A DOLL'S HOUSE: AN ILLUSTRATION OF SYMBOLISM

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1 A DOLL'S HOUSE: AN ILLUSTRATION OF SYMBOLISM An analysis of the symbolism in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" The following essay was originally published in The Ibsen Secret: A Key to the Prose Drama of Henrik Ibsen. Jennette Lee. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, pp Purchase Plays by Henrik Ibsen A Doll's House has had dozens of problems propounded for it. We have heard them -- after the theatre: "Did Nora do right to leave her husband?" "Was their marriage an ideal one?" "Is a marriage that is not ideal a real marriage?" "Ought Nora to have deceived her husband?" "Was she justified in forging the note?" "Is one ever justified in breaking a law?" "Was Nora's conduct ideal?" "Does Ibsen believe in marriage without mutual trust?" "Ought married women to eat candy?" The real problem of the play is perhaps a little more concrete than any of these and more universal than all of them. The conception of a problem play as one in which some problem of modern life is discussed by the characters and worked out in the plot is foreign to Ibsen, as to all great artists. His plays deal with situations and characters from modern life and are, in so far, allied to the problem play. But they do not present problems, in the ordinary sense of the word, nor do they solve them. Joseph Conrad, in Youth mentions two kinds of tales, -- one, the meaning of which envelops it like a haze; the other, in which the meaning lies in the tale itself, like the kernel of a nut. To these might be added a third class, in which the meaning is partly within the tale and partly without -- a soft, alluring haze, mysterious, far-reaching, and suggestive, lit up, now and then, by gleams of light flashed upon it from within. Ibsen's meanings belong to this third class. The symbol is clearly given, and the plot; but around them and enveloping them is a meaning of which one gets glimpses, now and again, tantalizing and elusive. One feels that there is a hidden meaning. He tries to find it by reading deeper into the text. But it eludes him. It is not there. The real problem will not be guessed till he looks outside the play itself, and then only as it is revealed in flashes, by gleams thrown upon it, from within, by character and plot and symbol. If one would understand a play, he must first understand the character about which the play circles, and he will not understand the character till he grasps the symbol that lies at the heart of it. The problem of A Doll's House, for instance, is not concerned with the marriage relations of Nora and Helmer, but with the character of Nora. The question whether she had a right to forge the note that saved her husband's life is of far less importance than the fact that she is what she is, and that as she is, she will face life and find herself. In so far as this is a problem, it might be the problem of any playwright, from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw. When the play opens, seven years after the forging of the note, and she comes upon the stage, a gay, dancing, twittering, flitting spirit, she is laden with Christmas gifts for the children -- a horse and sword, trumpets and dolls and cradles -- tiny things, inexpensive and useless and full of love. She carries, too, the little bag of macaroons on which she nibbles, assuring Helmer, when he sternly questions her, that she has not touched one. His "little lark" he calls her, his "squirrel" and "spendthrift." She is charming and dishonest, always flitting, never resting, a light-headed, lighthearted, inconsequent thing. A deeper note sounds in the music and the reader is startled by the revelation that this flippant creature has been carrying for years a secret and a burden that would have wrecked a heavier nature. The character is improbable, impossible; yet something in the telling of it holds one to a sense of reality. She has her little presents for the children, the Christmas tree, the macaroons, the surprise for Torvald, and last, and most important, her costume for the

2 fancy-dress ball. She is to dance the tarantelle, the Neapolitan dance that her husband has taught her. She is eager to dance it well for his sake and for her own. The tarantelle is the play. Coming in the natural course of the play, it seems a simple stage device, a mere feature of the fancy-dress ball, which, in its turn, is an episode of the play. But the tarantelle is not an ordinary dance. It is named for the tarantula, and its swift movement and dizzying rounds are measured to the victims of that poisonous sting. Round and round, in frenzied, hurrying course, swifter and swifter -- laughter and chatter and flight -- till they drop dead. Only a miracle may save them. The tarantelle is the symbol of Nora. Its wild, unresting movement is the tragedy of her nature -- light and frivolous on the surface, but concealing underneath a dread secret -- a wound that carries death in its train. It is the gruesome climax of Nora's doll life, and it is placed where the chief symbol of Ibsen's play is always placed, at the climax of the play. It is the culmination of the plot. The action approaches it and ebbs from it. It is a torch set at the apex, flaring both ways. Looking backward, by its light, Nora is no longer an inconsequent, impossible character. She is consistent throughout. Her inconsequence is the essence of her nature. She must always dance and flit and sing while her heart is heavy. The poison is in her veins, a part of her life. How it came there is unimportant. That she herself held the horrible, crawling thing to her bosom, pressing it close, and closer as it stung, lest it should escape her and harm those she loved, is unimportant. Those things are beside the action. Only a miracle can save her now -- the miracle of Torvald's love. And if the miracle should be that he should take upon himself her misery, that Krogstad should sting him as he has stung her! She does not for a minute guess that the poison in her veins is not of Krogstad's doing, that he, and he alone, is not responsible for her misery. To her he is the vile crawling thing that has thrust his fangs into her -- as he may into Torvald! No, it shall not be. Torvald shall not take it upon himself -- this dull, helpless ache, this melancholy fight -- and always the wild desire to dance and sing and laugh, till one drops dead. The miracle shall never me!... Then she discovers Torvald's real nature -- its selfishness, its meanness -- and she herself performs the miracle that sets her free. The wild dance is over. The poison has left her veins. She sees with clear eyes. "Yes, I have changed my dress." Her life is no longer a masquerade. She will no longer dance while her heart is breaking. She leaves her doll's house. Only "the miracle of miracles" can bring her back. I have chosen A Doll's House for a first illustration of Ibsen's symbolism because it is well known and because the tarantelle is at once more obvious and more subtle than many of the other symbols used. The symbol is, however, less finished than in other plays and will not bear too close application in detail, though it fits the play in its essential points. Dr. Rank, Nora's double in concealed disease, and Krogstad, her double in crime, both appear upon the scene for the last time during the tarantelle dance -- that is, at the climax of the play. All the movement is directed toward this symbol. Everything hinges on it. It is the superficial motive of the play. Toward which external events move, and it stands for the character in whose nature the real movement of the play takes place. The meaning of the play... can not be understood unless this symbol and its bearing on the character of Nora are clearly seen. A Doll's House is the second play in which Ibsen made use of the kind of symbolism outlined here. He wrote, after this, ten plays; and with each of them his mastery of symbol increased, growing more detailed, more minute, and intricate. In A Doll's House we have the main features of his method plainly indicated. In later plays he grows more skilful in his use of the device, but in each case the symbol of the play is some material object or event, a part of the mechanism of the piece. This object is introduced early in the action; it is wrought more or less closely into the structure of

