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Realism and A Doll House
by Brian Johnston

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 the 'mini-Nora' of Act One to the 'super-Nora' 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 he door, collapsing like a house of cards, to reveal the harsher winter landscape surrounding this little human shelter. Ibsen himself creates something like this scenic desolation 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 exit 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, 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 will become an unbearable prison to the newly awakening Nora.

There is another 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 lie 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. And 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) is a behavior that does not have a polite name. (The scene so shocked one translator, Eva le Gallienne, 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.

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