A Dolls House by Henrik Ibsen - Essay Example

Analysis of “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen Beginning with the title of the play and continuing artfully through the final curtain, Ibsen has created a unique world in “A Doll’s House” which still speaks to audiences today. The play gives us a peek into the beginnings of feminism and the transformation of society from a rigid, masculine world, and shows us the art of realism through Ibsen’s manipulation of the ordinary and the dramatic. By the end of the play, the two main characters have essentially changed emotional places, and Ibsen gives the audience no easy answer to the question of individuality. The title sets the stage: we are about to enter a place where manipulation is not necessarily negative, it just is what we will see. Nora and Helmer are playing at being adults; he plays with her as if she is a doll, and she responds in a doll-like manner, agreeing with (and pandering to) his thoughts and feelings without interjecting her own. Nora has not created her world; it has been created for her, from a time long before she was married. Nora comments toward the end of the play that she has been the plaything of both her father and her husband, that each of these men arranged the world to their own liking and both of them liked having her in it—the construct of Nora, an idealized shell, not someone with feelings and opinions. She has been coddled and loved, certainly, but not acknowledged or honored by the two most important men in her life. Because Helmer has spent a great amount of energy doing what he thinks will please her, he is shocked and angered when she comes up with the idea that she has done nothing with her life, nothing she can claim as her own. Helmer’s intentions, while misguided, do arise out of an idealized love for Nora. He does what he does because he thinks it will please her—at least until he runs up against disagreement. An Uneasy Mix of Fantasy and Reality Though the title sets us up to enter a fantasy world, on its surface the play portrays a realistic couple engaged in the normal actions of married people. Well, normal if having a nurse and a maid in the house are normal; at the time the play was written, this situation was more common. “A Doll’s House” was written just as the era of idealism in literature was coming to an end (Moi 257) and so Ibsen uses realistic elements and interactions between the characters. Viewers (and readers) in 2009 are quite used to seeing realism; in fact, we have taken pure realism and turned it back into theater through our fascination with “reality television” and non-fiction stories. At the time Ibsen was writing, realism was a relatively new way to portray situations; the idea of viewing a “slice of life” seemed very strange to audiences (Moi 257). This “slice of life” is not a direct representation of reality, however. Ibsen weaves fantasy throughout, as well as subterfuge. Moi refers to this fantasy as theatricality, a sort of play within a play device writers have used for centuries (258). This theatricality runs deeper than that, however, because it is an illustration of the different layers of charade that are going on in “The Doll’s House.” The game of hide-and-seek that Nora plays with her children is also a lovely illustration of Ibsen’s realism imitating art; she knows she will be found, wants to be found, and is briefly happy while hiding (Drake 32). The fact that she is discovered by another character who is hiding ruins her happiness. The masquerade parallels the theatricality and the game of hide-and-seek, creating layers of secrecy and revelation. Osterud’s discussion of the masquerade ball is particularly interesting because it illustrates the gradual buildup both to the party and the masquerade that Nora and Helmer are putting on in their marriage (148). The masquerade is complete when Helmer rushes his wife out of the party as soon as her dance has been performed and duly appreciated. In so doing, he steals the spotlight for himself; he controls each part of the orchestration from the practice to the final curtain. Nora is a prop which he uses to impress his fellow party-goers and everyone else, and she goes along with the charade, both to please her husband and to appear as the ideal wife. It is ironic that he is so pleased with her performance, yet at the same time his prudish ways point out that her dance was a little over the top, given the circumstances. In saying that, he robs Nora of her individual expression of the dance (Osterud 149). The fantastical dance may take place in “real” life, so to speak, but the underlying charade and Helmer’s orchestration of their marriage is complete. Ibsen’s use of fantasy in this instance is a subtle illustration of how married couples put on an exterior face (a mask) both to each other and to the greater world; Helmer is pleased with the extent of the masquerade, but Nora is not. She would like to continue living in the dream world so she can avoid the very real problems about to be revealed and to avoid the commitment she has tentatively made to herself, to commit suicide rather than face dishonor (Moi 263-264). The hiding and maneuvering parallels the lies sprinkled throughout the play. At the end of Act I, Ibsen sets the stage for his portrayal of the act of lying during the exchange between Helmer and Nora, discussing Krogstad’s alleged forgery. Helmer is a very black and white, one-dimensional person: he wears his ideals out on his sleeve and waves them at anyone who comes near. He also makes assumptions and judgments and determines guilt, innocence and responsibility very quickly. Nora isn’t so sure; she identifies with Krogstad, attempts to excuse him, and is extremely nervous when her husband pronounces judgment and forbids her to talk about it. Her deeper lie has yet to be revealed, of course. Nora is attempting to figure herself out: she doesn’t fit into her husband’s black and white world, yet she knows that some actions are wrong on some level (like lying). When confronted with the idea that her own lies might poison her children and cause them to be deviants, she dismisses that conclusion almost as easily as her husband dismissed Krogstad a moment ago. Almost as easily; Nora still has some things to work through before the issue is actually settled. Feminism—In the Days before Feminism This play was written at a time when women were just beginning to break free from their former gender roles and demand to be recognized as valuable individuals in the context of the greater society (Osterud 165; Guo 80). A woman was defined by her place in the family: wife first, mother second, sister/aunt/friend/nurse/teacher/neighbor following after. For instance, though her husband is dead, Christine is still known as Mrs. Linde; this affiliation is so strong that Helmer doesn’t know her when Nora introduces her as Christine, but can identify her as Nora’s schoolmate when the introduction is corrected to Mrs. Linde. And, in the third act as Nora