Henrik
Ibsen’s “A Doll House” presents a woman, Nora, who has been
under the proverbial thumb her entire life; that of her father’s
and then later when she comes to marry Torvald Helmer, a man who
comes to take the place of the paternal authority figure in her life.
Both are men who did not truly love her but were only in love with
the idea of a beautiful girl or woman that belonged to them. And
likewise Nora is not in love with the man she married, but with the
idea of pleasing a man who held such control over her. She does not
immediately recognize this since she is filling the role of
submissive housewife that is expected of her. In a sense all
characters in “A Doll House,” not just Nora and Torvald, are
living lies whether they realize it or not.
Nora’s
love for Torvald, or what she perceives to be love for him, is the
overwhelming element throughout the play. From the beginning Nora is
presented as a subservient and submissive person who caters to her
husband’s every whim and allows him to treat her as a child, or
pet. The names he uses, such as “little lark” and “little
squirrel,” are pet names, typically used when one speaks to a child
or someone who does not command respect equal to that of an adult.
Nora however never displays any resentment towards this behavior and
in fact seems to take joy when Torvald refers to her with those
terms. They can certainly be terms of endearment, however the
connotation they carry are not meant to be viewed in a positive
light. This can be viewed as Nora’s oblivious view of her
relationship to Torvald, which she comes to realize at the end of Act
III when she says “You don’t understand me, and I have never
understood you either–before tonight” (Ibsen III). Nora’s
“happiness” in her marriage, then, is more like blissful
ignorance as she does all she can to please her husband but does not
stop to take stock of herself and what matters to her.
Later,
Nora lies not once but twice about her eating macaroons, which
Torvald does not like as he believes it harms her teeth. She lies to
him when he directly asks her if she has been eating macaroons, then
the second time to Doctor Rank when he asks her where she got them,
telling him Kristine brought them. Ibsen shows that Nora’s
relationship with Torvald is in such a bad state that she resorts to
covering up even the most innocent lies. These are only the tip of
the iceberg as Nora then reveals to Kristine, in a fit of defensive
pride against Kristine’s accusation that Nora is a child, that Nora
was in fact responsible for saving her husband’s life when she
borrowed money to take him on a recuperative trip to Italy. She
declines to tell Torvald and instead pays the debt in secret from her
allowance. As she says, “how painful and humiliating it
would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he
owed me anything!” (Ibsen I). It is her fear of hurting Torvald’s
pride and not love that prevents her from telling him the truth about
the loan. Ibsen’s belief was that women, as
people, should be treated equally, and if they are not treated
equally then there can be no love, at least not the romantic love a
man and woman feel for one another (Freedman 92).
Nora
initially believes she loves Torvald the way he is, along with the
lifestyle he has practically chosen for her. Torvald likewise feels
that he loves Nora for who she is and that the love is genuine and
pure, when he in fact loves her for the part she plays for his
benefit (“Torvald Helmer”). He does not realize that the love he
feels is false as we come to realize in the play’s course of
events. Torvald is following the typical male gender role of the
time as a controlling husband. At the mid point of Act I, Nora asks
Torvald if he would consider giving a job to Kristine. He is
hesitant, since he believes that a woman’s place is in the home.
Later, after Krogstad has paid Nora a visit in Act I, Torvald
comments on his belief regarding forgery and how it affects the home:
“Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has
had a deceitful mother.” Nora asks him why he says only the mother
is responsible, clearly shaken by Krogstad’s threat to reveal her
own lie regarding the loan and forgery, and he responds: “It seems
most commonly to be the mother’s influence, though naturally a bad
father’s would have the same result” (Ibsen Act I), the latter part
meant to apply to Krogstad to whom he was referring. Although
Torvald appears to be a good and honest man it is revealed that he in
fact harbors his own secrets and denials regarding his wife, and in
fact his very view on his own life. Further into Act II Doctor Rank
comments on Torvald’s ability to handle serious news: “Helmer
with his sensitivity has such a sharp distaste for anything ugly”
(Ibsen). It is almost as if Torvald is unable to handle life as a
serious matter outside of his own selfish ambitions. He simply
desires beauty and wealth and a happy home, as he tells Nora on
numerous occasions. Torvald is perhaps the one character that does
not fully learn what it means to be truthful and therefore more
satisfied with one’s life as he is left alone in his house at the
end of the play.
Although
Nora and Torvald’s relationship is the key display of living in a
marital lie, there are other examples to be found. During Kristine
and Nora’s initial conversation upon Kristine’s arrival, she
explains to Nora that she married not out of love but out of
necessity, as she “was justified in refusing his offer”
(Ibsen I). Her mother was ill and two younger brothers needed to be
cared for, and so she married a man she did not love. In the end she
was left alone with no children and penniless when her husband’s
business went under, forced to work various odd jobs in order to
support her brothers and mother for three more years. The irony is
that Kristine was in love with Krogstad before she married Mr. Linde,
and only now after returning to the town does she admit to him that
she loves him and wants to marry him. When he questions her
intentions and wonders if she is doing it to help Nora, Kristine
tells him, “when you’ve sold yourself once for someone else, you
never do it again” (Ibsen I). She sold herself into a lie, a sham
marriage, once, and now she is hoping to Krogstad in the hopes of
finding something real.