3 the play; and its last appearance is the climax. From this point to the close of the play it becomes a chain of results. THE SCANDINAVIAN DRAMA: HENRIK IBSEN A DOLL'S HOUSE IN "A Doll's House" Ibsen returns to the subject so vital to him,--the Social Lie and Duty,--this time as manifesting themselves in the sacred institution of the home and in the position of woman in her gilded cage. Nora is the beloved, adored wife of Torvald Helmer. He is an admirable man, rigidly honest, of high moral ideals, and passionately devoted to his wife and children. In short, a good man and an enviable husband. Almost every mother would be proud of such a match for her daughter, and the latter would consider herself fortunate to become the wife of such a man. Nora, too, considers herself fortunate. Indeed, she worships her husband, believes in him implicitly, and is sure that if ever her safety should be menaced, Torvald, her idol, her god, would perform the miracle. When a woman loves as Nora does, nothing else matters; least of all, social, legal or moral considerations. Therefore, when her husband's life is threatened, it is no effort, it is joy for Nora to forge her father's name to a note and borrow 800 cronen on it, in order to take her sick husband to Italy. In her eagerness to serve her husband, and in perfect innocence of the legal aspect of her act, she does not give the matter much thought, except for her anxiety to shield him from any emergency that may call upon him to perform the miracle in her behalf. She works hard, and saves every penny of her pin-money to pay back the amount she borrowed on the forged check. Nora is light-hearted and gay, apparently without depth. Who, indeed, would expect depth of a doll, a "squirrel," a song-bird? Her purpose in life is to be happy for her husband's sake, for the sake of the children; to sing, dance, and play with them. Besides, is she not shielded, protected, and cared for? Who, then, would suspect Nora of depth? But already in the opening scene, when Torvaldinquires what his precious "squirrel" wants for a Christmas present, Nora quickly asks him for money. Is it to buy macaroons or finery? In her talk with Mrs. Linden, Nora reveals her inner self, and forecasts the inevitable debacle of her doll's house. After telling her friend how she had saved her husband, Nora says: "When Torvald gave me money for clothes and so on, I never used more than half of it; I always bought the simplest things....

