Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick Page B

and emotional distance this spirited young wife must travel. It is common to link the early Nora and the late Nora by an undercurrent of hysteria in the beginning of the play — a preparation of the ground by a sprinkling of overly bright notes, a little breathlessness and hurry. Hysterical worry will not connect the two Noras. Her panic is a fleeting thing, based upon reality. It has to do with the pressing practical problem of the odious Krogstad’s determination to use Nora for his own dishonest purposes.
    The hysteria, the worry will not open the door. The only way the two can be reconciled is for the players and the audience to give up their idea that an independent, courageous woman cannot be domestic, pleasure-loving, and charming. If the play were written today, Nora would have left Helmer long ago. They are ill-matched. She has a gift for life and a fundamental common sense made falsely to appear giddy and girlish by the empty, dead conventionality of Helmer.
    An exchange about debt: Helmer says, Suppose a catastrophe happened to a man and his family was left with a coffin of unpaid bills; Nora answers, “If anything so dreadful happened, it would be all the same to me whether I was in debt or not.” She shows this sort of undercutting intelligence and genuineness throughout the play. Her mind has always been free and original; she is liberated by her intelligence and high spirits.
    Strange that Helmer should want a doll’s house and yet be so hostile to details of domestic creation. Over and over he leaves the stage with an air of insufferable self-love when there is anything to do with sewing or household affairs. In one scene he mocks the arm movements of a woman knitting. He flees from the presence of the children when they come in from the cold outside, saying, “Only mothers can endure such a temperature.”
    Nora’s children — this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen’s day one actress refused the part saying, “I could never abandon my children.” Nora’s love for the children seems real. The nurse points out that they are used to being with their mother more than is usual. Helmer, again lecturing about heredity, says lying mothers produce criminal children. Nora shudders, remembering her interest payments. The nurse she will finally leave the children with is the one who has raised her, but still the step is a grave one. In one of the most striking bits of dialogue between husband and wife, Helmer says, “...no man sacrifices his honor, not even for one he loves.” “Millions of women have done so,” Nora replies.
    When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, “Millions of men have done so,” and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior. Nora seems to be saying that she cannot raise her own children in the old way and that she needs time to discover a new one.
    Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, assent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man’s practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.
    In William Archer’s Preface to A Doll’s House he had the idea that the woman who served as the model for Nora had actually, in real life, borrowed the money to redecorate her house! There is something beguiling in this thought, something of Nora Helmer in it. The real case was a dismal and more complicated one. The borrowing woman was an intellectual, a sort of writer, who had