Henrik Ibsen · 1879
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem) is the play that, by general consent, ended the Victorian era of European drama and inaugurated modern serious theatre. Premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in December 1879, it produced an immediate scandal across Europe, was banned and bowdlerised in multiple countries, and established a kind of social-realist play that the next hundred years of drama would build on. Its closing door slam is, in George Bernard Shaw's phrase, the moment "that reverberated through the parlour."
Nora Helmer, the wife of a respectable Norwegian banker named Torvald, has secretly borrowed money some years earlier to pay for a recuperative trip that saved her husband's life. She forged her dying father's signature on the loan because women were not legally permitted to take loans in their own name. She has been paying off the debt secretly ever since, working at small tasks and saving from the household allowance.
The play takes place over three days at Christmas. The moneylender Krogstad, threatened with losing his job, uses the forged loan to blackmail Nora. When Torvald finally discovers the truth, he reacts with horror at the social disgrace, not with gratitude for what she risked. Nora realises in this moment that her marriage has been a charade. She walks out — closing the front door behind her — to find herself.
The play's last sound — Nora closing the door behind her as she leaves Torvald and her three children — is one of the most discussed stage moments in nineteenth-century drama. The sound has been read as the moment Victorian domestic ideology publicly broke. Ibsen rejected the more conventional ending audiences expected (Nora staying for the children, or being reconciled with Torvald). He had Nora walk out on her marriage and her motherhood, and made the sound of the door the play's final word.
The German actress playing Nora in the Hamburg premiere refused to perform the ending. Ibsen reluctantly wrote a softer alternative ending for that production only, then disowned it permanently. He called the alternate ending a "barbaric outrage." The original ending, with the door slam, is now the only one performed.
The play's structural achievement is its representation of Nora's gradual transformation. The Nora of Act 1 — the "little squirrel," the "little skylark," in her husband's patronising vocabulary — is not the Nora of Act 3. Ibsen shows the transformation through small accumulating signals: her mention of having considered suicide; her serious conversation with the family friend Dr. Rank; the tarantella scene where she dances feverishly to distract Torvald; her moment alone after Torvald's first horrified reaction. By the time of the final confrontation, the doll has become a person — and the person was always there, repressed by the marriage's performance.
The play's most theatrical scene is Nora's frantic performance of the tarantella, an Italian folk dance Torvald has asked her to rehearse for a costume party. The dance, in folk belief, is supposed to be cured by frenzied dancing of its name's source — the tarantula spider's bite. Nora dances herself into exhaustion, ostensibly because she needs more practice but actually because she is trying to delay Torvald's opening of the mailbox where Krogstad's blackmail letter sits.
The dance functions on multiple levels at once. It is the play's most physical symbol — a woman literally dancing for her life, the husband providing the music, neither acknowledging the situation. It is also psychological: Nora's wild dancing externalises the desperation her composed surface has been concealing.
Torvald is one of the most precisely observed husbands in nineteenth-century drama — not a villain, but a man whose view of his wife as a "doll-wife" is so taken for granted that he cannot recognise her as anything else. His pet names for her are not romantic; they are diminishing. His habit of addressing her as if she were a child or a small animal — "little skylark," "little squirrel," "my little spendthrift" — is the marriage's basic vocabulary. The play's argument: this is what Victorian marriage was, in its everyday texture.
When Torvald finally learns of Nora's forgery and reacts with concern for his reputation rather than for her, the play's reveal is that he has not loved her at all in any sense she now requires of the word. He has loved his idea of her. The marriage's foundation is exposed in a single scene.
The play's third-act conversation between Nora and Torvald — after the crisis has been resolved by Krogstad's withdrawal of the blackmail — is one of the great extended dialogues in modern drama. Nora delivers what amounts to a structured indictment of the marriage. She tells Torvald that she has been treated as his doll, that her father treated her the same way, that she has never been allowed to become a person, and that she must leave to discover who she is.
Torvald responds with everything a Victorian husband might: appeals to her duties, threats about disgrace, invocations of the children, religion, social opinion. Nora counters each one calmly. The cumulative effect is the demolition, in real time, of the marriage's whole social framework.
A Doll's House changed European drama. Shaw, Strindberg, Chekhov, O'Neill, Brecht — all worked in modes Ibsen made possible. The "problem play" — drama that takes a serious social question seriously — became a genre. The first wave of feminism took up the play as inspiration. The closing door slam became cultural shorthand for the moment in which conventional domestic life cannot be sustained any longer.
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