4 Torvald never noticed anything. But it was often very hard, Christina dear. For it's nice to be beautifully dressed. Now, isn't it?... Well, and besides that, I made money in other ways. Last winter I was so lucky--i got a heap of copying to do. I shut myself up every evening and wrote far into the night. Oh, sometimes I was so tired, so tired. And yet it was splendid to work in that way and earn money. I almost felt as if I was a man." Down deep in the consciousness of Nora there evidently slumbers personality and character, which could come into full bloom only through a great miracle--not the kind Nora hopes for, but a miracle just the same. Nora had borrowed the money from Nils Krogstad, a man with a shady past in the eyes of the community and of the righteous moralist, Torvald Helmer. So long as Krogstad is allowed the little breathing space a Christian people grants to him who has once broken its laws, he is reasonably human. He does not molest Nora. But when Helmer becomes director of the bank in which Krogstadis employed, and threatens the man with dismissal, Krogstad naturally fights back. For as he says to Nora: "If need be, I shall fight as though for my life to keep my little place in the bank.... It's not only for the money: that matters least to me. It's something else. Well, I'd better make a clean breast of it. Of course you know, like every one else, that some years ago I--got into trouble.... The matter never came into court; but from that moment all paths were barred to me. Then I took up the business you know about. I was obliged to grasp at something; and I don't think I've been one of the worst. But now I must clear out of it all. My sons are growing up; for their sake I must try to win back as much respectability as I can. This place in the bank was the first step, and now your husband wants to kick me off the ladder, back into the mire. Mrs. Helmer, you evidently have no idea what you have really done. But I can assure you that it was nothing more and nothing worse that made me an outcast from society.... But this I may tell you, that if I'm flung into the gutter a second time, you shall keep me company." Even when Nora is confronted with this awful threat, she does not fear for herself, only for Torvald,--so good, so true, who has such an aversion to debts, but who loves her so devotedly that for her sake he would take the blame upon himself. But this must never be. Nora, too, begins a fight for life, for her husband's life and that of her children. Did not Helmer tell her that the very presence of a criminal like Krogstad poisons the children? And is she not a criminal? Torvald Helmer assures her, in his male conceit, that "early corruption generally comes from the mother's side, but of course the father's influence may act in the same way. And this Krogstad has been poisoning his own children for years past by a life of lies and hypocrisy--that's why I call him morally ruined." Poor Nora, who cannot understand why a daughter has no right to spare her dying father anxiety, or why a wife has no right to save her husband's life, is surely not aware of the true character of her idol. But gradually the veil is lifted. At first, when in reply to her desperate pleading for Krogstad, her husband discloses the true reason for wanting to get rid of him: "The fact is, he was a college chum of mine--there was one of those rash friendships between us that one so often repents later. I don't mind confessing it--he calls me by my Christian name; and he insists on doing it even when others are present. He delights in putting on airs of familiarity--torvald here, Torvald there! I assure you it's most painful to me. He would make my position at the bank perfectly unendurable." And then again when the final blow comes. For forty-eight hours Nora battles for her ideal, never doubting Torvald for a moment. Indeed, so absolutely sure is she of her strong oak, her lord, her god, that she would rather kill herself than have him take the blame for her act. The end comes, and with it the doll's house tumbles down, and Nora discards her doll's dress--she sheds her skin, as it

5 were. Torvald Helmer proves himself a petty Philistine, a bully and a coward, as so many good husbands when they throw off their respectable cloak. Helmer's rage over Nora's crime subsides the moment the danger of publicity is averted--proving that Helmer, like many a moralist, is not so much incensed at Nora's offense as by the fear of being found out. Not so Nora. Finding out is her salvation. It is then that she realizes how much she has been wronged, that she is only a plaything, a doll to Helmer. In her disillusionment she says, "You have never loved me. You only thought it amusing to be in love with me." Helmer. Why, Nora, what a thing to say! Nora. Yes, it is so, Torvald. While I was at home with father he used to tell me all his opinions and I held the same opinions. If I had others I concealed them, because he would not have liked it. He used to call me his doll child, and play with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house--... I mean I passed from father's hands into yours. You settled everything according to your taste; and I got the same tastes as you; or I pretended to--i don't know which--both ways perhaps. When I look back on it now, I seem to have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong. It's your fault that my life has been wasted.... Helmer. It's exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this way? Nora. What do you call my holiest duties? Helmer. Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and children. Nora. I have other duties equally sacred. Helmer. Impossible! What duties do you mean? Nora. My duties toward myself. Helmer. Before all else you are a wife and a mother. Nora. That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are--or, at least, I will try to become one. I know that most people agree with you, Torvald, and that they say so in books. But henceforth I can't be satisfied with what most people say, and what is in books. I must think things out for myself and try to get clear about them.... I had been living here these eight years with a strange man, and had borne him three children--oh! I can't bear to think of it--i could tear myself to pieces!.... I can't spend the night in a strange man's house. Is there anything more degrading to woman than to live with a stranger, and bear him children? Yet, the lie of the marriage institution decrees that she shall continue to do so, and the social conception of duty insists that for the sake of that lie she need be nothing else than a plaything, a doll, a nonentity. When Nora closes behind her the door of her doll's house, she opens wide the gate of life for woman, and proclaims the revolutionary message that only perfect freedom and communion make a true bond between man and woman, meeting in the open, without lies, without shame, free from the bondage of duty.

6 Realism and A Doll House You ought to make a thorough study of the history of civilization, of literature and of art An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to a modern author, for without it he is incapable of judging his age, his contemporaries and their motives except in the most incomplete and superficial manner. (Ibsen : Letter to John Paulsen while writing A Doll House, 1879 ) I. Realism and A Doll House A Doll House (Et dukkehjem) usually is acclaimed as a work of sturdy social realism for which athorough study of the history of civilization, literature and art would be superfluous. How do these requirements help us fathom the purpose of a play whose objective,we are told - though not by Ibsen - is the betterment of the status of women in nineteenth century Norway? I intend to show that it not only is possible but essential for an adequate analysis of the play to follow Ibsen s advice and integrate into its perspectives features from the history of civilization, of literature and of art. The ideological misreading of A Doll House has established its secure position in the modern theater; but now this is assured we can explore the more imaginative dimensions it shares with the other, at least as impressive plays in the Realist Cycle - and with other major works of art. For the first half of his career, Ibsen wrote mainly poetic and historical dramas but it is the Realist Cycle - twelve plays of modern life - that made him famous. These realist dramas continue the themes, perspectives and often the situations and characters of the poetic and historical dramas; especially ofemperor and Galilean. Today, we come to Ibsen's Realism not from the Romanticism from which it emerged but from later realistic traditions that have discarded the ambitious perspectives of Romantic art. Ibsen, however, as E.M. Forster insisted, remained a Romantic. Despite the consensus of traditional Ibsen commentary, he never set out to reproduce the appearance of the world around us. Ibsen s realism inherits from Romanticism the idea of the human condition as one of multiple and deep alienation. We are alienated, not only from the inherited social world that disfigures our collective human identity, but also from our own personal identities which, like society, are unrealized projects. This constitutes the anagnorisis (discovery) of Nora Helmer when she realizes she knows neither her world nor her own self within it. Ibsen's realism performs a dialectical deconstruction of the 'reality' we confidently inhabit. It is useful to keep in mind a distinction between the 'realist' and the 'realistic'. The 'realistic' has always been with us since classical times, throughout a number of genres and styles. It consists in the accurate rendition of persons and objects. 'Realist' art, on the other hand, was a radical new aesthetic that emerged in the 19th century and subjected representations of reality to a demanding aesthetic discipline. In the paintings of Manet and the Impressionists, it was not the subject that was important but the way it was radically reconfigured on the canvas. They rejected the grand, or

