Lit1000: Literary Analysis with critical commentary

The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen Author(s): Joan Templeton Source: PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 28-40 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462329 Accessed: 04-03-2018 00:44 UTC

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JOAN TEMPLETON

The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

A Doll House' is no more about women's rights than

Shakespeare's Richard HI is about the divine right of kings,

or Ghosts about syphilis.. . . Its theme is the need of

every individual to find out the kind of person he or she

is and to strive to become that person.

(M. Meyer 457)

J BSEN HAS BEEN resoundingly saved from

feminism, or, as it was called in his day, "the woman question." His rescuers customarily

cite a statement the dramatist made on 26 May 1898 at a seventieth-birthday banquet given in his honor by the Norwegian Women's Rights League:

I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honor of

having consciously worked for the women's rights move-

ment. ... 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. (Ibsen, Letters 337)

Ibsen's champions like to take this disavowal as a precise reference to his purpose in writing A Doll

House twenty years earlier, his "original intention,"

according to Maurice Valency (151). Ibsen's bi-

ographer Michael Meyer urges all reviewers of Doll

House revivals to learn Ibsen's speech by heart

(774), and James McFarlane, editor of The Oxford Ibsen, includes it in his explanatory material on A Doll House, under "Some Pronouncements of the

Author," as though Ibsen had been speaking of the

play (456). Whatever propaganda feminists may have made of A Doll House, Ibsen, it is argued, never meant to write a play about the highly topi-

cal subject of women's rights; Nora's conflict represents something other than, or something

more than, woman's. In an article commemorating

the half century of Ibsen's death, R. M. Adams ex-

plains, "A Doll House represents a woman imbued with the idea of becoming a person, but it proposes

nothing categorical about women becoming peo- ple; in fact, its real theme has nothing to do with the sexes" (416). Over twenty years later, after feminism had resurfaced as an international movement, Ei- nar Haugen, the doyen of American Scandinavian

studies, insisted that "Ibsen's Nora is not just a woman arguing for female liberation; she is much

more. She embodies the comedy as well as the

tragedy of modern life" (vii). In the Modern Lan-

guage Association's Approaches to Teaching A Doll

House, the editor speaks disparagingly of "reduc-

tionist views of [A Doll House] as a feminist

drama." Summarizing a "major theme" in the vol-

ume as "the need for a broad view of the play and

a condemnation of a static approach," she warns

that discussions of the play's "connection with fem-

inism" have value only if they are monitored,

"properly channeled and kept firmly linked to Ib-

sen's text" (Shafer, Introduction 32). Removing the woman question from A Doll

House is presented as part of a corrective effort to

free Ibsen from his erroneous reputation as a writer

of thesis plays, a wrongheaded notion usually blamed on Shaw, who, it is claimed, mistakenly saw

Ibsen as the nineteenth century's greatest iconoclast

and offered that misreading to the public as The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Ibsen, it is now de

rigueur to explain, did not stoop to "issues." He was

a poet of the truth of the human soul. That Nora's

exit from her dollhouse has long been the principal

international symbol for women's issues, including

many that far exceed the confines of her small

world,2 is irrelevant to the essential meaning of A

Doll House, a play, in Richard Gilman's phrase,

"pitched beyond sexual difference" (65). Ibsen, ex-

plains Robert Brustein, "was completely indiffer-

ent to [the woman question] except as a metaphor

for individual freedom" (105). Discussing the rela-

tion of A Doll House to feminism, Halvdan Koht, author of the definitive Norwegian Ibsen life, says in summary, "Little by little the topical controversy

died away; what remained was the work of art, with its demand for truth in every human relation" (323).

Thus, it turns out, the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the

women's rights movement is not really about

women at all. "Fiddle-faddle," pronounced R. M.

Adams, dismissing feminist claims for the play

(416). Like angels, Nora has no sex. Ibsen meant her to be Everyman.3

The Demon in the House

[Nora is] a daughter of Eve. [A]n irresistibly be-

witching piece of femininity. [Her] charge that in

28

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Joan Templeton 29

all the years of their marriage they have never exchanged one serious word about serious things is incorrect: she has quite forgotten how seriously Torvald lectured her on the

subjects of forgery and lying less than three days ago.

(Weigand 27, 64-65)

The a priori dismissal of women's rights as the

subject of A Doll House is a gentlemanly backlash,

a refusal to acknowledge the existence of a tiresome reality, "the hoary problem of women's rights," as

Michael Meyer has it (457); the issue is decidedly vieuxjeu, and its importance has been greatly ex-

aggerated. In Ibsen's timeless world of Everyman,

questions of gender can only be tedious intrusions. But for over a hundred years, Nora has been un-

der direct siege as exhibiting the most perfidious

characteristics of her sex; the original outcry of the 1880s is swollen now to a mighty chorus of blame.

She is denounced as an irrational and frivolous nar-

cissist; an "abnormal" woman, a "hysteric"; a vain,

unloving egoist who abandons her family in a

paroxysm of selfishness. The proponents of the last view would seem to think Ibsen had in mind a

housewife Medea, whose cruelty to husband and

children he tailored down to fit the framed, domes-

tic world of realist drama. The first attacks were launched against Nora on

moral grounds and against Ibsen, ostensibly, on

"literary" ones. The outraged reviewers of the pre-

miere claimed that A Doll House did not have to be

taken as a serious statement about women's rights because the heroine of act 3 is an incomprehensi-

ble transformation of the heroine of acts 1 and 2.

This reasoning provided an ideal way to dismiss

Nora altogether; nothing she said needed to be

taken seriously, and her door slamming could be

written off as silly theatrics (Marker and Marker

85-87).

