A Doll's House by Henryk Ibsen is often considered a feminist play about emancipation of women that contributed to the rise of the women's movement. It is the story of a woman striving for self-fulfillment by establishing her own individuality in a patriarchal society. The BANG with which Nora closes the door behind her as she leaves her husband reverberated through 19th-century society - and can still be heard today.
[Nora and Torvald]
Nora Helmer has been married to Torvald for seven years and is the mother of three children. But her husband treats her like a child herself, or rather like a cute doll (hence the title), making decisions without consulting her and not taking her seriously. The play opens during the Christmas season. Torvald has just been promoted to director of the bank where he works, but he pedantically reminds Nora that she should continue to live frugally.
Then Nora's former friend Christine Linde comes to visit. Nora and Christine have not seen each other for ten years, and they tell each other what has happened during that time. Christine has recently been widowed, and since her husband left her nothing, she is in need of an income and asks Nora to plead with her husband to get her a job at his bank.
Nora, in turn, tells Christine that years ago, unbeknownst to Torvald, she went into debt to pay for a foreign cure necessary for his health. She forged her father's signature to obtain that loan, and has been saving money from her household expenses for years to pay it back. But the lender, Krogstad, a former lover of Christine's, has just discovered the forgery. He demands the money back and sends a letter to Torvald. When Torvald reads the letter, he is furious and reproaches Nora severely. But not wanting to cause a scandal, he says he will take care of the matter.In the meantime, however, Christine has turned to Krogstad, the two fall in love again, and Krogstad returns the forged bill to the Helmers. When Torvald receives the paper, he burns it and forgives Nora, thinking that everything can go on as usual.
However, Nora draws her own conclusions from the whole affair. She realizes that Torvald has never cared about her, only his own honor and status. Suddenly he seems pitifully small to her. In the end, she decides to leave her husband and children, and the play ends with a bang as she closes the door behind her.
That bang caused a lot of excitement around 1880; there were even demonstrations for and against the play, not only in Norway, but all over Europe. A Doll's House has therefore been called one of the most influential works ever written. Nora's last words to her husband, "I must educate myself first, and you cannot do that for me...I have a duty too, equally sacred, my duty to myself..." have since become a rallying cry for the women's movement, focusing on women's self-realization and individuality.
A Doll's House is also a psychological drama about high expectations that are dashed. Nora expects a miracle - that her husband will be a knight in shining armor. When this does not happen, her world collapses and she is left on her own. She will have to fend for herself, and she is determined to do so.
Henryk Ibsen (1828-1906) was born and died in Norway, but spent nearly half of his life in Germany and Italy. Ibsen is the greatest Norwegian writer of all time, a giant of world literature, and the founder of modernist drama. He began writing plays at a time when there was hardly any theater in the Norwegian language, and the dramatic tradition in Europe was limited mainly to Romantic drama. Throughout his career, he transformed the idea of the modern stage and redefined the genre. By the time of his death, theater had once again become a literary genre on a par with novels and poetry.
Ibsen wrote twenty-five plays, usually divided into four periods: First, the historical and classical dramas of his early years; then the two great plays of the Rome-period (Brand in 1866 and Peer Gynt in 1867); then the plays of the modern Ibsen, in which he examines the social problems of the 1870s and 1880s (e.g. A Doll's House in 1879 and Ghosts in 1881); and finally the very retrospective tragedies of the end of his career (with Hedda Gabler in 1890 as a harbinger). There is a strong unity to his oeuvre, forming a chain in which each new work seems to emerge from the previous one.
The conflicting forces in Ibsen's plays represent the historical processes taking place in a rapidly changing society, such as the struggle between old morals and inevitable evolution. At the same time, they are part of less transcendental conflicts within the individual himself: the tragedies that oppose self-realization and the endless war between life and idealism.
English translation of the play at Project Gutenberg. I have read the translation by James McFarlane and Jens Arup in Oxford World's Classics (Ibsen, Four Major Plays).