The document outlines the process of researching and developing a marketing plan for Purell hand sanitizer, emphasizing the importance of utilizing multiple sources, including reputable business publications and the company’s website. It highlights the need for a minimum of twelve current articles and stresses the requirements for proper citations in APA format. The assignment's focus includes analyzing the current marketing mix and providing recommendations on the product's marketing strategy.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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,

5. 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

6. 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 (Nora,
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

7. 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.

8. 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,)
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 259
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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 261
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.

14. 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.

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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

18. Rank's
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 263
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

19. 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,

20. 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 generously 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

21. 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

22. 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.
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 265
The stage directions indicate that he is supposed to speak
through

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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 philosophy, the living doll - the doll that moves, that
gives
the impression of being alive - has been used as a figure for the
problem of other minds ever since Rene Descartes looked out of
his
third fioor window one evening in 1641 and saw people walking
around
in the street below. Or did he? His moment of vertigo arose
when he
realized that he could not with certainty say that he was
watching
real human beings. All he could really be sure of seeing were
"hats and
cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions
might be
determined by springs" {Discourse 84). In this sentence, the
phrase
"artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by
springs"
translates a single Latin word, namely automata (see Descartes,
Meditations 49).
The imagery of automata, robots, dolls - and in modern science

27. fiction - aliens gives voice to a fundamental philosophical
question: how
do I know that another human being is another human being?
that he or
she thinks and feels as a human being? how can I tell the
difference
between the human and the non-human, between life and
death?"^ For
this reason, the doll easily becomes a figure of horror: in
European
literature the image of the doll-woman is often found in the
borderlands
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 267
between Gothic horror and Romanticism. In E.T.A. Hoffmann's
horror story, "The Sandman," the writer Nathanael rejects his
real life
fiancee, Clara, for the doll Olympia, who can only nod and say,
"Oh!
Oh!'"^ While still part of a horror story, Hoffmann's doll also
serves
to criticize some men's preference for subservient women. In
Ibsen's own
works, the uncanny character of Irene in When We Dead
Awaken,
who is half woman, half statue, also evokes the Gothic and the
uncanny.
In recent film history, the original Stepford Wives articulates
the same
preoccupation with the horror and uncanniness of the woman-
doll,
in ways that can't fail to recall A DoWs House.^'^

28. In Madame de Stael's works, the figure of the doll, without
Gothic
overtones, is also used to criticize sexist attitudes towards
women. In her
short satirical play, Le Mannequin, a German painter called, of
all things,
Frederic Hoffmann helps his beloved Sophie de la Morliere to
trick
the stupid French count d'Erville, an enemy of "I'esprit des
femmes
[the intellect of women]," into preferring a paper doll to a real
woman.
In the key scene, the count falls in love with the doll precisely
because
she doesn't say a word. More important to A Doll's House,
however,
is Madame de Stael's use of the figure of the doll in Corinne, or
Italy,
where it certainly has affinities to A DolFs House. During a
long stay
in England, Corinne is forced to remain silent in society just
because
she is a woman, and complains that she could just as well have
been a "une poupee legerement perfectionnee par la mecanique
[a doll
slightly perfected by mechanics].'"^ When Corinne does speak
(or dance
or sing), the situation does not improve, for then she is accused
of being
theatrical.'^
Whether Corinne is forcibly silenced or accused of being
theatrical,
she is reduced to her body. In the first case she is entombed in
it, in the
second, it is turned into a theatrical spectacle. Either way, she is

29. not
listened to, her words are not heard, and her humanity - what
the
Romantics would have called her soul - remains
unacknowledged.
Corinne, then, is caught in a sexist dilemma in which she is
either
theatricalized or forcibly silenced, and, in both cases, she is
reduced
to a thing. A woman in such a position will struggle to signify
her
existence, her humanity. This is true for Corinne, but it is true
for
Nora, too, for she too has to try to assert her existence by
finding
a voice, by launching into what Cavell elsewhere calls her
"cogito
performance," an aria-like expression of her soul intended to
proclaim,
declaim, declare her existence (Contesting Tears, "Opera").^°
Losing
her voice, Corinne dies misunderstood and unacknowledged.^'
Ibsen's
Nora, however, finds her voice and claims her own humanity: "I
believe
that I too am first and foremost a human being, just as much as
you" (359)-
268 TORIL MOI
"THE HUMAN BODY IS THE BEST PICTURE OF THE
HUMAN SOUL":
NORA'S TARANTELLA

30. The tarantella scene in Act Two is something like Nora's bodily
"cogito
performance": a performance in which she demonstrates her
humanity
(as opposed to her "dollness") not through song but through
dance. The
tarantella scene is melodramatic in all the usual meanings of the
word.
It provides music and dance, and it is staged in order to
postpone
the discovery of a secret, a discovery that Nora believes will
lead to her
death. Nora, moreover, dances her tarantella motivated by fear
and
anxiety and gives a performance that is explicitly said to be
violent or
vehement [voldsom] (334).
The exaggerated expressivity of melodrama, Cavell writes, can
be
understood as a reaction to the fear of the "extreme states of
voicelessness" that can overcome us once we start wondering
whether
we can ever manage to make others recognize and acknowledge
our
humanity {Contesting 43). If this is right, then the
melodramatic
obsession with states of terror, of suffocation, of forced
expression,
expresses fear of human isolation, of being reduced to a thing,
of death.
Such states are at once bodily and quintessentially theatrical,
both
in the sense that they belong to the traditional repertoire of the
stage, and

31. in the sense that anyone exhibiting them will be suspected of
overacting,
of expressing more than they feel.
This is precisely the reaction that many actresses and directors
have
had to Nora's tarantella. They have wished to tone down the
sheer
theatricality of the scene, in the name of realism and in an
effort to
preserve Nora's dignity. Eleanora Duse was famous for hardly
dancing
the tarantella at all. Even Elizabeth Robins, the actress who
pioneered
many of Ibsen's plays in Britain, thought the tarantella was "too
stagey,"
Alisa Solomon writes (55).^^ But theatre and theatricality are
central
concerns of A DolPs House, and, if we are to understand Nora's
tarantella, we need to see that it is, among other things, an
invitation
to reflect on the nature of theatre. As Solomon brilliantly puts
it,
the tarantella is "not a concession to the old effect-hunting,
[but] an
appropriation of it" (55).
Given all the melodramatic elements of the tarantella, it would
be
easy to conclude that it simply shows Nora theatricalizing her
own body,
that she deliberately turns herself into a spectacle in order to
divert
Helmer's attention from the mailbox, thus acquiescing in her
own
status as a doll. Although this is surely Nora's main motivation

32. for
insisting on rehearsing her tarantella right away, the scene itself
exceeds
such a limited reading. Feverish with fear, Nora dances
extremely fast
and violently. This could also be a part of her act, for she wants
to
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 269
persuade Helmer that he needs to instruct her instead of reading
his mail.
But the stage directions tell us more: "Rank sits down at the
piano
and plays, Nora dances with increasing wildness, Helmer stands
over by
the stove regularly addressing instructions to her during the
dance;
she does not appear to hear him; her hair comes loose and falls
over her
shoulders, she does not notice, but continues to dance, Mrs.
Linde enters"
(334), We could, of course, link Nora's dancing to Freud's
hysteria, to
the woman's body signifying the distress her voice cannot
speak,̂ ^
But that would be to deprive Nora of agency by turning her into
a
medical case. It may be better simply to say that Nora's
tarantella
is a graphic representation of a woman's struggle to make her
existence
heard, to make it count (this is what I assume Cavell means by
"cogito

33. performance").
During the performance Nora's hair comes uhdone, Ibsen, I am
sure,
here dehberately invokes the theatrical convention known as
"back hair,"
which in nineteenth-century melodrama handbooks signifies the
"onset
of madness" (see Meisel 8), As her hair comes down, Nora no
longer
listens to Helmer's instructions. Now she dances as if in a
trance, as in the
grip of madness, as if she genuinely is the body Helmer reduces
her to.
But if Nora is her body and nothing else, then the tarantella
would be
pornographic, a mere display of a sexualized body. What
happens to our
understanding of the tarantella if, instead of agreeing with
Helmer,
we invoke Wittgenstein and say that, in this moment, Nora's
body is the
best picture of her soul?
The first question is what does this mean? What makes
Wittgenstein's
"[t]he human body is the best picture of the human soul"
pertinent
to A DolFs House"} The sentence appears in section four of the
second half of Philosophical Investigations, a section that
begins in
this way:
"I believe that he is suffering," - Do I also believe that he isn't
an automaton?
It would go against the grain to use the word in both

34. connexions,
(Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain
that he is not an
automaton? Nonsense!) (152)
Here the question of the suffering of others is linked to the
picture of
the automaton (I take this to be a deliberate invocation of
Descartes'
scepticism). At stake, then, is the question of the difference
between dolls
(automata) and human beings. This is reinforced by the next few
lines:
"[s]uppose I say of a friend: 'He isn't an automaton,' - What
information
is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a
human
being who meets him in ordinary circumstances?" (152), If I
imagine a
situation in which I would say, "He isn't an automaton" to a
friend (A)
270 TORIL MOI
about another friend (B), I find that I would say it if I were
trying to
tell A to stop treating B as she has been doing, perhaps because
I think that A has been cruel to B, that she has behaved as if she
did
not think that B, too, had feelings. That is what the "soul"
means in these
passages: the idea of an inner life, of (unexpressed) pain and
suffering
(but - I hope - joy, too).

35. To grasp what Wittgenstein is getting at here, it is necessary to
understand the sceptical picture of the relationship between
body and
soul. For one kind of sceptic - let us call her the Romantic kind
- the
body hides the soul. Because it is (literally) the incarnation of
human
finitude (separation and death), the Romantic thinks of the body
as an
obstacle, as that which prevents us from knowing other human
beings.
True human commutiication, the Romantic believes, must
overcome
finitude; thus we get fantasies of souls commingling, of perfect
communication without words, and of twin souls destined for
each
other from all eternity.
Another kind of sceptic - let us call her the postmodern kind -
may
impatiently reject all talk of souls as a merely metaphysical
constructs;
she prefers to picture the body as a surface, an object, or even
as
materiality as such. Considered as pure materiality, the body is
neither
the expression nor the embodiment of an interiority. To think of
the body
as a surface is to theatricalize it: whatever that body does or
says will be
perceived as performance, not expression. To think of it as a
thing or
as pure materiality is to de-soul it, to render it inhuman. While
the Romantic will deny finitude by rising to high idealist
heaven, the

36. postmodern sceptic will deny human interiority ("the subject,"
"agency,"
"freedotn") altogether.̂ '*
Wittgenstein's "the human body is the best picture of the human
soul"
is meant as an alternative to such sceptical positions. It is meant
to
remind us that scepticism ends up wanting either to escape the
body or
to obliterate the soul. The difference between a "doll perfected
by
mechanics" and a human being is that the former is a machine,
while the
second has an inner life.
Dancing the tarantella, Nora's body expresses the state of her
soul.
Nothing could be more authentic. At the same time, however,
her body
is theatricalized, by herself (her performance is her own
strategy) and,
even more so, perhaps, by the men watching her. For the
tarantella
scene does not simply show Nora dancing; it also stages two
different
ways of looking at her dance. First, there are the two men. They
watch her, I surmise, pretty much in a theatricalized, quasi-
pornographic
mode. For them, Nora's dance is a display of her body; their
gaze
desouls her and turns her into a "mechanical doll." But as Nora
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 271

37. dances, her friend Mrs. Linde, who is privy to Nora's secret,
also
enters the room:
MRS. LINDE {stands tongue tied by the door). Ah -!
NORA {still dancing). Watch the fun [lojer], Kristine.
HELMER. But dearest, best Nora, you are dancing as if your
life were at stake.
NORA. But it is!
HELMER. Rank, stop it. This is pure madness. Stop it, I say.
{Rank stops playing
and Nora suddenly stops). (334)
Nora cries out to Mrs. Linde that she should watch her. In
Norwegian,
the phrase is "Her ser du lojer, Kristine," which literally
translates as
"Here you see fun, Kristine." In a nineteenth-century Danish
dictionary,
lojer is defined as "something that is fun, that entertains and
provokes
laughter, something said or done in jest, without serious
intentions."
A traditional Norwegian dictionary defines it as "pranks; jest;
entertain-
ment; fun; noisy commotion."^^ The word describes what
Helmer and
Rank think they are seeing. But Nora tells Mrs. Linde to watch,
look at,
see, the fun going on: what Kristine is to see, is not just Nora,
but the
relationship between Nora's performance and the men's gaze.
Mrs. Linde sees Nora's pain; she also sees that the men do not.
They

38. see only Nora's wild body, which they theatricalize in the very
moment
in which it is most genuinely expressive. The point is stressed
by Ibsen,
for after the tarantella. Dr. Rank asks Helmer, privately, "There
wouldn't be anything - anything like that on the way?" which I
take as
a reference to pregnancy, that is, an attempt to reduce her dance
to
a mere effect of hormonal changes (335). Helmer replies that
it's just
"this childish anxiety I told you about" (335). Refusing to
consider
Nora's bodily self-expression as an expression of her soul (her
will,
intentions, problems), both men reduce it to a matter of
hormones or
the unfounded worries of a child. In either case, Nora is seen as
someone who is not responsible for her actions. (Paradoxically,
perhaps,
the only man in this play who treats Nora as a thinking human
being
is Krogstad, the man who teaches her that they are equal in the
eyes
of the law.)
This scene, then, invites the audience to see Nora both as she is
seen by
Helmer and Dr. Rank and as she is seen by Mrs. Linde. While
the former
theatricalize her, the latter sees her as a soul in pain. But the
scene does
not tell us to choose between these perspectives. If we try, we
find that
either option entails a loss. Do we prefer a theatre of
authenticity and

39. sincerity? Do we believe that realism is such a theatre? Then we
may be
forgetting that even the most intense expressions of the body
provide
272 TORIL MOI
no certain way of telling authenticity from theatricahty, truth
from
performance. Do we prefer a theatrical theatre, self-consciously
perform-
ing and performative? If so, we may make ourselves deaf to the
pain and
distress of others by theatricalizing it. If I were asked whether I
would call
Nora's tarantella theatrical or absorbed, I would not quite know
what
to say. Both? Neither the one nor the other? Here Ibsen moves
beyond
the historical frame established by Diderot,^^
Ibsen's double perspective, his awareness of the impossibihty of
either choosing or not choosing between theatricality and
authenticity,
stands at the centre of his modernism. It is the reason why his
theatre is so
extraordinarily rich in depth and perspective. In Nora's
tarantella, then,
Ibsen's modernism is fully realized. Here Ibsen asks us to
consider that
even the most theatrical performance may at the very same time
be
a genuine expression of the human soul, (But it may not: there
is no way

40. of knowing this in advance,)
But there is more. The striking theatricality of the tarantella —
the fact
that it is such an obvious theatrical show-stopper - reminds us
that we
are in a theatre, Ibsen's modernism is based on the sense that we
need
theatre - I mean the actual art form - to reveal to us the games
of
concealment and theatricalization in which we inevitably
engage in
everyday life, I do not base this claim only on Nora's dancing.
By placing
two kinds of spectator on stage during the tarantella, Ibsen tells
us that
only the audience is capable of seeing the whole picture, seeing
both the
temptation to theatricalize others and the possibility of
understanding
and acknowledging Nora's suffering. Admittedly, the audience's
per-
spective is closer to that of Mrs, Linde than to that of the two
men,
for Mrs, Linde knows more than the men do about Nora's deal
with
Krogstad, The audience, however, knows even more than Mrs,
Linde
about what is at stake for Nora, for it has just heard that she is
determined to commit suicide when Helmer learns the truth:
KROGSTAD, Perhaps you intend to -
NORA, I have the courage now,
KROGSTAD, Oh, you don't frighten me, A fine, spoiled lady
like you?
NORA, You'll see; you'll see,

41. KROGSTAD, Under the ice perhaps? Down in the cold, coal-
black water? And
then float up in the spring, ugly, unrecognizable, with all your
hair fallen out -
NORA, You don't frighten me, (329)
This masterly exchange conveys to the audience what picture
Nora
has in her head as she dances the tarantella, (Both declare that
they
are not frightened by the other's words, but surely they are,)
The vision
of Nora's ugly dead body conveys all the death and pain that
Helmer's
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 273
sense of beauty tries to disavow, and explains why Nora can't
help
answering, "But it is!" when Helmer says that she is dancing as
if her life
were at stake.
In A DolFs House, Nora has seven very brief soliloquies. These
have
often been read as indicators of Ibsen's still clumsy stagecraft,
as
unwitting or unwilhng breaks in the realist illusion.^'' But
already in 1869,
in The League of Youth, as Ibsen himself proudly pointed out in
a letter
to Georg Brandes, he managed to write a whole play without a
single
monologue or aside (see 16:249). Had he wanted to, he could

42. have
avoided soliloquies in A Doll's House as well. Nora's moments
alone
onstage are there to show us what Nora is like when she is not
under
the gaze of the man for whom she constantly performs, but they
are also
there to remind us that we are in a theatre.
Nora's fear and horror only appear when she is alone onstage.^^
At one point in Act Two, Helmer dismisses Nora's fears of
Krogstad's
revenge as "empty fantasies" (319) and claims that he is "man
enough
to take it all on myself (318). Left alone, Nora is "wild with
fear,"
whispering almost incoherently to herself: "He would be
capable
of doing it. He will do it. He'll do it, in spite of everything in
the
world . . . No, never ever this! Anything but this! Rescue -! A
way out - "
(319). These moments are almost Gothic. This is particularly
true for
the last one:
NORA (wild-eyed, gropes about, grabs Helmer's domino, wraps
it around herself:
speaks in a fast, hoarse and staccato whisper). Never see him
again. Never.
Never. Never. (Throws the shawl over her head). Never see the
children again
either. Not them either. Never; never - Oh, the icy black water.
Oh, this
bottomless - this - Oh, if only it were over - He has it now; he is
reading it now.

43. Oh no, no; not yet. Torvald, goodbye to you and the children -
(She is about to
rush out through the living-room: in that moment Helmer flings
open his door and
stands there with an open letter in his hand) (351)
In his 1879 review of the book, Erik Vullum wrote that this
passage is
"too beautiful not to be copied," and quoted it in full. Lear-like,
Nora
says "never" seven times, using the word "bottomless" to
describe the
black, icy water she is going to drown herself in; a few lines
later, in
a deliberate theatrical irony, Helmer uses the very same word to
describe
the "hideousness" of her crime (352). The moment when Helmer
stands there with the letter in his hand is a tableau, a moment of
high
melodrama that could have been a typical nineteenth-century
genre
painting.
By having Nora behave most authentically in what, from a
formal
point of view, are her most theatrical scenes, Ibsen signals,
again, the
TORIL MOI
power of theatre to convey the plight of a human being. Sitting
in the
audience we are given a precious opportunity. If we will not
acknowledge

44. Nora's humanity, then perhaps nobody will.
WIFE, DAUGHTER, MOTHER: HEGEL REBUFFED
Nora's claim that she is "first and foremost a human being"
stands
as an alternative to two refusals. We have already seen that she
refuses to be a doll. But she also refuses to define herself as a
wife
and mother:
HELMER. It's outrageous. That you can betray your most sacred
duties in this
way.
NORA. What do you count as my most sacred duties?
HELMER. And I have to tell you! Are they not the duties to
your husband and
your children?
NORA. I have other equally sacred duties.
HELMER. No, you don't. What "duties" might you have in
mind?
NORA. My duties to myself.
HELMER. You are first and foremost a wife and a mother.
NORA. I no longer believe that. I believe that I am first and
foremost a human
being, just as much as you - or, at least,' that I'll try to become
one. (359)
In Cities of Words, Cavell gives a bravura reading of this
passage, in
which he discusses the moral grounds that Nora can claim for
the notion
that she has duties towards herself: "Where do these distinctions
come

45. from in her? These are the opening moments of this woman's
claiming her
right to exist, her standing in a moral world, which seems to
take the form
of having at the same time to repudiate that world." (260). On
Cavell's
reading, Nora is heading for exile (thus imitating Corinne's
withdrawal
from the world). It is an open question whether she will feel
able to
return to society, to her marriage, to Torvald, who after all
loves her as
well as he can. Cavell rightly notes that the "final scene is only
harrowing
if his live love for her is not denied. I have never seen it played
so" (258).
Neither have I.
Most critics have not taken this passage as seriously as Cavell
does.
Joan Templeton has shown that many scholars insist that if Nora
wants
to be a human being, then she cannot remain a woman (see 110-
45).
Their motivation appears to be the thought that, if A DoWs
House is
taken to be about women and therefore, inevitably, about
feminism,
then it would follow that it is not a truly universal, that is to
say,
truly great work of art. In support of this idea, such critics
usually
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 275

46. invoke Ibsen's 1898 speech opposing the cause of women to the
cause
of human beings.
It strikes me as an over-reading, to say the least, to try to turn
Ibsen's
refusal to reduce his writing to social philosophy into evidence
that
Ibsen never thought of Nora as a woman or into grounds for
denying
that Nora's troubles have to do with her situation as a woman in
modernity. Such claims are fatally flawed, for they assume that
a woman
(but not a man) has to choose between considering herself a
woman
and considering herself a human being. This is a traditional
sexist trap,
and feminists should not make the mistake of entering into its
faulty
premise, for example, by arguing (but can this ever be an
argument!) that
Nora is a woman and therefore not universal. Such critics refuse
to admit
that a woman can represent the universal (the human) just as
much or
just as well as a man. They are prisoners of a picture of sex or
gender in
which the woman, the female, the feminine is always the
particular,
always the relative, never the general, never the norm. That
Ibsen himself
never once opposes Nora's humanity to her femininity is
evidence of his
political radicalism as well as of his greatness as a writer,̂ ^

47. Nora, then, refuses to define herself as a wife and mother. This
refusal
comes just after she has asserted that she has duties towards
herself and
just before she says that she is first and foremost a human
being, thus
aligning the meaning of "human being" with "individual" and
opposing
it to "wife and mother," To me, this irresistibly brings to mind
Hegel's
conservative theory of women's role in the family and marriage.
To explain why, I need first to look at a key passage in the first
act,
which establishes Nora's own unquestioned commitment to the
tradi-
tional understanding of women's place in the world. This is the
exchange
when Krogstad confronts Nora with her forgery and explains to
her that
she has committed a crime:
KROGSTAD, But didn't it occur to you that this was a fraud
against me?
NORA, I couldn't take that into consideration, I didn't care at
all about you,
I couldn't stand you for all the cold-hearted difficulties you
made, although you
knew how dangerous the situation was for my husband,
KROGSTAD, Mrs, Helmer, you obviously have no clear notion
of what you really
are guilty of. But I can tell you that what I once did, which
destroyed my whole
status in society, was neither anything more nor anything worse,
NORA, You? Do you want me to believe that you ever did
something brave to
save your wife's life?

48. KROGSTAD, The laws don't ask about motives,
NORA, Then they must be very bad laws,
KROGSTAD, Bad or not, - if I present this paper in court, you
will be sentenced
according to those laws.
276 TORIL MOI
NORA. I really don't believe that. Has not a daughter the right
to spare her old,
dying father from anxiety and worry? Has not a wife the right to
save her
husband's life? I don't know the laws very well, but I am sure
that somewhere in
them it must say that such things are permitted. And you don't
know about
that, although you are a lawyer? You must be a bad legal
scholar,
Mr. Krogstad. (303)
Krogstad asserts that there is no difference between what he
once did,
and what Nora did; and that the law and the community will
treat them
both as criminals. To Nora, this is insulting: she acted as a good
wife and
daughter should, for the benefit of her family. Left alone
onstage after
Krogstad's departure, she says "But? No, but it's impossible! I
did it
for love" (304). To Nora, then, her forgery was noble and
selfiess, an
example of the highest form of ethics she knows.

49. What makes the conversation between Krogstad and Nora so
Hegelian is the conflict between the law of the community
invoked
by Krogstad and Nora's sense of her ethical obligations as a
wife and
daughter, rather than as an individual. According to Hegel, the
family is
not a collection of individuals but a kind of organic unit: "one
is present
in it not as an independent person, but as a member," he writes
in
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (§158). Within the family,
feeling
is the dominant principle. For Hegel, words like wife, daughter,
sister,
mother (and husband, son, brother, father) are, as it were,
generic
terms. They refer not to this or that individual person, but to a
role or
a function. Any woman can be Mrs. Torvald Helmer, but only
Nora
is Nora.
This unit of generic members (father, mother, sister, brother,
son,
daughter) is headed by the father, the family's only connection
to the
state. Through his interaction with other men outside the family,
the man
gains concrete individuality: "Man therefore has his actual
substantial
hfe in the state, in learning, etc., and otherwise in work and
struggle with
the external world and with himself, so that it is only through
his division
that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity with himself,"

50. Hegel writes
(§166). Men become citizens and participate in public life;
women remain
locked up inside the family unit.
For Hegel, women never really become self-conscious, concrete
individuals (that is only possible if a person enters into a
struggle with
others through work and confiict outside the family). Enclosed
in "family
piety," women neither have nor care about having access to the
universal
(the state, the law) (§166). In family piety we find the "law of
woman,"
Hegel writes; this law is "emotive and subjective," whereas the
law of men
is the "public law, the law of the state" (§166). The reference to
"piety"
reminds Hegel of Antigone, whom he extols in The
Phenomenology
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 277
of Spirit as an example of the highest kind of ethical behaviour
that
a woman can ever reach. (The parallels between Nora and
Antigone have
often been explored.)^"
Women's exclusion from the universal has two consequences.
First, Hegel thinks that women are not really capable of
education.
(Apparently, he always refused to let women attend his
lectures.)

51. Nor can they ever be artists and intellectuals, for their work
requires
understanding of the ideal, that is to say, of the concept, which
in its
very nature is universal. Their capricious, contingent, emotional
defence
of their family interests also makes them entirely unfit to
govern:
Women may well be educated, but they are not made for the
higher sciences,
for philosophy and certain artistic productions which require a
universal
element. Women may have insights, taste, and delicacy, but
they do not
possess the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the
difference
between animal and plant; the animal is closer in character to
man, the
plant to woman, for the latter is a more peaceful [process of]
unfolding
whose principle is the more indeterminate unity of feeling.
When women
are in charge of government, the state is in danger, for their
actions are
based not on the demands of universality but on contingent
inclination and
opinion. (§166)
Second, Hegel thinks that because women's position in the
family makes
them incapable of relating to the universal, they will always be
unreliable
and disloyal citizens of the state, an eternal fifth column of the
community. The most famous formulation of this idea comes
from The

52. Phenomenology of Spirit:
Womankind - the everlasting irony [in the life] of the
community - changes by
intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end,
transforms its
universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and
perverts the
universal property of the state into a possession and ornament
for the Family.
Woman in this way turns to ridicule the earnest wisdom of
mature age which,
indifferent to purely private pleasures and enjoyments, as well
as to playing an
active part, only thinks of and cares for the universal. (§475)
In her conversation with Krogstad, Nora is the perfect
incarnation of the
Hegelian woman. Flighty, irresponsible, caring only for her
family's
interests, she has no relationship to the law (the universal). At
the end
of the play, however, all this has changed. Nora has undergone
a transformation. She began by being a Hegelian mother and
daughter;
she ends by discovering that she too has to become an
individual,
and that this can be done only if she relates to the society she
lives in
278 TORIL MOI
directly and not indirectly through her husband: "I can't be
satisfied

53. anymore with what most people say and what's written in the
books,
I must think about them for myself and get clear about them"
(360), Although the law of her day made it impossible for a
woman
who left her home to keep her children, this is not why Nora
leaves them. She makes a point of saying that she chooses to
leave her
children, precisely because she is not yet enough of an
independent
individual to educate them: "The way I am now, I can't be
anything
for them" (363), '̂
What Ibsen's Nora wants that Hegelian theory denies her is
expressed
in her desire for an education. Education is the prerequisite for
access
to the universal - to participation in art, learning, and politics.
As long as
marriage and motherhood are incompatible with women's
existence as
individuals and citizens, Nora will have none of them. It
follows that,
after A Doll's House, marriage must be transformed so as to be
able
to accommodate two free and equal individuals.
Freedom and equality, however, are not enough: Nora leaves
above
all because she no longer loves Helmer, Picking up the thread
from Pillars
of Society, A DolFs House insists that to love a woman, it is
necessary
to see her as the-individual she is, not just as wife and mother,
or as

54. daughter and wife:
NORA, That's just it. You've never understood me - A great
wrong has been
done to me, Torvald, First by Papa, and then by you,
HELMER, What! By us two - the two people who have loved
you more than
anyone else?
NORA (shakes her head). You never loved me. You just thought
it was fun to be
in love with me, (357)
Nora, then, demands nothing short of a revolutionary
reconsideration
of the very meaning of love.
When Helmer asks what it would take for her to return to him,
Nora
answers that the det vidunderligste (the most wonderful thing;
sometimes
(mis)translated as the "miracle of miracles"), would have-to
happen:
"That our life together could become a marriage" (364), I take
the
difference between samliv [life together] (what they have had)
and
cegteskab [marriage] (which Nora now thinks of as an
impossible dream)
to be love. What will count as love between a man and a woman
in
a world where women too demand to be acknowledged as
individuals?
What will it take for two modern individuals to build a
relationship
(whether we call it marriage or, simply, a life together) based
on freedom,

55. equality, and love? These are questions Ibsen will return to.
These are
questions we all return to.
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 279
NOTES
1 This article is a slightly edited version of chapter seven of my
forthcoming book
Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater,
Philosophy. The book
contains detailed discussion and analysis of the criteria for
Ibsen's modernism
summarized here (see particularly chapter six, on Emperor and
Galilean). The
chapter on A DoWs House is the first of the four chapters that
make up the third
and last section of the book, a section that is entitled "Love in
an Age of
Skepticism." The subsequent chapters analyse, respectively. The
Wild Duck,
Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea.
2 Although I will show that A DoWs House contains most of the
features of
Ibsen's modernism as I define them in Henrik Ibsen and the
Birth of Modernism,
I will try not to dwell on the obvious. It can hardly be
necessary, for example,
to show that A DolFs House is intended to produce an illusion
of reality. The
extensive references to acting have also been much analysed,
both in relation to

56. Nora's performance of femininity and in relation to their
implications for a
reassessment of Ibsen's realism. I recommend Solomon's
excellent chapter on A
DoWs House, which stresses Ibsen's self-conscious use of
theatre in the play,
and Aslaksen's analysis of Ibsen's use of melodramatic elements
in A DoWs
House. The best general presentation and analysis of the play is
Durbach,
Ibsen's Myth.
3 Shatzky and Dumont begin by invoking Bernard Shaw's claim
that "Ibsen's
real enemy was the idealist" (qtd. in 73), but they also follow
Shaw in reducing
idealism to a moral and political position.
4 In chapter three of Moi, Henrik Ibsen, I show that the concept
of idealist
aesthetics has been largely forgotten by literary historians and
literary theorists
today and that the relationship between realism and modernism
changes
radically if we discuss them against the background of idealist
aesthetics. I also
show that idealism lived on in various ways until the beginning
of the twentieth
century.
5 I discuss idealist responses to Love's Comedy and Emperor
and Galilean in Moi,
Henrik Ibsen.
6 Translations are mine. To save space, I have not included the
Norwegian

57. original texts. (They can be consulted in Ibsens modernisme.)
7 Socialists and feminists have always praised A DoWs House
as a breakthrough
for women's rights. For a general overview of Ibsen and
feminism, in which
A Doll's House figures centrally, I have found Finney to be very
useful.
Templeton's review of an important part of the reception of A
DoWs House is
also informative reading.
8 Two words in this quotation often recur in idealist reviews:
uskjont and pinlig.
Uskjent literally means "unbeautiful." The word also turns up in
A DoWs
House, usually in relation to Torvald Helmer. It is generally
translated as
"ugly," although the most common word for "ugly" today is
stygt.
TORIL MOI
(In Ibsen's time, stygt often had a clear moral meaning.) Pinlig
means
embarrassing, painful, distressing; the word is derived from
pine [pain,
torture].
9 The same views are expressed in an anonymous review of
Ibsen's Et dukkehjem
(Review).
10 "He was, as Helmer, not sufficiently refined" (Bang, '"Et

58. dukkehjem").
The text is also available in a modern critical edition (see Bang,
Realisme).
11 Bang also calls Nora and Ibsen himself idealists, but in those
contexts,
the word is not used primarily in an aesthetic sense ("fr
dukkehjem").
12 Postmodern readers might find this a little too simplistic.
(Can we just stop
performing our masquerades?) As I will show, Ibsen's play is
anything but
simplistic on these matters. But right here, I am not trying to
say anything
general and theoretical about the "performance of gender" in
modernity.
Rather, I am trying to say something about the depressing
consequences of
Nora's and Torvald's lack of insight into their own motivations
and behaviour
and, particularly, to draw attention to the fact that it is because
they do not
understand themselves that they do not understand others either.
13 Americans sometimes ask me whether Et dukkehjem should
be translated as
A Doll House or A DoWs House. As far as I know, both terms
designate the
same thing: a small toy house for children to play with, or a
small model house
for the display of miniature dolls and furniture. If this is right,
the only
difference between them is that the former is American and the
latter British.
In Norwegian, the usual word for a doll['s] house is en

59. dukkestue or et
dukkehus. {Hjem means "home," not "house.") Et dukkehjem is
thus far more
unusual than either the British or the American translation.
What did Ibsen
mean by the title? To indicate that Nora and Helmer were
playing house?
To signal that Nora's and Helmer's home life is made for display
only
(this would be the theme of theatricality)? That both of them are
as
irresponsible as dolls? As unaware of the real issues of human
life as dolls?
Or simply that both Helmer and Nora's father have treated Nora
as a doll?
Durbach's A Doll's House also contains an interesting
discussion of the
problems involved in translating the play into English; see
particularly 27-39.
14 "Play-house" is a translation of legestue, which means a
small house for
children to play in. It does not mean play-pen, as many
translators suggest.
15 I am speaking of the doll in the philosophical imagination. It
doesn't matter to
my argument whether or not mechanical dolls or automata
actually existed.
The link between the figure of the artificial human body and
scepticism was
first explored in Cavell, Claim esp. 400-18.
16 The story of "The Sandman" was also told in a popular 1851
French play by
Jules Barbier and Michel Carre called Les Contes fantastiques

60. d'Hoffmann.
Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffman did not open until
1881, two years
after A DoWs House.
Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House 281
17 By turning The Stepford Wives into a light-hearted comedy,
Frank Oz's 2004
remake gutted the doll motif of its potential horror.
18 For the French text, see Stael, Corinne, ou L'ltalie 369. The
published English
translation is slightly different: "a delicately improved
mechanical doll"
(Corinne, or Italy 249).
19 Explaining her hostility to Corinne, Lady Edgermond says to
Oswald:
"She needs a theatre where she can display all those gifts you
prize so highly
and which make life so difficult" (Corinne, or Italy 313).
20 In his analysis of Gaslight, Cavell writes that Ingrid
Bergman's
character launches into "her aria of revenge" at the end of the
film
(Contesting Tears 59-60). See also Cavell's discussion of the
unknown
woman's cogito performances as singing, in "Opera."
21 I analyse Corinne's death in Moi, "Woman's Desire."
22 Solomon also describes Duse's low-key performance of the
tarantella.

