Criticism on “A Doll’s House”
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Critiques have said and written so much about Henrik Ibsen’s intentions with Nora and her situation in “A Doll’s House.” For me, “A Doll’s House” is a beautiful problem drama. Ibsen employs this writing technique in this play because he presents a problem and leaves it to the readers to scratch their heads as they look for the solution. In this play, the author presents the question, “what is the position of a woman with regard to her husband and her home?” The play draws our attention to the conjugal life of a middle-class couple in Norwegian society. It reflects the sad results of the subordination of a married woman to the dominance of her husband. Besides, the plays show the method to get out of that predicament. Therefore, in this play, marriage is a significant theme where Nora, the heroine of the story, wins sympathy. Nora abandons her husband and children at the end of the play portraying her rebellious character against the patriarchal values which prevailed in European society those days. Thus, “A Doll’s House” can be viewed as a feminist play. In this essay, I will criticize this play by analyzing how the author tackles the feminist concept in his work.
“A Doll’s House” portrays a woman obsessed with the idea of becoming a person, although the play proposes nothing categorical about women being people. As the play opens, we see that Nora has been leading a pet’s life in her husband’s home. Although her husband Helmer loves her, the love portrays dominance for somebody lower in the rank (Langås, 154). Helmer insists that Nora should exercise the economy, and he always speaks like a moralist. He advises her wife to stop eating macaroons because they would spoil her teeth. Helmer feels that her wife inherited her spendthrift behavior from her father. Viewed in this context, Nora seems to be a victim of her husband’s controlling attitude about money. Nora’s discussion of money with her husband serves to illustrate Nora’s submissive position to her husband. Their conversation is all surrounding Helmer’s pet names for Nora as various birds and small creatures. He says, “It’s a sweet little bird, but it gets through a terrible amount of money. You wouldn’t believe how much it costs a man when he’s got a little song bird like you” (Act 1). Nora’s position concerning her husband is too submissive and unimportant such that he speaks about her in the third person as if she is a pet. In this conversation, Helmer strips his wife of her role as a woman and as a human being.
In Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Nora is also portrayed as a dependent human. This is seen when Helmer feels sick, and Nora has to take him to Italy for a medical check-up. Nora is a devoted wife, and since they do not have money to cater to travel and medical expenses for her husband, she has to borrow money and even forge her father’s signature. Nora does not reveal this sacrifice to her husband for a long time because of fear that it would demean Helmer’s self-respect and ego. This establishes the play’s undercutting that would convert Nora from her submissive character to a human by the end of the play (Gerould, 137). Nora’s conversation with her old friend, Mrs. Linde, reveals to us that Nora secretly borrowed money by forging her father’s signature because she did not want to be accused of not participating in the human struggle. Helmer was very opposed to Nora’s decision to borrow money, but Nora believed that the trip would and indeed did save her husband’s life. Nora reveals this to us when she says, “It was I who saved Torvald’s life…Papa never gave us a penny. It was I who raised the money” (Act 2). By this claim, Nora desperately challenges other characters to take her seriously because her husband has denied her that. Helmer sees women as both child-like and helpless creatures detached from reality and entirely dependent on men for support, and that is why he does not want Nora to secure a loan. While the audience perceives Nora’s actions as something a woman would do to her husband, it is still viewed as something that would upset the balance of power that the author establishes at the beginning of the play. Some critiques say that Nora committed a criminal act by forging her father’s signature to acquire a loan to save her husband, ignoring the fact that this is a wholly well-meant act, which is only a crime because Nora is a woman (Templeton, 34). Although Nora has shown her ability for freely independent thought and decisive action by borrowing money to help her husband and even secretly repaying it, she is still kept wholly in a subservient and weakened position by how Helmer treats her.
“A Doll’s House” revolves around the subject of the disillusionment of a wife caught in the predicament of her position. According to Hossain (12), Nora is disillusioned about her husband. The two reasons that lead to disagreement between Nora and her husband are that Helmer regards Nora as his property, and secondly, when Helmer reads, Krogstad’s letter becomes violent. For these reasons, Nora decides to leave her husband at the end of the play. Before leaving, Nora gives her husband her reason for going. She wants emancipation from her husband’s dominion. Nora says that she is leaving because first her father and then her husband wronged her. Her father used her as his baby doll, and Helmer treated her as his doll wife. Now, Nora is seeking to establish her own identity. Thus, she makes the hard decision of abandoning her husband and their four children.
Based on the above-discussed facts, “A Doll’s House” can be said to be a feminist play. The author of this play makes us sympathize with Nora and feel that she is right at the end of the play. Torvald’s urge to control Nora in almost everything, treating her like a child and the names he calls her, is evidence of his infantilization of her. By calling her names of birds and small creatures, Helmer wants to stress his dominance over Nora, disempower her, dehumanize her and make her subservient to him. The question that makes us feel that Nora is right is, “Why should a wife be subordinate and always servile to her husband?” The decision by Nora to leave her house compels husbands to examine their relationships with their wives. The play, therefore, advocates for women’s rights. It is a beautiful play that focuses on women’s predicament in a male-dominated society. The play ends with a vital step taken by a wife, making us admire Nora’s courage to leave the house, although Torvald declines to divorce her.
Works Cited
Templeton, Joan. “The doll house backlash: Criticism, feminism, and Ibsen.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1989): 28-40.
Gerould, Daniel Charles. “George Bernard Shaw’s Criticism of Ibsen.” Comparative Literature 15.2 (1963): 130-145.
Langås, Unni. “What Did Nora Do? Thinking Gender with A Doll’s House.” Ibsen Studies 5.2 (2005): 148-171.
Ibsen, Henrik. A doll’s house. A&C Black, 2008.
Hossain, Amir. “Re-interpreting A Doll’s House through Post-modernist Feminist Projections.” IRWLE 11.1 (2015): 1-14.