The argument for the two Noras, which still re-

mains popular,4 has had its most determined de-

fender in the Norwegian scholar Else H0st, who argues that Ibsen's carefree, charming "lark" could never have become the "newly fledged feminist." In

any case it is the "childish, expectant, ecstatic, broken-hearted Nora" who makes A Doll House

immortal (28; my trans.); the other one, the unfeel-

ing woman of act 3 who coldly analyzes the flaws

in her marriage, is psychologically unconvincing

and wholly unsympathetic. The most unrelenting attempt on record to

trivialize Ibsen's protagonist, and a favorite source for Nora's later detractors, is Hermann Weigand's.5

In a classic 1925 study, Weigand labors through

forty-nine pages to demonstrate that Ibsen con-

ceived of Nora as a silly, lovable female. At the be- ginning, Weigand confesses, he was, like all men,

momentarily shaken by the play: "Having had the

misfortune to be born of the male sex, we slink away

in shame, vowing to mend our ways." The

chastened critic's remorse is short-lived, however, as

a "clear male voice, irreverently breaking the si- lence," stuns with its critical acumen: "'The mean-

ing of the final scene,' the voice says, 'is epitomized

by Nora's remark: "Yes, Torvald. Now I have

changed my dress." "' With this epiphany as guide, Weigand spends the night poring over the "little vol-

ume." Dawn arrives, bringing with it the return of

"masculine self-respect" (26-27). For there is only

one explanation for the revolt of "this winsome lit-

tle woman" (52) and her childish door slamming:

Ibsen meant A Doll House as comedy. Nora's er-

ratic behavior at the curtain's fall leaves us laugh- ing heartily, for there is no doubt that she will return

home to "revert, imperceptibly, to her role of song-

bird and charmer" (68). After all, since Nora is

an irresistibly bewitching piece of femininity, an extrava-

gant poet and romancer, utterly lacking in sense of fact,

and endowed with a natural gift for play-acting which

makes her instinctively dramatize her experiences: how

can the settlement fail of a fundamentally comic appeal?

(64)

The most popular way to render Nora inconse-

quential has been to attack her morality; whatever the vocabulary used, the arguments have remained

much the same for over a century. Oswald Craw-

ford, writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1891, scolded that while Nora may be "charming as doll- women may be charming," she is "unprincipled" (732). A half century later, after Freudianism had

produced a widely accepted "clinical" language of

disapproval, Nora could be called "abnormal." Mary McCarthy lists Nora as one of the "neurotic" women whom Ibsen, she curiously claims, was the first playwright to put on stage (80). For Maurice

Valency, Nora is a case study of female hysteria, a willful, unwomanly woman: "Nora is a carefully studied example of what we have come to know as

the hysterical personality-bright, unstable, impul- sive, romantic, quite immune from feelings of guilt,

and, at bottom, not especially feminine" (151-52). More recent assaults on Nora have argued that

her forgery to obtain the money to save her hus-

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30 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

band's life proves her irresponsibility and egotism.

Brian Johnston condemns Nora's love as "unintel-

ligent" and her crime as "a trivial act which

nevertheless turns to evil because it refused to take

the universal ethical realm into consideration at all"

(97); Ibsen uses Torvald's famous pet names for

Nora-lark, squirrel-to give her a "strong 'animal'

identity" and to underscore her inability to under-

stand the ethical issues faced by human beings (97). Evert Sprinchorn argues that Nora had only to ask

her husband's kindly friends (entirely missing from the play) for the necessary money: " . . . any other

woman would have done so. But Nora knew that if

she turned to one of Torvald's friends for help, she would have had to share her role of savior with

someone else" (124). Even Nora's sweet tooth is evidence of her unwor-

thiness, as we see her "surreptitiously devouring the forbidden [by her husband] macaroons," even "brazenly offer[ing] macaroons to Doctor Rank,

and finally lying in her denial that the macaroons are hers"; eating macaroons in secret suggests that "Nora is deceitful and manipulative from the start"

and that her exit thus "reflects only a petulant woman's irresponsibility" (Schlueter 64-65). As she

eats the cookies, Nora adds insult to injury by declaring her hidden wish to say "death and dam-

nation" in front of her husband, thus revealing, ac-

cording to Brian Downs, of Christ's College, Cambridge, "something a trifle febrile and mor-

bid" in her nature (Downs 130). Much has been made of Nora's relationship with

Doctor Rank, the surest proof, it is argued, of her

dishonesty. Nora is revealed as la belle dame sans

merci when she "suggestively queries Rank whether

a pair of silk stockings will fit her" (Schlueter 65); she "flirts cruelly with [him] and toys with his af- fection for her, drawing him on to find out how

strong her hold over him actually is" (Sprinchorn 124).

Nora's detractors have often been, from the first, her husband's defenders. In an argument that

claims to rescue Nora and Torvald from "the cam- paign for the liberation of women" so that they "be- come vivid and disturbingly real." Evert Sprinchorn pleads that Torvald "has given Nora all the mate-

rial things and all the sexual attention that any

young wife could reasonably desire. He loves beau-

tiful things, and not least his pretty wife" (121).

Nora is incapable of appreciating her husband be-

cause she "is not a normal woman. She is compul-

sive, highly imaginative, and very much inclined to

go to extremes." Since it is she who has acquired the money to save his life, Torvald, and not Nora, is really the "wife in the family," although he "has regarded himself as the breadwinner . . . the main

support of his wife and children, as any decent hus- band would like to regard himself" (122). In another

defense, John Chamberlain argues that Torvald

deserves our sympathy because he is no "mere com-

mon or garden chauvinist." If Nora were less the ac-

tress Weigand has proved her to be, "the woman in her might observe what the embarrassingly naive

feminist overlooks or ignores, namely, the indica-

tions that Torvald, for all his faults, is taking her at least as seriously as he can-and perhaps even as

seriously as she deserves" (85). All female, or no woman at all, Nora loses either

way. Frivolous, deceitful, or unwomanly, she quali- fies neither as a heroine nor as a spokeswoman for

feminism. Her famous exit embodies only "the latest and shallowest notion of emancipated

womanhood, abandoning her family to go out into

the world in search of 'her true identity"' (Freed- man 4). And in any case, it is only naive Nora who

believes she might make a life for herself; "the au- dience," argues an essayist in College English, "can see most clearly how Nora is exchanging a practi- cal doll's role for an impractical one" (Pearce 343). We are back to the high condescension of the Vic- torians and Edward Dowden:

Inquiries should be set on foot to ascertain whether a manuscript may not lurk in some house in Christiania

[Oslo] entitled Nora Helmer's Reflections in Solitude; it would be a document of singular interest, and probably

would conclude with the words, "Tomorrow I return to

Torvald; have been exactly one week away; shall insist on a free woman's right to unlimited macaroons as test of his reform." (248)

In the first heady days of A Doll House Nora was rendered powerless by substituted denouements and sequels that sent her home to her husband. Now Nora's critics take the high-handed position that all the fuss was unnecessary, since Nora is not a femi- nist heroine. And yet in the twentieth-century case against her, whether Nora is judged childish, "neu- rotic," or unprincipled and whether her accuser's tone is one of witty derision, clinical sobriety, or moral earnestness, the purpose behind the verdict remains that of Nora's frightened contemporaries: to destroy her credibility and power as a represen- tative of women. The demon in the house, the mod-

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Joan Templeton 31

ern "half-woman," as Strindberg called her in the preface to Miss Julie, who, "now that she has been

discovered has begun to make a noise" (65), must

be silenced, her heretical forces destroyed, so that A Doll House can emerge a safe classic, rescued from feminism, and Ibsen can assume his place in

the pantheon of true artists, unsullied by the

''woman question" and the topical taint of history.

