Actress Elizabeth Robins, encountering Ibsen's Doll's House for the first time in a Novelty Theatre performance in June 1889, was thrilled by both the boldness of the play's ideology and the emotional power of the characters and the acting. The one element with which she found fault in the production, however, was Nora's tarantella, which she described nearly forty years later as “a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen's one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from.”Footnote 1 William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker concurred with Robins's assessment, criticizing Nora's dance as the play's “flawed streak,”Footnote 2 as “a theatrical effect, of an obvious, unmistakable kind” and “Ibsen's last concession to … the theatrical orthodoxy of his earlier years.”Footnote 3 The tarantella, they agreed, was an embarrassing irrelevance, a crowd-pleasing distraction from the play's serious brainwork, simply an opportunity for the lead actress to display her agility and her well-shaped legs.
Yet the “theatrical orthodoxy” of the tarantella, which struck Ibsen's most enthusiastic admirers as jarringly old-fashioned and “obvious,” was an essential component in the play's much-discussed critique of traditional marriage and gender roles, the critique that led some of these same admirers to hail the play as “an event that was to change lives and literatures.”Footnote 4 The criticisms directed at the tarantella by Robins, Archer, and other early London spectators—conventionality, shallowness, artificiality—bore a striking resemblance to charges of a very different sort: those leveled against the institution of marriage by contemporary social critics and women's rights advocates who hailed Ibsen as “the Woman's Poet” in The Englishwoman's Review and the Women's Penny Paper. Traditional marriage and traditional theatre were alike accused of patterning themselves after rigid and artificial customs instead of fact or probability, perpetuating false and simplistic assumptions about human behavior (in particular, about the relations between men and women), privileging appearance and display over authenticity, and glossing over questions or problems that were not easily resolved. Since long before the nineteenth century, marriage, like death, had served as a central structuring device for a variety of dramatic genres: the wedding of young lovers or the reconciliation of quarreling spouses signified comedy's happy ending by default, whereas the death of one or both lovers or the seduction of the young woman and her consequent exclusion from marriage and domesticity were the expected endpoints of tragedy. Thus, to question the rightness and necessity of marriage was to destabilize theatrical tradition in lasting ways.
A Doll's House was just such a destabilizing force in late Victorian England, a play that simultaneously exposed the problems of conventional marriage and the problems of conventional theatre. It offered a scathing critique of the nineteenth-century veneration of marriage and family, and it made conspicuous departures from nineteenth-century theatrical conventions in terms of what constituted a well-made play and in its jettisoning of the plot devices and character types of domestic melodrama. A Doll's House presented marriage itself as a theatrical performance, a play within the play that anticipated Eve Sedgwick's definition of marriage as a perpetual performance behind the “marital proscenium,” existing “in and for the eyes of others.”Footnote 5 The Helmers’ marriage is metatheatrical, endowing the protagonists with what Lionel Abel has termed “a playwright's consciousness” and “an acute awareness of what it means to be staged.”Footnote 6 In A Doll's House, conventional marriage and conventional theatre are each to some degree held responsible for one another's shortcomings, with the suggestion that if one is to be improved, then assumptions about both must be reexamined. In Judith Butler's terms, the play not only presents gender and other socially constructed identities as performed spectacles but also asks what it might look like to revise these traditional performances—both social and theatrical—so as to call attention to their constructedness and bring their naturalness into question.Footnote 7 It was this double attack on marriage law and theatrical custom that made the play such an epoch-making event for women's rights and for theatrical reform in late Victorian Britain.
In this essay, I call attention to the ways A Doll's House connected new drama with marriage reform, associating rigid gender assumptions with rigid dramatic conventions and finally rejecting both. This connection is especially evident, I suggest, in the tarantella and the play's other explicitly metatheatrical devices, in which the act of performance is brought to the consciousness of characters and audience.
This idea of marriage as theatre and theatre as a school for marriage held particular fascination for early English readers and viewers of the play and became a prominent theme in English criticism of it, particularly the criticism that took the form of what we would now call fanfics—adaptations, parodies, and sequels published by writers as diverse as Shaw, Henry Herman, and Henry Arthur Jones, Punch humorist F. Anstey,Footnote 8 novelist and historian Walter Besant, and socialist leader Eleanor Marx. These fictional and dramatic responses took a practical approach to criticism, showing rather than telling what Ibsen meant or what he ought to have written. While these rewritings primarily responded to Ibsen's challenge to traditional marriage, whether with attacks or support, they were also concerned with the play's departure from theatrical norms, taking Ibsen's unresolved ending as an invitation to a sustained conversation about dramatic structure, acting, and playwriting. In these dramas or short stories, the authors offered alternative narratives of the Helmer marriage, making use of conventional genre frameworks, including domestic melodrama, the moral cautionary tale, comedy, and farce, drawing from these genres and often revising them. Ibsen's critique of marriage, as all these adaptations illustrated and reiterated, posed a serious challenge to nineteenth-century theatrical conventions, making narratives of marriage and desire increasingly difficult to contain within traditional genre categories and revealing an insistent need for new kinds of drama.
Wife and Husband, Dancer and Director
I take Nora's tarantella as a convenient starting point because, as a compact play within the play, managed and performed by the husband and wife, it presents the intersection of theatrical performance and the marriage relationship at its most literal. The dance of the Capri fisherwoman is at once a theatrical display and a miniature portrait of the Helmers’ marital relationship; it presents marriage itself metatheatrically, as a theatrical spectacle that points to the act of performance. Errol Durbach calls attention to the tarantella's genre affiliations, its associations with the theatre Archer and Robins condemned as “orthodox.” “The tarantella,” he declares, “leaps straight out of the melodramatic entr'acte,” a form privileging music, emotional intensity, and visual display.Footnote 9 In appropriating and using the familiar spectacular convention, he argues, Ibsen also subverts and repurposes it; ironically, the insignificant and “effect-hunting” virtuoso display becomes a scene heavily laden with social meaning.
