Realism and A Doll House

I. Realism and A Doll House

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. This realist drama evolved from the poetic and historical dramas and continues their themes and often versions of their situations and characters. Theatre audiences today come to Ibsen's Realism not from Romanticism, from which it emerged, but from a later realistic tradition that has discarded the ambitious perspectives of Romantic art .But Ibsen's realism retains Romantic perspectives and aspirations. By ignoring this, we tend to see and perform Ibsen reductively, small scale, as if his drama was pioneering work in the modest task of reproducing the reality of the world around us instead, as is the case, of offering a radical counter-discourse to it.  It is useful to keep in mind a distinction, familiar to painting, between the 'realist' and the 'realistic'. The 'realistic' has always been with us since classical times throughout a number of genres and styles; in the accurate rendition of persons and objects. 'Realist' art, on the other hand, was a distinct stylistic approach, as in Impressionism, which subjected reality to a highly demanding aesthetic discipline. The artwork did not seek to render on the canvas a facsimile of reality: instead it subjected reality to the transformative recreation of the aesthetic discipline.

Ibsen's frequently dyspeptic comments on the world he found himself in should lead us to question the idea that he sought to render faithfully our experience of everyday reality. Ibsen did not imitate Norwegian reality he reinvented it: - as a metaphoric and histrionic space that could never exist in actuality. The great 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 archetypes from our cultural past could invade and agitate his scenes of modern life. In the words of his 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. This is one of the principal strategies of modernist art: as in the art of Ibsen's lifelong admirer, James Joyce.  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 aesthetic strategies of an art that is bringing on stage forces and possibilities that off stage reality excludes. One example that I will elaborate later is the uncanny way the 'world of the play' responds to the triple iteration of the word 'wonderful' where, on two occasions in Act One, the doorbell rings when it is uttered, each time bringing on just those characters who will ensure that idea of the wonderful will not take place. This obviously is more an occult than a realistic timing.

In an Ibsen play the dramatic plot is a deliberately subversive perspective brought to bear upon the idea of reality conveyed by the play's story. By plot, we mean the sequence and arrangements of events on the stage between the beginning and the end of the stage action. This is what Aristotle meant when he described the dramatist as a maker of plots, not a teller of stories. The story is the material which the plot will significantly reshape into aesthetic significance before our eyes as we watch the performance. It is not Nora and Torvald's life story that we should focus on but what the play's three-act plot structure will do with that story: the emphases, manipulations, artistic structuring to which the plot submits the story. To interpret a play like A Doll House by re-assembling the story behind the plot's structure is as if one were to interpret a painting by Manet by trying to recreate some hypothetical photographic "real object" behind it.

 

One still hears the complaint that Ibsen's 'plot-driven' method does violence to our experience of everyday reality. The point is, of course, that it is supposed to!    There even are attempts to tinker with the plot, even to interpolate elements into it - a practice that, if one were to attempt it with, say, a Beethoven string quartet, would provoke ostracism from the musical community where the art form is taken seriously. If, like naïve interpreters, one imagines the cast of characters of A Doll House to be real, living men and women, the sheer plethora of potential details would crowd upon and crush the stage and the play could not proceed. Their ancestors, parents, siblings, acquaintances, all of whom would impinge on actual life, would have to be accommodated. Their physical conditions, internal and external, their unceasing subconscious life, would all have a right to be represented. Otherwise, the artist already is severely distorting the reality he or she claims to be reproducing. Once one allows the principle of aesthetic selectivity one already has separated art irremediably from reality. To accept this fundamental principle of the realist - or any - aesthetic is to admit the necessary artificiality of the enterprise. This makes absurd the tendency to psychonalyze or morally judge fictional characters. These characters are brought into being for their indispensable function within the total aesthetic structure. It is the height of absurdity to analyze or morally condemn them as if they had any choice in the matter!

Ibsen's theatrical method plays by the most difficult rules of any dramatist: He has to create, within the confines of modern drawing rooms, huge archetypal conflicts behind the rhythms and images of everyday life: keeping to his actions of believable motives, entrances, exits, while at the same time get getting the great ghosts, the powers, to invade his plays as in séances. And the result has to be, as in a taut musical structure, a work of controlled symmetry: in A Doll House, a three act structure, each act containing its own peripety and anagnorisis while enacting a progressively evolving dialectic in three stages.  When interpreting or performing an Ibsen play we should search out, from within its structure it's aesthetic terms of existence: what makes it a work of art. The plot of the play, is not an unfortunate recidivism to the well-made-play format that Ibsen so detested: the plot is the organizing principle of his art. In A Doll House, it forms a dialectic, in three acts, each act building to its own crisis of peripety (reversal) and anagnorisis - perception. The average Norwegian housewife of the 19th. Century was not likely to undergo three major peripeties and anagnoreses in three days. Nor would that housewife find all the characters around her, and their actions, carefully programmed, on cue, to bring this about, while themselves following the same dialectic trajectory!

