Drama and Divorce: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, and Modern Divorce Trends
By E.C. Walsh
“I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll child; and here the children have been my dolls…That is what our marriage has been…I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now.” —Nora, Act III, A Doll’s House
Published in 1879, Henrik Ibsen’s classic play about a marriage disintegrating despite a lack of physical or blatant emotional abuse shocked audiences in its day but anticipated the rapid increase in no-fault divorce in the twentieth century. Nora’s husband Torvald Helmer has not physically abused his wife and dotes upon her extremely. However, he is neglectful of the sacrifices his wife has made to improve his health at a difficult time in the past (she apparently
saved his life but had to cut some corners to do so), and he is condescending to the point of infantilizing her. Ibsen is raising an issue that is at the heart of many broken marriages: should one member of a couple be allowed to leave simply because they are being stifled and disrespected?
Lucas Hnath’s sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2, takes place 15 years after Nora leaves her husband and children at the end of Ibsen’s play, but it was published in 2018, more than a century after Ibsen’s work. How did the intervening 139 years change playwrights’ perspectives on no-fault divorce? Hnath seems to be saying that little has changed in non-abusive but unhappy marriages. His Nora does not regret her actions 15 years later, even though she recognizes the pain she has caused and neither she nor Torvald have remarried. She continues to defy social and legal conventions that would have her defer to her husband about divorce, risking the wrath of a vindictive judge who threatens her freedom and hard-earned financial wellbeing.
The sequel is a sort of repetition and affirmation of the first play with Nora again leaving her husband behind and walking out the door of their home. Divorce data for Western Europe and North America bear out Ibsen’s prescience and Hnath’s post mortem.
The critic Vivian Mercier remarked about Waiting for Godot that the play’s two acts seem so repetitious that “nothing happens. Twice.” In a sense, the same could be said of Ibsen’s play and Hnath’s sequel. While on one level something clearly does happen in the first play in her family, on another level “nothing happens” because Torvald and Nora’s marriage has been a saccharine façade. Toward the end of the play, they acknowledge they have never had a serious conversation in all their years together. In the sequel, Nora doubles down on her decision to end the marriage, facing societal opprobrium in the hope that one day women will have more power to divorce and lead independent lives.
In the course of the play’s three acts, Nora is either belittled by Torvald with diminutive phrases like “little skylark”….etc. or she internalizes such language in a sort of painful self-deprecation and finally with bitter irony directed at the patriarchal condescension brought upon her first by her father then by her husband. About 67 instances of this sort of derogatory language occur in the play, mainly spoken by Torvald as would-be terms of endearment but occasionally by Nora herself in an apparently acquiescent way—but ultimately in a caustic, self-aware manner. In Torvald’s case, the belittling comments may reflect a patriarchal attitude toward a wife’s role in the household, the so-called “angel at the table,” which was of course more common in the mid- to late-19 th century. This condescension, combined with Torvald’s ignorance of the lengths his wife has gone to for his health and his deference to heavy-handed legal requirements, eventually push Nora to a point of no return. She realizes she has been acting in what the 20 th -century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would call “bad faith.” She has acquiesced in her overbearing husband’s conventional attitude to a wife as subordinate, a thing to be physically admired and played with, as if a doll. Her submission until the final act of the play amounts to what Sartre termed “being in-itself” (or “etre en-soi”), the powerful pull many people feel to surrender their agency to another person, an ideology, a stereotype, sexual desire, or a drug. In the third act, faced with her husband’s disdain, self-centeredness, and haughty
“forgiveness” of her past—relatively minor—legal transgression, Nora decides leaving the marriage is her only option to attain what Sartre called “being for-itself” (or “etre pour-soi”), the conscious choice of one’s behavior and position in society.
Part of the radical nature of Ibsen’s play is its heroine’s divergence from and defiance of ,religious authority and conventional notions of marriage. Nora says she must move out and be on her own, apart even from her children, to decide whether religion and its moral precepts are “right for me.” As Algius Valiunas put it in a recent essay, “the radicalism of A Doll’s House in its day rested on its presentation of Christian cultural authority as an enemy of the self..[for Nora] no authority is to be taken on faith.” Valiunas adds that the play, treated by many as a founding document of feminist social justice, dramatizes the suffering and irreparable damage caused by “some spurious ideal.” Nora has a moment of what Aristotle called anagnorisis at the end of the play, a profound recognition of her past bad faith in an unrealistically idealized form
of marriage.
