In Dr Rank we have encapsulated the destructive ironies at the heart of this middle-class ethic, presented to us as an inherited, incurable, fatal infection. One cannot relieve themselves of it, only attempt to avoid contracting it.
Kristine Linde also offers an intriguing impetus to Nora as well as being an interesting comparison. When we first encounter Nora she is bustling round her rooms efficiently and happily, she begins humming to herself, and talks gaily with the people around her, “Come on out Torvald, and see what I’ve bought”. Kristine, on the other hand, appears a more forlorn character. Her first line is to be delivered “subdued and rather hesitantly”, and her words echo her manner and she stands stripped of everything she had, left with “nothing at all… not even a broken heart to grieve over.” In sharp contrast to the apparent joviality and health of Torvald and Nora, Kristine, comparatively young, seems to have prematurely aged, so much so that Nora has trouble placing her at their first meeting, “I’m afraid you don’t recognise me”. In a recent production I saw this difference was made perhaps overly clear. The actress playing Kristine wore heavy eye shadow and white base on her face, giving her a thin, drawn look. The savagery she has been forced to endure on the outskirts of society, “opening a little shop, running a little school”, “these last three years have been one long relentless drudge”, manifest themselves both in her appearance, and in her desperate desire to be re-admitted into the ranks of accepted middle class citizens, “I couldn’t stand it any longer being cut off up there”. She stands as a doll herself, a figurine which Ibsen holds up to illustrate a potential consequence of the freedom Nora so craves by the end. Her condition seems to quite oppose Sartre’s comment at the opening of this essay, as the characters freedom seems to have forced life from both her and her husband leaving her little more than a porcelain shell, unrecognisable as her former self, and eager to re-admit herself into the society she strove to be free from. She has tried an alternative life, and the experience almost killed her. It is a point which, as we see as the play develops, casts an all important ironic shadow over Nora’s emancipatory departure at the end.
As I have already mentioned, Torvald is a very different creature to George Tesman, and Nora’s reaction is equally distinct. In Hedda Gabler Hedda’s escape at the end is, in an audiences eyes, more understandable perhaps than that of Nora. I will explore later the idea of suicide and death as a means of freedom, but for the meantime we can consider them both a release from societal constraints. Hedda suffers the indignity of a boring husband, “the whole of that case was crammed full of nothing but notes”, an overbearing in-law, “Well, of course I had to come and see how you’ve settled in”, a vibrant former associate who draws attention to the freedom she craves, “it must be beautiful”, and a sexually predatory neighbour, “Dearest Hedda… believe me… I shall not abuse my position.” Her situation is one of all consuming claustrophobia as, one by one, all these factors move in upon her. This was demonstrated with some beauty in a production I saw some years ago in which the walls were moved in a foot at a time during the black out between each act. By the end Hedda physically had to squeeze herself into her anti-room where she shot herself surrounded by Tesman’s books, loose leaves of Loveborg’s manuscript, a dying rose from Brack and Miss Tesman’s hat. It was a very powerful moment when you watched her raising the gun to her temple with physical difficulty due to the lack of space.
Nora does not find herself in this kind of claustrophobia. The conflict in A Dolls House is due to the way characters, specifically Nora, hide their true selves from each other and society. The claustrophobia and feeling of imprisonment, therefore, is as much internal as external. As Hedda strives to free herself from the oppression manifested in the characters around her, Nora strives to free herself from the lies and deceits that have become evident in herself and those around her.
Characters in A Dolls House willingly exist in a situation of untruth or inadequate truth which conceals conflict and contradiction.
