Ibsen Voyages with Brian Johnston

“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 a thorough 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 of Emperor 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 or own personal identities that are severed from their natural authenticity. This is the anagnorisis (discovery) of Nora Helmer when she realizes she knows neither her world nor her own self within it. Ibsen's realism offers, instead, a radical deconstruction of the false '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 painted that was important, but the way it was radically reconfigured on the canvas. They rejected the grand, or picturesque or 'anecdotal' subjects of Salon art. Instead they focused on the most familiar and even banal aspects of modern life and reconfigured them to conform to the requirements of the stringent aesthetic method. The later deveopment 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 the same moment.

The nineteenth century stage was Ibsen's canvas on which, he radically reconfigures our idea of reality to expose its inadequacy. He then infiltrates into it historical/cultural perspectives the modern world has lost sight of. His realist method consists of two main strategies.

(a) The dialectical subversion of given reality's claim to truth. (b) The summoning of archetypal perspectives into this 'reality'.

Ibsen, therefore, did not imitate contemporary Norwegian reality: he reinvented it as a metaphoric and histrionic stage space that only exist ed as aesthetic 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 '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 can be seen as one of the first - and most ambitious - Modernists.

The concern of Realist and Modernist literature is to reveal modern 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 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. One example , we will see, is the way the 'world of the play' uncannily responds, repeatedly, to the triple iterations of the word 'wonderful'. On two occasions in Act One, when it is uttered the doorbell rings - it 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 protagnists. Something that is in the nature of dramatic plotting is metaphorically extended, as in Greek drama, by a sense that this is the nature of reality itself. The dialectic, in Ibsen' drama, is the equivalent of the invisible shaping power of the Sophoclean gods.

Ibsen's theatrical method operates by the most difficult rules of any dramatist. He 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; 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 appreciated.

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 independent and imaginative adoption of G.W.F. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as of 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 and Ibsen where the reader will find a summary of objections to and defences of my thesis. Hegel's text, like an evolutionary psychoanalysis of the modern mind, charts the process of how, as a species, we became what we are in the world we have created. This is the existential question confronting Ibsen's individual characters. The Phenomenology is only one of the many imaginative sources and influences that feed into the Realist Cycle but it is crucial for understanding Ibsen's artistic method and intentions.

Hegel sees the Greek polis and its conflicts as the foundation of our historical and cultural identity. 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 Ibsen's play. Ibsen, in a draft to A Doll House 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 Phenomenology the 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 the 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 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 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.

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!

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). 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 and Judge Brack

In the last act the two worlds are 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 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 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 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 of Ghosts, 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 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 sea-voyage. 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 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 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 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, 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:

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.)

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 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, tragedy will be the condition from the beginning.

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. In conventional detective fictions the 'them vs. us' divide is rigorously maintained: the detective (Sherlock Holmes; Hercule Poirot) always expresses impeccably conventional moral attitudes, reassuring us that however ingeniously despicable the villain, our values will triumph. This, as Miss Prism would say, is what Fiction means.

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. Krogstad and Rank, therefore, force Nora and, finally Torvald, out of their dollhouse llusions and into tragic consciousness. The play is not just about Nora but about an illusory world-view held 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. However, it is not just an inadequate idea of marriage that is radically subverted but, more disconcertingly, the dialectic demolishes a whole structure of beliefs and assumptions by which we, men and women, think we understand reality. A Doll House is only an early stage of the odyssey Ibsen wants to take us on. The human spirit still has a long, desolating and emancipating journey in the plays that follow.

(Essay based on 'A Doll House, or "The Fortunate Fall' in Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama, pp.137-164)