Transcript Critical Perspectives A Doll’s House Henrik Ibsen • Coupling close reading with an informed understanding of key ideas, related texts and background information READING CRITICALLY • No view.

Critical Perspectives
A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen
• Coupling close reading with an informed
understanding of key ideas, related texts
and background information
READING
CRITICALLY
• No view of the text is dominant
• Representation of the ending as:
• Unrealistic [M. W Burn]
• A dramatic flaw [F. Petersen]
EARLY CRITICS
• Early responses focused on the play’s
ending
“Loving the repulsive”
“Illogical and immoral”
“Our own life, our own everyday life, has
here been placed on stage and
condemned!”
EARLY CRITICS
• Germany – Ibsen pressured into writing a
happy ending
VICTORIAN
ENGLAND
“IBSEN IN BRIXTON”
CARTOON
PUNCH 1891
VICTORIAN
ENGLAND
“How Torvald Helmer could by any
possiblity have treated his restless,
illogical, fractious, and babyish little wife
otherwise than he did; why Nora should
ever adore with such abandonment and
passion wthis conceited prig… are points
that… require a considerable amount of
argument… to convince the commonsense playgoer.” (C. Scott, Daily Telegraph,
8 June 1889)
“beware of confounding the feelings of men who look
to them for nothing better than pleasant sensations
and mental distractions, with the feelings of men who
look to them to raise their ideal of mental and moral
grace and beauty.” (Spectator, 1989).
… “sharpshooting at the audience…we are not
flattered spectators killing the idle hour with an
ingenious and amusing entertainment: we are
‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’”…
VICTORIAN
ENGLAND
The Quintessence of Ibsenism (G. Bernard, 1891)
Naturalism – Ibsen came to be known for it
LATER CRITICS
Ibsen’s naturalism had been necessary at the
time in order to show the psychological and
political limitation of bourgeois domestic life, it
was a stage the theatre needed to outgrow.
Ibsen is not naturalistic enough
Ibsen as a pioneer of modernism…an “invitiation
to reflect on the nature of theatre”
LATER CRITICS
The relationship of Ibsen’s plays – and A Doll’s
House in particular – to notions of theatricality
and performance is precisely what makes them
interesting
LATER CRITICS
The interpreters of Nora – an essential
dimension to understanding of how different
generations have understood Ibsen.
Sign Systems
• Convey meaning between people
• Gestures
• Clothing
• Codes of manners
SIGNS &
SEMIOTICS
Semiotics is the study of signs.
• Helmer – Nora prefers his first name
• Helmer considers use of his first name
to be on a friendship level, hence his
anger towards Krogstad’s informality
SIGNS &
SEMIOTICS
Names are most obviously arbitrary
labels of all
The Christmas Tree
Clothing
• Tension
Door Slam
SIGNS &
SEMIOTICS
• Christian ideals
• Festivity and fun
• Nora’s state of being
a play that allowed the
audience to become absorbed
in the action as if they were
watching real life was in danger
of lulling them into accepting
the society shown in the play
instead of wanting to change it.
MARXIST
CRITICISM
For Brecht,
• Whose story does this tell?
• Is it told at the expense of lower
economic groups?
MARXIST
CRITICISM
The current preoccupation of Marxist
criticism is with what a text does not say –
because the text itself has been produced
on a set of assumptions about the world
seen as ‘natural’ by author and audience
alike.
• Nora as a reward
• Nora as a pet / possession
• Mrs Linde as an object of exchange
MARXIST
CRITICISM
Nora and Mrs Linde as commodities
• She is no longer an object
Who is right?
MARXIST
CRITICISM
Nora challenges her world
GENDERED
CRITICISM
A Doll’s House remains one of the most
powerful refutations ever written of the
theory of separate spheres which
underpinned nineteenth-century society –
the idea that men and women belonged in
the workplace and the home respectively.
• Gender is not something we are
• Gender is something we do
Gender roles are apparent even within
costumes
GENDERED
CRITICISM
Gender is performative
Nora and Helmer - Gender stereotypes
Helmer
• Is attracted to her helplessness
• Acts as protector
GENDERED
CRITICISM
Nora
• Submissive
• Flattering of her husband
• Seeing work as beyond her due to
intellect
Critical Perspectives
•
•
•
•
Early Critics
Victorian England
Later Critics
Contemporary Approaches
•
Signs and Semiotics
•
Marxist Criticism
•
Gendered Criticism
Sourced from York Notes Advanced – A Doll’s House, by Frances Gray,
York Press, London 2008