Hidden
desire is also revealed as Nora attempts to coyly entice Doctor Rank
to convince Torvald to keep Krogstad in his position at the bank.
After he has revealed that he will die soon, a fact he wants kept
from Torvald until after his death, Nora speaks playfully with Doctor
Rank, using deception and feminine wiles to subtly get her way with
Doctor Rank. Even as she faces certain doom (doom to her in any
case), Nora continues to use the only skills available to her which
are lies and deception. After speaking with him and showing the
doctor the stockings she had purchased, Doctor Rank is unable to
contain himself. He admits, truthfully, to Nora that he loves her
and has been in love with her for a long while, and only because of
the friendship with Torvald has he been unable to admit the truth to
her. When faced with this truth Nora recoils and decides she wants
nothing to do with Doctor Rank. Although it is an unpleasant
experience for Nora she is once again faced with another instance of
hidden secrets and lies. It is around this time that she begins to
feel overwhelmed by the weight of the secret loan she borrowed in
order to pay for her family’s trip to Italy, Krogstad’s threat to
blackmail her in order to secure his position at the bank, and the
ongoing doubt in her mind about whether or not she should even remain
in the household; perhaps, she believes, it would be best to kill
herself to spare her husband the shame and trouble of dealing with
all of the lies. When faced with such hidden secrets Nora can only
think of her husband who she believes is a good and honorable man.
In
the cavalcade of deeply personal and selfish lies that are presented
throughout the play is the foremost among them and the critical
problem for Nora as the play’s protagonist: Krogstad’s threat to
blackmail her if she does not help him secure her position in the
bank. Krogstad reveals through this threat that he initially lost
his reputation in the community when he became a forger several years
before the play takes place, and Torvald himself calls out Torvald’s
rather unsavory reputation as a valid reason not to allow the man to
remain in his position at the bank (although he later reveals the
truth that he felt Krogstad was simply not showing him enough
respect). As a result it becomes very difficult for Krogstad to
maintain his position at the bank which he needs in order to maintain
his family, although as he states in Act II that for the last year
and a half he has “not had a hand in anything dishonourable, amid
all the time I have been struggling in most restricted circumstances”
(Ibsen II). He uses his past when he appeals to Nora, who herself
was guilty of forgery when she signed her father’s name to get the
loan, and although he is attempting to live as an honest man he still
not above blackmailing someone to retain his livelihood.
With
all this lying and deception present throughout the first two acts we
learn that all of the characters are in a sense miserable though it
does not appear so on the surface. Nora is in a sham marriage which
she is blissfully unaware of; Torvald treats his wife as a doll,
treating her as a helpless child that needs his constant attention
when she is more than capable of taking care of herself as a grown
human being; Kristine reveals that she lived a lie in order to marry
for money, albeit with questionably good reason, then was forced to
work difficult jobs to sustain herself and family when the man she
married died and left her with nothing; Krogstad is still suffering
from his forgery accusation years before and uses blackmail to
attempt to keep his job; and even the poorly Doctor Rank who is great
friends with Torvald and Nora reveals that he is sick with a disease
that he prefers to keep secret from Torvald and has been harboring a
deep desire for Nora that he decides to reveal before his death. In
Act III all the characters come to a type of acceptance about the
truth of things (either true love such as with Krogstad and Kristine,
or death with no secrets as with Doctor Rank), but no one more so
than Nora. All these characters are meant to be compared and
contrasted to Nora’s own struggle with the truth behind the lies
because out of all the characters in the play she is the one who
learns the most about the nature of truth and what it means to be
true not only with everyone around her but with herself as well.
Although she departs from Torvald’s household with a door slam and
on serious terms Nora takes a vital step towards her emotional growth
and ultimate happiness as a human being.
Works Cited
Fjelde, Rolf. Ibsen:
Four Major Plays Volume I. New
York: New American Library, 2006. vvii-xxxiii.
Freedman, Estelle. The
Essential Feminist Reader. New
York: Modern Library, 2007. 92-98.
Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll House.” Living
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.
Ed. John C. Brereton. New York: Longman, 2007. 1562-1611.
Jackson, Stevi. Women’s
Studies: Essential Readings. New
York: New York University Press, 1993.
“Torvald Helmer.” SparkNotes: A Doll’s House: Henrik
Ibsen. New York: Spark Publishing, 2002.
10.
Yalom, Marian. A
History of the Wife. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2002.