As the second play of a 12-play Cycle, A Doll House is only one stage of a long dialectical evolution that does not end until the last play, When We Dead Awaken. Only by knowing the whole Cycle will one be able to 'see' A Doll House adequately. Like all the plays in the Cycle, therefore, the play has a double life:

(a) As part of a huge completed design, the Collected Plays on the shelf, which Ibsen asked us to read in the order in which they were written, to see "the mutual connections between the plays"

(b) As the show we are putting on now, to be brought alive and re-interpreted before a contemporary, first night audience without reference to the Cycle.

A Doll House charts the possibility of the spiritual 'awakening' of both Torvald and Nora; for both live in an illusory 'doll house' idea of the world. Those who know Brand will recognize this attractive young couple as Einar and Agnes - who have now married and set up home and have their 'awakening' to reality yet to come. This pair needs to be ejected from its illusory "Eden" and there is a 'satanic' character Krogstad, provided for this service! If it is Nora who awakens from a doll existence first, it is because it is she, not Torvald, has been put through the violent shocks of the three days. But the play ends with Torvald, and the possibility of his awakening too.

This is less the mimesis of everyday reality than a carefully organized dialectic game that has strict rules and sets itself difficulties which raise the method to the level of major art. This is true of all major drama, which gets us to accept the terms of the game because the 'pay-off' will be worthwhile. One of the rules of the game is to get rid of everything irrelevant to the central action: to omit details that do not serve the function of the work. As in painting, this involves a selectivity that not only ignores or distorts things 'out there' that don't serve the composition, but also requires incorporating elements, not 'out there,' that are essential to it.

All dramas have 'gaps' which exclude elements irrelevant to the game being played. As Aristotle noted, in Sophokles' Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus and Jocasta seem not once to have discussed the nature of the death of Laius, or 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. Shakespeare's plays even have implausible plots, which we are willing to overlook because the pay-off, the human drama that emerges through the expressive verse rhetoric, is so compelling.  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 has no mother, Dr. Rank dies on cue, almost, and Christine Linde will have her Act Three reconciliation with Krogstad in the Helmer home, of all implausible places. Implausible, but metaphorically significant: to juxtapose the tragically separated couple, below, who will join in free union, with the dancing united couple, above, who will descend to tragically separate. These are some of the many necessary shaping devices - manipulations of reality - needed for the game Ibsen is playing.

Ibsen shapes his play to bring out certain large, archetypal conflicts and presences. To do the big things, he will overlook some small things. Minor dramatists take very great care of the small things and miss the big ones. Ibsen's games play by the most difficult rules of any dramatist: creating, within modern drawing rooms, large archetypal conflicts behind images of everyday life. He must all the while sustain his actions of plausible modern realistic motives, actions, dialogues, entrances, exits, and yet still get the great ghosts, the archetypal powers, to invade his plays.

As a play about spiritual rebirth within the modern world, 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 celebrates quite opposite values to the pagan: of renouncing this world, of sacrifice, of suffering. It is earth renouncing, reverencing allegiance to values that are not of this world.  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 Einar the artist 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 emboirdery versus knitting! The pagan tradition has been resurrected within the Christian feast, and, 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 in this world and its possibilities. But, like Einar and Agnes in Brand, they are "dancing over an abyss" and do not know it.    The second couple, Christine and Krogstad, might be called the world's insulted and injured that have lived through the 'sorrow' that Nora wants her world to be "free of" (sorgløs). Their outlook on the world, with Christine's life of sacrifice for others and Krogstad's of guilt and painful expiation, is the 'Christian' one which will get its wonderful reward this Christmas. These identities seem located in their names: Christ-ine Linde (Kristine) and Nils Krog-stad. [1]

In the last act we have the two worlds vertically juxtaposed: the pagan couple are heard dancing, 'above,' just before their world is about to be smashed up : while the Christian couple, Kristine and Krogstad, below, effect their 'miraculous' mutual salvation.[2] In this play Krogstad will be 'redeemed' by Christine. In the contrasting names and actions of the two couples, therefore, Ibsen already has hinted at other dimensions assembling behind the modest seeming characters and their domestic setting. These, and other discreet metaphoric presences make up what I have called the Supertext that 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 the best poems.