The High Claims of Art and Tautology: "Beyond Feminism" to Men

Nora: I don't believe in that anymore. (193)

Nora: Det tror jeg ikke lenger pa. (111)

The universalist critics of A Doll House make the

familiar claim that the work can be no more about

women than men because the interests of both are

the same "human" ones; sex is irrelevant, and thus

gender nonexistent, in the literary search for the

self, which transcends and obliterates mere biolog- ical and social determinations. Faced with a text in

which the protagonist rejects the nonself she

describes as a doll, the plaything of her father and

husband, we must take care not to let feminism, the

proper concern of pamphlets or, perhaps, thesis

plays, get in the way of art: "Ibsen's case is stronger, not weaker, if we don't let the tragedy disappear in

polemics about women's rights" (Reinert 62). Nora's drama can be poetry only if it goes "beyond" feminism.

The first point to make here is that the argument

in itself is a fine example of "begging the question": the overwhelmingly deductive reasoning, while never laid out, is that since true art cannot be about

feminism and since A Doll House is true art, then A Doll House cannot be about feminism. The con-

clusion rests on the assumption that "women's rights" (along with, one must suppose, all other

struggles for human rights in which biological or social identity figures prominently) is too limited to be the stuff of literature. The "state" of being a fem- inist is viewed as an uninteresting given, something a woman is, not something she becomes, a condi- tion suitable to flat characters in flat-heeled shoes and outside the realm of art, which treats univer- sal questions of human life, whose nature is com- plex and evolutionary. Restricted to works as predictable as propaganda, "feminist" heroines must spring from their creators' heads fully armed with pamphlets.

Second, implicit in the argument that would res-

cue A Doll House from feminist "ideology" is an emphatic gender-determined ideology whose base

is startlingly tautological. Women's rights, it is claimed, is not a fit subject for tragedy or poetry, because it is insufficiently representative to be

generally and thus literarily human. Now, if this is so, the explanation can only be that men, who al- ready possess the rights women seek, are excluded from the female struggle, which is, precisely, a struggle for equality with them. In other words, be- cause the sexes do not share inequality, woman's de- sire to be equal cannot be representative. The nonsense of the tautology is doubled when this

reasoning is applied to the literary text; for if the life

of a female protagonist is worthy of our critical and moral attention only insofar as it is unrelated to

women's inferior status, and if the text itself is art

only to the extent that what the heroine is seeking transcends her sexual identity, then what happens to her is significant only to the extent that it can

happen to a man as well. Whatever is universal is male. This means that Nora Helmer and such other famous nineteenth-century heroines as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, and

Dorothea Brooke could just as well be men-except for their sex, of course. And, as Dorothy Sayers re- minds us in her essay "The Human-Not-Quite- Human," women are, after all, "more like men than anything else in the world" (142). But to say that Nora Helmer stands for the individual in search of his or her self, besides being a singularly unhelpful and platitudinous generalization, is wrong, if not absurd. For it means that Nora's conflict has essen- tially nothing to do with her identity as a nineteenth-century married woman, a married woman, or a woman. Yet both Nora and A Doll House are unimaginable otherwise.

If this point needs illustrating, let us examine the popular argument by analogy that A Doll House is "no more about women's rights than Ghosts [is] about syphilis" (besides M. Meyer 457, see Adams 415-16 and Le Gallienne xxiv). We will remove from Ghosts the dated disease that penicillin has made merely topical (at least in the medical sense) and as- sign Captain Alving and his son, Oswald, another fatal malady-say, tuberculosis. Both the horror and the marvelous aptness of the venereal disease, one of Ibsen's grim jokes, are lost (Helene Alving fled the man she loved to return to "love" the one she loathed, and the diseased Oswald is the conse- quence), but the end is the same: the child inherits

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32 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

the father's doom. Now let us remove the "woman

problem" from A Doll House; let us give Nora Hel-

mer the same rights as Torvald Helmer, and let him

consider her his equal. What is left of the play? The

only honest response is nothing, for if we emanci-

pate Nora, free her from the dollhouse, there is no

play; or, rather, there is the resolution of the play,

the confrontation between husband and wife and

the exit that follows, the only crisis and denouement

that could properly conclude the action. As Ibsen

explained, "I might honestly say that it was for the

sake of the last scene that the whole play was writ-

ten" (Letters 300).

And to read the scene is to meet with a compen-

dium of everything that early modern feminism denounced about woman's state. When Nora ac-

cuses her father and husband of having committed

a great sin against her by treating her as if she were

a playmate, she provides a textbook illustration of Wollstonecraft's major charge in the Vindication, that women are brought up to be "pleasing at the

expense of every solid virtue" as if they were "gen- tle, domestic brutes" (Goulianos 142). When she

describes herself as a doll wife who has lived "by doing tricks" (191; "a gj0re kunster" 110), she is a

flawless example of Margaret Fuller's charge that man "wants no woman, but only a girl to play ball

with" (Rossi 167). When she realizes that she is unfit

to do anything in life and announces her remedy-

"I have to try to educate myself" (192; "Jeg ma se

a oppdra meg selv" 111)-she expresses nineteenth-

century feminism's universally agreed-upon base

for women's emancipation; in telling Torvald she

does not know how to be his wife, she might be

paraphrasing Harriet Martineau in "On Female

Education," which argues the necessity of rearing

women to be "companions to men instead of play-

things or servants" (Rossi 186). And finally, when

Nora discovers that she has duties higher than those

of a "wife and mother" (193; "hustru og mor" 111), obligations she names as "duties to myself" (193; "pliktene imot meg selv" 111), she is voicing the most basic of feminist principles: that women no

less than men possess a moral and intellectual na-

ture and have not only a right but a duty to develop

it: "the grand end of their exertions should be to un- fold their own faculties" (Wollstonecraft; qtd. in Goulianos 149).