The preparation and performance of the dance supply a secondary structure to the play, an ironically frivolous counterpoint to Krogstad's blackmail and Nora's efforts to stave it off. The roles Nora and Torvald play in preparing the tarantella performance offer insights into the functions each fulfills as wife and husband. That is, Nora serves as the entertainer who dances, and Torvald, besides being chief spectator to Nora's performance, positions himself as producer and director. He selects the piece, choreographs the movements, coaches Nora as she rehearses, and coordinates her exit on the evening of the party. In describing the performance afterward to Christina Linden,Footnote 10 he assumes the tone both of critic and impresario:
She dances her tarantella with wild applause, and well she deserved it. … Ought I to let her stop after that—to weaken the impression? Not if I know it. I took my sweet little Capri girl—my capricious little Capri girl, I might say—under my arm; a rapid turn round the room, a curtsey to all sides, and—as they say in novels—the lovely apparition vanished! An exit should always be effective.Footnote 11
He points out the flaws of her performance, admitting that “there was, perhaps, a little too much nature in her rendering of the idea—more than was, strictly speaking, artistic” (95). In other words, he claims authority not only to evaluate Nora's dancing but also to define “natural” and “unnatural.” Torvald sees the tarantella first and foremost as a showcase for his skill as a stage manager and proprietor of a gifted prima donna.
Yet in the case of the Helmers, this controlling and directing is a mutual process, a point that neither Nora nor Torvald appears to realize or acknowledge, even in the final discussion scene.Footnote 12 Nora, while apparently submitting to Torvald's infantilizing supervision, uses her dance as a means of manipulating him. To flatter his sense of masculine capability, she exaggerates her own dependence, repeating, “I can't get on without you” and “I can't dance to-morrow if I don't rehearse with you first” (45, 80). As she dances, she disregards Torvald's commands to dance “slower” and “not so violently”; in this way, she can simultaneously rebel against his directorship, if only for the moment, and reinforce her image of childish ineptitude (81). Even as she acts the parts of an Italian peasant and an incompetent female, the dance offers Nora a momentary opportunity to let down her hair (literally and figuratively) and break free from the civilized restraints of Torvald's society.
Nora's tarantella performance carries a not exactly subtle erotic suggestion that becomes increasingly explicit in the third act. In their Norwegian home, proverbially associated with chaste, chilly respectability, Torvald Helmer creates a miniature Italy, a northerner's fantasy of Italy as a space for uninhibited sensuality. Torvald frankly and tipsily spells out the dance's sexual implications after their return from the party: “I see you have the tarantella still in your blood—and that makes you all the more enticing” (98). The dance his wife performs and he directs stages his sexual fantasy, an almost literal sample of the couple's bedroom relationship.
Nora's dance is apparently not a unique incident in the Helmer home. Nora regularly charms her husband with private theatrical displays, “dressing up and acting” and “play[ing] all sorts of tricks” (21, 57). The Capri fisherwoman's tarantella is evidently only one of the many child-wife masquerades in her repertoire. Torvald's directorship is apparently also a matter of routine, for Nora begs him to “direct me as you used to do” (81). Considering their relationship in retrospect in the final act, Nora compares herself to a street performer and Torvald to the audience who pays to be entertained: “I seem to have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you” (114). They have had a marriage that, like many mid-nineteenth-century melodramas, has consisted largely of visual spectacle and predetermined character types.
The Melodramatic Perspective
This theatrical outlook shapes not only the way Nora entertains her husband but also the way they perceive themselves and each other. Their idyllic visions of married life echo the values routinely reinforced in mid-nineteenth-century drama. Such sentimental comedies and melodramas—plays that largely dominated the London theatrical scene in the 1880s and in which Ibsen pioneer Janet Achurch reportedly excelled as an “emotional” actress prior to her 1889 Doll's House ventureFootnote 13—generally featured beautiful, devoted heroines; courageous, protective heroes; and a trajectory of rising and falling action with a tidy resolution at the end.
A Doll's House appears to promise just such a clear-cut trajectory, not only to the audience but also to the characters themselves, for the Helmers implicitly rely on melodramatic conventions as the shaping forces of their own lives.Footnote 14 Throughout the playing out of Krogstad's blackmail plot, Nora's expectations vacillate between a last-minute deliverance and a pathetic suicide. Her romantic fantasies are made most explicit in her monologues, in which she vents her misery in the style of a melodramatic heroine and anticipates conventional stage crises and rescues. She envisions Krogstad's betrayal even as she declares it to be “nonsense” (44); she predicts her husband's miraculous self-sacrifice, repeating three times that “he would do it, in spite of all the world” (62). Like the tarantella, these monologues are a familiar device in mid-nineteenth-century theatre, the sort of speech that Ibsen had been proud to eliminate from his earlier realist play, The League of Youth (1869).Footnote 15 Yet he gave Nora seven of these speeches. Nora reveals more of her sentimental fantasies in her conversation with Christina, whom Archer disparaged as a stock stage confidante—like the tarantella, an outdated theatrical device.Footnote 16 Having saved her husband's life with the money she secretly borrowed and having repaid the debt with the earnings of her own labor, Nora describes to Christina a tender future revelation scene in which she will triumphantly claim the title of savior (21). The familiar theatrical techniques through which Nora makes these revelations highlight the conventional theatricality of the content she reveals and of the Helmers’ general perspective on their home and family life.
