A Doll S House Critical Overview
A Doll S House Critical Overview
A Doll S House Critical Overview
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
The Playwright
Reading a Play
Plot
In its simplest terms, the plot is the story line of a play. However, a plot is never a
collection of random incidents strung together; instead, it is a carefully selected
series of incidents (actions) that are presented in an order that is designed to
create—and then resolve—a conflict. The ordering of the incidents can be as
important as the incidents themselves. In a play, the incidents are almost
never told in the order in which they occurred. Even in a history play, the
events can be told from several perspectives so that some characters know
certain facts before others do.
Conflict
In A Doll’s House, the exposition occurs in several scenes, from Mrs. Linde’s
comments on Nora’s youthful reputation as a spendthrift to Helmer’s revelations
about Nora’s father and his character to the nursemaid’s acknowledgment that
she raised Nora after placing her own child out for adoption. Other scenes of
exposition include the gradual building of background on Mrs. Linde’s life,
Krogstad’s earlier struggles, and their previous relationship.
Characters
The main character in a play is called the protagonist; the opposing character is
the antagonist. While the protagonist can be a hero, many—in fact, most—
protagonists are far from heroic. Hamlet, for example, lacks the leadership
qualities of a hero, but he is the protagonist in Shakespeare’s play. Similarly, the
antagonist can have many positive qualities, but in the play, the antagonist’s role
is to oppose the protagonist.
Characters in a play are developed to different levels. Some are fully formed
characters with an interior life; these are round characters. In contrast, flat
characters have limited personalities and offer the audience little real interest.
The role of a flat character is to participate in incidents that move the
action forward or to behave in a predictable way that moves another
character to change.
In addition to round and flat characters and to dynamic and static characters,
plays can also be peopled by stock characters. These are almost like a mass-
produced item that is kept in stock in a store: you know exactly what you are
buying. A stock character is a stereotype, manifesting universal
characteristics. Thus, the dumb blonde could be a stock character, as could the
belligerent cop, the whining brat, the prejudiced Southerner. In the case of A
Doll’s House, the nursemaid - loyal, patient, supportive - is a stock
character.
Often, a stock, flat, or static character is used as a foil for a more highly
developed character. In this case, the less developed character is used as a
point of contrast in which a dynamic character’s growth is made more noticeable
by the sameness of the foil.
Ibsen uses the notion of the foil to good effect in Act III, where two fairly flat
characters, Mrs. Linde and Krogstad, decide to band together in hopes of
growing into the fuller selves each dreams of becoming. This development raises
questions of whether a marriage of two people who recognize their faults can
thrive and whether banding together will actually help them overcome those very
faults. The contrast between their decision and the sterility of the Helmer
marriage is a strong point of interest in the play, especially given Helmer’s
absolute inability to change his understanding of Nora.
Symbolism
Although A Doll’s House is a firmly realistic play, it uses strong visual symbolism
to convey its points. The delivery of the Christmas tree and the revelation of
Nora’s efforts to decorate for Christmas in the previous year symbolize the
importance of appearances in the household. The tree itself is an ornament,
just as Nora comes to see herself as an ornament in the home. Later in the play,
Nora’s changes of clothing take on symbolic importance. Her dress for the fancy-
dress ball is all about appearances and unreality, for this is a costume to cover
up her worries. When Nora changes into everyday clothes at the end of the play,
she is symbolizing her new life of plainness, reality, and work. The repeated
references to the letter box are important because they remind the reader that
Nora is locked out of the business transactions of the house, having no key to the
mailbox.
The monologue
Many of the plays from Ibsen’s early and middle periods, including A Doll’s
House, follow the conventions of the “well-made play.” This was a term used by
the influential French playwright Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) to describe a play
with the following elements:
• The pyramid itself is in the form of an equilateral triangle; the left leg is
the inciting moment, the standing point is the climax, and the right leg
represents the last suspense, the point at which the dénouement begins.
• The left leg of the pyramid is built on the inciting moment, that is, the
incident that begins the real movement of the play. This is not necessarily
the first incident of a play (such as the opening of a door or the
introduction of the early characters). Instead, it will be the first incident that
introduces elements of conflict, passion, or mystery.
• A line from the inciting moment to the climax encompasses all the rising
action, that is, all the incidents that add either exposition or complication to
the plot. In this sense, exposition is additional information, as when the
reader learns that Nora has borrowed a significant amount of money
without her husband’s knowledge. Complication ensues when a character
or incident makes the action more urgent or more delicate; for example,
the introduction of Krogstad is a complication.
• The climax is the crisis-point of the play—the moment of revelation
toward which the rising action has been moving.
• After the climax, incidents are considered falling action, as they fall away
from the high point along a line from the climax to the moment of last
suspense. However, life is untidy, and additional crises can arise, so the
falling action can include reversals and even a catastrophe.
• While Freytag’s pyramid shows the moment of last suspense as the end
of the play, Scribe used the term dénouement to point out that
explanations often follow the last bit of suspense in a play. Other critics
use the term resolution for the closing action of the play, in which the
conflict is resolved for good or ill.
