Modern Drama

IBSEN vs. IBSEN OR: TWO VERSIONS OF A DOLL'S .HOUSE Two SIDES OF IBSEN WERE AT WORK, and sometimes in conflict, when he wrote and re-wrote A Doll's House. * First there was the artist and craftsman; second, the social thinker-Ibsen preferred the term 'prophet'-insistent that the craftsman's hand weave his social ideas into the artist's re-dreaming of the world. Artist-craftsman and thinker wrestled fiercely with the materials of A Doll's House and with each other; their struggle explains some of the play's curious problemsparticularly why the final scene wrenches the play out of shape. Ibsen's first "notes for [this] modern tragedy" were mainly the thinker's work. They projected an indignant dramatization of "the two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. [Man and woman] do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by the man's law as though she were not a woman but a man. A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day...." The artist's subversion of the thinker is still far off. In Ibsens' mind the atoms of this angry play had long been gathering . A decade earlier Selma, in The League of Youth, had protested her woman's uselessness in words that would be familiar: "You have dressed me up like a doll; you have played with me as you would play with a child. Oh, what a joy it would have been to me to take my share in your burdens." And Ibsen's young friend, Laura Kieler, had lived through the improbable story that gave him his plot: sick husband , no money, a forged loan, a journey for health, secret revealed, husband angry. The skeleton of a conventional play, well-made, lay waiting here: the artist seized it, and dressed it in the conventional well-made devices-friends meet after many years, a hidden secret begins to fester, a loaded prop-in this case a letter-threatens the characters, will it go off-? But Ibsen worked to use these devices not only to lead the audience to a momentary, climactic suspense, but more important, so to hypnotize it that it could be assaulted with a fiery statement of woman's need for freedom and equality. The woman of the play, the notes predict, will commit forgery, but proudly, out of love. The husband, "with his conventional views of "'There are other fragments of revisions, but they are unimportant and do not affect a comparison of the two major drafts. 187 188 MODERN DRAMA September honor is on the side of the law and regards the question with masculine eyes." From the ensuing conflict, confusion, bewilderment, bitterness follow. "A mother in modern society is as useless, after she bears children, as insects who go away and die." She doubts her role, is fearful, anxious. The end was to be "despair, conflict, and destruction ." The first draft of A Doll's House was appropriately a craftsman's job of a thinker's play. There are long set piece discussions, of: divorce, the care of children, suicide, society, carried on mainly between Nora and her friend Kristine, and the doctor, Hank. Nora is a good woman , forced into small deceits to conceal the noble act she did. She is driven frantic by the villainous, blackmailing moneylender Krogstad , who threatens her, and jeers coarsely at her threats of suicide. Bitter and distraught, she is so pale and anxious that the kindly people about her fear for her health. But nobody is so solicitous as her husband, Thorvald: he speaks to her as if she were a little pet animal, a doll, but he worries about her illness and during the long week while she waits for her doom he treats her gently-until the doom comes, and he discovers she has borrowed money through a forged note. Then he is brutal to her, thinking only of the effect on himself. However, when a second note arrives from the reformed Krogstad lifting the danger, the husband's first thought is for her-"You are saved, Nora...