7 picturesque or 'anecdotal' subjects of Salon art and focused on the most familiar and even banal aspects of modern life, transfiguring them through a new and stringent aesthetic integrity The later development of painting intensified this process so that the 'figure' itself was radically distorted (e.g. in Cubism) to present multiple planes of the same figure: much as literary Modernism, beginning with Ibsen, presented multiple temporal perspectives within modernity. Ibsen's realist method consists of two main strategies: (a) The dialectical subversion of given reality's claim to truth. (b) Infiltrating archetypal perspectives into this 'reality'. Ibsen did not imitate contemporary Norwegian reality: he reinvented it as a metaphoric and histrionic stage space that only existed as aesthetic actuality. The difficulty Ibsen's art set itself was not to get his dramatic characters to act and speak like modern men and women: it was to get them to embody a new kind of poetry where 'archetypal' characters and actions from our cultural past invade and agitate scenes of modern life. The urgent and convincing modern events on his stage obscure the fact that they are recreating, in modern terms, events that have occurred before in our culture. This, is fact, has been a traditional practice in European literature and art from the time of the medieval Mystery Cycles to the present: where a classical or biblical subject is rendered in the likeness of the period of the artist. Modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, by including perspectives from the past in their images of the modern world, were continuing, in new terms, traditional strategies of Western art. Ibsen was one of the first - and most ambitious - Modernists. The concern of Realist Modernist literature is to reveal reality as layered with the accumulations of the past. As Terry Eagleton writes: "Realism in [the]... Hegelian sense means... an art which penetrates through the appearances of social life to grasp their inner dynamics and dialectical interrelations. It is thus the equivalent in the artistic realm of philosophical realism, for which true knowledge is knowledge of the underlying mechanism of things... The more a work of art succeeds in laying bare the hidden forces of history, the finer it will be. There is a sense in which this kind of art is more real than reality itself, since by bringing out its inner structure it reveals what is most essential about it. Reality, being a messy, imperfect sort of affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it. In the words of Ibsen's son, Sigurd Ibsen, "art gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights." These forces and possibilities could exist only under the peculiarly controlled conditions of art. Ibsen's re-invented Norway is a haunted, occult space desssigned to give banished forces the chance of coming into their rights. As the essay on this website, 'The Dangerous Seductions of the Past' argues, this had been Ibsen's visionary purpose from the beginning of his career and which he never abandoned. When we acknowledge this we will discover that many of the seeming 'implausibilities' of A Doll House, which directors might at first wish to cover up, are deliberate strategies of an art that is bringing on stage forces and possibilities that off stage reality excludes. People who go to the theater for facsimile reproductions of