Ibsen's contemporaries, the sophisticated as well

as the crude, recognized A Doll House as the

clearest and most substantial expression of the

"twoman question" that had yet appeared. In Eu-

rope and America, from the 1880s on, the articles

poured forth: "Der Noratypus," "Ibsen und die

Frauenfragen," "Ibsen et la femme," "La represen-

tation feministe et sociale d'Ibsen," "A Prophet of the New Womanhood," "Ibsen as a Pioneer of the

Woman Movement." These are a small sampling of

titles from scholars and journalists who agreed with their more famous contemporaries Lou Andreas

Salome, Alla Nazimova, Georg Brandes, and Au-

gust Strindberg, along with every other writer on Ibsen, whether in the important dailies and week-

lies or in the highbrow and lowbrow reviews, that

the theme of A Doll House was the subjection of

women by men.6

Havelock Ellis, filled with a young man's dreams

and inspired by Nora, proclaimed that she held out

nothing less than "the promise of a new social or-

der." In 1890, eleven years after Betty Hennings as Nora first slammed the shakey backdrop door in

Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, he summarized what A Doll House meant to the progressives of Ibsen's time:

The great wave of emancipation which is now sweeping

across the civilized world means nominally nothing more

than that women should have the right to education, free-

dom to work, and political enfranchisement-nothing in

short but the bare ordinary rights of an adult human crea-

ture in a civilized state. (9)

Profoundly disturbing in its day, A Doll House re- mains so still because, in James Huneker's succinct analysis, it is "the plea for woman as a human be- ing, neither more nor less than man, which the dra- matist made" (275).

Wishful Reading: The Critic, the Heroine,

and Her Master's Voice

Torvald: You stay right here and give me a reckoning. You

understand what you've done? Answer! You understand? (A Doll House 187)

Torvald: Her blir du og star meg til regnskap. Forstar du hva du har gjort? Svar meg! Forstar du det?

(Et Dukkehjem 108)

It is easy to answer Nora's zealous critics, who seem almost willfully wrong; being silly or "frivo- lous" is, after all, essential to the role of addle- brained doll that Nora plays in the marriage. And how frivolous was it to save Torvald's life? Nora's critics conveniently forget the bottom line of Nora's

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Joan Templeton 33

"crime": Torvald would have died if Nora had not

forged. Phobic about borrowing, the gravely ill hus- band refuses to take out a loan and so must be saved

in spite of himself. That Nora's lifesaving deed was a crime is the very foundation of Ibsen's conflict be- tween law and love; a good case could be made for

Nora as a bourgeois Antigone in her stalwart defi-

ance of the world: "A wife hasn't a right to save her husband's life? I don't know much about laws. .

I did it out of love" (149; "Skulle ikke en hustru ha rett til 'a redde sin manns liv? Jeg kjenner ikke lo- vene sa noye.. . Jeg gjorde det jo av kjoerlighet"

84). The argument that Nora is not sufficiently ap- preciative of her husband's fond attentions is per- haps best countered by quoting Veblen; noting the

common complaint against the new woman, that

she "is petted by her husband . . . [and] sur- rounded by the most numerous and delicate atten-

tions [yet] she is not satisfied," he points out that

the "things which typically are cited as advantages" are precisely those that make up woman's grievance

(357-58). As for the secret macaroon eating, it hardly seems a moral issue, and in any case this household convention dramatizes the modus

vivendi of the Helmer marriage, in which Nora is

expected to practice cookie-jar trickeries in the

game between the strong, wise, put-upon husband

and the weak, childlike wife. The argument that Ib-

sen blackens Nora in the famous silk-stocking scene with Doctor Rank, which so dismayed Eva Le Gal-

lienne that she simply omitted it from her transla- tion, seems both prudish and resolutely determined to ignore Ibsen's purposes. Nora, without reflect- ing on the significance of her feeling, quite naturally prefers the company of the understanding and

amusing doctor to that of her husband: "Yes, you see," Nora blithely tosses off, as she and Rank speak of their ease together, "There are some peo- ple that one loves most and other people that one would almost prefer being with" (166; "Ja, ser De,

der er jo noen mennesker som man holder mest av, og andre mennesker som man nesten helst vil vere sammen med" 95). It is Rank who will be her real audience at the dancing of the tarantella: "you can imagine then that I'm dancing only for you-yes, and of course for Torvald, too-that's understood"

(164; "og da skal De forestille Dem at jeg gjor det bare for Deres skyld,-ja, og sa naturligvis for Tor- valds; -det forstar seg" 93). It is not surprising that Rank provides a perfect piano accompaniment for Nora's famous practice session and that Torvald is perturbed: "Rank, stop! This is pure madness!"

(174; "Rank, hold opp; dette er jo den rene galskap"

99). It would not be too speculative, I think, to guess

that Rank, unlike Torvald, would not need to fan-

tasize that Nora is a virgin before making love to her. Through the silk-stocking scene, Ibsen shows

the sexual side of the Helmer mesalliance, a side

Nora scarcely sees herself. And its ending proves, indisputably, not her dishonesty, but her essential honorableness. When Rank confronts her with his

moving confession of love as she is about to ask him

for the money she desperately needs, she refuses to make use of his feelings and categorically rejects his help: "After that? . . . You can't know anything

now" (166; "Efter dette? . . . Ingenting kan De fa vite nu" 94).

The claim that Nora cannot be a feminist hero-

ine because she is flawed is an example of question

begging similar to the universalists' argument that

A Doll House is not a feminist play because femi- nism is ipso facto an unworthy subject of art. Nora

falls short according to unnamed, "self-evident"

criteria for a feminist heroine, among which would seem to be one, some, or all of the following: an

ever-present serious-mindedness; a calm, unexcit- able temperament; an unshakable obedience to the letter of the law, even if it means the death of a hus-

band; perfect sincerity and honesty; and a thoroughgoing selflessness. For A Doll House to be feminist, it would, apparently, have to be a kind of

fourth-wall morality play with a saintly Everyfeminist as heroine, not this ignorant, excit-

able, confused, and desperate-in short, human- Nora Helmer.

But while Nora is too flawed to represent women,

the argument stops short and the case is curiously altered in the claim that she represents human be- ings. Nora's humanity keeps her from representing women but not, magically, from representing

people-namely men, and women to the extent that what happens to them can happen to men as well-

surely as fabulous an example of critical reasoning as we can imagine, and yet one that is found everywhere.

This strange and illogical stance has its parallel

for nonsense in a knotty critical conundrum: if Nora is a frivolous and superficial woman who leaves her husband on a whim, then A Doll House qualifies as a piece of rather shoddy boulevardisme; if Nora is abnormal, a case study, then A Doll House is an example of reductive laboratory naturalism; if Nora is a self-serving egoist whose unbridled thirst for power destroys her marriage,

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34 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

then A Doll House is melodrama, with Nora as vil-

lain and Torvald as victim, and act 3 is either an in-

comprehensible bore or the most ponderously

unsuccessful instance of dramatic irony in the his-

tory of the theater. But Nora's critics have not

claimed that A Doll House belongs to any inferior

subgenre. Applauding it as a fine drama, they en-

gage in side attacks on its protagonist, sniping at

Nora to discredit her arguments and ignoring the

implications of their own.