61. 23 See the discussion of "realism's hysteria" in Diamond. A
similar claim is made
in Finney 98-99.
24 Langas's brilliant analysis of A DoWs House is deeply
attuned to the
ambiguities of the tarantella. We agree on many details in the
analysis of the
tarantella. But in the end, Langas reads the play as a "play about
the feminine
masquerade" (66) and turns Nora into a postmodern
performative heroine:
"Nora is so good at performing 'woman' that we do not see that
she is
performing. In her performance she cites established ways of
being a woman
and, at the same time, confirms those ways. By doing this, she
confirms and
strengthens the idea of femininity, and at the same time her
reiteration
legitimates this way of being" (76). Her postmodern perspective
makes it
impossible for Langas to take Nora's claim that she is first and
foremost
a human being quite seriously: "It is possible that she thinks she
will find
this "human being" in her new life, but given the premises
established by
the play, her only option will in my view be to explore and
shape new parts
to play" (67). In my view, Langas's ahistorical reading fails to
grasp the
revolutionary aspects of this play.

62. 25 I am grateful to Vigdis Ystad for providing these definitions
from
Riksmdlsordboken.
26 This is a reference to Denis Diderot's aesthetics and to
Michael Fried's
discussion of it in his epochal book Absorption and
Theatricality. The
importance for Ibsen's work of the nineteenth-century aesthetic
tradition
drawing on Diderot and G.E. Lessing is discussed in chapter
four of Moi,
Henrik Ibsen.
27 Solomon writes that "if students learn anything about Ibsen,
it's that his plays
follow a clear progressive trajectory from overwrought verse
dramas to
realistic paragons, the prose plays themselves evolving like an
ever more fit
species, shedding soliloquies, asides, and all the integuments of
the well-made
282 TORIL MOI
play as they creep, then crouch, then culminate in the upright
masterpiece,
Hedda Gabler" (48).
28 Northam lists all of Nora's monologues and considers that
they "lack the
illustrative power of comparable passages in poetic drama." As
they stand,
he claims, they provide but a "small opportunity of entering into

63. the souls
of [Ibsen's] characters" (16). I truly disagree.
29 I discuss the way in which women (but not men) are invited
to "choose"
between their gender and their humanity in Moi, "I Am a
Woman"; see
particularly 190-207.
30 For a good account of various comparisons between Nora
and Antigone,
see Durbach, "Nora as Antigone."
31 In her excellent study of Ibsen's revisions of the manuscript
of A DoWs House,
Saari shows that Ibsen began by thinking of Nora as "a modern-
day
Antigone, one in whom the sense of duty was grounded in a
specifically
feminine conscience" and that he was thinking in terms of
writing a tragedy
about a "feminine soul destroyed by a masculine world" (41).
This, she
stresses, was not the play he actually wrote. To me, this shows
that although
Ibsen may have begun by thinking in Hegelian terms, he ended
up breaking
with them.
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70. 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
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462329
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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

72. 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

73. 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

74. 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

75. 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
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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.

76. (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.

77. 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-

78. 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

79. "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,

80. 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-
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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

81. 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

82. 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-

83. 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

84. 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

85. 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-
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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

86. 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

87. 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

88. 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,

89. 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
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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-

90. 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

91. 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

92. 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:

93. 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

94. how frivolous was it to save Torvald's life? Nora's
critics conveniently forget the bottom line of Nora's
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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-

95. 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 of her husband: "Yes, you
see," Nora blithely tosses off, as she and Rank
speak of their ease together, "There are some peo-
ple that one loves most and other people that one
would almost prefer being with" (166; "Ja, ser De,
der er jo noen mennesker som man holder mest av,
og andre mennesker som man nesten helst vil vere

96. sammen med" 95). It is Rank who will be her real
audience at the dancing of the tarantella: "you can
imagine then that I'm dancing only for you-yes,
and of course for Torvald, too-that's understood"
(164; "og da skal De forestille Dem at jeg gjor det
bare for Deres skyld,-ja, og sa naturligvis for Tor-
valds; -det forstar seg" 93). It is not surprising that
Rank provides a perfect piano accompaniment for
Nora's famous practice session and that Torvald is
perturbed: "Rank, stop! This is pure madness!"
(174; "Rank, hold opp; dette er jo den rene galskap"
99). It would not be too speculative, I think, to guess
that Rank, unlike Torvald, would not need to fan-
tasize that Nora is a virgin before making love to
her. Through the silk-stocking scene, Ibsen shows
the sexual side of the Helmer mesalliance, a side
Nora scarcely sees herself. And its ending proves,
indisputably, not her dishonesty, but her essential
honorableness. When Rank confronts her with his
moving confession of love as she is about to ask him
for the money she desperately needs, she refuses to
make use of his feelings and categorically rejects his
help: "After that? . . . You can't know anything
now" (166; "Efter dette? . . . Ingenting kan De fa
vite nu" 94).

97. The claim that Nora cannot be a feminist hero-
ine because she is flawed is an example of question
begging similar to the universalists' argument that
A Doll House is not a feminist play because femi-
nism is ipso facto an unworthy subject of art. Nora
falls short according to unnamed, "self-evident"
criteria for a feminist heroine, among which would
seem to be one, some, or all of the following: an
ever-present serious-mindedness; a calm, unexcit-
able temperament; an unshakable obedience to the
letter of the law, even if it means the death of a hus-
band; perfect sincerity and honesty; and a
thoroughgoing selflessness. For A Doll House to be
feminist, it would, apparently, have to be a kind of
fourth-wall morality play with a saintly
Everyfeminist as heroine, not this ignorant, excit-
able, confused, and desperate-in short, human-
Nora Helmer.
But while Nora is too flawed to represent women,
the argument stops short and the case is curiously
altered in the claim that she represents human be-
ings. Nora's humanity keeps her from representing
women but not, magically, from representing
people-namely men, and women to the extent that

98. what happens to them can happen to men as well-
surely as fabulous an example of critical reasoning
as we can imagine, and yet one that is found
everywhere.
This strange and illogical stance has its parallel
for nonsense in a knotty critical conundrum: if
Nora is a frivolous and superficial woman who
leaves her husband on a whim, then A Doll House
qualifies as a piece of rather shoddy boulevardisme;
if Nora is abnormal, a case study, then A Doll
House is an example of reductive laboratory
naturalism; if Nora is a self-serving egoist whose
unbridled thirst for power destroys her marriage,
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34 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
then A Doll House is melodrama, with Nora as vil-
lain and Torvald as victim, and act 3 is either an in-
comprehensible bore or the most ponderously
unsuccessful instance of dramatic irony in the his-
tory of the theater. But Nora's critics have not
claimed that A Doll House belongs to any inferior

99. subgenre. Applauding it as a fine drama, they en-
gage in side attacks on its protagonist, sniping at
Nora to discredit her arguments and ignoring the
implications of their own.
The incompleteness of this attack, while never ac-
knowledged, is easily explained. To destroy Nora's
identity as wife and woman her critics would have
to "deconstruct" the play; in the words of Jonathan
Culler's useful definition, they would have to show
how the text "undermines the philosophy it asserts,
or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies"
(86). They would have to examine what Nora says
in act 3 about her husband, her marriage, and her
life and demonstrate that her unequivocal state-
ments are contested by the text. Since the text in
question is a play, deconstructing Nora would mean
arguing the significance-the interest, worth, and
importance-of the part of the dialogue Ibsen gives
Nora's foil, that is, her husband. It is not a matter

100. of absolving Torvald of villainy, as some of his
defenders seem to think it is; Ibsen was not in-
terested in the conflict of melodrama, and in any
case poor Torvald is obviously not "evil." It is a
matter of showing that his assertions seriously call
into question, delegitimize, the statements of his
wife. Not surprisingly, no one has yet risen to this
challenge, for while Torvald Helmer has had his
sympathizers, as we have seen, none of them has
suggested that Ibsen was of Torvald's party without
knowing it or that Torvald could be Ibsen's, or any-
one else's, raisonneur in any modestly enlightened
universe of the Western world. It would be an in-
trepid critic indeed who could seriously uphold the
position of a man who says to his wife, "Your
father's official career was hardly above reproach.
But mine is" (160; "Din far var ingen uangripelig
embedsmann. Men det er jeg" 90) or "For a man
there's something indescribably sweet and satisfy-
ing in knowing he's forgiven his wife.... [I]n a
sense, he's given her fresh into the world again, and
she's become his wife and his child as well" (190;
"Det er for en mann noe sa ubeskrivelig sott og til-

101. fredssstillende i dette 'a vite med seg selv at han har
tilgitt sin hustru. ... han har liksom satt henne
inn i verden pa ny; hun er pa en m'ate blitt bade hans
hustru og hans barn tillike" 109-10). In fact, a
charge frequently leveled against A Doll House is
that the husband seems too vain to be true, "an ego-
ist of such dimensions," in Halvdan Koht's phrase,
"that we can hardly take him seriously" (319). And
yet the accusations against Nora restate her hus-
band's; the charges range from frivolousness, made
when Torvald is annoyed at what he thinks are her
spendthrift habits ("What are those little birds
called that always fly through their fortunes?" [127;
"Hva er det de fugle kalles som alltid setter penge
over styr?" 70]), to deceitfulness, when he learns of
her secret loan to save his life (". . . a hypocrite,
a liar-worse, worse-a criminal" [187; ". . . en
hyklerske, en lognerske,-verre, verre,-en for-
bryterske!" 108]), to selfishness and thus unwoman-
liness, when he hears her decision to leave him
("Abandon your home, your husband, your chil-
dren.. . . Before all else you're a wife and mother"

102. [192-93; "Forlate ditt hjem, din mann og dine born!
. . . Du er forst og fremst hustru og mor" 111]).
Amused or angry, the husband's accusing voice is
so authoritative that in spite of Torvald's unworthi-
ness as moral spokesman, Nora's critics, in a
thoroughgoing and, one supposes, unconscious
identification, parrot his judgments and thus read
her through his eyes. Their Nora is Torvald's Nora,
a critical perspective that resembles taking Othello's
word on Desdemona.
Wishful Intention: Or, What Ibsen Is
Supposed to Have Meant
Bernick: People shouldn't always be thinking of them-
selves first, especially women. (Pillars of Society 57)
Bernick: Menneskene b0r da ikke i f0rste rekke tenke pa
seg selv, og aller minst kvinnene.
(Samfundets St0tten 32)
Anyone who claims that Ibsen thought of Nora
as a silly, hysterical, or selfish woman is either ig-
noring or misrepresenting the plain truth, present
from the earliest to the most recent biographies,
that Ibsen admired, even adored, Nora Helmer.
Among all his characters, she was the one he liked
best and found most real. While working on A Doll
House, he announced to Suzannah Ibsen, his wife,

103. "I've just seen Nora. She came right over to me and
put her hand on my shoulder." The quick-witted
Suzannah replied at once, "What was she wear-
ing?" In a perfectly serious tone, Ibsen answered,
"A simple blue woolen dress" (Koht 318).
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Joan Templeton 35
After A Doll House had made him famous, Ib-
sen was fond of explaining that his heroine's "real"
name was "Eleanora" but that she had been called
"Nora" from childhood. Bergliot Bjornson Ibsen,
the playwright's daughter-in-law, tells the story of
how she and her husband, Sigurd, on one of the last
occasions on which they saw Ibsen out of bed in the
year he died, asked permission to name their new-
born daughter "Eleanora." Ibsen was greatly
moved. "God bless you, Bergliot," he said to her
(157). He had, in fact, christened his own Nora with

104. a precious gift, for both "Nora" and "Eleanora"
were names given to the sister of Ole Schulerud, one
of the few close friends of Ibsen's life, who in the
early years of grinding poverty believed in Ibsen's
genius and tirelessly hawked his first play to book-
seller after bookseller, finally spending his small in-
heritance to pay for its publication.
Ibsen was inspired to write A Doll House by the
terrible events in the life of his protege Laura Peter-
sen Kieler, a Norwegian journalist of whom he was
extremely fond. Married to a man with a phobia
about debt, she had secretly borrowed money to fi-
nance an Italian journey necessary for her hus-
band's recovery from tuberculosis. She worked
frantically to reimburse the loan, exhausting herself
in turning out hackwork, and when her earnings
proved insufficient, in desperation she forged a
check. On discovering the crime, her husband
demanded a legal separation on the grounds that
she was an unfit mother and had her placed in an

105. asylum, where she was put in the insane ward.
Throughout the affair, Ibsen, her confidant and ad-
viser, was greatly disturbed; he brooded on the wife,
"forced to spill her heart's blood," as he wrote in
a letter to her (Kinck 507; my trans.), and on the
oblivious husband, allowing his wife to slave away
on unworthy jobs, concerned neither about her
physical welfare nor her work. Having done all for
love, Laura Kieler was treated monstrously for her
efforts by a husband obsessed with his standing in
the eyes of the world. In Ibsen's working notes for
A Doll House we find:
She has committed forgery, and is proud of it; for she has
done it out of love for her husband, to save his life. But
this husband of hers takes his standpoint, conventionally
honorable, on the side of the law, and sees the situation
with male eyes. (M. Meyer 446)
The conflict between love and law, between heart
and head, between feminine and masculine, is the
moral center of A Doll House. But Ibsen would

106. sharpen life's blurred edges to meet art's demand
for plausibility. The heroine would be a housewife,
not a writer, and the hackwork not bad novels but
copying; her antagonist, the husband, would not be
a cruel brute but a kind guardian: rather than put
her into an asylum, he would merely denounce her
as an unfit wife and mother, permitting her to re-
ceive bed and board, and then, once his reputation
was safe, would offer to forgive her and take her
back on the spot. The Helmers, in other words,
would be "normal." And this normality would
transform a sensationalfait divers into a devastat-
ing picture of the ordinary relations between wife
and husband and allow Ibsen to treat what he
called, in a letter to Edmund Gosse, "the problems
of married life" (McFarlane 454). Moreover, he
would reverse the ending: the original Nora, the ca-
reer journalist, had begged to be taken back; his

107. housewife would sadly, emphatically refuse to
stay.7
A year after A Doll House appeared, when Ib-
sen was living in Rome, a Scandinavian woman ar-
rived there, who had left her husband and small
daughter to run away with her lover. The Norwegian
exile community considered her behavior unnatu-
ral and asked Ibsen what he thought. "It is not un-
natural, only it is unusual" was Ibsen's opinion. The
woman made it a point to speak with Ibsen, but to
her surprise he treated her offhandedly. "Well, I did
the same thing your Nora did," she said, offended.
Ibsen replied quietly, "My Nora went alone"
(Zucker 182).
A favorite piece of evidence in the argument that
Ibsen was not interested in women's rights is his
aversion to John Stuart Mill (see, e.g., Chamberlain
96-98). It is popular to quote Ibsen's remark to
Georg Brandes about Mill's declaration that he

108. owed the best things in his writing to his wife, Har-
riet Taylor: "'Fancy!' [Ibsen] said smiling, 'if you
had to read Hegel or Krause with the thought that
you did not know for certain whether it was Mr. or
Mrs. Hegel, Mr. or Mrs. Krause you had before
you!"' (Brandes 77). But in fact, Brandes, one of
Ibsen's closest associates and probably the critic
who understood him best, reports this mot in a dis-
cussion of Ibsen's wholehearted support of the
women's movement. He notes that Mill's assertion
"seemed especially ridiculous to Ibsen, with his
marked individualism" (76), and explains that al-
though Ibsen had at first little sympathy for fem-
inism-perhaps, Brandes guesses, because of
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36 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
"irritation at some of the ridiculous forms the
movement assumed" -this initial response gave
way "to a sympathy all the more enthusiastic" when

109. he saw that it was "one of the great rallying points
in the battle of progress" (77).
A well-known, perhaps embarrassing fact about
Ibsen, never brought up in discussions disclaiming
his interest in women's rights, is that when he made
the banquet speech denying that he had consciously
worked for the movement, he was primarily in-
terested in young women and annoyed by the elderly
feminists who surrounded him. During the
seventieth-birthday celebrations, Ibsen constantly
exhibited his marked and, as Michael Meyer has it,
"rather pathetic longing for young girls" (773). He
had already had several romantic friendships, in-
cluding one that had caused a family scandal and
threatened to wreck his marriage. In the light of this
fully documented biographical information about
the aging playwright, is his intention in A Doll
House more likely to be revealed by what he said in
irritation at a banquet or by what he wrote twenty
years earlier in sketching out his play?

110. A woman cannot be herself in the society of today, which
is exclusively a masculine society, with laws written by
men, and with accusers and judges who judge feminine
conduct from the masculine standpoint. (Archer 4)
A Doll House is not about Everybody's struggle to
find him- or herself but, according to its author,
about Everywoman's struggle against Everyman.
A Doll House is a natural development of the
play Ibsen had just written, the unabashedly femi-
nist Pillars of Society;8 both plays reflect Ibsen's
extremely privileged feminist education, which he
shared with few other nineteenth-century male
authors and which he owed to a trio of extraordi-
nary women: Suzannah Thoresen Ibsen, his wife;
Magdalen Thoresen, his colleague at the Norwegian
National Theatre in Bergen, who was Suzannah's
stepmother and former governess; and Camilla
Wergeland Collett, Ibsen's literary colleague, valued

111. friend, and the founder of Norwegian feminism.
Magdalen Thoresen wrote novels and plays and
translated the French plays Ibsen put on as a young
stage manager at the Bergen theater. She was prob-
ably the first "New Woman" he had ever met. She
pitied the insolvent young writer, took him under
her wing, and brought him home. She had passed
her strong feminist principles on to her charge, the
outspoken and irrepressible Suzannah, who adored
her strong-minded stepmother and whose favorite
author was George Sand. The second time Ibsen
met Suzannah he asked her to marry him. Hjordis,
the fierce shield-maiden of The Vikings at Hel-
geland, the play of their engagement, and Svanhild,
the strong-willed heroine of Love's Comedy, the
play that followed, owe much to Suzannah
Thoresen Ibsen. Later, Nora's way of speaking
would remind people of Suzannah's.
The third and perhaps most important feminist
in Ibsen's life was his friend Camilla Collett, one of
the most active feminists in nineteenth-century Eu-
rope and founder of the modern Norwegian novel.
Fifteen years before Mill's Subjection of Women,

112. Collett wrote Amtmandens D0tre (The Governor's
Daughters). Faced with the choice of a masculine
nom de plume or no name at all on the title page,
Collett brought out her novel anonymously in two
parts in 1854 and 1855, but she nonetheless became
widely known as the author. Its main argument,
based on the general feminist claim that women's
feelings matter, is that women should have the right
to educate themselves and to marry whom they
please. In the world of the governor's daughters, it
is masculine success that matters. Brought up to be
ornaments and mothers, women marry suitable
men and devote their lives to their husbands' careers
and to their children. The novel, a cause celebre,
made Collett famous overnight.
Collett regularly visited the Ibsens in their years
of exile in Germany, and she and Suzannah took
every occasion to urge Ibsen to take up the feminist
cause. They had long, lively discussions in the years
preceding A Doll House, when feminism had be-
come a strong movement and the topic of the day
in Scandinavia. Collett was in Munich in 1877,
when Ibsen was hard at work on Pillars of Society,
and Ibsen's biographer Koht speculates that Ibsen

113. may have deliberately prodded her to talk about the
women's movement in order to get material for his
dialogue (313). In any case, the play undoubtedly
owes much to the conversations in the Ibsen house-
hold, as well as to the Norwegian suffragette Aasta
Hansteen, the most notorious woman in the coun-
try. Deliberately provocative, Hansteen took to the
platform wearing men's boots and carrying a whip
to protect herself against the oppressor. A popular
news item during the Ibsens' visit to Norway in
1874, Hansteen became the model for Lona Hessel,
the shocking raisonneuse of Pillars of Society.
The play opens with a striking image of woman's
place in the world: eight ladies participating in what
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Joan Templeton 37
has been, since antiquity, the most quintessentially
female activity in literature-they are "busy sew-
ing" (15)-as they listen to the town schoolmaster
read aloud from Woman as the Servant of Society.
Lona Hessel bursts in, and when the ladies ask her

114. how she can aid their "Society for the Morally Dis-
abled," she suggests, "I can air it out" (39; "Jeg vil
lufte ut" 22). Returning from America, where she
is rumored to have sung in saloons (even for
money!), lectured, and written a book, Lona is the
New Woman with a vengeance who teaches the
others the truth. Lona had loved Bernick, but she
packed her bags when he rejected her to marry for
money. Bernick turns out not to have been much of
a loss, however; he has reduced his wife, Betty, to
an obedient cipher and made a personal servant of
his sister, Martha, a paradigm of the nineteenth-
century spinster who devotes her life to a male rela-
tive. Martha's story may have had its source in The
Governor's Daughters. Like Collett's Margarethe,
Martha had once loved a young man but, too mod-
est to declare her feelings, suffered in silence. She
now lives for her brother, who is insufferable when
he speaks of her; she is a "nonentity" ("ganske
ubetydelig"), he explains, "who'll take on whatever
comes along" (57; "som man kan sette til hva der

115. forefaller" 32). It is in explaining Martha's exem-
plary function in life that Bernick speaks the line,
"People shouldn't always be thinking of themselves
first, especially women" (57; "Menneskene bor da
ikke i forste rekke tenke p'a seg selv, og aller minst
kvinnene" 32). Dina Dorf, Bernick's ward, dis-
regards this happy maxim, and though she agrees
to marry, she tells her husband-to-be, "But first I
want to work, become something the way you have.
I don't want to be a thing that's just taken along"
(98; "Men forst vil jeg arbeide, bli noe selv, saledes
some De er det. Jeg vil ikke vockre en ting som tas"
55). Dina knows beforehand what Nora learns af-
ter eight years of marriage: "I have to try to edu-
cate myself. . . I've got to do it alone" (192; "Jeg
ma se a oppdra meg selv. Det m'a jeg voere
alene om" 111).
Pillars of Society, little known and played outside
Scandinavia and Germany, is one of the most rad-
ically feminist works of nineteenth-century litera-
ture. Ibsen took the old maid, the butt of society's
ridicule, a figure of pity and contempt, and made
her a heroine. Rejected as unfit to be a wife, Lona
Hessel refuses to sacrifice herself to a surrogate
family and escapes to the New World, where she
leads an independent, authentic life. As raison-

116. neuse, she summarizes his point of view for B3ernick
and the rest: "This society of yours is a bachelors'
club. You don't see women" (117; "Jert samrfunn er
et samfunn av peppersvenn-sjele; I ser ikke kvin-
nen" 65).
It is simply not true, then, that Ibsen was not in-
terested in feminism. It is also not true that "there
is no indication that Ibsen was thinking of writing
a feminist play when he first began to work seri-
ously on A Doll House in the summer of 1879"
(Valency 150). In the spring of that year, while Ib-
sen was planning his play, a scandalous incident,
easily available in the biographies, took place that
proves not only Ibsen's interest in women's rights
but his passionate support for the movement. Ib-
sen had made two proposals to the Scandinavian
Club in Rome, where he was living: that the post of
librarian be opened to women candidates and that
women be allowed to vote in club meetings. In the
debate on the proposal, he made a long, occasion-
ally eloquent speech, part of which follows:
Is there anyone in this gathering who dares assert that our
ladies are inferior to us in culture, or intelligence, or

117. knowledge, or artistic talent? I don't think many men
would dare suggest that. Then what is it men fear? I hear
there is a tradition here that women are cunning
intriguers, and that therefore we don't want them. Well,
I have encountered a good deal of male intrigue in my
time. . . . (M. Meyer 449)
Ibsen's first proposal was accepted, the second not,
failing by one vote. He left the club in a cold rage.
A few days later, he astonished his compatriots by
appearing at a gala evening. People thought he was
penitent. But he was planning a surprise: facing the
ballroom and its dancing couples, he interrupted
the music to make a terrible scene, haranguing the
celebrants with a furious tirade. He had tried to
bring them progress, he shouted, but their cowardly
resistance had refused it. The women were espe-
cially contemptible, for it was for them he had tried
to fight. A Danish countess fainted and had to be
removed, but Ibsen continued, growing more and
more violent. Gunnar Heiberg, who was present,
later gave this account of the event:
As his voice thundered it wals as though he were clarify-
ing his own thoughts, as his tongue chastised it was as
though his spirit were scouring the darkness in search of
his present spiritual goal--his poem [A Doll House]-
as though he were personally bringing out his theories,
incarnating his characters. And when he was done, he
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118. 38 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
went out: into the hall, took his overcoat and walked
home. (M. Meyer 450)
In 1884, five years after A Doll House had made
Ibsen a recognized champion of the feminist cause,
he joined with H. E. Berner, president of the Nor-
wegian Women's Rights League, and with his fellow
Norwegian writers Bjornson, Lie, and Kielland, in
signing a petition to the Storting, the Norwegian
parliament, urging the passage of a bill establish-
ing separate property rights for married women.
When he returned the petition to Bjornson, Ibsen
wryly commented that the Storting should not be
interested in men's opinions: "To consult men in
such a matter is like asking wolves if they desire bet-
ter protection for the sheep" (Letters 228). He also
spoke of his fears that the current campaign for
universal suffrage would come to nothing. The so-
lution, which he despaired of seeing, would be the
formation of a "strong, resolute progressive party"

119. that would include in its goals "the statutory im-
provement of the position of woman" (229).
It is foolish to apply the formalist notion that art
is never sullied by argument to Ibsen's middle-
period plays, written at a time when he was an out-
spoken and direct fighter in what he called the
"mortal combat between two epochs" (Letters 123).
Ibsen was fiercely his own man, refusing all his life
to be claimed by organizations or campaigns of
many sorts, including the Women's Rights League
and the movement to remove the mark of Sweden
from the Norwegian flag. And he had a deeply con-
servative streak where manners were concerned (ex-
cept when he lost his temper), for he was acutely
suspicious of show. Temperamentally, Ibsen was a
loner. But he was also, as Georg Brandes declared,
"a born polemist" (47). While it is true that Ibsen
never reduced life to "ideas," it is equally true that
he was passionately interested in the events and
ideas of his day. He was as deeply anchored in his
time as any writer has been before or since. Writ-
ing to his German translator a year after the publi-

120. cation of A Doll House, Ibsen offered one of the
truest self-appraisals a writer has ever made:
Everything that I have written is intimately connected
with what I have lived through, even if I have not lived
it myself. Every new work has served me as emancipation
and catharsis; for none of us can escape the responsibil-
ity and the guilt of the society to which we belong.
(Hundrearsutgave 402; my trans.)9
Long Island University
Brooklyn, New York
Notes
I Rolf Fjelde, America's foremost translator of Ibsen, is right;
Et Dukkehjem is A Dol/ House and not A Doll's House: "There
is certainly no sound justification for perpetrating the awkward
and blindly traditional misnomer of A Doll's House; the house
is not Nora's, as the possessive implies; the familiar children's
toy is called a doll house" (xxv). I use Fjelde's translation of
the
title throughout; references in English to Pillars of Society and
A Doll House are to Fjelde's Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose

121. Plays (15-118; 125-96). References to the original texts are to
Ib-
sens Samlede Verker (9-65; 70-114).
2 One example is the title of a Carnegie Commission report
on the status of women in American graduate education: Escape
from the Doll House, by Saul D. Feldman.
3The notion that Ibsen's objective in A Doll House was non-
feminist has become so widespread that even feminist critics
honor it. Elaine Hoffman Baruch can term the drama "the fem-
inist play par excellence" and yet refer to "the speech in which
[Ibsen] denied being a feminist in A Doll House" (387),
accepting
the idea that Nora's meaning for feminism is essentially differ-
ent from Ibsen's intention. MiriaLm Schneir anthologizes the
last
scene of the play in Feminism: The Essential Historical
Writings
but explains its inclusion as justified "whatever [Ibsen's] inten-
tion" and in spite of his speech (179).
4 See, for example, Robert BrLlstein (49) and Marvin Rosen-
berg, whose article is a rehash of H0st's points, although
Rosen-

122. berg seems unacquainted with her well-known essay.
5 For a thoroughgoing defense of Weigand by a much later
critic who understands that 'A Doll House is not a feminist
play," see R. F. Dietrich.
6 For the studies mentioned in this paragraph see the entries
in Works Cited for Marholm, Woerner, Key, Canudo, A.
Meyer,
and Bennett, as well as those for Salome, Nazimova, Brandes,
and Strindberg.
7 In the succes de scandale of A Doll House, it was generally
known that Laura Kieler was the model for Nora. She became
deeply angry with Ibsen for having made use of her private life,
responding so violently that she even took Torvald's derogatory
comments on Nora's father as references to her own father.
More
than ten years later, Georg Brandes wrote an article claiming,
in-
explicably and rather nastily, that Nora's original had borrowed
the money not to save her husband's life but to decorate her
house. Widely circulated in the press, the article caused Laura
Kieler great distress; she begged a friend of Ibsen's to ask the

123. dra-
matist to publish a denial of Brandes's assertion. Ibsen refused
absolutely, replying that he did not understand why he should
be brought in to deny what the Kielers could deny themselves;
he agreed to see Laura Kieler, however, and she later described
a four-hour interview in Ibsen's apartment during which he was
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Joan Templeton 39
so moved that he wept, although he still refused to set Brandes
straight (Kinck 529-31). Claiming that Ibsen could have easily
written a letter to a newspaper refuting Brandes's charges,
Michael Meyer considers Ibsen's refusal "cowardly and
hypocrit-
ical" (635); at the same time, he suspects that the story of the
tearful interview may be "the confused and colored fantasy of
an old lady whose life had been a protracted tragedy" (680).
While Laura Kieler did suffer greatly in her personal life, be-

124. ing forced, in order to get her children back, to live with a man
who had had her locked up in an asylum, she enjoyed a long
and
productive career as a journalist; her books were issued in
many
editions and translated into foreign languages, and she was es-
pecially honored in Denmark for her writing on the Schleswig-
Holstein question. I would not describe her life as a "protracted
tragedy." In any case, there is no reason to doubt that she gave
a true account of her emotional interview with Ibsen. The fact
is that Ibsen was very attached to his "skylark," as he called
her,
and uncommonly affectionate with her; he had been greatly dis-
tressed by her husband's treatment of her, had written to her
warmly to tell her so and to give her advice, and, when he
heard
of her incarceration, had written to his publisher asking for
news
of her (Kinck 506-08). It seems probable that Ibsen would be
upset by Laura Kieler's tears and entreaties. His relations with

125. younger women, moreover, were marked by passionately felt
sen-
timent; his meeting with his protege is not the only occasion on
which he is reported to have shed tears.
As for his supposed cowardice, it is certainly true that Ibsen
was braver in print than in life. But it is also true that one of
the
abiding principles of his life was a systematic, scrupulously
hon-
ored refusal to comment publicly on his works. At the end of
their talk, when Laura Kieler saw he was not yielding, she
begged
him to let her come again the next day; he replied, "Oh, Laura,
Laura, I don't think I can let you go, but you mustn't come
tomorow. No, no, it can't be done. I can't do it. It's
impossible!"
(Kinck 531; my trans.). Yes, Ibsen could have written to a
news-
paper to say that Nora Helmer's original had acted honorably,
and perhaps he should have, but he could not bring himself to
do so, not even for Laura Kieler.

