Neil Bowen on
In what ways do you think Ibsen’s presentation of Nora Helmer and Mrs Linde contributes to his exploration of being female?
INTRODUCTION
Ibsen believed that men and women lived by different moral laws, and that in his society women were judged, unfairly, by ‘masculine law’. In a Doll’s House he dramatises this dynamic.
Ibsen’s claimed he was more interested in the theme of self-liberation than in women’s rights. His exploration of being female is really more an exploration of being an individual trapped by circumstance.
Ibsen makes clear the restrictions women lived under through both the characters of Nora Helmer and Mrs Linde.
For example Nora is literally and metaphorically confined by her house. She remains in the house up until the very last scene of the play, and even in the house she is restricted to just one room. The outside world is cut off from her access. Hence the stage window.
Similary through Mrs Linde Ibsen illustrates the difficulties for a woman of succeeding in a patriarchal society. Mrs Linde marries someone she does not love, instead of someone she does love, because of her sense of duty to her ill mother and her two younger brothers. For them she needs financial security, and Ibsen makes it clear that she has few other means of securing money. . . .Her role in life is defined very clearly.
Nora’s restrictions are also seen in dependency on her husband. Torvald has the keys to the house, sole charge of the finances and he even dictates the décor. He is in charge, and he has another life away form the home. Nora is a wife, and to some extent a mother. She has no other way of defining herself.
Nora’s dependency results in her sublimating herself in him. Her role is to look attractive, to entertain, and to mirror a positive image of her husband back to her husband. And not only does Torvald expect this he thinks it is perfectly natural. He patronises her and belittles her without any apparent understanding of what he is doing to her.
Nora and Torvald’s relationship reverts to a kind of infantilism.
Nora’s only power is her feminine wiles; her coyness, her flirtatiousness, her wheedling. Ibsen shows how women could be reduced to this.
Mrs Linde’s lack of power/choice/freedom seen in her having to ask for a job . . .and by the dismissive way she is treated by male company. Nora’s enforced ignorance makes her vulnerable to Krogstad. She has no understanding of the procedures of male institutions such as the bank, the law and ‘financial services’
Nora is a mother but is made incapable of doing this properly. She is dependent on a maid. The maid also contributes at the other end of the social scale to Ibsen’s presentation of the experience of being female. When Nora imagines abandoning her own children . . .
In the redemption scene between Krogstad and Mrs Linde and in the final scene of the play Ibsen shows the capacity for women to be more than passive victims of an oppressive male society. Mrs. Linde offers to marry Krogstad, Nora rejects her marriage to Torvald.