Ibsen Critical Views (AO5)

Ibsen - Male view

“Feminine conduct is judged from a male point of view”

Hathaway - Freedom

“Her freedom is clearly curtailed and limited by patriarchal power”

McNamara - Torvald

“His passionate desire for ownership of Nora”

Garland - Dynamic

“Constantly shifting positions of power”

Garland - Nora

“Certainly, she is unfair, certainly she is one-sided, certainly she is illogical”

Ross - Hierarchy

“Even in the smallest social unit of a family there is a hierarchy”

Hathaway - Nora

“She deliberately plays the role of the helpless female”

Garland - Manipulation

“Nora’s childlike behaviour is part of her manipulation of Torvald”

Hathaway - Manipulation

“The very first word of the play, hide, hints at Nora’s ability to manipulate and keep secrets”

Mona Caird

“The economical independence of woman is the first condition for free marriage. She ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter.”

Terry Otten

“The play is elementally about prostitution, about the willful selling of oneself to gain some advantage.”

Social Demokraten Review

Torvald “sacrifices Nora on the altar of his egotism”

Hedda Gabler - Torvald

He was “more preoccupied advancing in society than the happiness and health of [his] marriage”

Joan Templeton

“Women not showing men love was unorthodox”

Mona Caird - marriage

The “common respectable marriage” was “the most hypocritical form of woman-purchase.”

George Bernard Shaw

“The ideal wife is one who does everything that her ideal husband likes and nothing else.”

Bucher

“Being a woman in Victorian Britain meant that you were doubly judged: by both men and by God.”

Toril Moi - women’s roles

“They are wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and not really individuals.”

Sarah Stickney Ellis

“As women the first thing of importance is to be content to be inferior to men.”

Bjorn Hemmer

“It is not the human being in [Torvald] which speaks to Nora at their final confrontation; it is society, its institutions and authorities, which speak through him.”

Sandra Saari

The play shows “the radical transformation of Nora from female to human being”

Sophie Duncan

“All Nora’s men — her father, Torvald, and Rank — have suffered illness.”

Bjorn Hemmer

Torvald is “a pitiable and egotistic slave of the male society of which he is so conspicuous a defender”

Ronald Gray - Nora

"Her departure announced a great awakening in European drama as well as in woman's egalitarianism"

Sally Leger

"Ibesen is critically dissecting modern life and all its problems"

Ronal Gray - Nora and Rank

"Her flirtation with Rank is another indication of the more spirited woman beneath the convention respecting surface"

Eric Bentley - Krogstad

'Krogstad is a mere pawn of the plot'

Ronal Gray

"The play is crippled by its conformity to crude through popular standards"

Ronald Gray - Helmer

Ibsen makes “Helmer grotesque, and reduces the tragic quality of the ending”