126. 8 Nora appears in embryo as Selma Brattsberg in The League
of Youth, written in 1869, ten years before A Doll House.
When
Selma responds to her husband's announcement of his finan-
cial ruin, both her argument and her metaphor are Nora's: "How
I've longed for even a little share in your worries! But when I
asked, all you did was laugh it off with a joke. You dressed me
up like a doll. You played with me as you might play with a
child.
Oh, how joyfully I could have helped to bear the burdens!" (93)
Brandes suggested in his review of the play that Selma
deserved
a work all to herself; later he liked taking credit for giving Ib-
sen the idea for A Doll House.
9 I presented a longer version of the first two sections of this
essay on 15 February 1987 at the eleventh annual Themes in
Drama conference, entitled Women in Drama, at the University
of California, Riverside. I would like to express my thanks to
Bill
Harris, Dana Sue McDermott, and the other congress
organizers,

127. and to my audience, whose appreciation and support were
greatly
encouraging, especially to Karen Bassi (Syracuse Univ.),
Lynda
Hart (Xavier Univ.), and K. Kendall (Smith Coll.).
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2018 00:44:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Contentsp. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p.
38p. 39p. 40Issue Table of ContentsPublications of the Modern
Language Association of America, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan., 1989)
pp. 1-120Front Matter [pp. 1-97]Editor's Column [pp. 5-7]The
Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project [pp.
13-27]The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and
Ibsen [pp. 28-40]Vallejo's Venus de Milo and the Ruins of
Language [pp. 41-52]Kenneth Burke's Divine Comedy: The
Literary Form of The Rhetoric of Religion [pp. 53-63]The

134. Politics of Johnson's Dictionary [pp. 64-74]ForumVirginia
Woolf and Madness [pp. 75-77]Feminist Criticism [pp. 77-
79]Professional Notes and Comment [pp.
90+92+94+96+98]Back Matter [pp. 99-120]
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)
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135. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
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Human Beings
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PART I I
Characters an d
Relationships
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3
A DolVs House an d
Hedda Gabler

136. 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

137. 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 ,
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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

138. 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

139. 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

140. 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

141. 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 likel 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

142. 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

143. 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

144. 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
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 4 3
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

146. 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

147. 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

148. 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

149. 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 .
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 4 5

150. 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

151. 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 .

152. 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 .
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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

153. 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

154. 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
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 4 7
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 ,

155. "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 —

156. 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 imagin e tha t " a
daughte r ha s n o
right t o spar e he r dyin g fathe r worr y an d anxiety " o r tha t
" a wif e ha s
no righ t t o sav e her husband' s life. " Nora' s claim s ar e that
sh e cannot b e
adversely judge d becaus e sh e acte d ou t o f lov e an d tha t
ther e "won' t b e
any trouble " becaus e sh e ha s "thre e littl e children " (ac t 2)
.
Her belie f syste m i s shaken, however , whe n Torval d attack
s Krogsta d
at th e en d o f ac t 1 . Afte r committin g a forgery , Krogsta d
ha d escape d
punishment throug h "trick s an d evasions. " Whe n a ma n
behave s lik e
that, say s Torvald , "hi s lif e become s a tissu e o f lie s an d
deception . He' s
forced t o wea r a mask—eve n wit h thos e neares t t o him—hi
s ow n
wife an d children. " Krogsta d "ha s bee n deliberatel y
poisonin g hi s ow n
children fo r years , b y surroundin g the m wit h lie s an d
hypocrisy. " Nor a
recognizes hersel f i n thi s description , sinc e he r lif e i s a
tissu e o f lie s an d
deception. She , too, has committed forgery , an d sh e has

157. deceive d Torval d
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48 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
about th e loan . Sh e lie s habitually , abou t eatin g macaroons
, abou t wha t
she doe s with th e mone y Torval d give s her, abou t wha t sh e
is doing wit h
the tim e sh e spend s working , an d s o on . Sh e justifie s man
y o f thes e lie s
as bein g i n a goo d caus e an d require d b y Torvald' s
rigidity , bu t afte r
Torvald's speec h abou t Krogsta d sh e become s terrified .
Afrai d tha t sh e is
harming he r famil y an d corruptin g he r home , sh e begin s t
o withdra w
from he r childre n an d t o contemplat e goin g away . The self-
hat e an d self -
doubt thu s activate d remai n wit h he r throug h th e res t o f th
e play .
It i s because Mrs . Lind e i s appalled b y the "decei t an d
subterfuge " o n
which Nora' s relationshi p wit h Torval d i s base d tha t sh e
insist s o n
exposing Nora' s secret , eve n thoug h Krogsta d i s willing t o
tak e bac k hi s
threatening letter . Sh e feel s tha t Nor a an d Torval d mus t
com e "t o a
thorough understanding, " tha t "Helme r mus t kno w th e truth

158. " (ac t 3) .
She tells Nora tha t sh e has "nothin g t o fea r fro m Krogstad "
bu t tha t sh e
"must spea k out. " Nora' s reactio n t o thi s i s remarkable :
"No w I kno w
what I mus t d o " — t h a t is , sh e mus t commi t suicide .
Why ? I f sh e ha s
nothing t o fea r fro m Krogstad , sh e doe s no t hav e t o kil l
hersel f t o sav e
Torvald's caree r an d preven t th e wonderfu l thin g fro m
happening . Doe s
she wan t t o di e s o a s t o avoi d a confrontatio n wit h
Torvald ? Doe s sh e
sense what hi s reactio n wil l be ? Doe s sh e fear tha t h e will
despis e her , a s
he doe s Krogstad .
Torvald's denunciatio n o f Krogsta d ha d bee n extraordinaril y
passion -
ate: "I t woul d hav e bee n impossibl e fo r m e t o wor k wit h
him . I t literall y
gives m e a feelin g o f physica l discomfor t t o com e i n
contac t wit h suc h
people" (ac t 1) . The perfectionisti c Torval d i s pursuin g a
flawles s excel -
lence i n th e whol e conduc t o f life , an d h e discharge s ont o
Krogsta d th e
contempt h e woul d fee l fo r himsel f shoul d h e behav e a s
Krogsta d ha s
done. Krogsta d is , i n effect , hi s despise d image , wha t h e
canno t bea r t o
be, an d h e finds hi s ver y presenc e disturbing , especiall y
whe n Krogstad ,
an ol d schoo l friend , treat s hi m wit h familiarity . Hi s
repudiation , con -
demnation, an d defianc e o f Krogsta d confir m hi s hig h

159. standard s an d
solidify hi s sens e o f identity .
Nora dread s Krogsta d partl y becaus e he r fathe r ha d bee n
attacke d i n
the newspapers , an d sh e fear s tha t Krogsta d wil l attac k
Torvald . Confi -
dent o f hi s rectitude , Torval d dismisse s he r fears : "M y dea
r Nora , ther e
is a distinct differenc e betwee n you r fathe r an d me . Your
father's conduc t
was no t entirel y unimpeachable . Bu t min e is ; an d I trus t i
t wil l remai n
so" (ac t 2) . Torvald feel s tha t hi s strengt h i s the strengt h o
f te n becaus e
his hear t i s pure. Hi s bargai n i s that h e will ultimatel y
triump h an d hav e
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 4 9
nothing to fea r a s long as his conduct i s unimpeachable. A t
the beginnin g
of th e play , hi s bargai n seem s t o b e working . H e suffere d
financially
because h e woul d no t tak e shad y cases , bu t h e ha s receive
d a splendi d
new appointmen t a s the rewar d o f hi s virtue .
Torvald's reactio n t o Krogstad' s lette r i s s o intens e becaus
e hi s well -

160. earned succes s has bee n poisoned , an d h e ha s bee n pu t i n
the powe r o f a
man h e detests . Sinc e h e will b e i n a fals e positio n
whateve r h e does , th e
flawless excellenc e o f hi s lif e ha s bee n los t forever .
Perhap s th e greates t
blow fo r hi m i s tha t hi s idealize d imag e o f Nor a an d thei
r relationshi p
has bee n shattered . H e ha s awakene d afte r eigh t year s t o
discove r tha t
the woma n wh o ha d bee n hi s "prid e an d joy " i s "lawless "
an d "unprin -
cipled" (ac t 3) . He ha s ha d intimation s o f th e conflic t
betwee n hi s value s
and Nora' s before , bu t h e ha s dismisse d the m becaus e o f
hi s nee d t o
hold ont o hi s exalte d imag e o f he r an d thei r relationship .
Whe n h e
catches he r i n a li e abou t Krogstad' s no t havin g bee n t o
se e her , h e doe s
not tak e th e matte r seriously : " (Threatens with his finger)
M y littl e bir d
must neve r d o tha t again ! A song-bird mus t sin g clear an d
true ! No fals e
notes! (Puts arm around her) Isn' t tha t th e wa y i t shoul d
be ? O f cours e
it is ! (Let's her go) An d no w we'l l sa y n o mor e abou t it "
(ac t 1) . Torvald
now believe s tha t Nor a ha s inherite d he r father' s lac k o f
principle ; sh e
has "n o religion , n o mora l code , no sens e o f duty " (ac t 3)
. She embodie s
everything Torval d abhor s i n othe r peopl e an d i s afraid o f
i n himself .
Torvald ca n b e easil y see n a s a cowar d an d hypocrite , bu t

161. th e situa -
tion i s mor e complicate d tha n that . H e ha d mad e a sho w
o f courag e
as lon g a s hi s conduc t wa s unimpeachable , bu t Nora' s
behavio r ha s
compromised hi s hono r an d undermine d hi s belie f i n hi s
powe r t o
control hi s destiny . Horne y observe s tha t fo r th e
perfectionisti c perso n
the appearanc e o f rectitud e ma y b e more importan t tha n
rectitud e itself ,
and appearance s ar e ver y importan t t o Torvald . Th e "matte
r mus t b e
hushed u p a t an y cost " i n orde r t o avoi d a scandal , an d h
e an d Nor a
must preten d t o hav e a marriag e i n orde r t o "sav e
appearances " (ac t 3) .
Nora's drea m wa s tha t Torval d woul d tak e th e responsibilit
y fo r th e
forgery o n himself , thu s showin g ho w muc h h e love d her ,
bu t give n hi s
own defenses , thi s i s somethin g tha t Torval d coul d neve r
do . Sh e i s
asking hi m t o presen t hi s despise d imag e t o th e worl d a s
hi s tru e reality .
When Torval d say s tha t "on e doesn' t sacrific e one' s hono r
fo r love' s
sake," Nor a replie s tha t "million s o f wome n hav e don e so.
" Sh e i s
expressing value s tha t belon g t o he r defens e syste m an d h
e value s tha t
belong t o his .
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162. 50 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
Krogstad's lette r plunge s Torval d int o a stat e o f
psychologica l crisis .
His solutio n ha s faile d an d hi s "whol e worl d seem[s ] t o b
e tumblin g
about [his ] ears " (ac t 3) . H e i s goin g t o piece s no t onl y
becaus e Nor a
has expose d hi m t o disgrace , bu t als o becaus e hi s
misfortun e force s hi m
to realiz e tha t h e ha s violate d hi s ow n principles . Hi s cod
e i s tha t on e
should not sacrific e hono r fo r love , bu t tha t i s what h e di
d whe n h e wa s
sent t o investigat e Nora' s fathe r an d engage d i n a cover-u
p fo r he r sake :
"If yo u hadn' t . . . bee n s o kin d an d helpful—h e migh t hav
e bee n
dismissed" (ac t 2) . Torval d no w feel s tha t h e i s bein g
punishe d "fo r
shielding" Nora' s fathe r (ac t 3) . B y failin g t o liv e u p t o
hi s shoulds , h e
has expose d himsel f t o catastrophe . Thi s generate s a sens e
o f help -
lessness an d pani c an d als o a grea t dea l o f self-hate , whic
h h e external -
izes b y feelin g victimize d an d blamin g hi s wife . Lik e Nora
, h e feel s
unjustly treate d b y hi s mate : "An d t o thin k I hav e yo u t o
than k fo r al l
this—you who m I'v e don e nothin g bu t pampe r an d spoi l
sinc e th e da y
of ou r marriage " (ac t 3) . As we hav e seen , Nor a i s also

163. feelin g self-hate ,
which sh e externalize s b y blamin g he r fathe r an d Torvald .
Torvald's pani c subside s whe n Krogsta d withdraw s hi s
threat , an d h e
immediately resume s hi s patronizin g behavior . Afte r
forgivin g Nora , h e
assures he r tha t sh e i s saf e an d tha t h e wil l cheris h he r a
s i f sh e wer e " a
little dove " h e ha d "rescue d fro m th e claw s o f som e
dreadfu l hawk " (ac t
3). Despit e hi s craven behavior , Torval d want s t o reviv e th
e ol d scenari o
in whic h h e i s Nora' s protector , bu t sh e n o longe r believe
s him . H e
becomes eve n mor e paternalisti c tha n h e wa s before . Nor a
wil l becom e
his chil d a s wel l a s hi s wife , an d h e wil l b e "bot h wil l
an d conscience "
to her .
Torvald's behavio r i s incredibl y inappropriate , an d i t ma y
see m t o
some tha t Ibse n i s presentin g a caricatur e o f a chauvinisti
c male . I t i s
understandable, however , i n term s o f Torvald' s psychology .
H e i s a mal e
chauvinist, o f cours e (" I a m no t a ma n fo r nothing") , bu t
ther e i s
more t o hi s behavio r tha n that . Hi s descriptio n o f Nor a a s
hi s "deares t
treasure" i s not a n exaggeratio n (ac t 3) . He i s an emotionall
y need y ma n
who, spellboun d b y Nora , want s t o posses s he r entirel y an
d liv e i n a
world o f thei r own . Whe n the y ar e wit h othe r people , h e

164. romanticall y
pretends tha t the y lov e eac h othe r i n secret , an d h e think s
tha t Rank' s
death ma y b e fo r th e best , sinc e no w the y wil l b e "mor e
tha n eve r
dependent o n eac h other. " H e i s prou d o f Nora' s beaut y an
d charm ,
which bolste r hi s ow n sens e o f worth , muc h a s Torvald' s
succes s feed s
Nora's pride . He ha s blinde d himsel f t o anythin g fault y i n
Nora becaus e
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 5 1
he doe s not wan t t o relinquis h hi s idealizatio n o f he r o r t
o hav e an y flaw
in their relationship .
There i s an inne r conflic t i n Torvald betwee n hi s
dependency o n Nor a
and hi s perfectionism. H e trie s to resolv e that conflic t b y
treating he r lik e
a helpless , uncomprehendin g femal e wh o wa s no t "abl e t o
judg e ho w
wrong" he r behavio r wa s (ac t 3) . I f h e continue d t o
condem n Nora , h e
would los e her. B y regarding he r a s too immatur e t o b e
held responsible ,
he is able to forgive he r and continue their relationship. He
will keep Nor a

165. straight, an d thu s protec t himself , b y bein g he r wil l an d
conscience . H e
envisions merging with Nora mor e completely tha n eve r
before .
Torvald's fantas y i s profoundl y oppressiv e t o Nora , wh o n
o longe r
respects hi s judgment . Whe n h e start s regardin g he r a s hi s
littl e dol l
again, "who m yo u woul d hav e t o guar d mor e carefull y tha
n ever , be -
cause sh e was s o weak an d frail " (ac t 3) , she realizes th e
degre e t o whic h
she ha s bee n infantilize d an d demand s t o b e treate d lik e a
rea l person .
This doe s no t produc e a sudde n lea p int o maturit y fo r
Nora , no r coul d
it. Sh e herself i s conscious o f he r inadequac y an d
uncertainty . Sh e know s
that sh e i s no t fi t t o teac h he r children , tha t sh e doe s no
t understan d
society o r religion , an d tha t sh e i s bewildere d abou t ethica
l questions .
What sh e is clear abou t i s that sh e is not clear . Sh e knows
tha t sh e is ou t
of touc h wit h hersel f an d th e worl d an d tha t sh e mus t ge t
awa y fro m
Torvald i f sh e i s to "lear n t o fac e reality. " Sh e i s awar e
tha t sh e i s a t th e
beginning o f a lon g proces s an d tha t sh e doe s no t "kno w
wha t sor t o f
person" sh e will become .
I hav e suggeste d tha t i f Nor a continue d t o grow , ther e
migh t b e a
chance fo r he r marriage . Tha t woul d depen d o n Torval d a s

166. well, bu t he ,
too, ha s begu n t o chang e an d ma y hav e a s goo d a chanc e
a s sh e o f
arriving a t th e necessar y insights . H e doe s no t accep t
Nora' s positio n
that h e shoul d hav e sacrifice d hono r fo r love , nor , give n
hi s personality ,
is h e eve r likel y t o d o so . Nora need s t o se e th e source s
o f tha t expecta -
tion i n he r ow n psychology . Torval d doe s respond , however
, t o Nora' s
indignation a t no t havin g bee n treate d a s a person . H e
understand s tha t
there i s " a grea t void " betwee n the m an d ask s Nor a t o
believ e tha t h e i s
capable o f change . Sh e thinks tha t h e migh t b e when h e "n
o longe r [ha s
his] dol l t o pla y with " (ac t 3) . Agai n sh e i s right . Th e
separatio n i s a s
essential fo r Torval d a s i t i s fo r her . Nor a appear s t o b e
somewha t
vindictive whe n sh e say s tha t hi s inabilit y t o endur e th e
though t o f
parting wit h he r i s al l th e mor e reaso n wh y sh e shoul d go
, bu t perhap s
she recognize s tha t sh e must b e cruel i n orde r t o b e kind .
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52 I A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
The questio n w e ar e lef t wit h a t th e en d o f th e pla y i s

167. whethe r Nor a
and Torval d ca n chang e enoug h s o tha t thei r "lif e togethe r
migh t trul y
be a marriage " (ac t 3) . Unless thi s happens , say s Nora , the
y wil l alway s
be strangers . If i t wer e t o happe n i t would b e "th e mos t
wonderfu l thin g
of all, " bu t Nor a say s tha t sh e "n o longe r believe[s] i n
miracles. " Tor -
vald, however , cling s t o thi s hope . Th e las t lin e o f th e
pla y i s his : "Th e
most wonderfu l thin g o f all—? " Give n th e severit y o f Nor
a an d Tor -
vald's problem s an d th e absenc e o f therapeuti c help , i t
woul d b e a
miracle indeed .
Hedda Gabler i s abov e al l a stud y o f character ; t o
comprehen d th e play ,
we mus t understan d Hedda . I t i s difficul t t o establis h
Ibsen' s themati c
intentions, bu t h e shows wit h brillian t psychologica l insigh
t ho w Hed -
da's pligh t a s a woman i n a n extremel y restrictiv e societ y
produces inne r
conflicts tha t mak e he r lif e steril e an d lea d t o he r
destructiv e behavior .
Hedda i s no t portraye d sympathetically , lik e Nora , bu t
psychologica l
analysis reveal s tha t beneat h he r cold , haught y demeano r
sh e i s a suffer -
ing huma n being .
As i n A DolVs House, th e heroine' s relationshi p wit h a
ma n i s th e
focus o f th e play . Hedda' s mos t importan t relationshi p i s

168. no t wit h he r
husband bu t wit h Ejler t Lovborg , who m sh e ha d know n
befor e he r
marriage. Afte r th e scen e i s se t i n ac t 1 , th e dramati c
actio n i s initiate d
by The a Elvsted' s visit , whic h lead s t o Lovborg' s reentr y
int o Hedda' s
life. Ac t 2 is focused o n Hedda' s rivalr y wit h Thea , a s sh e
induce s Ejler t
to tak e a drin k an d g o t o Judg e Brack' s party . Ac t 3
show s u s he r
disappointment whe n Ejler t fail s t o enac t th e scenari o sh e
ha d envisage d
for him , an d i t end s wit h Hedd a urgin g hi m t o kil l himsel
f beautifull y
and burnin g hi s manuscript . I n ac t 4 , Hedd a i s drive n t o
suicid e whe n
all he r solution s collaps e afte r Ejlert' s death . I f w e ar e t o
appreciat e th e
subtlety o f Ibsen' s psychologica l portrai t an d mak e sens e o
f wha t hap -
pens i n th e play , we mus t understan d Ejlert' s rol e i n
Hedda' s life .
The mos t widel y hel d vie w o f Hedda' s behavio r i n ac t 2
is that sh e i s
trying t o und o Thea' s constructiv e influenc e o n Ejlert , wh o
ha d bee n
leading a wil d bohemia n lif e i n th e day s whe n h e an d
Hedd a wer e
friends. Inspire d b y Thea , h e ha s stoppe d drinking , ha s
publishe d a
highly acclaime d book , an d ha s writte n anothe r tha t i s mor
e brillian t
still. Enviou s o f Thea , Hedd a wishe s t o exercis e a mor e
powerfu l influ -

169. ence o f he r ow n b y turning Lovbor g bac k int o th e ma n h e
was whe n sh e
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 5 3
knew him . Sh e seek s t o disrup t Ejlert' s relationshi p wit h
The a an d t o
replace he r a s th e dominan t forc e i n hi s life . The a i s afrai
d tha t Ejler t
will b e destroye d i f h e revert s t o hi s ol d ways , an d mos t
peopl e see m t o
feel tha t Hedd a i s trying t o undermin e hi m i n orde r t o fee
l tha t fo r onc e
in he r lif e she , too, ha s "th e powe r t o shap e a huma n
destiny " (ac t 2) .
There i s much i n thi s vie w wit h whic h I agree, bu t I do no
t thin k tha t
Hedda induce s Lovbor g t o tak e a drin k an d g o t o Brack' s
part y i n orde r
to undermin e him . I n respons e t o Thea' s concer n abou t
"wha t wil l com e
of al l this, " Hedd a confidentl y predict s tha t "A t te n o'cloc
k h e wil l b e
here, wit h vin e leave s i n hi s hair . Flushe d an d fearless! "
(ac t 2) . Sh e
envisions hi m a s a triumphan t figure. Hedd a i s disappointe
d rathe r
than please d whe n sh e hear s fro m he r husban d tha t th e
drunke n Ejler t

170. carelessly droppe d hi s manuscrip t an d learn s fro m Judg e
Brac k tha t h e
finally turne d u p a t Mademoisell e Diana's , where h e insiste
d tha t h e ha d
been robbed , raise d a row , an d wa s take n awa y b y the
police : "S o that' s
what happened ! Then , afte r all , h e ha d n o vin e leave s i n
hi s hair! " (ac t
4). H e i s behavin g lik e th e Ejler t o f old , bu t tha t i s not,
evidently , wha t
Hedda ha d wanted . I n orde r t o understan d wha t Hedd a wa
s hopin g fo r
we mus t examin e he r inne r conflict s an d Ejlert' s rol e i n he
r effor t t o
manage them .
Some o f Hedda' s conflict s ar e presente d quit e vividl y i n he
r reminis -
cence with Ejler t abou t th e ol d days , when ther e wa s a
"secre t intimacy "
between the m tha t "n o livin g sou l suspected " (ac t 2) . Wit h
Genera l
Gabler readin g hi s pape r i n th e sam e room , Ejler t woul d
describ e hi s
"days an d night s o f passio n an d frenzy , o f drinkin g an d
madness " t o
Hedda. Sh e evoked hi s confessions b y boldl y askin g "deviou
s questions "
that h e perfectl y understood . Rejectin g Lovborg' s ide a tha t
sh e wa s
trying t o was h awa y hi s sins , Hedd a explain s he r motive :
"Isn' t i t quit e
easy to understan d tha t a young girl , especially i f i t can b e
don e i n secre t
. . . shoul d b e tempte d t o investigat e a forbidde n world ? A
worl d she' s

171. supposed t o kno w nothin g about? "
Hedda i s a sociall y prominen t woma n wit h a ver y stron g
sens e o f
propriety wh o need s t o maintai n he r dignit y a t al l costs an
d wh o canno t
bear th e though t o f doin g anythin g tha t woul d diminis h he
r respectabil -
ity. A t th e sam e time , sh e ha s powerfu l sexua l an d
aggressiv e impulse s
that sh e want s t o expres s a s me n d o an d tha t sh e i s bitte
r a t havin g t o
deny. Sh e live s i n a societ y tha t impose s enormou s
constraint s upo n a
woman o f he r socia l class , constraints t o whic h sh e
outwardl y conform s
but agains t whic h sh e inwardl y rebels . Her "secre t intimacy
" wit h Ejler t
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54 I A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
Lovborg enable d he r t o escap e thes e constraint s vicariously
, sinc e h e
acted ou t he r forbidde n impulse s an d the n tol d he r abou t
it . When Ejler t
wonders ho w sh e coul d hav e brough t hersel f "t o as k suc h
questions, "
Hedda insist s that sh e did s o "i n a devious way," tha t is ,
without directl y
violating decoru m (ac t 2) . W e se e Hedd a lookin g fo r a

172. simila r kin d o f
safe, voyeuristi c gratificatio n whe n sh e make s obliqu e
reference s t o
Judge Brack' s affair s an d relishe s the thought o f hi s sta g
party, which sh e
wishes sh e coul d atten d unseen .
Hedda's problem , then , i s how t o satisf y he r "cravin g fo r
life " (ac t 2) ,
as Ejler t describe s it , withou t sacrificin g he r positio n a s a
lady . Hedda' s
need t o confor m t o th e rule s o f propriety i s so great tha t i t
bot h alienate s
her fro m he r rea l feeling s an d make s i t impossibl e fo r he r
t o expres s
the resultin g rebelliou s impulses . I t i s no t a health y cravin
g fo r self -
actualization bu t he r suppresse d neuroti c need s tha t Ejler t
Lovbor g i s
acting out . T o Hedda , however , h e i s a ma n wh o ha s "th e
courag e t o
live hi s life " a s h e see s fit (ac t 3) , in a wa y tha t sh e
canno t liv e hers . It i s
not onl y hi s escapade s tha t sh e vicariousl y enjoy s bu t als o
wha t the y
symbolize, hi s freedo m fro m th e constraint s b y which sh e
feel s hersel f t o
be suffocated .
Ejlert provide s a solutio n t o Hedda' s proble m unti l h e drag
s thei r
intimacy dow n t o realit y b y makin g sexua l advances . Hedd
a i s s o
alarmed b y thi s tha t sh e threaten s t o shoo t him , bu t sh e i
s afrai d t o d o
so becaus e sh e ha s "suc h a fea r o f scandal " (ac t 2) . Whe

173. n Lovbor g
accuses he r o f bein g " a cowar d a t heart, " sh e
wholeheartedl y concurs :
"A terribl e coward. " Sh e confesse s tha t he r "greates t
cowardic e tha t
evening" wa s i n no t respondin g t o hi s advances .
Hedda i s caught i n a conflict betwee n a desire to ac t ou t he
r rebelliou s
aggression b y leadin g a wild , free , bohemia n life , lik e
Lovborg , an d a n
even stronge r nee d t o compl y wit h th e norm s o f he r
society , t o b e a
refined, respectabl e lady , th e prope r daughte r o f a n eminen
t general . T o
escape th e agon y o f thi s conflict , sh e become s cold , aloof ,
detached , ou t
of touc h wit h he r ow n emotion s an d indifferen t t o othe r
people . Sh e
does no t believ e i n love , marrie s fo r convenience , an d the
n i s terribl y
oppressed b y th e boredo m o f he r empt y existence . Whe n
sh e return s
from a length y weddin g tri p wit h a husban d sh e canno t
bear , sh e want s
a butler , a saddl e horse , a ne w piano , an d a n activ e socia
l lif e partl y fo r
reasons o f statu s an d partl y becaus e sh e i s spoiled , bu t
mostl y becaus e
she feel s desperat e an d i s searchin g fo r distractions . Sh e
become s eve n
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174. A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 5 5
more frustrate d whe n sh e learn s tha t the y wil l hav e t o
curtai l thei r
expenses.
Hedda's pligh t i s vividl y depicte d i n he r conversatio n wit h
Judg e
Brack a t th e beginnin g o f ac t 2 . After greetin g hi m wit h
pisto l shot s an d
explaining tha t sh e i s "jus t killin g time " becaus e sh e
doesn' t kno w
"what i n heaven's name " sh e i s to d o wit h hersel f "al l da y
long, " Hedd a
complains abou t th e boredo m o f he r weddin g trip . Sh e
make s i t clea r
that sh e does not "love " Jorgen ("Ugh ! Don' t us e that
revoltin g word!") ,
and tha t sh e marrie d hi m becaus e h e ha d a promisin g
caree r an d sh e
"wasn't gettin g an y younger. " Hedd a i s twenty-nin e an d ha
s a drea d o f
aging. Brac k an d Hedd a the n engag e i n a deviou s exchang
e i n whic h
Brack propose s a n affai r an d Hedd a make s i t clear tha t sh
e would rathe r
continue he r tete-a-tet e wit h Jorgen tha n ente r int o a
triangle tha t woul d
compromise he r respectability . Sh e ha s n o objectio n t o
Brack' s comin g
over t o amus e her , however .
In respons e t o Hedda' s complain t abou t ho w "incredibl y I
shal l bor e

175. myself here, " Brac k suggest s tha t sh e find "som e sor t o f
vocatio n i n
life," bu t Hedd a canno t imagin e a vocatio n tha t woul d
attrac t her .
Perhaps sh e coul d ge t Jorge n t o g o int o politics , despit e
th e fac t tha t h e
is completel y unsuite d fo r suc h a career . Lik e mos t o f th e
wome n i n
Ibsen's plays—an d i n hi s culture , n o doubt—Hedd a ca n
find a n outle t
for he r expansiv e tendencie s onl y throug h identificatio n wit
h o r manipu -
lation o f a man. Ther e ar e variation s o n thi s them e i n A
DolVs House (a s
we hav e seen) , The Master Builder, an d Rosmersholm.
Hedda feel s tha t lif e i s "s o hideous " becaus e o f he r
"gentee l poverty" ;
but, sensin g he r detachment , Judg e Brac k astutel y observe s
tha t "th e
fault lie s elsewhere, " i n th e fac t sh e ha s neve r "reall y bee
n stirre d b y
anything." H e suggest s tha t thi s ma y chang e whe n sh e
finds hersel f
"faced wit h what' s know n i n solem n languag e a s a grave
responsibility. "
Hedda angril y replies , "B e quiet ! Nothin g o f tha t sor t wil l
eve r happe n
to me. " Sh e i s alread y pregnant , however , an d i s tryin g t o
den y he r
condition, bot h t o hersel f an d t o others . No t onl y i s sh e
confine d t o a
woman's narro w spher e i n life , bu t sh e ca n find n o
satisfactio n i n wha t
her cultur e regard s a s feminine joys . She puts of f marriag e
a s lon g a s sh e

