Humanistic Feminism in A Doll House

            A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen is a brilliant play that tackles many, still relevant social issues.  This play is an illustration of a humanist prospective of feminist issues.  The issues presented in the play pertain to the struggle which women were enduring and fighting against in the late nineteenth century.  Of course, such struggles existed before the nineteenth century and, sadly, still exist today.  The play was written in 1879.  Unfortunately, women would not see suffrage, at the earliest, until several decades after this play was written and takes place.  But this time was pivotal in the women’s rights movement.  Such a topic as women’s rights is a natural one for Henrik Ibsen, who was humanist.

           Today, A Doll House is widely considered to be one of the great feminist works of literature.  But wait, wasn’t Ibsen a humanist, not a feminist?  It seems that this play would be better described as a humanist work.  The reason for this is that feminism wasn’t a movement yet, and would not be for more than seventy years.  Feminism is a movement for the equal rights, opportunities and treatment of women.  These ideas fit under the scope of humanism.  Humanism is concerned with the same issues, but it extends to similar issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and much more.  Henrik Ibsen may have written this play from a humanist prospective, but the specific issues addressed are very much of a feminist nature.

          A Doll House takes place in the late nineteenth century in Europe.  It is important to understand that women had almost no rights, whatsoever.  Women could not participate in politics or law, nor could they privately sign contracts or engage in business.  The only notable exceptions were widows who were then responsible for their late husband’s assets.  In the story, Nora (the main character) must go behind her husband’s back to save his life by borrowing a lot of money.  When the lender starts blackmailing Nora, Nora’s actions are revealed to her husband, Torvald, resulting in the end of their marriage.  Everything in the play masterfully leads up to and justifies the dramatic ending.

            Throughout the play, but made especially obvious during the beginning.  Nora is continually referred to by her husband, Torvald, as a squirrel, or other such pet name.  Pet names are usually used as terms of endearment.  It may very well be the case in this situation, at least from the prospective of Torvald.  Torvald may find it to be very cute and innocent, and Nora may also find it cute and innocent.  But it’s not.  What Torvald is doing by this, it reducing Nora down to the level of an animal.  He is literally dehumanizing her in, what is likely, an unconscious way.   We hear him use these pet names as much, if not more, than he uses Nora’s actual name.  Perhaps a respectful husband should not continually refer to his wife as a rodent.  It is very clear to the reader that it is insulting and demeaning.  It is a subtle expression of Torvald’s, and male society’s dominance over Nora.  It may be especially telling that Nora makes no comment of it and doesn’t seem to particularly mind it much.  After all, Torvald is not expressing any particular dislike for Nora.  Quite the opposite.  He is very satisfied as the man of the house and Nora just as a little squirrel.  Unfortunately, Nora does much more than tolerate these pet names.  She embraces them.

            We now must wonder why Nora does not mind living under such conditions where she is referred to as an animal instead of as a human or a woman.  The reason can be seen in several examples, but it boils down to a minor advantage.  When she is being ‘cute’ and playing along with Torvald’s name calling, she can then persuade him to give her what she wants.  Such behavior is simply a feminist nightmare!  Nora is actually embracing her own oppression.  Furthermore, she is encouraging the demeaning behavior by playing along with it.  The reason is that she probably has no memory of a time when she was not referred to by pet names and demand in this way.  Before her husband, Nora was likely talked to in this way by her father.  We, the readers, find it immediately appalling the way she is referred to.  But Nora has no baseline to judge such behavior.  She has never known anything different from this.  More so, she probably expects Torvald to act and speak to her in this way.  Another reason that she would embrace the oppressive behavior relates to what I mentioned earlier about Nora being able to get what she wants when she, herself, uses the pet names which she’s been given.  This may be the only time that Nora can ever exercise control openly with her husband.  She would surly not sacrifice even this small amount of power for respect.  Especially since society has promised her neither power nor respect.  As a matter of fact, society has given Nora almost nothing at all, either in the home or in the outside business world.

            The legal inequality that women of that time period faced, including Nora, is monumental.  Nora needs to do something as a simple as taking out a loan, but she is incapable of this by her own volition because of laws restrictive to women.  Much of the conflict in the story comes from the secretive nature of Nora’s exploits.  Even under secrecy from her husband, she must still have a man’s signature to take out a loan form a silent individual, not even an official financial institution.  But the salient point is this story is that it must be kept s secret from her husband.  It’s bad enough that society won’t legitimately let her take out a loan or sign a contract alone, but even her husband would not hear of such an action.  On the contrary, he would rather die than take the expensive vacation he needs to recuperate.  All of this is made painfully clear in the scene where Nora is confronted by Krogstad, the secretive lender of the money.  It is not Nora’s debt to him, but the truth of the existence of the loan that gives Krogstad the leverage he needs to blackmail Nora. The sexist tones become overwhelming as Nora starts to come to the conclusion that she is greatly disadvantaged by her ignorance of legal matters.  This realization will gestate in her mind until the conclusion of the story.  Her lack of business education is by design and a product of her oppressive society.  This financial setup is designed to inform us of Nora’s situation.  She is not only trapped in the confines of her home by her husband, that is merely a microcosm.  She is also in the confines of her society by all men.  When she exercised the forgery of her father’s signature, which is certainly a bad thing, she brings a great conflict onto herself because now only a woman signed the document.  Considering Nora’s defiance, it can be wondered if she would have done the same if she had a better knowledge of the system which confines her.  Nora realizes, as we do, that this treatment of her was present when she was a child and remains present in her life as an adult.