is declaring her intention to walk out the door, Helmer reminds her of sacred duties—namely, those of performing as a wife and mother, centered, of course, around Helmer. Nora may live in the world, but she does not understand it and cannot accept a stereotypical woman’s role in it. Helmer states a sad-but-true fact that Nora really doesn’t understand the conditions of the world in which she lives, as he so succinctly puts it during the final scene. The world has not been constructed to include her and her human flaws; it has only been constructed to contain an ideal of her, which she feels is a masquerade and a lie in itself. This doll house-like world of Helmer’s (and, by extension, the greater culture in which the play is set) has a rigid set of values and social stratifications. The nicknames Helmer uses toward his wife keep her a little girl, a doll, which is supposed to be her place. It may seem quaint and insulting for a man to refer to his wife as a small animal for an affectionate nickname, but at the time (and within the construct of the play) those nicknames are sweetly loving gestures, given with no harm intended. Guo (82) disagrees that these are loving words; in this feminist’s view, these nicknames become ways to subtly cut Nora down to size, to keep her in her place by belittling her. Shafer (31) points out that there is a wonderful ambiguity to Helmer’s character, and different actors can interpret his lines according to the director’s vision. Nora is also a little guilty of nicknaming; at various times throughout the play she refers to her own children as sweet blessings, dolly children, and so on, and during her big confrontation with Helmer in the third act she finally realizes and expresses that she has been treating her children as dolls, just as she was treated as a doll. Rejection as the First Act of Transformation Since Helmer is left an empty man at the end of the play, this reader assumes that he neither intended to belittle Nora nor did he purposely wield masculine power over her. He simply is what he is, just as Nora is what she is; Nora would like very much to be something different, but Helmer has no idea that the world could or should change. For Nora, the only way to create her own world is to completely reject the previous doll house situation and start fresh. Nora’s complete rejection of her husband is more than the simple act of leaving him; it arises from her desire to have her own honor, her own thoughts and opinions, and her basic human need to be acknowledged as an individual even though she is flawed (Shafer 29). Her method of seeking freedom (lying and hiding from her husband) is also flawed, but the end result is that she has arrived at the exit because she feels it is the right thing to do. The reader has to wonder if it will be possible for Nora to complete her transformation, because deep down in her heart she wanted her husband to take the blame for her actions—so she could snatch the blame back with dramatic flair, but nevertheless she wanted to see a great gesture from him. Helmer comments to her that no real man would sacrifice his honor, even for the woman he loved dearly; thus he puts his ideals over his ideal of the perfect wife. When Nora reminds him that women have been sacrificing their honor for men since forever, he dismisses her—it is not even in his world to think that the honor loaned to a woman from a man is somehow less than honorable. It will certainly be a struggle for Nora to figure herself out, because there is something comforting in being rescued; once she shuts the door at the end of the play, she is on her own and determined to avoid being rescued. It is interesting that at the end of the play, Helmer is the one left alone and empty now that Nora is gone (Osterud 166). He is “hopelessly trapped within his doll’s house” with nobody to play with anymore (Drake 33). During the time of their marriage, Nora lived in an unrecognized emptiness as a shell of an idealized woman; she was as hollow as a doll, very beautiful on the outside but nothing of substance on the inside. By the end of the play, she has at least decided that this emptiness is no longer acceptable, and the tables are turned on Helmer: he is the one left talking to the air, and she turns a deaf ear to his pleas. She does not see anything of value in him that would cause her to reconsider her departure, perhaps stay in the marriage and attempt to discover whatever she is looking for in her individuality. In a sense, she has become him, but without the loving kindness he clumsily showed to her. It’s always kind of fun to apply modern sensibilities to a work of literature written many years ago in another time and place. Critics (including the writer of this essay) must remember that “interpretation of the [play] as straightforward, unambiguous statements about society does a disservice to Ibsen” and to the brilliant handling of character, movement and theater (Shafer 27). Viewing this piece of literature from the eyes of the “modern” person, and knowing all the cultural changes that occurred in between the time Ibsen set pen to paper and our current-moment read of his work allows us to interpret it in broad ways—perhaps ways Ibsen would approve, perhaps ways which would cause him to shake his head and declare, “But I never meant that….” Certainly one reason literature endures is because it still has something to say, though many years have come and gone. If one looks at our modern entertainment choices, it can clearly be seen that the questions of gender, identity, reality and individuality have not been solved—we are still exploring these issues today. Works Cited Drake, David B. “Ibsen’s A Doll House.” Explicator 53.1 (Fall 1994): 32-33. Accessed 4 September 2009 from Academic Search Complete, EBSCO host. Guo Yuehua. “Gender Struggle over Ideological Power in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.” Canadian Social Science 5.1 (28 February 2009): 79-87. Accessed 4 September 2009 from Academic Search Premier Complete, EBSCO host. Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll House.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 1256-1305. Print. Moi, Toril. “First and Foremost a Human Being”: Idealism, Theatre and Gender in “A Doll’s House.” Modern Drama 49.3 (Fall 2006): 256-284. Accessed 4 September 2009 from International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. Osterud, Erik. “Nora’s watch.” Ibsen Studies 4.2 (December 2004): 147-175. Accessed 4 September 2009 from International Theatre and Dance with Full Text, EBSCO host. Shafer, Yvonne. “Complexity and Ambiguity in Ibsen’s A Doll House.” Literature in Performance 5.2 (April 1985): 27-35. Accessed 4 September 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host. Stetz, Margaret D. “Mrs. Linde, Feminism, and Women’s Work, Then and Now.” Ibsen Studies 7.2 (December 2007): 150-168. Accessed 4 September 2009 from International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text, EBSCO host. Read More