Torvald's expectations are no less theatrically conditioned than Nora's. He describes himself as a hero who fears no threats, who has “shoulders … broad enough to bear the whole burden” (61). In his more tipsy amorous moods, his role playing becomes elaborate and he envisions the Boxing Day party as a scene of romantic intrigue à la Romeo and Juliet. “When we're among strangers,” he explains to Nora, “do you know why I speak so little to you, and keep so far away? … Because I am fancying we love each other in secret, that I am secretly betrothed to you, and that no one guesses there is anything between us” (98). Ironically, to perform his marriage relationship before third persons, Torvald must perform singleness. The departure from the party becomes, in his imagination, a wedding or the happily-ever-after conclusion to a romantic comedy: “And then, when we have to go … I imagine you are my bride, that our marriage is just over, that I am bringing you for the first time to my home, and that I am alone with you for the first time” (98–9). As Joan Templeton has pointed out, these speeches offer a telling commentary on the sexuality of the manly man who is most aroused by the fantasy of his wife as a passive virgin bride.Footnote 17 They also construct a bizarre inversion of Sedgwick's marital proscenium. That is to say, the Helmers’ marriage might, like all marriages, exist “in and for the eyes of others.”Footnote 18 Yet while the “others” at the party see an ordinary, long-married couple, Torvald envisions himself and his wife as two secretly engaged people who must conceal their affection. The social and artistic conventions of sentimental romance have so thoroughly permeated his consciousness that in order for his marriage to be happy or even functional, it must be imaginatively refashioned in the image of these conventions.
Torvald and Nora reimagine their rather ordinary bourgeois married life after the pattern of sensational theatre. Shaw later alleged in the preface to Three Plays for Puritans that many English playgoers shared this tendency, having been long exposed to drama and fiction that was preoccupied with romantic love: “If the conventions of romance are only insisted on long enough … then, for the huge compulsorily schooled masses who read romance or nothing, these conventions will become the laws of personal honor. … Nay, why should I say will be? they are. Ten years of cheap reading have changed the English from the most stolid nation in Europe to the most theatrical.”Footnote 19 Ibsen's play anticipated Shaw's conclusions not only about the faultiness of conventional marriage and gender relations but also about romantic drama's importance in shaping those conventions.
Unmaking the Well-Made Play
Although theatrically conditioned assumptions underpin the Helmer marriage, by the third act, these assumptions have collided disastrously with the couple's prosaic characters and circumstances, and their relationship is coming unstitched. Not surprisingly, Torvald's heroic declarations are discarded as soon as his reputation is threatened by Krogstad's blackmail, and Nora's sacrificial aspirations culminate in a hysterical suicide attempt that rescues no one.
In the midst of the debt crisis, the clash between romantic fantasy and unromantic fact is dramatized by the husband's and wife's ludicrously mismatched speeches and responses. As Torvald reads Krogstad's incriminating letter, Nora delivers her last soliloquy with an anguish worthy of Isabel Carlyle: “Never to see him again. Never, never, never. Never to see the children again. Never, never. … Oh no, no, no, not yet. Torvald, good-bye! Good-bye my little ones!” (105–6). Envisioning her husband as a savior about to brave public disgrace for her sake, she poises herself to prevent this sacrifice, pausing to luxuriate in her emotional excess. Torvald, however, far from sacrificing himself chivalrously, berates her like an ordinary man aghast at his own sudden loss of prestige. These incongruities are played out in the resulting dialogue:
Helmer: What is this? Do you know what is in this letter?
Nora: Yes, I know. Let me go! Let me pass!
Helmer: (holds her back) Where do you want to go?
Nora: (tries to get free) You sha'n't save me, Torvald.
Helmer: (falling back) True! Is it true what he writes? No, no, it cannot be true.
Nora: It is true. I have loved you beyond all else in the world.
Helmer: Pshaw—no silly evasions.
…
Nora: Let me go—you shall not save me. You shall not take my guilt upon yourself.
Helmer: I don't want any melodramatic airs. (106)
The scene reads, as Durbach has said, like a “farcical breakdown of Scribean theatrical convention.”Footnote 20 (This dramatic breaking down evidently jarred on some English audience members, for more than one adaptor, as I will later show, took particular pains to rewrite this scene with proper symmetry.) For Nora, swept away by the pathos of her husband's anticipated heroism, the uppermost facts of the situation are her love and her need to prevent his self-sacrifice, and she expects him to meet her affectionate declarations halfway. Torvald, however, has no sacrificial intentions to resist. Contemplating the mundane facts of debt, forgery, blackmail, and possible imprisonment, he sees her protestations simply as “melodramatic airs,” manipulative ploys for sympathy.
As the melodramatic conventions fall apart, so do the couple's drama-based assumptions about their marriage. Nora, while saving her husband's life, has jeopardized his career and social standing through her debt and unwitting felony. Perhaps more significant, she has jeopardized his manly self-reliance as he discovers that he owes his recovery and health to her years of labor and management. In Torvald's eyes, Nora has suddenly ceased to be an ingenuous girl and ideal wife and become “a hypocrite, a liar … a criminal” and “an unprincipled woman” (107). The romantic marriage ideal, in short, can no longer be the template for their life narrative, and the marriage must consequently either be dissolved or continue on some other model. Torvald, priding himself on his upright respectability, can envision no alternative but a retreat behind the marital proscenium in a hollow imitation of their old ideal married life. “We must live,” he says, “as we have always done; but of course only in the eyes of the world. … Henceforward there can be no question of happiness, but merely of saving the ruins, the shreds, the show of it!” (108). Torvald's tirade, unjust and self-absorbed as it is, illustrates a problem that Ibsen treated seriously both in A Doll's House and two years later in Ghosts: the absurdity of an unhappy marriage maintained merely as a facade for the approval of neighbors—the painful consequence of an exclusive preoccupation with the reputation and respectability that must constantly be performed. As Torvald's marriage is transformed, so is his relation to outsiders; from intrusive observers from whom he conceals his affection as a “secretly betrothed” lover, these third persons have become the all-important “world” who force him to play the part of husband despite his estrangement from his wife.
