3RUWDOWR)RUJLYHQHVV$7ULEXWHWR,EVHQ V1RUD

Vicki Mahaffey

South Central Review, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 54-73 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/scr.2010.0013

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/scr/summary/v027/27.3.mahaffey.html

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54 South Central Review

Portal to Forgiveness: A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora

Vicki Mahaffey, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Any examination of the idea of forgiveness must acknowledge that

forgiveness is one possible way of responding—perhaps with time—to
a prior transgression. Harm was done to someone or something; a wound
was inflicted. What is to be done with the pain and suffering that resulted
from that transgression? Unexpectedly, this is a “literary” problem, be-
cause both the victim and the perpetrator respond by telling a story about
what happened. The question is, what kinds of stories get told? What
presuppositions authorize the different possible ways of telling them, and
what are the implications of the various narrative configurations?
Forgiveness is usually understood as one possible response of a victim
to someone who has offended him or her, as a decision to grant absolution
rather than to blame. Such a view turns the question of forgiveness into
a moral (or even moralistic) issue. I am arguing, on the contrary, that in
order to understand the significance of forgiveness, we must take it out of
the realm of morality altogether. When we do so, forgiveness emerges not
as a response to someone else’s action, but is instead an internal move—a
change of attitude within the self—that has no necessary relation to the
question of whether or not the victim has decided to absolve the other
party. Forgiveness, then, need not be defined as an indulgent or selfless
generosity toward the perpetrator: a gift that displaces and annuls the
rage of retribution. The offender’s culpability is actually irrelevant to the
most immediate problem at hand, the problem of how to move forward
after having received a wound. The first step towards a forgiveness as-
sociated with healing cannot take place as long as the victim is blaming
(or excusing) the person who has done wrong. The reason for this has to
do with the similar psychology at work in both blame and defense: power
is being attributed to the perpetrator. Where the blame is, that’s where
the power is. To blame is to continue to attribute power to the other; it
sustains the victim’s feeling of helplessness. It is often to expunge such
helplessness that a victim engages in retribution. But forgiveness (defined
as a conscious decision to refocus attention from past damage to what
remains in the present and possibly even the future, without minimizing
the severity of the damage) can be conceptualized as an alternative to
both blame and absolution. More specifically, forgiveness is a decision

© South Central Review 27.3 (Fall 2010): 54–73.

A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 55

to avoid conflict, whether emotional or physical, in order to create a calm

space in which fuller self-realization may become possible.
The kind of story that victims typically tell in reaction against having
been wronged is a grievance story, a story of blame. The main character
of a grievance story is the perpetrator: the person who caused the harm.
Fred Luskin, who defines grievances as painful episodes that the narra-
tor has endured but not healed from, summarizes research findings that
offenders and victims give significantly different accounts about who
was responsible for the hurt; both offenders and victims blame the other,
whether directly or indirectly, for the offense: “subjects who responded
from the point of view of the offended minimized their responsibility
for what happened and put blame on the offender. . . . they themselves
were relatively blameless.” On the other hand, “Subjects writing from
the point of view of the offender . . . placed more responsibility for what
happened with the offended and minimized the damage done by their
actions. In their stories the hurt was more accidental.”1 The idea of ac-
cidental injury is worth pausing over, because the offender’s insistence
that he or she did not intend to hurt the victim, that the victim provoked
the offender in such a way that in reacting, the offender accidentally did
harm, highlights the asymmetry between the accounts of the offender
and the victim. The victim accuses; the offender disavows and deflects
the charge by making a counter-accusation that is indirect, but nonethe-
less antagonistic.
The unwillingness or inability to forgive—either one’s victim or one’s
abuser—amounts to a sustained refusal to permit healing, often for what
seem to be very good reasons. Neither party will let the wrong or the
conflict with the perpetrator go, whether that wrong was perceived or
actual. Why hold on to a grievance that continues to cause suffering?
The answer is complicated, because it needs to take into account some-
thing that is going on beneath the surface. Both “blamers” often cling to
their reciprocally accusatory positions because they presume that they
know or understand what was happening in the mind of the other. This
presumption offers the solace of certainty, and uncertainty can seem
more threatening than (justifiable) suffering. To blame is to hold on to
an offence, whereas to forgive is to “lose” it, to give it away; the word
“give” is nestled in “forgive.” Often, when someone feels he or she has
lost something already, it becomes difficult to “lose” anything else, even
if what one is losing is a grievance and the “loss” results from a deliber-
ate choice, a kind of gift to oneself and (perhaps secondarily) to another.
Forgiveness is the result of learning how to retell the story of hurt so
as to interweave one’s objections to having been harmed, having one’s
56 South Central Review

