3. First and Foremost An Ideal American Woman?

3. First and Foremost An Ideal American Woman? A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, Thanhouser, 1911)

Ali Yalgın

The gender politics of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) have been subject to recent reconsideration, which has led to thought-provoking discoveries regarding the iconic play’s role in the women’s rights movement. This includes enquiries as to whether Ibsen was a feminist or not and how the play raises feminist questions regardless of that conundrum (Moi 2021), and the implications of the globalisation of those questions thanks to the actresses who have played Nora over the course of more than a century (Holledge et al. 2016). The Thanhouser Company’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, 1911) gives us important clues as to how the play’s gender politics were perceived and reformulated in the framework of its early globalisation within a Western culture, more specifically the American Progressive Era. Recently re-discovered, this one-reel film is known to be the first stage-to-screen adaptation of the play, with Julia M. Taylor as Nora, Edward Genung as Torvald, and William Russell as Krogstad. On the one hand, the Thanhouser film was not advertised as an adaptation of a “problem play” on the women’s cause, unlike the 1918 adaptation featuring Elsie Ferguson or the 1922 adaptation featuring

Alla Nazimova.1 The 1911 reviews were positive, yet they did not emphasise the work’s relationship with women’s emancipation. The trade press affirmed that the film did a good job in terms of generating “an adequate staging” (Morning Telegraph, 1911), that it was “adapted very cleverly, dealing only with the essence of the plot” (New York Dramatic Mirror, 1911), and that it “convey[ed] the central idea of the drama to the average mind, which latter would never know the play either through the book or through the stage” (Moving Picture World, 1911). The company and the press, as I show below, were interested in framing the adaptation as a part of the film industry’s “uplift” movement rather than focusing on gender. The rhetoric of uplift sought to distinguish cinema from other forms of “cheap amusement” by way of positioning it as a potential instrument for the moral and cultural education of the masses (Grieveson 2004, 24–25). Edwin Thanhouser, the company’s founder, employed this rhetoric when he claimed Ibsen to be “good material” because it facilitated the company’s goals of putting “the moving picture on a higher plane and gain[ing] for our particular brand a world-wide respect” (Moving Picture News, 1911a). What is not immediately visible from this narrative, however, is how the uplift movement was entwined with gender politics. In this chapter, I will first put the Thanhouser adaptation of A Doll’s House within the context of cultural uplift as a system of gender regulation during the American Progressive Era, then closely read the film through this lens. In particular, in order to understand the feminist potential (and limitations) of A Doll’s House in American silent cinema, we need to be aware of the complicated relationship between the uplift movement, the women’s rights movement, and the image of the ideal woman in early twentieth-century America. In general, we need to remember that the

1 For example, a press book made for the 1918 film suggests that one of the publicity texts to be published in the press begins with the title “Can a woman reared as doll child have ideas of her own? This problem is solved by Elsie Ferguson in her newest photoplay, ‘A Doll’s House’ soon to be displayed here” (Ulrich 1918, 11). A review of the Nazimova film in 1922 explicitly claims that Ibsen’s play “marked the first step in the emancipation of woman, in a manner of speaking, and was used as a premise in the feminist movement” (Moving Picture World, 1922).

play’s potential for stimulating feminist questions is dependent on the constructions of gender that surround its recreation and reception in different cultures and media. Although the uplift discourse has been a part of the discussion on silent Ibsen films (see also King in this volume), the movement has not been explicitly framed as a gender regulation act. The focus has been mostly on the puritanical impositions of the movement, without an emphasis on its imagery of the ideal white middle-class American woman. Writing on the Ibsen adaptations in early American cinema, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen points out the discrepancy between the scandalous themes of Ibsen’s plays and the uplift movement’s desire to associate cinema with respectability (2017, 172–73). He astutely claims that the Ibsen films struggled to find a place in this landscape due to “a lack of familiarity with general audiences, difficulties in negotiating with the aesthetics of the theater, and texts brimming with unwelcome moral transgressions and ambiguities” (ibid., 175). What we are missing here, however, is a clearer picture of the agents that actively defined and categorised those “unwelcome moral transgressions”.2 Although Hanssen has written elsewhere on gender within the context of the four American silent adaptations of A Doll’s House, he has omitted the issue of uplift from this discussion. His argument is that rather than being foregrounded for its importance to the women’s rights movement, the play was seen predominantly as a vehicle for individual actresses to shine in the industry. Therefore, the Noras embodied in these films did not represent “a collective transition from subjugation to power, modernity, and equality” (ibid., 8). Furthermore, the male reviewers of the trade press and some key feminists, such as Elizabeth Robbins, had issues with Ibsen; the former claimed his by then more than thirty-year-old play to be “outdated, antiquated, and primarily of

2 Hanssen even cites an acerbic review on the 1915 adaptation of Ghosts, titled “Emasculating Ibsen”, that criticised the film for bastardising the play by superimposing “a Prohibitionist agenda” and accused “[t]he wet nurses who minister to the mob” for “put[ting]our old friend Ibsen into diapers”. However, he does not zero in on the gendered associations that this review was making.

historical interest”, whereas the latter were disappointed with his non-transformative politics (ibid., 7).3 Early twentieth-century white middle-class Americans did find the tableau of gender inequality of A Doll’s House to be outdated; however, by taking this irrelevance at face value, we are missing a link in how the play’s potential for a more radical feminist interpretation was neutralised, at least in the realm of cinema. This chapter will try to find that link by looking at the highly coded gender politics of the uplift movement’s cultural project as an active agent affecting the play’s reproduction and reception in early cinema. I will begin this analysis by investigating the conditions under which the Thanhouser company came to release the film.

