My Write up on the First-Wave Feminism in Nora, the "New Woman" in IBSEN'S A DOLL'S HOUSE, published in The Bangladesh Post, December 30, 2017 01/01/2018 From the world of "will" and "idea" of Schopenhauer to Henrik Ibsen's 'Play of Ideas' Avik Gangopadhyay reads the First-Wave Feminism in Nora, the "New Woman" in A DOLL'S HOUSE Avik Gangopadhyay In his Notes for a Modern Tragedy, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), perhaps worthy to be ranked with Sophocles and Shakespeare as one of the greatest masters of the art of the stage, also regarded by many as the "father of the modern drama", penned: "a woman cannot be herself in modern society," since it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." The play's theme is not women's rights, but as also been argued, the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person. Premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, published earlier that month, the three-act play, set in a Norwegian town circa, Et dukkehjem, translated as A Doll House, has contributed significantly to the change of social attitudes toward the end of the 19th century. The play has demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the history of the drama, the power of the stage in motivating social conduct. There is a strange combination that the play demonstrates: emphasis on social problem and realism, introduction of social and personal debate and discussion and championing individualism. Henrik Ibsen was surely there to open new frontiers of modern drama violating all the unwritten taboos of the 19th century theatre, asserting the Kierkegaard's thesis, the conflict between “Either/Or" presented through "All or Nothing". The play aroused a great sensation at the time and caused a “storm of outraged controversy” that went beyond the theatre to the world newspapers and society. A Doll's House was based on the life of Laura Kieler (maiden name Laura Smith Petersen), a good friend of Ibsen. Much that happened between Nora and Torvald happened to Laura and her husband, Victor. Similar to the events in the play, Laura signed an illegal loan to save her husband. She wanted the money to find a cure for her husband's tuberculosis. She forged a check for the money. She was found out. When Victor discovered about Laura's secret loan, he divorced her and had her committed to an asylum. Two years later, she returned to her husband and children at his urging, and she went on to become a well-known Danish author, living to the age of 83. Ibsen wrote A Doll's House at the point when Laura Kieler had been committed to the asylum, and the fate of this friend of the family shook him deeply, perhaps also because Laura had asked him to intervene at a crucial point in the scandal, which he did not feel able or willing to do. Instead, he turned this life situation into an aesthetically shaped, successful drama. In the play, Nora leaves Torvald with head held high, though facing an uncertain future given the limitations single women faced in the society of the time. In A Doll's House the moral rigidity of Helmer is tragically contrasted with the freedom of Nora's romantic sensibility, and in the celebrated final scene the continuance of their marriage is made to hinge on the possibility of reconciling their antithetical viewpoints in a synthesis. The play has come under furore and storm. A Doll's House has remained as a vital play of a strong-willed character, Nora, who has become a path breaking type. In spite of strong social realism as the base, the play is, as I see them, not merely a play of character, neither a "play of ideas," nor even a "play of ideas and character," but as the play of character with ideas. It is because of the vitality and energy of Ibsen's protagonists that GB Shaw considered them as part of Life Force, an aspect of French philosopher Henry Bergson's Creative Evolution. . A Doll's House questions the entire fabric of marital relationships. The play investigates the development of self- awareness in character and eventually indicts all the false values of contemporary society which denies the worth of individual personality. Nora is the 'New Woman' who is far from being a victim. She possesses, to quote Schopenhauer, a psychic world of both "Will" and "Idea". She is capable of dominating her domestic world, take initiative to nurse her husband during his long illness; she has the courage to forge signature in order to get money for her husband's convalescence and she is even able to meet the payments on her loan. The turning point of the play is based on Nora's supposed innocence of the realities of the world than on her husband's understandable fear of scandal in their provincial world. Because her notion that marriage could protect her from all eventualities is shattered and because she had romantically expected heroic sacrifices from him, Nora resolves to find some basis for her marriage other than convention and girlish romanticism: Nora: I have been greatly wronged, Torvald-first by papa and then by you. Helmer: What! By us two-by us two, who have loved you better than anyone else in the world ? Nora: (shaking her head) You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me which I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions, and if I differed from him 1 concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll- child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. And when I came to .live with you...I mean that 1 was simply transferred from papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your taste, and so I get the same tastes as you or else I pretended to.....I have existed merely to perform tricks for you. [Act III] This is not merely a vehement protest but an initiation of the process of self-realisation. The second phase of realisation is intoned unequivocally. Helmer: Have you not been happy here? Nora: No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to me. But our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them. That is what our marriage has been Torvald. [Act Ill] The intensity of the speech forces a reflection. Nora questions the very basis of the institution of marriage. The expressions 'doll-wife' and 'doll-child' reflect both the limitation of the marital and the filial relationship as well as an ideal, the make-belief nourished and turned to convention by fathers, husbands, wives, mothers and children. Ibsen does not restrict the sense in making one dominating and the other subordinate. This is evident in Nora's third phase of assertion: Helmer: It's shocking. This is how you neglect your most sacred duties. Nora: What do you consider my most sacred duties? Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children? Nom: I have other duties just as sacred Duties to myself. Helmer: Before all else, you are a wife and a mother. Nora: I don't believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you arc-or, at all events, that I must try and become one. Here is the dawn of the 'New Woman', the woman who puts her rationality first after gaining the strength of coming out of the world of make-belief, that is, her illusive social self, the deep rooted conventional self. She decides to leave her "doll's house" to seek independence in the "outside world". One important facet remains to be mentioned. How does Ibsen convince the spectators that Nora really believes that she can leave her young children and desert her husband? A reading of G. B. Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism illuminates an enquiring reader. To Shaw, the most original part of the play was the discussion Nora initiated once the threat of prosecution for forgery was completely removed by the blackmailer's repentance. In a conventional "well-made" play, Torvald’s eagerness to forget the entire unpleasant crisis would have been followed by a quick reconciliation and an unclouded denouement. In rejecting such conventional climax, Ibsen was transcending Scribe and the 19th century commercial theatre. His intention was to ground his play in the psychological realities of human character, like the nineteenth century realists Balzac, Flaubert and Turgenev. Ibsen's "the drama of ideas”, has its firm root in the everyday social and domestic middle-class world of Europe. The middle-class milieu has also enabled him to pinprick the very word 'morality', with which Nora was much concerned. The questions raised by Nora are also the questions raised first by Ibsen among others. In fact Ibsen has changed the direction of modem drama by raising realistic social questions and by the discussion of formerly forbidden topics in his plays. The attitude of Nora focuses the search-light of truth and reason on the changes of social perspectives. Ibsen highlights the need to modify social institutions. Social institutions like family, marriage have become habitual conventions and synonymous of moral ideals. Collectively people are enslaved by these ideas and believe them as virtue. In Nora Ibsen has portrayed that man is outgrowing his ideals, which must be challenged. "Conduct must justify itself by its effect upon happiness and not by its conformity to any rule of ideal" -in the way the neo-moralists see the ways of the world, where Nora rushes to make way for a free citizenship. Because of the departure from traditional behaviour and theatrical convention involved in Nora's leaving home, her act of slamming the door as she leaves has come to represent the play itself, which in a contemporary review rightly noted: "That slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world." In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most performed play for that year. UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value. The reviewer, a literary critic and researcher, writes from Kolkata, India View in Publication Site