176. can, partl y becaus e it s restriction s d o no t appea l t o he r an
d partl y
because th e me n wh o attrac t he r ar e no t eligibl e an d th e
me n wh o ar e
eligible d o no t attrac t her . Sh e i s appalle d b y th e prospec
t o f mother -
hood, agai n becaus e o f he r detachment : "Tha t sor t o f thin
g doesn' t
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56 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
appeal t o me , Judge . I' m no t fitted fo r it . N o
responsibilitie s fo r me! "
Terribly frustrate d herself , sh e ha s nothin g t o giv e a child
, wh o wil l
further limi t he r freedom . I n rebellio n agains t th e feminin e
rol e bu t
unable t o find an y other , sh e tell s Judge Brac k tha t th e
onl y thin g sh e i s
"really fitted for " i s "borin g mysel f t o death! "
Hedda i s in despai r abou t he r life . Fro m th e beginnin g o f
th e play, sh e
is ful l o f frustration , irritability , an d anger , whic h sh e
displace s a t first
onto th e self-effacin g Aun t Juliane , wh o let s i n to o muc h
sunlight , thu s
revealing Hedda' s agin g fac e an d filled ou t figure, an d
whos e ha t Jorge n
has indecorousl y lef t o n a drawin g roo m table . Whe n Judg

177. e Brac k
scolds he r fo r tormentin g "tha t nic e ol d lady, " Hedd a
explain s tha t sh e
suddenly get s "impulse s lik e that " an d canno t "contro l
them " (ac t 2) .
She i s no t callousl y amusin g herself , bu t i s compulsivel y
dischargin g
some o f he r pent-u p rage , jus t a s sh e doe s whe n sh e fires
of f he r father' s
pistols, those symbol s o f mal e power .
Constantly lookin g fo r somethin g tha t migh t interes t her ,
Hedd a
regards th e possibl e competitio n fo r th e professorshi p
betwee n Ejler t
and Jorge n a s a n even t i n whic h sh e ca n tak e " a sportin g
interest " (ac t
1), despite th e fac t tha t he r husband' s professiona l an d
financial fortune s
are a t stake . The arriva l o f The a take s he r i n a new
direction , sinc e The a
announces th e presenc e o f Ejler t Lovborg , wh o ha d onc e
provide d
Hedda wit h a wa y o f dealin g wit h he r frustration s an d
inne r conflicts .
When sh e learn s tha t Ejler t i s i n tow n sh e ha s a vagu e
hop e tha t h e ca n
somehow b e o f hel p t o her , an d sh e immediatel y ask s
Jorge n t o invit e
him.
Upon Lovborg' s arrival , Hedd a become s involve d i n a
competitio n
with The a fo r influenc e ove r him . Hedd a i s threatene d b y
The a an d ha s
a powerfu l nee d t o triump h ove r her . Whe n the y kne w eac

178. h othe r a t
school, Hedd a use d t o pul l Thea' s hai r an d onc e sai d sh e
wa s "goin g t o
burn i t al l off" (ac t 1) . Ibse n describe s Thea' s hai r a s
"extremel y thic k
and wavy, " whil e Hedda' s i s "no t especiall y abundant. "
Thea' s thic k
hair symbolize s fertilit y an d make s Hedd a al l th e mor e
consciou s o f th e
sterility o f he r ow n existence , despit e he r pregnancy . Th e
contras t be -
tween th e two wome n i s developed throughou t th e play .
Whereas Hedd a
reveled i n Lovborg' s debauchery , The a inspire d hi m t o writ
e books ,
which h e describe s a s thei r children . Hedda' s fea r o f
scanda l mad e he r
afraid o f respondin g t o Ejlert' s advances , bu t The a leave s
he r husban d i n
order t o follo w hi m t o town : "But , Thea , m y darling!"—
exclaim s
H e d d a — " H o w di d yo u dare d o suc h a thing? " (ac t 1
; m y emphasis) .
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 5 7
When The a declare s tha t sh e wil l neve r g o bac k t o he r
husband , Hedd a
is shocked : "Bu t wha t wil l peopl e sa y abou t you , Thea? "
"The y ca n

179. say," replie s Thea , "whateve r the y like. " I n pursui t o f wha
t i s reall y
important t o her , The a ignore s publi c opinio n i n a wa y tha
t Hedd a
cannot. Hedda' s env y i s exacerbate d whe n Lovbor g praise s
Thea' s "tre -
mendous courage " wher e he r "comrad e i s concerned" :
Hedda: God , yes , courage! If on e onl y ha d that !
Lovborg: Wha t then ?
Hedda: The n lif e migh t perhap s b e endurable , afte r a l l . .
.
(act 2 )
Thea i s Hedda's nemesis , the woman wh o demonstrate s tha t i
t is possible
to hav e a fruitfu l lif e i f on e ha s th e courag e t o def y
convention .
There ca n b e n o doub t tha t Hedd a manipulate s Lovbor g int
o takin g
a drin k an d goin g t o Judge Brack' s part y i n orde r t o
disrup t hi s relation -
ship wit h The a an d t o sho w tha t sh e ha s mor e powe r ove
r him . Bu t sh e
is no t ye t ou t t o destro y Lovborg , a s sh e i s late r whe n sh
e conceal s th e
fact tha t Jorge n ha s foun d hi s manuscript . A t thi s poin t i n
th e pla y sh e
wants Ejler t t o enac t a scenari o sh e ha s conceive d fo r hi
m i n whic h h e
will b e a triumphan t autho r wh o i s free o f self-doub t an d
anxiet y abou t
himself. Sh e want s "th e powe r t o shap e a huma n destiny "
i n wha t sh e

180. regards a s a positiv e way .
Lovborg's refusa l t o tak e a drin k an d g o t o Brack' s part y
disturb s
Hedda becaus e i t seem s t o b e motivate d b y th e sam e kin d
o f fea r tha t
has mad e he r lif e unendurabl e an d filled he r wit h self-
contempt . Hedd a
despises hersel f fo r he r conformity , he r drea d o f scandal ,
he r cowardice .
She taunt s Ejler t wit h no t darin g t o tak e a drin k o r g o t o
th e party :
"Didn't dare ! You sa y I didn't dare! " (ac t 2) . She cannot bea
r t o se e hi m
afraid an d egg s hi m o n becaus e sh e want s hi m t o lea d th
e free , uninhib -
ited lif e tha t sh e canno t lea d herself . Sh e i s caugh t i n a
crossfir e o f
conflicting shoulds , sinc e sh e hate s hersel f fo r he r
cowardic e bu t know s
that sh e woul d hat e hersel f eve n mor e fo r an y breac h o f
propriety . Sh e
wants Lovbor g t o rescu e he r fro m he r impass e b y bein g
bot h rebelliou s
and triumphant , b y returnin g "flushe d an d fearless, " "wit h
vin e leave s
in hi s hair. " The n h e "wil l hav e regaine d confidenc e i n
himself . He'l l b e
a fre e ma n foreve r an d ever. "
Thea ma y hav e reclaime d Ejlert , bu t sh e ha s als o tame d
him , mad e
him fearfu l o f spontaneity , jus t a s Hedda is . She acts boldl
y o n hi s behal f
but i s terribly anxiou s fo r him . Hedd a feel s a simila r
anxiet y fo r hersel f

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58 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
at th e though t o f darin g behavior , bu t sh e wants t o believ e
tha t Lovbor g
can ac t upo n hi s impulse s wit h impunity . Sh e want s t o
triump h ove r
Thea, t o shap e a huma n destiny , an d t o gai n a vicariou s
fulfillmen t o f
her need s t o b e independent an d courageou s b y having
Lovbor g ow e hi s
freedom an d fearlessnes s t o her . Havin g n o hop e o f
becomin g wha t sh e
wants t o b e herself , sh e seek s t o escap e he r impotenc e an
d self-hat e b y
making Ejler t int o a ma n throug h who m sh e ca n liv e an d
wit h who m
she ca n proudl y identify .
Hedda's i s an impossibl e dream . Sinc e Lovborg i s an
alcoholic , freein g
him o f hi s fear s an d inhibition s i s boun d t o destro y him .
Whe n h e
refuses t o joi n th e othe r me n a t th e punc h bowl , Judg e
Brac k says ,
"Why, surely , col d punc h i s no t poison. " "Perhap s no t fo r
everyone, "
Ejlert replies , wit h th e implicatio n tha t i t surel y i s fo r hi
m (ac t 2) . The a
is s o anxiou s becaus e sh e understand s Ejlert' s vulnerability

182. . Desperate ,
Hedda blind s hersel f t o hi s conditio n an d construct s a
scenari o tha t wil l
satisfy he r contradictor y need s bu t tha t h e canno t possibl y
fulfill .
When Ejler t ha s no t returne d b y th e nex t mornin g The a i s
i n panic ,
but, holdin g ont o he r dream , Hedd a envision s hi m a t Judg
e Brack' s
"sitting wit h vin e leave s i n hi s hair , readin g hi s
manuscript " (ac t 3) .
Tesman come s bac k wit h a glowin g accoun t o f th e ne w
work , bu t finds
it "appalling " tha t Lovborg , "wit h al l his great gifts , shoul d
b e so utterl y
incorrigible." "Becaus e h e ha s mor e daring, " Hedd a asks ,
"tha n an y o f
the res t o f you?" This i s Hedda's idealize d imag e o f
Lovborg . I t is Ejlert' s
excessive drinking , however , t o whic h Jorgen i s referring,
sinc e it has le d
him carelessl y t o dro p hi s preciou s manuscript . Jorge n ha s
foun d i t an d
leaves i t wit h Hedd a whe n h e i s summone d t o th e bedsid e
o f th e dyin g
Aunt Rina .
Judge Brack' s accoun t o f th e evenin g shatter s Hedda' s drea
m o f livin g
through a liberate d Lovborg . Havin g conceive d o f Lovbor g
a s a kin d o f
romantic hero , a n untame d superio r being , sh e i s sickene d
b y hi s sordi d
fight wit h Mademoisell e Dian a an d hi s arrest . I f Hedd a ha
d simpl y

183. wanted t o sho w he r powe r ove r Lovbor g an d brea k u p hi s
relationshi p
with The a b y inducin g hi m t o rever t t o bohemia n ways , sh
e woul d hav e
been please d b y his nigh t o f drinkin g an d madness .
It i s at thi s poin t tha t Hedd a turn s destructive . Sinc e sh e
ha s no t bee n
able t o mak e Ejler t int o th e her o o f he r dreams , sh e exert
s he r powe r i n
a differen t wa y b y first concealin g an d the n burnin g hi s
manuscript .
Ashamed t o confes s tha t h e ha s los t thei r "child, " Lovbor g
tell s The a
that h e ha s tor n th e manuscrip t int o a thousan d piece s an
d tha t h e wil l
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 5 9
"do n o mor e work , fro m no w on " (ac t 3) . The a
"despairingly " ask s
what sh e wil l "hav e t o liv e for, " accuse s hi m o f "child-
murder, " an d
sees "nothin g bu t darkness " befor e her . Lovbor g i s als o i n
despair , fo r
he know s "i t won' t en d wit h las t night, " an d debaucher y n
o longe r
appeals to him: "she' s someho w broke n m y courage—my
defian t spirit. "
"To think, " say s Hedda , tha t tha t prett y littl e foo l shoul d

184. hav e influ -
enced a man' s destiny."Hedd a migh t hav e bee n abl e t o sav
e Lovbor g
had sh e reveale d tha t sh e wa s i n possessio n o f th e
manuscript , bu t sh e
allows hi m t o believ e i t i s lost . Whe n h e announce s tha t h
e want s "t o
make a n en d o f it, " Hedd a doe s no t tr y t o dissuad e hi m o
r produc e th e
manuscript bu t instea d give s hi m a pistol , urge s hi m t o us
e it , an d
enjoins hi m t o "le t i t b e beautiful. " Afte r Ejler t leaves , sh
e burn s th e
manuscript, callin g i t hi s an d Thea' s child .
Hedda's behavio r ca n b e explaine d a s a continuatio n o f he
r rivalr y
with The a an d o f he r desir e t o shap e a man' s destiny—fo r
il l i f no t fo r
good; bu t thes e ar e no t he r onl y motivations . Wit h th e
collaps e o f he r
dream o f triump h fo r Lovborg , an d vicariousl y fo r herself ,
Hedd a i s
confronted onc e mor e b y he r contradictor y needs , whic h sh
e no w ha s
no hop e o f fulfilling . She , too , i s i n despair , an d wishe s t
o mak e a n en d
of it . Sh e i s afrai d t o commi t suicide , however , partl y
because , a s Brac k
says a t th e end , "peopl e don' t do suc h things! " Afte r
Lovbor g disap -
points her , sh e develop s a ne w scenari o i n whic h h e wil l
commi t suicid e
in jus t th e wa y tha t sh e woul d lik e t o do , an d sh e wil l
glor y i n thi s ne w
form o f freedo m an d darin g an d i n he r ow n contributio n t

185. o it . Whe n
Brack announce s tha t Lovbor g ha s sho t himsel f throug h th
e heart ,
Hedda i s exultant: "I t give s me a sense of freedo m t o kno w
tha t a n ac t of
deliberate courag e i s stil l possibl e i n thi s world—a n ac t o
f spontaneou s
beauty" (ac t 4) . Hedd a feel s hersel f t o b e incapabl e o f suc
h a n act , bu t
Lovborg ha s don e i t fo r her , sh e thinks. Judge Brac k
destroy s he r "beau -
tiful illusion " b y revealing tha t Ejler t wa s accidentall y sho t
i n the bowel s
while demandin g hi s "los t child " i n Mademoisell e Diana' s
boudoir .
"How horrible! " exclaim s Hedda . "Everythin g I touc h
become s ludi -
crous an d despicable!—It' s lik e a curse! "
Hedda i s drive n t o kil l hersel f b y th e collaps e o f al l he r
solutions . Sh e
can n o longe r hop e t o gai n a sens e o f freedo m an d t o
satisf y he r suicida l
impulses vicariousl y throug h Lovborg , an d sh e i s put int o a
n impossibl e
position b y Judge Brack' s effor t t o blackmai l her .
As soo n a s sh e returns fro m he r weddin g journey , Brac k
begin s press -
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186. 60 | A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
ing fo r " a triangula r friendship " i n whic h h e wil l b e he r
love r (ac t z) .
Hedda welcome s Brack' s attentions , bu t give n he r fea r o f
scandal , a n
affair i s unthinkable . Thi s i s th e sam e Hedd a wh o ha d
draw n a gu n o n
Ejlert Lovbor g whe n h e wante d t o brin g thei r relationshi p
dow n t o
earth. Afte r confessin g t o Ejler t tha t sh e doe s no t lov e he
r husband , sh e
hastens t o add , "Al l th e same , n o unfaithfulness , remember
" (ac t z).
Brack welcome s Lovborg' s disgrac e afte r h e i s arreste d a t
Mademoisell e
Diana's becaus e h e sense s Ejler t a s a riva l an d hope s tha t
Hedda' s hom e
will b e close d t o him , lik e othe r "respectabl e house[s] " (ac
t 3) . His ai m
is to b e "cock-of-the-walk, " an d "fo r that, " h e tell s Hedda ,
" I wil l figh t
with ever y weapo n I ca n command. " Hedd a realize s tha t h
e i s " a
dangerous person " an d i s "exceedingl y glad " tha t h e ha s "n
o sor t o f
hold" ove r her .
Brack gain s a hol d ove r Hedda , however , whe n h e
recognize s th e
pistol wit h whic h Lovbor g wa s shot . Hedd a i s no w face d
wit h thre e
possibilities, al l o f whic h ar e unbearable . Brac k suggest s
tha t sh e ca n
declare th e pisto l t o hav e bee n stolen , bu t sh e say s tha t "i
t woul d b e

187. better t o die " tha n t o d o tha t (ac t 4) . Brac k dismisse s he r
speech : "On e
says suc h things—bu t on e doesn' t do them. " Wh y th e threa
t o f suicid e
here? Becaus e lyin g abou t havin g give n Lovbor g th e pisto l
i s a n ac t o f
cowardice tha t woul d exacerbat e he r self-hate ? I have no
bette r explana -
tion. I f th e polic e trac e th e weapo n t o Hedda , say s Brack ,
sh e wil l hav e
to appea r i n cour t wit h Mademoisell e Dian a an d explai n
wh y sh e gav e
it t o Lovborg : "thin k o f th e scanda l . . . . o f whic h yo u ar
e s o terrified. "
If Brack keep s quiet , however , th e weapo n wil l not b e
traced, an d Hedd a
will neithe r hav e t o li e nor b e expose d t o scandal . Thi s
means , however ,
that sh e will b e in Judge Brack' s power : "Subjec t t o you r
command s an d
wishes. N o longe r free—no t free ! . . . No , I won' t endur e
th e thought .
Never!"
Given he r psychologica l needs , Hedd a ca n neithe r def y
Brac k no r
submit t o him . Hedd a strike s u s a s a masterfu l perso n wh
o know s ho w
to ge t wha t sh e wants , bu t th e fac t i s tha t sh e i s extremel
y complian t
where propriet y i s concerned . Sh e coul d no t endur e th e los
s o f respect -
ability tha t woul d resul t fro m he r defianc e o f Brack .
Confine d t o th e
narrow rang e o f activitie s suitabl e t o a woma n o f he r
station , Hedd a

188. compensates fo r he r lac k o f contro l ove r he r destin y b y
manipulating th e
people aroun d her , an d especiall y b y seekin g t o influenc e
th e fat e o f a n
important man . Bein g subjec t t o Brack' s wishe s an d
command s woul d
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A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 6 1
render he r utterl y powerles s an d would b e as unendurable a s
the conse -
quences o f defiance .
Hedda's nee d fo r freedo m i s a s compensator y a s he r cravin
g fo r
power. Th e product o f a highly restrictiv e environmen t tha t
ha s allowe d
her fe w choices , sh e ha s a suppresse d desir e t o rebe l an d
a longin g fo r
liberty. As is typical o f detached people , sh e is hypersensitive
t o anythin g
that seem s t o imping e upo n her , suc h a s the expectation s o
f others , th e
march o f time , o r bein g touched . Sh e recoils fro m th e
gentle embrac e o f
Aunt Juliane : "Please ! Oh , pleas e le t m e go! " (ac t i ) . Sh e
canno t bea r
being pregnan t o r th e responsibilitie s tha t parenthoo d wil l
entail . Sh e
pursues a freedo m from constrain t rathe r tha n a freedo m to

189. fulfil l her -
self. She is much too alienated fro m hersel f an d dominated b
y her cultur e
to kno w wha t sh e reall y want s t o d o wit h he r life . Drive
n a s sh e i s by
both socia l an d psychologica l coercions , Hedda' s sens e o f
freedo m i s an
illusion, o f course , bu t i t i s essentia l t o he r t o preserv e it
. Give n he r
phobic reactio n t o ordinar y intrusions , expectations , o r
constraints , w e
can imagin e he r desperatio n a t th e prospec t o f bein g a t
Brack' s "bec k
and cal l fro m no w on" (ac t 4).
When Hedd a say s tha t sh e "won' t endure " th e though t o f
no t bein g
free, Brac k "hal f mockingly " replies , "Peopl e manag e t o ge
t used t o the
inevitable" (ac t 4). But since Brac k threaten s Hedda' s
compulsiv e need s
for respectability , fo r power , an d fo r freedom , sh e canno t
possibl y ge t
used t o this situation .
To mak e matter s worse , Jorge n an d The a begi n
reconstructin g Lov -
borg's manuscript , deprivin g Hedd a o f he r triump h ove r
The a an d put -
ting her even more int o Brack' s hands . Like Hedda, The a ha s
been tryin g
to liv e throug h Lovborg . H e acknowledge s he r a s th e co-
creato r o f hi s
new book , an d she follows hi m to town partl y ou t of anxiet y
an d partl y
because sh e wants t o b e wit h hi m whe n i t i s published : " I

190. wan t t o se e
you showere d wit h prais e an d honors—and , th e joy ! I wan
t t o shar e
that wit h you too!" (act 3). When Ejler t announce s tha t h e
has destroye d
his manuscrip t an d will d o no more work , The a feel s sh e
has nothing t o
live for. Her reaction t o the news o f Ejlert's deat h i s
remarkable. Instea d
of bein g stupefied b y shock an d grief, sh e digs his notes ou t
of the pocket
of he r dres s an d immediatel y begin s rewritin g th e boo k wit
h Jorgen .
Ejlert ma y b e dead , bu t Thea' s searc h fo r glor y i s alive .
Sh e has gotte n
from hi m wha t Hedd a neve r coul d an d i n th e proces s ha s
thwarte d
Hedda's effor t t o gain a sense o f power b y burning th e
manuscript .
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62 I A DOLL'S HOUSE A N D HEDDA GABLER
Thea's triump h i s al l th e mor e complet e becaus e sh e ha s
no w begu n
to influenc e Jorgen , wh o say s h e wil l devot e hi s lif e t o
rewritin g Ejlert' s
book. The a wil l mov e i n wit h Aun t Juliane , an d Jorge n
wil l spen d hi s
evenings ther e workin g wit h he r o n th e project . Whe n
Jorge n ask s

191. Brack t o kee p Hedd a compan y whil e h e i s away , Brac k
readil y agrees ,
anticipating " a ver y joll y time " (ac t 4) . "That' s wha t yo u
hope, " say s
Hedda fro m th e nex t room , "No w tha t yo u ar e cock-of-the-
walk. " The n
she shoot s herself .
Hedda's suicid e i s a desperat e ac t o f escape—fro m th e
collaps e o f he r
efforts t o fulfil l he r neuroti c need s fo r respectability ,
power , an d free -
dom, an d fro m th e unresolvabl e conflic t betwee n thes e
need s tha t ha d
led he r t o tr y t o liv e vicariousl y throug h Ejler t Lovborg .
Sh e i s fleeing
her self-hate , he r boredom , he r marriage , he r unwante d
pregnancy , an d
the prospectiv e burde n o f motherhood .
From Hedda' s perspective , he r suicid e i s als o a triumph , o
f th e sor t
she thought ha d bee n accomplishe d b y Lovborg. He r respons
e t o Brack' s
initial repor t tha t Ejler t ha d sho t himsel f throug h th e hear t
give s u s he r
view o f he r ow n act . "A t last, " sh e exclaims , " a dee d
wort h doing! " " I
know tha t Ejler t Lovbor g ha d th e courag e t o liv e hi s lif e
a s h e sa w it —
and t o en d i t i n beauty. " H e ha s "mad e u p hi s ow n
accoun t wit h life "
and don e "th e on e righ t thing " (ac t 4) . Whe n Hedd a learn
s th e trut h
about Lovborg' s death , sh e realizes tha t i f a n ac t o f
"deliberat e courage "

192. and "spontaneou s beauty " i s t o b e performed , sh e mus t d o
i t herself .
She has no t ha d th e courag e t o liv e her lif e a s sh e sa w it ,
bu t sh e escape s
her self-contemp t b y defying publi c opinio n an d behavin g
wit h darin g a t
last. Sh e woul d b e please d b y Brack' s commen t tha t "peopl
e don' t do
such things. " Sh e ends he r lif e beautifully , b y her standard s
a t least , wit h
a sho t i n th e temple . Sh e thwart s Judg e Brack , wh o ha d
counte d o n he r
cowardice, an d puncture s he r husband' s complacency . I n the
las t fleeting
moment o f he r life , sh e actualize s a n idealize d imag e o f
hersel f an d
becomes a person sh e can respect .
Ibsen ha s painte d a brillian t portrai t o f a neuroti c woman ,
a produc t
of he r restrictiv e society , wh o ca n escap e he r problem s an
d attai n th e
glory fo r whic h sh e i s searching onl y b y killing herself .
As w e ca n se e fro m th e precedin g discussions , althoug h
character s ca n
be identifie d a s displayin g on e o r anothe r o f Horney' s
defensiv e strate -
gies, the y ar e mixe d cases , no t t o b e though t o f simpl y i
n term s o f on e
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193. A Doll's House and Hedda Gable r | 6 3
personality type . Nor a Helme r i s strikingl y self-effacin g
throug h muc h
of th e play , bu t whe n he r predominan t solutio n fails , he r
aggressiv e an d
detached trend s emerge , revealing inne r conflict s tha t hav e
bee n ther e al l
along. Th e domineering , perfectionisti c Torval d ha s
dependenc y need s
that mak e hi m clin g t o Nor a a t th e end . Conflictin g trend
s ar e s o
evenly balance d i n Hedd a Gable r tha t i t i s difficul t t o sa y
whic h i s he r
predominant solution . Sh e i s extremel y detached , bu t sh e i
s als o ver y
compliant i n relatio n t o socia l conventions , an d ther e i s so
much aggres -
sion i n Hedd a tha t sh e i s mos t commonl y though t o f a s
manipulativ e
and domineering . Al l categorie s ar e reductive , o f course .
Horney' s ar e
least s o whe n the y ar e use d no t t o classif y character s bu t
t o revea l thei r
individuality an d inne r conflicts .
We ca n als o se e fro m ou r analyse s o f A Doll's House an
d Hedda
Gabler tha t a Horneya n approac h enable s u s t o understan d
motivatio n
and explai n behavio r eve n whe n w e hav e littl e o r n o
knowledg e o f a
character's childhood . W e kno w mos t abou t Nora' s histor y
becaus e o f
her reference s t o he r lif e wit h he r father . W e ca n utiliz e

194. th e informatio n
she supplies , bu t w e ar e no t overl y dependen t upo n it , an
d w e d o no t
have t o inflat e it s importance . W e kno w nothin g abou t
Torvald' s earl y
life an d no t muc h abou t Hedda's . Hedda' s problem s deriv e
i n par t fro m
the restriction s tha t he r cultur e place s o n a woma n o f he r
socia l class ,
but w e hav e almos t n o informatio n abou t he r earl y
experience , an d w e
really canno t sa y why sh e responds t o he r situatio n i n th e
particular wa y
that sh e does . Not al l women i n he r positio n wer e drive n t
o suc h sterile ,
destructive lives . Although w e kno w littl e abou t th e
childhood s o f thes e
characters, thei r personalit y structure s ar e portraye d i n
considerabl e
detail, an d wit h th e hel p o f Horney' s synchroni c theor y w
e ca n analyz e
them psychologicall y withou t havin g t o postulat e a histor y
tha t i s not i n
the text .
A Horneya n approac h help s u s t o understan d no t onl y th e
leadin g
characters o f thes e play s bu t als o th e relationship s o n whic
h the y ar e
focused. Th e interactio n betwee n Nor a an d Torval d become
s intelligibl e
only whe n w e se e ho w thei r defense s bot h harmoniz e an d
clash . Th e
relationship betwee n Hedd a an d Ejler t i s a t th e cente r o f
th e play , an d
we ca n appreciat e wh y Ejler t i s s o importan t t o Hedd a onl

195. y whe n w e
recognize ho w sh e trie s t o us e hi m t o escap e he r inne r
conflict s throug h
the vicariou s fulfillmen t o f he r needs .
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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
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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

197. 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

198. 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
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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

199. 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

200. 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

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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

202. 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

203. 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).
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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

204. of the divine within the family. The father's position in the
family as the
extended arm of God was strengthened by the Protestant
church. The
father had an obligation to represent both the Christian
patriarchal view
of life and, to a certain extent, to help carry out the church's
duties re
lated to evangelizing and establishing the faith within the
family. Through
Pastor Manders's role in Ghosts and the relationship
established between
Pastor Manders and the "diabolical" carpenter Engstrand, the
church's
natural authority becomes disengaged, and the church's
unequivocal fight
for the old family order becomes clear. The church is shown as
integrally
involved in the maintenance of the traditional patriarchal
authority and
a part of the established phallic order.
Engstrand provides the most elegant presentation of the
church's
position when he states in a conversation with R?gine at the
beginning
of the play:
ENGSTRAND. All right, I'm going. But you just have a talk
with him, coming in
there. He's the man to tell you what a child owes its father.
Because after all I
am your father, you know. I can prove it from the Parish
Register. (5: 354)
The one coming is Pastor Manders, who has allowed Engstrand

205. to be
recorded in the parish register as Regine 's father (rather than
Captain
Alving, the real father). The parish register, the official church
record,
is thus stripped of its credibility. It is "false" in its defense of
Captain
Alving's patriarchal order, and it becomes a defender of
Engstrand's
patriarchal exploitation of Regine. In the second act it is
revealed that
Mrs. Alving sought refuge with Pastor Manders when she
discovered
her husband's amoral behavior, but at that time Pastor Manders
nearly
chased her back to Captain Alving with these words: "Woman,
go back
to your lawful husband" (5: 385). Consequently, the Pastor
shows that
the "lawful order," as he calls the destructive marriage, takes
precedence
over all other concerns. In Ghosts Ibsen drives a wedge in the
relationship
between patriarchal authority and Christianity. Reference to the
parish
register can no longer spare the father at any price.
The problematization of fatherhood is reinforced a few years
later in
The Wild Duck, and it is this work I will focus on in the
remainder of this
article. Many have discussed the question of who the
protagonist actu
ally is in The Wild Duck. The play does not have one clear
protagonist,

206. as do several other Ibsen dramas. Is it Gregers Werle or is it
Hjalmar
Ekdal? Or is it Hedvig? Which of the characters possesses a
sufficient
tragic dimension to emerge as a representative of the central
gestalt in
the work? The title of the play makes us immediately think of
Hedvig,
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 821
but there is not just one wild duck in this drama; there are
many, as we
shall see. For this reason the play is difficult to interpret based
on the
traditional theory of tragic drama, which often takes the tragic
hero's
role as its point of departure.
In The Wild Duck, however, the focus is not on the individuals,
but on
particular relationships between people and the consequences
these have.
The family relationships, or the "family sorrows," are the
focus, and, more
precisely, the family represented through the father-child
relationship.
In the play we meet three real father figures in three father-
child rela

207. tionships: Werle-Gregers, Ekdal-Hjalmar, and Hjalmar-Hedvig.
Through
the drama, Ibsen illustrates three fathers by presenting three
different
forms of fatherhood. I call these three forms the patriarchal
father, the
fallen father, and the loving but helpless father. These are three
significant
forms of fatherhood in Ibsen's drama that correspond to actual
father
roles in Ibsen's time. One key aspect of Ibsen's dramas is the
manner in
which he weaves together these father roles. He does not
separate them
as three distinct forms of fatherhood, but instead demonstrates
how they
are interconnected through relationships, dissolutions,
continuities, and
discontinuities. The Wild Duck is especially effective at
illustrating the
significance that the various father roles may hold for the next
genera
tion. As in a novel, we can read of the life connections between
three
generations in this tightly constructed drama.
The Patriarchal Father
The patriarchal father appears in almost all of Ibsen's works.
We meet
him in an idealized form in the grand megalomaniac, Brand. He
acts as a
social pillar as Consul Bernick, who governs societal
development, suppos
edly in the best interests of society, along with the other public
officials.

