Ibsen's A Doll's House

A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem) by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was published in Copenhagen on 4 December 1879 and first performed at the Royal Theatre there on 21 December. Nora Helmer seems the happy, childlike wife of the banker Torvald. We learn that years ago she secretly forged a signature to borrow money to save her husband's life. When the lender, Krogstad, threatens to expose her, Torvald reacts with selfishness and outrage instead of gratitude. Nora decides she has been treated as a doll, and in the final scene she leaves him and the children to find out who she is.¹²

Ibsen (1828 to 1906) wrote the play in Italy, after years in self-imposed exile from Norway. It draws on a real case of a woman who had committed forgery to save her husband, and it belongs to the realist theater, with ordinary middle-class rooms and everyday speech, in contrast to the romantic plays and melodramas of the time. The women's movement of the nineteenth century gave it its sense of urgency, and critics at the time debated marriage in terms drawn from it. German actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to play the ending as written, and for a Flensburg production in 1880 Ibsen wrote a different ending in which Nora stays, which he later called a barbaric outrage.¹²

The play was a sensation across Europe and a milestone in modern drama. Performances caused heated arguments, and the closing sound of the slammed door was widely said to echo across Europe. It has been translated into many languages and staged repeatedly.¹²