The incompleteness of this attack, while never ac-

knowledged, is easily explained. To destroy Nora's

identity as wife and woman her critics would have

to "deconstruct" the play; in the words of Jonathan

Culler's useful definition, they would have to show

how the text "undermines the philosophy it asserts,

or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies"

(86). They would have to examine what Nora says

in act 3 about her husband, her marriage, and her

life and demonstrate that her unequivocal state-

ments are contested by the text. Since the text in

question is a play, deconstructing Nora would mean arguing the significance-the interest, worth, and importance-of the part of the dialogue Ibsen gives

Nora's foil, that is, her husband. It is not a matter

of absolving Torvald of villainy, as some of his defenders seem to think it is; Ibsen was not in- terested in the conflict of melodrama, and in any

case poor Torvald is obviously not "evil." It is a matter of showing that his assertions seriously call into question, delegitimize, the statements of his wife. Not surprisingly, no one has yet risen to this

challenge, for while Torvald Helmer has had his sympathizers, as we have seen, none of them has

suggested that Ibsen was of Torvald's party without

knowing it or that Torvald could be Ibsen's, or any-

one else's, raisonneur in any modestly enlightened

universe of the Western world. It would be an in-

trepid critic indeed who could seriously uphold the position of a man who says to his wife, "Your father's official career was hardly above reproach.

But mine is" (160; "Din far var ingen uangripelig

embedsmann. Men det er jeg" 90) or "For a man

there's something indescribably sweet and satisfy-

ing in knowing he's forgiven his wife.... [I]n a sense, he's given her fresh into the world again, and she's become his wife and his child as well" (190;

"Det er for en mann noe sa ubeskrivelig sott og til-

fredssstillende i dette 'a vite med seg selv at han har

tilgitt sin hustru. ... han har liksom satt henne inn i verden pa ny; hun er pa en m'ate blitt bade hans

hustru og hans barn tillike" 109-10). In fact, a

charge frequently leveled against A Doll House is

that the husband seems too vain to be true, "an ego-

ist of such dimensions," in Halvdan Koht's phrase,

"that we can hardly take him seriously" (319). And yet the accusations against Nora restate her hus-

band's; the charges range from frivolousness, made when Torvald is annoyed at what he thinks are her

spendthrift habits ("What are those little birds

called that always fly through their fortunes?" [127; "Hva er det de fugle kalles som alltid setter penge over styr?" 70]), to deceitfulness, when he learns of

her secret loan to save his life (". . . a hypocrite, a liar-worse, worse-a criminal" [187; ". . . en hyklerske, en lognerske,-verre, verre,-en for- bryterske!" 108]), to selfishness and thus unwoman-

liness, when he hears her decision to leave him

("Abandon your home, your husband, your chil-

dren.. . . Before all else you're a wife and mother" [192-93; "Forlate ditt hjem, din mann og dine born!

. . . Du er forst og fremst hustru og mor" 111]).

Amused or angry, the husband's accusing voice is so authoritative that in spite of Torvald's unworthi-

ness as moral spokesman, Nora's critics, in a thoroughgoing and, one supposes, unconscious identification, parrot his judgments and thus read

her through his eyes. Their Nora is Torvald's Nora,

a critical perspective that resembles taking Othello's word on Desdemona.

Wishful Intention: Or, What Ibsen Is Supposed to Have Meant

Bernick: People shouldn't always be thinking of them-

selves first, especially women. (Pillars of Society 57)

Bernick: Menneskene b0r da ikke i f0rste rekke tenke pa seg selv, og aller minst kvinnene.

(Samfundets St0tten 32)

Anyone who claims that Ibsen thought of Nora as a silly, hysterical, or selfish woman is either ig- noring or misrepresenting the plain truth, present from the earliest to the most recent biographies, that Ibsen admired, even adored, Nora Helmer. Among all his characters, she was the one he liked best and found most real. While working on A Doll House, he announced to Suzannah Ibsen, his wife, "I've just seen Nora. She came right over to me and

put her hand on my shoulder." The quick-witted Suzannah replied at once, "What was she wear- ing?" In a perfectly serious tone, Ibsen answered, "A simple blue woolen dress" (Koht 318).

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Joan Templeton 35

After A Doll House had made him famous, Ib-

sen was fond of explaining that his heroine's "real"

name was "Eleanora" but that she had been called

"Nora" from childhood. Bergliot Bjornson Ibsen,

the playwright's daughter-in-law, tells the story of

how she and her husband, Sigurd, on one of the last

occasions on which they saw Ibsen out of bed in the

year he died, asked permission to name their new-

born daughter "Eleanora." Ibsen was greatly

moved. "God bless you, Bergliot," he said to her (157). He had, in fact, christened his own Nora with

a precious gift, for both "Nora" and "Eleanora" were names given to the sister of Ole Schulerud, one

of the few close friends of Ibsen's life, who in the

early years of grinding poverty believed in Ibsen's

genius and tirelessly hawked his first play to book-

seller after bookseller, finally spending his small in-

heritance to pay for its publication.

Ibsen was inspired to write A Doll House by the

terrible events in the life of his protege Laura Peter-

sen Kieler, a Norwegian journalist of whom he was

extremely fond. Married to a man with a phobia

about debt, she had secretly borrowed money to fi- nance an Italian journey necessary for her hus-

band's recovery from tuberculosis. She worked frantically to reimburse the loan, exhausting herself

in turning out hackwork, and when her earnings

proved insufficient, in desperation she forged a

check. On discovering the crime, her husband

demanded a legal separation on the grounds that

she was an unfit mother and had her placed in an

asylum, where she was put in the insane ward. Throughout the affair, Ibsen, her confidant and ad- viser, was greatly disturbed; he brooded on the wife,

"forced to spill her heart's blood," as he wrote in

a letter to her (Kinck 507; my trans.), and on the

oblivious husband, allowing his wife to slave away on unworthy jobs, concerned neither about her

physical welfare nor her work. Having done all for

love, Laura Kieler was treated monstrously for her

efforts by a husband obsessed with his standing in the eyes of the world. In Ibsen's working notes for