legitimate boundaries violated, with acceptance of the fact that unless

the wound was traumatic (incapable of being healed), the pain that was
inflicted need not be permanent. Perhaps what makes forgiveness more
difficult, though, is that in order to do it the victim must let the offender
go, along with the agon that keeps victim and offender intimately con-
nected through “passion” (here understood with its secondary erotic
meaning heard through its original, etymological one: suffering). In
order to forgive, one must be willing to stand alone to do the slow and
exploratory work of healing.
The psychology behind accusation and (self) defense is oddly similar:
both parties (blamer and blamed) strive to preserve an illusion of inno-
cence, of having been in the right when they performed (or endured) a
given action. Each side can only sustain the illusion of innocence if the
other side is exposed as culpable. The two sides compete for the prize
of seeming justified in their hostility. This competition simultaneously
sustains and denies any intimacy in the connection between victim
and perpetrator, the consummation of which is likely to be destructive.
Sigmund Freud offered insight into the dangers of agon when he asked
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who was one of his patients and adherents, never
to defend him or his works when she heard him being attacked. H.D.,
in Tribute to Freud, her account of having undergone psychoanalytic
treatment with Freud that she recorded retrospectively during the blitz
in London, recounts Freud’s reasons for making this strange request.
He explained that at the moment when she began to mount a defense of
her doctor and teacher, she would only drive the attacker’s anger and
prejudice deeper; she could do no good for Freud by defending him:
“antagonism cannot be rooted out from above the surface, and it thrives,
in a way, on heated argument.” Moreover, Freud asserted that her effort
to defend him would not benefit her, either; she would simply expose
her feelings. Instead, he recommended that she simply ignore whatever
she happens to hear: “If the matter is ignored, the attacker may forgo his
anger – or in time, even, his unconscious mind may find another object on
which to fix its tentacles.”2 Freud isn’t telling H.D. to give up her values,
convictions, or principles, nor is he saying that argument itself is always
useless. His advice concerns the best response to emotional (rather than
rational) objections: when someone is angry, the best response is not to
engage but to move on, to bypass what we might call the “intimacy of
agon.” He is reminding her of her limits as a conscious agent as well
as underscoring her autonomy of mind, which may well be affected by
an antagonistically charged “bonding” with one of Freud’s detractors.
To ignore a hate-filled challenge is a kind of “forgiveness”: you don’t
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 57

condone or confirm the other’s opinions or feelings, but you give him
or her permission to express them freely, without bonding with that
hate. When accusations are rooted in emotion rather than reason, and
when they are motivated by a hunger for conflict, it is destructive, not
constructive, for a listener to enter into partnership with the accuser by
arguing against him or her.
Henrik Ibsen’s famous (or infamous) nineteenth-century play, A Doll’s
House (1879), provides readers or viewers with a particularly complex
and powerful set of stories about transgression and forgiveness, and
about the emotional need to assert and defend one’s own heroic “right-
ness” that often subtends accusation.3 Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora
“play” at marriage and parenting, but Nora discovers at the end of the
play that they were playing by very different rules. Nora thought that
each of them would do anything to promote the well-being of the other,
that each would sacrifice the self for the other. She saw herself and her
husband as sharing a secret, reciprocal bond, and it was the underlying
security provided by this bond that allowed them to enjoy themselves in
superficial but nonetheless delightful ways the rest of the time. She had
privately sacrificed herself to save her husband’s life when he was ill, and
she was certain that he would do the same for her if her well-being was
ever threatened. Torvald, in contrast, was playing a hierarchical game in
which the thing that mattered most was his honor and reputation. Nora
was his “doll wife” (as she had been her Daddy’s “doll child” before
she left home), a delightful toy that he cared for and that gave him much
entertainment and pleasure in return. As she explains, “the children in
turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played
with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with
them.”4 The heroism Torvald prided himself on was predicated, not on
a willingness to sacrifice himself for those he loved, but on his ability
to protect them (and himself), which he does by creating an artificial
domestic world in which they are “safe” from harm, but also from real-
ity. In Torvald’s world, neither his wife nor children have the power of
autonomous movement, which makes it impossible not only for them to
take risks, but also to change or grow.
Ibsen’s play is relevant to my discussion here because it stages a
conflict between two different models of forgiveness: Torvald’s under-
standing of what it means to forgive (and transgress) is pitted against the
new (and radically amoral) conception of forgiveness that Nora forms
as a result of what has happened in the course of the play. Torvald’s
understanding of transgression is the normative one: one must avoid
doing or being wronged because both states threaten the preservation of
58 South Central Review

one’s integrity. One can “forgive” and “forget” only if there is no longer
any threat to the status quo. In that case, nothing will have changed, and
everything can go on as it did before the threat occurred. Nora’s view of
forgiveness has less to do with transgression, because she had always been
operating by a different code of ethics that was not predicated on right
or wrong. Instead of protecting her self-interest, she valued something
almost diametrically opposed to such self-protection: the willingness
to sacrifice the self out of love. She and Torvald had been able to play
house so pleasurably because although neither had a clear view of what
was really happening, her self-sacrifice worked to promote his stability
of being, and they felt “happy.” When she finally apprehends the two
different codes under which she and her husband had been living, her
“forgiveness,” unlike his, is not a forgiveness of the other person; the
“gift” is not a gift to the spouse or offender, but to the self. What she gives
herself is temporary freedom from bondage, if we understand bondage
neutrally, not just as slavery, but as engagement in any bond with another
person, whether of intimacy or conflict. Nora gives herself space, and
specifically the space to achieve a new self-realization.5
Torvald’s model of forgiveness is apparent at two different points
in the play, in Act Two and again in Act Three. Both instances empha-
size his readiness to blame Nora for violating his rules and precepts, a
reaction shockingly at variance from what Nora expects: that he will
want to sacrifice himself to save her (as she sacrificed herself for him:
by forging her father’s signature to borrow money to take him to Italy,
thereby restoring his health). In Act II, Nora tries to dissuade Torvald
from terminating Krogstad’s employment, the man who has power over
her because he lent her money without her husband’s knowledge. She
cajoles, “If a little squirrel were to ask ever so nicely . . . Would you
do something for it.” She then implores Torvald to let Krogstad keep
his job at the bank. Torvald replies, “The more you plead for him, the
more impossible you make it for me to keep him on,”6 and he dismisses
Krogstad immediately. Torvald’s response to her anxiety is to “forgive”
her for it, while refusing to do what she asks:

My dear Nora, I forgive you this anxiety of yours, although it

is actually a bit of an insult. Oh, but it is, I tell you! It’s hardly
flattering to suppose that anything this miserable pen-pusher
wrote could frighten me! But I forgive you all the same, because
it is rather a sweet way of showing how much you love me.
[He takes her in his arms] This is how things must be, my own
darling Nora. When it comes to the point, I’ve enough strength
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 59

and enough courage, believe me, for whatever happens. You’ll

find I’m man enough to take everything on myself.7

Nora’s response is terror and an assertion that she will never allow him
to do that, at which point Torvald compromises, saying, “All right, then
we’ll share it, Nora—as man and wife.”
In the light of what eventually happens—Torvald’s unwillingness,
despite his earlier assurance to the contrary, to take any imputation of
wrongdoing at all upon himself—his reassurance here, while probably
sincere, is revealed as more of a placation than a commitment. When his
integrity feels threatened, he will not be able to demonstrate the loving
willingness to assume responsibility he calls “manliness,” although by
this definition Nora, his female doll-wife, had been “man” enough to take
the responsibility for her husband’s illness and cure upon herself. The first
point to notice about Torvald’s forgiveness of Nora here is that she hasn’t
done anything wrong, except perhaps to interfere in matters of business
by asking him to reconsider a decision he has made. He calms his wife
by telling her a story, one that is true only under certain circumstances:
that he is committed to protecting Nora and their children at any cost to
himself. What he doesn’t specify is that he can only do this if it doesn’t
compromise his public reputation, what he calls his honor. Moreover,
his claim that he will assume responsibility for whatever happens rests
on the presupposition that Nora is helpless and innocent; in other words,
that she is a helpless victim and Krogstad a ruthless offender. In Act I,
Torvald had already condemned Krogstad for the same act of wrongdoing
that Nora also committed: forgery.8 A forgery, to him, is a particularly
pernicious form of lie, and he prides himself on an abhorrence of lies.
Although he begins by deploring the forgery of Krogstad, he goes on
to denounce the danger of other lies, especially those of a woman and
mother. He describes liars as contaminating the whole domestic space:

Just think how a man with a thing like that on his conscience will
always be having to lie and cheat and dissemble; he can never
drop the mask, not even with his own wife and children. And the
children—that’s the most terrible part of it, Nora. . . . A fog of
lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection
to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of
house is reeking with evil germs.9

At this point he jumps from Krogstad to women, claiming, “Practically

all juvenile delinquents come from homes where the mother is dishonest.”
Nora questions this, since he began with the example of a dishonest father
60 South Central Review

(Krogstad). Torvald brushes her question aside, conceding that although

fathers can have the same poisonous effect, “it’s generally traceable to
the mothers.”10 The act ends with Nora imagining herself as poisoning
her home, and then rejecting such a thing as even possible.
In this scene, Torvald dramatizes the psychology that makes forgive-
ness possible only in a moral sense: he has blamed a man for deception
and asserted his own inviolable honesty (and that of his family) in contrast
to it. Torvald is strongly defended against the notion that he or anyone
he loved could ever do anything wrong, borrow money, or keep secrets.
As Nora tells her friend Kristine in Act I, “he refuses to take on anything
that’s the least bit shady.”11 Of course his high ethical standard is not the
problem; the problem is his oversimplification of the difference between
right and wrong, his conviction—perhaps his determination—that there
can never be an overlap between them. That is what makes Torvald judg-
mental: he can never contemplate the possibility that a person could run
foul of the law through love, or compassion, or consideration, or even
innocence, which are the qualities that motivated Nora’s two deceptions:
her forgery of her father’s name, and her act of borrowing money (and
working to pay it off) without her husband’s knowledge.
Torvald’s inability to forgive is a sign of his inflexibility, his determi-
nation to create what cannot be created: a perfect “world” in the home
that he might call his castle, although Nora (like Ibsen) comes to see it
as much smaller: a doll’s house. He treats his wife as a pet, a wild bird
or a squirrel who frolics for his amusement, and he refuses to tolerate
or contemplate anything ugly. Nora confesses to Torvald’s friend Dr.
Rank that although she is very happy, there is one little thing she’d like
to do, but dare not try because “It’s not very nice.” When Rank presses
her to reveal what it is, she confesses that she would love to say “Damn”
in front of her upright husband, and Rank accuses her of being mad for
even contemplating it.12 In Act II, Rank not only acknowledges but de-
fends Torvald’s intolerance for unpleasantness when he tells Nora that
he intends to break off communication with Torvald once his own “final
horrible disintegration” has begun (due to a syphilitic infection inherited
from his father). He explains, “[Torvald] Helmer is a sensitive soul; he
loathes anything that is ugly. I don’t want him visiting me . . .”13 Dr.
Rank’s fatal illness is a kind of punishment for a transgression he did
not even commit, but he knows and accepts that Torvald would recoil
from apprehending the final stages of his pain and suffering. There is
something Christlike about Rank’s suffering “for another man’s sins,”14
but Torvald’s morality is not that of Jesus. Rank’s final “passion” will be
signified when he sends Nora a visiting card with a black cross on it. The
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 61

