The Past
HENRIK IBSEN
A Doll’s House was written by Henrik Ibsen and premiered at a theatre in Denmark in 1879. Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. He only received a formal education until age 15 and faced a number of challenges in his youth. He had an illegitimate child with a housemaid, was rejected from the University of Christiana, and even found himself involved in an anarchist movement. But in 1851, Ibsen was hired as the Writer in Residence at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, Norway. He remained there, eventually working as the Artistic Director, until the theatre’s bankruptcy in 1862. Ibsen eventually fled Norway to avoid previous debts, yet he continued writing.
Ibsen’s plays were not immediate successes, however his inclusion of social issues and societal standards as themes within his works made him a leader in the new movement of modernism. At the time of his death in 1906, Ibsen had written nearly 30 plays, including classics such as Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. While some of his plays may have caused outrage and scandal at the time, they also provoked thought and discussion of the social issues presented, making Ibsen’s works persist as seminal works of theatre still widely produced.
A DOLL'S HOUSE - INSPIRATION AND CONTROVERSY
In 1858, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoreson and the couple had one child together. Their relationship inspired many of Ibsen’s thoughts on equality and marriage, including his important idea that women in marriages should be seen as equal to their husbands.
Laura Kieler, a family friend of Ibsen’s even inspired the story of A Doll’s House. Kieler needed Ibsen’s support to publish a novel she wrote as a sequel to his play, Brand. She wanted to publish this novel to help pay for her sick husband’s medical bills. She wrote to Ibsen asking for an endorsement, and Ibsen never replied. Kieler ended up forging her own husband’s signature to take out a loan to pay for the medical bills. When this was discovered, Kieler’s husband committed her to a mental institution, which greatly saddened Ibsen. He was then inspired to write the play that became A Doll’s House, where he molded the ending to leave Nora triumphant.
While A Doll’s House is an important modernist play, one of the first to showcase a moral dilemma that is delivered with honesty, it was frequently met with controversy. Many critics called it scandalous, even stating that the ideas presented on stage would encourage women to demand equality in their own lives and even go so far as to leave their husbands. Theatres themselves even had complaints for the play - Ibsen was forced to rewrite the ending for a German production in 1880 and a theatre in London even created a new, "less controversial" play based on Ibsen’s story, called Breaking a Butterfly in 1884.
Gender Politics and Divorce in Norway
“The way they have the laws the man can get a divorce for no reason at all but a woman has to prove the man did something horrible to her.” -Nora, A Doll’s House Part 2
Both today and in Nora’s time, laws governing women’s rights and roles in society lagged behind the discussions posed by revolutionary thinkers. When Nora returns to her home fifteen years later, she continues to grapple with the government’s restrictions of her independence. Women gained the right to inherit property in 1854, and in 1863 unmarried women were no longer viewed as minors, opening them up to occupation options. Even so, women continued to struggle with divorce and marriage rights. A woman who chose to separate from her husband in the 19th century would not receive financial support. Originally, only the 3 biblical reasons (impotence, adultery, or desertion) were seen as valid reasons for divorce. There was a large burst in the number of divorces, going from an average of seven divorces in a year in the 1870s rose to an average of over 50 in 1890. The new Norwegian divorce act wasn't passed until 1909, and a number of legal grounds were recognized as valid reasons for divorce. The law also established two ways to obtain a divorce – through the legal system or through administrative appropriation, as is also the practice today.
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Camilla Collett, an influential Norwegian Nationalist and Feminist writer, explored progressive women’s roles in marriage during the time. She criticized forced marriages and posited that marriage should not be the sole purpose of a woman’s life in her famous novel Amtmandens døttre, or The District Governor’s Daughter. Collett urged women to discard the culture of self-sacrifice and instead to embrace freedom in their relationships.
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In 1871, Ibsen met Collett, and she frequently visited him during his time in Italy. They remained in touch for 27 years and frequently spoke about women’s rights.