The play draws much of its power and controversy from the possibility of opposing Nora’s reasoning and choice to leave at the end of the marriage. A staunch defender of the institution of marriage might argue that as a grown woman she should have known before marrying Torvald what type of man he was, and, however much he may have disappointed her after their marriage,
she should have been bound by her willing decision to wed to work out their problems as best she could without leaving her husband and children. Ibsen’s play gives no indication that Torvald has been physically abusive to his wife (he does show some unwanted amorous affection after a few drinks), nor has he apparently lied to her, been unfaithful, or consciously exploited her emotions. He is exceedingly condescending to her, but is this reason enough for ending a
marriage? Torvald does try to make amends in the third act, when Nora says she will leave him and the children, but he is left pathetically alone in their apartment at the play’s end, hoping desperately for “the most wonderful thing of all” to happen, for the two of them to change sufficiently for reconciliation. The final sound is that of the front door shutting from below as
Nora leaves.
The play is often proffered as a prime example of theatrical realism, a dramatic style that strips away all romantic, traditional, and grandiose themes to present life as it is lived by ordinary people. Nora’s determination to re-discover herself apart from kith and kin suggests she is not held back by genetic and environmental factors that play such an important part in
naturalist drama and fiction. But, on second thought, the play does suggest the social and familial oppression that build to her abrupt decision to leave amounts to an environmental factor guiding her fate. Are the patriarchy and condescension that Torvald, Nora’s father, and Krogstad show toward her an environmental determinant? Are religious, cultural, and legal conventions
about marriage further factors beyond Nora’s control that effectively paint her into a corner?
With no other way out apparent, she makes the radical choice to break all ties with her past life. She feels forced into an all-or-nothing decision.
Just over a decade after the first production of A Doll’s House, Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun published Hunger in 1890, a radical naturalist work of fiction about a writer so dedicated to what he sees as his artistic calling and worldview that he suffers poverty, alienation, hunger, poor health, and ultimately exile. While Hamsun rejected the self-determinative aspects
of realism, his unnamed protagonist in this novel makes a choice akin to Nora’s. He chooses to leave Christiana (now Oslo) to work onboard a ship. The play and the novel share a dramatic trajectory of accumulating disenchantment with a home environment building to an abrupt
departure. Both characters assert a radical self-assertion at odds with societal standards and expectations.
Readers do not learn what becomes of Hamsun’s protagonist, but his story might be thought of as a kunstelrroman, a novel tracing the development of an artist, akin to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was published 26 years later. Both Hamsun’s narrator and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus decide loyalty to their artistic calling takes precedence over social or religious conformity. Dedalus more explicitly rejects both Dublin life and the suggestion that he become a Catholic priest, asserting “n/on serviam.” But the narrator of
Hunger also in his idiosyncratic way rejects the bourgeois respectability of Christiania. As Paul Auster puts it, “pity plays no part in Hunger. The hero suffers but only because he has chosen to suffer.” He and Dedalus end their stories setting out from their home cities for more fertile grounds overseas.
For her part, Nora’s story may be thought of as a Feministischerroman, a drama tracing of a feminist, even though Ibsen averred that he meant to produce poetry with the play rather than ideology. Ibsen’s play was nonetheless described as “feminist propaganda,” And its popularity can easily be correlated to the building momentum for women’s rights in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. While Hamsun was reacting against Ibsen’s domestic realism (turning inward instead of toward a supposedly objective outward), his theme of individual liberation from societal expectations shared something with his compatriot’s topic in A Doll’s House. Still, Hamsun’s translator, Robert Bly, claimed the Norwegian novelist “blew much
moralistic work of the time, like Ibsen’s, apart.” Hamsun, in Bly’s view, wanted characters who were intellectually superior to their audiences, not just their equals. He distrusted the bourgeoisie and did not think it could be reformed. He is, in a sense, a romantic, and believed with William Blake that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Nora, for all her transgressions
and non-conformity, is more of a traditional moralist.
