Ibsen/Rossetti A03, AO2 and A05:
Lies, deception, immorality, desire for independence:
ADH:, the tarantella, the motif of the door (representing her independence), walking out (Nora) - “Hide that Christmas tree away, Helen” - “she tiptoes across and listens at her husband’s door.” - “Pops the bag of macaroons in her pocket and wipes her mouth” - “A home that is founded on debts and borrowing can never be a place of freedom and beauty.” - “You could give me money, Torvald” - “Not a little nibble at a macaroon? Nora: No, Torvald – I promise you, honestly–!” - “but when a wife has a little business sense, and knows how to be clever” - “It’s usually the mother – though of course the father can have the same influence” - “sitting at home all these years poisoning his children with his lies” and “morally speaking, he is dead” - “corrupt my little children –! Poison my home!” - “Mrs Linde: are you going to give a performance? Nora: Yes, Torvald says I should”
AO3: The Tarantella is a fast-paced folk dance from Southern Italy. Its origins are linked to the tarantula spider; it was believed that if bitten, you went into a hysterical frenzy, and mad dancing was the way to sweat out the venom, Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) stated: “Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.” Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854): “Man must be pleased; but him to please/ Is woman’s pleasure”
AO5: (for desire for independence): “Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique (1963): “Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?”
Rossetti: W:MS (hiding the truth) - “I tell my secret, no indeed, not I” - Soeur Louise (for desire)- “o vanity of vanities, desire”, Good Friday (feeling of being immoral due to not feeling sadness and grief), Goblin Market (Desire, immorality), Twice (the critical eye, male judgment), Shut Out (the buds and her garden kept away), Maude Clare (Thomas and his betrayal of Maude, secrets)
Love and relationships:
ADH: Torvald’s little nicknames for Nora, Nora’s submission (“could never go against what you say” type), Christine and Krogstad (clearing the misunderstanding and their past), Nora claiming she did it all for Torvald (and when Torvald acknowledges this at the end), the ending (Nora and not staying with a ‘stranger’)
“Is that my skylark twittering out there?” - “Is that my squirrel rustling?” - “my little squander-bird” - “My little songbird mustn’t droop her wings. What’s this? Is little squirrel sulking?” - “The squanderbird’s a pretty little creature, but she gets through an awful lot of mone” - “Oh, thank you, Torvald, thank you!” - “wouldn’t wish my darling little songbird to be any different from what she is” - “You could give me money, Torvald” - “(wags his finger)Has my little sweet-tooth been indulging herself in town today, by any chance?” - “(goes over to the table, right)You know I could never act against your wishes.” - “a wife can’t borrow money without her husband’s consent” - “you don’t have to tire your pretty eyes and your delicate little hands” - “Once upon a time, he’d have done anything for my sake” (Mrs linde says) - “that you don’t love me any longer” Nora: No, that’s exactly it” - “Do you really think I’m so utterly heartless? You think it was easy for me to give you up?” - “oh, Nils, give me something- someone - to work for” - “you and I need each other” - “I am afraid of nothing - with you” - “a woman who has sold herself once for the sake of others doesn’t make the same mistake again”
AO3: “Upon marriage, a husband becomes legally responsible for the actions of both his wife and children, therefore he can physically and verbally chastise them in order to control their behaviour” 1860 – the Law of Coverture, “Before your husband comes home: brush your hair, put a ribbon in, tidy the home, have his tea ready and put on some lipstick, a smile and a clean pinny [pinafore]” 1960s, Good Housekeeping, “she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, & freedom of disposal of herself” - John Stuart Mill on his marriage to Harriet Taylor Mill
AO5: “Thousands of women in middle-class Europe and America, in that Victorian time, saw themselves in Nora.” Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique (1963)
Rossetti: “o memory, love, hope of finished years” (Echo - for Mrs Linde and Krogstad) or “pulse for pulse, breath for breath” - “I shall not hear the nightingale sing, as if, in pain” (Song - since Nora is a little “skylark”)
Motherhood and the Angel of the home:
