Historical Context
A Doll’s House was published in Norway in 1879. The first stage
production was in Stockholm, in 1880. The play caused an immediate sensation,
sparked debate and controversy, and brought Ibsen international fame. It was
highly provoking: People tended to respond strongly to it, whether in praise or
censure. All around the world, Nora’s final door-slam made conservatives rage
and liberals cheer, gave anti-feminists reason to fear and feminists reason to
hope. The play has less shock-value today, but in the late-nineteenth century,
performing it was often, as one critic puts it, “a revolutionary action, a
daring defiance of the cultural norms of the time.”
What were these cultural norms? Without simplifying too much, we could
say that they were the ideals and values represented by Torvald Helmer and his
doll-wife Nora, before her great change. These were the ideals that defined what
is commonly termed “bourgeois respectability”: financial success, upward
social mobility, freedom from financial debt and moral guilt (or at least the
appearance thereof), and a stable, secure family organized along traditional
patriarchal lines. The patriarchal ideal was supported and reinforced by a
social structure wherein women had little overt political or economic power,
wherein they were economically, socially, and psychologically dependent on men
and especially on the institutions of marriage and motherhood. The ideal of
bourgeois respectability prevailed in the nineteenth century, but it never went
unchallenged, and by the time Ibsen wrote his own challenge to it, at the end of
the century, a new era of crisis and uncertainty regarding all things
conventional had already begun. The position of women was an especially volatile
issue because the patriarchal ideology underlay the entire social, political,
and economic structure. If women
were to have autonomy, then the whole structure of society would have to be
reimagined¾the
world would have to be remade. It was an apocalyptic idea that thrilled many
intellectuals but terrified the ruling and middle classes, so that each move in
the direction of autonomy¾
women’s suffrage, revised marriage laws, advances in women’s education¾
felt like the end of the world. The last decades of the nineteenth century had
already begun to feel like the end of the world, anyway. The Western world was
about to enter a period of unprecedented change—revolutions social, political,
economic, cultural, and scientific. No one knew exactly what was coming, but a
great many looked toward it with a mixture of hope and dread. When Nora slams
the door of her doll’s-house, shutting herself out of the only world she has
known and stepping into a future that is unknown and therefore both promising
and threatening, the sound resonates with the apocalyptic tremors of Ibsen’s
time.