But what exactly does Nora strive to be free from? What causes these internal “conflicts and contradictions”. An easy answer might be that of Torvald’s patriarchal supremacy. The title of the play pays homage to the position she holds in the house, and her husband calls on her for light amusement, sex and dancing. And yet the opening scenes may call this into question. For we see, in action, Nora controlling Torvald expertly. He may adopt a controlling tone, “Ah, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be extravagant”, “You didn’t go nibbling a macaroon or two?”, yet she is still getting her own way, both “nibbling” macaroons and spending money. There may even be a sense that Torvald knows this and that part of their relationship requires him to set the rules and Nora to flout them. One production beautifully displayed this quality by Torvald’s brushing sugar from Nora’s lips and collar as she denies eating macaroons. There is also no evidence of Nora ever feeling patronised by Torvald’s names, indeed she uses them herself to retain control over him. The answer might be that both are role playing, and over the years have developed a highly attractive and, initially, warm bandiage based on this sense of identity adoption.
One crucial factor in the roles Nora plays is that she needs to be in control, to take the lead role, as it were, using other people either as supporting actors or audience and that she writes her own script.
So having displayed for us the Christmas time banter between the two of them:
HELMER Good heavens, I know only too well how Christmas runs away with the housekeeping.
NORA Ten, Twenty, Thirty, Forty. Oh thank you, thank you Torvald! This will see me quite a long way.
HELMER Yes it’ll have to.
NORA Yes, yes, I’ll see that it does.
Why does Ibsen then drive his leading character to despair, contemplative suicide and eventual desertion of the man she loves, her children and her home. What does she need to be free from? Someone said of Chekhov’s writing, specifically The Cherry Orchard that the characters are divided into those who are “victims of illusion” and those who are “victims of disillusionment”. Ranyevskaya, for example, occupies the former category, as Anya say “We scarcely managed it here, and Mama doesn’t understand! We’ll sit down to dinner… and she orders the most expensive thing on the menu”. Firs, in his closing soliloquy, painfully inhabits the latter, “My life’s gone by, and it’s just as if I’d never lived at all”.
I would suggest that the same categories can be used to describe Nora’s change, except that Ibsen chooses to have her occupy both factions, moving from the former to the latter, and the act of disillusionment is the catalyst for her emotional upheaval and subsequent retreat. Her illusion, perhaps, is that of the condition of her marriage. The warmth of the house, complete with Christmas tree, laughing children and a roaring fire, contrasts with the weather outside, which is presented as a typical Scandinavian winter. The film version starring Jane Fonda made this explicitly clear by showing us Krogstad’s desperately cold and cramped living quarters, where he has to try to raise his children. All this leads an audience to believe that the Helmer’s domestic situation is based on warmth, content and, more importantly, love. However Nora’s illusion is that this love is the primary force. Desperately gay and apparently care-free at the plays opening she undergoes s stringent reworking, moving through paranoia, “Someone’s coming… no, no it’s no one”, depression, “Thirty one hours to live”, and finally despair, “Torvald, Torvald it’s hopeless”. At this stage she lives under the illusion that Torvald, so aggrieved by the loss of trust, will throw her from his society. The love which she so treasured, and which she is under the illusion that he treasured also, is lost, or at least overshadowed, by her apparent treachery. When he shouts, “You have ruined my entire happiness”, she understands it as a man incensed by the “pangs of love”. Yet when he follows up with, “you have jeopardised my whole future”, she has, in that second, all her illusions shattered as she realises that his anger does not stem from love, but from reputation. It is from this disillusionment that she must free herself.
Finding herself trapped within the ultimate society marriage, caught in a bond tainted yet desperate to present a golden face, her instinct is to escape.
She spends the play, following Krogstad’s arrival, desperate to extradite herself, and her family, from the danger Krogstad presents. So frightened is she of being responsible for something “poisoning my home”, that she spends the play at the end of her wits trying to avoid the repercussions. A tarantella is, of course, a ritualistic dance performed around a tarantula victim. The process is mythically supposed to clear the poison from the blood. In A Dolls House this offers an interesting perspective as we see Nora passionately dancing as a form of exorcism, trying to clear the poison from her marriage. Yet what we realise with her in the closing pages, is that the actions were all meaningless. Torvald reads the letter, and then forgives her, leaving her, once again, in the same, if not even more, patriarchal society. She owes more to Torvald at the end that she does at the beginning, and his power over her is more patronising still, “You think and talk like a little child”. And yet now the love, which brought life into the house, now seems less important to him and her than the appearance of the house itself. The “poison” she mentioned earlier becomes something of which Krogstad is not responsible, but rather Torvald and even herself. Her dance, in retrospect therefore, could be her attempting to free herself from the house’s oppressive toxic quality, and again we are reminding of the word “rotten”, which occurs sporadically throughout the play, which Nora desperately tries to avoid. When she cannot avoid it, she must be free of it in order to live.