ADH: opening with bringing gifts and what she bought them all (gender roles), Torvald’s mentions of Nora’s father, Nora playing with the kids, Nora and corrupting the kids (You take them, Helen), Helen’s backstory (giving up her child), Christine and not having kids and “someone to live for” (and when Krogstad gives her that), Torvald’s comments on Mothers, when Torvald takes the kids away, when Nora leaves (How she won’t take the kids with her)
“new clothes for Ivar – and a sword. And a horse and a trumpet for Bob. And a doll and a cradle for Emmy” - “You’re a funny little creature. Just like your f in ather used to be” - “It’s usually the mother – though of course the father can have the same influence” - “corrupt my little children –! Poison my home!” - “you take them, Anne-Marie” - “you’ve got a little paler, though, Christine. And perhaps a bit thinner.” - “No children, either? Mrs Linde: No” - “Not even a feeling of loss or sorrow” (mrs Linde on her being a widow and not a mother) - “Dear kind papa” - “Oh, it’s the saddest thing that’s happened to me since I got married” (papas death) - “is it really true you didn’t love your husband?” - “My mother… was helpless and bedridden. ..had my two little brothers to take care of” - “unspeakably empty” - “No one to live for any more” - “But I had to when I came to nurse my little Miss Nora” - “She’s written to me twice, once when she got confirmed and then again when she got married”
AO3: Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895).
AO5: Lee Breuer 2007 production of ADH, At its heart is the image of the doll's house and nursery, where the statuesque Nora (Maude Mitchell, who is superb) must contort her body to fit into the space, while her tiny husband, Torvald (Mark Povinelli), feels perfectly at home.
Masculinity:
ADH: Torvald’s entry (pen in hand, scolding, lectures her on finances), comments on Nora being a ‘spendthrift’, immorality in Krogstad vs Torvald’s “perfect” reputation, “guiding” Nora (both Nora and Torvald show these ideas), Dr Rank (a vulnerability to masculinity), Krogstad shown as a three dimensional man (kids, and survival), Nora’s father (Torvald’s criticism of him and his financial dealings), the toys given to Ivar (their son), Nora’s mentions of the miracle, Torvald’s reactions to Nora’s truth, Torvald being sheltered from Rank’s unpleasant situation, Torvald at the end (not moral, just concerned with appearances, not the man Nora thought he was), how Krogstad changes immediately when he reconciles with Christine (the effect of femininity on masculinity), Torvald’s implied sexual assault of Nora (“am I not your husband?”), being “petty” towards Krogstad using Torvald and not Helmer
“he opens the door and looks in, his pen in his hand.” - “Has my little squanderbird been overspending again?” - “The squanderbird’s a pretty little creature, but she gets through an awful lot of money”
AO3: “It is legal (and therefore perfectly acceptable) for a man to beat his wife,
providing that the stick he uses is no thicker than his thumb” 1857 – the Rule of Thumb, Conjugal Rights (to sleeping with your wife, when she is in your home)
Femininity and role of the woman:
ADH: Nora and the macaroons, Being a spendthrift, a product of her father (mentioned many times), Nora’s flirting with Rank, Christine’s judgment of Nora’s loan, Christine as the unconventional woman, Christine’s sacrifice for her family, Nora’s sacrifice to run the home, Nora’s melodramatic reactions, Torvald teaching Christine how to be more ‘feminine’, Nora and Torvald after the Ball (he’s drunk, Madonna- whore complex), “am I not your husband?”, Rank’s confession to Nora, Krogstad’s threat of being under the “cold, bleak” water (the only avenue for a woman), Nora’s “duty to myself” and Torvald’s reactions, motif of being “mad” throughout the play, Nora’s exit (slamming the door), Christine having “someone to live for” - “I had no choice - then” (mrs linde) - “working and earning money, it was almost like being a man”
“this is monstrous! Can your neglect your most sacred duties?” - “duties towards your husband, and your children” - “My duty towards myself” - “First and foremost you are a wife and a mother” - “I believe…I am first and foremost a human being, like you” - “that I must try to become one” (a human being)
AO3: Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester’s wife, Bertha, as the Mad Woman In the Attic (trope), “He has had a busy day and his day is more important than yours” from a 1960s Women’s magazine Good Housekeeping, Married Women’s Property Act 1882 (allowed only married women control over their property)
AO5: Betty Friedan, wrote in The Feminine Mystique (1963): “Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?” And “that a woman was also a human being, he struck a new note in literature”.