In A Doll’s House, Ibsen relies primarily on irony, which occurs when the reality
of the situation is not what appears on the surface. The gap may be apparent to
the audience, but not to the characters (dramatic irony), or the irony may be
recognized by one character but not by another (situational irony). In Act III of A
Doll’s House, Helmer says, “Do you know, Nora, I have often wished that you
might be threatened by some great danger, so that I might risk my life’s blood,
and everything, for your sake” (p. 71). In this example of situational and dramatic
irony, Helmer actually is in such a situation; both Nora and the audience know it,
but he does not.
Verbal irony occurs when a character makes a comment that is heard one way
but meant another. In Act III, after reading Krogstad’s letter, Helmer asks if Nora
understands what she has done. She answers, “Yes, now I am beginning to
understand thoroughly.” (p. 72) Helmer hears this as a simple acknowledgment
that she knows what she has done wrong in committing a fraud, but Nora is
saying—and the audience is hearing—her admission that she is beginning to see
how wrong she has been to be beholden to Helmer for eight years. This can also
be viewed as a form of dramatic irony.
A Doll’s House was published in 1879. Ibsen was still living in Europe on his long
self-imposed exile when he wrote this play, but he was very closely attuned to
social developments in his native Norway as well as to the mores in the rest of
the continent. The European social norms at this time were still largely influenced
by England, the dominant political and military power. Queen Victoria set a
standard of middle-class propriety, with social life tending to be based in the
home, the family unit held up as an ideal, and men—in spite of Victoria’s own
gender—being held up as the superior being in a household. Popular art and
literature extolled the calm household under the benign authority of the male. For
example, consider the royal portraits by Franz Winterhalter, which idealized the
domestic life of Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert.
In contrast to the surface picture of happiness and prosperity, however,
challenges to the established concept were being published, although they were
considered shocking, even radical. Charles Dickens was writing novels that
exposed the bare and brutal underside of Victorian life, with its disregard of the
poor, blatant class inequities, grinding exploitation of those who were relegated
to domestic service and manual labor because of their lack of educational
access, and heartbreak brought into homes by alcohol, poverty, and abuse.
These trends were echoed across Europe and in the United States. By living in
Spain, Italy, and Germany, Ibsen was exposed to these social norms and
tensions to a much greater extent than he would have been had he remained
solely in Norway.
Women did not have the right to vote during this period. In Great Britain, the first
resolution proposing that women be empowered to vote was introduced to
Parliament in 1851. While this effort failed, social critics began to think and write
about the penalty society paid when only half of its members participate fully as
voting citizens. John Stuart Mill, an influential English social critic, published
Subjection of Women in 1869—ten years before Ibsen published A Doll’s House.
A second bill proposing women’s suffrage in Great Britain was introduced in
Parliament in 1870. Political action leagues took up the cause, and women
sought newspaper coverage as one way of achieving their aims.
This strategy put the debate about women’s roles and rights in the mainstream of
daily life and spread the discussion into novels and plays. In fact, this debate
went on for many years; women gained the right to vote in Norway in 1913, with
Norway and Finland being the first countries to extend this right. Suffrage was
extended to women over the age of 30 after the First World War in Great Britain
and revised to be the same as for men in 1928. In the United States, women
were granted the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution
in 1920.
Although voting rights were perhaps the most prominent index of women’s place
in society, other social reforms were also the subject of debate. These included
property rights, the role of women in the workplace, and access to education.
Ibsen was living in Europe when he wrote A Doll’s House; it was published in
1879. While social critics, such as John Stuart Mill, were writing and speaking for
an expanded role for women (Mill’s Subjection of Women was published in
1869), the movement for women’s suffrage was not yet a robust one, and women
had a very narrow role in society. In many countries, as in Norway, they could not
borrow money; in many places, women could not even own property. Instead,
they were often treated as property rather than as people. Middle and upper-
class women were generally educated at home if at all, and they were not
prepared for careers.
Literary critics were, by and large, not social critics, and they tended to accept
the status quo for women. Thus, when A Doll’s House was published, it was
regarded as quite a radical work because of the inversion of the social order that
occurs in the play. More recently, however, feminist criticism has emerged as a
new way of looking at literary works. Beginning in the 1970s, a number of female
critics have argued for a reexamination of literary works with the goal of gaining
insights into the evolving role of women and understanding how both women and
men have used women in literature to further certain points of view.
In the world of feminist criticism, Henrik Ibsen demands close study for his use of
women as protagonists and fully formed characters. Nora Helmer and other
women created by Ibsen were intended to drive home the point that no
society can flourish if half its members are in bondage. Ibsen’s full
development of Nora, as contrasted with his limited treatment of Helmer, is
designed in part to bolster the argument that women should be full participants in
society. Nora’s radical decision at the end of the play is intended to argue
that a woman can be a better wife and mother if she is fully actualized—that
is, if her own intellectual and emotional needs are met in the process.