208. Their decisions regarding important communal benefits,
however, prove
to be guided more by their own interests than by social
solidarity, and
in the process the children are nearly destroyed. The patriarchal
father
is also present as the caretaker of idyllic dollhouses, more
reminiscent
of fragile glass menageries than solid families. We also find
him in the
character of Dr. Stockman, who rebels in the name of truth
against the
outdated ideas and false games of society and the state,
believing in the
division between society and family, in blind faith, and that he
stands
alone when in reality he stands stronger as part of a community
at the
conclusion of the play than he ever had before.
The patriarchal father is also present in the characters of
Johannes
Rosmer, Dr. Wangel, Solness the contractor, Alfred Allmers,
and John
Gabriel Borkman, but he becomes increasingly unstable and
more akin
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822 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
to the fallen father. It may be said that there are no pure,

209. untarnished
patriarchal men in Ibsen's dramas. Some are more reliable than
others,
such as Dr. Stockmann, or Helmer at the conclusion of the play
when
he begins to see the truth, or Consul Bernick, who is saved in
the end
and thus is able to maintain his status in society. Indeed, it
appears that
Bernick is on the verge of becoming a genuine pillar of society
when
the curtain falls. But even Stockmann, Helmer, and Bernick do
not leave
the stage without a tarnished reputation, and in all three works
it is the
women who emerge as strong, free seekers of truth.
Reminiscent of Helmer and Bernick, old Werle in The Wild
Duck is a
patriarch willing to do anything to save his own skin, including
aban
doning his own son. But at the conclusion of the play, Werle
emerges
as the only one who seems capable of changing both his
attitudes and
perspective on life and, in his new marriage to Mrs. S0rby, the
only one
capable of creating a relationship of truth and openness in his
marriage.
As we will see later, though, there is reason to believe that in
this phase
of his life Werle has so little to lose that even truth and
openness can
serve his own selfish purposes.
In this phase of his career, Ibsen has a duel attitude toward

210. patriar
chy. He deprives the men of their dignity while he seems to
want to
give them the potential to create another type of masculinity,
one that
is both open and capable of listening. Werle represents this
type of du
ality. He is a typical authoritarian patriarch, who, in blind faith
in the
necessity of maintaining the patriarchal order, does whatever
he likes at
the expense of his loved ones, but when he is on the verge of
literally
going blind, he turns himself around and realizes his mistakes.
It may
appear that Ibsen gives Werle a second chance, but as we shall
see, this
is hardly the case.
At the opening of the play, we become acquainted with Werle,
both
as a "stud" who has had erotic escapades and as a father who,
in his
instrumental reason, has not publicly acknowledged for the past
sixteen
years that he actually has a son. The hired waiter Jensen says:
"I never
knew old Werle had a son" (6: 131). His estrangement from his
son is
demonstrated in a number of ways. For example, Werle has not
written
one personal word to his son during their sixteen-year
separation; instead,
their correspondence has been strictly businesslike. The family
life Ibsen
writes about is also rejected quite harshly by the son, Gregers,

211. when in
a conversation with his father in the first act he exclaims:
"When has
there ever been any family life here? Never as long as I can
remember!"
(6: 149).
Their family life has consisted of an ongoing battle between
Mr.
and Mrs. Werle, and the most important fight between the
couple is
for power over their son, Gregers. In this fight we recognize
gender
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 823
oriented positions: Mrs. Werle is emotional and long-suffering,
"sickly"
and "high-strung," as Werle calls her. Werle is rational and
authoritar
ian. The rationality emerges since the marriage was not based
on love,
but on economic motivation. Later it becomes apparent that
Werle had
miscalculated, and a large dowry did not accompany the
marriage. The
economic motivation is clear in Werle's persistent hate, as
expressed in
the drama by his bitter comment:

212. WERLE. . . . From being a child, you've always had a sickly
conscience. It's a
heritage from your mother, Gregers . . . one thing she did leave
you.
GREGERS, with a contemptuous smile. That must have been a
bitter pill to swallow
when you found you had miscalculated, after expecting her to
bring you a
fortune. (6: 196)
In the same conversation between father and son at the end of
the
third act, the father's authoritarian role also emerges. Gregers
says: "I
didn't dare. I was scared . . . too much of a coward. I can't tell
you how
frightened of you I was then and for a long time after, too" (6:
196).
Because Gregers was so frightened of his father, he stayed
away from
him for sixteen years.
From their respective sides of the Aristotelian gender
dichotomy, Mr.
and Mrs. Werle have fought their bitter fight?a fight that Mrs.
Werle
lost when she succumbed to alcoholism and an early death,
although she
won the fight for her child. She convinced Gregers to side with
her. In
the end, the loss of his son has cruel consequences for Werle,
who loses
his heir when Gregers rejects all his inheritance rights out of
contempt

213. for his father. It is often overlooked that Werle loses even more
than this.
He also loses his other potential heir, his illegitimate child,
Hedvig. When
Werle leaves a letter with the Ekdal family in which he offers
old Ekdal
one hundred kroner a month for the rest of his life, he also
makes this
offer to Hedvig, who would inherit this right and receive one
hundred
kroner a month thereafter. Through this act it appears that
Werle wants
to bind Hedvig closer to him and almost advance the
inheritance. When
Hedvig dies, this opportunity is also lost, and Werle finds
himself com
pletely alone again. His loneliness is also expressed in
particular passages
when he touches upon his own suffering. In a conversation with
Gregers,
he says: "I'm a lonely man Gregers; I've always felt lonely, all
my life; but
especially now that I'm getting on a bit in years" (6: 148). He
also says
later: "Laughter doesn't come so easily to a lonely man,
Gregers" (6:
150). Werle's authoritarian and economic rationality has not
achieved
any results. On the contrary, he has failed miserably. Lonely
and nearly
blind, he becomes marginalized and moves to H0ydalsverket
along with
his housekeeper, who has obviously hobnobbed with several of
the city's
upper-class and now will care for Werle until he dies.

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824 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
The fact that he moves to H0ydalsverket is an important cue for
the
interpretation of Werle's circumstances. H0ydalsverket
occupies a cen
tral position in the play. The place has a clearly negative
connotation,
both as the place where old Ekdal lived when he lost
everything and as
the place to which Gregers fled when he felt totally lost within
his own
family. H0ydalsverket is the place of outcasts, and it stands in
contrast to
and undermines the truth and openness that old Werle and Mrs.
S0rby
associate themselves with at the conclusion. If Werle is
analyzed apart
from the other characters in the play, it may appear that he
undergoes
a process of self-discovery, but in relation to the others, and
especially
from the perspective of fatherhood, it is clear that he loses
everything
and becomes marginalized. The fight between Mr. and Mrs.
Werle, or
a family drama based on economics rather than love, leads to
loss for
both husband and wife, to the son's blind, unrealistic idealism,

215. and,
ultimately, to the death of the illegitimate child.
At this point, I want to digress by viewing the drama in relation
to
a contemporaneous debate in order to emphasize how this issue
per
tained to many other figures other than Ibsen. In 1884, the
same year
that The Wild Duck was published, a fight about the family
occurred on
the political level. The Norwegian National Assembly debated
the issue
of separate property rights for married women. The issue of
women's
rights in general was being hotly debated at the time. That
same year
women were granted the right to pursue higher education, and
the fight
was at hand for the right of political participation and equal
rights for
women and men in marriage, both economically and legally.
The issue
of separate property rights was one of the important topics; the
right of
the mother to keep the children following divorce was another.
In 1883,
BJ0rnstjerne Bj0rnson had published his drama A Glove, and
the fight
over morality had also begun. In Bj0rnson's drama, the
housewife Svava
demands complete reciprocity between the spouses and a new
regimen
for the relationship between women and men. As Ibsen had
done in A
Doll's House, Bj0rnson had also taken sides, fighting the battle

216. for women's
rights and equality along with the first Norwegian feminists.
In 1884, the four central male voices for feminism in Norway
united
and wrote to the Norwegian National Assembly regarding the
issue of
separate property rights for married women. In a petition dated
April
12, 1884, Bj0rnson, Ibsen, Jonas Lie, and Alexander Kielland
wrote to
the Norwegian National Assembly requesting that women be
granted
separate property rights. They also criticized the Assembly for
its un
willingness to go all the way and make these rights
automatic?this in
response to the Assembly's proposal that women may have the
right to
separate property. In the petition, the four critics focus on the
relation
ship between economics and love, using it as the basis for their
critique
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 825
of the committee's proposal. The petition states the following
about
women: "She must know and feel that she enters into the
marriage with

217. the same rights as her husband. Not only she, but her husband
as well,
will morally benefit from this, and from the very beginning,
their lives
together will assume the proper sense of dignity. Also love, if
it exists,
will be supported by the feeling of equality."6
Ibsen endorsed this petition to the Norwegian National
Assemblyjust a
few weeks earlier in a letter to Bj0rnson dated March 23, 1884.
Suffused
with a lack of faith in men, politicians and farmers, the letter
concludes
with the following political vision: "If I could have my way at
home, then
all the unprivileged should unite and form a strong, resolute,
progressive
party, whose program would include nothing but practical and
productive
reforms?a very wide extension of the suffrage, the statutory
improvement
of the position of woman, the emancipation of national
education from
all kinds of medievalism, etc." (LS 229). The right to vote, the
position
of women, and the enlightenment are three key components of
Ibsen's
philosophy at this time. However, it is not only in Ibsen that
we find this
philosophy; all four Norwegian authors who signed the petition
to the
Norwegian National Assembly asserted similar ideas in their
political and
literary agendas. The position of women is not an isolated
problem, but

218. must be seen in the context of the desire of these modern,
groundbreak
ing authors for a departure from age-old conceptions and for
movement
toward enlightenment and a more genuine world.
In April of the same year that the petition was sent to the
Norwegian
National Assembly, Ibsen had also begun writing The Wild
Duck. Its
theme was the consequences of a failed marriage, in which the
issue of
economics and love played a key role. Let me attempt for just a
moment
to follow the flow of gender-political reflections that occur
from one
text to another. Just one month after the letter to Bj0rnson
dated April
21, Ibsen writes to his publisher, explaining that he has finally
started
work on his new play. The first act, which he soon will finish
and which
forms the exposition of the drama, deals with a marriage based
not on
love, but on economic motivations. In a letter to Hegel in June,
Ibsen is
finally able to report that his family drama is finished: "Dear
Councilor
Hegel, I am pleased to be able to inform you that I finished the
draft of
my new play [ The Wild Duck] yesterday. . . . 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. It will

219. certainly
provoke discussion, but it cannot possibly give offense to
anyone" (LS
231). Ibsen was correct. Although the work is a harsh critique
of the
bourgeois family's falseness and the patriarch's mendacity, the
transition
from politics to literature is actually a transition from
argumentative to
dialogical language. Because of the play's symbolic form and
contradic
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826 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
tory characters, the contemporary audience was confused and
uncertain
as to how to interpret the drama.
Nevertheless, a correspondence does exist between the social
and
literary events. The battle was over marriage and the survival
of the
patriarchal family structure. In this context, it is interesting
that the
patriarchy was fundamentally altered first in literary form.
Intellectuals
and authors led the critique of the authoritarian father and
hastened
his fall in the coming century.

220. The Fallen Father
The other form of fatherhood in The Wild Duck consists of the
relation
ship between old Ekdal and Hjalmar Ekdal. This father-son
relationship
is closely tied to Werle and the patriarchal father, both in that
the Ekdal
family belonged to the traditional patriarchal bourgeois elite
and because
the Ekdal family in Ibsen's play is continually positioned in
direct rela
tion to old Werle, symbolically as well as literally.
The fallen father has received little attention in research,
although
this form of fatherhood was probably not too unusual in the
1800s. This
omission has a likely cause: the patriarch who does not master
the task
of building a masculinity that is solid, acceptable, and strong,
and who
thus falls by the wayside, leaves little source material about his
own de
mise. While bourgeois men write autobiographies about their
masculine
achievements, there are very few who write extensively about
their own
failures and unmanliness. Rather, the act of falling is addressed
in terms
of what happens to you if you do not maintain a masculine
character, an
extremely important issue for men in bourgeois society of the
1800s.

221. In his book A Man's Place, John Tosh, one of the foremost
international
researchers on the history of fatherhood, does not offer any
reflections on
those men who do not succeed, whose life is characterized by
unmanliness.
Instead, he operates with four forms of fatherhood in the
bourgeoisie
of the 1800s: the absent father, the distant father, the tyrannical
father,
and the intimate father.7 According to Tosh's work, Werle
would be a
typical distant father, emotionally reserved, with a touch of the
tyran
nical father. I will return to the intimate father in the next
fatherhood
relationship in Ibsen's play.
There is a much-discussed fallen father in the Norwegian
material
from the 1800s, though, namely Ibsen's own father, Knud
Ibsen, a suc
cessful businessman in Skien, who married Manchen, the
daughter of
the well-to-do John Andreas Altenburg. When Knud Ibsen
received an
inheritance following the death of his father-in-law in 1830, the
Ibsen
family became one of the most prosperous in Skien. However,
just a few
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222. IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 827
years later in 1834?35, Knud Ibsen lost the entire fortune.
Partly due to
overinvestment and poor management and partly due to an
economic
recession, the family was forced to give up all its property. The
family
had to move from their patrician villa in Skien to a smaller
house in the
country. The father never recovered from this fall from their
economic
and social class. He held a few odd jobs after this until he died
a poor,
lonely alcoholic in Skien in 1877. No documents were left that
indicate
how this must have felt to the young Ibsen, only how his father
struggled
to provide for his family economically.
Henrik Ibsen, who was the family's eldest son, left his father
immedi
ately after his confirmation in 1843 and traveled to Grimstad.
He prob
ably made a visit home in 1850 before leaving for Christiania.
After this,
father and son never saw each other again. Nor did Henrik ever
send
a letter or greetings directly to his father. In fact, it appears
that in the
twenty-seven years from the time that he moves until his father
dies, he
sends only two real letters to his family in Skien, one to his
sister when

223. his mother dies in 1869 and one to his uncle when his father
dies in
1877.8 This must be regarded as very seldom from a talented
author's
hand, and it could be seen as evidence of the pain the father's
downfall
inflicted on the son. However, nowhere does Henrik write
about his
relationship to his father, and it seems that Henrik attempts to
extin
guish his father and his family from his own history rather than
trying
to restore his father's honor.9
While historical documentation on Knud and Henrik Ibsen
lacks reflec
tion on the downfall, it nonetheless tells indirectly of the great
emotional
cost of such a downfall: social marginalization, loss of face and
position,
isolation and loneliness, cooling of family relationships
(between mother
and father, as well as between father and son), and finally
alcoholism and
abject poverty. In this context, the term unmanliness is
relevant. Through
loss of social position, the father loses both his masculine
strength and
his patriarchal authority within the family, which when
combined with
alcohol abuse reinforces the father's unmanliness. Strength,
endurance,
steadfastness, and decisiveness were essential characteristics
for men in
the 1800s, and men who showed these characteristics were

224. viewed as
strong and moral, while men who lost their strength or
steadfastness
were quickly seen as morally weak. This made it difficult for
men such
as Knud Ibsen to regain their position.
Henrik Ibsen's relationship to his father emerges, though, in the
continual problematizing of fatherhood throughout his works,
making
his dramas fascinating reading from the perspective of
fatherhood. The
fallen father is a pervasive figure in Ibsen's works. In Peer
Gynt he is the
father of Peer, John Gynt, who drinks and loses his entire
inheritance,
making his son fatherless and heirless. The contractor Solness
falls liter
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828 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
ally into a highly effective Ibsen-like irony combining
megalomania and
acrophobia. Ibsen is most earnest in his description of the
fallen father
through his characterization of John Gabriel Borkman, who
locks him
self in his own house for seven years following his catastrophic
financial

225. escapades. He sits just as deadlocked in his patriarchal self-
understanding
as the ore in the mountain, and he is only willing to see his son
if he
promises to restore his father's honor. The most amenable of
the fallen
fathers is possibly old Ekdal in The Wild Duck.
Old Ekdal experiences a greater fall than Knud Ibsen. He is
prosecuted
for illegal logging, imprisoned for several years, and returns a
broken
man. His punishment is even harder to bear because his partner
and
friend, Werle, lets him down by allowing him to take all the
blame for
the illegal logging. He has been both punished and betrayed,
and upon
his return he finds that the man who betrayed him has become
one of
the city's most prominent men. His opportunities for restitution
are
few. He does get some odd jobs, even from Werle, but he seeks
isolation
in the attic and drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Old Ekdal has
lost his
masculinity and tries to restore it metaphorically by putting on
his old
lieutenant's uniform once in a while and going on an
illusionary hunt
in the attic.
His son, Hjalmar Ekdal, is also greatly affected by his father's
down
fall. In a conversation with Gregers, he explains that it was like

226. a solar
eclipse when his father was imprisoned. "When they had taken
him
away, and he sat there under lock and key?oh, that was a
terrible time
for me, I can tell you. I kept the blinds lowered at both
windows. When
I looked out and saw the sun shining the same as usual, I
couldn't un
derstand it. I saw people walking about the streets, laughing
and talking
about things of no importance. I couldn't understand it. I felt
that all
creation ought to have come to a standstill, like an eclipse" (6:
187).
The comparison to a solar eclipse is an apt picture of the life he
has
lived since his father's downfall. The eclipse overshadowing
his life has
touched both the external and internal aspects of his life. He
withdrew
behind the blinds when his father was imprisoned, he has since
moved
into the dark attic with his own family, and we come to know
him as a
person with amazingly little self-insight and inflated notions of
his own
role as provider and of his masculinity. Over the years the
critics have
used many different adjectives to describe Hjalmar's
helplessness. J0rgen
DinesJohansen calls his language form "egocentric and self-
pitying," thus
emphasizing how self-pity and egocentrism are bedfellows.10
Hjalmar's
self-absorption falls into a totally different category than old

227. Werle's
authoritarian egoism. Therefore, it is not his striking
egocentrism, but
his comical way of taking himself too seriously that makes him
a rather
pathetic and wretched fellow.
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 829
Hjalmar's comical features are so obvious that when these are
combined
with Dr. Relling and the theologian Molvik the work nearly
tips over
into a character comedy. Hjalmar is exposed to the public, who
smiles
and laughs from the first moments at Hjalmar's lack of self-
insight and
pitiful attempts to be something. Ibsen is so aware of this fact
that in a
letter to theater director Hans Schr0der upon the first
production of
the drama at Christiania Theater, he stresses that Hjalmar must
not be
played in an explicitly comical manner; otherwise the tragic
aspect of
the drama will easily be lost: "This part must definitely not be
rendered
with any touch of parody not with the faintest suggestion that
the actor
is aware that there is anything funny about his remarks. He has

228. a warm
and sympathetic voice, as Relling says, and that should be
maintained
above all else. His sentimentality is genuine, his melancholy
charming in
its way?not a bit of affectation" (LS 242). This creates a strong
ambiva
lence in the character. Clearly comical, but utterly without self-
insight
into his own comic effect, and at the same time, clearly
pathetic, but
apparently with great self-confidence. In the middle of this
ambivalence
hang the blinds Hjalmar talks about, which he has drawn closed
over his
being and which make his inner life bear the traces of a solar
eclipse.
These blinds also seem to make their mark on the public and
readers.
The parody is so striking that one smiles knowingly and
patronizingly
with the self-pitying Hjalmar. Most critics also stop their
analysis with the
persistently helpless character of Hjalmar, seeing little of the
vulnerability
and pain in the figure behind the blinds.11
Like Gregers, Hjalmar feels excluded by society. Both view
themselves
as the thirteenth person at the dining table, unwanted and
without a
place in the social network. Gregers has hidden in
H0ydalsverket for
sixteen years, while Hjalmar has hidden behind the blinds his
entire
life. And they are both strongly affected by their relationship to

229. their
fathers. Both are deeply wounded personalities who have
partially sunk
to the bottom and partially done what they can to resurface:
Hjalmar
with his fabrication of a great discovery he is going to make,
and Gre
gers by saddling others with the claim of the ideal. Hjalmar
intends to
earn back the money and restore his family's lost honor through
mate
rial restoration while Gregers intends to restore the Werle
family's lost
morale through the good cause. They are both wounded ducks,
and
Ibsen's drama does not give them the opportunity to rise up
from the
depths. The influence of their fathers is so powerful that the
sons cannot
liberate themselves from it.
However, there is an essential difference between Hjalmar's
and
Gregers's relationships with their fathers. While Hjalmar shows
caring
and love toward his father, Gregers hates his father so much
that he
could imagine spitting on his grave. Hjalmar uses many
different terms
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230. 830 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
of endearment for his father, but generally he addresses him as
"father,"
acknowledging the relationship between them. Also, since his
father was
released from prison, Hjalmar has housed him and partially
provided
for him. Hjalmar's plan to restore the family honor is also
aimed directly
at his father, so that he can once again live a life of dignity.
Hjalmar
behaves exactly the opposite of what we saw in Ibsen's
relationship to
his own father. While Ibsen leaves his father at an early age
and never
sees or contacts him again, Hjalmar and his father seek out
each other
in their sorrow over the father's downfall. Hjalmar's
helplessness is not
caused by a damaged relationship to this father, but rather by
the father
pulling his son down with him so that Hjalmar does not have
the ability
to see either himself or the world in a realistic way. The
relationship
between them and their flight from the world are shown clearly
at the
beginning of the third act when together they seek refuge in the
attic,
a protected little paradise far from the difficult demands of the
outside
world. It also turns out to be a place where Hjalmar can work,
be active,
and create something, while leaving most of the real
work?photogra

231. phy?to Gina and Hedvig.
Hjalmar's relationship to both his father and Hedvig is unusual.
He is
the only man in the drama, and one of the few in all of Ibsen's
works,
who openly expresses love. For this reason, this part must be
taken seri
ously, and I will attempt to do just that in the next aspect of
fatherhood
brought forth in The Wild Duck.
The Loving but Helpless Father
Many Ibsen critics have taken Gregers's plan in relation to the
Ekdal
family too literally. That is, a genuine idealism lies at the
bottom of his
playacting, and he knows the truth about the Ekdal family's
false founda
tion. Although Hjalmar believed that it was true love that
brought him
together with Gina, according to Gregers it was his father who
brought
them together to save his own skin. The child whom Hjalmar
loves is not
his own, but rather old Werle's. Nobody doubts that Gregers
wants the
truth to be revealed and through this revelation to form the
basis for a
genuine marriage. Not even Gina doubts Gregers's good
intentions at
the end of the fourth act, after his plan becomes clear and the
Ekdal
family begins to unravel.

232. GREGERS. You do believe I meant it all for the best, Mrs.
Ekdal?
GINA. Yes, I dare say you did. But may God forgive you, all
the same. (6: 219)
However, there is a much better reason to doubt that Gregers's
discourse
is the truest one in this work. Everything suggests that Werle is
Hedvig's
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 831
biological father and that Werle has actively manipulated the
situation
so that Hjalmar is prepared to marry Gina, but this is not the
only true
discourse in the drama. The other true narrative is, in fact, that
Hjalmar
clearly married Gina for love and that he has always regarded
Hedvig as
his own daughter, loving her more than anything else in the
world. Viewed
from his perspective and the opportunities available to him,
Hjalmar has
achieved a good marriage based on love rather than economic
motives,
in stark contrast to the marriage of old Werle.
Rekdal has pointed out how The Wild Duck is constructed in
spatial

233. terms, building upon Erik 0sterud's thorough explanation of
how the
play is visually constructed in tableaux.12 Two houses are set
up facing
each other: Werle's house with a dark workroom in the
foreground and
a large, well-lit, elegant living room in the background, and
Hjalmar's
house with a workroom and living room in the foreground and
the dark
attic in the background. The green lampshades in both houses
tie the
stages together. While the one house has plenty of food and
drink, the
other house saves on butter to make ends meet. The rooms,
therefore,
connect the two houses, but the Ekdal family house is an
inversion of
old Werle's.
The question is what kind of meaningful conclusions can we
draw
from this? Rekdal points out how Hjalmar oscillates between
the two
stages. In the one, he is practically a clown for the others at the
party at
Werle's house. At home, he turns everything around and
becomes a hero
in his own narrative of how he put everybody in their place.
Hjalmar's
position as a social outcast is obvious, but it is questionable
whether it
is possible to draw the conclusion that Rekdal does; that is,
that the
Ekdal family home is a "dramatization of the family ideal as

234. illusion . . .
a counterfeit of reality" (SG 141). Nothing in Ibsen's stage
descriptions
suggests that home is a counterfeit of reality. On the contrary,
his stage
descriptions clearly indicate that even though this home is
indeed poor,
it has a good atmosphere. The stage directions at the beginning
of the
second act state: "The studio is cheaply but pleasantly
furnished" (6:
151). The same applies to the attic. The stage directions
consistently
invoke positive associations. The moon shines in clearly, or the
sunshine
streams through the windows. Not until the beginning of the
last act,
after Gregers has committed his fatal act, does the atmosphere
change.
The stage directions now state: "Hjalmar Ekdal's studio in the
cold grey
light of morning, wet snow is lying on the large panes of the
skylight"
(6: 222). Gregers's story of truth brings sadness into the home.
Similarly, the relationship between Gina, Hedvig, and Hjalmar
(and old
Ekdal) is characterized by solidarity and a great deal of trust
and care.
There is love within the Ekdal family, in contrast to the Werle
family. In
a conversation with Gregers in the fifth act, after Gregers has
disclosed
Werle's plot against the family, Hjalmar exclaims:

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832 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
HJALMAR. I can't tell you how I loved that child. I can't tell
you how happy I
felt every time I came home to my modest room and she would
come running
across to me, with her poor sweet, strained little eyes. (6: 235)
HJALMAR. . . . Oh, I can't tell you how much I loved her!
How it would have
given me supreme happiness just to have taken her by the hand
and led her
along, as one leads a child that is afraid of the dark through a
great empty
room! (6: 236)
There is little in the play to suggest that Hjalmar is not telling
the truth.13
In the second act, after he has come home from the party at
Werle's, he
says: "What though we have to pinch and scrape in this place,
Gina! It's
still our home. And this I will say: it is good to be here" (6:
161).
Hedvig's relationship to her father is also shown in a clearly
positive
light. She runs to meet him, sits on his lap, expresses love for
him, and
demonstrates this in her actions. Hedvig represents what

236. Anders Wyller
calls "the longing for love in Ibsen."14 She manifests purity
and goodness,
always seeking out love. Hedvig is a product of the family she
grows up
in, and her feelings of love are spawned from the Ekdal family
and no
other. While Gregers and Hjalmar are each in their own way
negatively
affected by their childhoods, Hedvig is the exact opposite. She
has grown
up with love and expresses love.
Gregers does not see this. He is so deprived of love that he is
not able to
see love when it is present. His admission of the truth is,
therefore, based
on blindness to the truth that is right in front of him?the Ekdal
family's
relative happiness. And it is in this context that we must
understand the
inversion of the stage rooms. The Werle family is wealthy, but
loveless,
while the Ekdal family is poor, but filled with love and
warmth. Werle is
characterized by a patriarch's rationality and emotional
absence, while
Hjalmar is continually present, overemotional, and nonrational.
Werle's
choice of a spouse was based on economics, Hjalmar's on
love.15
This meaningful inversion is shown in several contexts in the
drama.
The wild duck is shot by Werle, but saved and given life by the
Ekdal

237. family. Old Ekdal is destroyed by his collaboration with Werle,
but is
given a certain dignity in the attic with Hjalmar and Gina. Gina
is abused
by Werle and saved by Hjalmar. Hedvig is Werle's illegitimate
child, but
is given a genuine and sincere father through Hjalmar. Even
Gregers
wants to be saved by the Ekdal family. He is completely
destroyed in the
Werle house. Fleeing from his father's house, he becomes a
tenant of,
and wants to be picked up by, the Ekdal family. In a
conversation with
Gina, he says: "I hope I shall be like the wild duck and . . ." (6:
171).
Wounded, he is thrown out of Werle's house and seeks to enter
the
warmth of the Ekdal family. He also wants to be picked up and
given
warmth and comfort, in the same way as all the other wild
ducks taken
in by the Ekdal family.
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 833
Everyone taken in by the Ekdal family enjoys being there. This
is also
underscored in the drama when the wild duck is introduced to
Gregers

238. for the first time, with special mention that the bird thrives so
well in
the attic. It is this contentment that Gregers both seeks out and
destroys.
In some respects, we can talk about Hjalmar's fatherhood as a
form of
"intimate fatherhood," to use Tosh's characterization of
fatherhood forms
in the 1800s. "The intimate father set more store by the
transparency
of spontaneous relations than by the disciplines of restraint.
Through
anxieties about the future and tensions between the parental
roles, the
intimate father held to the value of tenderness and familiarity,
both to
himself and his children."16 It is clear that familial values are
the only
thing of significance to Hjalmar. Within the family he has
value; outside
he is practically nothing.
Hjalmar thus plays a double role in the drama. On the one
hand, he
is the unintentionally comical, self-absorbed, unhappy clown
that most
of the critics focus on. On the other hand, he has helped to
create a
family of warmth and love, where all types of wild wounded
ducks seek
refuge. It is this other role that no Ibsen critics have
commented on and
that becomes clear only through the perspective of fatherhood.
However, it should not be ignored that Hjalmar's ability to care
is lim

239. ited at times. His self-pity sometimes makes it difficult for him
to show
real caring. He forgets to bring something tasty to Hedvig from
the party
at old Werle's as he promised, and asks her to be satisfied with
a menu
instead. He is not willing to take responsibility for her eyes
when she
takes over his job to earn money for the family, so that he can
go up to
the dark attic: "But don't ruin your eyes! D'you hear? I'm not
taking any
responsibility; you have to take the responsibility yourself.
Understand?"
(6: 179) Hjalmar is not a mature, responsible father. He likes to
be seen
as the father in the house, but he does not act with the authority
that
would indicate that he, in fact, is the father. In many ways, he
is truly "a
man with a childish disposition," as Relling points out. He
trusts others
with an absolute na?vet? and changes according to whom he is
talking.
Dines Johansen makes a crucial point when he brings up this
point about
Hjalmar's dialogue: "However, even if the properties, function,
and pur
pose of his way of speaking are definable, the content of his
speech, in
contradistinction to the other characters, changes according to
the other
party to the dialogue. Especially Relling and Gregers influence
him by sug
gesting subjects and even vocabularies that are mirrored in his
thoughts

240. and speech. In this respect Ekdal is a successor of Peer Gynt,
and one
can peel the onion without finding any core."17 The
consequence of this
is that it becomes difficult to talk about Hjalmar as egotistical
in the true
meaning of the word since we can hardly speak of the presence
of any
ego in Hjalmar at all. When Hjalmar pulled down the blinds,
his mind
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834 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
and soul remained undeveloped, and thus we meet a childish
disposition
with the same longing for love as Hedvig. As a grown person
who tries
to act like an adult, he becomes cowardly and helpless, largely
guided
by the whims and suggestions of others. Hjalmar does not only
believe
in Relling and Gregers. He believed just as much in Werle.
Throughout
the entire drama, we meet a person who is generally subject to
the whims
and lies of others (which he does not manage to see through),
except
at home, where he attempts to play the role of the father. It is
thus a

241. loving, but helpless father role that he plays.
A reading such as this, emphasizing Hjalmar's ability to love,
makes
the tragic aspect of the play emerge even more clearly. Hjalmar
becomes
more than a self-absorbed idiot without the ability to
understand what is
happening. In his own way he has tried to achieve a genuine
marriage and
give Hedvig a life of love. Gregers not only leads Hedvig into
death?he
also kills the attempt to establish a family based on love.
Hjalmar thus
becomes even more of a tragic figure, first subjected to old
Werle's game,
then exposed to Gregers's game, which he believes in just as
much.
This plays out most tragically when Gregers cannot restrain
himself,
but must immediately claim victory when the shot is heard
from the attic:
"She wanted to sacrifice the most precious thing she had in the
world,
for your sake. Then, she thought, you couldn't help loving her
again"
(6: 238). Hjalmar accepts this fatal sacrifice and immediately
forgives
Hedvig. He believes just as easily in Gregers's proposition as in
Werle's.
The tragedy lies in this combination of Gregers's false idealism
(when
he says "she thought," as if it were her own mad idea) and
Hjalmar's

242. lack of inner strength and sense of responsibility.
As Dines Johansen has pointed out, the result is that the play
concludes
with two lonely couples with no heirs and, consequently, two
families that
become extinct.18 Therefore, the Ekdal family is the
personification of
the patriarchy as comic tragedy and a portrait of the
infeasibility of the
loving father role at the end of the 1800s.
University of Oslo
notes
1 See D. Russell Davis, "The Death of the Artist's Father:
Henrik Ibsen," British Journal
of Medical Psychology 46 (1973); Linn Konrad, "Father's Sins
and Mother's Guilt: Dra
matic Responses to Darwin," in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed.
James Redmond (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sydney Mendel, "The
Revolt Against the Father: The
Adolescent Hero in Hamlet-and The Wild Duck," Essays in
Criticism 14, no. 2 (1964): 171-78;
and Wolfgang Sohlich, "Ibsen's Brand: Drama of the Fatherless
Society," Journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism (Spring 1989). One would expect to find
issues related to fatherhood
in analyses of Ibsen like Atle Kittang, Ibsens heroisme: Fr?
Brand til N?r vi d0de v?gner (Oslo:
Gyldendal, 2002); Joan Templeton, Ibsen's Women
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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243. 2018 00:47:10 UTC
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IBSEN AND FATHERHOOD 835
1997) ; Fredrik Engelstad, Kj rlighetens irrganger: Sinn
ogsamfunn i Bj0rnsons ogIbsens diktning
(Oslo: Gyldendal, 1992); Vigdis Ystad, "?livets endel0se
g?de": Ibsens dikt og drama (Oslo:
Aschehoug, 1996); and Per Thomas Andersen, "Stormen fra
fjellet," in Fra Petter Dass til
Jan Kjcerstad: Studier i diktekunst og komposisjon (Oslo:
Cappelen, 1997), but, in fact, these
works do not discuss fatherhood.
2 See the chapter, "Ibsen: Do Fathers Know Best?" in Ross
Shideler, Questioning the Father:
From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press,
1999).
3 Anne Marie Rekdal, Skolens gjenganger [The School's
Ghosts] (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,
2004) (hereafter cited in text as SG).
4 Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 6,
trans, and ed. James McFarlane
(London: Oxford University Press, 1960); Ibsen, Ghosts, in
Oxford Ibsen, vol. 5, trans, and
ed. McFarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). All
references to The Wild Duck
and Ghosts are taken from The Oxford Ibsen (hereafter cited in
text by volume and page
number).
5 Ibsen, Ibsen's Letters and Speeches, ed. Evert Sprinchorn

244. (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964), 231 (hereafter cited in text as LS).
6 Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson, Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie, and
Alexander Kielland, Skrivelse til
Stortinget ang: gifte kvinners s reie [Letter to the Norwegian
National Assembly Regarding
Separate Property Rights for Married Women] (Oslo:
Stortinget, document no. 92).
7 John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class
Home in Victorian England
(London: Yale University Press, 1999), 93 ff.
8 Else H0st comments on these letters in the last chapter of her
comprehensive analysis
of The Wild Duck. The chapter is entitled "Venst0p" and deals
entirely with Ibsen's relation
ship to his own family. H0st, Vildanden av Henrik Ibsen (Oslo:
Aschehoug, 1967), 204 ff.
9 In addition to H0st, Robert Ferguson, Oskar Mosfjeld, and
Bergliot Ibsen also stress
that Henrik had a strained relationship with his father, filled
with bitterness and pain.
Robert Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen, mellom evne oghigen (Oslo:
Cappelen, 1996); Oskar Mosfjeld,
Henrik Ibsen og Skien: En biografisk og litteratur-psykologisk
Studie (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1949); Ber
gliot Ibsen, De tre: erindringer om Henrik Ibsen, Suzannah
Ibsen, Sigurd Ibsen (Oslo: Gyldendal,
1948).
10 J0rgen Dines Johansen, "The Wild Duck: A Play About
Language and Understanding,"
in Ibsen, Tragedy, and the Tragic, ed. Astrid Saether (Oslo:
Centre for Ibsen Studies, 2003), 85.
This article operates with seven different ways of speaking in
The Wild Duck, with Hjalmar's
egocentrism being one of these.

