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Realism and A Doll House
by Brian Johnston

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 has made him famous. This realist drama grew out of the poetic and historical dramas, and continues the themes - and often even the situations and characters - of these earlier dramas. Theatre audiences today, however, come to this Modernist art - Realism - not from the Romanticism from which it evolved, but from a later 'realistic' tradition that has discarded the ambitious perspectives of Romantic art. This means 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 would be useful for us 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: in the skilful rendition of persons and objects throughout a number of aesthetic styles. 'Realist' art, on the other hand, was itself 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 demands of the aesthetic discipline.

Ibsen's frequently dyspeptic comments on the world he found himself living in should lead us to question the idea that he sought to render faithfully the experience of our everyday reality. Ibsen method was not to imitate Norwegian reality but to invent it: - as a metaphoric and 'histrionic' space that could never exist in actuality: an 'occult' space where his archetypal dramas could be acted out via the metaphors of the realistic aesthetic: a more rigorous aesthetic, by the way, than much non-realist drama. The great difficulty Ibsen's art sets itself is 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 huge 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, in fact, is one of the principal strategies of modernist art: especially 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 and indispensable aesthetic strategies of an art that is trying less to recreate an off-stage actual reality than to bring on stage forces and possibilities that off stage reality denies. Here, I will mention just one example that I will elaborate later: the uncanny way the 'world of the play' responds to the iteration of the word "wonderful" where in Act One, the doorbell twice rings when it is uttered, bringing on each time 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.

There seemed little in our world Ibsen found worthy imitating. The world already was a bad work of art, evolved through blundering centuries of collective error as an artificial, unnatural, repressive, system standing in the way of our true self-determination. Realist painters like Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, Ibsen's contemporaries, shared this critical and subversive attitude towards everyday reality and selected only those elements of the modern scene that conformed to the requirements of their own aesthetic needs. Impressionist painters frequently were derided for ineptitude in recreating an everyday reality familiar to the viewer, in contrast to the meticulous verisimilitude of the salon painters. Ibsen, likewise, was accused of not knowing his art, of being unable to recreate the familiar and wholesome reality of everyday life. But everyday reality was not a Truth Ibsen was trying to reproduce: on the contrary, everyday reality was a sham, to be radically re-organized into the demands of aesthetic truth. It was all the more insidious for seeming so attractive: a doll house that had to be exposed, even if violently, as a prison of the human spirit.

In an Ibsen play the dramatic plot is an alienating, 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 truth 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.

In painting, the Impressionists won the battle: in the theater and theater criticism, the battle still is being fought and one still hears that Ibsen's 'plot-driven' method does violence to our experience of everyday reality. The point is, of course, that it is supposed to do so! 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 late Beethoven string quartet, would provoke ostracism from the musical community, where the art form is taken seriously. If, like many 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 any pre-existing actuality. 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 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 'psycho-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 the structure of the play, it's aesthetic terms of existence: what makes it a work of art. The plot of the play, for example, 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 a time of symbolic rebirth. Christmas is the time 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, for ideas 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 other 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, Ezra Pound, were to do after him: of rediscovering those 'archetypes' of our communal psyche, hovering behind the banalities of everyday consciousness..

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1. Krog seems derived from the world for 'crooked' or tricky - satanic aspects; and Nicholas [Nils] already has made a diabolic appearance in The Pretenders. Krogstad, of course, is only seemingly 'diabolic'.
2. This recreates the scene in Brand where Einar and Agnes are dancing above an abyss just before they encounter the Christian priest, Brand, who will smash up their child-like world.