The Uplift Movement and the Ideal American Woman The Thanhouser Company’s Ibsen films were a part of the organisation’s greater project of bridging theatre and film in order to increase the latter’s respectability as a form of high art. This strategy was used by many film companies, such as the Vitagraph Studios, which made “quality films” comprising of adaptations of classics, including works by Shakespeare and Dante (examined by William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson in their 1993 study). However, the Thanhouser company had, through its founder, connections with the art of theatre long before its first stage-to-screen adaptation of St. Elmo (1910), which had in turn been adapted for the stage from Augusta Jane Evans Wilson’s 1866 novel and toured in 1909 (Bowers, 1995a). Indeed, Edwin Thanhouser had a theatrical past, which he often liked to highlight in interviews. After managing a theatre company in Milwaukee for years, Thanhouser started a film company in New Rochelle in 1909 (Thanhouser 2011, 90). His grandson Ned, who has rigorously reconstructed

3 While other researchers have also affirmed that Ibsen’s relevance to gender equality in the early twentieth century was challenged (see Farfan 2004; Schanke 1988, 62; Krouk 2021, 233), the presence of women who simultaneously continued to refer to Ibsen for their cause, such as Emma Goldman and Mary Shaw, whose “use of Ibsen bears comparison to the radical English appropriations of the late nineteenth century, which associated the playwright with the figure of the New Woman” (Krouk 2021, 231), complicates this reading.

many of the previously lost Thanhouser films, claims that “[t]he decision to enter the film industry was a business venture for Edwin Thanhouser, not an idealistic dream of changing the world with better entertainment” (ibid.). Charlie Keil, however, has shown that the company, following other film companies at the time, advertised high artistic quality as one of their founding principles, exemplified by “generic selectiveness”, “a theatrical pedigree”, and “moral purity”; their approach ensured that “even those Shakespearian plots that featured unpleasantness would be avoided” (2011, 113). Edwin Thanhouser’s primary concern might have been to maintain a profitable business; after all, as a part of the Motion Picture Distribution and Sales Company (MPDSC), the company needed to follow certain rules of production and distribution and fight for its place in an increasingly standardised industry. This necessity often meant, as Eileen Bowser claims, the sacrifice of “experiment and change” for the benefit of financial “stability” (2009, 49). However, the promise of intellectually and morally superior entertainment was definitely a part of the company’s marketing strategy to make financial profit, and that claim to superiority was evidenced by the company’s connection to theatre. In addition to Shakespeare, Ibsen seems to have been an important indicator of that theatrical connection, as the company produced three adaptations of his plays in 1911 (The Pillars of Society came first, and The Lady from the Sea was released last). The advertisements for all three films explicitly framed the company’s engagement with the playwright as a step taken to make high-quality films. As a press announcement for A Doll’s House stated:

The picture carries all the great dramatic qualities that made Ibsen’s writings so powerful in play form, and you cannot go wrong if you rig up some special advertising display for this very fine feature. Simply the words ‘A Doll’s House, by Ibsen’ will do, outside the show, but paint’em in big letters with the name ‘Thanhouser’ underneath as a guarantee of merit. (Moving Picture News, 1911c)

The announcement promised exhibitors that besides high-quality content, the title of the source text and name of the playwright would

attract customers to the nickelodeon. While the source text is said to have “great dramatic qualities”, equally important are the film being defined as a “very fine feature” and the producer being a guarantor of “merit”. All of these descriptions are indicators of status, communicating a yearning for an upper-class clientele. Ibsen would have been a good choice to fulfil this aspiration, as he was quite niche even in the relatively high-status world of legitimate theatre. A Doll’s House was not an entirely welcome play, especially in the early years of its run. Looking at the reception history, we see that it was a controversial play that did not do particularly well at the box office. Adapting this play for the ulterior motive of financial gain would therefore have been odd. For instance, speaking of the early reception of A Doll’s House, Ståle Dingstad (2016) claims that the staging of the play in Germany for the first time in 1880 was quite a flop, even though Ibsen had written the famous “German ending”, wherein Nora does not leave house and home due to her inability to abandon her children. Establishing the reception of the play on the basis of Georg Brandes’ review of the Berlin Residenz-Theater production in 1880, Dingstad shows how Brandes puts the blame for this failure on the “Berlin audiences”, whom he characterises as “artistically depraved”, unsophisticated people who “wanted value for money and distasted any kind of seriousness” (as quoted in Dingstad 2016, 113).4 Unsurprisingly, Germany was not the only country where A Doll’s House was considered to be too much for the regular theatregoer. The United States, where the play was first performed by an amateur group as The Child Wife, was not exactly teeming with Nora fans. Although during the 1890s and early 1900s, a variety of nationally and internationally known stars, such as Minnie Maddern Fiske and Alla Nazimova,

4 While Dingstad admits that the real reason behind the anticlimactic reception of the play is “hard to find” and might have been caused by a range of factors, from bad performances to the play’s daring challenge to idealism, we see here that even an intellectual as supportive of Ibsen as Brandes affirmed that A Doll’s House would not do well in the theatre; there was a view that Ibsen was an acquired taste and, therefore, that staging his plays did not promise high sales.

played Nora in versions where Nora slams the door at the end of the play and leaves, these productions did not make Ibsen popular in the USA. Orm Øverland, for instance, claims that the Norwegian playwright was criticised for being inscrutable, didactic, too serious, “obscene”, and “irrelevant” by American reviewers (2006, 96). He did not fare well in the 1910s either; according to Dean Krouk, although Ibsen was beginning to be canonised in the 1910s as a pillar of modern drama, he had lost his shine in the theatre, “a development that has been attributed to familiarity and popular acceptance but was also connected to the First World War and the more intense profit orientation of professional theatres” (2021, 233). Although Ibsen plays generated a lot of discussion, they were never quite box office hits. Therefore, for Edwin Thanhouser, the brief affair with Ibsen must have been connected more with the cultural capital generated through adapting his dramas and less with short-term monetary goals. He has, in fact, formulated this affair as an artistic sacrifice in an interview on the filming of The Pillars of Society: “We are sacrificing money to art, a little here and a good deal there, but we actually think we are attaining our ideals” (Moving Picture News, 1911a). This financial sacrifice for the sake of ideals is an example of what Rob King identifies as an eagerness for cultural uplift, which “implied escaping the stigma of the film industry’s largely lower-class audience, and […] involved exploiting high or ‘highbrow’ culture as a model for filmmaking practice” (2009, 118). In line with this elitist trend, in the aforementioned interview Edwin Thanhouser said:

We are after uplift. […] We are essaying the big things that we feel filmdom needs. Subjects that heretofore many film producers have not approached, we are staging with full success. I believe we are making a lasting impression on the public mind, both from an artistic and an educational standpoint. Our start in this direction has stood us in good stead, and today observers place us among the best in our particular line. (Moving Picture News, 1911a)

The interview shows not only that Thanhouser was quite adept at using the keywords that would appease the industry’s anxieties over dignifying film as a respectable form of art, but also that he connected

Ibsen closely with the task of “education” and the underlying desire to become a social force that improves society. We see not only the functionalisation of Ibsen as a mark of distinction but also the objective of using Ibsen for instruction. By bringing Ibsen from stage to screen, then, Thanhouser seems to have wanted both to be part of the strategy to engage with higher-class patrons, so that the industry could attract upper-class customers and investors, and to educate the lower classes by way of this popular entertainment format that they loved and consumed with pleasure. The educational aspect of the uplift project immediately recalls the highly coded gender politics of this endeavour, as it was tightly connected with the ideal of what made a respectable middle-class woman. Writing on the regulation of early cinema, Lee Grieveson says:

Cinema’s shift from ‘unworthy past’ to ‘higher future’ and move into the realm of moral discourse was aligned with the complex configuration of classed and gendered conceptions of respectability so central to the self-definition of the middle class. (2004, 11)

As popular theatre had tried and succeeded at becoming respectable in the nineteenth century, it was now cinema’s turn to play the game of respectability by making the nickelodeon both family- and womanfriendly. This task called for both a physical transformation (a cleaner and more comfortable environment, brighter theatres, properly dressed personnel, and, shamefully, racial segregation) and more carefully curated programming that avoided taboo subjects, such as sex, drunkenness, and crime. However, women were not merely the target consumers of respectable art; they actively worked to better the industry, making use of their perceived essential moral superiority (Grieveson 2004, 101). For instance, white middle-class women reformers became deeply involved in the National Board of Censorship, where they represented a large majority.5 Apart from the connection between

5 Grieveson claims that “by 1912, 57 of 75 censors were women, and by 1915 the figure had risen to 100 out of 115” (2004, 101).

women’s work and respectability, Grieveson points out yet another bond between the uplift movement and gender. He says that “the promotion of the educational potential of cinema was linked closely also to the efforts to attract women audiences, for women’s traditional role was closely linked to the education of children” (2004, 104). A cinema that inculcated moral purity could therefore be associated with the quality of motherliness. The uplift movement seems to have wanted to kill two birds with one stone here: associating cinema with women would make the nickelodeon respectable, but it would also reinforce the image of a certain type of ideal woman (the morally pure mother) and rebuke those departing from it. Unsurprisingly, this idealisation of women was full of internal tensions, as it tried to conceal the heterogeneity of what it meant to be a woman. On the one hand, women were essentially good and moral; on the other, they themselves needed to be educated. How could A Doll’s House serve this purpose? Playwright and critic Clayton Hamilton, a supporter of Ibsen during this era, suggests that “Shakespeare wrote for an audience made up mainly of men and boys, and gave them Rosalind and Falstaff: Ibsen and Pinero have written for an audience made up mainly of women, and have given them Nora Helmer and Zoe Blundell” (1914, 266). Later in the same article, Hamilton asserts that “any movement to improve the theatre-going public, any movement to uplift the audience, must […] be directed toward the women of America”. He proposes that Nora be exploited as a figure for the cultural uplift agenda, because women loved to watch Nora and would benefit from the instruction of this classical piece that specifically targeted them (ibid.). But who exactly did critics like Hamilton have in mind when they said “women”? Were they, for instance, talking about producer-directors such as Alice Guy Blaché, or Lois Weber, who, according to Karen Ward Mahar, embodied “the ideal director at the height of the uplift movement, between 1909 and 1916” (2006, 99)? Or were they talking about women in multiple lower-level posts within the fluid film industry, whose work we risk obliterating, as Jane Gaines has persuasively warned, by limiting our research to “entrepreneurial women” (2018, 157)? Were they including the slapstick comediennes

whose bodies, as Margaret Hennefeld’s research reminds us, resisted “the bourgeois upward mobility and institutional standardization of the American film industry” by shifting from shape to shape (2017, 148)?6 Were they even thinking about women of colour? The discourse of uplift flattened the differences between women by imposing the ideal of “a middle-class, middle-aged matron”, whereas women from “working-class and immigrant communities” who went to see films and were not necessarily interested in sacrificing their existence to this ideation (Mahar 2006, 81). And yet, it was not only men insisting on an ideal image of femininity. Margaret Finnegan’s research (1999) has shown that the mainstream suffragists banked on this image too, as they were influenced by consumer culture’s commodification of personality. Within this atmosphere of buying and selling in mass, the mainstream suffragists began to market themselves as the embodied versions of the ideal, self-realised citizen and were extremely careful about building the right image of themselves in order to gain the right to vote. Therefore, Finnegan claims, “suffragists from a variety of perspectives could represent the standards of womanly personality most valued by early twentiethcentury Americans: moral purity and heterosexual (or at the very least motherly) love combined with passion, charisma, and a zeal for life” (1999, 87). Those women who were fighting for their right to vote could be the same ones making essentialist claims about female moral purity, which they could operationalise in service of cultural uplift. Placed within this context, the Thanhouser film can show us that the Ibsen play would have had a hard time fulfilling the purpose of razing the

6 As Hennefeld shows, “[W]omen assumed a fantastic range of shapes and textures, places and positions, sexual and racial identities in early filmmaking: transmogrifying themselves into micrographic nicotine fairies (Princess Nicotine, 1908), cutting off their own limbs to finish their housework on time (The Kitchen Maid’s Dream, 1907), razing the public sphere in protest to win voting rights (Kansas City Saloon Smasher, 1901), or having spontaneous, female to male sexual reassignment by ingesting magical African seeds (A Florida Enchantment, 1914)” (2017, 146–47).