245. 11 Perhaps Else H0st goes farthest in her condescending view
of Hjalmar, characterizing
him as a "loafer, windbag and coward who does not dare to
look reality in the eyes and
cannot pull himself together to take resolute action." H0st,
Vildanden av Henrik Ibsen, 52,
my translation.
12 Rekdal, Skolens gjenganger, 138; Erik 0sterud, "Henrik
Ibsen's Theatre Mask: Tableau,
Absorption and Theatricality in The Wild Duck," in Theatrical
and Narrative Space (Aarhus:
Aarhus University Press, 1998).
13 Bj0rn Hemmer is a good example of one of many critics
who accepts Gregers's story
and who does not see Hjalmar's perspective. Therefore,
Hjalmar's ability to love must also
be ridiculed. Hemmer makes the following comment to the
quotation above: "As the audi
ence we are first and foremost a witness to Hjalmar's selfish
and rather pathetic attempt
to explain to Gregers that Hedvig after all has been central to
his life. It is understandable
that he is shaken and fears that Hedvig will perhaps prefer a
life with completely differ
ent opportunities, if the offer should come from her real father.
All of this is reasonable
enough. But in this fatherhood tragedy he tries to play, Hjalmar
does not convince anyone.
He reveals himself yet again as a rather banal, pompous person.
And his rhetorical revers
als still cannot conceal the fact that Hedvig means a great deal
to him. He does not have
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246. All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
836 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
much else of real significance in his life." Hemmer, Ibsen:
Kunstnerens vei (Oslo: Vigmostad
Bj0rke, 2003), 320, my translation.
14 Anders Wyller, "Villanden: En innledning og en kritikk" [
The Wild Duck: An Introduction
and Critique], Edda (1936), my translation.
15 If anyone should be subjected to Gregers's critique, it is
Gina, who is the only true liar
in the story (except for old Werle, who is exposed during the
drama). Surprisingly, Gina
escapes criticism, even by the critics, who discuss her in
friendly, understanding terms.
One example is Toril Moi, who, in her otherwise excellent
article on The Wild Duck, turns
Gina into a heroine: "In my view, Gina is a veritable saint of
the everday . . . and I come
very close to idealizing her." Moi does not recognize that one
possible reason Gina is so
cautious and timid compared to other female characters in
Ibsen is that she carries with
her a veritable lie. Moi, "'It was as if he meant something
different from what he said?all
the time': Language, Metaphysics, and the Everyday in The
Wild Duck," New Literary History
33, no. 4 (2002): 655-86.
16 Tosh, A Man's Place, 99.
17 Dines Johansen, "Play About Language and Understanding,"
91.
18 Dines Johansen, "Play About Language and Understanding,"
98. This assumes that

247. Gregers does what he says he will do and takes his own life.
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Contents[817]81881982082182282382482582682782882983083
1832833834835836Issue Table of ContentsNew Literary
History, Vol. 37, No. 4, Attending to Media (Autumn, 2006),
pp. 685-852Front MatterNaturalism and Narrative, or, What
Computers and Human Beings Can't Do [pp. 685-706]The
Metropolis and Mental Life in the Novel [pp. 707-724]Moving
Tales: Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theater [pp.
725-738]Notes toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the
Evocation of the past in Two European "Heritage" Films [pp.
739-760]Taking "Seinfeld" Seriously: Modernism in Popular
Culture [pp. 761-776]The Black Arts Movement and the
Genealogy of Multimedia [pp. 777-794]A Discussion of Ibsen's
"The Wild Duck"Animal, Magnetism, Theatricality in Ibsen's
"The Wild Duck" [pp. 797-816]Ibsen and Fatherhood [pp. 817-
836]Commentary: Family Analysis [pp. 837-843]Commentary:
Animalism and Fatherhood [pp. 845-847]Books Received [pp.
851-852]
Shafiuddin Ahmad
Angela Gawel
The Politics of Money: Incomplete Feminism in A Doll's House
1
Ibsen criticism in recent decades has shown a marked tendency
to adopt ;
generally ahistorical stance. With respect to A Doll's House
canonize<

248. Ibsen criticism often makes the claim that the play is concerned
more witl
the process of individuation and self-discovery than with
feminism. Tht
question of women's rights in A Doll's House has been regarded
as a "meta·
phor for individual freedom" (Brustein 105); the play's central
concern hru
been identified as the "reality" beyond sexual difference
(Gilman 65); tht:
theme of the work is not women's rights, we are told, but
individual self.
discovery (Meyer 457). This hermeneutic drive to unveil the
meaning of A
Doll's House represents, in the words of Joan Templeton, "a
gentlemanly
backlash" (29) against the original understanding of the play as
having fot
its subject the "woman question."
Within a predominantly male critical tradition, this "backlash"
strikes
against the "feminist" view of A Doll's House taken by Ibsen's
contempo-
rary critics and those close to his time, for these critics never
failed to
classify A Doll's House as a play about the "woman question."
Contempo-
rary epithets for lbsen2 included "A Prophet of New
Womanhood" and "A
Pioneer of the Woman Movement." Early criticism hailing A
Doll's House
as a feminist work was nevertheless limited by its incapacity to
look beyond
the theatrical and emotional furor the play often engendered.
Notwithstand-

249. ing the validity of the observation that more recent lbsen
criticism has
indeed shown signs of "backlash," an unqualified recuperation
of A Doll's
House as a feminist text fails to recognize the incomplete
feminism of A
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 171
Doll's House, since it ignores the social, historical, and
ideological
implications of the play.
It is relatively easy to see that A Doll's House should not be
considered
a single-mindedly feminist play merely because contemporary
reviewers
and commentators considered it so. While the play does echo
Mary
Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, the political subtext of the
play calls
for a cautious pause to examine the ways in which the
contemporary
feminist position has been revised by Ibsen 's vision. Arbitrary
isolation of
a few "textbook" speeches from the intricate context of the play
to highlight
a particular observation is a seductive trap critics, gyno- or
otherwise, must
avoid. One might say, after sporadically looking at the exchange
Henry V
has with Bates and Williams (Henry V, IV.i), that Henry Vis
about
Shakespeare's passionate denunciation of kingship, despite the

250. fact that
some images of regal authority are quite disinterestedly
examined in the
play. Likewise, we must consider the whole context of Nora's
speeches and
departure. Clearly, by the time she slams the door of the doll's
house both
her personality and the concept of the family have been
transformed. Yet
underneath that alteration of relations, the play remains an
ideologically
unaltered discourse.
One pertinent example of a late nineteenth-century "new
woman"
inscribed within an insidious alternative is George Meredith's
Diana
Warwick of Diana of the Crossways (1885). After abandoning
her ill-
chosen husband and winning a lawsuit against him, Diana
establishes her
own social position as an independent writer. She falls in love
with a
politician, however, and having run into debt providing him
with entertain-
ing evenings, in desperate need of money, she betrays him and
her
government by selling a state secret to the press. Chastened and
abandoned,
Diana in the end settles the whole matter of autonomy and lack
of cash by
marrying a wealthy industrialist who had loved her all along.
The problem
for a feminist reader of Meredith's novel, as for feminist readers
of A Doll's
House, is the persistence ofthe cash nexus. Not content to allow

251. their
heroines to initiate a re-organization of society after they have
slammed the
door on old sex roles, these authors insist on the capitalist
alternative. To
read Ibsen's play as an embodiment of feminist values and
nothing else is,
therefore, to compromise feminism severely.3
Feminist theorists remind us that any feminist reading must
explore and
examine the "assumptions of hierarchical differences"4 in
relation to which
gender is constructed in fiction. "Gender difference," they
insist, "is a
172 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
historically specific cultural construct with diverse forms and
damagin
consequences for characters in plays" (Adelman et al. 77). The
criti
should, therefore, address the construction of gender difference
and it
consequence in a play. A Doll's House demonstrates that
femininity an1
masculinity are, in essence, hierarchical values, and that the
"weaker" of th
sexes must be transformed into the "stronger" other. In the
course of th'
play, Nora changes into the complete opposite of what she was
at th1
beginning. The woman wishes to "settle accounts" with Torvald
in clearl:

252. logical and rational terms. As we shall see, the play underscores
the notio1
that spontaneity of human relationships is inferior to the
rationality of th1
individual. That life must be subjected to rationality and
unemotiona
syllogism is precisely the error, irredeemably determined by
eighteenth- an<
nineteenth-century history, that A Doll's House perpetuates.
"The view tha
'science' and 'rationality,'" write the group of feminist critics
mentione<
earlier, "can comprehend 'complex factors in human
development' withou
the messy intrusion of 'gender and ideology' is an
Enlightenment dream
long since turned to nightmare" (Adelman 78).
2
We wish to argue in this study that the apparent chiasmos
(dramatic
reversal) of A Doll's House, so often applauded by critics, in
effect, suffen
from an irreversible vision. The play remains, when all is said
and done, ~
male discourse, essentially unaltered. On the surface, it replaces
sucll
exponents of feudalism as the authority of the father with the
autonomy o1
the individual, changing superficial reality into its antithesis.
Ironically,
however, A Doll's House ends at the same juncture where it
began: man and
his conceptualization of the world remain as ever the referents
in relation

253. to which woman is portrayed. To the stupefied Torvald, Nora
declares that
she must try to "become" "a reasonable human being" just "as
you
are"(65).5 The image of the "reasonable human being" in the
play is imbued
with the notion of freedom defined by money. A Doll's House
not only
vouches for the ideology of abstract individualism-a correlate of
post-
industrial capitalism-it ultimately denies woman what Virginia
Woolf
identified as the female "inheritance" ("the difference of view,
the
difference of standard" [Culler 50]). At the end of the play,
Ibsen transforms
Nora into the woman patriarchy and nineteenth-century
capitalism had
conspired to construct.
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOU' S HOUSE 173
Ibsen wrote that the purpose of his play was to dispense with
the
"woman-like" (McFarlane 90): infantile, hysterical and
instinctive Nora.
What he created instead is a masculine effigy of a woman which
Nora
unquestioningly accepts as an appropriate self-image. Raymond
Williams
notes that the final scene of A Doll's House epitomizes, not
what Shaw saw
in it, that is, "a living confrontation between actual people," but
rather, a

254. "straight, single declaration" (Williams 77).6 Torvald's
questions are only
rhetorical ones inserted feebly in the impassioned expressions
of Nora 's
self-discovery. The erasure of his viewpoint from the last scene
and the
introspective clarity Nora seems to achieve-(" I have never felt
my mind
so clear and certain as to-night" (66)--affinn a rearranged
perception about
man, woman and society in the play.
About his time, lbsen believed that "the age we now stand in
could just
as well be described as a closure, and that from it something
new is in the
process of being born" (McFarlane 108). To usher in the "new
age" and to
let a woman be "herself in contemporary society," we read,
Ibsen wrote A
Doll's House (McFarlane 90). The play therefore embodies the
playwright's
idea of a civilization ("the transfonnation of social conditions"
[McFarlane
105]) which, he thought, should invalidate the conventional
relationships
and enable every individual woman and man alike to engage in
social
intercourse. Historical verities, Ibsen tells us, should be objects
of derision.
"I do not believe in the eternal validity of human ideals," he
wrote (108).
Unfortunately, the new perception of ideals in the play is not
quite so
novel. Ibsen once remarked that his "intention [in Ghosts, the

255. play
immediately following A Doll's House] was to try to give the
reader the
impression of experiencing a piece of reality" (McFarlane 94).
His concept
of reality, however, was far from consistent. In The Harvest of
Tragedy, T.
R. Henn writes of Ibsen being afflicted with the question: What
is reality?
Ibsen's mind was virtually characterized by an unresolved
contradiction in
a ceaseless encounter between an ever-fluctuating reality and
the idealized
intent (McFarlane 207). This contradiction was evident in his
concern for
the status of women in modem society ("A woman cannot be
herself in
contemporary society" [McFarlane 90]) and his unconscious
adherence to
the Victorian image of woman. As long as Nora remains a
"woman," and
hence incapable of pursuing any rational course of action, she is
unable to
realize her self. "Self' for the Hegelian playwright meant
something beyond
femininity. He dreamed of a reoriented social perspective on
women
(McFarlane 105) but described the Victorian view of the
mother, devoted
174 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
to educating children and inculcating in them a sense of
discipline an

256. culture, as woman's ideal state (lbsen, Speeches and New
Letters 66
Though lbsen claimed that he believed in "the transformation of
socii
conditions ... concerned with the future status of the workers
and c
women" (McFarlane 1 05), he certainly on occasion resented
being calle
a social philosopher (Speeches 65).7 His stated purpose was not
to om
social criticism, rather to present "a description of humanity"
(Speeches 65
Did he presuppose a human nature beyond the constraints of
historic;
events and experiences of Scandinavian society (see Helge
Ronninl
"Individualism and the Liberal Dilemma" 105) and still await
the advent<
a new culture for men and women?
This incongruity between intent and belief underlies A Doll's
House. ·
the play is a statement about women's rights and emancipation,
it is so on1
on the deceptive surface. A closer look reveals that the play
belongs to a
historically determined ideology which had far-reaching
patriarch<
objectives. For A Doll's House is an evaluative account,
imperceptible t
the unwary eye, of the images of the two predominant
ideologies of th
nineteenth century. Ibsen 's society was riven between a fading
feudalisr
with its code of chivalry and an emerging industrial capitalism
with il

257. notion of bourgeois individualism. The play quite conspicuously
fon
grounds the new ideology. What remains unchanged within the
changin
structure of the play, however, is its innate patriarchy, or as
Ann Rosalin
Jones puts it, the essentially "masculinist ways of seeing the
world" (Jone
361). Only recently have critics begun to realize how
inextricable capitalist
has been from patriarchy throughout history (see Ryan,
Marxism an
Deconstruction xiv). Henrik Ibsen's praise for the "new age"
turns out, i
reality, to be an apology for industrial capitalism-an ideology
infused wit
patriarchal structures. To sum up, the text of A Doll's House is
a dramati
plea made in favor of nineteenth-century capitalism historically
ensconce
in patriarchy. It constructs a "new woman" only within a system
which i
indisputably masculine, monetary and repressive. In other
words, lbsen'
"new woman" exists under the control of a sort of "new man":
the newl
minted abstraction of "the individual."
Following Barthes, Catherine Belsey demonstrates in Critical
Practic
how illusionism, characterized by closure and a hierarchy of
discourse1
establishes the so-called truth in some nineteenth-century realist
texts (70:
The primary characteristic of such a text is a terminal and
transcender

258. wisdom which it purports to convey to the reader. Through
events an
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 175
characters, the realist text meanders forward and eventually
introduces
closure ensuring the reinstatement, however precarious or
untenable in
prospect, of order. This closure via reinstatement of order arises
out of a
movement from inconsistency towards consistency in the
subject position
within the text (Belsey 68-69). The movement from
contradiction, which
in Lacanian theory is the ingredient of the human mind, towards
the unified
person was the construct of the contemporary ideology. This
ideology
emphasized the wholeness of the individual and the freedom of
the mind
above everything. Writes Belsey:
"The mind of man," infmite and infinitely mysterious,
homogeneous system
of differences, unchangeable in its essence however manifold its
forces, is
shown in classic realism to be the source of understanding, of
action and of
history.(75)
The bourgeois ideology assumed in the realist worlcs a vision of
the non-
contradictory individual whose "unfettered consciousness was

259. the origin of
meaning, knowledge and action" (Belsey 67). This "unfettered
conscious-
ness" underlies Nora's decision in the last scene of A Doll's
House. From
a world rife with contradictions, lies and secrets, the play
progresses
towards an absolute non-contradiction achieved through gradual
jettisoning
of the discorrespondences. Ibsen 's Nora appears to be a
representative of
the free, unified and autonomous subject. Historically, however,
as Marx,
Engels and Weber note, this notion of freedom is an euphemism
for
consumer choice. Marx and Engels write: "By freedom is meant,
under the
present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free
selling and
buying." (Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy 22; also
compare Max
Weber's phrase "the fondness for external goods" in "Protestant
Asceticism
and the Spirit of Capitalism" 160; Fromm, To Have or To Be
57; Belsey
67). The freedom Nora achieves thus is illusory; what she earns
by rejecting
the subordination of being a "wife" and a "mother" in order to
embrace her
rational "individuality" is subjection to money: the "father,"
says Lionel
Trilling, in a different context, of the illusions and lies
capitalism spreads.8
Freedom within the context of the play implies a new bondage;
Nora's

260. servitude at home ends but it resumes elsewhere. By expressing
her
determination to be rational, whole and autonomous, she makes
herself not
a "new woman" but a token of exchange.
176 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
A Doll's House builds up, in the manner of the intrigue drama, a
subtext
which points towards the dichotomy of perceived reality and
undisclosed
truth in the Helmer household (see Williams 26). The play
makes unceasing
allusions to a secret which must be uncovered at the expense of
the
superfluity of domestic living. Not only the so-called truth but
also the
urgency of its coming to light is underscored. '"This unhappy
secret must be
disclosed," says Mrs. Linde to Krogstad near the beginning of
the third Act.
"They [the Helmers] must have a complete understanding
between them."
This "understanding" is "impossible," she tells Krogstad, in a
relationship
that allows for "concealment and falsehood" (67). In order for
the Helmers
to have "a complete understanding," to have "perfect freedom"
and to
experience "a real wedlock" (68), the discrepancy in their
relationship as
well as in their understanding of each other must be laid bare in
the open

261. and overcome. The skeleton of the formidable "truth" lurking in
the closet
must put the much too familiar mode of existence to which the
Helmers are
used to a trial of rational scrutiny.
The absence of understanding between Nora and Torvald is
manifest in
the incompatibility of their worlds. Her lying, pretentiousness,
affection,
cajoling and, finally, the desperate yet fragile attempts to keep
the secret
from being discovered are contrasted with his self-
righteousness, ludicrous
pomposity and myopic vision of beauty, honor and the family
(4). Torvald's
insensitivity is quite tellingly expressed in his inability to
appreciate Nora's
spontaneous vivacity (her humming, laughing, singing, physical
agility,
affectionate attempts to win his admiration). To him, her every
action is
simple puerility.
From the beginning, the play is fraught with disjunctions and
contradic-
tions. This is especially true of Nora who begins as a complex
of traditional
"feminine attributes." She is imbued with love, care, lies,
games, pretences
and extraordinary insight into Torvald's psyche ("Good
Heavens, no! ...
And besides, how painful and humiliating it would be for
Torvald, with his
manly independence, to know that he owed me anything!" [13]).
Clearly

262. enough, she stands in opposition to the spirit of the "new age"
that sought
to establish the absolute, ideologically non-contradictory, and
individualis-
tic human Ibsen so idolized. Nora's final comment about herself
reflects her
desire to become this rational, independent and introspective
individual. She
says, "I can no longer content myself with what most people
say, or with
what is found in books. I must think over things myself and get
to
understand them" (65).
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 177
The bourgeois delusion of the free and rational individual9 is
what
forever lures Nora's psyche. A Doll's House initially dramatizes
Lacanian
desire, manifest in conflict, multiplicity and sexual awareness,
but gradually
removes it and centrestages Nora's relentless will. Interestingly,
her will is
described only in terms of monetary power. The play
unequivocally weaves
the power of money with freedom. This alliance is evident in
the definition
of freedom, selfuood and knowledge the play purports to
communicate.
Nora describes her emotional state in monetary terms and it is
money that
will allow her freedom. Freedom and beauty for Torvald may
mean a home

263. without debt (4), but for Nora they mean the ability to do "just
as we
like"(9). Money means "a big salary and a lot of commissions"
(9): the
fmancial power that can ensure a life without anxiety.
The movement from the play's beginning to its end highlights
the
conversion of humanity into bourgeois property relations
defined by money,
in other words into "exchange value" (see Marx and Engels,
Basic Writings
9-10, 23-24). In the beginning, Nora considers freedom as
freedom from
care in human situations and relationships, and believes that
only money
can guarantee such felicity: "to be able to play and romp with
the children;
to be able to keep the house beautifully and have everything just
as Torvald
likes it! And, think of it, soon the spring will come and the big
blue sky!
Perhaps we shall be able to take a little trip--perhaps I shall see
the sea
again!" (15). In the end, Nora awakes to clarity of mind and
realizes that her
worth must be ascertained in part by her education but mostly
by her
fmancial ability. "The perfect freedom"(67) Nora claims to have
achieved
finally translates into her fierce ability to divorce herself from
home and
children. The ideology of money, wrote Marx and Engels in The
Commu-
nist Manifesto, tore away from the family its "sentimental veil,"
and

264. "reduced the family relation to a mere money relation" (Basic
Writings 10).
Through her estrangement from her family relations, Nora
attests to the
veracity of the statement. 10
When the curtain rises on A Doll's House, Nora is shown as
impulsively
subscribing, without appreciating its full dramatic import, to
what Marx
called "that single, unconscionable freedom" (Basic Writings
10)-the
freedom of trade: of buying (to be able to make up the mind on
buying [5])
and selling. She is inclined to understand human possibility and
aspiration
in terms of financial excess. To Mrs. Linde 's comment that it
would be
delightful "to have what one needs," Nora retorts: "No, not only
what one
needs, but heaps and heaps of money" (9). One must note that
the initial
178 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
implication of money in the play is theatrically ambivalent; it
allows for
Nora's independence from the "saddest time" (10) as well as
guarantees her
ability to buy, as Helmer puts it, "any number of unnecessary
things" (5).
Money enables Nora to express "the best of intentions to please
us all" (7),
but also allows her to be in a position to "waste" (9). Through

265. references to
money, we are offered glimpses into her character and learn that
since her
childhood money has had a vicious lure for Nora. She has been
a notorious
spendthrift (9). Her need of money characterizes an off-and-on
passion for
it which is to become, by the end of the play, the mainstay of
her personal-
ity.
Despite Nora 's excitement about it, money nevertheless remains
subordinate to human emotions in the first act. Interhuman
relations are
more important than the value of money. To Mrs. Linde, Nora
throws the
vital question: "Is it imprudent to save your husband's life?"
(13). As the
chiasm os of the play evolves, making the prey the predator, a
nearly
imperceptible metammphosis of money takes place. It sheds its
barter value
(its ability to be exchanged for goods and services) and emerges
as the sole
arbiter of human action. Nora's vocabulary in the last scene
alters radically.
The "discussion" in which marriage, matrimonial love,
motherhood,
conventional family, religion and morality crumble becomes "a
settling of
accounts" (62). As relations are commercialized, Nora becomes
aware that
the hope about "the wonderful thing" is futile. That Torvald,
like a romance
hero, would save her ends up an illusion (66). Marx and Engels
describe the

266. phendmenon of the loss of "feudal" and "idyllic" relations in
this way:
The bourgeoisie ... has pitilessly tom asunder the motley feudal
ties that
bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no
other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment."
(Basic Writings 9)
Nora affronts nineteenth-century masculinity and patriarchy by
embracing a new capitalist, individualist ethic. She does not,
however,
embrace feminism. The new individual of capitalism is not a
sexual being
but an acquisitive one. To hail the outcome of A Doll's House as
a purely
feminist paean to the "new woman," all of lbsen's statements
and intentions
aside, is to devalue the very project of feminist theory by
inscribing it
within a capitalist discourse. Just as Nora (regardless of her sex
and more
so because of it) affronts feudalism by becoming a capitalist, so
too does
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 179
ignoring the clearly capitalist ideology of A Doll's House while
reading its
feminist aspects in isolation affront feminism. The play's
substitution of one

267. form of patriarchal dominance (based on sex) for yet another
(based on
money) is certainly not the rejection of patriarchal dominance in
favor of
independent feminist values, nor is it the rejection of all
patriarchal
structures in favor of an acceptance of difference.
The rhetoric of money that internally stitches A Doll's House
together
finds its impeccable representation in Mrs. Linde. Once married
for money,
now widowed, a castigator ofNora's affection, nervous about
sexual
responsiveness (underscoring perhaps her displaced eroticism)
and
financially totally independent, she stands for the ascetic
individual Marx
noticed at the advent of bourgeois capitalism. In Ibsen's eyes,
however, she
would be the individual capable of eliminating all"conventional
views of
honour" (McFarlane 90). It is not surprising that Mrs. Linde
appears as the
representative of impersonal competitiveness, sexual aridity and
monetary
independence. She thus ironically reveals the stark and
dehumanized
destiny of both women and men envisaged in Marx 's
description of
capitalism. Her remark to Krogstad ("This unhappy secret must
be
disclosed; they must have a complete understanding between
them which
is impossible with all this concealment and falsehood" [52]) in
the end

268. becomes Nora's article of faith and inducts her into Mrs. Linde
's territory.
The "absolutely clear and certain" "reason" in Nora's mind for
abandoning
Torvald is that she has to "understand myself and everything
about me!"
(64). Mrs. Linde's voice is recognizably echoed in Nora's
excited harangue.
With the foregrounding of the concept of the individual and
abstract
freedom, the heterogeneous motives and action that have
separated Nora
from other personages are gradually brought under ideological
impress and
led to coalesce into homogeneity. The images of her former
self: affection-
ate mother and homemaker, playful singer, wasteful shopper,
exuberant
lover and flirtatious wife are discarded to make way for the
rational and
fmancially independent (self-owning?) individual prescribed by
nineteenth-
century political economy. It is evident that Nora, after she
leaves Torvald's
home, will be defined entirely by the exchange value she is
likely to have,
not by her psycho-physical and emotional reality as a human
being. (Marx
and Engels diagnosed the malaise of the time which changed
women into
"mere instruments of production" in The Communist Manifesto
[Basic
Writings 25]). In the final outburst she is made to call her home
"a
playroom" (64) and her acts of love and care "tricks" (63) and

269. pretensions
180 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
(63). But how much can we trust what she says? If she ever
were aware of
any distance between pretension and reality, it was in her
former role when
she was able to refute categorically Mrs. Linde 's ostentatious
claim to
seriousness (11 ). It was then that her insight into Torvald 's
character
summed up the wooden, confused and self-righteous man
pitiably locked
in his own workroom. It was then that she was able to
demonstrate the
multilayered interior of her own personality (13).
The transmutation of Nora into a free individual, not possessed
(55) by
or financially dependent on anybody's unthinking wishes (33}--
the concept
of human laissezjaire, one could say-is curiously simultaneous
with the
process of the denial of her personality. No other character in
the play
interacts with as many people or exudes such interpersonal
intimacy with
others as she does, except when she is dealing with Torvald of
course.
(Even in the middle of her jubilant vibrancy in the first scene,
she is
cautious about Torvald [3].) She wants the Christmas tree to be
a surprise

270. for the children, tips the porter generously, and after Mrs. Linde
arrives,
recounts the sad days of her misery with a transparent
innocence ("That was
the saddest time I have known since our marriage" [10]). She
exclaims in
passionate language the joy of happy living (10). What is
clearly discernible
in Nora 's character early on in the play is emotional abundance.
She
expresses sympathy for her widowed, unemployed childhood
friend (11),
plays with the children (19), discusses with the nurse her
unhappy past (30)
and shows sincere concern for the dying Dr. Rank. Torvald's
epithet, "my
skylark," in effect, beautifully describes her personality."
A Doll's House is about the disappearance of this "femininity"
and the
appearance of something new. As events and the tension arising
from them
press on, Nora begins to strip herself of her feminine difference.
She
becomes increasingly preoccupied, as Kiberd notes, with a
"masculine"
code of work and behavior (65). Her spontaneous versatility
gradually gives
way to rational single-mindedness. To Ibsen, this entropy in
Nora's
character signals the advent of a "new civilization." He wrote
effusively
about this phenomenon, "In becoming civilized, man undergoes
the same
change as when a child grows up. Instinct weakens, but powers
of logical

271. thought are developed" (McFarlane 95). A Doll's House
postulates that the
prescription for civilizing women remains the same as for
children. Through
a process of change they both ought to discard their "innate
intuitiveness,"
best expressed in spontaneity, and develop a strenuously
singular logical
thought. Ibsen 's obseiVation about the separateness of the
sexes (McFarlane
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 181
90, 97) was also an observation about the hierarchy of the
sexes. One was
seen as dominating the other. If lbsen was pained by the sore
fact of history
that man unduly dominated woman, he had the solution to the
malaise at
hand. The way to rid society of the unequal relationship was to
obliterate
the difference between the sexes and let a new sexual role
delete the former
ones. This new ideal, alas, was no improvement. Acquisition of
rational
neutrality with regard to human interests-we may recall Marx
and
Weber-was the ideological raison d' etre capitalism advocated.
A Doll's
House to a large extent proves the truth of the remarlc. It shows
that the idea
of the "instinctive feminine woman" cannot survive in an
altered culture and
hence prescribes the absolute rationality of a "civilized"

272. individual as the
remedy (McFarlane 97). To be civilized then is the unavoidable
destiny of
a woman. It is hardly surprising that at the end Nora coolly
decides to be a
reasonable human being like Torvald ("Just as you are" [65])
abandoning
her instincts, home and "little ones" (67).
A Doll's House acts out patriarchy in its relentless repression
ofNora's
personality and through the marginalization of female sexuality
in its
discourse. As suggested, it is not without meaning that Nora
leaves
Torvald 's home for Mrs. Linde 's. For it is the same ideology
Mrs. Linde
subscribes to that overwhelms her. Nora not only convinces
herself of the
worthlessness of "small household cares and that sort of thing!"
(11), she
wants to become as desensitized a wage earner as Mrs. Linde is.
Nora may
not become emotionally sterile like Mrs. Linde but can certainly
stifle her
former identity.12
Symptomatic of nineteenth-century realism, A Doll's House puts
forth,
within the binarism between the apparent (the infantile) and the
desirable
(the "civilized"), a scale of inferior/superior orders. With the
inferior is
associated childish imprudence, with the superior the wisdom of
the adult.
Mrs. Linde, the adult, is able to describe her relationships with

273. others
(parent, siblings, deceased husband) in purely utilitarian terms
and can
identify herself unemotionally with money. In Act One, Mrs.
Linde
condescendingly calls Nora "a child" and is regarded by Nora as
superior
( 11 ). Financial inferiority in the play never ceases to be a
metaphor for
infantile instinctiveness. When at the end Nora describes herself
as an
impoverished woman who has been living "from hand to mouth"
(from
what we have seen of her character, however, we suspect the
tone), she also,
by using consistent rhetoric, frees herself from the "vices" that
lbsen
thought were inalienable from her former self. She assumes the
persona of
182 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
an argumentative, solipsistic and non-dependent woman. She
becomes a
copy of Mrs. Linde: a calculating person who has known money
as the only
determiner ofliving. (One only has to recall, for example,
Krogstad's
remarlc to Mrs. Linde, after she has told him the reason why she
abandoned
her impecunious lover [Krogstad] to marry a rich man: "So that
was it. And
this-only for the sake of money!" [50].)