Rossetti: ITRT - the powerlessness of Skene's "pale young wife" as he "Close his arm about her now,".... "Close the pistol to her brow" - she has no choice or agency - FTA - "It's a weary life" "Doubly blank" as women are often caught between submission to the patriarchy or being outcast for defying it - GM - Women as self-sacrificing "For your sake I have braved the glen and had to do with goblin merchant men" - “Laura bow’d her head to hear, lizzie veiled her blushes” and “pricking up her golden head” (links to the 2007 Lee Breuer production of ADH) - “you tell me of our future that you planned” (Remember)
Morality:
ADH: Nora’s loans, Nora’s flirting with Rank, Krogstad as an immoral man (climbing the ladder, his kids, yet his threats and his financial misconduct), Nora’s father’s financial troubles (makes his immoral), duality to Torvald (Who swept his father in law’s misconducts under the rug, just to marry Nora), Torvald as a moral Saint,
AO4: (links between ADH and Rossetti):
Song:
“I shall not see the shadows/ I shall not feel the rain” - links to “Under the ice? Down in the cold, black water?” (Both represent death, and the grave - but the first is a solace from the pains of the world, the latter is the only avenue out - AO3 - Found Drowned, by G.F Watts (1850), which shows a “fallen woman”, washed up in the Thames, after she threw herself off Waterloo Bridge (shows the cold, black water) - AO5 - Jamie Lloyd’s 2023 production in New York, with Jessica Chastain as Nora, and at the end, she got up from the chair she was sat on the whole time, and actually walked out of the theatre into NYC - while this is hopeful, it may be that her ending is like (AO3) Augustus Egg’s Number 3 from the Past and Present (1858)
FTA:
“I wish and I wish I were a man” - links to “working and earning money, it was almost like being a man” (Both show the desperation of the speaker and Nora to have freedom and independence, to not be reliant on a man, and instead to be a provider and earner) - AO3 - New Woman, a term coined in 1894 by novelist Sarah Grand - John Stuart Mill’s 1851 Statement on marriage - “that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action…as if no such marriage had taken place” - AO5: Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique 1963) “Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?“
No, thank you, John:
“I have no heart? - Perhaps I have not” links to ““that you don’t love me any longer” Nora: No, that’s exactly it” - the shock, horror of a woman actively rejecting a man, reclaiming her identity and her agency
AO3 - Domestic violence and the law:
historical perspective – 1
• It is legal (and therefore perfectly acceptable) for a man to beat his wife,
providing that the stick he uses is no thicker than his thumb.
1857 – the Rule of Thumb (150 years ago)
historical perspective – 2
• Upon marriage, a husband becomes legally responsible for the actions of both his wife and children,
therefore he can physically and verbally chastise them in order to control their behaviour
1860 – the Law of Coverture (150 years ago)
Historical perspective – 3
• Wife beating is prohibited between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am,
because
• the noise keeps the neighbours awake.
1895 – Curfew on wife beating (110 years ago)
(City of London Byelaw)
From the Manchester Evening news
• A woman giving evidence against her husband at Salford yesterday, on a charge of assault, was admonished by the Stipendiary.
• Mr Makinson said: “This is the way with you women. You chatter, chatter, chatter until you irritate. You get the man mad, then you get struck and come here. Try to keep your mouth shut and you will get on better.”
