A Doll’s House

July 2018

A Doll’s House

Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. 1875. Translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup.  Four Major Plays. Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

When the final door slammed in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House theatre was changed forever. A play that refused to comply with the expectations and unspoken rules of its day. Instead of showing a happy wife and family, A Doll’s House highlighted the deep gap between the upper and lower classes through the metaphor of a husband and a wife. Nora’s powerlessness is what causes the issues between her and her husband  Torvald but it is also a weapon that she uses to manipulate him. At the beginning of A Doll’s House she is happy with her situation because she is convinced of her husband’s love. But when it becomes obvious that he cares more about his reputation than he does about her, she realizes that their life together has no substance and she chooses to leave him so she can learn how to be independent and find her own strength. Her words to Torvald might as well have been the cry of the 20th century working class, no longer willing to be beaten down by the upper class who were so out of touch with them, and developing a mistrust in their leaders that has only become more apparent in the years since the development of tv, and now of social media. 

A Doll’s House speaks with the people of an era, but like the idealists behind communism and radical social reform, the play does not address the fallout of decisions made. Nora’s defiant choice to leave Torvald was brave, yes, but my practical brain could not but immediately wonder how she would do. She is  a single woman with no useful education who is very used to the comforts of an upper-middle-class lifestyle, I suspect she may find that life without Torvald is much harder than she anticipated, and history has shown that the social reform she symbolizes is equally complex.