When Krogstad's second letter arrives, more private theatricals ensue, this time with the parts reversed. For Torvald, the return of Nora's forged IOU signals the melodramatic rescue, just as the earlier threatening letter was, for Nora, to have precipitated the melodramatic catastrophe. He repeats, “We are saved,” and “It's over,” stock phrases appropriate to a happy ending (109–10). The sudden deliverance is, to him, so satisfyingly characteristic of the well-made play's formula that he forgets how wildly this formula contrasts with the facts of his situation. Enamored of the heroic character that he repudiated five minutes before, he comes to believe he has saved his wife as she expected. “You may rest secure,” he assures her; “I have broad wings to shield you” (111). Nora's misery and her affection for him—which he has just dismissed as irrelevant if not spurious—now take the uppermost place in his mind: “Oh, Nora, they must have been three awful days for you! … And in your agony you saw no other outlet but—no; we won't think of that horror” (110). He now quite accurately comprehends Nora's suicidal frenzy of five minutes earlier as he views the situation from the same theatricalized perspective. Along with his readiness to welcome theatrical closure, his belief in the romantic rightness of his marriage also returns. His just-rescued heroine is again his “scared little song-bird,” his “bewildered, helpless darling” (111, 112).
The playacting, however, is as one-sided as before, despite Torvald's repeated attempts to prompt with “Don't you hear, Nora?” (110). For Nora has now discarded her faith in happy endings and happy marriage and she greets her husband's lengthy rejoicings with curt, brief sentences. Though Torvald may no longer feel it necessary to “come to an understanding” about the failures of their marriage, it is now Nora's turn to say that they must “come to a final settlement” (108, 112).
The well-made fragmentation that concludes Ibsen's blackmail plot was most memorably and vividly highlighted, perhaps, by Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman in Breaking a Butterfly, an adaptation that painstakingly restored the dramatic continuity that Ibsen had taken such pains to interrupt. Years later, as a mature and established dramatist, Jones recalled the adaptation as one of the “transgressions of my youth and ignorance,” an attempt to turn A Doll's House into a “sympathetic play,” knowing “nothing of Ibsen, but … a great deal of [Tom] Robertson and H. [J.] Byron.”Footnote 21 Written and produced in 1884, five years before Ibsen's unadapted original play made its English debut at the Novelty Theatre, Breaking a Butterfly more or less follows the contours of Ibsen's plot for the first two acts, with Flora Goddard the frightened child-wife attempting to hide her guilty secret, and Dunkley the villainous creditor threatening to expose her forgery. The sudden break from the original comes at the end of the second act, when Flora's husband, Humphrey Goddard, does what Torvald Helmer has failed to do: he shields his wife by claiming guilt for her crime. Following this “miracle,” the final act unfolds according to the melodramatic expectations of the audience, the same expectations that were so rudely deflated in the case of the Helmers. In Breaking a Butterfly, Ibsen's lopsided half-crisis and half-resolution are fused together into one tender scene, so that the husband pities and forgives at the same moment the wife protests his sacrifice:
Flora: Humphrey, you shall not do it. … The innocent must not suffer for the guilty!
Humphrey: In this case the innocent must suffer for the innocent. Thank God, no burden has yet fallen upon me in my life but I have been able to take it up and bear it like a man. …
Flora: Let me go! Throw me off, and don't mind what becomes of me! I'm not worth your caring for!
Humphrey: Hush! Hush! … All you did was for the best.Footnote 22
The lines are essentially a scrambled and paraphrased version of Ibsen's dialogue, with a few jarring passages removed. This is the scene that Nora anticipated and that Torvald in retrospect would have preferred. Humphrey shows himself to be the loving, selfless, heroic protector, and Flora has all Nora's winsome childishness with none of her unruly grown-up qualities. Their marriage is so ideally uncomplicated that when the forged note is retrieved on the penultimate page, the play is over, and Humphrey closes the curtain by declaring: “Nothing has happened, except that Flossie was a child yesterday: to-day she is a woman.”Footnote 23 In rewriting Ibsen's work as a “sympathetic play,” Herman and Jones turned A Doll's House into a representative specimen of the genre from which Ibsen was turning away, rendering Ibsen's moment of transition doubly striking.
Serious Discussion: New Drama, New Marriage
This transition, when Nora orders her husband to sit down for the discussion, repudiates the simple structure Herman, Jones, and their peers imposed. Shaw and Archer saw this scene not only as a sudden change of direction in the plot of one play but also as a defining event in dramatic history, in which Ibsen found himself on “the threshold of the essential drama”Footnote 24 in which he “conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art.”Footnote 25 Ibsen, in fact, takes care to call attention to the abrupt departure from custom as the Helmers sit down to talk, for Nora comments on the novelty of their situation at some length:
Nora: (after a short silence) Does not one thing strike you as we sit here?
Helmer: What should strike me?
Nora: We have been married eight years. Does it not strike you that this is the first time we two, you and I, man and wife, have talked together seriously?
Helmer: Seriously! Well, what do you call seriously?
Nora: During eight whole years and more—ever since the day we first met—we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things. … I say that we have never yet set ourselves seriously to get to the bottom of anything. (113)
In case audience and critics (like Torvald) were in danger of overlooking the seriousness of the occasion, Nora repeats the word serious or seriously four times.
Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, took her speech as a turning point between old theatre and new, the introduction of the so-called discussion scene, a technical innovation marking the shift from domestic melodrama to problem play or play of ideas, when Nora “very unexpectedly … stops her emotional acting and says: ‘We must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us.’”Footnote 26 The well-made play, Shaw said, followed the pattern of exposition, situation, and unraveling, whereas the new problem play, of which A Doll's House was the prototype, followed the trajectory of exposition, situation, and discussion.Footnote 27 This new feature in the play, Shaw argued, signaled a change in the function of theatre: rather than simply presenting a formulaic story, the new drama would offer a forum for discussing problems and ideas, with the events of the plot serving mainly as a pretext for the debate, being gradually “overspread[ ]” and “assimilate[d]” into the conversation.Footnote 28 The discussion scene, untheatrical and even antitheatrical by older dramatic standards, gradually became accepted first as a novelty and eventually as a part of a new set of theatrical conventions. Later critics have likewise taken this scene to effect a significant change in dramatic structure, though some have questioned the success of that change.Footnote 29
While critics have seen Nora's repeated insistence on the new “seriousness” as a disruption to the well-made play, Nora herself is more interested in disrupting the pattern of her marriage and in contrasting it with the marriage she wishes to have. Until now, she has viewed her relationship with Torvald as a melodrama propelled by emotion and sensory excitement; now a new theatrical convention offers a new model for envisioning her marriage and herself. She pursues what is, if only for the moment, an experiment with this other kind of marriage, one that, like the new theatre, centers on conversation and honest consideration of problems. This contrast is marked visually by the sudden cessation of physical movement. Throughout the play, the previous interactions between Nora and Torvald have been accompanied by dance, comings and goings, and sexual overtures; now, they sit still. Stage directions are, for the moment, beside the point, except for occasional emotional (or unemotional) cues to indicate that Nora is “shaking her head” (113) or that she is “undisturbed” (114). Nora makes these differences explicit at the outset of the conversation, insisting that this is the “first time” they have had such a conversation.
In explaining what she sees as the flaws in their marriage, Nora presents an implicit description of the marriage that she would accept as genuine. She declares that she has modeled all her tastes and opinions after those of her husband (114); by contrast, the new kind of marriage would allow her to form and express her opinions independently, as she is doing at that moment. Their home has been a “playroom” (114); a real marriage would make space for “serious” discussion and reflection. Throughout their marriage her husband has directed her to dance or stop dancing, to come or go, to dress or undress; she now takes initiative for the first time, ordering him to sit down and listen.
Kristin Ørjasæter, examining Ibsen's indirect description of the better marriage, credits many of his claims to the influence of Camilla Collett, a Norwegian feminist and Ibsen's longtime friend. Collett, she explains, argued for marriage as “a union between two equal partners” who are dedicated to “personal growth” and have “mutual duties to respect and guide each other.”Footnote 30 Many of Nora's arguments in the final scene of A Doll's House, she suggests, might be read as echoes of Collett's claims. More broadly, Joan Templeton sees the play as a part of a much larger conversation on women's rights. She points out that among Ibsen's British audiences, the play's critique of conventional marriage and its call for education and independence for women would be familiar from the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Martineau.Footnote 31 In the final discussion scene, Ibsen dramatized a debate that European intellectuals had been engaged in for several decades.
Nora concludes that this other, more equitable marriage cannot be sustained between herself and Torvald until she has become “a fit wife”; to become one, she leaves in order to “stand quite alone” and “know [her]self” (115). Here again, Ørjasæter suggests, Ibsen may be showing Collett's influence, in particular her insistence that women must do “substantial inner work” to develop the self-respect and the capability for clear thought needed to participate in the more egalitarian marriage she advocated.Footnote 32 Nora asserts that a true marriage between herself and Torvald could be effected only by the “miracle of miracles,” and her slamming door cuts short Torvald's hopeful musings (122, 123). With this grim conclusion, Ibsen's play stops short of dramatizing the positive side of the marriage argument—though it has vividly depicted the flaws of the Victorian ideology of a domestic happiness entrenched in fixed gender roles and hierarchy, it can do little more than speculate about what a marital relationship between equals, without these flaws, might look like.
The Other Discussion Scene
While numerous critics from Shaw onward have examined the discussion scene at the end of the last act, few have taken note of the somewhat similar discussion with which the act opens, between Christina Linden and Nils Krogstad.Footnote 33 Their conversation's immediate outcome is a complete contrast to Nora's outcome, ending with an intended marriage where Nora's conversation ended with a de facto divorce. This contrast has led some scholars to characterize Christina as simply a foil to Nora, a “womanly” woman juxtaposed with the New Woman.Footnote 34 Yet in structure and dialogue, the two discussions have much in common. Like Nora, Christina initiates the conversation by dictating her interlocutor's movements, directing him to prepare physically for the discussion; she tells him twice to “come in” to the room, and he reluctantly complies, as Torvald will later do when told to “sit down” (87–8, 112). Also like Nora, Christina opens the discussion by signaling that they have “a great deal” to say to each other and that he has “never really understood” her (88). In taking the initiative in this scene and in assuming the masculine functions of proposing and (presumably) breadwinning, Christina anticipates the departures Nora will later make from the sentimental happy ending and from her prescribed gender role. At the same time, as Ørjasæter observes, Christina's intended union with Krogstad is “based on a mutual acceptance of their need for each other” and thus offers hope for the “real” marriage the Helmers can only hope to achieve through the “miracle of miracles.”Footnote 35 Here, as in the close of the play, the theatrical technique of discussion is used to interrupt the melodramatic trajectory that, until now, has set the pattern for marriage and for the play itself.