implicit identification of Rank’s suffering with that of Jesus on the cross

signals that there is another, self-sacrificial model of forgiveness at work
in the play, one linked with Christianity as it is most often understood,
the one that Nora has been using as her guide.15
It might be worthwhile to pause for a moment over the “crime” that
both Krogstad and Nora committed—forgery—in order to understand its
symbolic importance in the play. Forgery is the act of pretending to be
someone you aren’t, and to profit from that deception. It is a kind of art,
a form of “play-acting,” except that a forger’s deception is motivated by
a conscious objective: to impersonate someone else. Torvald, too, could
be described as impersonating someone else for his own profit, but his
deception isn’t conscious or deliberate. His disguise is that of a perfect
man, who has a perfect wife and perfect children, who never do any wrong
and are rewarded for their tractability. His inability to forgive Krogstad
(or Nora, at least until he discovers that no one will know what she did)
is motivated by a self-interest that he disavows. Ironically, playing house
with a family of “dolls” could be described as dishonest in a different
sense, because Torvald is dishonest with himself. He believes that his
miniaturized domestic world has none of the imperfections that can help
human beings come to realize themselves more fully; he mistakes living,
changing, loving individuals for dolls, and his own smallness of mind
for honorable integrity.
The setting of the play, on the two days that surround Christmas,
frames Nora’s ethos of forgiveness in relation to the way forgiveness
is most often understood through Christianity: as Jesus’s loving and
agonizing gift of his life for the salvation of others. He consciously and
deliberately offers his life—that of a perfect sacrificial lamb—for theirs,
taking all the suffering of the world upon himself in order to “forgive” or
protect them for suffering for their wrongdoings. According to this view,
Jesus gives his life as one huge payment to cancel the debts of others
by bearing all the costs of what they’ve done on his own body; he gives
for others, an act that thereafter defines for-giving. His giving for others
is pitted against acts aimed at “getting” material advantages “for” the
self, acts that are represented as forgetting both human mortality and
the eternity associated with the world of the spirit. When Jesus throws
the moneychangers out of the Temple, he announces his advocacy of a
new ethos for Judaism, an ethos in which giving will displace getting.
However, what is not generally acknowledged about Jesus’ sacrifice
is how its meaning is affected by his resurrection and transfiguration.
The resurrection suggests that his act of supreme giving is not what it
may seem to be: a selfless abandonment of his own needs and desires in
62 South Central Review

favor of the needs of others. On the contrary, the resurrection suggests

that Jesus’ gift, his for-giveness, produced an almost unprecedented
transformation, or new realization, of the self. He reappears transfigured
by his gift, and his transfiguration is represented as his transcendence
of his former limitations, even the limitation of mortality. According to
this argument, Jesus’ sacrifice is not selfless; it is instead a model for
changing the self, for facilitating its evolution.
If we plot Nora’s changing ethics over the course of the play against
those of Jesus, whose birth they are celebrating with their family, it be-
comes apparent that she moves from an understanding of forgiveness as
loving self-sacrifice to an experience of forgiveness as self-realization,
and that this change in her, that all the world deplored as “scandalous,”
mirrors that of Jesus as he moved from the agony of the Passion to the
despair of the crucifixion to the self-realization figured by the resurrec-
tion. It is ironic, then, that the world decried Nora as a “monster.”16
For most of the play, we see Nora taking pride and joy in the secret
self-sacrifice she made to save her husband’s life. Not only did Nora
herself do whatever was necessary to restore her husband’s well-being,
regardless of what it cost her, but she also expected that Torvald would
return the favor if he found out, taking all responsibility for what she
did upon himself, out of love for her. She refers to what she knows he
will do for her as the “miracle.”17 Her romantic if melodramatic plan is
to have the last word in this Liebestod by killing herself, thereby mak-
ing the ultimate sacrifice, in order to save his reputation. After Torvald
has read Krogstad’s letter in Act III, Nora’s first exclamation is “You
mustn’t try to save me, Torvald!”18 It is only after he makes it clear
that he has no intention of “saving” her—in fact, he will cut her off in
everything but name from himself and the children—that she realizes
he is living by a different story. Like the offenders that were studied in
the research Luskin cites, Torvald minimizes his own responsibility for
the family dishonor and treats Nora as fully deserving his punishment
of her, disregarding her loving motives. If Nora’s conception of loving
self-sacrifice reflects a shallow—albeit widespread—understanding of the
Christian ethos, Torvald, as a man of the world, merely paid lip service
to that ethos. Unlike Nora, he knows that self-preservation is a neces-
sary precondition to loving, so he, too, has half of the truth. As long as
the two live in harmony, Nora and Torvald can balance each other, but
a conflict will be irreconcilable.
The conflict between the perspectives of man and wife is embodied in
a frenzied dance: the tarantella that Nora is to perform at the main social
event of the Christmas season: a masquerade party which Nora will attend
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 63

in the costume of a Neapolitan fisher lass. The tarantella provides Ibsen

with a physical and artistic metaphor of Nora’s internal struggle19—
between her love of life and her desire to prove her love for her husband
by sacrificing herself for him—as well as an emblem of the excitement
and poison of their marital relationship. Nora’s dancing is her Passion,
her agony and ecstasy, and watching it kindles a different kind of passion
in her husband, who cannot wait to get her alone afterwards.20
The conflict between the two different stories of the Helmers’ mar-
riage—the story of the family’s inhuman perfection, that must be pro-
tected at any cost, versus the story of self-sacrifice for the greater good
of all—is something that Nora first performs, without words, with her
body when she practices the Tarantella so wildly at the end of Act II. It
is appropriate that the dilemma Nora has found herself in ends up being
expressed physically, coached by Torvald, through a dance she learned on
the island of Capri. She asks Torvald to help her rehearse it in an effort to
distract him from opening the letterbox, which contains the letter outlin-
ing her deception, her debt, and her forgery. She asks Torvald to play for
her, and to tell her “what to do, [to] keep me right—as you always do.”21
When she grabs her tambourine and a bright shawl and begins to dance
to his accompaniment, he complains that she is dancing too fast and too
wildly, but she insists, “This is how it has to be.” Dr. Rank suggests that
he replace Torvald as the accompanist, so that Torvald can better direct
her, but even when she is not dancing to her husband’s tune Nora dances
“more and more wildly,” and “she does not seem to hear” his repeated
directions, until Torvald orders everyone to “Stop,” saying “This is sheer
madness.” Nora insists that he coach her right up until the performance
the following night, postponing all of his business, and he indulges her,
saying, “The child must have her way.”22
The Tarantella is perfectly chosen as a wordless, physical expression
of desire laced with poison. It allows Nora to express her fear that she
might “go mad,”23 as well as her conviction that once her dance per-
formance is over, she must die. At the same time, the dance enacts the
eroticism of her relationship with her husband and the agony produced
by her willingness to die for him. Traditionally, the principal theme of
the dance is the passion between men and women.24 In Capri, the dance
is performed yearly on January 1 and 6 in costume, which for a woman
is a long red skirt trimmed with colored ribbon, a white apron and blouse,
a black bustier, and a colored headscarf. By some accounts, the dance
is ancient, but other histories trace it to the early 18th century, when
the candidates for an arranged marriage were allowed to meet but not
touch. Dancing the tarantella apparently gave couples the opportunity
64 South Central Review

