Chris's Reviews > A Doll's House

Whenever I read a play I always try to find a movie or a recorded production to see how directors and actors handled the material and to see if it matches up with own impressions. The best production I could find of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" was a 1973 movie starring Jane Fonda. Sight unseen I knew this play had feminist overtones and probably created a stir when it was first produced. Not that there's anything wrong with feminist overtones. And yes it did create a stir. "A Doll's House" is a drama about Nora, a pampered wife treated like a kewpie doll by her upwardly mobile husband, Torvald, who has just landed the dream job that will allow him to finally keep Nora in the style to which she has been accustomed. What he doesn't know is that years ago Nora had taken financial matters into her own hands and forged Torvald's signature on loan agreements that gave her money to keep the family afloat. But now the secret is out and Torvald finds that he might be in the power of a disreputable character. He takes the information poorly saying that Nora betrayed him and even declares it a criminal act. But when he gets the loan agreement back he is all forgiveness and sweetness. But in the end Nora will have none of it. She has seen the ingratitude she has received for all she has done to keep the family going and she decides then and there to leave Torvald and her family. She just walks out the door.

Now this seems a little unrealistic and it was done for dramatic effect and for shock value. My question is how bad must it have been for women in the 1800s? Were all men really tyrants? Were women really so powerless? Consider Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". Tess was poor and worked on the d'Urberville estate where she became involved with the scion of the family and bore an illegitimate child which died shortly thereafter. When she later fell in love with another man, Angel Clare, she is reluctant to tell him about her past. But when they later marry Angel confesses that he once had an affair with an older woman and hopes Tess will forgive him. She does but she then makes the mistake of confessing her own affair. At which point Angel wordlessly leaves the room and eventually walks out on her. Men didn't come off real well in 19th Century Lit.

So Ibsen and Hardy would be surprised and pleased to see what has happened to women since their writings. Women's suffrage? Women Prime Ministers? But there is obviously more to be done. Women don't have to be confined to Doll Houses anymore when White Houses can be within their reach.