Helmer When your dance is done…
Nora Then you are free.
It is important to understand Nora does not leave Torvald to escape the condescending attitude he has towards her. That was, in her eyes, a small price to pay for the comfort and stability of his home. In Bernard Shaw’s essay on A Dolls House he expresses that the climax of the play occurs when “the woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her husband if left staring at her”.
It is interesting to explore the nature of death in terms of being set free, certainly in Ibsen drama. When Hamlet complains that “Denmark’s a prison”, we somehow feel that his death at the end is the only appropriate method of escape for him. With the words “the rest is silence”, he seems finally to have been freed from the confines of his situation and his mind. In death, someone, he seems more alive than he was when fighting, wooing or merely procrastinating. In one film version I have recently seen the camera, shooting from above, centred on his face for those last immortal lines, and immediately afterwards moved up and away from him, as though following his soul, escaping from his body in his final exhalation. The effect was one of total liberation, and a surreal form of vitality.
Ibsen and Chekhov similarly show us death as a form of escape, and in some cases the character becomes more alive. Sometimes this is merely because their confines seem to give them a negative life force, for example Hedda, who only seems to exist initially at least, through other people. She becomes increasing frustrated with her condition, and the presence of Loveborg only further emphasises to her the emotional squalor she has adopted over such finery. Indeed some might suggest that her insistence to Loveborg to kill himself and to “do it beautifully”, is to remove the final temptation in her life. Yet even this is not enough, and as the walls move in, and Brack with them, “There is nothing to fear as long as I keep my silence”, and Tesman continues to witter annoying in the background, “Mrs Elvsted… you’ll have to move in to Aunt Julie’s, then I’ll come up in the evenings”, we see the tension building within her, and see her life and vitality being slowly compressed, and as she walks off and the voices and clamour grow in volume, pace and insistence, we come, as audience members, to wish the gun shot on faster, so that the noise and fervent action, which as been as offensive to our eyes and ears as to Hedda’s, will cease. When it happens we cannot help but revel in the new feeling of freedom, and as Hedda herself, in the one production I have seen, fell out from the anti-room, she did so outstretched, and seemed almost larger-than-life. The freedom she felt just before pulling the trigger was reflected in the half smile on her face and I got the distinct impression that she was more alive now, than she ever was under the societal oppression. Brack’s last line, “People don’t do such things”, echo quite nicely Rank’s reaction of “Are you mad?”, when Nora suggests saying “Damn”. Both offer a victory and a certain female mischievousness to the female heroines.
Firs, at the end of The Cherry Orchard also exhibits that kind of liberation. In his tear jerking abandonment, “They’ve forgotten about me”, he also reveals a new lease on life. It is unclear whether Chekhov wishes us to believe Firs dead or merely sleeping at the end, though it is fairly immaterial in this respect. In his final line he calls himself a “sillybilly”, and we, as audience members, understand this word as harking back to youth, childhood and vitality, and Firs’ abandonment becomes a liberation and he is granted, however briefly, a new life.
As an after thought to the narrative of these plays, it might be interesting to explore the nature of freedom and life in characters meta-theatrically. Chekhov, possibly following on from his work as a doctor, adopts something of a clinical approach to both ordinary life and the characters he places within it. His dictum seems to have become, “I only ask the questions, I do not supply answers”, and yet, despite, as one of my fellow student vehemently exclaimed, “nothing really happens in his plays”, much is revealed about his characters and the quality of their lives through hints and cunning anti-climaxes. But perhaps this results in Chekhov keeping too close an eye on his characters, leaving them far from free outside the context of the play.
