A Doll’s House — Commentary

In brief

Nora Helmer has spent years secretly repaying a loan she raised by forging her dying father’s signature, in order to take her sick husband to Italy. At Christmas he is made manager of a bank, the money troubles seem over, and the clerk he plans to sack turns out to hold her bond. For two and a half acts she fights to keep a letter from him. When he reads it he calls her a criminal. When the bond comes back he forgives her. She changes out of her costume, sits him down, tells him what their marriage has been, and goes.

The construction is that of a well-made melodrama and the ending is the opposite of one. Nearly everything of interest in the play comes from the collision of those two facts.

The door

Whether the play was ever about women usually gets settled by quoting a toast. On 26 May 1898, at a banquet given for him in Christiania by the Norwegian Women’s Rights League, Ibsen said he “must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement”; his task had been the “description of humanity”. That line has been used ever since to take the politics out of the play. Michael Meyer argued that its theme is not women’s rights but every individual’s need to find out who he or she really is.

The Norwegian text is short and says both less and more than that. Ibsen tells his hosts he is no member of their society, and that he is not even clear what their cause is. To him it has been a human cause. Solving the woman question is no doubt desirable, he adds, as a side matter, but it has not been the whole purpose. The key words are consciously and whole, and neither amounts to a denial. Then comes the part seldom quoted. It is for mothers, by slow hard work, to awaken a conscious feeling of culture and discipline; it is women who must solve the human question; as mothers they must, and only then can they.

So the speech does prove something: that at seventy Ibsen would not be claimed by a movement, and that his idea of women’s work was not the League’s or ours. It does not prove what he intended in 1879, and his own papers from those years point the other way. A note written in Rome on 19 October 1878, outlining a “modern tragedy”, says that “A woman cannot be herself in modern society”, because it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint”. Early in 1879, Harper’s reports, he astonished the Scandinavian Society in Rome by demanding that women should vote in it and be eligible for its librarianship, and when only the librarian motion passed he attacked its opponents at a banquet. He was planning this play at the time.

The play’s own answer makes the quarrel look false. Helmer says, “Before all else, you are a wife and a mother.” Nora replies, “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being” (Act III). Her sentence is the description of humanity, and it is a feminist claim because of who says it and what it costs her. When Helmer says no man would sacrifice his honour for the one he loves, she does not speak for humanity: “It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.”

The shape of the play

Three acts in one room, from Christmas Eve to the night after Christmas Day. Act I sets the trap, Act II closes it with a dismissal, a failed appeal to Doctor Rank and a letter through the door, and Act III springs it and then does something new.

Helmer reads the letter and insults her. A second letter arrives enclosing the bond. He shouts “I am saved!” Nora asks, “And I?” “You too, of course”, he says, and burns the paper. That is the happy ending, on schedule. Then Nora comes back in everyday dress and says, “Torvald, this is a settling of accounts.” William Archer conjectured in his introduction that Ibsen first planned a conventional close and found his characters outgrowing it. That is a guess, but it describes what an audience feels: the play changes genre while it watches.

Machinery

Ibsen’s props are mechanisms, each doing one job in the plot and another on the marriage.

The macaroons come first. Nora eats one or two and wipes her mouth before she faces her husband. Helmer teases, “Not even taken a bite at a macaroon or two?”, and she lies to his face. It is comedy, and it shows the household economy in small: a forbidden pleasure, a wagging finger, a wife who has learned to lie sweetly.

The letterbox is the cruellest device. It has glass, so the letter can be seen, and a lock. Mrs Linde asks, “And your husband keeps the key?” “Yes, always”, says Nora. A wife in this house can look at what will destroy her and cannot touch it. In Act III Helmer finds the lock tampered with, “Here is a broken hairpin. Nora, it is one of yours”, and he opens the box for the dullest reason in drama: “there will be no room to put the newspaper in tomorrow morning”. Rank’s cards with the black cross lie on top, so that one man’s death notice comes to hand with the other’s disgrace.

The tarantella is a delaying action that turns into an exposure. Helmer is walking to the box when Nora strikes the first bars at the piano. Then she dances more and more wildly, her hair coming down, while he calls out instructions. “You are dancing as if your life depended on it”, he says. “So it does.” The dress is his and the dance is his display, and the one time she uses it for herself he thinks she has forgotten her lessons.

The bank

Money is what makes the play run. Helmer’s promotion should at last clear the debt, and his first use of the post is a staff change that hands Krogstad’s job to Nora’s friend at Nora’s own request. Her kindness and her crime meet in a personnel decision. His reason for the sacking, when pressed, is not the old forgery but that Krogstad greets him at work with “I say, Helmer, old fellow!”

The first scene gives Helmer his creed: “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.” His home has depended on nothing else. Mrs Linde states the position, “a wife cannot borrow without her husband’s consent”, and Nora’s pride is that she has managed the “quarterly interest” and the instalments anyway, by cutting her dress money and copying by night. “It was like being a man”, she says. The forgery is a clerk’s comedy: as Krogstad points out, “your father signed this bond three days after his death”.

Ibsen keeps the vocabulary going to the end. Rank, examining himself, finds the result “Bankrupt!” Nora’s last scene is bookkeeping: ring returned, keys laid down, nothing accepted from a stranger. The moral discovery of the play is presented as an audit, which is why it feels so cold and is so hard to answer.

The second couple

Mrs Linde and Krogstad are usually treated as plot furniture. Archer called them the confidant and the villain, of a different order of art from Ibsen’s later people. I think they are the argument’s other half. Krogstad’s forgery is the same offence as Nora’s, and he alone tells her so, with the plain sentence the play is built on: “The law cares nothing about motives.”

