VII
A DOLL'S HOUSE
(1879)
Ibsen has been persistently confounded with those mannish women who, averse from marriage, furiously denounce it as a tyrannical institution. Strindberg, who was half mad at the time, accused the Norwegian poet of being a woman's rights advocate. Dr. Brandes has told us the contrary. Ibsen was never a woman's man; he did not like women's society, preferring men's. He did not admire John Stuart Mill's book on the woman question, and entertained an antipathy for those writers who declare, gallantly enough, that they owe much in their books to their wives. A sheer sense of justice impelled him to view the institution of matrimony as not always being made above. A woman is an individual. She has, therefore, her rights, not alone because of her sex, but because she is a human being. So he wrote A Doll's House to show a woman's soul in travail beset by obstacles of her own and others' making.
Thoroughly he accomplished his task. Nora Helmer, a lark-like creature in Act I, grows before our eyes from scene to scene until, at the fall of the curtain, she is another woman. In few dramas has there been such a continuous growth. The play seems a trifle outmoded to-day, not because its main problem will ever grow stale, but because of the many and conflicting meanings read into it by apostles of feminine supremacy. Ibsen declared in one of his few public speeches that he had no intention of representing the conventional, emancipated woman.
It is Nora as an individual cheated of her true rights that the dramatist depicts, for her marriage, as she discovers in the crisis, has been merely material and not that spiritual tie Ibsen insists upon as the only happy one in this relation. So she goes away to find herself, and her going was the signal for almost a social war in Europe. His critics forgot that Ibsen was a skilled deviser of theatric effects, and such an unconventional exit was not without its artistic values. This does not mean that he was insincere—Nora's departure is a logical necessity. Without it the play would be sheer sentimental, and therefore banal, nonsense. Nevertheless, that slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world, and not over the knocking at the gate in Macbeth was there such critical controversy.
One finds Nora Helmer a fascinating type of womanhood to study. To be sure, she is not new—neither is Mother Eve, but can we ponder the apple story too often or unprofitably? This Scandinavian Frou-Frou, bursting with joy of life, is confronted with a grave problem, and as she has been brought up perfectly irresponsible and a doll, she solves the problem in an irresponsible manner. She commits forgery, believing that the end justified the means, and you perforce sympathize with her as her act brought good, not evil—rather would not have brought evil if it had not been for the evil mind of Krogstad.
After the awakening Nora resolves to go away—away from husband, home, and children. That such a revulsion should occur in the nature of a gadabout and featherbrain like this girl, is not unnatural. Now Torvald is not a bad man. On the contrary, he is what the world calls a good man, and he is an insufferably selfish, priggish bore into the bargain. Nora knew that when she left him "the miracle of miracles" would never occur—that the leopard does not change his spots. The end of this human fugue, so full of passion and vitality, contains some of the strongest lines Ibsen penned. Nora is such a volatile, gay, frivolous, restless, perverse, affectionate, womanly, childish, loving, and desperate creature, that we hardly marvel at both her husband and her father petting her like a doll. The awakening was severe, and Torvald suffered, and it served him quite right. Dr. Rank forms "a cloudy background" to the happiness of the Helmer household. He is very interesting, with his cynicism and tragic resolves and passion. But he serves his purpose in indicating certain things to Nora. He first suggests, unconsciously, to her the thought of suicide, for Krogstad discovers this thought lurking in her mind at his second visit and just after Dr. Rank has made his confession of love to her. As for Krogstad, he is only a man of mixed impulses. He could have been a decent member of society; indeed, he tried hard to be. The unfortunate entrance into the Helmer family life of Mrs. Linden upset all of his calculations, and he became a blackmailer in consequence.
The afternoon of February 15, 1894, Mrs. Fiske played Nora in A Doll's House at the Empire Theatre. It was a benefit performance. Her support was unusually strong; W. H. Thompson, the Krogstad, won critical admiration for the manner in which he suggested the shades of a character whose possibilities for good and evil are perplexingly interwoven. Mrs. Fiske was, however, the surprise of the day. Shedding her Frou-Frou skin, she sounded every note on the keyboard of Nora Helmer's character. She was bird-like, evasive, frankly selfish, boiling with material enthusiasms, a creature of air, fire, caprice, gayety, and bitterness. Excepting Agnes Sorma no one has indicated with such finesse of modulation the awakened moral nature of the woman. And it is to be doubted if Mrs. Fiske ever bettered that first rapturous interpretation.
The ending is an unresolved cadence, though to the ear attuned to the finer spiritual harmonies it is not difficult to discern that the wife will suffer and grow—and be herself. But the children, cries the world! Ibsen, who has proved his love for the little ones, answers the question by another. Read Ghosts, and you will see what might have become of the Helmer children if Nora had stayed at home and continued in her life-lie.