274. The latent patriarchy becomes palpable in Nora's denial of her
sexual
identity in the last scene. While "settling the accounts," she
instantly
considers her past life as a protracted period of mindless
prostitution and
breeding (67). Throughout the play, Nora has been aware of her
multifaceted femininity characterized by the partly obligatory,
partly self-
motivated, sexual behavior of a wife with Torvald and the
spontaneous
sexual response of a woman to Dr. Rank. She herself makes it
clear in her
conversation with Dr. Rank ( 40-41) that Torvald is a reminder
of paternal
duty and the doctor of natural delight. Many times in the play
has she taken
pride in her female body. ("Thank Heaven, any clothes look
well on me"
[14], "You will see how charming I look" [30], the fond desire
to dance the
tarantella [31], "I look so nice, Torvald" [45]). It is to her
irresistible
sexuality that Dr. Rank knowingly and passively submits (40),
and towards
which Torvald frantically rushes ("When I watched the
seductive figures of
the Tarantella, my blood was on fire" [55]).
In order to change Nora, her recalcitrant sexuality must first be
disposed
of. This need is emphasized in Mrs. Linde's scorn and ridicule
for Nora's
spontaneity, her "femininity." To the invitation to come and
enjoy Nora's
costume for the tarantella, Mrs. Linde sarcastically replies that

275. she will see
Nora in her "fine feathers" (31). A seemingly passionless
woman older than
Nora who never loved her dead husband becomes suspicious at
Nora's
playful reference to the man who has supposedly bequeathed her
some
money (14 ), thinks Dr. Rank the provider of the loan and asks
her bluntly
to make an "end of it" with Dr. Rank (32). Why is the person so
keen on
making others find out about the "truth" in their relationship so
fidgety
about a possible relationship, probably reciprocal and hence
based on
"understanding," between an unfulfilled homemaker and a
solitary friend?
Why is there so much fear of Nora's sexuality, especially on the
part of the
character claiming to be the most clear-sighted in the play and
who
presumably understands the heroine best? Is it lbsen's
frightened puritanical
prudery and affronted patriarchy that give Mrs. Linde the
authority to define
the future Nora? Has the patriarch put on the costume of an
asexual and,
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 183
therefore, rational woman to lead the dazed woman out of her
utter
confusion? To Krogstad Mrs. Linde remarks that she is devoid
of "a

276. woman's overstrained sense of generosity" (51) and could not
endure life
without work (51). Work in the play always means the ability to
earn
money. She is proud that work, experience (32), age (32) and
bitter
necessity (50) have stripped her of emotions and kindness. She
is prudent
(50) and free: an ideal adult in Nora's juvenile world. In the
hands of a
director sensitive to the ideological ramifications of the play,
Mrs. Linde 's
role might take on a far deeper meaning than it usually does.
When it is
only Mrs. Linde who can feel the need of "a complete
understanding" (52)
between the Helmers, the political intent of the play becomes
too conspicu-
ous to be overlooked. 13 As the play moves towards crisis (a
truly
Aristotelian anagnorisis), Mrs. Linde binds her life with
Krogstad's, though
she will not give up Krogstad's job at the bank. Her imminent
new marriage
will be, like the former one, a marriage of convenience: a drab
ceremony of
expediency based on needs (11). She embodies the unemotional
wisdom the
play underlines. By the end Nora too becomes a "free
individual" and a
"worker." And, the image of the worker in the play is, we may
recall,
unequivocally male. Earning money, Nora says ecstatically, "is
just like
being a man" (14).

277. The controversy, misconception and euphoria that surrounded A
Doll's
House at the time of its original performances, and after, have
more often
than not given way to an incomplete if not erroneous
interpretation of the
play. One cannot agree with Michael Meyer that the play is not
about the
problem of women's rights (457). The "gentlemanly" voice in
his comment
can be scarcely ignored. However, lbsen's political agenda, it is
ironic to
note, would have reinforced Meyer's statement. For the purpose
of Ibsen's
dramaturgy was to introduce and welcome a new age that he
thought was
late in coming to Scandinavia, not to advance the rights of
women. "I am
not even quite clear as to just what this women's rights
movement really is"
(Speeches 65), he said at a convention. His task had been "to
advance our
country and give the people a higher standard" (65). At the end
of the above
speech outlining his objectives delivered at the Norwegian
Women's Rights
League on May 26, 1898, he raised his glass and proposed a
toast to the
mothers who "by strenuous and sustained labour" would
"awaken a
conscious feeling and culture and discipline"(66). Evidently, it
was not
Nora but rather the Victorian icon of the mother that was on
Ibsen's mind.

278. 184 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
The social problems that needed to be solved must be solved,
according to
lbsen, by women as mothers (66).
Contrary to the opinion of Ibsen 's proteges, friends and
reviewers, a
conscious reader is forced to say that A Doll's House is not
quite what it has
been said to be about. It is certainly not simply "a play about
the emancipa-
tion of women," as James Joyce remarked (quoted by Kiberd
64). Ibsen
may have been perceptive enough to observe that his society
was graven
with ruthless double standards ("In matters of practical living,
the woman
is judged by man's law, as if she were not a woman but a man"
[McFarlane
90]), but the play never presents any vision as to how that
unjust dualism
in the moral and legal system could have been dispensed with.
It does not
propose any rearrangement of the male-dominated structures of
society
lbsen apparently abhorred. Instead, it rationalizes the extinction
of female
identity. By suggesting that the wage earner is the only
reasonable person
in society (65) and earning money the most significant activity
an intelli-
gent social being can engage in, the play seeks in the end to
transform
women into exchange chips (a role man was already attaching to

279. himself).
lbsen may have believed that "an age is impending where the
political and
social concepts will cease to exist in their present forms," and
that the new
civilization would break down "all existing things" into "new
categories"
(McFarlane 108, 98) but, ironically, the new liberty was
conceived only
within the framework of industrial capitalism and prehistoric
patriarchy.
When the sham family, and the reified concepts attached to it,
disintegrate
in the play one only hopes for a new affirmation of "the
maintenance and
reproduction of human life" (Marx-Engels, Basic Writings 22)
which never
occurs.14 Finally, he refuses categorically to accommodate the
female
"inheritance," and presents the female exclusively through the
prism of
male consciousness. The masculinist prejudice that man alone is
capable of
understanding woman is explicit in the remark Joyce made
about Ibsen's
treatment of women. According to him, lbsen seemed "to know
them
[women] better than they knew themselves" (Joyce, quoted by
Kiberd 63).
In a recent article, Joan Templeton has attempted to retrieve A
Doll's
House for feminists. Critics like those who come under
Templeton's fire
have observed that A Doll's House stemmed from "the
inhibitions set upon

280. individual freedom and self-realization by social and
institutional forces"
(McFarlane, Plays xi). The fallacy bourgeois capitalism spread
about the
independent individual is at work in such criticism. The play
clearly
deconstructs this opinion. In reality, it is the "social and
institutional forces"
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 185
in the beginning as well as in the end that have moulded
Torvald 's and
Nora 's actions. If Nora has freed herself from the constraints of
Torvald 's
forces, she has also subjected herself to a new set of social and
institutional
forces. These new forces concentrate more on individual
isolation, wage
earning and abstract rationalization than on communality,
interdependence
and recognition of sexuality.
In his notes on the character of the heroine, Ibsen writes:
"Everything
must be borne alone" (McFarlane 90)-by men and women alike.
Such
statements not only glorify the isolation of the individual, they
make
isolation the necessary precondition of a glorified existence. In
times of
crisis, therefore, like those Nora encounters, the individual must
negate
his/her human relations and must fall back on his/her rationality

281. and
selfhood. What has passed for rationality in history,
sociologists, historians
and feminist critics tell us, has often masked "oppression based
on
unexplored assumptions of hierarchical difference" (Adelman
78). The
concept of rational individualism advanced in the play, on
hindsight we
perceive, was exclusively determined by the politics of the time.
Solipsistic selfishness, it has been said, is integral with "the
male values
of work" (Kiberd 65). lbsen, by subscribing to such an image
(Nora "only"
knows what is "necessary for me" [ 64]) attempts to transform
woman into
such a worker. By allowing a human to appear significant only
in relation
to the cash nexus, A Doll's House endorses the ideology of
bourgeois
capitalism. By identifying the individual worker with the self-
absorbed and
expedient man, it demonstrates a deep-lying patriarchy in Ibsen
's
dramaturgy. 15 One of the playwright's purposes was to write a
play
debunking the romantic delusion of chivalry. It is thus not
surprising that,
as Raymond Williarns points out, he was welcomed primarily by
people
who were looking for a leader with a moraVpolitical ideology
(Williams
48). Some of these critics detected, with considerable accuracy,
the
decomposition of feudalism in the play but failed to discern the

282. insidious
blending of patriarchy and capitalism in its discourse.
NOTES
1. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House in Four Plays, tr. R.
Farquharson Sharp (Toronto, New
York: Bantam Books, 1981). Other translations have been
consulted for comparison,
186 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
but all references to the text are from this edition. Although
Rolf Fjelde 's translation
of Et dukkehjem is A Doll House without the possessive, the
conventional translatioH
handed down by William Archer, Michael Meyer, James
McFarlane and others, and
the English title used in the Memorial Edition oflbsen's plays
published by Norwegian
State Publications, has been A Doll's House. The present writers
have, therefore,
adhered to the generally used title.
2. Throughout his career Ibsen demonstrated, as probably all
artists do, contradictions,
possibilities, uncertainty and anxiety, and could hardly be
described as a monomaniac
writer as ventured by Shaw. Critics now agree that the brilliance
of The Quintessence
of lbsenism is that of a skilled rhetorician, burning with a fury
to pronounce that plays
are "illustrations of a thesis," or "messages," rather than
"imaginative creations"

283. (McFarlane 64-65). A contemporary reader will benefit from
Barthes 's remark that
writing signifies "something other than [meaning besides] its
content" (Writing Degree
Zero 16) and the post-structuralist tenet that a literary text is
never able to denote
absolute signification. Ibsen was truly perceptive when he wrote
that modern society
was "merely a society of males" (McFarlane 95); he never failed
to realize that to write
[at digte] was "to see in such a way that what is seen comes into
the possession of the
beholder as the poet saw it (McFarlane 85, our emphasis). In
other words, he knew that
a text was inextricably bound to the author's viewpoint. And a
viewpoint is forever in
flux, because the "conscience" that gives shape to it is "not a
stable thing" (McFarlane
98). Ibsen himself may have been aware of the chasm between
his apparent intent and
the incurably male prescriptive position he was historically
conditioned to take when
he wrote: "To wish and to will. Our worst faults are the
consequences of confusing the
two things" (McFarlane 98).
3. Both Meredith and Ibsen sensationalize their heroines'actions
to fit their interpretations
of a woman's mind and actions. What is intriguing is that Laura
Keiler, the woman on
whom Nora Helmer was based, did not slam the door and leave
in "perfect understand-
ing"; nor did Caroline Norton, the woman on whom Diana
Warwick is based, marry "in
the end" for wealth. Keiler put up with her marriage; Norton
supported herself. In

284. nineteenth-century art-as in life-the woman who leaves may
shock and disrupt the
established social order, but in art, at least, she is always
returned to a "safe" or
manageable place by cash.
4. Interestingly enough, the same issue of PMLA (January 1989)
which carried Joan
Templeton's article on the "gentlemanly backlash" against
feminist interpretations of
Ibsen also printed a letter outlining the basic issues of feminist
criticism. The letter,
written by Janet Adelman, Catherine Belsey, Gay le Greene, Lis
a Jardine and Coppelia
Kahn, among others, was a rebuttal of Richard Levin's
"Feminist Thematics and
Shakespearean Tragedy" (PMLA 103 [Dec. 1988]: 125-138). A
brilliant exposition of
contemporary feminist concerns, the letter warned against the
critical hazard of
"presenting snippets of decontextualized quotations" "in
isolation from characters or
structure or culture." Unfortunately, the thrust of Joan
Templeton's article relied on just
such decontextualized snippets of A Doll's House. See Janet
Adelman et al., "Feminist
Criticism" in the members' "Forum" (PMLA [January 1989]: 77-
78).
5. Henrietta Prances Lord, Michael Meyer and Rolf Fjelde
translate et menneske as "a
human being" whereas McFarlane translates the phrase as "an
individual." See Ibsen,
Four Major Plays, tr. James McFarlane, 82. By "individual,"
Marx and Engels wrote,
was meant "no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle

285. class owner of
property" (Basic Writings 23). In the same place, they also say:
From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into
capital, money, or
rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e.,
from the moment
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOU' S HOUSE 187
when individual property can no longer be transformed into
bourgeois property,
into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes
(23).
6. Nevertheless, Shaw must certainly have noticed the great
importance of money in A
Doll's House. In 1886 he read the part of Krogstad in a private
performance of the play
at Eleanor Marx's flat. Marx herself read the part ofNora
(Wisenthal5-6).
7. As well, lbsen specifically objected to being called a socialist
During an interview with
the Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Chronicle in
August 1890, lbsen
"declared he never was nor ever would be a Social Democrat"
("lbsen and Socialism"
Daily Chronicle 13 August 1890; quoted by Wisenthalll-12).
8. See Lionel Trilling, "Introduction," in Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn xiv.

286. 9. See Max Weber, "Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of
Capitalism," in Weber,
Selections in Translations, ed. W. G. Runciman, 138-173. Also
see Marx's comments
on the individual's preoccupation with his/her private purpose
apart from social
connectedness in the Grundrisse in The Marx-Engels Reader,
ed. Robert C. Tucker
222-223. The obsessive personal acquisitiveness of the
individual has been the subject
of many social historians and sociologists. One pertinent early
onslaught on such an
abstraction as humanity as only emotion or the embodiment of
pure reason, not living
beings of both combined, came from Lukacs and his friend,
Andor Gabor, during the
debates between Brecht and Lukacs in 1931-33. To fail to
present man as he loves and
lives, Gabor pointed out in his support of Lukacs, was suitable
only for bourgeois
idealists. See Andor Gabor, "Zwei Buhmenereignisse" 18, 24.
10. That money was the irreplaceable agent of the Great
Socialization of the nineteenth
century and that the formation of the modem individual was the
making of fmancial
acquisitiveness have been often suggested (Moretti, "The
Moment of Truth" 44 ). In
Wage Labour and Capital, Marx discusses at length how in a
capitalist society the
worker and her/his human functions are reduced to the cash
value of earnings. The
worker's "own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life"
(Marx-Engels Reader
204-205) becomes the exercise of labor and earning of wages.
Two major aspects,

287. rationalization of the world and rationalization of human action,
according to Marx,
characterize the flourishing of capitalism. The bourgeoisie,
write Marx and Engels in
The Communist Manifesto, divested human life and interhuman
conduct of "religious
fervour," "chivalrous enthusiasm" and "philistine
sentimentalism," and substituted for
them "the icy water of egotistical calculation" (Basic Writings
9). The demystifying
effect the ideology of money had on culture led Marx to call
capitalism the "practical
asceticism." Marx's critique is based on the thesis that
capitalism generates a culture
of renunciation of life and human needs (Avineri 11 0). In 1844,
disagreeing with
Hegel's position on property and ownership, Marx wrote in
Manuscripts that since
money "reduces all human qualities to quantitative,
interchangeable values, it
eliminates man's real capacity for externalization and self-
expression" (see Avineri
116). The desire to be free, autonomous and self-understanding
was, Marx argued, an
irredeemable fallacy perpetuated by capitalism for its own
interest. "The selfish
misconception that induces a [bourgeois] to transform into
eternal laws of nature and
of reason the social forms springing from [the] present mode of
production and form
of property," write Marx and Engels, is a misconception the
bourgeois shared with
every preceding ruling class (Basic Writings 24).
11. Nora may live under the horror of Torvald's domination yet
is capable of retaining her

288. unique "inheritance" (Woolf) and difference. She may thus be
quite rightly compared
with the mother-figure, "the omnipotent and generous dispenser
of love, nourishment
and plenitude," Helene Cixous admires (Moi 115). Nora's early
action in the play is
always tinged with what Cixous calls the "typically female
gesture," the libidinally
188 DALHOUSIE REVIEW
determined trait that brings about and celebrates the vivacity of
life (New Feminist
365). In Cixous's terms, Nora's denial of her loving nature may
be construed as a
denial of her sex. In this way, Nora rejects the subjection of
woman but repudiates her
own sexuality as well.
12. The marginalization of female sexuality is evident in Mrs.
Linde and in her suspicions
concerning Nora's connection to Dr. Rank. Mrs. Linde had long
ago married for
money, and she now mistakenly suspects Nora of doing
likewise: exchanging her
sexual favors for Dr. Rank's financial security. The power of
female sexuality as a
purchasing agent-abhorrent as it may have been by the 1880s
(see Loma Sage's
Introduction to Diana of the Crossways [Virago 1980]}--was,
apart from money itself,
a socially acceptable power available to nineteenth-century
women in the marriage
marketplace. But beyond the marriage market, a sexually aware

289. female became a
dangerous threat to the social order: Nora might ruin her home
by having an affair with
Dr. Rank, Diana Warwick could bring down the government
because of her sexual
response to Percy Dacier. In both cases, female sexuality is
reduced to a cash value
then controlled either through denial or by being channelled
into a new marriage.
13. It is interesting to note the resemblance between what Mrs.
Linde says to Nora and
what Ibsen wrote to his "skylark," Laura Keiler, about the need
of understanding
between husband and wife. He wrote:
It is unthinkable that your husband knows everything, so you
must tell him; ...
confide all your troubles to your husband. He is the one who
should bear them.
(Meyer 443-44)
14. Brecht seems to have recognized the limitations ofNora's
new liberty in his
Messingkauf Dialogues. The actress in the Dialogues is
apparently speaking of the role
ofNora when she says:
For fifty nights I played a bank director's wife who's treated as
a toy by her
husband. I stood up for women being allowed to have
professions too, and take
part in the great rat-race, as hunter or hunted or both. At the end
I was having to
drink myself silly in order to be able to get such stuff past my

290. lips. (29)
15. The unconscious masculinity of the play may however be
allayed to a degree by the
fact that A Doll's House is, first and foremost, a play text, and
as such, filled with
equally valid strands of different meanings. By demonstrating
its unbridgeable rifts and
conflicting contexts (Torvald discovers "an abyss" between
them while Nora discovers
"perfect freedom" on both sides [67]), A Doll's House in the
first instance only offers
pure theatrical situations and obliquely undermines its claim to
any immutable truth.
In his study of the predominant modern literary genre, Mikhail
Bakhtin mentions that
the influence of the novel on modern literature is ineradicable
(The Dialogic
Imagination). He particularly mentions Ibsen (5). The influence
of the novel on A
Doll's House is not only discernible in its narrativity-already
noted by William
Archer (see Williarns 48}--it is evident in the conflict of the
socio-political ideologies
it dramatizes.
This conflict is manifest in the play's unknowing undermining
of the apology for
stark rationalism. Though Mrs. Linde appears to bear the
wisdom of the new age, the
text unwittingly undercuts her position. While on the surface
the play upholds her
unemotional speeches, it also brings into focus the unreliability
of her pretension to
rationality. In her most important moment in the play, it is
dream, imagination and

291. passionate lyricism, all clothed in a rhetorical trope, that
overwhelm everything else. Let
us quote the section in full:
Mrs. Linde.
Krogstad.
I have learnt to act prudently. Life, and hard, bitter necessity
have
taught me that.
And life has taught me not to believe in fine speeches.
INCOMPLETE FEMINISM IN A DOLL'S HOUSE 189
Mrs. Linde. Then life has taught you something very reasonable.
But deeds
you must believe in?
Krogstad.
Mrs. Linde.
Krogstad.
Mrs. Linde.
Krogstad.
What do you mean by that?
You said you were like a shipwrecked man clinging to some
wreckage.
I had good reason to say so.
Well, I am like a shipwrecked woman clinging to some wreck-
age-no one to mourn for, no one to care for.
It was your own choice.

292. And, then, she employs her rhetorical trick, "Nils, how would it
be if we two
shipwrecked people could join forces?" to which Krogstad
whisperingly exclaims,
"Christine!" (50-51 our emphasis).
This interchange inadvertently asserts what it does not
acknowledge on the surface.
The conversation that expresses a disdain for "fine speeches"
becomes reliant on a
metaphor. It also reveals the failure of the writer to attach a
definitive direction to his
text. By encoding aporias, differences and paradoxes within its
essence, the play in a
reverse way denies one single ideology (despite the author's
reiterative efforts to the
contrary) to stabilize itself.
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Colin Smith. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1967.

293. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London and New York:
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Brecht, Bertolt. The Messingkauf Dialogues. Tr. John Willett.
London: Eyre Methuen, 1965.
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__ .Four Major Plays. Tr. James McFarlane. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1981.

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Ibsen's Political and Social Ideas
Author(s): Philip George Neserius
Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 19, No. 1

296. (Feb., 1925), pp. 25-37
Published by: American Political Science Association
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IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS
PHILIP GEORGE NESERIUS
Man, "to be himself," is "to realize himself." This funda-
mental thought became a beacon of light which Ibsen unhesi-

297. tatingly followed through financial distress, through social
isolation, and through severe and often malicious criticism by
his contemporaries. To advance the country and elevate the
people was Ibsen's cardinal aim, which he consistently strove
to attain.' He dared to be himself; he spoke the truth when he
saw it, and fought for his convictions. If one never commits
himself, he never expresses himself; his self becomes less and
less
significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihi-
lation of self. This was not true of Ibsen. In a letter to Bj6rn-
son he says: "Had I to decide on an inscription for the monu-
ment, I should chose the words: "His life was his best work."
So to conduct one's life as to realize one's self seems to be the
brightest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task
of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it."2 Ibsen strove for
this attainment, firmly believed in living his self, in being
taken as
his own personality, in being understood. He separated himself
from his own parents, because a position of half-understanding
was unendurable to him.' He also left his country, voluntarily
exiling himself, to be better able to deliver his message. During
this period of residence abroad nearly all of his works were
written.
He faced a storm of discussion, approving and disapproving,
which must have assured him that he had again aimed correctly
and struck well at another timeworn, declining institution of
society.
Such blows Ibsen deemed necessary to arouse the people from
1 Samtliche Werke, Bd. 1, Intro.
2 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 359.
3 Ibid, p. 146.
25

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26 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
the rut into which their thinking had fallen, to present to them
problems which they had not stopped to analyze and indicate to
them that a solution was possible, though the future would have
to work it out for them. The idea of reforming organized insti-
tutions and above all of bringing about political reforms was
repugnant to Ibsen. It was a wrong aim, for nothing can set
society right, except society itself by living its self in
unrestrained
freedom.4 To aid society in finding its weak points, by
shattering its long cherished idols, by leading it on to the truth
was his aim. Ibsen has opened channels for discussion which
practically deal with all the fundamental phases of human life.
His attitude toward the relation of the individual to society,
toward democracy in general and, above all, his view on the
emancipation of women are phases of his works which
captivate
and hold the interest of students.
Ibsen does not, as Schiller and Goethe, picture the struggle of

299. one suppressed class of society against another, not even the
struggle of the masses against tyranny, but the revolt of an
individual against existing society and against the conditions
such
society creates. In the Catiline we have the work of a genius in
revolt against the ruling class and institutions.5 His tendency
to
view the individual as a unit, whose interests are diametrically
opposed to the general interests of the state, dates from this
work.
Henceforth, his entire thought revolves about the relation of the
individual to society, and this becomes the chief and central
problem of Ibsen's writings. He directs his revolutionary
polem-
ics against the government of human society as at present
organized.
Ibsen is the most convinced and consistent poetic champion
of individualism. Early in his career he was fascinated by the
virtue of self-reliance, militantly advancing against the
authority
of state, church and family. The conflict between the individual
and the political state, the individual in discord with the
author-
ity-sanctioned superficiality of the church as a religious
institu-
tion, we meet in Catiline and in Brand. Brand advances forcibly

300. 4Heller, 0., Henrik Ibsen, p. 67.
5 Reich, Emil, Henrik Ibsen's Dramen, p. 14.
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IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 27
against the spiritual lassitude that prevents the individual from
developing a more personal and, therefore, more intimate
feeling
for his religion. "Formerly each man was a member of the
church, now he is a personality."' It is this expression of one's
personality that does not suit the Provost, the representative of
society as it is. He thus expresses it to Brand: "Hitherto you
paid too much attention to the particular needs of individuals;
between ourselves, that is a grave fault. Weigh them in the
lump, comb them all with the same comb; believe me, you will
not repent it.", But since Brand is not that kind of shepherd,
he cannot conform to the principles of life as outlined by the
Provost, and totally misunderstood by the people among whom
he had lived and worked, he dies as he had existed on the
height
unattained by any other fellow-being of the lowland.
In Love's Comedy Ibsen challenges society to the fight for
moral
and intellectual consistency against universal sham. The weak-
ness of society is the general belief or pretense that love, ideal
and lofty, is everlasting in the union of lovers. Falk takes it
upon
himself to expose the irony of this belief and to denounce

301. society
for sheltering and perpetuating such a lie. Viewed in the light
of his later utterances on similar occasions, we feel the depth
of
Ibsen's indignation against such social lies in Falk's words:
And this they think is living, Heaven and earth,
Is such a load so many antics worth?
For such an end to haul up babes in shoals,
To pamper them with honesty and reason,
To feed them fat with faith one sorry season?8
And in reply to Svanhild's suggestion to flee, he says:
Is not the whole world everywhere the same?
And does not Truth's own mirror in its frame
Lie equally to all the sons of men?9
Falk strives to free himself from the evil of the social lie, for to
him to be free means to do what he is called upon to do, to
assist
in fighting sham and pretense.
6 Archer's translation of Ibsen's Works, III, p. 232.
7 Ibid, p. 230.
8 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 430.
9 Ibid, Vol. 1, p. 431.
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28 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW

302. Before Falk can hope to succeed in the task he must first
educate himself; he must work out his own salvation, before he
can be of service to the community. It appears that from aim-
less attack upon the existing order, Ibsen changed to the exalta-
tion of the individual, following him and guiding him in his
proc-
ess of self-education and, to anticipate, in a further progress
thence to the successful socialization of the developed
individual.
Consul Bernick of The Pillars of Society is subjected to such
an
ethical education, with the aim of making him the outpost of a
truthful community. The play is a serious accusation against
society, against the moral foundation of modern society.
Consul
Bernick owes his success, his reputation and even his family
happiness to a lie and to his moral cowardice. His fear of
public
opinion, his struggle to keep up appearances, make him a
despi-
cable coward.
Ibsen discloses unsparingly the very depth of moral depravity
existing in society, and particularly in the circles which should
look out for its welfare and guide it. He questions what society
gives to the individual. Is society willing at any cost to

303. improve,
is society willing to follow a leader? Not unless this leader
caters
to the populace and assures it of immediate gain.'0 But a man
who has no sense of subordinating his individuality to mere
local community interests can seek no understanding with
society; the voice of society condemns such a truth-loving indi-
vidual and far from considering him a friend of the people,
pronounces him an enemy.
In the Wild Duck Ibsen questions whether he had any right to
demolish the ancient moral to save the individual." Is it not
better for the individual to remain in the illusions in which he
has
been brought up, in the belief of his own importance and of his
relation to society? Rob the average man of his life-illusions
and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.12
In the Little Eyolf Ibsen changes from egoism to altruism.
Here the individual places the interests of society above his
own,
10 Litzmann, B., Ibsen's Dramen, p. 63.
11 Boettcher, F., La Femme dans le Thedtre d'Ibsen, p. 133.
12 The Wild Duck, Act v, p. 372.
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IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 29

304. subjugating his own self by striving to provide others with a
loftier and better life. The individual does not liberate himself
from his selfish purposes and intentions, because he does not
live
and work for the sake of others,'3 His only aim is to lord it
over
others and he strives to attain the social height from where he
can best do so. Extreme individualism, according to Ibsen,
which disregards the surrounding conditions and limits set for
it
by social requirements, cannot succeed. A broader conception
of the world is necessary to make the work of the individual
really effective for society. The individual to be influential
must always be above the society in which he lives.
Ibsen never considered himself a child of a people, a leader of
a group, a member of society, or a part of a whole; he felt him-
self exclusively a gifted individual, and the sole object in
which
he believed and for which he cherished respect was personality.
It is through personality that supreme truth can be achieved
and the rebirth of humanity accomplished, against whose
progress
society and its chief agent, the state, at present stand, The
future will solve the problem of this transformation and bring
about the third kingdom. Ibsen lends his personality to illumine
the road and to lead those who walk in the dark.