Mrs Linde gave up Krogstad for a husband with money because her mother and brothers needed it. Her proposal to him in Act III is the only honest negotiation in the play: “Two on the same piece of wreckage would stand a better chance”. Then comes the turn that makes her, not him, the author of the catastrophe. He offers to ask for his letter back, and she stops him: “No, Nils, you must not recall your letter.” She has decided that “This unhappy secret must be disclosed”.

Their marriage complicates any simple account of Nora’s exit. Mrs Linde has had the independence Nora goes out to find, and she reports: “There is not the least pleasure in working for one’s self.” As one wife leaves three children, another woman takes on a widower’s family with her eyes open. Ibsen does not say which of them is right.

The other people

Torvald Helmer

Helmer is not a brute, which is why the part is hard. He speaks in pet names from his first line, “Is that my little lark twittering out there?”, and is at his most repellent in the speech of forgiveness, which makes her “both wife and child” to him.

Doctor Rank

Rank is dying of a disease he blames on his father’s excesses, “this penalty for another man’s sin”. He ends his one use to her by telling her he loves her at the moment she is about to ask him for help.

Anne the nurse

Anne gave up her own child to nurse Nora, because “A poor girl who has got into trouble should be glad to.” Nora’s question to her, whether children forget a mother, is asked as research. The doll’s house rests on another woman’s lost child.

Laura Kieler

The case behind the play is real. Laura Kieler (1849–1932), Norwegian-born, wrote a reply to Brand at nineteen and met Ibsen in Dresden in 1871. He called her “the lark”. After her husband Victor caught tuberculosis she borrowed money under false pretences for a cure in Italy. Years later, desperate to repay, she sent Ibsen a novel for his publisher, and he declined to recommend it. She then forged a cheque. Her husband demanded a separation, she entered an asylum, and it was while she was there that Ibsen started the play. She returned to the marriage; accounts differ on who urged it, how long she was confined and whether she was committed or broke down.

Ibsen took a woman he had declined to help and gave her fictional counterpart the exit she did not get. She answered in her own work, including an 1890 play about a man who mines a woman’s suffering for material. Archer shows how lightly the matter was once taken: the real Nora, he says, committed forgery “not to save her husband’s life, but to redecorate her house”.

The German ending

Published in Copenhagen on 4 December 1879 and staged there on 21 December with Betty Hennings as Nora, the play reached Germany in 1880 with a problem. The actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused the last scene: “I would never leave my children!” Ibsen’s plays had no copyright protection in Germany, so any manager could rewrite him. Rather than let a hack do it he wrote the alternative himself, in which Nora is led to her children, collapses and, it is implied, stays. He called it a “barbaric outrage”, and in Archer’s account preferred “to commit the outrage himself, rather than leave his work to the tender mercies of adapters”.

It played at Flensburg in February 1880 and in several other cities, did not succeed, and was dropped when Raabe went back to the original. The episode shows exactly what was unacceptable. Forgery, blackmail and a suicide plan could stay; what had to go was one woman’s walk through a door without her children.

The English of it

The text linked here is R. Farquharson Sharp’s (Project Gutenberg #2542), complete in three acts and the plainer of the two free versions. It keeps Ibsen’s recurring det vidunderlige as “the wonderful thing” and his figure in “hundreds of thousands of women”. Set against the Norwegian, it has three real weaknesses. It turns tolv hundrede specier into two hundred and fifty pounds, in a play where money matters. It adds a word to the central line, since Nora says only et menneske, a human being, not a reasonable one. And it softens the most famous sound in modern drama: Ibsen’s final direction is the boom of a street door slamming shut, and Sharp has “The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.”

William Archer’s version, in volume 7 of the Collected Works (#70566, bound with Ghosts), repairs all three: “Twelve hundred dollars”, “before all else I am a human being”, “the reverberation of a heavy door closing”. But it is stiffer, renames Mrs Linde Mrs Linden, inflates the figure to “Millions of women have done so”, and makes the wonderful thing “the miracle of miracles”. For modern versions, Michael Meyer’s (1965, Methuen) and James McFarlane’s (Four Major Plays, Oxford World’s Classics) are the usual choices; Christopher Hampton’s (Faber, 1989) is a playwright’s version; Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik’s (Penguin Classics, 2016) follows the new Norwegian critical edition.

Readers and afterlives

Shaw, who took the part of Krogstad in a private production at Eleanor Marx’s lodgings in 1886, called Nora’s departure “a journey in search of self-respect and apprenticeship to life”. Strindberg attacked her in Getting Married (1884), for her lies and for leaving her children. James Huneker wrote in 1905 that “that slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world”.

The best question came from Beijing. In 1923 Lu Xun told a women’s college that without money Nora’s choices were prostitution or a humiliating return. Ibsen’s plot supports him: she leaves with a small bag, having refused any help. Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2017) picks up with a knock on that door fifteen years later. Nora has made money as a feminist novelist and now needs Torvald’s signature, because the divorce was never finalised and she has signed contracts as an unmarried woman. Hnath saw the joke Ibsen left lying: the plot starts over with a woman’s signature.

How to read it

Follow the money. Keep a running note of who owes what to whom, and when each thing falls due.
Read Act III twice. Stop at the bond in the stove, imagine the curtain, then go on.
Do not skip the second couple. Their scene is a rehearsal for the last one, with the opposite result.
Check the last line in Archer. It is only a stage direction, and it ought to be heard.