A Doll House we find:

She has committed forgery, and is proud of it; for she has

done it out of love for her husband, to save his life. But

this husband of hers takes his standpoint, conventionally

honorable, on the side of the law, and sees the situation

with male eyes. (M. Meyer 446)

The conflict between love and law, between heart

and head, between feminine and masculine, is the

moral center of A Doll House. But Ibsen would

sharpen life's blurred edges to meet art's demand

for plausibility. The heroine would be a housewife,

not a writer, and the hackwork not bad novels but

copying; her antagonist, the husband, would not be

a cruel brute but a kind guardian: rather than put

her into an asylum, he would merely denounce her

as an unfit wife and mother, permitting her to re-

ceive bed and board, and then, once his reputation

was safe, would offer to forgive her and take her

back on the spot. The Helmers, in other words, would be "normal." And this normality would

transform a sensationalfait divers into a devastat-

ing picture of the ordinary relations between wife

and husband and allow Ibsen to treat what he

called, in a letter to Edmund Gosse, "the problems

of married life" (McFarlane 454). Moreover, he

would reverse the ending: the original Nora, the ca-

reer journalist, had begged to be taken back; his

housewife would sadly, emphatically refuse to

stay.7

A year after A Doll House appeared, when Ib-

sen was living in Rome, a Scandinavian woman ar-

rived there, who had left her husband and small

daughter to run away with her lover. The Norwegian

exile community considered her behavior unnatu- ral and asked Ibsen what he thought. "It is not un-

natural, only it is unusual" was Ibsen's opinion. The

woman made it a point to speak with Ibsen, but to

her surprise he treated her offhandedly. "Well, I did

the same thing your Nora did," she said, offended.

Ibsen replied quietly, "My Nora went alone"

(Zucker 182).

A favorite piece of evidence in the argument that

Ibsen was not interested in women's rights is his

aversion to John Stuart Mill (see, e.g., Chamberlain

96-98). It is popular to quote Ibsen's remark to Georg Brandes about Mill's declaration that he

owed the best things in his writing to his wife, Har-

riet Taylor: "'Fancy!' [Ibsen] said smiling, 'if you

had to read Hegel or Krause with the thought that

you did not know for certain whether it was Mr. or

Mrs. Hegel, Mr. or Mrs. Krause you had before

you!"' (Brandes 77). But in fact, Brandes, one of Ibsen's closest associates and probably the critic who understood him best, reports this mot in a dis-

cussion of Ibsen's wholehearted support of the women's movement. He notes that Mill's assertion

"seemed especially ridiculous to Ibsen, with his marked individualism" (76), and explains that al-

though Ibsen had at first little sympathy for fem-

inism-perhaps, Brandes guesses, because of

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36 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

"irritation at some of the ridiculous forms the

movement assumed" -this initial response gave way "to a sympathy all the more enthusiastic" when

he saw that it was "one of the great rallying points

in the battle of progress" (77).

A well-known, perhaps embarrassing fact about

Ibsen, never brought up in discussions disclaiming

his interest in women's rights, is that when he made

the banquet speech denying that he had consciously

worked for the movement, he was primarily in-

terested in young women and annoyed by the elderly

feminists who surrounded him. During the

seventieth-birthday celebrations, Ibsen constantly exhibited his marked and, as Michael Meyer has it, "rather pathetic longing for young girls" (773). He

had already had several romantic friendships, in-

cluding one that had caused a family scandal and threatened to wreck his marriage. In the light of this

fully documented biographical information about

the aging playwright, is his intention in A Doll

House more likely to be revealed by what he said in irritation at a banquet or by what he wrote twenty

years earlier in sketching out his play?

A woman cannot be herself in the society of today, which

is exclusively a masculine society, with laws written by

men, and with accusers and judges who judge feminine

conduct from the masculine standpoint. (Archer 4)

A Doll House is not about Everybody's struggle to

find him- or herself but, according to its author,

about Everywoman's struggle against Everyman.

A Doll House is a natural development of the

play Ibsen had just written, the unabashedly femi-

nist Pillars of Society;8 both plays reflect Ibsen's

extremely privileged feminist education, which he

shared with few other nineteenth-century male

authors and which he owed to a trio of extraordi-

nary women: Suzannah Thoresen Ibsen, his wife;

Magdalen Thoresen, his colleague at the Norwegian

National Theatre in Bergen, who was Suzannah's

stepmother and former governess; and Camilla Wergeland Collett, Ibsen's literary colleague, valued

friend, and the founder of Norwegian feminism.

Magdalen Thoresen wrote novels and plays and translated the French plays Ibsen put on as a young stage manager at the Bergen theater. She was prob-

ably the first "New Woman" he had ever met. She pitied the insolvent young writer, took him under

her wing, and brought him home. She had passed

her strong feminist principles on to her charge, the

outspoken and irrepressible Suzannah, who adored

her strong-minded stepmother and whose favorite

author was George Sand. The second time Ibsen

met Suzannah he asked her to marry him. Hjordis, the fierce shield-maiden of The Vikings at Hel- geland, the play of their engagement, and Svanhild, the strong-willed heroine of Love's Comedy, the play that followed, owe much to Suzannah

Thoresen Ibsen. Later, Nora's way of speaking would remind people of Suzannah's.

The third and perhaps most important feminist

in Ibsen's life was his friend Camilla Collett, one of

the most active feminists in nineteenth-century Eu- rope and founder of the modern Norwegian novel.

Fifteen years before Mill's Subjection of Women,

Collett wrote Amtmandens D0tre (The Governor's Daughters). Faced with the choice of a masculine

nom de plume or no name at all on the title page,

Collett brought out her novel anonymously in two parts in 1854 and 1855, but she nonetheless became

widely known as the author. Its main argument,

based on the general feminist claim that women's

feelings matter, is that women should have the right to educate themselves and to marry whom they please. In the world of the governor's daughters, it is masculine success that matters. Brought up to be ornaments and mothers, women marry suitable men and devote their lives to their husbands' careers

and to their children. The novel, a cause celebre, made Collett famous overnight.