to exchange eye contact and express desire without violating the rules
of prenuptial interaction.25 But there is also a less jubilant interpretation
of the accelerating dance; according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the tarantella is so named because it was supposed to be a remedy for
the disease of tarantism, which was attributed to the bite of a tarantula.
The OED cites a quotation from Engel in 1866: “According to popular
belief, a person bitten by the venomous spider Tarantula can be recovered
from the state of nervous disorder which the poison produces, only by
dancing the Tarantella until complete exhaustion compels him to desist
from the vehement exercise.”
Cure or poison? The dance represents the central question about the
Helmers’ marriage. It expresses with immediacy and feeling the two
meanings of the word “passion”—desire and suffering. Nora uses her
frantic dance to prolong life and to stave off what she believes to be her
need to kill herself to prove her love. In her mind, she is anticipating a
struggle with her husband over which of them will be allowed to make
the greatest sacrifice for the other. She thinks that the act of taking re-
sponsibility for the one you love is glorious, a “miracle.” Yet her dance,
through its suggestion that she has been poisoned, also implicitly rec-
ognizes that her husband lives by a different story than the one he tells
her in moments of fondness and desire. He does not take her seriously;
she is for his amusement and pleasure only, and so he must regard her
as “helpless” and “childlike,” dependent upon him for everything. These
two different stories are presented as characteristic of women and men,
respectively, as Krogstad emphasizes when he dismisses Mrs. Linde’s
desire to live for him and his children as “a woman’s hysteria, wanting
to be all magnanimous and self-sacrificing.”26 The tarantella wraps up
in one accelerating dance all the excitement and dis-ease that is created
by the mating of men and women who live by such different values in
western society.
The play climaxes in a masquerade (held offstage) that draws attention
to the masquerade of the Helmers’ marriage. Ibsen’s great drive was to
unmask social hypocrisy, to reveal the poison as well as the longing that
motivates the marital “dance,” a tarantella that balances agony, eroti-
cism, discipline, and joyful wildness. He articulated his conviction that
society forces women into a disguise when he made what is possibly the
most often-quoted statement about A Doll’s House: “A woman cannot be
herself in contemporary society; it is an exclusively male society with
laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine
conduct from the male point of view.”27 Mrs. Linde hopes to see the
deception end: “it’s quite incredible the things I’ve witnessed in this
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 65

house in the last twenty-four hours. . .This unhappy secret must come
out. These two must have the whole thing out between them. All this
secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on.”28
What I want to argue here, however, is that when Nora slams the door
of her doll’s house on the way out, leaving her husband and children
behind in her determination to figure out who she is by educating her-
self and learning “to stand alone,”29 she is demonstrating a redefinition
of forgiveness. This forgiveness does not absolve anyone of blame, but
creates a space for future self-realization by refocusing the attention
from the past to the present and future. Nora determines to broaden her
inquiry, looking not only at who or what may have been wrong (herself,
Torvald, Krogstad, the law), but also at the socio-legal contexts in which
such wrongs could occur. Although the attention of the world focused on
Nora’s slamming of the door as she left her home and children, I want
to put equal emphasis on Nora’s opening of a door. That opening of the
door is a gift for herself and for her husband, and in that strict sense she
has for-given both of them. Angela Carter’s narrator, in her novel Love,
asks, “To forgive is only to obliterate and what good does that do?”30
That view of forgiveness—as forgetting—characterizes Torvald, but
not Nora; she assures her husband that she will not forget them; she will
“often think about you and the children and this house.”31 To “forgive” in
the sense Nora comes to practice it is to honor—not abandon—a “sacred
duty”: the duty to oneself.32 It is to unify the divergent codes by which
she and Torvald once lived: she will learn to preserve her integrity and
to act compassionately to ensure the well-being of others; she will learn
to create a home that is neither a miniature, artificial playhouse nor a site
of secret, heroic self-abnegation.
Remarkably, even after her disillusionment with her husband’s angry,
contemptuous reaction, Nora never tells what Luskin calls a “grievance
story”; she doesn’t accuse her husband (as he accused her) or complain
about his fond (but hardly respectful) habit of playing with her. Instead,
she tells a “hero’s story,” which Luskin describes as a story told from
the point of view of the good she intended to accomplish: to save her
husband’s life and avoid distressing her dying father. It is often difficult
to tell such stories because to do so, the teller has to acknowledge that his
or her positive intention has been lost or tarnished.33 In Nora’s case, she
has to admit—and the admission is heroic because it is so difficult—that
the years of secret work and sacrifice that she devoted to repaying the
money she borrowed for the sake of her husband’s health are wasted: not
only did he fail to appreciate her sacrifice, but he regards her actions as
both stupid and culpable. She has to give up her idealistic views of him
66 South Central Review