January 6, 1905 – 100 years ago
Advice from a woman’s magazine
• Before your husband comes home: brush your hair, put a ribbon in, tidy the home, have his tea ready and put on some lipstick, a smile and a clean pinny [pinafore].
• Don’t bother him with your day. He has had a busy day and his day is more important than yours.
• Don’t ask questions if he is late or stays out all night.
1960’s Good Housekeeping – 40 years ago
Historical perspective – 4
• “Domestic violence and stray dogs ...... rubbish work for police officers.”
1984 – Sir Kenneth Newman Metropolitan Police Commissioner (24 years ago)
historical perspective – 5
In England and Wales
• Marriage implies consent for sexual intercourse;
• It is deemed as a husband’s legal right,
Therefore
• No criminal offence is committed if a husband ‘rapes’ his wife.
Marital rape was only made a criminal act in 1991 (17years ago)
Marital rape
• Up until then it was considered impossible for a man to rape or sexually assault his wife. To quote:
• “A husband cannot rape his wife unless
the parties are separated or the court has by Injunction forbidden him to interfere with his wife or he has given an undertaking in court not to interfere with her.”
(The law made simple, The Chaucer Press, 1981)
AO3 - Feminism:
The first wave of feminism came about when women’s calls for equality synthesised into a clear movement. It focused on women’s fight for the vote by the peaceful suffragists (led by Millicent Fawcett) and the militant suffragettes (led by Emmeline Pankhurst)
Suffragists vs Suffragettes:
Key Figures/ Quotes:
Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) stated:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
Likewise, a friend of Rossetti, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854) came to define the female stereotype for Victorian society:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman’s pleasure
These ideas were pervasive; even Queen Victoria was quoted as referring to her husband Prince Albert as her: “husband, father, lover, master, friend, adviser, and guide.”
While these gender roles where generally upheld, it is important to acknowledge nuance. Deviation from gender roles was also an important aspect of Victorian culture: the New Woman came to be an important symbol of female empowerment in the last decade of the century, and couples such as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill repudiated the patriarchal constructs underpinning marriage.
Finally, Simone De Beavoir - “one is not born a woman…”..”one becomes a woman”
The “New” woman:
However, the late nineteenth century (fin de siècle) saw a new female identity emerge with the rise of the New Woman, a term coined in 1894 by novelist Sarah Grand.
Through the century, women’s rights movements had emerged in the US in the Seneca Falls convention (1848) which in turn had influenced British campaigners such as Harriet Taylor Mill, who wrote ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ (1852) in response.
By the end of the century, women had developed more professional independence and freedoms, in spite of their political and economic restrictions. This became a recurrent literary theme, in works such as Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895).
A Doll’s House is partly influenced by one of Ibsen’s friends, Laura Kieler. When her husband had tuberculosis, Kieler took out a loan without his consent, to take him to Italy and save his life. She forged a cheque to repay the loan, but when her husband found out, he separated her from her children and committed her to an asylum.
AO3 - Victorian Art:
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853):
Details in the painting reveal that the woman is a mistress, or ‘kept woman’, unmarried to the man she is having an affair with. Half-rising out of her seat, she is transfixed by something through the window.
Originally, the woman’s expression was one of more severe pain and repentance before Hunt repainted it (as the owner didn’t enjoy seeing her so unhappy):
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Found’ (1854-55):
“The picture represents a London street at dawn, with the lamps still lighted along a bridge which forms the distant background. A drover has left his cart standing in the middle of the road (in which, i. e. the cart, stands baa-ing a calf tied on its way to market), and has run a little way after a girl who has passed him, wandering in the streets. He has just come up with her and she, recognising him, has sunk under her shame upon her knees, against the wall of a raised churchyard in the foreground, while he stands holding her hands as he seized them, half in bewilderment and half guarding her from doing herself a hurt.” (Rossetti):
Augustus Egg, ‘Past and Present’ (1858):
“In the central piece the husband discovers his wife's infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their lost mother, and their mother, from behind a boat under a vault on the river shore.” (John Ruskin) - Number 1, 2 and 3 in order, are below:
Found Drowned, George Frederic Watts (1848 or 1850)
AO3 - The Tarantella:
The Tarantella is a fast-paced folk dance from Southern Italy. Its origins are linked to the tarantula spider; it was believed that if bitten, you went into a hysterical frenzy, and mad dancing was the way to sweat out the venom.