8 the life they ordinarily live, will find Ibsen's procedure unsettling by making them aware of its artifices. One example, we will see, is the way the 'world of the play uncannily responds, repeatedly, to the triple iterations of the word 'wonderful' in the three acts. On two occasions in Act One when it is uttered the doorbell rings - and brings on just those characters who will ensure that idea of the wonderful will not take place. Events are being shaped and guided beyond the control - or consciousness - of the protagonists. The dramatic plotting is responisve to an occult dimension beyond ordinary or everyday reality. The world of the play is being metaphorically extended, as in Greek drama, to insist this dimension is in the nature of reality itself. The action of the dialectic, in Ibsen' drama, is the equivalent of the invisible shaping power over the human action of the Sophoclean gods. All dramas have 'gaps' which exclude elements irrelevant to the game being played. As Aristotle noted, in Sophokles' Oedipus tyrannos, Oedipus and Jocasta, in the course of their long married life, seem not once to have discussed the nature of the death of Laius nor their own extraordinary pasts before the fateful day of the plot. That huge implausibility of the story, outside the plot, is needed to get the tragedy going. Within the structure of the plot, however, the play exhibits a devastating logic which totally disperses doubts about the events' plausibility. Shakespeare's plays have implausible plots that we overlook because the human drama that emerges through the expressive verse rhetoric allows us not to fret over how many children had Lady Macbeth. Ibsen's realist plays are more plausibly plotted, but there still will be some very strange gaps. Thus, Torvald seems to have no parents, Nora no mother, Dr. Rank dies on cue and Christine Linde will have her Act Three reconciliation with Krogstad in the Helmer home, of all places! Ibsen's realism operates by the most difficult rules. It creates within the confines of a drawing room, modern actions made up of plausible characters, motives, significant stage entrances and exits, that at the same time indicate universal perspectives 'behind' the events. The result also is a work of controlled, artistic symmetry: in A Doll House, a three-act structure, each act building to its own peripety and anagnorisis while enacting a progressively evolving dialectic. This is no more like 'real life' than is The Importance Of Being Earnest, but a temptation, for many interpreters of A Doll House, is to hurry past all its intricate artistry to immerse oneself in the human story or to deliver its imputed message; to treat the characters as 'real life' individuals and empathize with, moralize or speculate upon them. This is less demanding than objective analyses of the plays as works of art; but if Ibsen has remained a force in our culture it is because of his formidable artistic achievement. And this still has to be emphasized. A Doll House is only the second of a long twelve-play Cycle whose dialectical evolution concludes with the last play, When We Dead Awaken. In The Ibsen Cycle (1975) I claimed Ibsen created this Cycle from his imaginative adoption of G.W.F. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as other sources from "the history of civilization, of literature and of art." This claim is elaborated and explained in the book itself and also on this website: in Helge Salemonsen's article Sophocles, Hegel

9 and Ibsen where the reader will find a summary of objections to and defences of my thesis. Hegel's text, like a psychoanalysis of the modern mind, charts the process of how, as a species, we became what we are in the world we created. This is the existential question confronting Ibsen's individual characters. The Phenomenology isonly one of the sources and influences that feed into the Realist Cycle but is crucial for understanding Ibsen's artistic method and intentions. In the section of the Phenomenology (Books VI and VII) that takes up the story of humanity as a communal species, Hegel sees the Greek polis and its conflicts as the foundation of our later history and culture. He particularly fastened on the conflict between the law of Man vs. the law of Woman and uses as the illustration of his analysis the Antigone of Sophocles. Antigone, I will suggest, is a text embedded in A Doll House. Ibsen, in a draft to the play wrote: "There are two kinds of spiritual laws, two kinds of conscience, one in a man and a completely different one in a woman. They do not understand each other; but in reality women are judged by the law of men, as if she wasn t a woman but a man." This, as Helge Salemonsen observes, is practically a paraphrase of Hegel's argument at the stage of the Phenomenologythe play is drawing upon. "With these words Ibsen could just as fittingly have been describing Sophocles Antigone. Had I not known better, I could have believed that this was Hegel s note to the first subsection of the sixth chapter in the Phenomenology: a. The ethical world; Human and Divine Law; Man and Woman. But it is not. It is Ibsen s commentary on A Doll s House." Salemonsen then proceeds to offer an analysis of A Doll House, revealing how Ibsen's play reproduces many of the crucial details of Hegel's text: "In the different stages of his life, Helmer has taken part in the political, administrative, and juridical system, and now in a powerful financial institution. He is an explicit expression of what Hegel defined as The Human Law, society s law, the male law... Nora, like Antigone had done what she did out of care for her loved ones, a care that at all times has been seen as a woman s responsibility and obligation, as it was also Antigone s... Helmer, who identifies himself with society s law, and who identifies morality with law-abidingness, reproaches Nora for lack of morals... As with Antigone we see [Nora] in conflict between two ethical expectations, which are justified by tradition, and that are connected to the sexes different foundation in the ethical world, the woman as the family s servant, the man as an active member of society. Nora identifies her moral sense with care for her family s well-being. For Helmer, morality is identical with obedience, obedience to the institutions of society, church and state... What [Nora} has to sort out. [is what] constitutes our self-image, our identity as a child, as a woman, as a man, or as a human being in the times we live? The traditional roles of women and men are identities which are inherited, which we have to work on and develop sovereignty over." The critic Jan Kott noted how the tragic action of Torvald and Nora re-enacts another well known Greek play - Euripides' Alcestis - in which a wife 'dies' to save her husband, as Nora, 'figuratively' does in Act II when she decides on suicide to spare

