A Doll's House: A Level York Notes

‘My Nora went alone.’ Ibsen said this to a woman who left her husband for a lover and who claimed to identify herself with his heroine. Nora walks into the darkness of a winter night. She has no protector, no children, and no money (even though Helmer offers some). It was important to Ibsen that Nora did not ‘gain’ materially by leaving; he made it clear to the audience that her choice involved sacrifice, but left them to debate whether she had, or had not, gained anything else.

The audience may have been shocked at the idea of a woman abandoning a comfortable home, security and a regular income, at a time when most women had to marry to obtain them. As a modern spectator, however, I cannot see these ‘losses’ as disastrous. Nora has proved herself capable of earning money as a copyist, as intelligent and resourceful as Mrs Linde, the embodiment of the independent female nineteenth-century feminists called the New Woman.

However, Nora loses Helmer and the children – a far more serious loss. Although she is profoundly disillusioned with the man from whom she expected a ‘miracle’, there is a bond between them. Ibsen initially stresses their playfulness, suggesting they can be happy together; Nora begins to resent her childlike ‘skylark’ persona only when under pressure to hide her true situation. She evidently finds Helmer attractive, telling him that living together as brother and sister would ‘not last’. In David Thacker’s 1992 production for the BBC, Trevor Eve and Juliet Stevenson played the parting in tears, showing the cost to both.

The children are an even greater loss. Directors at the time forced Ibsen to write an ending in which Nora stays. However, in his alternative version he makes Nora ‘collapse’ after this decision – a graphic image of the psychological price of staying.

Nora is a loving mother, as we see in her interaction with her children in Act One. But Helmer’s conviction that lying parents are ‘poison’ leads her to withdraw from them. To some extent, then, she has – unwillingly – ‘lost’ the children before Christmas Day. Later, Helmer decides to deny her any contact with them. This is a threat born of temporary rage – but it is important to realise he would be within his rights. Even the most indulgent nineteenth-century husband took for granted his right to decide his children’s education, religious upbringing and lifestyle without reference to his wife. Helmer’s anger vividly brings home the limits of a mother’s power to Nora (and us). Though her loss is terrible, she may be right to say that she ‘can be nothing’ to her children unless the relationship changes drastically.

I think it is incorrect to say that Nora has lost more than she has gained, because in her aloneness she has found the beginnings of a self. From his opening words, ‘Is that my skylark?’, it is plain that Helmer has imposed upon her the image of what patriarchy wants her to be: pretty, obedient and ignorant. The only real decision she has ever made is to borrow the money. Despite the strain this causes, she takes pride in her new identity as working woman – but the secrecy involved suggests that she can only make life-defining decisions away from Helmer, outside the home. She can only define herself once she leaves. As yet, she is not a fully-realised person, but a male construct of femininity – as she rightly says, a ‘doll’, for her father and Helmer to play with and dress to their taste. Nobody could be expected to see existential nullity as a fair price to pay for family love.

I cannot agree with the assumption underlying this question – that the final curtain is the last word. Ibsen is not tying up loose ends in the way satirised by Wilde in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ – ‘The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ He gives his plot the untidiness and ambiguity of real life, which actors can explore in different ways. The ending is the beginning of a new story. As Nora says, ‘I’ve no idea what will happen to me.’ She walks into the dark – but throughout the play she has been linked (especially by Rank) to light and optimism. It is for the reader, or the actor, to imagine what happens next and whether their particular Nora loses or gains.

Some critics have suggested that the ending is contrived – a ‘strong curtain’. Robert Ferguson points out that ‘Nora has already proved herself the stronger’, and considers the parting psychologically unnecessary for Nora or Helmer. However, Nora says that Helmer can only change if his ‘doll’ is taken away from him. I think that she is right. I would choose to play Nora here as perceptive, not unkind. She has to risk losing Helmer for ever, because although his broken sentences show his pain, he tries to keep Nora by appealing to various authorities – the Church, the Law – rather than thinking for himself. He does not yet have a voice of his own to say that he loves and wants her. Toril Moi says that Nora ‘demands nothing short of a revolutionary consideration of the very meaning of love.’ This is a great deal to ask – but the play does not exclude the possibility of the ‘miracle of miracles’. Nora is still forging a self; Helmer at least knows that he must do so if he is to win Nora – and she him. They may yet become a truly modern couple. The Nora walking into a new day may gain not just a self, but everything else as well.