and herself, and she does so, which literally allows her to move out the
door to a new set of goals centered on self-realization. This attitude of
changing focus, of letting go, after a disappointment is something that
Jesus counseled his disciples to adopt when he was preparing them for
ministry: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake
off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.”34 The hero’s
story “starts with the desire for a loving family. It does not deny pain
and suffering. [It] does not imagine a world filled only with beauty and
goodness; it does put hurt into a perspective that promotes healing.”35
Forgiveness, then, sets the stage for a possible transfiguration of the self;
it offers an opening through which we may learn “to manage the effect
of other people’s hurtful actions in our lives.”36 That is what Nora is at-
tempting to do when she so emphatically leaves the diminutive house
where she has been kept in a state of arrested development. Her gift to
herself is a kind of rebirth or resurrection in which she reclaims the only
control she can exercise in a state of grief: control over herself.
Torvald’s “forgiveness” of her, in contrast, is closer to most people’s
understanding of what the word means. Instead of being a way of mov-
ing forward into a new future with greater sensitivity and awareness,
it reflects a desire to return to a past that was conceived as “innocent”
because it was based on denial: the denial of responsibility, growth,
sickness, and pain. Before he learns Nora’s secret, Torvald is amorously
proud of “his capricious little Capri girl,” his “most treasured posses-
sion,” and he anticipates enjoying her that very evening.37 He confesses,
“as I watched you darting and swaying in the tarantella, my blood was
on fire . . . and that’s why I brought you down here so early.”38 Nora
refuses him, however; and so he reads the letter and discovers what she
has done. His first response is incredulity, but Nora assures him that it
is all true, asserting the positive intention that motivated her actions: “It
is true. I loved you more than anything else in the world.” But Torvald
dismisses her explanation as “a lot of paltry excuses,” and when she an-
ticipates that he will want to take the blame for her, he tells her to “Stop
play-acting!” and begins a lament for his “terrible awakening” to the
fact that his “pride and joy” is actually “a hypocrite, a liar, worse than
that, a criminal!”39 He accuses her of ruining his “entire happiness” and
“jeopardizing [his] whole future,” when from her point of view, she had
saved his life. She goes in a short moment from being his pretty sky-lark
to a faulty “feather-brained woman.”40
After accusing his wife of having committed a crime against him, their
children, and the law, Torvald tells her his solution, that “The thing must
be hushed up at all costs.” He essentially proposes that they perform a
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 67

different masquerade. This time, the motivation for the deception will be
a determination to “preserve appearances,” but the reality behind those
appearances will be far different: “as far as you and I are concerned,
things must appear to go on exactly as before. But only in the eyes of
the world, of course. In other words you’ll go on living here; that’s un-
derstood. But you will not be allowed to bring up the children, I can’t
trust you with them.”41
Torvald’s tirade is interrupted by the ringing of the front door-bell,
and a maid appears with an apologetic letter from Krogstad retracting his
threats to expose Nora. Torvald responds by shouting, “I am saved! Nora,
I am saved!” Nora wonders about the fact that he does not include her
in this salvation and he replies, “You too, of course, we are both saved.”
He proposes to forget the whole thing, announcing, “I’ve forgiven you.
But I have, Nora, I swear it. I forgive you everything. I know you did
what you did because you loved me.”42 This is the popular conception of
forgiveness as a magnanimous willingness to overlook or forget a wrong
(note that Torvald here thinks he has been hurt by Nora’s actions, rather
than the beneficiary of them). Twice more he rejoices in the generosity
of his own willingness to forgive, finding her “doubly attractive for be-
ing so obviously helpless” and calling himself a “real man” for having
“forgiven her, completely and genuinely,” from the depths of his heart.
It’s as though it made her his property in a double sense: he has, as it
were, given her a new life, and she becomes in a way both his wife and
at the same time his child.43
When Torvald claims that he has given new life to his wife, allowing
her to be reborn to him, he mirrors Nora’s earlier belief that she had done
the same for him by finding the means to cure his illness. Forgiveness
does presage a possibility for new life, but it is not something that one
person can give to another; one misconception that both Nora and Torvald
shared is the idea that they had this power to give new life to the person
they loved. In congratulating himself for having given her new life by
forgiving her, Torvald not only destroys her pride in having “saved” him,
but he denies that she had any power at all, being “so obviously help-
less.” While he is busy “forgiving” her, though, she is in another room
changing her clothes and preparing to leave.
The final scene of the play clarifies just how different Nora’s ulti-
mate conception of forgiveness is from his forgiveness of her; her new
forgiveness also differs significantly from her earlier self-sacrifice for
him. Unlike him, she does not indulge in a grievance story, a “tale of
helplessness and frustration based on taking something too personally
and blaming someone else” for how she felt.44 We see that when Torvald
68 South Central Review

expressed a grievance against her, it caused him “to lose flexibility”

in how we respond,45 but Nora’s capacity to respond—her “response-
ability”—increases when she bypasses accusation in favor of inviting
him to engage in their first “serious talk.”46 The forgiveness she exhibits
is not moral, and it is not therefore defined in relation to blame or abso-
lution; instead, it is a choice to release her past in order to heal herself
in the present. Even though she has been wounded by her husband’s re-
sponse to the revelation of her secret, she does not waste energy blaming
him. Instead, she leaves in an effort to figure out how to hurt and suffer
less; she turns her attention to her own desire to change, and to heal.47
Instead of trying to change Torvald, she focuses her attention on how
best to change the way she thinks.48 Her objective, in a sense, is personal
resurrection, which will not come without sacrifice (she must leave her
children, at least temporarily), but what she will no longer sacrifice is
her own potential for growth.
In the final scene, Nora states that for the first time in their eight years
of marriage, she and her husband “are going to have things out,”49 to
talk to each other honestly and respectfully. She tells him that neither
he nor her father ever loved her; moreover, when she learned that her
husband “wasn’t the man [she] thought he [was],” she discovered that
she doesn’t love him either.50 When she expresses her determination to
learn more about herself and the world, he offers to teach her, but she
tells him “you are not the man to teach me to be a good wife for you”;
education is something she must do on her own. Her independence is
manifested in her declaration that she’s “not content any more with what
most people say, or with what it says in books.”51 She also explains that
she has doubts about the law, especially a law against forgery that does
not take the motive into account: “I simply can’t get it into my head that
that particular law is right. Apparently a woman has no right to spare her
old father on his death-bed, or to save her husband’s life, even.” She is
determined to find out for herself who is right, herself or society.52 And
she is certain that Torvald “neither think[s] nor talk[s] like the man I
would want to share my life with.”53
Although Torvald remonstrates with Nora, reproves her for “talk-
ing like a child,” and accuses her of hysteria and madness, he finally
comes to believe her declaration that she now sees him as a “stranger.”
He finally admits that “There is a tremendous gulf dividing us.”54 That
gulf is not just a difference of privilege authorized by a society with a
different standard for men and women; it is also, at least by the end, a
psychological difference that concerns two—or perhaps three—different
understandings of forgiveness. Torvald’s forgiveness is an extension of
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 69

