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English 1020 April 1, 2000 On the Other Side of the Slammed Door in A Doll House Nora Helmer s decision to leave her family in Henrik Helmer's s 1879 play A Doll House reflects the dilemma faced by many nineteenth-century women who were forced either to conform to highly restrictive gender roles or to abandon these roles in order to realize their value as individuals. Although Ibsen brings his audience to the moment that Nora chooses to disregard her social role and opt for her freedom, his play does not clearly reveal the true fate of women who followed Nora s path in the nineteenth century. Historically, most women who chose not to acquiesce to the socially prescribed roles of marriage were treated as unnatural creatures and shunned by the respectable public. An actual letter written in 1844 by Marcus to his estranged wife, Ulrike, reveals the effects of this severe social condemnation (His letter implies desperate fate that inevitably befalls women who reject their prescribed duties as wives and mothers.
Through Marcus s latter to his wife, the painful ramifications of Nora s decision to accommodate her own personal desires instead of those of her family become even more poignant, courageous, and tragic. In the nineteenth century, women had few alternatives to marriage, and the women who failed at marriage were thought to have failed in their most important duty. In his letter, Marcus articulates society s deep disgust for women who reject what it believes is the sacred female role of homemaker. His letter, while on one level an angry condemnation of his wife s stubbornness and a cruelly condescending list of conditions to be met on her return, is on another level a plea for her to accept again the role that society has assigned her.
He is clearly shaken by his wife s abandonment and interprets it as a betrayal of social law or tradition, which, to Marcus s mind, ought to be carved in stone. He responds to this betrayal by demanding complete obedience from his wife in the form of a promise to follow in my wishes in everything and to strictly obey my orders (1628). Only when she acquiesces to his conditions and returns to her role as docile and obedient wife will Marcus in turn be able to return to the comfortable familiar, socially sanctioned role of dominant, morally superior husband. Like Ulrich, Nora decides to leave the security and comfort of her restrictive domestic life to try and become a human being. Ibsen, neglects, however, to show his audience the actual result of that decision. At the conclusion of A Doll House, Nora slams the door on her past life, hopping to begin a new life that will somehow be more satisfying.
Yet the modern audience has no genuine sense of what she may have found beyond that door, and perhaps neither did Nora. Through Ulrike s story, however, the reader understands the historical truth that the world awaiting Nora was hostile and unsympathetic. Marcus warns his wife that your husband, your children, and the entire city threatens indifference s or even contempt (1628) if she refuses to return immediately to her socially acceptable domestic role. This pressure to conform, combined with the bleak prospects of a single women, results in Ulrike s ultimate choice to keep up the appearance rather that further subject herself to a contemptuous world that neither wants nor understands her. Although we cannot know Nora s fate after she leaves Torvald, we may assume that her future would be as bleak as Ulrike s and that the pressure to return to her domestic life would be equally strong. When A Doll House was first produced in 1879, audiences had no more sympathy for Nora s predicament that they did for the real-life stories of women such as Ulrike.
As Errol Durbach Points out, in the nineteenth century, Ibsen s play did no precipitate heated debate about feminism, women s rights, or male domination. The sound and the fury were addressed to the very question What credible wife and mother would ever walk out this way on her family? (14). A great many reader and audience members tended to side with Torvald, who seemed, to them, the innocent victim of Nora s consuming selfishness. The audience s toward Nora s apparently unnatural action of abandoning her family mirrors the responses of Marcus and Torvald Helmer, the bereft, perplexed, and angry husbands.
Nora and Ulrike radically disrupt their husbands perceptions of family relationships by walking out of their lives, preferring to recognize their own needs before any others. These women suggest that Torvald s claim that before all else, you re a wife and mother (1609) may not necessarily be true for all women, but brave rejections of domestic life cannot force society to condone their behavior. Ibsen maintains that A Doll House is not about women s rights specifically but encompasses a more universal description of humanity: (Letters 337). In showing a human being trying to create a new identity for herself, however, Ibsen reveals the extent to which people are trapped in societal norms and expectations. Nora s acknowledgment that she can t go on believing what the majority says, or what s written in books (1609) suggests a profound social upheaval that has the potential to subvert long-established gender roles. If Nora and Ulrike relinquish the role of the subservient and helpless wife, then Torvald and Marcus can no longer play the role of the dominating, protective husband.
Without this role, the men are as helpless as they want their wives to be, and the traditional gender expectations are no longer beyond question. Yet the historical reality is that in spite of Nora s daring escape from her oppressive family, the world was not ready to accommodate women who rejected their feminine duties. Ulrike was thwarted in her attempt to free herself from her family; history suggests that Nora may have met the same fate. Modern audiences tend to see Nora as strong, admirable woman, who is courageous enough to sacrifice everything in order to fulfill her own needs as an individual and as a woman. She shatters gender stereotypes through her defiant disregard for all that society demands of her. Yet, taken in the context of nineteenth-century life, perhaps Nora s story is more tragic that we might initially believe.
Ulrike s story, told through her husband s letter, suggests that in a time of turbulent social upheaval, what was interpreted as a collapse of what we now call family values was shocking, scandalous, and deeply frightening to many. In the nineteenth century, Nora was not the sympathetic character that she is today: instead, she symbolizes many negative attributes what Marcus calls false ambition and stubbornness (1628) that were often ascribed to women. Ulrike s forced return to her role as dutiful wife and mother suggest that society was quick to punish disobedient women and that the slamming door at the end of A Doll House was not necessarily the sound of freedom for Nora. Durbach, Errol. A Doll s House: Ibsen s Myth of Transformation. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll House. Trans. Rolf Field.
Meyer 1564 - 1612... Letters and Speeches. Ed. And trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York: Hill, 1964. 337.
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