The tragic action of Torvald and Nora also seems to re-enact a well known Greek play about a marriage - 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 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 Greek-derived name now begins to be suggestive. When she finally rebels against, not only her husband but also her whole society, she takes on the identity of another Greek heroine, Antigone. In these first four plays in the Cycle, the Greek ghosts are crowding back into the modern world. Ibsen, in fact, is doing something which such modernists as Thomas Mann, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were to do after him: of rediscovering archetypes of our communal psyche within the banalities of everyday consciousness.

II. The Living Stage Set

To create a suitable 'haunting ground' for his dramatic séance, Ibsen makes his stage sets 'come alive' and take part in the drama. Just as Nora evolves from her illusory identity of Act One to the awakened woman of Act III, so the set of A Doll House goes through a drastic evolution, 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 this little human shelter. Something like this scenic desolation occurs at the end of Ghosts, when the light breaks over the icy peak of a glacier beyond the devastated Alving home.

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 lies in the mailbox on the door. This door, then, represents the menacing 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 sea-voyage. In the course of the play, those two doors will undergo dialectical 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, where the word is usually 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 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 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 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 neo-colonial 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 nor by 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 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.)

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'.  It is, I think, a signal to deep Ibsenists that, at this moment, tragedy is about to be born in the Cycle. It is 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 in the world: not merely a combination of the wonderful of Acts One and Two, but a new category altogether that has yet to be discovered.

Another 'fateful' word repeated three or more times, we saw, is 'sorrowful' or 'sorrow-free'' sorgelige- sorgløs'. In Act One, we remember, Nora tells Christine how she looks forward to a 'sorgløs' future, free of sorrows. In Act Two she could not bear to listen to Dr. Rank's sorrowful history. Putting her faith first in material happiness and then in a fantasy of romantic heroics, she had counted on a life free from tragedy. While evasion of tragedy is a very natural and human thing to wish for that we can sympathize with, it is a bad thing for a theater to wish for. A theater that can't face up to tragedy, to recognize its world as tragic, as the Greek and Elizabethan theatres could, is an inadequate theatre. So Ibsen must train not just Nora but his theatre audience to see how the tragic is inextricably involved in human experience.

In Act Two, the dialogue between Nora and Dr. Rank hovered around this word sorgelige - the sorrowful - as Rank and Nora, contemplating Rank's inherited and fatal disease, his disintegrating body, acknowledge, as the stage darkens, how the sorrowful is inescapable in life.  Dr. Rank's declaration of love for her had been an unwelcome intrusion into the romantic script she had written of her liebestod - she and Torvald each willing to sacrifice for the other, followed by her poignant suicide. This is melodrama, not tragic sorrow.  It is only in Act III, when Nora knows what Dr. Rank is about to do and establishes this knowledge as an unspoken bond between them (in the gesture of lighting his cigar) that Nora fully takes in the sorrow of the tragic vision. In Ghosts, too, tragedy will be the condition the drama evolves out of the condition of melodrama: a training for the characters in the play and the audience that observes their evolution.

In the past, Torvald had constructed an aesthetic playpen for his doll wife and doll children in the belief he can quarantine all this from social evil. Torvald divides the world between a 'them' and an 'us'. Evil and crime is what other people do and examples of men like Krogstad are to be welcomed for making the doll home seem by contrast beautiful and pure. This is the primary function of the 'villain' in fiction: it confirms one's own unexamined idea of the world.   The virtues we congratulate ourselves upon are the luxuries our unexamined crimes permit.   Torvald, however, declares men like Krogstad make him feel actually ill: as if he is another species from them.

Krogstad, the despised criminal and outcast, rudely intruded into this playpen and opened Nora's eyes to a reality she shared with him. He forced her, and later Torvald, to see the fallacy of living in a moral plastic bubble uncontaminated by the world, as if they did not share in its corruption.   Dr. Rank, too,  had been a flattering presence: "His loneliness - his suffering - was like a cloudy background to our sunlit happiness" Torvald  declares.  Rank's tragedy was a charming aesthetic effect in a scene of bourgeois bliss.  Nora experiences the terror threatened by Krogstad and finallly, the sorrow from Rank and his dying.  Both Krogstad and Rank force Nora out of the dollhouse  tragic consciousness. The play is not just about Nora, however, but about a world-view made up by all the characters in the play and the communal consciousness of the theatre audience.