10 her husband. The imagery of the play is first her death by drowning, and then, with the tarantella dance, the death from the poison of the tarantula spider. Nora's Greekderived name is a further link to Hegel's account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of that phase of our evolving consciousness where Greek ghosts crowd back into modern consciousness. A Doll House charts the possible spiritual 'awakening' of both Torvald and Nora; both live in an illusory 'doll house' idea of the world. Those who know Brand will recognize meeting a similar attractive, innocent young couple, Einar and Agnes - who now have married and set up home and have their 'awakening' to reality yet to come. Like Einar and Agnes, they need to be ejected from their illusory Eden and there even is a 'satanic' figure, Krogstad, provided for this service! If it is Nora who awakens from a doll existence first, it is because it is she, not Torvald, who has been put through the violent shocks of three days. But the play ends with Torvald, and his possible awakening too. While the play recreates the dialectic of Hegel's The ethical world; Human and Divine Law; Man and Woman, it also draws upon other spiritual streams (åndelige strømninger) from the cultural past. As a play about possible spiritual rebirth, its action is set at Christmas - a time of symbolic regeneration; of the death of the old year and the birth of the new. This seasonal feast, in Norway, is given the pagan name of 'Yule (jul) and has the pagan associations of feasting, dancing, gifts and the good life in material terms: the pleasures of the senses, of beauty, art. But Christmas is a major event in the Christian calendar, and Christianity insists on quite opposite values to the pagan: of renouncing this world, of sacrifice, of suffering and forgiveness. It is earth-renouncing, with allegiance to values that are not of this world. The two couples, therefore, experience this 'turning point' of the year in radically different ways. One couple has the pagan names of Torvald (Thor) and Nora (Eleonora = Helen). Torvald, like the artist Einar in Brand, adopts an 'aesthetic' attitude towards reality and the play associates him with a preoccupation with costume, music, dancing, 'appearance,' aesthetic propriety: even on the aesthetics of embroidery versus knitting. The pagan tradition within the Christian feast reverences this world; its season of the yule tree, the gifts, the tarantella dance, the feasting; and this goes along with the young couple's whole outlook on life: the emphasis on joy, the beauty of physical things, aesthetic values: The fantasies they build up for each other in their doll house, of the heroic Torvald and his beautiful bride-wife, derive from a pagan joy-of-life and its possibilities. But, like Einar and Agnes in Brand, Act I. they are "dancing over an abyss" and do not know it. The second couple, Christine and Krogstad, are the world's insulted and injured who have lived through the 'sorrow' that Nora wants her world to be "free of" (sorgløs). Christine's life of sacrifice for others and Krogstad's of guilt and painful expiation, is the 'Christian' experience that will get its wonderful reward this Christmas. These identities seem located in their names: Christ-ine Linde (Kristine) and Nils Krog-stad (from kroke=crooked).

11 Krogstad's action in the play, of effecting the 'fortunate fall' of the couple from their innocent Eden links him to other, not-too-solemn 'satanic' figures in the Cycle: Engstrand, Morten Kiil, Relling, Ulrik Brendel, Judge Brack and, for a final appearance, Ulfheim. In the last act the two worlds are vertically juxtaposed: the pagan couple are heard dancing, 'above' (like Einar and Agnes) just before their world is about to be smashed up: while the Christian couple, Kristine and Krogstad, below, effect their mutual salvation.[2] Krogstad will be 'redeemed' by Christine and she fulfilled in caring for others by him. In the contrasting names and actions of the two couples, therefore, Ibsen already has hinted at other perspectives behind the modestly local seeming characters and their domestic setting. These, and other discreet metaphoric presences make up what I have called the Supertextthat creates the expanding dimensions of the Cycle. Ibsen called his plays 'poems' and the best way to approach A Doll House is to see it organized as intricately and as imaginatively as complex poetry. II. The Living Stage Set To create a suitable 'occult ground' for his dramatic séance, Ibsen's stage sets 'come alive' and take part in the drama. Just as Nora evolves from her illusory doll identity of Act One to the awakened woman of Act III, so the set of A Doll House goes through a drastic dialectic; from light to darkness, from paradise to prison until, by the end of the play, it has been ethically demolished - and one could imagine the doll house set, when Nora slams the door, collapsing like a house of cards to reveal the harsher winter landscape surrounding the little human shelter. Something like this scenic desolation occurs at the end ofghosts, when the light breaks over the icy glacier beyond the devastated Alving home. The Ibsen domestic scenes are illusory constructions that shatter on contact with reality. Looking at the set we see, first of all, those two doors in the rear wall. The door on the left (from the audience's viewpoint) leads to Torvald's study, and is opened and closed only when he chooses. It represents security, authority, patriarchal power, like the door leading to the inner chamber of a prince in neo-classical drama. Entering and exiting through that door carries particular weight: Torvald's invisible presence behind that door is felt as godlike. When Krogstad goes through it, it is to receive his dismissal from the bank. Rank must try to keep Torvald in that room while Nora has her desperate conference with Krogstad in Act II. Whenever Torvald emerges from this door, until the last act, it is always on his own terms, to direct and control events. (His first emergence is on the cue-world 'spend', to lecture Nora on domestic economy.) The door to the right in the rear wall leads to the outside world. Only damaged people come through this door: Christine, Rank, Krogstad, all of whom have been variously hurt by the world outside the dollhouse. This door lets in the terrifying Krogstad and, in the last act, his letter to Torvald menacingly lies in the mailbox on the door. This

