprised by how few critics and analysts
have addressed
issues related to fatherhood in Ibsen's dramas, including the
fathers'
sometimes unethical and ruthless behavior toward their
children. Except
for a few articles over the years, I have found just a few
references that
discuss fatherhood in Ibsen's works.1 These articles address
this topic as
a minor element in analyses dealing with and discussing other
aspects of
the dramas. The commentaries on Ibsen both in Norway and
abroad are
so numerous, however, that I will not attempt to refer to all of

these.
I will mention two books, though, that take a broader
perspective on
issues related to fatherhood. In his book Questioning the Father
(1999),
Ross Shideler analyzes several of Ibsen's dramas from a post-
Darwinist
perspective.2 Shideler examines Ibsen in relation to a number
of other
important European authors of the time who replace a religious
pater
familias structure with a biocentric and conflicted bourgeois
family, in
which the father's power is unstable and insecure. Shideler
shows how
these authors are part of both a post-Darwinist and a feminist
discourse
on the family, patriarchal power, women's fight for a new
freedom, and
conflicting reactions toward the democratization of the family.
In the
chapter on Ibsen, Shideler discusses Pillars of Society (1877),
A Doll's
House (1879), and Ghosts (1881), three dramas in which
fatherhood
occupies a central position. In Shideler's interpretation, these
plays are
an expression of the struggle between the patriarch-oriented
men and
the biocentric-oriented women who argue in favor of a new
social order
through references to a new knowledge-base founded on human
freedom
and equality. Consequently, in these three dramas, Ibsen
emerges as one

of the most important advocates for the improved status of
women in
the second half of the 1800s.
In the newly released book Skolens gjenganger (The School's
Ghosts),
Anne Marie Rekdal also chooses fatherhood as one of the main
perspec
tives in her commentaries on Ghosts and The Wild Duck.3 As
the book
has an explicitly pedagogical purpose aimed at the discussion
on Ibsen
in high schools, it emphasizes a presentation of different
perspectives
on and possible readings of the various Ibsen dramas.
Nonetheless, the
book offers new approaches to and understandings of the
individual
dramas. In the analysis of Ghosts, Rekdal focuses on the
fathers and their
absence from the family drama, and, in The Wild Duck, she
presents the
two father-son relationships?Werle-Gregers and Ekdal-
Hjalmar?as mir
ror images, in which the two sons have different crosses to bear
due to
their fathers' misdeeds.
There are several reasons that Ghosts and The Wild Duck in
particular
invoke this perspective on fatherhood, but one obvious reason
is that
these two dramas are the most clearly family-oriented of
Ibsen's dramas.4

2018 00:47:10 UTC
IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 819
Subtitled A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts, Ghosts is the only
one of Ibsen's
dramas with a subtitle such as this, while The Wild Duck is
associated
with an often quoted notation by Ibsen on the play's thematic
structure.
"Gregers' knowledge of children's first and deepest sorrows.
They are not
sorrows of unrequited love; no, they are family sorrows?painful
home
circumstances?" (6: 434). In a letter to publisher Frederick
Hegel, Ibsen
addresses this same topic as he is about to finish writing the
play: "This
play does not concern itself with political or social questions or
with
public matters in general. The action takes place entirely in the
area of
family life."5 Quite simply, Ibsen wanted to explore the
dramatic workings
of the family in both these dramas, specifically the relationship
between
mother, father, and child?not just between the woman and man
or
the relationship between the adults. The children occupy a
deliberate
and central place in both plays, with an emphasis on how
children are

wounded to their core in the bourgeois family drama.
However, many critics have taken Ibsen's use of the term
"family" too
literally. It is not so much the family as such that is reflected in
Ibsen's
two dramas, but rather fathers and fatherhood in particular. In
these
two dramas, the word "father" is used far more often than in
any other
works by Ibsen, and the role of the father is importunate in
both works.
Even though the mother is without a doubt the protagonist on
stage in
Ghosts, it is her relationship to society's father figures that lies
at the heart
of her despair and ultimate self-knowledge. To talk about the
family as
such can easily conceal the fact that it is fatherhood being
examined in
these two plays.
In some respects, Ghosts is a precursor to The Wild Duck.
These family
dramas are tied together not only because they are Ibsen's two
explicitly
family-oriented dramas, but also because Ghosts establishes the
precondi
tions for issues related to fatherhood in The Wild Duck. Ghosts
represents
Ibsen's first fundamental critique of the patriarchal family.
Brand (1866),
Pillars of Society, and A Doll's House problematize the father's
role. Brand
sacrifices his son, Alf, out of pure romantic idealism, while
Bernick is

willing to sacrifice his son, Olaf, for his own personal and
financial in
terests. But in both these works, the possibility is left open for
the men
to make restitution by the end of the plays. In A Doll's House,
the father
and mother build a patriarchal home of illusion for the
children, but
when Nora has had enough and leaves, the father remains with
both
children?a conclusion that makes possible a new and different
kind of
fatherhood. First in Ghosts, the patriarchy is stripped of all its
dignity. This
is pointed out by both Rekdal and Shideler. Rekdal writes:
"Mrs. Alving's
radical rebellion and fight for freedom in Ghosts is directed
toward all
types of ghosts, toward all types of defunct opinions and
beliefs, but first
and foremost toward those fathers who are bearers of the
patriarchal
social order" (SG 122).
2018 00:47:10 UTC
820 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
One of the most important preconditions for laying bare the
symbolic
power of the patriarchy is the disclosure of the father as a
representative

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