Nora’s performance sees her losing control. Her experience is related to ‘hysteria’, the most frequently recorded mental illness for Victorian women. In 1859, French doctor Paul Briquet claimed in his Treatise on Hysteria that over a quarter of women suffered from the condition. Its origins date back to Greek medical theory, with the word hysteros meaning ‘womb’ in Greek. Philosophers and early doctors such as Plato and Hippocrates believed that the womb wandered around the female body, causing emotional and mental volatility and lack of control over emotions.
AO3 - The Mills:
Harriet Taylor (1807-1858) met the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1831. They had a long intellectual friendship until finally she married him in 1851, two years after her first husband died.
Both were feminist and campaigners and writers, with Harriet writing ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ (1851) and John Writing ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869).
When they got married in 1851, John wrote and published this ‘Statement on Marriage’...
Being about, if I am so happy as to obtain her consent, to enter into the marriage relation with the only woman I have ever known, with whom I would have entered into that state; & the whole character of the marriage relation as constituted by law being such as both she and I entirely & conscientiously disapprove, for this amongst other reasons, that it confers upon one of the parties to the contract, legal power & control over the person, property, & freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will; I, having no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers (as I most assuredly would do if an engagement to that effect could be made legally binding on me) feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage, in so far as conferring such powers; and a solemn promise never in any case or under any circumstances to use them. And in the event of marriage between Mrs. Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention, & the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, & freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place; and I absolutely disclaim & repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of such marriage.
AO3 - Conjugal rights:
‘Conjugal rights’ refers to the right to live with your spouse (with sexual consequences – a husband had the right to sex with his wife).
1813: If you desert your spouse and refuse to return you get imprisoned by six months.
1884: You entitle your spouse to a separation/divorce.
Marital rape was only made illegal in the UK in 1991 through the court case ‘R v R’.
However, there were objections to this at the time...
‘The baser part of the populace think that when a legal power is given to them over a living creature – when a person, like a thing, is suffered to be spoken of as their own – as their wife, their child, or their dog – they are allowed to do what they please with it’.
Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill, Wife Murder (1851).
Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to—though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him—he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.
JS Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)
AO3 - Child Custody:
In the Victorian era, children were the property of the husband. An Act of 1839 allowed an innocent wife custody of her children under the age of seven years (raised to sixteen years in 1873). The Infants Custody Act of 1886 made the welfare of the children the determining factor in deciding questions of custody, but even then the father remained during his lifetime the sole legal guardian.
We can see the effects of this law in the life of Charles Dickens: when he separated from his wife Catherine, mother of his ten children, he kept custody of them, and they became estranged from Catherine. Only the eldest, Charles, kept seeing his mother; the rest did not even go to her funeral.
A05:
AO5 - feminist critics of ADH:
Betty Friedan, member of the Women’s Liberation Movement, founder of NOW, wrote in The Feminine Mystique (1963):
“Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human? - That this is what feminism was all about was seen symbolically by Henrik Ibsen. When he said in the play ‘A Doll’s House,’ in 1879, that a woman was simply a human being, he struck a new note in literature. Thousands of women in middle-class Europe and America, in that Victorian time, saw themselves in Nora.”
