Voyages in Drama with Ibsen
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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.