“façades”7 of gender roles at this time in America, because the mainstream imagination of what was meant by a “woman” was quite strictly engineered to conform to a certain ideal. The silent Noras were in a dialogue with this ideal. In the next section, I will perform a close reading of Thanhouser’s silent film in order to analyse that dialogue.

An Idealised Nora When we look at A Doll’s House (1911), what we immediately see is a typical example of the transitional-era American film (1907/8–1917), quite like the other surviving US-produced Ibsen films. Hanssen has shown how all the silent Ibsen films are the products of a change in the “industrial and economic structures of film production, distribution, and exhibition” (2017, 157). Accordingly, the films reflect the stylistic shift from the aesthetics of the cinema of attractions towards classical filmic storytelling, wherein realistic and pictorialistic acting styles blended together and their length in terms of reel numbers increased from one to many (ibid.). Produced around the middle of this era, A Doll’s House is no different. Comprising twenty-six (mostly mediumlong) shots, thirteen intertitles summarising the plot at the beginning of each scene, and four inserts, A Doll’s House strives in its one-reel journey to follow Nora from the moment her father gives her hand to Torvald until the very end, when she leaves her husband and his house. Gone is the reasonable, recently widowed Kristine Linde, who is looking for a job, as well as Torvald’s best friend, Doctor Rank, who, while suffering acutely from hereditary syphilis, is secretly in love with Nora. The scenes are mostly shot in a studio, save for a scene in the gardens, which is supposed to represent the couple’s visit to the south in order to cure Torvald’s illness. The camera movement is limited to occasional

7 I borrow the analogy of the façade from Mark Sandberg’s study on the architectural metaphors in Ibsen’s plays. For instance, Sandberg claims that in his early prose plays, such as Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House, “Ibsen removes a given home’s false façade to invoke a truer home elsewhere, a home based in fantasies of absolute structural integrity” (2015, 60). Arguably, the pessimistic ending of A Doll’s House denies the existence of such a “truer home”.

pans, and the narration depends heavily on the use of mise-en-scène and mixed acting styles. As Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have argued, the late nineteenth-century theatre’s style of pictorialism found its way well into the silent film era, seeping into everything from the actors’ performances to mise-en-scène (1997, 7). Quite like its contemporaries, the film showcases an acting style that has traces of both realistic subtlety and pictorial elements, including tableau-like shots and grand gestures (see also Sandberg in this volume for a discussion of acting styles). We can therefore affirm, as Hanssen argues, that the film is made in the aesthetics of the transitional era. Seen from this perspective, the erasure of women from the advertisements and reviews connected with the film can also be blamed on the transitional era’s yet-to-be-established conventions. While in the theatrical tradition, the actresses who played Nora were closely identified with the role (Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alla Nazimova, Janet Achurch, Eleanore Duse all embodied different Noras, as we see in Holledge et al.’s aforementioned research), in 1911 the star system was not yet quite established, and actors were just beginning to get credit for their work in film. Accordingly, the advertisement released by Thanhouser does not reveal that Nora is played by Julia M. Taylor, a theatre actress who became a temporary member of the Thanhouser Company in 1910–11 (Bowers, 1995b). Similarly, we do not know the name of the actress who briefly appears as Marie Helene, the nurse. As Hanssen shows, the later silent adaptations of the play did advertise the name of the lead actresses, including Dorothy Phillips, Elsie Ferguson, and Alla Nazimova (2015, 4–5); therefore, the exclusion of the actresses’ names in the 1911 film is rather standard given the context. Apart from the actresses, another woman who suffers exclusion from the production is Gertrude Homan Thanhouser, Edwin Thanhouser’s wife. Thanks to the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), we now know that Gertrude “was a major contributor to the success of the Thanhouser film enterprise, where she worked as actress, scenario writer, film editor, and studio executive” (Thanhouser 2016). Gertrude was credited with co-writing the scenario for the company’s earlier stage-to-screen adaptations, including Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale

(1910). While she was not given screenwriting credits for the Ibsen adaptations, it is quite possible that she was involved in them. In any case, Ned Thanhouser’s profile on WFPP positions her as the executive producer of all three of the films. Despite their erasure from A Doll’s House, both Julia M. Taylor’s and Gertrude Homan Thanhouser’s names appeared in the trade press on later occasions.8 Interestingly, while the identity of the actress who portrayed Nora is obscured, the character that she plays is reborn as a woman of the 1910s. An obvious piece of evidence is the insert of a promissory note showing Nora’s name as “Nora Helmer” and indicating that Nora has agreed to borrow “twelve hundred dollars” on “Jan. 17, 1911”. The date and the currency on the note signal to the public that they should recognise this woman as their contemporary and as a compatriot. Positioning Nora as a woman of the 1910s almost creates the effect of watching her actions in real time. This stands in marked contrast with Ibsen’s retrospective dramaturgy – a realistic unfolding of the secrets and repressed emotions of the characters, created with painstaking verisimilitude and generating the effect of a slow burn in the spectator. No secrets are kept from the spectator here; instead, during the first two thirds of the reel, we follow a hyper-dramatic version of Nora’s backstory in the original plot; the moments of marriage, illness, death, forgery, threat, argument, and marital separation are all connected in a linear fashion. Thanks to Hanssen, we know that this kind of linearisation was typical of the silent Ibsen films (2017, 162). As mentioned early on in this chapter, the reviewers appreciated that the gist of the play was made understandable for the “average mind”, i.e. those lowbrow audiences who supposedly had nothing to do with Ibsen. In addition to its function of exposition, though, the linearisation also strangely liberates Nora from the melodramatic “woman with a past” trope, which, as Elin Diamond points out in her famous 1990s criticism of