            Nora’s explains to Dr. Rank, and therefore to the readers as well, that she is not in love with him, despite all of the time she spends with him and flirting she does with him.  But first, we have to ask why Dr. Rank is in this play at all.  Why would Henrik Ibsen create a character that would love Nora just to be turned down by her?  The answer lays in Nora’s relationship with her father.  When she was a child, she loved her father and wanted to be with him.  But she found herself, not with her father much of the time, but rather with the servants in the servant’s quarters.  She did so because the servants gave her something that her father couldn’t or wouldn’t.  Respect.  The servants talked to her the same way that they talked to anyone and about anything.  They did not treat her different because she was a women.  From Ibsen’s humanist prospective, they treated her like a human, plain and simple.  Now we can turn to Dr. Rank and his painful rejection.  Dr. Rank and the servants form Nora’s childhood share the same function in Nora’s life.  Conversely, Torvald and Nora’s father share a similar role.  This time, Torvald is the one who won’t give her the respect by talking to her like a person about things that matter, and Dr. Rank is the one she turns to for a real conversation.  Unfortunately, Nora’s preference for Dr. Rank’s company is most misleading to Dr. Rank’s feelings.  Near the end of the play, and Dr. Rank’s life, he expresses his feelings of passion to Nora.  Nora must then reject him because despite her dissatisfaction with her husband, she does not want to hurt him.  Nor does she share the same feelings for Dr. Rank.  Nora would have been content with simply flirting and some good conversation with poor Dr. Rank.  The next minor character in A Doll House that we will look to for Ibsen’s depiction of women’s struggles is the character of Christine.

            The character of Christine was created by Henrik Ibsen to show the readers an alternative depiction of a strong woman.  She is meant to give us some prospective on what might happen to a woman who is, for whatever reason, independent.  This step-up will not pay off until the end of the story when Nora choses to leave Torvald and rely on herself.  Needless to say, the result of Christine’s venture into independence ends tragically.  Furthermore, Christine was in a more advantageous position to be autonomous than Nora will find herself in.  The reason for this is because Christine finds herself to be a widow, thereby possessing some default power over her late husband’s assets and an established business.  Despite this advantage, her business fails, partly as a result of her gender.  Despite her business effort, she got married for one reason, to be able to take care of her family while her new husband pays the bills.  Her gender role dictates that she must be the caretaker before anything else.  When her role as a mother overcomes her attention to the point where she must cease business, she then has no choice but to seek a new role as, again, a caregiver or anything else.  It is at this point that we are introduced to her in the story.  Except, we do not yet know that her struggle will mirror Nora’s, and perhaps foreshadow Nora’s exploits.  At first, she functions as a foil for Nora’s character.  Christine’s state being a great contrast to Nora’s state and allows us to understand Nora better.  Finally, Christine must revert to her caretaker role as her only method of helping Nora.  She can do nothing but use her feminine skills to become Krogstad’s wife.  This return to a wife’s status could be interpreted as a prediction to Nora’s future.  By the end of the story, when Nora is ready to set out on her own, we are meant to remember Christine as a warning or cautionary tale that reflects what Nora is very likely to encounter.  Christine serves as one of two other female side characters in A Doll House.

            The next female character is the nanny who cares for Nora’s children.  This character does more that marginalize Nora’s role as a mother and make her long-term absence understandable at the end of the story.  The nanny shows us a woman who is completely dominated by her role as a caregiver.  In contrast to Christine, who tries to overcome this role.  Not only is she confined to the caregiver role, but society has forced her to leave her own children to do so!  Her own children are left alone so that she can just serve others in the same maternal capacity.  This nanny not only is raising Nora’s children, but raised Nora when she was a child, severing Nora’s emotional connection with her own mother.  Likewise, Nora’s children have a stronger emotional connection to the nanny that with their mother.  What’s worse, Nora feels more distant from her children as well.  The nanny character gives us a more informed look at the role and condition of women in society.  The next supporting character that is probably the most influential to the plot of A Doll House is Nora’s Husband, Torvald.

