A Doll's House
When produced in London in 1889, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) led to a debate about sexual roles and the theatre. The play begins as melodrama, the popular dramatic form in which an innocent woman was often beset by a seducer or blackmailer. The unworldly wife Nora, constantly belittled by her husband Torvald Helmer as his “starling” and “squirrel,” has forged her father’s signature without realizing the significance of her crime. An unscrupulous banker blackmails her, but, after revealing the forgery to Torvald, the blackmailer undergoes a change of heart and releases her from her debt to him. Torvald is relieved to think that he can have his wife back, but Nora refuses to allow a conventional happy ending. At this point, melodrama gives way to naturalism. “Sit down, Torvald,” Nora says, “we have a lot to talk over.” Their debate about marriage dominates the final act. Nora complains that she has been a “doll-wife” to Torvald and declares that she will leave him:
[Torvald] Helmer: Oh, it’s outrageous. So you’ll run out like this on your most sacred vows [to your husband and children]?…Nora abandons her husband and children. In order to have the play acted in Germany, Ibsen was forced to write an alternative ending in which Nora decides to stay with her family. He called the revised ending “a barbaric outrage” and later refused to have it performed.[1]
Nora: I have other duties, equally sacred.
Helmer: That isn’t true. What duties are they?
Nora: Duties to myself.
Helmer: Before all else, you’re a wife and a mother.
Nora: I don’t believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being….
The controversy surrounding A Doll’s House in England spawned a number of imitators, such as Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, who wrote “problem plays” about marriage.[2] Most of these plays ended, however, like the German version of A Doll’s House, with the wife submitting to her husband. The conservatism of the English stage resulted in part from the heavy hand of the Lord Chamberlain, the official censor of plays, who prevented the serious discussion of many controversial subjects, including religion, politics, and sex. The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen’s prime defender in England and a leader of the socialist Fabian society, fought an ongoing battle with the Lord Chamberlain.[3]
- ↑Ibsen, "'A Doll's House' and Other Plays," trans. Peter Watts (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 334.
- ↑Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1968), pp. 172-180.
- ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 43-44.