8 See, for instance, an article presenting the actors of the Thanhouser Company, which has the pictures and names of the actors who usually appeared in the films (Moving Picture News, 1911b).

“Ibsenite realism”, grants the spectator the pleasure of finding out Nora’s dirty secrets piecemeal and diagnosing her as a hysteric.9 Rather than learning about Nora’s shocking past, the film’s spectators become complicit in Nora’s actions as they unfold in real time; they witness the circumstances that push her to commit forgery and then slam the door shut and leave Torvald. The gendered logic of uplift starts to become visible as we notice the nature of the relationship that the adaptation strives to shape between the spectator and Nora. To repeat Hanssen’s argument, the controversial behaviour of Ibsen’s characters (forgery, adultery, incest, and alcoholism to name a few) proved to be problematic due to the moral values of the uplift project (2017, 171). The Thanhouser company seems to have evaded this problem by modelling Nora as an essentially virtuous and productive woman. The film signals this moral superiority through Nora’s body, the mise-en-scène, and finally Nora’s actions, each of which I analyse below. Consequently, we realise that this film’s Nora is highly reminiscent of the ideal of the good white middle-class American woman, a key image of the uplift movement and non-radical suffragists. Nora’s body, from the film’s earliest shot right through to the end, represents the main source of technology giving us information about her character and making us bond with her. In the very first shot, spectators can read Nora’s curiosity and nervousness at the same time: she secretly glances at Torvald, lowers her gaze when addressed by her father, and constantly fiddles with the back of a chair, with three quarters of her body turned to the camera. As Nora communicates messages to viewers through the work of her eyes, hands, and posture – all within the same medium-long shot taken from a fixed angle – the

9 Elin Diamond argues that “Ibsenite realism guarantees its legitimacy by endowing the fallen woman of popular melodrama with the symptoms and etiology of the hysteric” (1990, 60). Realism is more interested in giving the onlookers the pleasure of diagnosing and dissecting the hysterical “fallen woman” than in seeing the fallen woman thrive. However, Nora is also one of Ibsen’s rare protagonists who actually finds a way out of the maze. If Nora is an exception to the rule, then it becomes all the more interesting to see how the gender politics of the uplift movement tried to re-purpose her.

Fig. 1. Julia M. Taylor as Nora in A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

film establishes her gendered status as lower in relation to the more comfortable men. Her movement is quite restrained, she does not speak, and she acts the way a shy child behaves near adults. However, right after this shot, we see a relatively untethered Nora who uses her hands, arms, and torso more liberally as Torvald grabs her bag of macaroons, a famous symbol of Torvald’s superficial yet oppressive love. She feigns innocence; then, before he leaves the frame, she tries to give Torvald an exaggerated kiss of assurance that she will behave. Once Torvald has left, Nora takes out a piece of macaroon that she had hidden and eats it facing the camera directly, thereby making the spectator an accomplice to her illicit action (Fig. 1). We understand that she is a woman who is capable of taking charge despite her childish mannerisms and who even manipulates her husband by playing innocent. As the film progresses, we see Nora’s movement grow further. She not only assumes a central position in all the scenes, which start in medias res, but also directs the limited camera movement (mostly consisting of

rather stuttering pans), thereby claiming ownership of the story by directing our attention. However, the film is equally adept at communicating Nora’s helplessness and eliciting pity for her through the use of her body. In a later scene, when the doctor announces that she must take her husband to the south to improve his health, Nora faces the camera in despair, sitting in a chair in the foreground of the frame, resting her head on her hand (Fig. 2). The repeated shots of Nora looking at the camera let her actively engage with the public, which is invited to partake in both her mischief and her dilemma through the physical and emotional signs emitted by her body. As such, the film positions Nora as a complicated character with ambiguous motives. However, Nora’s complexity starts to dissolve as the story unfolds. Using the mise-en-scène, the adaptation emphasises that she is a virtuous fighter despite the criminal act she is about to undertake. Specifically, the film uses the contrast between the foreground and the

Fig. 2. Julia M. Taylor as Nora in A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

background of the frame in order to establish this perception. According to Brewster and Jacobs, there is a parallel between the silent film actor in the foreground of a frame and the theatre actor in the footlights in terms of signalling importance to the spectator, which means that the closer a subject is to the camera, the more important they are interpreted to be (1997, 92). The Thanhouser film, however, reverses this dynamic by positioning Nora behind Torvald on multiple occasions in order to establish a bond of complicity between her and the viewer. Torvald, meanwhile, stays in the foreground, unaware of what Nora is up to behind his back. This configuration is repeated twice in the film. The first time is right before Nora forges her father’s signature. The camera shows a desperate Nora, who has just applied for a loan in secret and lost her father (who was supposed to endorse her for the loan), as she checks on a sickly, coughing Torvald. While the latter sits in his armchair in the foreground, Nora watches him from the background of the frame, by the door. After a while, Nora’s facial expression changes into one of determination as she unfolds the loan agreement she had been clutching in her right fist (Fig. 3). The spectators see then and there, in Torvald’s unwitting presence, that Nora is breathing in and taking the decision to do something with the note. The following scene shows Nora in the next room, the antechamber of their apartment. She reads the note again, stares at the room she just came out of, then sits down, resolved to forge her father’s signature. Connecting like this with an anxious Nora, who is physically behind Torvald, the spectator realises that Nora is the behind-the-scenes force keeping this marriage (and her husband) alive and finds further proof of when another, similar layout occurs, in the sequence after Nora and Torvald return from their trip. While Torvald, cured and happy, sits in his room, Nora sneaks in from the background, looks at him enchantingly and blows him kisses, before returning to the dark antechamber where she secretly takes in sewing to pay off her debt (Fig. 4). The foreground-background logic in the frames therefore shows the silent film spectator an important dramaturgical vein in Ibsen’s play, which relates to hiding and revealing secrets, as one might grasp from the