his own self-interest. He forgives Nora once the threat to his self-interest
is no longer present, but for him, nothing has changed. Nora’s original
understanding of forgiveness was indistinguishable from Christian self-
sacrifice; she endured admittedly minor hardships to obtain the means
whereby they could cure his illness by getting away. Once she sees that
this model of love and forgiveness was not one that they shared, though,
she “forgives” differently; this time, her giving is not for him. After he
threatened to cut her off in all but name and then retracted his threat,
she doesn’t forgive him because she never made the mistake of accusing
him. While someone else might have accused Torvald of ingratitude or
intolerance, or even of insufficient love and understanding, Nora simply
sees him as being different from what she had imagined. Forgiveness
for her is a gift of freedom for herself, the freedom to reevaluate her
way of thinking about both of them and their relation to one another. It
recognizes that a change has already occurred—she has learned to see
him differently—and that other changes will ensue from that first one.
Unlike her husband, she accepts responsibility for her contributions to
the situation that she now sees as damaging: if her husband treated her
like a doll, she played along. Finally, she comes to terms with her own
tendency to idealize her husband, an idealization that helped her tolerate
his fond trivialization (and objectification) of her. Forgiveness, for Nora,
is the willingness to look at a changed situation carefully, with enough
distance on the situation to re-evaluate it carefully and accurately.
What I have proposed is nothing less than a shift in our collective
understanding of forgiveness from an arguably abject willingness to
sacrifice oneself for love to a willingness to let go of grievances, how-
ever painful that release may be, for purposes of self-transformation
and self-realization. This shift brings with it a fundamental rereading of
Christian doctrine, according to which Jesus’s forgiveness is not seen as
embodied in the crucifixion alone, an agonizing if voluntary self-sacrifice,
but is instead found in the connection between the crucifixion and the
resurrection. If we regard the resurrection as that which was produced
by the crucifixion, then Jesus’s actions no longer represent abject self-
denial. Instead, Jesus preserved his integrity through his willingness
not to engage in conflict; he was willing to give himself completely,
and that “giving” of himself for love produced a miraculous change in
him. Together, the crucifixion and the resurrection show that Jesus was
modeling a program of metamorphosis; he simultaneously revealed the
costliness and the “miracle” of self-transformation through forgiveness:
the refusal to engage in the self-limiting (because polarizing) “intimacy”
of conflict and violence. According to this view, Jesus integrated what the
70 South Central Review

Church has interpreted as forgiveness—loving self-sacrifice—with what

Friedrich Nietzsche later attributed only to the Antichrist: the courage
to realize and thereby transform the self by letting go of both grievance
and illusion. He not only preserves but exponentially magnifies his
spirit by not trying to defend himself, but by letting go of everything he
held most dear without resentment. This provides us with a demanding
formula for self growth.55
The problem with the opposing positions of both Nora and Torvald
at the beginning of A Doll’s House is that neither partner can change or
evolve. Nora, Torvald, and their friend Rank have all been “poisoned”
in one way or another, whether by inherited syphilis or by the bite of a
metaphorical tarantula. The ideas we inherit keep us from growing, and
in some cases from living, as Mrs. Alving explains in Ibsen’s Ghosts
(1881):

I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders,

every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers
and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories,
all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that
they live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot
get rid of them. . . . Over the whole country there must be ghosts,
as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us,
abysmally afraid of the light.56

The hardest thing for a doll or a ghost to do is to take decisive steps to

endure the pain of becoming human, of becoming real, by letting go of
the past. It can only be done by engaging in battles not with others but
with oneself, battles that James Joyce, in a 1901 letter to Ibsen that he
wrote in Dano-Norwegian, referred to as those “fought and won behind
[one’s] forehead.”57 Joyce paid homage to Ibsen for “open[ing] the
way” to spiritual truth, and to emancipation from “public canons of art,
friends and shibboleths.” Ibsen’s double in this respect is Nora, who has
the courage to open a door and walk away from all that is the familiar
(“familiar” shares a root with “family”). The door Nora opens is a “portal
of discovery” into a larger, more animated world.58

Notes
1. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002), 35–6.
2. H.D., Tribute to Freud (1956; New York: New Directions, 1974), 86–7.
3. A Doll’s House was the second of Ibsen’s twelve “investigative dramas of con-
temporary life.” See James McFarlane, “Introduction.” In Henrik Ibsen: Four Major
Plays, trans. Mcfarlane and Jens Arup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), vii–xiv.
vii.
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 71

4. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, 1–88. 80–81.

