Why A Doll’s House? And why now?

 

     Works of art that survive, survive because they talk to us beyond the vagaries of time. A Doll’s House is one such work of art. But to speak to all times and all cultures, the work of art must, to a certain extent, be amorphous. It must lend itself to being interpreted by one and all. It must be a hanger for coats of evolving shapes, styles, colors. It must, whatever the dominant trend of thought, moral system, fashionable ideas, provide the stimulus for reflection, debate, empathy or repulsion, identification or rejection, judgment and counter-judgment. For stage plays, this means openness, ambiguity, more questions than answers – answers wither with time, questions don’t.

 

     Why would a woman leave a husband she loved and their three young children? When A Doll’s House first opened, in 1879, the play seems to have been received as an answer: Nora’s departure was a rebellion against the infantilized status her husband and society forced on her. To a nineteenth-century audience, the ending was surprising, shocking, offensive even. The word ‘doll’ – and therefore the explanation of the title – does not appear until the very end of the play: “I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.” The original function of the play was in its resolution, and the first playbill could have included a spoiler alert: “Please don’t tell your friends about the ending.”

 

     The twentieth century carried on the “rebellion” interpretation, which the feminist movement read as a premonition and a gesture of hope and militancy. Nora closing the door [literally] on her relationship with her husband and her young children was viewed as a positive development, a sign of maturity, a progress.

 

     If we approach A Doll’s House, not as a time capsule, but as a work of art whose interpretation evolves with time, questions remain. Today, the condescending and infantilizing attitude of the male characters has survived and mutated into what is now labeled as “toxic masculinity”.

 

     How old is Nora – not in calendar years, but her psychological age? At which stage of her life cycle does she see herself? The play does not mention Nora’s age. Her infantilization invites us to see her as younger than her husband. Stage productions and screen adaptations typically present her as a woman around 30 years of age. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Norway, life expectancy at birth was 40 years. So, was her decision to leave a positive leap towards a better future? Or was it the heart-rending decision of a woman who, having spent most of her life being belittled, has little prospect of a future ahead of her? How much guilt is Nora experiencing? How much of that guilt is she able to process? Is Nora’s state of mind when she leaves closer to that of Eliza Doolittle’s in Shaw’s Pygmalion? Or that of Raskolnikov’s in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment?

 

     With the passing of time, expectations have been reversed: A nineteenth-century wife infantilized by her husband was expected to take it on the chin in the name of the sanctity of marriage. A twenty-first-century wife is expected to fight back, leave him, fight for her children, or demonstrate why she can’t. Time has had a distancing effect on the play. In the nineteenth century, A Doll’s House revolved around the question: “What should/will Nora do?” Today, it’s “Why didn’t she do it earlier?”

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David Valayre

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