Figs. 3–4. Edward Genung and Julia M. Taylor as Torvald and Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

very first line spoken by Nora: “Hide the Christmas tree well, Helen”10 (Ibsen 2016, 109). More importantly, however, the mise-en-scène reveals that Nora’s act of hiding things and keeping secrets is a form of labour. Consequently, the public gets no opportunity to associate her with criminality, which would have posed a problem for uplift purposes. Whatever Nora does, she does out of love, and she excels as a woman whose labour is completely dedicated to her family. The film’s treatment of Nora’s labour is not only ideational; her labour is also materialised in the scene where she sews by candlelight, in secret, in order to pay her loan. As with many of the scenes in the film, this one is shown as part of Nora’s backstory in order to deliver the plot comprehensibly in the silent medium. However, within the gender dynamics of 1910s America, the scene gains another significance. On the one hand, the frame shows a Nora who is claiming more space in the doll house, as the scene begins with her locking the door, then approaching her sewing box with extreme care so as not to make any noise and finally sitting down at the table to work. In his audio commentary on the film, Hanssen (2020) interprets Nora at this moment as “locking the door to be alone; the secret work here represents newfound independence, rather than emotions and cravings needing to be concealed”. However, it is also remarkable that Nora’s independence comes under conditions of duress. The synopsis of the film, published in the trade press, emphasises the cumbersome nature of Nora’s sewing work:

She worked late at night sewing to pay off the load of debt under which she labored. And the years passed on, and children came, and Torvald grew in wealth and knowledge, but he never once realized that Nora had troubles and anxiety, simply because she bore her cross with a smiling face. (Moving Picture News, 1911d)

While her work does help Nora realise that her marriage had a weak foundation and ultimately leads to her independence, the description

10 “Gem juletræet godt, Helene” (Ibsen 2008, 213).

above draws the picture of a Christ-like Nora, which does not exactly evoke a joyful liberation. The film therefore seems to argue that Nora deserves liberation because she has worked very hard for it. Although never once referred to as a “New Woman” in the synopsis, the portrayal of Nora’s sewing reminds us of the ideal, selfrealised, and industrious figure of the New Woman. In contrast with Torvald’s male fantasy of locking Nora within a doll’s house for display, the reformers in America desired to functionalise the New Woman as a useful element of the workforce. Although their work was still mostly compartmentalised in this era, women were encouraged to contribute to the moral and economic progress of America. Indeed, rather than deeming a working woman unusual, middle-class society singled out the woman who did not work and was spending too much money. Drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s criticism of the leisure class, Janet Staiger identifies one of the many types of “bad women” types on screen as “the butterfly”, shorthand for “the social butterfly”. As Staiger posits:

[A woman] was bad when she assumed that the marriage contract was a mere monetary one in which she was to flit about as the social butterfly, going from flower to flower. She was bad when her meaning was limited to being an ornament. Worse yet was when she could not adjust her consumption to her income, her desire to her position. Overconsumption was as threatening to the home as inadequate consumption in this modern era. (1995, 165)

While the original Torvald frequently chastises Nora for her spending, calling her a “spendthrift”, he has no problem with positioning her as a shining jewel to be displayed, then put back into the cabinet, and with no other purpose in life. The ideal wife for Torvald in 1879 Norway, however, is not at all the ideal woman of the white middle-class America of the 1910s. When Nora is sewing on screen, we see that she is not Torvald’s idealised doll-wife; rather, she is the antithesis of the butterfly. She sews with dedication, while throwing quick glances at the door to see if Torvald is coming. To that end, Nora becomes the exemplary white middle-class woman holding the family, and by extension, all of society, together. The very next shot in the film affirms this interpreta-

tion. It takes place “some years later” and shows Nora happily dancing and chasing her children, with Torvald then joining their game, and the happy family stays together for a bit longer before the mother and the children send the father off to work. While we may not be certain whether the sewing scene and the happy family scene were sequenced to achieve a narrative connection (after all, we are still in the transitional era), we can see that Nora, unlike the butterfly, is useful.11 But useful to whom, and for what? To herself, as “first and foremost a human being”,12 as Nora famously says in the play (Ibsen 2016, 184), or to society, as a good, productive wife and mother? The fact that the adaptation eliminated some of the elements of the source text that would potentially have made Nora morally dubious might give us a clue that, at least in terms of liberated sexuality, the film strives to fashion Nora as the morally pure American woman. The most obvious example of such an elimination is the disappearance of Dr Rank from the adaptation, which leaves the viewer no room at all to question Nora’s innocence. In the original play, there is a scene in which

