The creation and impact of A Doll’s House

BY SARAH ROSE LEONARD

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House ends with an infamous door slam. Nora Helmer, a housewife in Norway, leaves her husband, Torvald Helmer, in a dramatic exit that rocked audiences when the play debuted in Copenhagen in 1879 and continues to divide viewers today. The play made Ibsen famous and endures as his most well-known work. It has been translated into 78 languages and is a well-regarded classic in the world theatre canon. What made Nora’s door slam so shocking then is remarkably what continues to resonate today: a wife leaves her husband and children in search of herself.

The action of A Doll’s House centers on Nora’s attempts to hide from Torvald her forgery of a signature in order to obtain a loan. When Torvald fell ill, his doctor said it was necessary for them to travel to a warmer climate for his recovery, and Nora told Torvald the money for the trip came from her father. Now, years later, Torvald is well, and Nora has saved money in secret, slowly repaying the debt. When Torvald finds out, he explodes, mostly out of concern for his own social standing, then forgives her. But it’s too late. After Torvald’s outburst Nora sees him as an empty man who is not connected to her in any real way. She experiences a revelation: she sees that her father and Torvald did her a disservice in life by treating her as though she were a toy, a doll who “lived by doing tricks.” She realizes she has no skills to do anything in life and announces to Torvald, “I have to try to educate myself.” She plans to return to her hometown. Finally, Nora realizes that she is not just a wife and mother, but also has duties to herself. She decides to leave her three children in the care of Anne Marie, their maid who also raised Nora, saying “they are in better hands than mine.” She says goodbye to Torvald, and we hear the door slam before the curtain falls.

Ibsen’s protégé, Laura Petersen Kieler, a successful journalist and writer, served as a model for Nora in A Doll’s House. He called her his “skylark,” as Torvald calls Nora in the play. When she was 19, Kieler wrote a novel entitled Brand’s Daughters, a sequel to Ibsen’s play Brand, his first financial success. Ibsen and his wife Suzannah encouraged Kieler as a writer, remaining in close contact with her throughout her life. At one point Kieler asked Ibsen his opinion of her manuscript of a new novel; she needed it published as she was in dire financial straits. Ibsen did not care for it and failed to recommend it to publishers. He did, however, find out the cause of her debt. She had borrowed money to finance a trip to Italy for her husband’s recovery from tuberculosis, but could not tell her husband about the borrowing, as he was terrified of debt. In order to repay the loan she churned out bad novels, but when her writing didn’t sell enough she forged a check. When her husband discovered her forgery, he demanded a legal separation on the grounds that she was an unfit mother and placed her in an insane asylum.

In his notes for A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s thoughts circle Kieler’s sacrifice, clearly an act of love rather than deceit, and encompass her ungrateful husband as well, who treated her extremely harshly. Ibsen wrote, “The wife in the play ends up by having no idea what is right and what is wrong; natural feelings on one hand and belief in authority on the other lead her to utter distraction…A woman cannot be herself in modern society. It is an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.” This injustice spurred Ibsen’s pre-existing thoughts on feminism. A play began to form.

Ibsen shifted Kieler’s story to be more “average,” aiming the play at theatregoing Europeans. He swapped in a housewife as a protagonist, rather than a writer. (In A Doll’s House, Part 2, however, Lucas Hnath makes his Nora a writer.) Ibsen portrayed her husband, Torvald, as a protector rather than a villain, and instead of taking her to an asylum he merely denounced her. These adjustments shifted the story away from the sensational and toward the plausible. Nora and Torvald Helmer typified the gender dynamics in a marriage in the late 19th century: husbands essentially dictated their wives’ existence. When the play became a hit, Kieler felt mortified. Her story had circulated widely before the play’s publication; anyone who knew it recognized Kieler in Nora. She never forgave Ibsen for using her life as fodder for his drama.

Kieler, however, wasn’t the only woman who influenced Ibsen’s seminal play. In her paper “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen,” Joan Templeton posits that the playwright owed the iconic door slam to three feminist thinkers in his life: Suzannah, his wife; Magdalene Thoresen, Suzannah’s stepmother; and Camilla Collett, a founder of Norwegian feminism, famous for writing the first novel in Norway about women’s liberation in 1854.

