The quandary of the desperate housewife. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen.
Ever had a doll when you were a kid? Well, I had G.I. Joes. and they were a lot of fun. My sister had Barbies. The G.I. Joes would somehow punch above their weight class and manage to hookup with the Barbie somehow. It’s all fantasy land, a period of make believe when we were kids and it was some good times to be fair, the only thing that was exhausting was sitting down so long on the floor and having sore elbows and knees.
But it seems that in adulthood, we are still obsessed with playing dolls, it’s just that the dolls are not G.I. Joes or Barbies anymore, but they’re your partners and children. When we first meet Nora, entering her home with her Christmas shopping, we see her as a carefree woman with little to trouble her as she hummed to herself in “high spirits”. Little do we know what troubles will fester later, as her husband’s gentle scorning of her shopping habits masked the cancer underneath — the family’s financial troubles.
The play is self-contained, it goes little outside of its three walls with Ibsen’s meticulous stage direction. The rooms of the house, the furnitures, the distance of each were all details which seemed pedantic, but provide the backbone of the play and frames the movements of its characters, especially the restless Nora, whose movements become increasingly erratic as she becomes increasingly more unhinged.
It is without a doubt, a play that has in its core the question of gender roles and identity. Nora, a housewife with three young children, is supposed to be the caretaker of her offsprings and the emotional bulwark of her husband. In some ways, she had done so, but not in the right way. Borrowing money from a shady acquaintance, Nils, he engineered her downfall as his own position in the bank became more precarious.
Was Nora right then in borrowing the money to save her husband’s state of mind? Had she had left Torvald to his own devices, without taking him to Italy, would he had survived? It is perhaps not the right question to ask, as in the end, Torvald earned a promotion thus overcoming his mental barriers. Nora, who claimed that she had saved her husband’s life, is perhaps not all wrong regardless of how shallow we might feel of how she had rescued Torvald, as she may have had selfish motives of her own to travel to Italy.
Yet, it was not her place to borrow money for whatever purpose. Being a woman, she needed the consent from her husband and she had to create a fraudulent document signed by the father who had passed away a few days before without her knowing. But for this, Nora had to suffer the consequences. Society has little place for those who stray from its conventions, unjust or not.
Nora’s liberation comes at the realisation of her husband’s superficiality, who was willing to forsake his marriage and punish Nora when he was at the brink of humiliation, but restored his faith in the same marriage when he knew that he was safe. Nora, having been disgusted by her husband’s ambivalence broke the bonds which had restrained her from being who she was, whoever that might be:
“I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being just as you are — or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.”
Even at the cost of her own children, who she admitted, she had treated as dolls herself — to play with when things are fine, and to store in the corner when she had done with them. Though the play does not go deep into Nora’s role as a mother, the silence of the children is deafening. They are mere props in the play to serve as Nora’s source of amusement. Their futures were never discussed, Nora does not seem to be slightly concerned for them except for their own enjoyments. Nora, in this light, stink of her amorality.
But is this amorality necessary for Nora to rebuild herself, her own values? She is the Norwegian superwoman, breaking all conventions to create her own reality. Though we can argue that all along, she had been trying to create her own reality by defying the existing principles, which pushed her to create fraudulent documents to go on a holiday to Italy. The way I see it, she had not liberated herself at all to transcendence, but is effectively repeating the same pattern, and thus will suffer the same consequence: that society’s conventions will catch up to her and bite her in her fat Norwegian ass. No, I feel very little sympathy to Nora. I think that she’s just a giant selfish cunt.
If we want to speculate what would happen to Nora after the play, we can look no further than Richard Wright’s Native Son, where Bigger Thomas, a black man who had committed manslaughter suffer for his crime for trying his damnest to fool and subvert existing laws and conventions. Society’s norms, whether we like it or not, seems to be superman’s kryptonite, that is superman of the Nietzsche vein. In the case of Bigger Thomas, the consequence of his defiance is punishment by death, I believe that in the case of Nora, she’s just going to be a miserable cat lady.