11 Although I have not been able to find Thanhouser-related material to emphasise the issue of Nora’s usefulness, the materials related to the Ferguson and Nazimova films do show that the subject of a woman’s functionality in the family and society was used to attract the potential viewer’s attention. One example is the text from an advertisement in the 1918 Artcraft adaptation pressbook, starring Elsie Ferguson, with the headline: “Doll Wives Sometimes Prove Useful Women”, followed by the sub-heading “Theory of Helplessness Is Disproved in Artcraft Picture, ‘A Doll’s House’” (Ulrich 1918, 15). The uselessness of the doll wife, according to the text that follows the headline, is based on her inability to “aspire to higher altitudes of thought and action” (ibid.). Another page of the press pack, with the title “Advertising Campaign Suggested for the Exploitation of ‘A Doll’s House’”, advises exhibitors to get a “car card” printed “with a photograph of Ferguson at one end, a doll’s house at the other” and to print the following text in the middle: “Are doll wives good mothers? Are they practical and have they ideas of their own? Elsie Ferguson will answer you in her portrayal of the doll wife in ‘A Doll’s House’ at the … Theatre next” (ibid., 20). In a review by Motion Picture News on the 1922 Nazimova film, a New York Sun reviewer is quoted as saying, “Nazimova is quite sincere and appealing, and her face has taken on real charm. […] She set forth the story of the butterfly wife who won her emancipation with a simplicity and directness that make ‘A Doll’s House’ one of the unusual pictures of the year—one which every woman will demand to see as her natural right” (1922). Note that the “natural right” granted to women is the viewing experience of a transformation narrative from the “butterfly wife”, i.e. of the archetypal over-consuming bad woman to the virtuous New Woman. 12 “først og fremst et menneske” (Ibsen 2008, 370).

Nora is suggested to sexually tease Dr Rank (by showing him her newly bought stockings), who later confesses his feelings for her. With the disappearance of Dr Rank, this scene also disappears. In this way, the adaptation resembles an earlier production of A Doll’s House by Minnie Maddern Fiske, which retained the role of Dr Rank but got rid of the suggested eroticism. A report on the 1894 production indicates that the actress “had properly removed from the role of Rank some of its hideousness. Nora’s stockings were not on view, and nothing was said about them” (New York Times, 1894). Dingstad writes of this production that it was organised as “a fundraiser for a hospital in the city”, this being why Fiske wanted to “make the play more respectable in order to counter Ibsen critics” (2016, 121). The Thanhouser adaptation, on the other hand, bars Dr Rank from the story altogether, although he is replaced by a middle-aged doctor who diagnoses Torvald’s illness. The reviews of the film do not seem to have noticed Rank’s absence, and the synopsis published by the company never once mentions him. Without any reference to Rank, the adaptation is less complicated, in terms not only of the narrative structure but also with regard to its moral content. The Thanhouser Nora is a morally appropriate woman who does not show a trace of the notorious Ibsen’s obscenity. The Thanhouser film ensures that Nora ends up surviving the cruel world that surrounds her with her decency unscratched, save for her act of forgery, which she commits, in any case, out of wifely duty. Ibsen’s Nora, however, is not so much the ideal woman who has been set up to survive all external moral threats and more a human being who makes mistakes and transforms herself. As Toril Moi observes, Ibsen uses the metaphor of theatricality in order to criticise idealism, performed by Nora and Torvald in flesh and bone until the scripted roles of “ideal wife” and “ideal husband” explode:

Both Nora and Helmer spend most of the play theatricalizing themselves by acting out their own clichéd idealist scripts. Nora’s fantasies are variations on the idealist figure of the noble and pure woman who sacrifices all for love. (2006, 232)

According to Moi, what makes Ibsen’s play so sophisticated and modern is the way it consciously intertwines theatricality and authenticity, thereby questioning the acts of spectating and acting not only in the theatre but also in daily life (ibid., 240–41). Nora’s transformation comes with her rejection of the burden of idealism. The tarantella scene is one of the peak moments in which the play’s critique of idealism is in perfect harmony with the playwright’s use of metatheatricality, whereby Nora is doubly subjected to a commodifying gaze while also given an opportunity to express herself and gaze at the world (Moi 2006, 236–38). For instance, when Alla Nazimova danced the tarantella sensually in her 1907 production, one reviewer said, “[T]he interviews with Dr. Rank were graphically expressed in many illuminating details of light and shade, and the Tarantella was executed with much natural and sensuous charm” (Theatre, 1907). Interestingly, when Nazimova also adapted the play into a film, which is now lost, Adele Whitely Fletcher interpreted the dance without eroticising it: “[Nazimova’s] Nora who dances frantically to keep her husband from the letter-box wherein lies an incriminating letter; her Nora dancing at the masquerade with a worried heart; […] they are, all of them, human characterizations” (1922, 73). Either Nazimova toned down the erotic aspects of the dance, or perhaps Fletcher, as a woman, was able to avert the male critic’s commodifying gaze. In the Thanhouser film, however, which admittedly was produced more than ten years before the Nazimova film, the dance does not fulfil the double function of eroticisation and self-expression. When the evening of the masked ball comes, the costumed Nora enters the frame hopping and dancing rather childishly on her own, soon to be joined by her children, who give her a hug. The scene turns into an episode of peaceful domesticity. Whereas in Ibsen’s play, Nora is already threatened by Krogstad and dances the tarantella both in order to distract Torvald and expel her anguish, in the film the dance represents a mother’s moment of joy with her children. Indeed, the dancing is kept to a minimum and is only preparatory to Krogstad’s entrance, which creates a dramatic effect on the spectators, who iden-