Collett regularly visited the Ibsens in their years of exile in Germany, and she and Suzannah took

every occasion to urge Ibsen to take up the feminist cause. They had long, lively discussions in the years preceding A Doll House, when feminism had be-

come a strong movement and the topic of the day

in Scandinavia. Collett was in Munich in 1877, when Ibsen was hard at work on Pillars of Society,

and Ibsen's biographer Koht speculates that Ibsen may have deliberately prodded her to talk about the women's movement in order to get material for his

dialogue (313). In any case, the play undoubtedly owes much to the conversations in the Ibsen house- hold, as well as to the Norwegian suffragette Aasta

Hansteen, the most notorious woman in the coun-

try. Deliberately provocative, Hansteen took to the platform wearing men's boots and carrying a whip

to protect herself against the oppressor. A popular news item during the Ibsens' visit to Norway in 1874, Hansteen became the model for Lona Hessel, the shocking raisonneuse of Pillars of Society.

The play opens with a striking image of woman's place in the world: eight ladies participating in what

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Joan Templeton 37

has been, since antiquity, the most quintessentially

female activity in literature-they are "busy sew- ing" (15)-as they listen to the town schoolmaster

read aloud from Woman as the Servant of Society. Lona Hessel bursts in, and when the ladies ask her

how she can aid their "Society for the Morally Dis-

abled," she suggests, "I can air it out" (39; "Jeg vil lufte ut" 22). Returning from America, where she

is rumored to have sung in saloons (even for money!), lectured, and written a book, Lona is the New Woman with a vengeance who teaches the

others the truth. Lona had loved Bernick, but she packed her bags when he rejected her to marry for money. Bernick turns out not to have been much of

a loss, however; he has reduced his wife, Betty, to

an obedient cipher and made a personal servant of his sister, Martha, a paradigm of the nineteenth-

century spinster who devotes her life to a male rela-

tive. Martha's story may have had its source in The

Governor's Daughters. Like Collett's Margarethe,

Martha had once loved a young man but, too mod-

est to declare her feelings, suffered in silence. She

now lives for her brother, who is insufferable when

he speaks of her; she is a "nonentity" ("ganske

ubetydelig"), he explains, "who'll take on whatever

comes along" (57; "som man kan sette til hva der

forefaller" 32). It is in explaining Martha's exem- plary function in life that Bernick speaks the line,

"People shouldn't always be thinking of themselves first, especially women" (57; "Menneskene bor da

ikke i forste rekke tenke p'a seg selv, og aller minst

kvinnene" 32). Dina Dorf, Bernick's ward, dis-

regards this happy maxim, and though she agrees to marry, she tells her husband-to-be, "But first I want to work, become something the way you have.

I don't want to be a thing that's just taken along"

(98; "Men forst vil jeg arbeide, bli noe selv, saledes some De er det. Jeg vil ikke vockre en ting som tas"

55). Dina knows beforehand what Nora learns af-

ter eight years of marriage: "I have to try to edu- cate myself. . . I've got to do it alone" (192; "Jeg ma se a oppdra meg selv. Det m'a jeg voere alene om" 111).

Pillars of Society, little known and played outside

Scandinavia and Germany, is one of the most rad- ically feminist works of nineteenth-century litera- ture. Ibsen took the old maid, the butt of society's ridicule, a figure of pity and contempt, and made her a heroine. Rejected as unfit to be a wife, Lona Hessel refuses to sacrifice herself to a surrogate family and escapes to the New World, where she leads an independent, authentic life. As raison-

neuse, she summarizes his point of view for B3ernick

and the rest: "This society of yours is a bachelors'

club. You don't see women" (117; "Jert samrfunn er et samfunn av peppersvenn-sjele; I ser ikke kvin- nen" 65).

It is simply not true, then, that Ibsen was not in- terested in feminism. It is also not true that "there

is no indication that Ibsen was thinking of writing a feminist play when he first began to work seri- ously on A Doll House in the summer of 1879"

(Valency 150). In the spring of that year, while Ib-

sen was planning his play, a scandalous incident, easily available in the biographies, took place that proves not only Ibsen's interest in women's rights

but his passionate support for the movement. Ib-

sen had made two proposals to the Scandinavian

Club in Rome, where he was living: that the post of librarian be opened to women candidates and that women be allowed to vote in club meetings. In the

debate on the proposal, he made a long, occasion- ally eloquent speech, part of which follows:

Is there anyone in this gathering who dares assert that our

ladies are inferior to us in culture, or intelligence, or knowledge, or artistic talent? I don't think many men would dare suggest that. Then what is it men fear? I hear

there is a tradition here that women are cunning intriguers, and that therefore we don't want them. Well, I have encountered a good deal of male intrigue in my

time. . . . (M. Meyer 449)

Ibsen's first proposal was accepted, the second not, failing by one vote. He left the club in a cold rage. A few days later, he astonished his compatriots by

appearing at a gala evening. People thought he was penitent. But he was planning a surprise: facing the ballroom and its dancing couples, he interrupted the music to make a terrible scene, haranguing the celebrants with a furious tirade. He had tried to bring them progress, he shouted, but their cowardly resistance had refused it. The women were espe- cially contemptible, for it was for them he had tried to fight. A Danish countess fainted and had to be removed, but Ibsen continued, growing more and more violent. Gunnar Heiberg, who was present, later gave this account of the event:

As his voice thundered it wals as though he were clarify- ing his own thoughts, as his tongue chastised it was as though his spirit were scouring the darkness in search of his present spiritual goal--his poem [A Doll House]- as though he were personally bringing out his theories, incarnating his characters. And when he was done, he

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38 The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

went out: into the hall, took his overcoat and walked

home. (M. Meyer 450)

In 1884, five years after A Doll House had made

Ibsen a recognized champion of the feminist cause,

he joined with H. E. Berner, president of the Nor-

wegian Women's Rights League, and with his fellow Norwegian writers Bjornson, Lie, and Kielland, in

signing a petition to the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, urging the passage of a bill establish- ing separate property rights for married women. When he returned the petition to Bjornson, Ibsen

wryly commented that the Storting should not be

interested in men's opinions: "To consult men in

such a matter is like asking wolves if they desire bet-

ter protection for the sheep" (Letters 228). He also spoke of his fears that the current campaign for universal suffrage would come to nothing. The so-

lution, which he despaired of seeing, would be the formation of a "strong, resolute progressive party"

that would include in its goals "the statutory im- provement of the position of woman" (229).

It is foolish to apply the formalist notion that art

is never sullied by argument to Ibsen's middle- period plays, written at a time when he was an out- spoken and direct fighter in what he called the "mortal combat between two epochs" (Letters 123).