305. IBSEN'S ATTITUDE TOWARD DEMOCRACY
As early as 1849, Ibsen became engrossed in political matters;
he was as revolutionary, as a young man with strong
convictions
of liberty and freedom frequently is. Though it is claimed that
he never was at heart a red-hot revolutionist,14 it cannot be
denied that during the years 1850-51 he was intensely
interested
in the socialistic ideas stirred up by events in France, and
openly
joined the opposition to the existing regime by working for a
political journal.
Ibsen's politics deal with the individual, the advocate or repre-
sentative of an outspoken tendency. His political ideas never
became theoretic or dogmatic,'5 except where they touched
upon
13 Litzmann, B., Ibsen's Dramen, p. 161.
14Heller, O., Henrik Ibsen, p. 66.
16 Lothar, R., Henrik Ibsen, p. 24.
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30 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
the organization of the state, which he regarded as the curse of

306. the individual, and which he was willing to fight. The state, he
held, at its best can provide the individual with civic privileges
only, can treat him as a citizen, and can take care of his
material
welfare, paying little or no attention to his spiritual interests.
The political situation in Norway at that time, when the major-
ity of the members of Parliament were rural representatives,
considerably influenced Ibsen's conclusions-1 In a letter to
Brandes he says: "As to liberty, I take it that our dispute is a
mere dispute about words. I shall never agree to making liberty
synonymous with political liberty. What you call liberty, I
call liberties; and what I call the struggle for liberty is nothing
but the constant living assimilation of the idea of freedom."''7
Liberty, as ordinarily understood, is only for the citizen, and
the
individual does not necessarily have to be a citizen. "On the
contrary-the state is the curse of the individual.
The state must be abolished! In that revolution I will take part.
Undermine the idea of the state; make willingness and spiritual
kinship the only essentials in the case of a union and you have
the
beginning of a liberty that is of some value."18
Ibsen's assertion that free choice and spiritual kinship are the
only binding qualities for a union might lead the uninformed to
think that the defender of the rights of the individual was
advocating an anarchistic state of society. Nothing was further
from Ibsen's mind in his later years, in the period of his
greatest
productivity, than to hold and express in his works socialistic
and even democratic ideas in connection with organized
society.
In devoting himself to the cause of the individual he had con-
ceived of a state of society that might be termed a loftier form
of

307. aristocracy. He looked forward to a time when human minds
and emotions shall be beyond the necessity of external
supervision
and control, to a development of the individual, so wonderful
in
its efficacy that under enlightened anarchy mankind would
attain
an almost ideal state. But such an ideal state must remain
16 Reich, Emil, Henrik Ibsen's Dramen, p. 95.
17 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 208.
68Ibd.
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IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 31
visionary, the hope of the poet and the philosopher,-while the
common people continue synonymous with the mob: ignorant,
foolish, reckless and easily led astray by their passions.
Ibsen expressed himself publicly to that effect in a brief
address
at a workingmen's meeting at Trondjeim (1855) when he said:
"There remains much to be done before we can be said to have
attained real liberty. But I fear that our present democracy will
not be equal to the task. An element of nobility must be intro-

308. duced into our national life, into our parliament, and into our
press. Of course it is not nobility of birth that I am thinking of,
nor of money, nor yet of knowledge, not even of ability and tal-
ent. I am thinking of nobility of character, of will, of soul.""9
Before this transformation within mankind shall take place, the
ideal state cannot come to pass.
Again and again, Ibsen emphasizes the necessity of a
revolution
of humanity from within, and scorns the political attempts to
establish democratic forms of government. Commenting upon
the events taking place in France in 1870 he says: "Liberty,
equality, and fraternity are no longer the things they were in
the
days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politi-
cians will not understand, and therefore I hate them. They
want only their own special revolutions, revolutions in
externals,
in politics, etc. But all this is mere trifling. What is all-impor-
tant is the revolution of the spirit of man."20 Yet, democracy
itself stands in the way of such revolution for democracy, says
Ibsen, gives the individual no opportunity to develop, to rise
above his surroundings, to push his head above the common
level.
Democracy insists on having the individual conform to its
levels.
It tends to a dead level and opens a way for the commonplace;

309. it equalizes, generalizes and standardizes men, making them
alike
in ideal, thought and emotion.
All this was contrary to Ibsen's principles and beliefs, for he
never doubted that it is given to the individual, alone, to attain
the acme of culture and civilization; the mob can only hinder.
In
Brand we witness the struggle of the individual with the
majority.
19 Speeches and New Letters of Ibsen, p. 53.
20 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 205.
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32 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
Brand, the idealist, is expelled and stoned when the majority
that
follows him for only a brief while realizes that the ideals he
had
held out to them cannot readily be materialized. The society
in which Brand lives is based on concessions and compromises,
on selfish aims and material advantage. It is not yet educated
to the altruistic and lofty point of view where it can understand
and follow a spiritual leader.
In the Enemy of the People we have the struggle of the indi-

310. vidual with the "compact" majority, intensified by his personal
experience obtained through the stupidity and harmfulness of
the populace. Who is right? The individual or society? Does
not democracy stamp itself as a fallacy and a time-worn super-
stition, for whoever believes that the fools outnumber the
sages,
cannot think otherwise than that in a democracy justice and
wisdom are most likely to be overruled. The individual alone is
right, and the "compact" majority can only represent the low
and
wicked in society. The majority can, therefore, never be the
herald of progress, and it is left to the individual alone to hold
aloft "the banner of the ideal." Such an individual must stand
on a height by himself and cannot have a majority around
him.2'
"I maintain," says Ibsen, "that a fighter in the intellectual
vanguard can never collect a majority around him. In ten years
the majority will, possibly, occupy the standpoint Dr.
Stockman
held at the public meeting. But during these ten years the Doc-
tor will not have been standing still; he will be at least ten
years
ahead of the majority. He can never have the majority with
him."22 Ibsen views his hero's attempt to deliver his message
to
the mob, which has but little regard for him as an individual, as

311. a
sacrifice of self for the public good. He leads him to the
conclu-
sion that he can only achieve his aim by remaining alone, he
leads
him to realize that the strongest man is the one who stands by
himself, he permits him to turn to the future for a solution of
the
problem and face the coming dawn as schoolmaster to the
genera-
tion that is to help on its own progress.
At heart, though, Ibsen sided with political freedom as he did
2" Archer's transl. of Ibsen, I. Intro. xiv.
22 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 370.
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IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 33
with freedom of conscience in any form and, therefore, joined
in
many demands of the Liberals. He was no advocate of any
political party or tendency, and in his League of Youth did not
mean either to criticize liberalism or to defend conservatism.
His
object was to fight pretension, in this case the idle Liberal
phrase,

312. so often found in the mouths of those who use it for selfish
pur-
poses. When Ibsen relieves himself in an outburst like "The
Liberals are the worst enemies of freedom," or "the Liberals are
most treacherous enemies of free men," he refers to the tyranny
of "liberals" in intellectual things. The arraignment was
meant for the sham reformers whose short-ranged vision is
a greater obstacle to progress than a reasonable and principled
conservatism.2Z
In a letter to Brandes he says: "It will never, in any case, be
possible for me to join a party that has the majority on its
side." And further on: "I must of necessity say 'The majority
is right.' Naturally I am not thinking of that minorityof stag-
nationists who are left behind by the great middle party which
with us is called Liberal; but I mean that minority which leads
the van and pushes on to points which the majority has not yet
reached. I mean that man is right who allied himself most
closely
with the future."24 In his own opinion, then, Ibsen was right;
in our opinion, well, suppose we too follow the lead of the
philoso-
pher, and leave the decision to the future.
IBSEN ON THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMAN
The choice of Ibsen's material and its presentation show that
the author expected some definite contribution from woman
toward the solution of the cultural and social problems. Ibsen
explores women's soul with unusual skill, broadening the

313. dramat-
ic world, and adding woman to what had seemed until then
"a world of bachelor-souls."25 He furthermore chooses the
mar-
ried women for his heroine, presenting her in her relation to her
home, family, and society.
23 Heller, 0., Henrik Ibsen, p. 89.
24 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 349.
2 Pillars of Society, Act iv, p. 408.
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34 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
Shall woman be an individual? Then she must not be
restrained from exercising her individuality, for the foundation
of the social structure rests on the intelligent relations of the
sexes. Brandes says: "As far as I can judge, the idea of
woman's
emancipation, in the modern acceptation of the phrase, was far
from being familiar and dear to Ibsen at the outset of his
career.""
There is a gradual increase in the complexity of the problems
which confront his feminine characters and in the nature of the
characters themselves. In regard to the latter his early works
deal with two separate types of character: one depicting the
virtues of the angelic woman, the other her diabolic prototype.
He divides women into two distinct classes, those controlled by
their wills and those led by their hearts. He keeps the two
classes

314. well apart, blending them only in Lady of Oestrot, to show the
tragedy that arises when heart and will conflict. His sympathies
are decidedly with the strong-minded and self-asserting type of
woman, the sort that is meant by Margit (The Feast at
Solhaug):
"Aye, those women . . . they are not weak as we are, they
do not fear to pass from thought to deed;"27 or by Hjordis (The
Vikings): "The strong women that did not drag out their lives
tamely like thee and me."28 In spite of his sympathies,
however,
Ibsen allows the altruistic women to carry off the victory in the
struggle between altruism and egoism. From Love's Comedy to
Emperor and Galilean, woman does not go through that
struggle,
but fights to draw the soul of man toward virtue, sacrificing
her-
self together with him for society. In both groups woman plays
but a subordinate part, and only in his social plays does Ibsen
assume his permanent stand, that of considering woman as an
individual and claiming individual freedom for her.
After Svanhild in Love's Comedy, the chain of strong female
characters is for a time broken. In the Pretenders none of the
women exist for themselves, but live for those whose aim they
help to accomplish. In the Pretenders as well as in Brand,
the woman's problem as a loving wife consists of unconditional
26 Brandes, Georg, Eminent Authors of the 19th Century, p.
452.
27 Act. i, p. 231.
28 Act. ii, p. 157.
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315. IBSEN'S POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 35
loyalty and unlimited self-sacrifice, no matter what the
demands
of the husband may be. Agnes in Brand goes so far in that
respect as to become a martyr in the end. Solveig in Peer Gynt,
too, is an ideal figure of Ibsen's womanhood, whose greatness
and
strength of heart consist in her belief and trust and in her readi-
ness to sacrifice herself. But Solveig is a little more than a
victim of Peer Gynt's demands. She serves to indicate Ibsen's
belief that woman is fundamentally society's support. In this
case it is the pure woman, the basis of social morality, that
proves
to be society's redemption.
With the League of Youth Ibsen introduces the woman who
begins a long and persistent fight for recognition. Selma is only
one of the links connecting Nora with Margit. She, too, craves
to be more than a mere toy for her husband: she wants to share
the fortunes and misfortunes of the house. True marriage
should
be distinguished from mere choosing of a mate, in that the
husband looks upon the wife as his peer and partner, entitled to
share his anxieties and troubles, as well as his successes. Then
is the woman an end in herself, or is she a means toward
realizing
the ideal of collectivity?
Ibsen's sympathies are evidently not with the general belief
that woman should be naught but wife and mother. In Lona

316. Hessel, for example, he shows the self-supporting, self-
protecting,
active woman, who knows how to take care of herself and her
interests. She becomes the only real pillar of society by living
her own life, unbound by conventionalities and unrestrained by
tradition. The woman who sang in American vaudeville and
wrote eccentric books to support herself and her half-brother,
dependent on her, is the one of all the pillars of society to hold
up "the banner of the ideal," the banner of truth and freedom-
not political freedom only, but freedom from the shackles
imposed
by false notions of respectability and fear of public opinion,
from
chains forged by wrong aims of life such as the love of worldly
distinction. In the spirit of such truth and freedom she-and
through her Ibsen-sees the pillars of society which originate in
the relations of men and women, especially as represented in
marriage and in family life. Dina Dorf, for example, in the New
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36 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
World begins life not as a thing which John Tonnesen had
simply
taken unto himself, but as her husband's equal, co-worker, and
comrade-thus representing the younger generation which
initiates their emancipation.
In the Doll's House Ibsen champions the right of woman,
defends her claim to a life of her own aside from that of wife
and

317. mother. Is she to be regarded as an individual, or should her
liberty be limited by the interest of the community? This and
the similar situation in Ghosts, "Just because she is a woman,
she
will, when once started go to the utmost extreme,"29 shows
how
far Ibsen's respect for women exceeds his respect for men.
In his later works30 Ibsen, though with continued faith in the
powers and glory of woman, modifies and restricts her sphere
of
action. With Hedda Gabler he had reached the conclusion that
it was not the woman of masculine intellect and ability who
propped the beam of society, but the ideal woman, the wife and
mother with noble instincts, who reigns supreme over humanity
by power of her virtues. In his last two dramas, women have
missed their vocation as women. His last two plays, John
Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken are more sceptic
of the high ideals of women. But in When We Dead Awaken
Ibsen returns to his original contention that woman is to be
regarded as a personality and not as a piece of property. He
con-
tinues to give his modified view by allowing Irene to say: "I
should have borne children into the world-many children-real
children-not sudh children as are hidden away in grave vaults.
That was my vocation,"'' meaning that there Irene would have
realized herself, would have lived her individuality.
These conclusions the philosopher finally reached, publicly
subscribing to them when on May 26, 1898, at the festival of
the Norwegian Women's Rights League in Christiania, he said:
"I must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for
the

318. women's rights movement. I am not even quite clear as to just
29 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 351.
30 John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken, The Master
Builder and
Little Eyolf.
31 When We Dead Awaken, Act ii, p. 419.
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IBSEN'S POLIMCAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 37
w hat this women's rights movement really is. To me it seemed
a problem of humanity in general." Again: "The task always
be fore my mind has been to advance our country and give the
pe ople a higher standard. To obtain these two factors are of
im portance: it is for the mothers by strenuous and sustained
la bor to awaken a conscious feeling of culture and discipline.
T his must be created in men, before it will be possible to lift
the
people to a higher plane. It is the women who are to solve the
so cial problem. As mothers they are to do it. And only as
such can they do it. Here lies a great task for woman.."32
32 Speeches and New Letters of Henrik Ibsen.
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319. All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Contentsimage 1image 2image 3image 4image 5image 6image
7image 8image 9image 10image 11image 12image 13Issue
Table of ContentsAmerican Political Science Review, Vol. 19,
No. 1, Feb., 1925Volume InformationLimitations on National
Sovereignty in International Relations [pp.1-24]Ibsen's Political
and Social Ideas [pp.25-37]Scientific Research and State
Government [pp.38-50]Constitutional Law in 1923-1924: The
Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United
States in the October Term, 1923 [pp.51-68]Legislative Notes
and ReviewsAdvisory Referendum in Massachusetts on the
Child Labor Amendment [pp.69-73]Centralized Purchasing
Agencies in State and Local Governments [pp.73-82]One House
of Congress as Two. [pp.82-83]Foreign Governments and
PoliticsThe British Election. [pp.84-96]Political Science in
Great Britain and France. [pp.96-103]Reports of the Second
National Conference on the Science of Politics [pp.104-
162]News and NotesPersonal and Miscellaneous [pp.163-
170]Doctoral Dissertations in Political Science [pp.171-
177]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp.178-180]untitled [pp.180-
182]untitled [pp.182-183]untitled [pp.183-185]untitled [pp.185-
187]untitled [pp.187-189]untitled [pp.190-191]untitled [pp.191-
192]untitled [pp.193-194]untitled [pp.194-196]untitled [pp.196-
198]untitled [pp.198-199]untitled [pp.199-202]untitled [pp.202-
203]untitled [pp.203-204]Briefer Notices [pp.204-221]Recent
Publications of Political InterestBooks and Periodicals [pp.222-
251]Government Publications [pp.251-259]Back Matter
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Works Cited
Jamil, S. Selina. "Emotions in the Story of an Hour."
Explicator, vol. 67, no. 3, Spring2009, pp. 215-220.
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Emotions in THE STORY OF AN HOUR
AUTHOR:S. SELINA JAMTL
TITLE:Emotions in THE STORY OF AN HOUR
SOURCE:The Explicator 67 no3 215-20 Spr 2009
COPYRIGHT:The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of
this article and it is reproduced
with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation
of the copyright is
prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.heldref.org/
In "The Story of an Hour" (1894), Kate Chopin focuses on a

321. late nineteenth-century American
woman's dramatic hour of awakening into selfhood, which
enables her to live the last moments of
her life with an acute consciousness of life's immeasurable
beauty. Mrs. Mallard, who suffers from
a weak heart, seems to live a psychologically torpid and anemic
life until she hears the news of
her husband's death. This news comes from her husband's
friend, who says that Brently Mallard
has died in a railroad accident. Mrs. Mallard's sister, Josephine,
mindful of Mrs. Mallard's heart
condition, breaks the news to her "in broken sentences" and
"veiled hints" (193). But when Mrs.
Mallard hears the shocking news, she undergoes a profound
transformation that empowers her
with a "clear and exalted perception" (194). As Chopin
demonstrates, this heightened
consciousness comes to the protagonist because of her
awakened emotions. Revealing her own
dynamic and avant-garde understanding, Chopin rejects the
tradition of attributing supremacy to
the faculty of reason in the act of perception, and she
attributes it instead to the faculty of
emotions.
When she hears the news of her husband's death, Mrs.
Mallard's obliviousness to the beauty
of life breaks down under the powerful impact of emotion. Until
this moment, Mrs. Mallard hardly
thinks it worthwhile to continue her existence; as the
narrator of the story says, "It was only
yesterday [Mrs. Mallard] had thought with a shudder that life
might be long" (194). Her life until
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322. 1 of 5 1/3/18, 9:02 AM
this point seems devoid of emotion, as the lines in her face
"besp[ea]k repression" (193). Upon
hearing the news, her sorrow gushes out in a torrent:
"She wept at once with sudden, wild
abandonment" (193). The narrator points out, however, that
Mrs. Mallard is not struck, as "many
women" have been, by "a paralyzed inability" to accept the
painful sense of loss (193). On the
contrary, she is roused from her passivity by an uncontrollable
flood of emotion. This "storm" that
"haunt[s] her body and seem[s] to reach into her soul"
(193) ultimately purges her of the
sufferance of a meaningless life, as it becomes the impetus for
the revelation that leads to her
new freedom.
Until her moment of illumination, Mrs. Mallard's emotions
have been stifled and suppressed to
fit into the mold of hollow social conventions. As Chopin
implies, Mrs. Mallard's "heart trouble"
(193) is not so much a physical ailment, as the other characters
in the story think, as a sign of a
woman who has unconsciously surrendered her heart (i.e., her
identity as an individual) to the
culture of paternalism. This repression has long brewed in
the depths of Mrs. Mallard's heart
(emotionally speaking), and it causes her to be generally
apathetic toward life. The physiological
aspect of Mrs. Mallard's heart ailment appears to be, then, a
result of the psychological burden of
allowing another individual's (i.e., her husband's) "powerful
will" to smother and silence her own

323. will (194). In the patriarchal world of the nineteenth-century
United States that Chopin depicts, a
woman was not expected to engage in self-assertion. As Norma
Basch observes of the American
legal and economic milieu of the period, the patriarchy of
that time "mandated the complete
dependence of wives on husbands," making marriage "a form of
slavery" (349, 355). The virtuous
wife, in Mrs. Mallard's world, was the submissive woman who
accepts the convention that her
husband has "a right to impose a private will" upon her -- as
Mrs. Mallard realizes has been true
of her marriage (194). So insistent is this artificial life of empty
conventions for Mrs. Mallard that it
tries to assert itself even after its barriers are broken, as
she sits in her room and begins to
comprehend the freedom that awaits her as a widow: "She was
beginning to recognize this thing
that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to
beat it back with her will" (194). But
the excitement in her heart, which is supposed to be frail, is
uncontrollable, and her fear soon
transforms into joy (193, 194). That is, the power of her
emotions conquers the force of
conventionality.
As she sets aside the world of social conventions, her
emotions underscore the individuality
that is awakening in her. "[T]his thing" that is approaching her
is her consciousness of her own
individuality, and she waits for it "fearfully" (193).
Accompanying it is "a monstrous joy" that
highlights the colossal significance of self-discovery at the
expense of the hollow conventions that
would dismiss her joy as horribly inappropriate and unbecoming
(194), Now, however, joy and
hope lead her to an awareness that she has become, as she

324. realizes, "Free! Body and soul free!"
(194). Just as she locks herself in her room and locks out her
social world, she also locks out
social conventions. And thus, purging her repressed emotions,
she awakens to all the individual
elements of her natural environment: she notices, as she
looks out her bedroom window, the
trees, the rain, the air, the peddler's voice, the notes of a song,
the sparrows, the sky, and the
clouds (193). Because her emotions are no longer bottled,
Louise Mallard attends to "the sounds,
the scents, the color" in the natural world (193), and they teach
her of the sounds, the scents, and
the color within her own soul. That is, they teach her of the
particular combination of attributes
within her soul that make her a unique individual. Clearly, her
new emotional freedom leads to the
awakening of her mind.
Chopin's investigation of emotion in this story clearly fits R.
J. Dolan's argument that emotion
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influences not simply attention, but also "preattentive
processing" (1191, 1192). As Chopin shows
through Louise, the act of watching nature and engaging
in sense perception is the act of
processing emotional stimuli: "She could see in the open square
before her house the tops of
trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The

325. delicious breath of rain was in the air"
(193). These objects inspire joy and hope in her, which, in turn,
stir Louise's attention: "[S]he felt
it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the
sounds, the scents, the color that filled
the air" (193). The "it" that she feels emerging from nature is
the vision, or perception, of her
freedom, which occurs through her aroused emotions. The
presence of emotion signifies Louise's
sensitivity, responsiveness, and mindfulness.
Indeed, it is not the rational faculty that enables
Louise's discovery of her individuality. As
Chopin carefully points out, the coming of consciousness
occurs suddenly, spontaneously,
intuitively. As Louise looks out her window, her face shows
"not a glance of reflection, but rather...
a suspension of intelligent thought" (193). The discovery of her
individuality is "too subtle and
elusive" for the rational faculty to analyze and grasp. It can
only be "felt" first with instinct and then
with emotions (193). Alone and unencumbered in her room,
Louise spontaneously opens herself
to the sublimity and grandeur of the physical world around her,
of which she herself is a part.
As Chopin demonstrates through the physical changes in
Louise, emotion connects the soul to
the body. As her body responds to her emotions, she feels a
rhythmic connection to the physical
world. As John Deign defines emotion, it is "a state through
which the world engages our thinking
and elicits our pleasure or displeasure" (829-30), for it is
the "turbulence of the mind" that
"captures our attention, orients our thoughts, and touches
our sensibilities" (829). Fittingly,
Louise's emotions enable her to feel harmony between her body
and soul. According to William

326. James, a psychologist who was a contemporary of Chopin's,
"bodily feelings" are "characteristics"
of "various emotional moods" (1066). Fittingly, Chopin
underscores Louise's physical state: "Now
her bosom rose and fell tumultuously" (194). At this point
Louise's apparent emotional anemia
has given way to healthy blood circulation: "Her pulses beat
fast, and the coursing blood warmed
and relaxed every inch of her body" (194). Indeed, if James
argues that "the immediate cause of
emotion is a physical effect on the nerves" (1073). Chopin
demonstrates that emotion is
accompanied by physical changes: Louise's "coursing blood"
reflects her profound joy about her
new sense of life's sacred beauty (194).
Chopin also shows the influence of Romanticism in her
emphasis on the creative role of
emotions. As M. H. Abrams argues, for the Romantics, the poet
"modif[ies] or transform[s] the
materials of sense" (55): "objects of sense are fused and
remolded in the crucible of emotion and
the passionate imagination" (54). Similarly, Louise's
passion influences her imagination: "Her
fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her" (194).
Evidently, her feelings of curiosity
and wonder influence her "fancy," which here is
synonymous with the creative faculty of
imagination. But, in using the word "fancy" instead of
imagination, Chopin suggests that it is
emotions that are prompting the creative work. As Abrams
interprets the Romantic viewpoint,
"[f]eelings project a light -- especially a colored light -- on
objects of sense" (54). Stepping beyond
the Romantics, not only does Chopin make Louise's flooding
emotions vitalize the landscape, but
she also makes the latter's emotions create a meaningful,

327. purposeful landscape: it symbolizes the
stirring, creative, dynamic forces of life.
Further, Chopin uses nature -- the objects of sense -- as a
symbol of the powerful faculty of
emotions, which creates design and harmony. Just as spring
symbolizes the "new... life," so the
natural world symbolizes the vigor and power of Louise's "wild
abandonment," her passionate
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outburst (193). As nature returns to life after winter, so Louise's
emotions return to life after a
prolonged winter of patriarchal confinement. Furthermore, just
as nature awakens instinctively, so
do Louise's repressed emotions. That is, as nature bursts
with energy and vitality, so does
Louise's love of life. Louise's emotions bring together all the
individual elements of the natural
world in such a way that they form a new pattern, a unique
living picture. Because her husband,
the source of her suppressed and repressed emotions, suddenly
seems to have disappeared, her
bottled emotions gush out to taste freedom just as the world of
nature ("the sounds, the scents,
the color that fill [] the air") breaks out spontaneously
(193). And yet her society rejects this
natural world of emotions and associates it with illness. Thus
Josephine implores, "Louise, open
the door... you will make yourself ill" (194). While Chopin

328. associates emotions with sound health,
the nineteenth-century patriarchy associates them with ill
health, Louise's responsiveness to the
sounds, scents, and color is her excited and intense
responsiveness to beauty. To feel life's
beauty, then, is to see the beauty of one's own life. For to look
at the world of nature is to feel
life's innate, spontaneous beauty: "she was drinking in a
very elixir of life through the open
window" (194). Indeed, the base metal of her own life is
now transformed to invaluable gold
because of her "abandon[ment]" to her own nature (194). As
Chopin illustrates through Louise's
sense of freedom, the latter engages in an interpretive act that
shows how the individual creates
meaning for herself through the faculty of emotions. So
profound is this awakening that in that
one hour of self-fulfillment, Louise experiences a taste of
eternity.
In that one hour, then, Louise sees and creates a new identity
with her newly awakened faculty
of emotions (193). Chopin illustrates the role of the
emotions in creating the moment of
illumination by highlighting the connection between her eyes
and her emotions: "The vacant stare
and the look of terror... went from her eyes. They stayed keen
and bright" (194). The awareness
that transforms Mrs. Mallard into Louise, the individual, and
that makes her "[see] beyond" the
stifling past into a promising future is the product of
acute emotions: "There was a feverish
triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a
goddess of Victory" (194). Louise
breaks the shackles of the patriarchal culture as she
comprehends that she can "live for herself"
instead of living the life that her husband sanctions for her

329. (194). And this comprehension has to
be felt with emotions. Thus Chopin shows how Louise's faculty
of emotions influences her faculty
of reason: she now comprehends her "possession of self-
assertion which she suddenly
recognized as the strongest impulse of her being" (194). As
Dolan observes, there is a strong
relationship between emotion and cognition: "the growth of
emotional awareness informs
mechanisms that underwrite the emergence of self-identity
and social competence" (1194).
Standing confidently at the top of the stairs, the height of which
represents Louise's exalted state,
she has reached the zenith of self-awareness.
Thus it is no surprise that Louise suffers an acutely painful --
and ultimately fatal -- shock when
her husband returns home. It turns out that he has missed his
train and thus has been spared the
accident that otherwise would have killed him. He arrives home
and enters through the front door
just as Louise, at the end of her "brief moment of
illumination" (194), is making her symbolic
descent down the stairs. When she spots her husband, Louise
seems to realize in an instant not
only that her husband, as a proponent of patriarchal culture,
would never allow for a woman's
self-discovery, but also that she could never reverse her
progress and once again take up the
confinement of her former life. At the sight of her husband she
is at once profoundly aware of her
newfound freedom and the fact that it will not last. The shock
that kills her must, then, be the
realization that she has lost this freedom, and with it her
human individuality. Her emotions
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spread through her entire being so profoundly that they lead to
another severe physical change,
and she dies immediately.
As Chopin demonstrates, then, so powerful is emotion that it
enables clarity of perception in
Louise. It allows her to perceive life's immeasurable beauty,
without which, as she realizes with
the suddenness of acutely shocking pain at the sudden entry of
her husband, there is only death:
the "joy" that kills Louise is the joy that (unbeknownst to the
doctors who ironically assume that it
is joy at her husband's return that kills her [194]) she refuses to
surrender, as the patriarchy would
require her to do at Brently's return. But, for one climactic hour
of her life, Louise does truly taste
joy. For one hour of emotion, Louise does glimpse meaning and
fulfillment. To be fully alive, then,
is to engage in heightened consciousness, to observe and
connect with the world around one's
self. Indeed, Chopin makes clear that to simply observe the
world through one's rational faculty is
nowhere near as powerful as observing it with the vibrant,
vigorous, acute, and heightened
awareness that emotion makes possible.
ADDED MATERIAL
S. SELINA JAMTL, Prince George's Community College
KEYWORDS
Kate Chopin, emotion, freedom, patriarchy, perception, "The
Story of an Hour"

331. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank the Explicate editors who aided in
the revision of this article.
WORKS CITED
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition. London:
Oxford UP, 1953. Print.
Basch Norma. "Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of
Marital Unity in Nineteenth-Century
America." Feminist Studies 5.2 (1979): 346-66. JSTOR. Web.
30 Oct. 2008.
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Literature: Reading,
Reading, Writing. Compact 6th ed.
Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Boston:
Thomson/Wadsworth, 2007. 193-94.
Print.
Deigh, John. "Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions."
Ethics 104.4 (1994): K24-54. JSTOR.
Web, 7 Nov. 2008.
Dolan, R. J. "Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior." Science
298,5596 (2002): 1191-94. JSTOR.
Web. 2 Nov. 2008.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Print.
"This publication is protected by US and international copyright
laws and its content may not be
copied without the copyright holder's express written
permission except for the print or download
capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This
content is intended solely for the use of
the individual user."
Accession Number: 509910447
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A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen
Act I of A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen
You can find the full text of the play online at this
link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2542/2542-h/2542-h.htm
You can find the full audio version of the play online at this
link: https://librivox.org/a-dolls-house-by-henrik-ibsen/
You can find a performance of the play online at this
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3nw7CZvO8
Act II of A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen
You can find the full text of the play online at this
link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2542/2542-h/2542-h.htm
You can find the full audio version of the play online at this
link: https://librivox.org/a-dolls-house-by-henrik-ibsen/
You can find a performance of the play online at this
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3nw7CZvO8
Act III of A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen
You can find the full text of the play online at this
link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2542/2542-h/2542-h.htm
You can find the full audio version of the play online at this
link: https://librivox.org/a-dolls-house-by-henrik-ibsen/
You can find a performance of the play online at this
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3nw7CZvO8
Writing Assignment

333. Essay #2: Literary Analysis with Critical Commentary
Assignment
One of Ibsen’s biographers argues that the play is not so much
about women’s rights as about “the need
of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she
really is, and to strive to become that
person.” 1 For this writing assignment, you must use two of the
articles of critical commentary that are
posted in the Critical Commentary folder in Module 9 on
Blackboard as well as your own reading of the
play to support Meyer’s interpretation. In other words, the
question that you are trying to answer in this
essay is: In what ways is this play an argument for the
individual’s responsibility to find out who they
really are, whether they are a man or a woman?
You will use A Doll House as your primary source. The two
critical articles that you select to incorporate
as support for the argument that you are making are your
secondary sources. I have uploaded an essay
called “Emotions in ‘The Story of an Hour’” as a model for you
of how literary scholars write essays
about texts with the incorporation of critical commentary by
other scholars.
Expectations
Your essay should be typed, double-spaced, in 12-point font
with one-inch margins, in MLA format, no
fewer than 700 words (two and a half complete pages), and
proofread prior to submission. Please rely
on class notes, information posted on Blackboard, and your
textbooks for appropriate MLA citation
information and incorporation of quotes into sentences. Your
essay should adhere to conventions of

334. writing that you have learned in your previous writing classes
and in the videos that you reviewed on
Blackboard.
This essay should also include a works cited page that will
include entries for any texts or references that
you utilized in your essay.
Grading
My grading will focus on the format, structure, and organization
of your essay, but primarily, my
attention will be on the quality of your argument (make sure
you have a strong thesis statement and
topic sentences to guide and control your writing) as well on the
effective incorporation of two
secondary sources. Use these sources to help you make your
point or use them as a counterargument to
refute. BE CAREFUL! The challenge with assignments like this
is that students allow critical commentary
to make an argument for them. Make sure that your argument is
the primary argument in the essay and
that you are bringing in these additional sources as support for
what you want to say about the play.
Submission
You will upload your essay through the link in Blackboard that
says “Dropbox: Literary Analysis with
Critical Commentary.” When you click on that, you should
submit your document as an attachment by
clicking on “Browse My Computer.” If you are not using
Microsoft Word (.doc) as your word processing
software, please be sure that you save and upload your

335. document as a .pdf (Portable Document Format)
to prevent compatibility issues.
Help!
As always, please contact me at [email protected] if you have
any issues, concerns, or questions prior
to the due date.
1 Michael Meyer, Ibsen. Sutton Publishing, 2005.
mailto:[email protected]