5. The alternative, “conciliatory” ending that Ibsen was pressured to write for
German audiences, a revision he calls a “barbaric outrage” (McFarlane’s note at the
end of A Doll’s House, 88) in his letters, is outrageous precisely because it shows Nora
returning to her ethos of self-sacrifice by discovering that she cannot leave her children.
The alternative ending changes the meaning of the play, restoring the status quo, when
it depicts Nora abandoning her newfound determination to give herself the freedom to
learn more about who she is and what she values, which she can only do by herself.
6. Ibsen A Doll’s House, 42.
7. Ibid., 43–44.
8. Ibid., 32.
9. Ibid., 33.
10. Interestingly, Rank’s degenerative sickness is due to the dishonesty of his father,
not his mother.
11. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 9.
12. Ibid., 20.
13. Ibid., 45.
14. Ibid.
15. As Hannah Arendt argues in The Human Condition (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), Jesus was the “discoverer of the role of forgiveness
in the realm of human affairs.” She points out that this is an important moment in politi-
cal thought; moreover, “The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and
articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a secular
sense” (238).
16. MacFarlane, “Introduction,” ix. Now we are in a position to understand what
Henry James meant when he saw in another Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler) a “state of the
soul” underlying the action (Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun called it the “uncon-
scious life of the soul”). James averred that there was an “Ibsen within an Ibsen” that
takes viewers from the life of the individual into the “history of the human spirit.” As
Roy Fuller wrote, “Ibsen revealed that the symbol had a past,/ That crude interpretation
could be stripped/ Of rings of time, to find/ Inside the foliate five/ Acts the small puls-
ing germ.” Cited by Errol Durbach, “A Century of Ibsen Criticism,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Ibsen, ed. James MacFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 237–238. Both the article by Henry James (from the Pall Mall Gazette, February
1891) and the Fuller poem are reprinted in James MacFarlane, ed., Henrik Ibsen, Penguin
Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth, 1970), 149–50 and 272.
17. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 56, 60.
18. Ibid., 73.
19. My argument is designed to amplify Toril Moi’s proposal—derived from an idea
in Wittgenstein—that Nora’s dance constitutes an image of her soul. See Moi, Henrik
Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 226 and 236–242. The one scene that Ibsen added after completing the first
draft in October 1878, according to Michael Meyer, is the one at the end of act II when
Nora dances the tarantella. According to Alastair MacAulay, the actress who was playing
Nora in the opening production in Copenhagen (December 21, 1879), Betty Hennings,
was a dancer who had performed in choreographer August Bournonville’s Valdemar.
Bournonville’s Napoli concluded with a famous tarantella. See The Times Literary
Supplement (July 15, 2005). I am indebted to Tania Lown-Hecht for this reference.
72 South Central Review

20. The tension between Nora and Torvald, which for her concerns life and death
and for him is about sex, anticipates the similar tension between Gretta and Gabriel after
another Christmas party, the one in James Joyce’s “The Dead.”
21. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 58.
22. Ibid., 59–60.
23. Ibid., 55.
24. See www.capri.com/en/tradizioni, “The Tarantella,” and Erich Schwandt, “Tar-
antella.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 13 May 2010.
25. See http://www.scialapopolocapri.com/en/tarantella.html, as well as “Tarantella,”
International Encyclopedia of Dance: a Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc.,
ed. Selma Jean Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
26. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 64.
27. From Ibsen’s notes and jottings in the autumn of 1878, cited by James MacFar-
lane, “Introduction,” xviii.
28. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 66.
29. Ibid., 81.
30. Angela Carter, Love (New York, Penguin, 1971, 1987), 52.
31. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 86.
32. Ibid., 82.
33. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 141.
34. Matthew 10:14, The New Oxford Annotated Bible.
35. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 148.
36. Ibid., 160.
37. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 67, 69.
38. Ibid., 70.
39. Ibid., 75.
40. Ibid., 76.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 77.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Luskin, Forgive For Good, 39.
45. Ibid., 40.
46. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 79.
47. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 63.
48. Which is what Luskin says one must do in order to forgive. See, for example,
p. 130.
49. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 79.
50. Ibid., 83–84.
51. Ibid., 81, 82.
52. Ibid. 83.
53. Ibid., 84.
54. Ibid., 85.
55. Arendt sees forgiveness as that which makes it possible to continue to act,
given that actions are irreversible and we often act in ignorance of what we are doing
(or what the implications of a given action might be). Her focus is on the importance for
the individual of being forgiven by other people, because forgiveness liberates people
from the “chain reaction” of revenge and retaliation (240). Unlike revenge, “the act
of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected
A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 73

way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of
action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but
acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore
freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven”
(241). I am wholeheartedly in agreement with Arendt’s claim here that forgiveness is an
autonomous and even creative act that liberates the forgiver from bondage to a repetitive
tennis match of ongoing reprisal.
My divergence from Arendt is rooted in her claim that “Forgiving and the relation-
ship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual
or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it” (241).
Forgiveness can, of course, be inspired by love for another, but Arendt contends that
“nobody can forgive himself” (243). I would disagree: although some external stimu-
lus is required for the individual to gain distance on his or her own prior actions, the
creative, unpredictable, “anti-political” power of forgiveness can indeed be applied to
the self. The dialogue that Arendt sees as necessary to forgiveness can be internal, as
we see when Nora begins her slow, non-judgmental process of self-questioning. For
women, in particular, this internal dialogue is crucial, because women are socialized to
see themselves as dependent, and therefore inadequate.
Of course, forgiveness can be understood in different registers, and Arendt’s discussion
is most valuable as an understanding of forgiveness as a social phenomenon. Her view
that a transgressing individual must be forgiven by other people in order to continue to
act constructively in the world is illustrated by the case of Krogstad in A Doll’s House:
after having been accused of forgery, Krogstad is unable to shed the reputation of dis-
honesty, which in turn makes it difficult to support his dependent children in socially
acceptable ways. People like Torvald, in particular, are unwilling to give him a second
chance, which keeps him bound to a transgression that he would not be eager to commit
again, now that he understands its consequences.
56. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts. In Ibsen, Four Major Plays, 89–164. 126.
57. Reproduced in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 86–7.
58. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus argues that “A man of genius makes
no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Ulysses, ed. Hans
Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random-Vintage,
1986) episode 9, lines 238–9.