Archer dismissed Krogstad and Christina as stock characters, relics of the obsolete theatrical tradition from which Ibsen was breaking away. In his introduction to the play in his 1906 collection of Ibsen's works, he exclaimed, “How impossible, in [Ibsen's] subsequent work, would be such figures as Mrs. Linden, the confidant, and Krogstad, the villain!”Footnote 36 Early in the play, this evaluation seems accurate; the two fulfill fairly traditional, almost mechanical, dramatic functions: Christina serves as Nora's uninformed interlocutor, facilitating the play's exposition, and Krogstad threatens Nora with ruin, raising both terror and the expectation of rescue. In their final conversation, however, their desires to help or harm Nora are set aside and they are occupied entirely with their own pasts, presents, and futures. Christina dismisses the Helmer family from the conversation with, “The Helmers are at the ball upstairs. … Why not?” (88). When the Helmers are reintroduced at the end of the conversation, confidant and villain appear to have traded intentions; Krogstad is eager to retrieve the blackmailing letter, while Christina is determined to leave it to reveal its secret and the numerous secrets of Nora's marriage. The marriage of villain and confidant, with its calm optimism and unorthodox gender performance, defies melodramatic convention nearly as boldly as the separation of hero and heroine.
The challenge the two characters posed to these dramatic stock types might be measured by the alterations that Ibsen's English bowdlerizers found necessary. Jones and Herman, in Breaking a Butterfly, evidently thought Christina and Krogstad unconventional enough to need significant revision. Their secondary characters, Agnes Goddard the confidant and Philip Dunkley the villainous blackmailer, remain a confidant and an unrepentant crook throughout. They are also kept safely separate, with no thought of romance or even of private conversation between them, and they, like Flora and Humphrey, adhere strictly to orthodox gender roles. Christina's masculine functions of taking the bank job and recovering the forged IOU are delegated not to Agnes but to male characters who are created to fill those functions (and to court and marry Agnes). The revisions Jones and Herman felt were necessary to make the play acceptable to audiences accustomed to conventional well-made plays illustrate the extent to which Ibsen had disrupted these conventions. Ibsen's secondary characters, as well as the central couple, are used to challenge Victorian assumptions about marriage and theatre, and Jones and Herman and others who adapted the play responded to this challenge in a variety of ways.
Remodeling the Doll's House: Parodies and Adaptations
Breaking a Butterfly was an early instance of what Kerry Powell has called “the epidemic temptation to rewrite Ibsen.”Footnote 37 More succumbed to this temptation a few years later, when actual Ibsen plays began appearing on London stages.Footnote 38 Some writers, offended by the plays’ unflattering depictions of family, respectability, duty, and other moral ideals, wrote corrective adaptations or meted out punishment to the offending characters in sequels or prologues, restoring the moral balance. Ibsen's supporters, led by Shaw and Archer, pressed the Ibsenite campaign forward with dramatic polemics and essays with the plea that “the ball must be kept rolling on every possible pretext.”Footnote 39 Other adaptations were frank caricatures, aiming simply to get a laugh at the expense of admirers and detractors who seemed to take the plays far too seriously.
Not surprisingly, most of the various adaptations of A Doll's House hotly debated the play's criticisms of traditional marriage. In attempting to counter or reinforce these criticisms, some rewritings followed Ibsen's example in presenting marital problems as metatheatrical spectacles and, in some degree, holding theatre responsible for these problems. This relationship was made especially explicit in “A Doll's House Repaired,” an alternative ending written by Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx's daughter, in collaboration with playwright and novelist Israel Zangwill. Eleanor Marx had been one of Ibsen's early English supporters, having hosted and starred in an 1886 drawing-room performance of A Doll's House (featuring a young Bernard Shaw as Krogstad). By 1890, she had published translations of An Enemy of the People and The Lady from the Sea.Footnote 40 The “repaired” parody, published in the socialist monthly paper Time in March 1891, is a caustically humorous satire of Ibsen's attackers and their ideal of “womanliness,” a sanitized reworking in which both Nora and Christina are rebuked for the sins of working for their livings and thinking for themselves and in which Nora is made to remain in the doll's house for respectability's sake. The script was published with a snide introduction presenting the alterations as “in accord with Ibsen's real intentions”Footnote 41; that is, the authors eliminated the supposed inconsistencies of character of which Ibsen's critics had complained, preserving Nora's childish dependence and Torvald's masculine authority to the end. Crediting Jones and Herman as a precedent, Marx and Zangwill followed their example in rewriting the story essentially from Torvald Helmer's point of view, as he would have preferred it; but unlike the earlier adaptors, they did so tongue in cheek. As Bernard Dukore explains, they mocked Torvald's values by making those values central to the play's conclusion.Footnote 42 In the final discussion scene, the lines are virtually swapped: Zangwill and Marx put Nora's recriminations into Torvald's mouth (with a few modifications) and Torvald's bewildered remonstrances into Nora's. Whereas Ibsen's Nora reproaches Torvald for infantilizing and controlling her, the “Repaired” Torvald takes Nora to task for having put up an infantile front while secretly thinking and acting for herself in an unwomanly manner. Echoing the declaration of Ibsen's Nora, “I've lived by performing tricks for you,” the “Repaired” Torvald concludes:
You lived by playing tricks on me. … Here you have been an actress, just as at home you were your papa's infant phenomenon. And the children, in their turn, will grow up actors. I thought it real when you were only playing before me, just as the children did when we took them to the pantomime. That has been our marriage. … You were never the helpless, silly song-bird I took you for. When I thought you my little lark, my squirrel, you were deceiving me.Footnote 43
Torvald directs his rebuke not primarily against Nora's lying and forgery, as in Ibsen's original, but against the feminine role-playing that he himself has invited and encouraged. Marx and Zangwill exaggerate Torvald's arrogance to the point of caricature, making him openly flaunt his own gullibility as he condemns her, and at the same time pointedly emphasize the theatrical nature of Nora's femininity and wifely submission.
They likewise stress the importance of the “eyes of the world” in the Helmers’ increasingly cynical marriage performance, offering a wicked parody of the original Torvald's appeal to “duty”:
Nora: Consider what the world will say.
Torvald: The world! The world will know nothing unless you again forget yourself, and forsake your holiest duties.
Nora: My holiest duties? What are my holiest duties?