One of the abiding miracles of Chekhov’s characters is that one can place them. Almost with their first speech they stand revealed to us. We know at one what kind of a man, a woman, a girl they are.
Now I would argue with Caryl Brahms in claiming such a method to be miraculous. It is clear that Chekhov’s intention is to transpose a social message, and Brahms goes on to describe how a message spoken from the play is spoken by the character Chekhov has built to deliver it, and sits happily within the terms of that character. I would contrast this with Shaw, who, equally didactic and pragmatic, produces his argument from any character to hand. Social lecturing aside, however, these methods do put a restriction on an actor assuming a role in a Chekhov play, and I cannot help but feel that the character is not free to be changed. A character’s freedom on stage is perhaps the ability to seem different with each new presentation. People flock to Shakespeare time and time again, confident in the knowledge that the actor declaiming “Is this a dagger I see before me”, will do so with different levels of confidence, disbelieve, humour and confusion. In Chekhov, however, one cannot be totally sure that a character will be different other than a change in hair colour of shoulder width, the social message we, as audience members, receive is unchanged, and somehow the character has less life because of it.
Ibsen’s Nora, on the other hand has been described as “underdetermined”, and the plethora of essays and papers discussing the last few pages of A Dolls House pays tribute to its lack of “determined” message.
At the heart of great characters is a mystery, an ambiguity, something that finally eludes rational interpretation.
We do what we can to make reasonable sense of her motives, but we can never be entirely successful and remain true to the character as presented to us because of her freedom as a character, which offers her a new life every time a new actress adopts her. As one critic put it, in relation to Shakespeare, the greatest dramatic characters have the “freedom of incongruity”, and hence the power to evade the neat compartments we want to place them in. Nora is not simply a icon for female emancipation and suffragette movements, nor is she a malicious abandoner. To pigeon-hole her like that is to over-determines Nora, seeing in her a character whose actions are fully and entirely comprehensible in the light of a modern ideology, making her, in effect, typical rather than extraordinary, which is far from the truth. She is, in meta-theatrical and literary senses a truly free character, and in frantic dances, fervent sobbing, and final resounding door slam, more alive than most figures on stage.
Ibsen, A Collection of Critical Essays: Ed. Rold Fjelde (Specturm 1965)
All Ibsen quotes taken from Four Major Plays: Henrik Ibsen (Oxford 1994)
A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov & Strindberg: Michael Pennington (Faber and Faber Ltd 2004)
All Chekhov quotes taken from Plays: Chekhov (Methuen 1991)
Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen: Vol 6: Ed. (SUP 1989)
Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen: Vol 8: Ed. (Aschehoug 1994)
Ibsen, A Collection of Critical Essays: Ed. Rold Fjelde (Specturm 1965)
A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov & Strindberg: Michael Pennington (Faber and Faber Ltd 2004)
Ibsen’s Heroines: (Limelight 1990)
Ibsen’s Heroines: (Limelight 1990)
All Hamlet quotes taken from Hamlet: William Shakespeare (Arden 1982)
My Thoughts on Drama: Nicola Greenhow (Homerton College 2004)
Reflections in a Lake: Caryl Brahms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1976)
All Macbeth quotes taken from Macbeth: William Shakespeare (Penguin 1994)
On Ibsen’s A Dolls House: Ian Johnston (MUP 2000)
On Ibsen’s A Dolls House: Ian Johnston (MUP 2000)
Shakespearean Afterlives: John O’Connor (Icon 2003)
Additional Bibliography
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A Dolls House, A Push to Freedom: John Shaw (Epic 1976)
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What Chekhov Meant By Life: Russell Watts (Friedlin 1985)
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Suicides in Ibsen: Vigdis Ystad ()
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An Introduction to The Cherry Orchard: Nick Worral (Methuen 1995)
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A Cambridge Companion to Chekhov: Ed. Vera Gottlieb & Paul Allain (Cambridge 2000)