While Ibsen in his writing appeared more concerned with accurately capturing humanity rather than striving for equality, feminism is baked into A Doll’s House. Nora is a human character asking for the freedom to be herself, something all people regardless of gender deserve, but the play hinges on the fact that she is a woman navigating a man’s world. Nora’s speech, particularly at its conclusion, echoes leading feminist thought of the time. Ibsen took Collett’s argument that women, like men, possess a moral and intellectual nature and have a right to develop their minds.

Many critics argue that Ibsen did not intend to write a feminist play, citing the speech he gave at the 70th birthday banquet given in his honor by the Norwegian Women’s Rights League in 1898:

“I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement […]True enough, it is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others, but that has not been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity.”

The phrase “the woman problem” sounds harsh in the English translation, but crops up again and again in writings about the early days of feminism in Scandinavia. It roughly stands in for the arguments over how women should be treated in society.

When Ibsen’s play premiered in Copenhagen in 1879, audiences exploded with horror and praise alike. Theatres across Scandinavia clamored to produce A Doll’s House. A translator living in Stockholm at the time wrote “Such furious discussion did Nora rouse when the play came out that many a social invitation given in Stockholm during that winter bore the words ‘You are requested not to mention Ibsen’s Doll’s House.’” To leave one’s husband was one thing, but to leave one’s children? Beyond the pale. When the play premiered in Germany the actress playing Nora felt so upset by the notion that Nora leaves her children that she insisted a new ending be written. Begrudgingly, Ibsen wrote this:

NORA: … Where we could make a real marriage out of our lives together. Goodbye. [Begins to go.]

TORVALD: Go then! [Seizes her arm.] But first you shall see your children for the last time!

NORA: Let me go! I will not see them! I cannot!

TORVALD: [draws her over to the door, left]. You shall see them. [Opens the door and says softly.] Look, there they are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they wake up and call for their mother, they will be— motherless.

NORA: [trembling]. Motherless…!

TORVALD: As you once were.

NORA: Motherless! [Struggles with herself, lets her travelling bag fall, and says.] Oh, this is a sin against myself, but I cannot leave them. [Half sinks down by the door.]

TORVALD: [joyfully, but softly]. Nora!

[The curtain falls.]

However, after several protests against the “distortion of the play,” the theatre reverted back to the original script, much to Ibsen’s delight.

The U.S. premiere took place in Milwaukee in 1883, with the title The Child Wife. The play, under its original title, then debuted on Broadway in the in 1889, and continues to be performed regularly to this day.

Many productions of A Doll’s House reflect a current conversation about feminism. A notable 2012 production from the Young Vic in London placed Nora’s three young children— including a baby—onstage to make her abandonment of them more palpable. (Usually, the children are offstage characters.) That same production team released a short film interpreting Nora as a contemporary London working mother, highlighting the struggle women face worldwide as they aim to balance work and motherhood. A decade ago, Lee Breuer directed Mabou Mines Dollhouse, casting actors less than four feet tall to play the men and tall actresses to play the women. He also included puppets and toy furniture to accentuate the loss of control the women had over their lives. A recent Chinese version examined a western woman marrying into a Chinese family. A 2004 Norwegian production placed all five actors on the stage throughout, acting as a chorus of sorts. Only Nora broke the fourth wall to speak to the audience, transforming her into an observer of a dream.

Ibsen wanted his audience to consider what it meant to be free. His body of work shows characters constricted by social norms and judgments. Their central conflicts often concern their personal freedom. In A Doll’s House he invited the audience to contemplate the ramifications of Nora’s exit. Lucas Hnath contradicts Ibsen’s intentions by showing us her return. When Hnath asked people what they thought happened to Nora after she closed the door, many did not expect her to last long out there in the world. Without education or social standing, her most likely career choices were maid, wife, or prostitute. Many imagined that she returned to Torvald and the children. Others thought she died. Hnath decided to challenge these expectations, and give her a true career. In a way, this vindicates Laura Kieler, Ibsen’s inspiration for Nora. After her stay in the insane asylum, Kieler returned to her husband and children. She fell into a depression and Norwegian society largely forgot about her. In A Doll’s House, Part 2 Nora is as Kieler could never be: a resourceful, eloquent woman seeking how to be her true self in the world.