Likewise, Kate Millett pioneered feminist criticism in Sexual Politics (1969), writing about how literature contains undercurrents of sexual power that reflects the gender roles and assigned power dynamics in society:
Nora is “the true insurrectionary of the sexual revolution . . . battling the sexual politic openly
and rationally . . . [with her band] of revolutionaries. "
AO5: Marxist Criticism:
Eleanor Marx: “There are approximately equal numbers of men and women, and the highest ideal seems to be the complete, harmonious, lasting blending of two human lives. Such an ideal, almost never attainable to-day, needs at least four things. These are love, respect, intellectual likeness, and command of the necessaries of life. Each of these four is far more possible under the system towards which we move than under that in which we now scarce "have our being." The last is absolutely ensured to all. As Ibsen makes Helmer say to Nora, "Home life ceases to be free and beautiful directly its foundations are borrowing and debts." But borrowing and debts, when one is a member of a community, and not an isolated man fighting for his own band, can never come.” (from ‘The Woman Question: A Socialist Point of View’, 1886)
Errol Durbach’s counter-argument: “If, like a good Socialist, she had gone to A Doll's House to affirm the Marxist hope that cultural change and self-transformation were the happy consequence of subverting the social system, then Ibsen might indeed have betrayed her hopes and aspirations. What her Ibsenism had failed to note in the play was Ibsen's belief that spiritual revolution is prior to social change, and that there is only a tenuous hope for miracle in a world where evil may be endemic to human nature.” (from ‘A Century of Ibsen Criticism’, 1994)
AO5: Realism and Naturalism:
George Bernard Shaw:
“Ibsen supplies the want left by Shakespeare. He gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situations. The things that happen to his stage figures are things that happen to us. One consequence is that his plays are much more important to us than Shakespeare's. Another is that they are capable both of hurting us cruelly and of filling us with excited hopes of escape from idealistic tyrannies, and with visions of intenser life in the future.” (from ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’, 1891)
Virginia Woolf:
“Ibsen has the same realistic power. A room is to him a room, a writing table a writing table, and a waste-paper basket a waste-paper basket. At the same time, the paraphernalia of reality have at certain moments to become the veil through which we see infinity. When Ibsen achieves this, as he certainly does, it is not by performing some miraculous conjuring trick at the critical moment. He achieves it by putting us into the right mood from the very start and by giving us the right materials for his purpose. He gives us the effect of ordinary life, as Mr. Forster does, but he gives it us by choosing a very few facts and those of a highly relevant kind. Thus when the moment of illumination comes we accept it implicitly. We are neither roused nor puzzled; we do not have to ask ourselves, What does this mean? We feel simply that the thing we are looking at is lit up, and its depths revealed. It has not ceased to be itself by becoming something else.” (from ‘The Novels of E. M. Forster’, 1927)
AO5 - (Performance ADH): Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse (directed by Lee Breuer, 2007): (review by Lynn Gardner)
It is the casting of 6ft women against much shorter male actors that has grabbed people's attention prior to the arrival of Lee Breuer's extraordinary production in Edinburgh. But what is as interesting is the way Breuer takes Ibsen's 19th-century classic A Doll's House, often cited as one of the first modern plays, and demonstrates how its social radicalism was built on Victorian theatrical values. Like a child playing jacks in a graveyard, Breuer tosses the bones up into the air and lets us watch as they fall into the pit of sentimental melodrama, wild excesses of puppetry, and finally - when all else fails, for both play and Nora - delirious operatic aria.
Beginning with a silent-movie-style accompaniment and culminating in puppet versions of Nora and Torvald, who sit in a theatre watching their own marriage disintegrate, Breuer's production is always commenting upon performance itself. As it flies off into nightmarish Fellini-style sequences, it smashes not just the conventions of 19th-century bourgeois marriage but also those of bourgeois theatre itself. It has something of the shock of the new that Ibsen's original audience must have felt on seeing the drama for the first time.