The play is constructed as a rich exploration of a condition of mind, or spirit, shared by a whole culture. The characters that appear in Act One re-appear in each succeeding act and no new main characters will appear.  'Ensemble' drama is Ibsen's method, as it is Chekhov's. But there is a telling difference. In Chekhov, the re-appearance of the same group in act after act emphasizes their unchanging quality through the passage of time - usually a much longer time (at least a whole summer) than the Ibsen action. The three sisters and their companions, or the owners of the cherry orchard, may be older, sadder, dispossessed, but they are essentially the same characters pondering the same condition in every act. In A Doll House and Ibsen's other plays, all the characters and the world they inhabit are undergoing radical change even, as we saw, with the very language they use.   So, too, the sets and the visual imagery undergo change (the Xmas tree; the darkness and light images, the changing costumes, the nature of the three doors, etc.).   Furthermore, these sets, themes and visual and verbal images will not re-appear in a later play: there is a Doll House world and its imagery utterly different from that of Ghosts and the sequence of plays in the Cycle. Each play, that is, establishes its own overall controlling metaphor, with its unique pattern of visual and verbal imagery.

In Act III, as in the last act of Hedda Gabler, the emphasis is on the tragic color black and on the darkness of the night.  Rank,Torvald and Nora all wear prominently black colors; (the men's evening dress; Nora's colored dress is covered with a black shawl). There is the grave ceremonial action of Rank asking Nora for a light for his last cigar as he goes off into the night. When Nora and Torvald first descend his elegant evening clothes are more 'functional' and therefore authoritative than her gaudy fancy dress which is a Neapolitan fantasy. However, when she changes into 'everyday' dress it is now Torvald's formal evening dress that is incongruous to the gravely developing situation. He suddenly is at a sartorial disadvantage, one might say.

    Characters undergo such violent reversals that they transform into the opposite of what they started out as; which, along with the other dialectical reversals, creates in the theater audience, a distinct feeling of reality being radically re-organized into something new. The play seems continually to be setting up situations that call for conventional, sentimental resolutions and then perversely flouting them. Even if audiences were willing to accept that all the possible escapist theatrical conventions  were closed off - Rank supplying the money; Krogstad repenting in time; Nora attempting suicide and rescue by a heroic Torvald - even if all these and other possibilities were rejected and the audience agreed to the final show down between husband and wife, this, too, is a violent subversion of nineteenth century tradition in which, conventionally, it is the guilty wife who collapses before the morally outraged husband.[3]  In the famous discussion scene, however, it is Nora who now leads and instructs the now humiliated master of house, Torvald, and it is Torvald who is the pupil needing instruction. When Nora remarks that this is the first time she and Torvald have sat down and seriously talked together she might, as George Bernard Shaw observed, be describing all married couples in the theater, and in most literature, up to that moment.

IV. An Observation on the 'Game' of Realist Drama

This idea of a drama as a form of aesthetic play (ludus) does not contradict the actors' conviction that they inhabit a 'real' human being driven by emotions and compulsions: not, of course, spontaneously as in real life or they would have to go off script: but sufficiently persuasive to enable them to render a performance convincing and compelling.  Actors, however, are not given sufficient credit for their own creativity.  An actor/actress assembles the convincing coherence of the dramatic character  and then projects it from the stage, exploiting the opportunities of the role.  

Critics and interpreters who treat dramatis personae as real and therefore vulnerable to the judgments we pass on actual humans, usually are a good deal more naïve than theater practitioners who are well aware of the artificiality of all art: how much rehearsal is required, for instance, to bring off a scene between, say, Nora and Krogstad: and how, under new inspiration, that whole rehearsed sequence may be radically altered, or scrapped as not functioning aesthetically. Performers in interviews might tell us how real the characters and situations they are impersonating are, but we know they talk like this because they are psyching themselves up to put on a more effective impersonation. Audiences, too, though willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of hours, really are aware that the characters that cause them to bring out the Kleenex still exist in the aesthetically delimited arena of stage space and could not survive transplanting into our medium of existence. We know we cannot enter into and influence their situations. Our approval or disapproval of them is a way of asserting our own preconceptions over the experience the play has offered.  Our expressions of approval or disapproval of the characters and their actions is less demanding, by far, than attending to the demands of the artistic intention.  The world of the drama occupies an artificial space completely demarcated from the space of everyday reality we inhabit and requires from us a totally different form of vigilance.