12 door, then, represents the dengerous reality of the outside world, its power to hurt but also, as a scene of danger and conflict, its power to force one to grow up, to stop being a doll. Outside this door is the social world of a hostile community that has inflicted harm on Krogstad and made life harsh for Christine and whose opinions Torvald himself fears: and, beyond the social dimension is the natural world of winter weather, through which, Nora observes, it took Christine courage to make her seavoyage. In the dialectic of the play, those two doors will undergo radical change. The door to Torvald's study, in a form of emasculation, will lose all its authority and power; whereas the menacing door to the outside world will be transformed to become the door of liberation from the doll home which has become an unbearable prison to the newly awakening Nora. There is a third door, in the right wall - the door to the nursery and bedroom and the shared sexuality of Torvald and Nora. This, we find out, is a world of sexual fantasy, of Nora performing childish roles (squirrel, lark, etc.) to keep Torvald infatuated with her and assured of his dominance in the doll home. Nora, however, is hardly an innocent. She plays along with this for her own convenience, and lies to and manipulates her husband. Ibsen's point is that both Nora and Torvald are damaged by the lies by which they live. If not, there would be no need for this ordeal of awakening. One of Nora's meanest actions, for instance, is to blame the children for tampering with lock on the mailbox. Her attitude towards the dying Dr. Rank in Act Two, in which she first flirts with him (showing the flesh colored stockings, brushing his cheek with them and then coldly rebuffing him when he responds) is a behavior that does not have a polite name. (The scene so shocked one translator that she omitted it altogether). Those who sentimentally exculpate Nora have to ignore many of the less than admirable things she does. The role-playing serves her interests until she is awakened to larger interests. If Nora were not damaged by her situation, she would not need to be shaken into adulthood. III. Key Words in the Play - The 'wonderful' Each Act in the play organizes its actions characters and dialogues around a crisis, where there will occur an anagnorisis (perception/recognition) and a peripety (reversal): therefore, there will be three in this play. And each such 'turning point' is also built around the word 'vidunderlig' - wonderful. What should be noted is that this word, 'the wonderful' means a drastically different thing in each act of the play. That is, the earlier meanings of the word are progressively 'deconstructed' and different meanings replace them - only to be replaced in turn. (Other words go through the same evolutionary and deconstructive process. vejlede-guide; plikter-duties; sorgelige-sorrowful, sorgløs - sorrow-free, carefree etc.). These word-clusters, with the word iusually repeated three times, change their emphases and meanings within the evolution of the play: the dialectic at work in the play is revealed in the evolution of the words the characters speak. In Act Two Torvald offers to 'guide' (vejlede) Nora in her dance and she agrees she needs

13 guidance. In Act Three he rhetorically asks her that if she won't accept his guidance; later, he asks, doesn't she have an infallible 'guide' in the church? which she rejects. When he reminds her of her duties (pligter) she responds that she has a higher duty to herself. This word, duty emerging in this Act, will become a key word in the next play, Ghosts. Therefore, while key words change their meaning, within a play, other key words are introduced that will evolve in a later play in the Cycle; much as themes emerge and develop in music: We will focus mainly on 'vidunderlig' (wonderful), and its dialectic transformation in the play, for it is a leitmotiv of this play and not of any other in the Cycle. It is, one can say, the 'doll-house word' - just as 'pligter' and livsglede' (duty, joy of life) are the leitmotivs of Ghosts. In Act One, the 'wonderful' means the good life in domestic, material, and social terms. It is the new job Torvald will get at the bank with an increased income; for Nora, it is the end of the old hard times of economizing and debts. Torvald will no longer have to work at home, and Nora need not trouble herself with housework - it is the good life seen in material economic terms. When Nora utters the word three times, the doorbell rings, bringing onto the stage Christine Linde, one of the characters who will ensure none of these wonderful, material things will happen. The next time Nora uses the word 'wonderful' in this Act, in her conversation with Christine Linde (together with the triple iteration of the word "sorrow-free" - sorgløs) the doorbell rings again, bringing onto the stage Krogstad, the other agent who, together with Christine, will transform her world. It is obvious that Ibsen's stage is becoming an occult space where uttering certain words proves dangerous. As Norwegians are no more given to repeating themselves three times at key moments than other ethnic groups, this is obviously a deliberate theatrical device, a transfiguration, not an imitation, of everyday reality. The passage where Nora uses the word 'sorgløs' is worth noting. She believes she and Torvald are about to enter a life free of sorrow, "Because my troubles are over. Oh, God, it's so lovely to think of, Kristine! Carefree! (sorgløs). To be carefree, completely carefree" The fatal triple iteration, we notice. 'Sorgløs' (free of sorrow) implies a way of life concerned to evade tragedy. But the theme of the play is that to grow out of the doll house way of life one must be able to take in the tragic perspective: this is true for the theater, too, which is inadequate if it fails to take in the tragic vision. When Ibsen confronted his theater audience with the tragic even more grimly in the next play, (Ghosts) that audiences violently protested - indeed Ghosts was officially banned from the theatre for years. In this act the theme is 'society'. All the characters discuss human identity in social terms. Rank talks of society as a hospital that looks after moral cripples like Krogstad. Nora declares she does not care for "dreary old society", revealing her immaturity at this stage of her evolving drama. Christine, who has suffered in her role in society, needs a social, position, and gets a job at the bank at the expense of Krogstad, one of society's pariahs, who threatens Nora with social disgrace. Finally, Torvald complacently divides society into good and evil and believes he can