Ibsen was fiercely his own man, refusing all his life

to be claimed by organizations or campaigns of

many sorts, including the Women's Rights League

and the movement to remove the mark of Sweden from the Norwegian flag. And he had a deeply con-

servative streak where manners were concerned (ex-

cept when he lost his temper), for he was acutely

suspicious of show. Temperamentally, Ibsen was a loner. But he was also, as Georg Brandes declared,

"a born polemist" (47). While it is true that Ibsen never reduced life to "ideas," it is equally true that

he was passionately interested in the events and

ideas of his day. He was as deeply anchored in his

time as any writer has been before or since. Writ- ing to his German translator a year after the publi-

cation of A Doll House, Ibsen offered one of the

truest self-appraisals a writer has ever made:

Everything that I have written is intimately connected

with what I have lived through, even if I have not lived

it myself. Every new work has served me as emancipation

and catharsis; for none of us can escape the responsibil-

ity and the guilt of the society to which we belong.

(Hundrearsutgave 402; my trans.)9

Long Island University

Brooklyn, New York

Notes

I Rolf Fjelde, America's foremost translator of Ibsen, is right; Et Dukkehjem is A Dol/ House and not A Doll's House: "There is certainly no sound justification for perpetrating the awkward

and blindly traditional misnomer of A Doll's House; the house

is not Nora's, as the possessive implies; the familiar children's

toy is called a doll house" (xxv). I use Fjelde's translation of the

title throughout; references in English to Pillars of Society and

A Doll House are to Fjelde's Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose

Plays (15-118; 125-96). References to the original texts are to Ib-

sens Samlede Verker (9-65; 70-114).

2 One example is the title of a Carnegie Commission report

on the status of women in American graduate education: Escape from the Doll House, by Saul D. Feldman.

3The notion that Ibsen's objective in A Doll House was non- feminist has become so widespread that even feminist critics

honor it. Elaine Hoffman Baruch can term the drama "the fem-

inist play par excellence" and yet refer to "the speech in which

[Ibsen] denied being a feminist in A Doll House" (387), accepting

the idea that Nora's meaning for feminism is essentially differ-

ent from Ibsen's intention. MiriaLm Schneir anthologizes the last scene of the play in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings but explains its inclusion as justified "whatever [Ibsen's] inten-

tion" and in spite of his speech (179).

4 See, for example, Robert BrLlstein (49) and Marvin Rosen-

berg, whose article is a rehash of H0st's points, although Rosen-

berg seems unacquainted with her well-known essay.

5 For a thoroughgoing defense of Weigand by a much later critic who understands that 'A Doll House is not a feminist

play," see R. F. Dietrich.

6 For the studies mentioned in this paragraph see the entries in Works Cited for Marholm, Woerner, Key, Canudo, A. Meyer,

and Bennett, as well as those for Salome, Nazimova, Brandes,

and Strindberg.

7 In the succes de scandale of A Doll House, it was generally

known that Laura Kieler was the model for Nora. She became

deeply angry with Ibsen for having made use of her private life,

responding so violently that she even took Torvald's derogatory

comments on Nora's father as references to her own father. More

than ten years later, Georg Brandes wrote an article claiming, in-

explicably and rather nastily, that Nora's original had borrowed

the money not to save her husband's life but to decorate her

house. Widely circulated in the press, the article caused Laura

Kieler great distress; she begged a friend of Ibsen's to ask the dra-

matist to publish a denial of Brandes's assertion. Ibsen refused

absolutely, replying that he did not understand why he should

be brought in to deny what the Kielers could deny themselves;

he agreed to see Laura Kieler, however, and she later described

a four-hour interview in Ibsen's apartment during which he was

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Joan Templeton 39

so moved that he wept, although he still refused to set Brandes

straight (Kinck 529-31). Claiming that Ibsen could have easily

written a letter to a newspaper refuting Brandes's charges,

Michael Meyer considers Ibsen's refusal "cowardly and hypocrit-

ical" (635); at the same time, he suspects that the story of the

tearful interview may be "the confused and colored fantasy of

an old lady whose life had been a protracted tragedy" (680).

While Laura Kieler did suffer greatly in her personal life, be-

ing forced, in order to get her children back, to live with a man

who had had her locked up in an asylum, she enjoyed a long and

productive career as a journalist; her books were issued in many

editions and translated into foreign languages, and she was es-

pecially honored in Denmark for her writing on the Schleswig-

Holstein question. I would not describe her life as a "protracted

tragedy." In any case, there is no reason to doubt that she gave

a true account of her emotional interview with Ibsen. The fact

is that Ibsen was very attached to his "skylark," as he called her,

and uncommonly affectionate with her; he had been greatly dis-

tressed by her husband's treatment of her, had written to her

warmly to tell her so and to give her advice, and, when he heard

of her incarceration, had written to his publisher asking for news

of her (Kinck 506-08). It seems probable that Ibsen would be

upset by Laura Kieler's tears and entreaties. His relations with

younger women, moreover, were marked by passionately felt sen-

timent; his meeting with his protege is not the only occasion on

which he is reported to have shed tears.

As for his supposed cowardice, it is certainly true that Ibsen

was braver in print than in life. But it is also true that one of the

abiding principles of his life was a systematic, scrupulously hon-

ored refusal to comment publicly on his works. At the end of

their talk, when Laura Kieler saw he was not yielding, she begged

him to let her come again the next day; he replied, "Oh, Laura,

Laura, I don't think I can let you go, but you mustn't come

tomorow. No, no, it can't be done. I can't do it. It's impossible!"

(Kinck 531; my trans.). Yes, Ibsen could have written to a news-

paper to say that Nora Helmer's original had acted honorably,

and perhaps he should have, but he could not bring himself to

do so, not even for Laura Kieler.

8 Nora appears in embryo as Selma Brattsberg in The League

of Youth, written in 1869, ten years before A Doll House. When

Selma responds to her husband's announcement of his finan-

cial ruin, both her argument and her metaphor are Nora's: "How

I've longed for even a little share in your worries! But when I

asked, all you did was laugh it off with a joke. You dressed me

up like a doll. You played with me as you might play with a child.

Oh, how joyfully I could have helped to bear the burdens!" (93)

Brandes suggested in his review of the play that Selma deserved

a work all to herself; later he liked taking credit for giving Ib-

sen the idea for A Doll House.

9 I presented a longer version of the first two sections of this essay on 15 February 1987 at the eleventh annual Themes in

Drama conference, entitled Women in Drama, at the University

of California, Riverside. I would like to express my thanks to Bill

Harris, Dana Sue McDermott, and the other congress organizers,

and to my audience, whose appreciation and support were greatly

encouraging, especially to Karen Bassi (Syracuse Univ.), Lynda

Hart (Xavier Univ.), and K. Kendall (Smith Coll.).

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