A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen, 1879 ★★★★

Selfishness is Not a Virtue

One is so geared to the view A Doll’s House is proto-feminist art that pushback appears in order. The author himself denied an agenda before a gathering of Norwegian suffragettes in 1898.

Still, the crux of the play deals with limitations society places on a woman; gender sensibility hovers over every one of its three acts.

But is Nora Helmer a sturdy feminist symbol? A suggestion: The play itself works because it doesn’t open itself exclusively or even predominantly to one interpretation, unless that interpretation is that life is hard and people are stuck to live it whatever way they can.

The play focuses on Nora’s marriage to Torvald, a upwardly-mobile bank manager with very strict ideas about public appearances and debt. The thing is, once upon a time Nora took on a lot of debt behind Torvald’s back to help him recover from an illness. Now the lender, Nils Krogstad, wants to use the fact she did so without male consent (something mandated at the time for women taking loans) as leverage to keep his job at Torvald’s bank.

He threatens to write a letter to Torvald exposing Nora’s “crime.” Nora notes she did what she did to save her husband. She couldn’t even alert him to how sick he was, she explains, because the doctor warned her that would worsen his frail condition:

KROGSTAD: The law takes no account of motives.

NORA: Then they must be very bad laws.

That they are is clear; is exposing that the purpose of the play?

Clearly Ibsen was taking on the larger social order of his time; conventions of marriage and expectations people placed upon one another to behave just so. In Torvald we have a clear case of excess rigidity, a man in need of having an iron rod pulled from his keister.

Torvald’s attitude toward Nora, often affectionate, is also condescending, handing her household spending money with the comment: “It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet.” He calls her a “little squirrel” and tells her not to eat macaroons because they ruin her teeth. Throughout acts One and Two, while Nora worries, Torvald makes clear his disapproval of any transgression.

Anthony Hopkins as Torvald and Claire Bloom as Nora in a 1973 film adaptation of A Doll's House, one of two versions released by major studios that year. Productions can vary wildly in tone, especially with Torvald, who can be overbearing when played to the hilt. Hopkins found a good balance in this film. Image from imdb.com.

Yet there is other business afoot. A longtime friend of Nora’s, newly widowed Kristine Linde, seeks a job. Even before Nora’s marital troubles are spelled out, Kristine delivers her own shock to the social order by explaining how she never loved her husband, marrying him for money. She hopes Nora can help her find employment. Torvald cheerfully offers her Krogstad’s position at the bank.

Then there is Dr. Rank, a longtime friend of Torvald’s, and by extension, Nora’s. He has his own issue, a malady of the spine which he apparently inherited from his father’s venereal disease. [A common myth of the time which shows up more prominently in Ibsen’t next play, Ghosts.] Rank knows time is short and wants to tell Nora he loves her.

A thick veil of sadness hangs over everything here. During a break in the action Nora has an exchange with her children’s nursemaid, a woman whose first job was looking after Nora herself as a girl. The nursemaid recalls a daughter she was forced to give away:

NURSEMAID: When a poor girl’s been in trouble she must make the best of things. Because he didn’t help, the rotter.

NORA: But your daughter will have forgotten you.

NURSEMAID: Oh no, she hasn’t. She wrote to me when she got confirmed, and again when she got married.

I am using the 1961 James McFarlane translation from Oxford World Classics, which may skew things in a particular direction. This is a play of inflections, after all. But the main thematic takeaway here is more than a 19^th century Stepford Wives or Handmaid’s Tale. It’s about a society in conflict with basic human impulses, where selfishness rules.

If the story is all about repressed Nora, that doesn’t account for how others besides Torvald speak down to her.

“Nora, Nora, haven’t you learned any sense yet?” Kristine complains. “At school you used to be an awful spendthrift.”

Nora’s own manner veers from empty-headed frivolity in the first act to desperation over Krogstad’s pending bombshell, a kind of feral yearning which pulls us in but at the same time suggests shallow self-interest at her core. Nora offers no vessel for feminist emulation. Having worked hard to pay off her debt, she wants everything back to where she can play with her children and be her husband’s favorite possession.