Ibsen’s play preceded and to some degree anticipated the emergence of no-fault divorce in the West in the 20th and 21st centuries. While readers and audiences can have differing opinions, my interpretation of the evidence Ibsen provides is that Nora would need to make a no-fault divorce petition, which was not available at the time. I do not think Torvald’s behavior reaches the level of emotional abuse. Russia, in the throes of communist revolution, was among the first countries to allow no-fault divorce in 1915. In the U.S., California led the issue by legalizing it in 1969, with once-divorced Governor Ronald Reagan signing it into law, and it has since been followed by the rest of the country. Norway legalized no-fault divorce in the early 1990s. The U.K. is in the process of legalizing it this year (the latest data from England and Wales indicate most divorces are requested by women, and their reason is mainly the “behavior” of their spouses, not adultery or outright abuse). No-fault divorce has been a complex and controversial issue, with some feminist advocates like the National Organization of Women arguing that it allows abusive spouses to escape liability for their misbehavior. It is not a simple matter to discern the effect of growing feminist movements, successive “waves” of feminism,
and increased legal and cultural gender equality on divorce rates. Recorded annual divorces did increase sharply in the 20 th century, and it appears that in most developed Western countries about one-third to one-half of all marriages end in divorce or permanent separation, suggesting
there is some truth in the old saw that “half of all modern marriages end in divorce.”
Hnath’s sequel to A Doll’s House takes place within the lifetimes of the original play’s characters but has the authorial hindsight of the historic achievements for more equal gender rights since Ibsen’s day. In the sequel, Nora has become a successful fictional author and proponent of women’s liberation; she is both artist and feminist but remains bound by social and legal conventions even after living self-sufficiently for over a decade. If Torvald’s condescending diminutive terms for Nora were a defining stylistic in Ibsen’s play, highly frequent ellipses, often with no words spoken before or after them, are a dominant feature of dramatic encounters in A Doll’s House, Part 2. Hnath uses ellipses 166 times in the course of conversations in this play. Towards the end, Torvald and Nora often are at a loss for words. One of their wordless exchanges is represented by ten consecutive ellipses attributed to
the two of them, followed by Torvald saying, “…I don’t know what to do around you, I don’t know how to behave…”, and then three more wordless exchanges represented again by ellipses.
On the following page, the drama is represented by seven consecutive ellipses without any words. In a prefatory note, the playwright says these silences reflect “a moment of thinking or rethinking or sussing or a look, a sidelong glance, etc.” When Torvald and Nora do talk, it devolves into shouting and cursing. By stark contrast, my Dover Thrift Edition of Ibsen’s play contains no conversational ellipses. It is as if the certainties and conventions of the first play have evaporated, and characters are left with a succession of awkward or pregnant silences. Nora has rid herself of the domestic model that made idle or offensive chit-chat possible for much of Ibsen’s play. Her feminist liberation has torn down the patriarchal edifice that propped up her marriage earlier in life, and it is uncertain what has taken its place—to the extent that characters often do not know what to say to each other.
The sequel ends with Nora essentially affirming her decision to leave Torvald 15 years earlier, while defying Norwegian legal conventions that could endanger her writing career. She is left with acceptance of her dire circumstances and optimism that society can change for the better: “The world didn’t change as much as I though it would, but I know that some day
everything will be different, and everyone will be free—freer than they are now…I just hope I live to see it.” This hope that society can improve when presented with injustice remains true to Ibsen’s realism and contrasts with Hamsun’s artistic rejection of bourgeois society in its entirety. For Nora, her own alienation within society is the price of broader liberation and gradual reform.
For the narrator of Hunger, exile seems to be the only option.
The influence of literary works like A Doll’s House on human behavior and laws can be easily overstated, but it also should not be ignored. It is difficult to compare current divorce rates with those in the 19th century, but Norway’s divorce rate as of 2016 was 42.2%, according to Wikipedia. That put it about in the center of divorce rates for developed Western countries in the early 21 st century (The U.S. rate was 44.6% as of 2017; the U.K. was at 40.9% as of 2015; the E.U. as a whole was at 45.5% as of 2017; China, Japan, and South Korea had divorce rates of about one-third to one-half in 2018-19). A rough estimate would show this as a sharp increase from divorce rates of 5% or less in the mid-1800s. Art can affect real life. Consider Shakespeare’s influence and the humanistic message of many Renaissance artists. Or the real suicides that seemed to emulate the eponymous hero of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther or the male codes of honor and sense of tragedy that Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald instilled in many young American men in the last century.
The themes emerging in dramatic performance often must be more acceptable to the general public (audience members can simply walk out if they do not like what they are seeing) than those broached in novels and poems, where individual readers might be more accepting of
iconoclastic and avant-garde issues. That Ibsen’s play was such a popular success with audiences in his time and to this day, both in its original form and extended in Hnath’s sequel, suggests the Norwegian realist had his finger on society’s pulse. With divorce rates apparently declining slightly in the 21 st century, audiences are left to wonder if a new writer should pen a drama where a character like Nora makes a starkly different decision about how to respond to her marital problems.