Helmer: Do you ask that? To keep up appearances.Footnote 44
The revisions, according to Marx's sarcastic preface, were calculated to “satisfy the English sense of morality and decency”Footnote 45 by preventing the wife's departure and rebuking her lies and insubordination. As her husband has found her unfit as a wife and mother, he banishes her to the guest room but maintains the nominal marriage in order to preserve the family's reputation.Footnote 46
The “Repaired” ending, like Ibsen's original play, makes use of melodramatic asides and gestures; however, Marx and Zangwill not only use these far more abundantly but continue to make use of them in the closing lines of the play instead of dropping them when the blackmail threat is withdrawn. As Torvald berates Nora for her forgery, she does not, like Ibsen's Nora, stand silent, comprehending her husband's true character for the first time. Rather, she “sinks shrieking on the floor at his feet,” then “rises and stands with clasped hands”;Footnote 47 later, as he orders her to the guest room and removes the children from her custody, Nora “sinks on her knees” and begs him to relent while “catching hold of his coat tails.”Footnote 48 Dukore suggests that in using conventional melodramatic gestures, the writers “imply that the social views and dramatic technique of the earlier period, which this scene parodies, are what respectable English theatergoers prefer.”Footnote 49 I would add that the parodists not only invoke both the views and the techniques but conflate them: in a move of reductio ad absurdum, Marx and Zangwill imply that to be melodramatic, in the judgment of Ibsen's hostile critics, is to be womanly.
A more lighthearted perspective on marital metatheatricality appeared in F. Anstey's Nora; or, The Bird-Cage, originally published in Punch and afterward compiled with several other Ibsen parodies in Mr. Punch's Pocket Ibsen (1893), a collection of condensed and cartoonish parodies lampooning the pessimism and the “magnificently impenetrable obscurity” of Ibsen's plays.Footnote 50 When Nora, preparing for her final departure, is asked how she intends to educate herself in order to become grown up and independent, Anstey makes her reply, “I shall begin—yes, I shall begin with a course of the Norwegian theatres. If that doesn't take the frivolity out of me, I don't really know what will!”Footnote 51 The remark jibes at the gloom and didacticism that had become synonymous with Ibsen's name in England and at the same time attributes to these gloomy, didactic plays the real-world marital consequences of the wife abandoning her home. The idea is reinforced when Nora, having exited, returns a moment later, “with a somewhat foolish expression.” Torvald exclaims, “What? Back already? Then you are educated?,” to which Nora replies, “[T]he Norwegian theatres are all closed at this hour—and so I thought I wouldn't leave the cage till to-morrow—after breakfast.”Footnote 52 Anstey jokingly turns the idea of marriage as theatre on its head; instead of an escape from an unhealthily theatrical marriage, the theatre is presented as a cause of the wife's rebellious departure and the destination of her (unsuccessful) escape. If life inside the doll's house is theatrical, Anstey implies, then life outside it may be more theatrical still.
This conclusion suggests an insight into the ways that mainstream English theatregoers responded to Ibsen's technical and ideological innovations. By the early 1890s, English playgoers had recognized Ibsen's dramas, in their rejection of popular genre conventions, as a genre with its own set of conventions. Anstey stresses this in all his parodies with repeated references to frequently recurring motifs in Ibsen plays. In making her confession to Rosmer, Rebecca West offers the preamble, “A long time ago, before the play began—in Ibsenite dramas, all the interesting things somehow do happen before the play begins—.”Footnote 53 Hedvig Ekdal and Hedda Gabler are prevented from their suicides with the pistol, “that fatal Norwegian weapon which, in Ibsenian dramas, never shoots straight.”Footnote 54 In revising the attitudes and devices of domestic melodrama, Ibsen created another genre, purportedly a more honest and realistic one; but Anstey questions this claim, highlighting what he considers to be the absurdities and inconsistencies of Ibsen's plots and strategies.
The idea of Ibsenian drama as a new genre was considered more seriously in a pair of sequels published in 1890 by Walter Besant and Bernard Shaw, each imagining events twenty years after Nora's departure, titled, respectively, “The Doll's House—and After” and “Still After the Doll's House.” Besant's narrative sequel, published in the English Illustrated Magazine, attacked Nora's departure as heartlessly selfish and showed its disastrous consequences, culminating with the suicide of Nora's daughter, Emmy. Shaw's sequel to Besant's story, published, like Marx and Zangwill's parody, in Time, defended Nora, placing the blame for Emmy's death on the respectable society that has ostracized Emmy, Nora herself, and the entire Helmer family as a result of Nora's rebellion. Besant, familiar with the feminist writings and speeches of his enstranged sister-in-law Annie and deeply uncomfortable with her ideas, presented the mature Nora as a fashionable and self-satisfied novelist, holding a weekly salon and “laugh[ing] scornfully” at the mention of her family's misery—her former husband's chronic drunkenness, her son's forgery and recklessness, and her virtuous daughter's lonely poverty.Footnote 55 Nora's New Woman identity is described as a theatrical pose directed toward spectators, intended to be watched, studied, and discussed:
She threw aside … all the conventions, and openly, not secretly, in the sight of all, she began to live the life of perfect freedom. She wrote novels also, which the old-fashioned regarded with horror. In them she advocated the great principle of abolishing the family, and making love the sole rule of conduct. She even related in these works her own adventures.Footnote 56
Through Besant's eyes, the New Woman becomes a smug egotist and her philosophy of freedom simply a thin attempt to give her selfishness a righteous coloring. Nora's independent life is enacted “in the sight of all” and becomes material for rebellious and lucrative novels. By the mid-1890s, Besant's arrogant, crusading Nora had become a stock type familiar from Sydney Grundy's New Woman (1894), Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), and Arthur Wing Pinero's The Amazons (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). The New Woman, as these plays depicted her, showed her independence primarily by dressing dowdily, shrilly mouthing emancipatory jargon, and denouncing her husband or lover for “brute force” at every opportunity.Footnote 57 Nora, Besant suggests, has left the dramatic stock scenario of the happy marriage, but her departure has created a new stock scenario: the emancipated woman's defiance of society.