A scene from one of the first stagings of A Doll's House. Objections to the shocking ending, particularly from a German actress playing Nora, forced Ibsen to write an alternate, less-dire ending. Ibsen hated it. Image from https://pages.stolaf.edu/th271-spring2014/production-history-a-dolls-house/.

Selfishness stands out most in the handling of the secondary characters. Dr. Rank’s declaration of unrequited love for Nora is an odd scene, coming as it does mere moments after he explained his pending mortality. Nora seems blasé over the prospect of Dr. Rank’s death, yet blows up when he tells her he loves her.

NORA: Oh, my dear Dr. Rank, that really was rather horrid of you.

RANK [getting up]: That I have loved you every bit as much as anybody? Is that horrid?

NORA: No, but that you had to go and tell me.

It is suggested Nora believed the confession “unnecessary” because she already knew, something she coquettishly refuses to confirm or deny. Given Dr. Rank’s health, it seems odd of her to put her delicacies so far ahead of his need to make a clean breast of things.

The person who acts most selfishly is also the one treated to it most, Krogstad. He’s everyone’s whipping boy in Act One, someone whose obvious difficulties as a strapped widower with many children earn not a dollop of pity. Surely any good doctor would be reluctant to discuss a patient the way Rank does Krogstad:

RANK: He’s rotten to the core. But even he began talking about having to live, as though it were something terribly important.

Krogstad himself starts out earning this contempt, blackmailing Nora about the loan she took from him. Never mind she made her payments and is about to close out the debt; Krogstad knows the signature on his IOU was actually forged by Nora herself.

“…you haven’t the will to help me,” Krogstad tells her. “But I have ways of making you.”

I suspect most people who have read it say Nora is their favorite character. For me, it’s Krogstad. Sure he starts out a one-note villain, but as the play goes on, he becomes more sympathetic and reveals a depth not suggested at the outset. If there’s any hope for humanity in this play, it’s Nils. Looking over the ruins of his life with his old flame Kristine, he completes a journey from abuse magnet to dastard to romantic foil, a transition that deepened my engagement for both the character and the play.

Author Henrik Ibsen. While many of his plays remain popular to this day, none are staged as often as A Doll's House. Image from https://www.stagemilk.com/list-of-best-henrik-ibsen-plays/

While a pioneer of modern drama, Ibsen shows himself here quite the cunning purveyor of melodrama, with several suspenseful scenes involving Krogstad’s threatened exposure of Nora. Can Nora convince Krogstad to drop his case? Failing that, can she distract her husband long enough by dancing the tarantella? It’s stagey, yes, but effective.

But what people leave the theater remembering about A Doll’s House is not the build-up but the conclusion. It is the part of the play that gets the most attention, and thus requires a SPOILER ALERT.

After Torvald reads Krogstad’s blackmail letter, he tells Nora she can no longer be a wife or mother. She will only go through the motions for appearances. Then comes another letter from Krogstad, calling off his blackmail. He even sends the IOU. An ecstatic Torvald expresses relief, and reaffirms his love for Nora. But she has heard enough. She tells him she is leaving him immediately. Since the law won’t let her take their three children with her, she abandons them too, presumably forever.

A dumbstruck Torvald objects:

TORVALD: First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

NORA: That I don’t believe any more. I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as much as you are – or at least I’m going to try to be. I know most people agree with you, Torvald, and that’s also what it says in books. But I’m not content any more with what most people say, or with what it says in books. I have to think things out for myself, and get things clear.

Whether Nora’s actions are correct is a debate that keeps A Doll’s House at the forefront of Ibsen adaptations to the present day. But there is another debate going on here. Are people ultimately so consumed by self-interest that social and family obligations mean nothing by contrast?

Poor Rank’s announcement of death is handled by the others as a curious afterthought. Kristine casually admits marrying for money. Nora not only never loved Torvald, but felt nothing for her own father.

A social order weighted against women is a given; less pointed but more prevailing is the suggestion it does nothing for anyone. When a social order built on selfishness is violated, does it really matter to anyone?