tify with a happy Nora who is caught unawares by the villain.13 As such, it is doubtful whether the adaptation sees Nora as “first and foremost a human being”, or, rather, as a morally pure mother who is trying to save her selfish husband. In any case, a reviewer has remarked that “[t]he dancing incident at the ball is not quite plain to one who has not read the play” (Moving Picture World, 1911). By obscuring this scene of theatricalised sexuality, the film also seems to make the plot less clear. On the whole, the Nora of the Thanhouser film cannot quite achieve her transformation from a self-theatricalising, self-sacrificing ideal wife into a woman who rejects the predetermined roles defined by the ruling ideology. The film comes across instead as showing the story of a childish yet goodwilled and industrious wife who releases herself from the clutches of a shallow husband who wants a trophy wife. While the first silent Nora victoriously overcomes the repression of Torvald and leaves to lead an independent life, it is not clear whether she rejects the role of “self-sacrificing woman” imposed on her by the patriarchal order. Consequently, Thanhouser’s A Doll’s House imposes the standards of moral appropriateness on Nora, who, due to the producer’s concern for uplift, seems unable to eschew the role of idealised white middle-class woman, even if she does leave her husband and children. Indeed, a reviewer from The New York Dramatic Mirror commented, “The actress might perhaps have better realized Nora’s awakening, and thus made the last scene more vital” (1911). Thinking about the changed gender dynamics in the adaptation, and the consequent idealisation of Nora, I wonder whether Julia M. Taylor could have played Nora’s transformation better.

13 Then again, the Thanhouser version was not the only one to rush through the scene. The previously mentioned account of Fiske’s 1894 production indicates that the Tarantella sequence “was distinctly disappointing”, for she did not “take advantage of the Tarantella to produce theatrical effect”; however, this choice was justified by a gloriously strong scene between Nora and Mrs Linde immediately afterwards (New York Times, 1894).

Looking at the Thanhouser Film Today As a coda, it is worth remembering Jane Gaines’ question about feminist film history – “What kind of an answer do we now want” (2018, 24) – based on viewing the first silent adaptation of A Doll’s House. Perhaps, despite the evidence that the play’s gender politics were reappropriated by the uplift movement, we desire some ambiguity in the adaptation that leaves us with the sense that a feminist utopia where all kinds of women are included somehow manages to resist the imposition of gendered ideals. For this reason, I would like to finish the chapter by interpreting an exceptional scene in the Thanhouser film that makes the last sequence quite pleasingly puzzling in terms of its stance towards Nora’s emancipation from idealism, even if this interpretation comes from today’s perspective. After reading Krogstad’s letter, which threatens to expose Nora’s forgery, Torvald leaves Nora in the antechamber and locks himself in the inner room. All alone, Torvald snarls, lifts up a photographic portrait of Nora, and turns his back on the camera (Fig. 5).14 Three representations of women in three different media form a triangular configuration in this shot. At the very back, hung on the wall, is a painting of a woman with her head turned slightly to the right. Closer to the camera but behind Torvald is the bust of a woman facing in the same direction as the head in the painting on the wall. The third is the photographic portrait of Nora which Torvald is holding, which is also looking in the same direction as the other two heads. These three representations of women produce a constellation for a brief moment, allowing us (if not the viewers in 1911, then the viewers of today) to criticise Torvald’s idealisation and iconisation of Nora. Torvald raises a finger and tells off Nora’s photographic portrait, ripping up the image and then throwing the pieces into the fireplace. As he puts a cigar in his mouth, the scene cuts to an anxious yet determined Nora waiting in the antechamber, all dressed up to go

14 This photograph of Nora is the same as the one of Julia Taylor that was printed in the article introducing the players of the Thanhouser Company, which was published four days before the film was released (Moving Picture News, 1911b). Thus, unexpectedly and indirectly, Julia Taylor’s actress persona does make an appearance in the film.

outside. The ripping up of the picture could be shorthand for Torvald and Nora’s intense argument, or indeed, a replacement for physical violence. However, this violence also takes on symbolic meaning. In this Torvaldian, idealist realm, furnished with heavy works of art and neoclassical busts, Nora’s photographic portrait, which symbolises the modern woman, can no longer exist. The photo, which frames Nora’s face as previously posed, is ripped apart by the patriarch, who throws the remaining bits into the fireplace. Once the image has been destroyed, we find a Nora who has transformed herself. More than a century later, then, we might interpret the scene as a (perhaps accidental) critique of the aesthetics of idealism, after which Nora sets herself free. At least, we know that the reviewer who disapproved of the inscrutable tarantella scene seems to have liked this scene, as he said, “The last act is well done and the last act is the most important” (Moving Picture World, 1911). The Thanhouser production of A Doll’s House, the first film adaptation of the iconic Ibsen play, follows the industrial endeavour of 1910s American filmmaking to redeem cinema as a tool for social uplift. In this chapter, I have tried to remind the reader of the close connection between that endeavour and the politics of gender regulation, which sought to forge an image of ideal femininity, fashioned after the white middle-class American woman. By situating the Thanhouser film within this context, we can see that the tableau of oppression painted by the source text would have been perceived as outdated in the 1910s in America. After all, the ideal middle-class woman was not the butterfly – she was expected to be productive. However, we also see that women were still burdened by scripted idealised roles and that the idealised image had slipped into the construction of Nora on screen, at least in the case of the Thanhouser film. We certainly cannot assert that all Ibsen films constructed Nora this way; however, the analysis of the Thanhouser film does help us understand more clearly why, leaving aside Ibsen’s association with highbrow culture, the films of A Doll’s House did not have more of a positive impact on the women’s cause. In this specific case, we can say that the film’s subsumption under a project of uplift caused the source text to lose its firm stance

against idealism, as it placed Nora within the confines of a new ideal, one that excluded women who were not white and middle class. Ultimately, we have to remind ourselves that the dynamic, yet cultureand-medium-specific, conventions of gender greatly shape the reproduction and reception of the perceived politics of a work that has been adapted to a new setting. This proves to us one more time that the silent Ibsen films deserve our attention, for they come back to us with the message that, although the conventions of making and consuming art may reinforce dominant ideologies, these may also be disassembled, not least by way of retrospective scrutiny.

Fig. 5. Torvald (Edward Genung) looking at a photograph of Nora (Julia M. Taylor), A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

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