A Doll's House

Overview

A Doll’s House is three acts and about ninety pages, and it takes roughly two hours in performance. It is set entirely in one room over three days at Christmas, and it has eight characters.

Ibsen is writing in a form he largely perfected: the realist problem play. There are no soliloquies, nobody addresses the audience, the dialogue sounds like speech, and the set is a middle-class living room with real doors. The machinery is inherited from the French well-made play, an old secret, a compromising document, a ticking deadline, and Ibsen uses it with great efficiency while turning the ending inside out. In a well-made play the secret comes out, the misunderstanding clears, and the marriage is saved. Here the secret comes out, everything is understood correctly, and that is the disaster.

The other thing to know is that the play is structurally a detective story in reverse. The crime has already happened, before the curtain, and the three acts are the slow arrival of its consequences.

Ibsen resisted being made into a feminist banner. He told a Norwegian women’s rights society that he had been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than they credited, and that he was writing about human beings. Audiences then and since have declined to accept the distinction, and the play does not obviously support it.

What happens

Act I. Nora Helmer comes home with Christmas parcels and eats macaroons she has been told not to eat. Torvald, her husband, has just been made manager of the bank and their money troubles are over; he teases her about spending, calls her his squirrel and his skylark, and she plays up to it.

Two visitors change the temperature. Kristine Linde, an old school friend, arrives widowed and broke, looking for work; she married a man she did not love to support her mother and brothers. Nora, stung by being treated as someone who has never done anything, tells her the secret. Years ago Torvald was seriously ill and the doctors said a winter in Italy would save him. There was no money and he would not borrow. Nora borrowed it herself, told him it came from her father, and has been paying it off out of the housekeeping and by copying documents at night. She is proud of it.

Then Krogstad, who works at the bank and is about to be dismissed by Torvald. He is the man who lent her the money, and he knows what she did to get it: her father’s signature on the bond is dated three days after her father died. If he loses his job, he will use it.

Act II. Nora tries everything to get Krogstad kept on, and Torvald refuses partly out of principle and partly because Krogstad is familiar with him at the office. She tries to keep Torvald from the letterbox. Doctor Rank, the family friend who is dying of a disease inherited from his father’s dissipation, chooses this afternoon to tell her he loves her, which closes off the one person she might have asked for money. Krogstad drops the letter in the box, and Nora, waiting, dances the tarantella wildly to keep her husband’s attention until it is too late for him to read it.

Act III. Upstairs, at the party, Torvald has been drinking. Downstairs, Mrs Linde and Krogstad, who loved each other years ago before she made her practical marriage, agree to start again, and she makes the choice that decides the play: she tells Krogstad not to ask for the letter back, because this marriage cannot go on with a secret in it.

Torvald reads it. His reaction takes about ninety seconds and destroys everything: he calls her a hypocrite and a criminal, says she has ruined his future, declares that she is not fit to bring up the children and that the marriage will continue as an appearance for the look of the thing. Then Krogstad’s second letter arrives returning the bond, and Torvald says he is saved, forgives her, and tells her not to worry her head.

Nora goes out and comes back in ordinary clothes and asks him to sit down, because they have been married eight years and have never once had a serious conversation. What follows is the scene the play exists for. She had believed that when the truth came out he would take the blame on himself, and had intended to kill herself to prevent it. Instead she has learned what he is, and that she has spent her life being handed from her father’s opinions to her husband’s without acquiring any of her own. She cannot raise children when she is a child herself. She has to find out who is right, the world or she, and she cannot do it here. Torvald appeals to her duties as a wife and mother, and to religion, and to what people will say. She leaves, and the door closes.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting. It is built to be felt as an accelerating machine and it does not survive being put down.

Read Act I for the traps being set and not for the charm. Almost everything Nora does in the first twenty minutes, the macaroons, the wheedling, the coy evasions, is what she has learned to do in place of having standing, and the last act reinterprets all of it.

Take Torvald seriously. He is pompous, proprietary and a coward under pressure, and he is also a man behaving as his society taught him and genuinely believes he loves her. A production that makes him a villain makes the play easy and untrue.

Watch Mrs Linde. She is the one who decides to let the letter be read, on the ground that the marriage needs to face it. Whether that is courage or interference is a fair argument, and she is the play’s quiet counterweight: a woman who married for money, was widowed, works, and knows what she is doing.

Read the alternative ending, which most editions print. Ibsen wrote it under duress for German productions, and in it Nora is taken to the door of the children’s room, looks in, and sinks down. It takes four lines to destroy the play, which is the best demonstration available of what the real ending is doing.

Questions it raises

• Is Nora right to leave the children? The play’s power depends on refusing to soften that, and it is the point most audiences still stall at.
• Torvald has broken no law and no promise. What exactly has he done wrong, and would he have understood the charge?
• Nora committed forgery out of love and the play treats the law as the absurd party. Is that defensible as a general principle?
• Mrs Linde prevents the letter from being withdrawn. Is she saving the marriage, ending it, or arranging her own?
• Ibsen said he was writing about human beings rather than about women. Can the play be read that way?
• If the final scene is an education rather than a rejection, what is Nora going to do on Tuesday? The play does not say, and the omission may be the point.