At its heart is the image of the doll's house and nursery, where the statuesque Nora (Maude Mitchell, who is superb) must contort her body to fit into the space, while her tiny husband, Torvald (Mark Povinelli), feels perfectly at home. With her squeaky baby voice and tumbling blonde curls, Nora is like a perfect doll. Indeed, her daughters play with a replica doll's house and a tiny puppet version of Nora as they learn to grow up just like mummy. In the circumstances, her escape seems infinitely brave - and, in an astonishing, confounding moment, Mitchell tosses off her corset and blonde wig to reveal herself completely naked and entirely hairless. She looks at once Amazonian and desperately vulnerable, like a newborn babe about to stride out into the world.
It is a stunning moment in a stunning show, which concludes with the eerie image of Nora's young daughter sitting astride the nursery rocking-horse, riding into her future. Like that final glimpse of her mother, it is an ambivalent representation that suggests this tot might indeed carve a new role for herself in the world, but also hints at how, a century after Nora slammed the door, many men and women are content to remain in the doll's house, where they will always be vulnerable.
AO5 - “Breaking a Butterfly” (ADH):
In its first appearance on the English stage, ADH was adapted to better accommodate the Victorian masculine archetype.
Torvald is renamed to Humphrey Goddard, and Nora is renamed to Flora. The play departs from Ibsen’s when Humphrey finds out about Flora’s secret, he takes responsibility for the crime; due to this, Flora stays with him, and the play ends on their continued happy marriage:
“Ibsen appears to hold that business men ought to talk business with their wives in the domestic circle, since the moral of the piece is that his heroine in her ignorance is more sinned against than sinning. Very wisely, however, the adapters have not insisted upon this view of the case. They allow villainy in the long run to be defeated, and happiness to be restored to the troubled home, and so no great harm ensues after all from the banker’s neglect to initiate his wife into the mysteries of finance. The Norwegian dénouement is, indeed, of a kind hardly likely to commend itself to the ordinary playgoer in this country. When the forged document is recovered, husband and wife do not fall into each other’s arms and shed tears of joy. The "doll," transformed into a woman, sternly resolves to have done with a husband who has not thought fit to acquaint her with the importance of never putting any name to a cheque but her own, and goes out into the world alone, the curtain falling upon the ominous shutting of the door behind her. Besides providing a conventional termination, the adapters have contrived an original situation by making the husband at one point assume responsibility for the forgery in order to shield his wife, but as nothing comes of this self-sacrifice on his part, the story is not thereby materially strengthened. The play as a whole cannot be described as impressive. It partakes rather of the nature of a storm in a tea-cup.” (The Times review, 1884)
AO5 - The ending of ADH:
As we’ve seen, the first British performance of ADH (Breaking a Butterfly, 1884) changed the ending to preserve Torvald’s masculine integrity, as he sacrifices his reputation for Nora and preserves their marriage. Through its history, the ending of the play has been continually manipulated according to different contexts.
In 1880, when the play was first performed in Germany, Nora’s actress, Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to perform the ending, saying “I would never leave my children.” Ibsen was forced to rewrite the ending so Nora collapses at the thought of abandoning her children, and doesn’t leave. Ibsen regretted this ending, and eventually the play’s original ending was restored.
This alternate ending, however, was used for Harold Braun’s film adaptation in 1940s Germany, upholding the Nazi ideology of female identity: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). It was also used in the 1943 Argentinian film adaptation.
The 1954 Mexican adaptation allowed Nora to leave, but added an additional scene set a year later when she returns. Since then, there have been many other adaptations that manipulate the ending, either for conservative means or to test the viability of the ending, or its relevance in an increasingly changing society.
“Then there was Hans Neuenfels's 1972 "Doll's House" in Stuttgart, in which Nora climbed back into the house through a window after her triumphal exit.
In Rudolf Noelte's 1976 production in Berlin, Torvald was reduced to a drunken weakling who wasn't worth the trouble of leaving.
In 1990 a young and unknown East German named Leander Haussmann became an overnight star with a "Doll's House" from Weimar that ended with a comically gymnastic fight between Nora and Torvald, replete with swinging kicks from a chandelier, after which the 19th-century period set revolved to reveal modern homeless people shivering in the cold.