Shaw reinforced this idea in his sequel to Besant's sequel, though on all other points he flatly contradicted what he called Besant's “representative middle class evangelical verdict on the play.”Footnote 58 “Still After the Doll's House” is a discussion scene in which Nora converses with Nils Krogstad, now a prosperous but secretly reluctant moral paragon. Their argument chiefly examines the causes of her daughter's suicide, along with some more general points regarding family, marriage, hypocrisy, and respectability. Nora chaffs Krogstad for allowing Christina, now his wife, to direct and control him with her notions of duty as Torvald had once controlled Nora: she declares, “You know that if you had any pluck, Krogstad, you would walk out, and be no longer [Christina's] puppet.”Footnote 59 As a retort, Krogstad sulkily points out marriage's true double standard: “A woman can [leave her husband] and be made a heroine of, if she is only pretty enough. But the very set that makes a heroine of you would join my set in hounding me out of the place as a blackguard if I did such a thing.”Footnote 60 Nora likens the Krogstad marriage to a puppet show; their home life is a reversed doll's house spectacle, in which the husband is the performer and the wife assumes control—an idea that Shaw was soon to explore more fully in his own play Candida (1894).Footnote 61 Nora, by contrast, in quitting her husband, has become a “heroine.” If the Nora of Ibsen's earlier play envisioned her life as a melodrama of sentimental self-sacrifice and if her departure abruptly severed her life from that genre, then Shaw suggests, like Besant, that she now sees herself as the “heroine” of another genre, the New Woman narrative. Though Shaw certainly viewed this narrative from a perspective very different from Besant's, he acknowledged a few grains of truth in the stereotypes Grundy, Jones, and Pinero dramatized; in The Philanderer (1893), the proudly “unwomanly” women of the Ibsen Club have obviously picked up Ibsenite phrases and ideas as the latest literary fashion. Like Walter Besant, Shaw suggests that Nora's single, independent life and the speeches and physicality that accompany it have ironically become a matter of performance, spectatorship, imitation, and critique, just as her marriage once was—a specimen of the Ibsenian genre. When she quits the conventional melodrama of her marriage, Ibsen's Nora declares a wish to escape into some unperformed, absolute reality—to leave the “playroom,” to “stand quite alone” (114, 115). But, as Besant and Shaw both suggest, her departure from the doll's house is as much a drama as her life there ever was.
Conclusion
A few years after the London debut of A Doll's House, Shaw impatiently asserted, “I have pointed out again and again that the influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and morals are becoming more and more theatrical, the theatre itself remains impervious to common sense, religion, science, politics, and morals.”Footnote 62A Doll's House acknowledged and accentuated the real-world theatricality on which Shaw insisted, and this was an important part of the appeal that led Shaw and others to welcome the play as a revolution, a drama that was not “impervious,” a play that, by challenging conventional codes of morality, religion, and law, served to “greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility.”Footnote 63A Doll's House presented marriage as an obvious and weighty example of “theatrical” conduct, showing a couple who treated their marriage as a dance, a melodrama, a series of poses. In presenting marriage metatheatrically, the play implied that the theatre itself was partly to blame for marital problems like those of the Helmers: traditional theatrical genres reinforced standards of “manly” and “womanly” behavior, encouraged excessive sentimentality, and uncritically accepted marriage as the necessary and satisfactory narrative endpoint, the sine qua non of the happy ending.
The illusions and discontents of the Helmer marriage are acknowledged and addressed through discussion—through a conversation in which the partners are bent on understanding and making themselves understood, in which preconceived assumptions about each other are recognized, evaluated, and in some cases discarded. This is hardly startling for twenty-first-century audiences, for whom such phrases as “talk it out” and “be completely honest with each other” have become pop-psychology clichés. For Torvald, however, the idea of sitting down to converse with his wife—or rather, to hear her talk—is a jarring novelty, an experiment in redefining the married state. It posed a somewhat similar challenge to spectators: in contrast with more traditional performances, it blocked or at least postponed resolution, requiring audiences to weigh and consider as well as feel.
In this way, the discussion scene was presented as a starting point both for better marriages and for better theatrical performance. If marriage and human conduct in general were becoming “theatrical,” as Shaw asserted, taking stage performance as their models and as their lenses on life, then the content and quality of the performance had become a momentous question. Melodrama, dance, and domestic comedy have failed as models, the play suggested; better to take a discussion play as pattern. If theatre and other arts are among the ways that societies create discourse and articulate identities, then new theatrical genres might ultimately offer new ways of understanding and living life.
This idea received a variety of responses from the authors who attempted to rewrite A Doll's House. Marx and Zangwill reinforced and intensified Ibsen's critique of romantic theatre by caricaturing and exaggerating the melodramatic sentimentality of the conventional ideal woman. Anstey and Herman and Jones erased or mocked the dramatic innovations that were becoming recognized as the “Ibsenite” genre, suggesting that this new kind of drama, and not traditional romantic theatre, was leading to the marital discontents and conflicts for which A Doll's House blamed dance and melodrama. Besant and Shaw elaborated on the idea of an “Ibsenite” or “New Woman” dramatic genre by depicting the theatricality of Nora's life as a mature, emancipated woman. The proliferation of Doll's House sequels and parodies not only prolonged and broadened the public discussion of Ibsen's works and ideas, as Archer, Shaw, and their associates were eager to do, but also suggested that the widely acknowledged turning point in theatrical conventions might have far-reaching consequences for marriage and society.
