Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick Page A

like Helmer. She tells Nora, “A wife can’t borrow without her husband’s consent.” Nora thinks that is nonsense, a technicality. (In this conclusion she shows herself prophetic of modern American practice.) She is not, like Krogstad, dishonest and self-pitying. Instead she seems to enjoy the triumph of the borrowing and the struggle to repay. She has nothing but the most honorable intentions toward the money and the interest. Krogstad is a true forger, always wanting to make a leap without taking the consequences. He whines about his reputation. “All paths barred.” It is strongly suggested that he would have been more respected if he had gone to jail. Instead he has somehow edged out of that but has not been able to push away the cloud over his name.
    No one understands vice better than Ibsen. He knows what a Krogstad is like. The outcast does not care about reality, but only about fancy. Krogstad holds Nora’s fate in his hands; the fact that she has almost repaid the money does not impress him. He knows about the forging of her father’s name. Well enough. She must make Helmer keep him on at the bank, give him that little bit of respectability. And then suddenly the minor post is not sufficient. Krogstad begins to dream, a true forger’s dreaming. He will not be a mere clerk; no, he must be Helmer’s right-hand man and soon become the manager himself! This flamboyant soaring, done in only a few lines, is masterly. (Old Father Ibsen dreaming over his schnapps, no doubt.) In the end, Mrs. Linde and Krogstad decide to share the future. It is a case of supply and demand.
    Helmer finds out about the borrowing and the forgery. He flies into a rage and nowhere shows the “miracle” of understanding or of male chivalry Nora had pretended to expect. He thinks she’s a treacherous little idiot who can tear down in a moment of folly all a man has built up by his most painful efforts. When he sees that it may not all be revealed, that they can get by with it, his fury abates. But Nora has suffered a moral disappointment. Helmer is not only a donkey, but a coward as well. She makes her decision to leave him and her children because she feels she has been deceiving herself about marriage and happiness and must now learn what life is really about.
    The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the bright woman — with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of “heaps of money” — can be a suitable candidate for liberation. No, that role should by rights belong to the depressed, child-less, loveless Mrs. Linde and her lonely drudgery. The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. And Nora never for a moment trusted Helmer. If she had done so she would long ago have told him about her troubles.
    Nora kept her secret because she took pride in having assumed responsibility for her husband’s life. She also kept quiet out of a lack of faith in her husband’s spirit, a thorough knowledge of his conventionality and fear. Even as he is opening the letter that tells of the borrowing and forgery, before he knows , she thinks, Goodbye, my little ones. Of course her worst fears are true. Helmer behaves very badly, saying I told you so, and babbling on about her being her father’s daughter. Had Nora stayed with him, we can imagine a rather full store of grievance would be in the closet. At the least Helmer would be eternally joking about her foolishness and looking into his wallet at night.
    It is difficult to play Nora on the stage. Not that the role is demanding in the usual ways, but rather because of the intellectual