A Doll's House

Act 3 Helmer (what actually happened)

'I shall not allow you to bring up the children; I dare not trust them to you. To think that I should be obliged to say so to one whom I have loved so dearly, and whom I still—'

Act 3 Helmer (Departure from real events)

Look, he sends you your bond back. He says he regrets and repents—that a happy change in his life—never mind what he says!

Act 3 Nora (clarity and authority)

[looking at her watch]. It is not so very late. Sit down here, Torvald. You and I have much to say to one another. [She sits down at one side of the table.]

Act 3 Nora (agency)

NORA.And I—how am I fitted to bring up the children?

HELMER.Nora!

NORA.Didn't you say so yourself a little while ago—that you dare not trust me to bring them up?

Act 3 (ending)

NORA.That our life together would be a real wedlock. Goodbye. [She goes out through the hall.]

HELMER.[sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands]. Nora! Nora! [Looks round, and rises.] Empty. She is gone. [A hope flashes across his mind.] The most wonderful thing of all—?

[The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.]

Searching for Nora (The Guardian)

I suspect she missed the deeper compliment that Ibsen paid her. Thanks to him, Laura Kieler lives forever. He caught her character and set her in amber for all the world to see

Laura Kieler Play

Brand's Daughters, written in response to Ibsen's Brand when she was 19, how they met in 1868

Ibsen Scope

Ibsen 'uncommonly affectionate' with Kieler. 'the daughter he never had'. he called her 'my skylark'

Scandinavian Club Incident

1879- Ibsen rails against women at the club after a failed vote to allow them entry. Attendee Gunnar Heiberg said 'as his voice thundered it was as though he were clarifying his own thoughts… as though he were personally living his own theories, incarnating his characters'

Ibsen's response to Laura Kieler's novel, written to free her from debt

'Are you thinking of continuing to write? Much more is needed than mere talent. One must have something to create from, some genuine experience […] the rest is only lies'

Eric Bentley (In Search of Theater)

'The glory of Ibsen is that he refused to make certain fatal separations. He refused to separate… the personal from the social'

Blaming Nora (The Guardian) 2009

'A small minded person, in the moment of her realization of her own small mindedness' 'every time I read the play I find myself judging Nora with less and less sympathy.'

Einar Haugen, American-Scandinavian Studies authority

'Nora's conflict represents something other than, or something more than, woman's'

De Beauvoir (the Second Sex)

'the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral'

Ibsen on the Ending'

'I might honestly say that it was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was written'

Which production of the Dolls House altered the ending?

The 1880 staging, where Torvald drags Nora back to the nursery

Laura Kieler 2nd Play

Men of Honour (1890)- never translated. Doll's House available in 56 languages, performed from San Francisco to Japan

Maurice Valency (Freudianism)

'Nora is the carefully studied example of what we might term the hysterical personality'

seduction theory

developed by Freud in 1896. idea that children were affected by sexual abuse. moved to inspiration from tragedy to create the Oedipal complex

Ibsen's Women (Joan Templeton) 1997 (greek)

The critics who deride her think of her as a 'housewife Medea', but she is more a 'bourgeoisie Antigone'

Ibsen's women (Joan Templeton) Against Laura

'Ibsen softened the unusual and sensational aspects of Kieler's story to meet art's demands for plausability. His protagonist he made a housewife not a writer, and the hack work not novels but copying'

Ibsen's Women (Joan Templeton) Paternalism and genius

The letter denying Kieler financial support was 'fatherly' it was 'Ibsen's stroke of genius' 'career woman Laura Kieler begged her husband to take her back, but housewife Nora Helmer is tired of begging''

Which article postulated Laura Kieler as Nora?

1924, The Living Age (Boston) 'the real dolls house'

What feminist organisations did Laura Kieler participate in?

a co-organizer of the Women's Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1895

Susan Sontag (The Pain of Others)

'For a long time, some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness'