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Realism
and A Doll House
by Brian Johnston
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 no guiltier 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 and 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 past
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 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 the sorrow from
Rank and his dying. Both Krogstad and Rank force Nora out of the
dollhouse into 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. The '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.). 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 other
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 artificial and 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
theatrically conventional escapes were closed off: - Rank supplying
the money; Krogstad repenting in time; Nora attempting suicide and rescued
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 most
literature, up to that moment.
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3.
Augustus Egg's (then famous) triptych, Past and Present is almost
a model of the drama that Ibsen totally subverted. In the first scene,
the grief-stricken but implacable husband holds the accusatory letter;
the guilty wife lies prostrate and devastated at his feet; the children
sit by a house of cards that is falling; on the drawing room walls are
scenes of the expulsion from Eden and a shipwreck - the whole composition
is to affirm the impregnable citadel of bourgeois morality from which
the guilty wife is from now on for ever expelled to ruin and a sordid
death.
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