It’s easy to sit back and watch A Doll’s House because it is first and foremost a play about a marriage. You can watch the relationship unravel and leave the theater entertained without much fuss. You could do this, but you shouldn’t. Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House as a scathing indictment of his society and without knowing his society, you will miss the layers of social statements Ibsen included in his work. So let’s explore that, shall we?
1879 was the dawning of a new era. Norway was only beginning to interact with English-speaking peoples of the world during the period in which Ibsen wrote this classic. Most of the primary sources available are still in their original Norwegian and, due to it not being easily translated into English, were practically unreadable. Norway was a nation changing along with all the others in the face of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution led to a surge of nationalism in Norway and the development of a culture unique to the Norwegian people. However, by 1874 the initial boom of the Revolution had faded, and the world sank into the first global economic depression that would last until 1896.
This production is set in 1879 in Christiania (now called Oslo), Henrik Ibsen’s hometown. Norway has been growing rapidly, tripling its population since the beginning of the century and Christiania has just annexed five new “counties” into its township. City life is not easy: it’s crowded, and noisy. Diseases like Smallpox, typhus and tuberculosis and cholera run rampant among the populace like it never has before. As the masses move in, so does prostitution and venereal disease. With little to no explanation as to treatment or cause, sex itself is blamed and suppressed. It is labeled dirty and a strong moral contraband is put on it outside of marriage. Marital sex is to be done only for reproduction. Torvald’s strict adherence to these rules is mostly to save his own reputation, but the moral codes put in place in this time as a whole are not intended to keep people down, but to keep them alive—such is the importance.
The birth of Norwegian art is picking up steam: landscapes of the beautiful Norwegian scenery painted by Johan Christian Dahl pave the way for other Norwegian artists such as Kitty Kielland, Harriet Backer, Frits Thaulow, and Christian Krohg. Norwegian men are also well-educated, as all men were taught to read and write. It was very expensive for men to go to University. At University, there were a lot of tests for the students to take. Geography and history were emphasized in higher-level learning, though the English decided they were lacking in “gentlemanly bearing.” Torvald, of course, would scoff at this. Women, of course, did not receive higher education until years after A Doll’s House was written.
Norwegian women, like most women around the world at the time, experience second-class status. Ibsen himself said that a woman “cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and whit a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view,” and that she is expected to “like certain insects…go away and die when she has done her duty in the propagation of the race.” Indeed, women were only just starting to fight for their rights: only single women were considered “independent adults” who could take care of their own assets. Married women, like Nora, surrendered all to their husbands. Nora was in fact based off of a woman named Laura Kieler, a good friend of Ibsen’s. Laura also had a secret loan, but her husband Victor divorced her and had her commited to an asylum. This is the society that Nora was raised in. This is what she walks into when she leaves her home.
Now let’s look at Nora’s debt from a modern standpoint so that we realize the gravitas of Nora’s situation: Nora borrowed today’s equivalent of $56,969 from Nils Krogstad. To put that into perspective, The average man in Norway in 1879 the equivalent of $7, 751 a year. Even after his promotion, Torvald would only have made around $15,311 per year!
By better knowing the world in which the events of A Doll’s House, the audience can better understand the implications of Nora’s plight, the society she’s up against, and just how loudly that slamming door resonates at the end of the play.