            Torvald is portrayed as an affectionate husband who is also controlling and insensitive to his wife.  Henrik Ibsen is trying to show how men in general not just Torvald, do not treat their wives like real people.  The Feminist protective is that he is treating her, specifically, like a woman (at least how Torvald thinks a woman should be treated).  Either way there is a difference in the treatment and Nora is surely being treated poorly.  No scene shows this level of demeaning control over Nora than the scene where Torvald is instructing Nora how she is to dance at the party.  In this scene, Torvald is shaping her every move to be exactly what he wants it to be.  Under the context of dance choreography, this could seem permissible, even normal.  The reality is that this instance is a microcosm of their entire marriage.  The way he dictates her every move in the dance symbolized how he dictates her every move in day to day life.  In this scene, Nora is wearing a disguised for the party. This is a metaphor for how she is masked form her true self every day and all women too.  We also see how she is naturally much more wild and untamed before she is told how to be and how to act.  We can even read her off-beat performance as her natural tendency to stray form the rhythm of society.  Next, Torvald won’t let her go out until she has shown him her performance correctly.  This all serves as additions emphasis for how Nora and all women are being controlled and dominated by their husbands and other men in their lives.  However, Torvald does not control Nora for its own satisfaction; he is also using her to his own benefit.

            The dramatic finale of the play occurs after the big party.  Krogstad sends a letter to Torvald, revealing the truth about his arrangement with Nora.  When Torvald discovers that his wife went behind his back and forged a signature he gets most angry.  Torvald then explains how it must be a kept a secret and that he must give into all of Krogstad’s demands.  Nora was naively thinking that Torvald would take full responsibility of everything so not to put a mark on his wife’s honor, out of love.  At which point, Nora would insist on taking the blame herself.  Unfortunately, Torvald is only concerned with his own honor and his own reputation.  He says that his personal honor comes over love.  This statement shows extreme single mindedness (no wonder he ends up single) and a shallowness of prospective.  He takes no concern in the effect that the situation had on his wife or what his wife went through up until that point.  He also makes no attempt to understand his wife’s reasoning for her actions.  He instead choses to denounce all of his trust in her (as if he ever trusted her anyway), not only as a person, but as a woman and worse, a mother.  He actually tells her that she may no longer be trusted with the children.  Again, his single mindedness and shallowness of prospective results in Nora getting very hurt.  This hurt is nothing compared to when Torvald forgives Nora.

            Next, Torvald reads Krogstad’s second letter which relieves all debt and responsibility form Torvald and Nora.  Immediately , all of the consequences for Nora’s actions are dissolved; Torvald tries to act as if everything is back to the way it was before.  What Torvald doesn’t know is that the consequences to his actions with Nora haven’t dissolved.  Regardless of the consequences, Torvald revealed how little faith he had in Nora.  But worse, showed that Nora didn’t really matter to him.  All that really mattered to him was what effect Nora had on him.  After Nora realizes this truth, she has had enough.  She knows that she is not really being considered a person in the eyes of Torvald.  There is no mutual respect or equality, even in their private home.  She decides to leave him.  She tells him how she was always behind everything, making it all work and keeping it all going in the house.  She claims that she will then educate herself and become an engaged member of society.  This is the lesson that Henrik Ibsen wants everyone to take.  From this, we can infer that he thinks that Nora is taking the righteous action.  By this point in the story, we are glad to see a strong woman trying to overcome her oppression as a woman and a subordinate to her husband. 

            Nora takes the time to give us some prospective at the end in regard to her relationship to her father and how it compares to her relationship with her husband.  She tells how her father used to talk at her about many things.  She soon learned to repeat these same opinions and remain silent when she didn’t agree with them.  This same practice was use in the marriage with Torvald.  She just adopted and assimilated what she had to.  She was effectively colonized by her male dominated society.  Such colonization is nothing new, of course.  Too many of us know women who find themselves engaging in activities with the men they love, may they be familial or romantic, that they probably would not otherwise bother with.  The involvement or agreement is to facilitate bonding time without the benefit of actually bonding over the topic matter.  In the event of Nora, she starts to see these effects and realizes that they are a false form of connection that modern feminists would immediately recognize that Torvald made no attempt to assimilate into Nora’s Life.  The effective colonization of women usually creates a most agreeable spouse.  But in Ibsen’s A Doll House, we get to see the rightful response to female oppression.  The abandonment of the oppressor.

            Torvald goes onto insist that Nora is a wife and mother before anything else.  This type of gender role is exactly what Ibsen is trying to get at; any feminist would agree that this type of social construction is oppressive and sexist.  By this point in the story Nora is far beyond accepting any type of conclusion form anyone on how she should be.  As it was common for the time, the nanny was the primary caretaker for children of those who had as much money as Torvald did.  So that dissolves the mother role for Nora.  Next, she is far from thinking that at this point that her worth as a wife is at all significant to Torvald.  His comment is not only useless to its goals, but also offensive to Nora.  So actually, the mother and wife expectation is counterproductive to winning Nora back.  For if she is only valuable as a wife or mother, and is apparently not valued as either, why stay?  This part is so important to Ibsen because Nora is not being viewed as a human, but as a woman.  A feminist would agree and focus on the female aspect of the dehumanization. A feminist, like Nora, would not sit still for such treatment of so many.

            By the end of the story, we are left with a clear message that Henrik Ibsen is a humanist who is concerned with feminist issues.  That is why feminists love this play for showing women’s struggles.  Sometimes, A Doll House is translated as A Doll’s House.  This translation is most interesting because the possessive form of ‘doll’ suggests that the doll controls the house and not that the house is fit for a doll.  I hope that this and all insights are not lost on anyone who reads or watches this great play.