A Doll’s House

By Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House

• 1879• Norwegian title: Et dukkehjem• highly controversial –why?• Written while Ibsen was in Rome and Amalfi, but set in Norway at Christmas time

A time of revolution in Europe. • 1861-1865 American Civil War• 1863–1865: Polish uprising against the Russian Empire• 1866: Austro-Prussian War ends the German

Confederation• 1867: Serbia independent from Ottoman

Empire• 1868-1878: Ten Years War Cuba & Spain• 1876: Bulgarians rise against Ottoman rule• 1877–78: Russo-Turkish War for independence of

Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania

Balkan Revolution (twcenter.net)

Revolutions• Ibsen had also been a supporter of the1848 revolutions

(Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Austrian Empire, etc)

• Political perspectives of individual freedom led to the movement of modernist and realist drama in Europe

• Ibsen mastered and popularized the realist drama• People read and attended his plays throughout Europe (often in translation) and he was extremely popular

The Well Made Play• Genre of theatre from the 19th century, perfected by

Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) very popular between 1815 and 1830 in Paris (wrote over 420 plays). Now he is not well-regarded by critics.

• pièce bien faite is considered formulaic• It has a strong neo-classical flavor, involving a very

tight, artificial plot and a climax very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play and revealed through thinly veiled exposition.

• Common device: letter or papers falling into unintended hands, causing plot twists

Attributes of a “Well Made Play”

• Plot based on a withheld secret, usually about the play's hero, the revelation of which provides the turning point of the play.

• Initial exposition provides information, often by question and answer, about events that precede the start of the play (antecedent action) and both leads toward the secret and withholds it.

• Ups and downs seen in dialogue, exchanges of wit between opponents, in which we move closer to the revelation of the secret.

• Reversal, followed by a revelatory scene (the Scène à faire, a scene that’s obligatory for its genre)

• A plausible dénouement is designed to make everything that has occurred believable.

• Return to order and• Happy ending• (Genre often used for humor and farce)

• In his book The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Bernard Shaw proposed that Ibsen converted this formulaic genre for "serious" use by substituting discussion for the plausible dénouement.

• “Thus, the play becomes open ended, as if there were life beyond the last act curtain.”

• Critics agree that, up until the last moments of the play, A Doll's House could easily be just another modern drama broadcasting another comfortable moral lesson.

• When Nora tells Torvald that they must sit down and "discuss all this that has been happening between us", the play diverges from the traditional form.

• With this new technical feature, A Doll's House became an international sensation and founded a new school of dramatic art.

The Feminist Message• The play rocked the stages of Europe when

it was premiered.• Nora's rejection of marriage and

motherhood scandalized contemporary audiences.

• German productions of the play in the 1880s had an altered ending (which Ibsen hated)

• Ibsen was reacting to the uncertain tempo of the time; Europe was being reshaped with revolutions.

• The revolutionary spirit and the emergence of modernism influenced Ibsen's choice to focus on an unlikely hero--a housewife--in his attack on middle-class values.

• The play succeeded in provoking discussion and can be read in many different ways.

Major Themes

• Women and Men: – This play focuses on the way that women are

seen, especially in the context of marriage and motherhood. Torvald, in particular, has a very clear and narrow definition of a woman's role.

• George Steiner claims that the play is “founded on the belief…that women can and must be raised to the dignity of man,” but Ibsen himself believed it to be more about the importance of self-liberation than the importance of specifically female liberation—

• Materialism vs. People: – This is particularly important for Torvald,

whose sense of manhood depends on his independence.

– In fact, he was an unsuccessful barrister because he refused to take "unsavory cases". As a result, he switched to the bank, where he primarily deals with money.

– In other words, money and materialism can be seen as a way to avoid the complications of personal contact.

• Images of women:

• Light:

• The Dress:

• The Tarantella:– folk dance from southern Italy that accelerates from its

already quick tempo and alternates between major and minor keys.

– In the 16th and 17th Centuries, Italians believed that victims of the tarantula bite needed to dance a frenzied, fast-paced dance to sweat the poison out and avoid “tarantism” and death

– The dance was later applied as a supposed cure for the behavior of neurotic women ("'Carnevaletto delle donne'")

– How is this symbolic of what was going on with Nora in the play?

Where is the Wise Old Man?• Ibsen's realist drama disregarded the tradition of

the older male moral figure.• Dr. Rank, the character who should serve this role,

is far from a moral force; instead, he is sickly--rotting from a disease picked up from his father's earlier sexual exploits--and lascivious, openly coveting Nora.

• The choice to portray both Dr. Rank and the potentially matronly Mrs. Linde as imperfect, real people was a novel approach at the time.

Sites Cited• “A Doll’s House” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 8 February 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen• Gillis, G. J. and Westhagen, Jen. SparkNote on A Doll’s House. 5 Apr.

2007 http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dollhouse/. • "Henrik Ibsen” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 5 April 2007

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen• “The Modernism Lab at Yale University” 8 February 2011

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Henrik_Ibsen• "Well-Made Play" Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 8 February 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-made_play• William, Robert. “About A Doll’s House.” Grade Saver.

http://www.gradesaver.com/a-dolls-house/study-guide/about/