14 quarantine his doll home from social evil. What Torvald does not realize is that his world - his doll-home -relies on the moral credit extended by Krogstad as well as on secret financial credit: for Torvald's naive idea that his home is shielded from all taint of evil and guilt is going to be horribly shattered when he will discover that the most innocent center of that household, his wife, is as guilty as the social outcast, Krogstad. Ibsen once wrote "Each person shares the guilt of the society to which he/ she belongs." Simply by being part of a human society we share its guilt. The Britain that fostered me gained its well being, from the ruthless exploitation of millions within its empire. The prosperity of the United States depends on the dispossession and massacre of the Native Americans; upon the slavery this culture's wealth was founded on; upon neocolonial wars and the continuing greedy exploitation of the world's resources. We put people in jail who are less guilty than ourselves. Ibsen wishes to awaken us into a more adequate discourse about ourselves. There is no such thing as innocence in the human community; neither by generation, class, race or gender.. "Only the animals are innocent," Hegel wrote. The painful self-knowledge the Helmers are made to experience is the unexpected and best Christmas gift they could receive. In Act Two the word wonderful' is again repeated three times: NORA: A wonderful thing is about to happen MRS. LINDE : Wonderful? NORA: Yes, a wonderful thing. But also terrible, Kristine, and it just can't happen, not for all the world. This time, however, it means something utterly different - even terrible, which must not happen, not for all the world. What does this word mean, now? In this scene, the Christmas tree that Nora decorated now is stripped bare. The toys and presents have disappeared - all the emblems of material happiness. And not just Nora, but all the characters shift the subject of the play from society and social/ material values to the psychological - to change within the individual psyche. It is in this act that Torvald tells Nora how he has the inner strength to take on whatever Krogstad may threaten; that Rank, as the stage darkens, reveals the depth of his love for Nora; that Krogstad and Nora, in a deep and searching, intimate duologue, contemplate their urge and final inability to commit suicide; and that Nora reveals the wonderful that is now about to happen. That 'wonderful' is what she imagines will be the terrible but heroic inner drama where, to prevent Torvald from taking the blame for her crime, she will at last find the courage for suicide. It is in this agitated spirit that she dances the tarantella, the dance those bitten by the tarantula reputedly danced - either until they died or until they expelled the poison from their blood. We will see another dimension to that tarantella dance in Act III. This new 'wonderful' element, therefore, is a Romantic and inward value that is the antithesis of the material 'wonderful' of Act One. That it is just as much an illusion is what Nora must learn in

15 Act III, when the word will be sounded in triple iteration again, at the end of the play. (Translations that vary the word as 'miracle' obscure Ibsen's intentions.) The evolving dialectic In Act III, the subject of the play again evolves into something new - not a material, nor a psychological, but an existential dimension. In this Act one couple will be united and the other will separate. Christine and Krogstad survey their own damaged, shipwrecked lives, and agree to fill the emptiness through a marriage without illusions. As they move from desolation to joy, we hear the sounds of the tarantella above, with Nora and Torvald dancing above these shipwrecked lives. The tarantella music suddenly stops and as Krogstad hastily leaves, the couple now descends, Nora in her fancy dress costume with a black shawl, Torvald in an elegant evening suit with a black domino. The emphasis on night, darkness, and the color black implies the tragic themes that follow. The dance also introduces a covert reference to 'tragedy'. Nora learned the dance on Capri. Torvald will call Nora "My Capri girl, my capricious little Capri girl " Again, a triple iteration: a signal to Ibsenites to take note. Capra means 'goat' and the Greek word, 'tragedy' means 'goat-ode/song'. - a sourc of much speculation from scholars. It is, I think, a signal to deep Ibsenists that, at this moment, tragedy is about to be born in the Cycle. It prepares the moment when Torvald and Nora's last childish illusions vanish and the doll home will be shattered. Dr. Rank enters, also in black evening dress, irritating Torvald who is sexually aroused and eager to get into the bedroom with Nora. Rank, in a coded conversation to Nora reveals he is about to go out into the night to die. Nora and Torvald, like sentimental playwrights, write the kind of romantic scripts for themselves that were (and are) the staple of conventional theatre. Torvald fantasizes that Nora is in some terrible danger and that he, Torvald, will heroically rescue her. Nora elaborates the fantasy: he will try to do this and she will heroically hurl herself into the river to prevent his destruction. Both are play-acting in the terms of a melodramatic theatre that is being deconstructed around them. When Torvald collapses over the revelations in Krogstad's first letter, both he and Nora are awakened from their fantasies. Torvald's shock is terrible. He is in the hands of a blackmailer who can do what he likes with him. Furthermore, his pure doll wife has turned out to be a criminal. Nora has had three days to absorb the shock: Torvald has had less than three minutes. His collapse reveals to Nora the fantasy world she had inhabited until now. In her confrontation with Torvald she realizes that she does not know reality, does not know the world or herself, and certainly does not know Torvald. She confesses she is not fit to bring up her children - and Torvald is the last person to teach or guide her how to, for he and her father have most encouraged her to live in fantasy; an inauthentic doll existence, bearing three children with a stranger. The marriage could only be regained if the 'wonderful' were to happen. In the Norwegian, she now uses 'vidunderlig" in its superlative form 'vidunderligste' (lit. 'wonderful-est') and it is again sounded three times, the last time by Torvald, as the door slams. This time, the idea of the wonderful means an existential transformation of the human way of living