In Karin Henkel's 1997 production in Vienna, the couple shut themselves out of the house together at the end, continuing their marital spat beyond the slammed door.
And in Stefan Kimmig's 2003 Hamburg production, no less modernized than Mr. Ostermeier's, Nora didn't leave home at all but rather climbed onto her roof balcony to chain-smoke.”
In Jamie Lloyd’s 2023 production in New York, with Jessica Chastain as Nora, Nora sat on a chair throughout the performance, which slowly rotated around the spinning stage. However, at the end, she stood up and walked to the back of the stage, as the stage door lifted up to reveal the real street behind the theatre. As Chastain walked directly from the theatre to the streets of New York, both character and actor left their respective fictions to walk into the ‘real world’.
La Maison d'Argile 1907 (The House of Clay) by Emile Fabre:
loose French sequel of ADH where the protagonist leaves her abusive first husband who she had 2 children with, earning a fortune from the divorce and marries a 2nd husband who she loves. Her 2nd husband is in financial debt and her money can get him out of his situation but she doesn't want to give it all up despite her love for him. Her children from her first marriage feel entitled to her money as well because they believe that she is as fault for breaking up their family. In the end, the woman gives up, surrenders her money to her 1st children, and is then blamed by her 2nd husband for not helping him with his debt as she has now lost all of her money. She is left alone and defeated and she accepts that it is her rightful 'punishment' for choosing herself over her family, even though she was in an impossible situation. Emile Fabre's intention was to make the woman the villian, which he does with a 30 minute segment where the woman is berated by her first children whilst the French audience cheered them on. A 1907 review of the play by the New York Times calls it "a French refutation of A Doll's House with a vengeance".
Pradhan’s ADH - 2015:
Directed by Basab Pradhan
Uses a seemingly perfect Indian American marriage in the Bay Area
A capable and educated Indian woman, who chooses to be a homemaker
Pradhan focuses on how the choice, even if it is the woman’s own choice, overshadows her identity as a human being - she is a mother first, despite being educated and capable
Malaev- Babel: 2016 production:
Typical housewife, Nora depicted as a homemaker: wearing an apron, with hair pinned up, very childlike in her body language
Nora shown as power hungry and greedy for money: because Torvald is in a suit, he is part of the world of business
Lyric Hammersmith, 2019:
Torvald is played by an older, white man and Nora is played by a South Asian actress
Often, physical violence and abuse is also hinted at and Nora is submissive to this abuse of her husband
Nora is in a bright red, traditionally south Asian costume, while Torvald is in a suit
Remember that Anglo- Indian couples were frowned on in Victorian era, which adds another layer of what Nora gave up to be with Torvald
Physically, Torvald is taller, older and bigger
Young Vic, 2019
This adaptation uses 3 different Nora’s: 1918 (1st wave feminist movements, married woman able to vote - a shift in power of women), 1968 (2nd wave feminism, the contraceptive pill introduced, gives women power over their bodies and sexual freedom), 2018 (this Nora gets a payday loan, and she’s able to)
Highlights the progression or rather regression of women’s rights
Azusa Pacific University Theatre, 2015
Set in the 1960s, where the director claims that women were still perceived as fragile housewives
Women were still not allowed to have a credit card/bank account, take out loans etc without their spouse or father’s approval
Costume: Torvald is once again in a suit, and is played by a white man - whereas Nora is played by a black woman
Theatrical Niche production, 2018:
Focus on mental health, and the company even worked with mental health charities and domestic abuse charities, the cast even spoke about this post show, asking audiences to donate to these causes
Use of real life accounts of abuse and mental issues
As part of choreo, objects passed through the walls as would happen in an actual dolls house, along with commentary on emotional baggage
Polly Teale, 2012:
Uses an alternate stage of a derelict house, a bare and grey space, and Nora emerges from the only prop (aside from a few presents on chairs), a huge doll house
Shows what would actually happen if Nora left her ‘doll house’ - what awaits her