The Writing of A Doll's House
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1996
The theme of A Doll’s House was inspired by a real event. In 1870 Ibsen had met a young Norwegian woman, Laura Petersen, who had written a speculative sequel to his earlier verse drama Brand. Two years later she married a Danish schoolmaster named Victor Kieler who, shortly afterwards, fell ill. Doctors prescribed a warmer climate to help him recover, but as the couple were poor, and Victor refused to discuss money matters, she secretly arranged a loan to finance a move to Switzerland and, subsequently, Italy. On their way home through Munich Laura Kieler visited the playwright and confessed to him what she could not tell her husband.
By 1878, with the debt needing to be repaid, she hastily dashed off a novel which she sent to Ibsen in the hope that he would recommend it to his publisher Hegel, and thereby secure for her a large advance. Ibsen was embarrassed: the book was bad, and he wrote back to the woman he had come to call his “skylark” advising her to tell her husband everything.
This she did, but only after having forged a cheque to clear the debt which her bank refused to honour. On learning the truth, Victor Kieler reacted badly. Claiming she was an unfit wife and mother, he demanded a divorce. Laura Kieler suffered a nervous breakdown but, after a brief stay in a lunatic asylum, eventually managed to convince Victor to take her back for the sake of their children.
These events crystallised for Ibsen certain consequences for women in the unequal role they played in a male-dominated society. In Autumn 1878, following a move from Munich to his old stamping ground of Rome, he began to contemplate the play’s structure. (This process usually took six months, and during this period Ibsen proposed to the Scandinavian Club in Rome that the post of paid librarian should be open to women, and that they should also have the right to vote on Club matters. The first motion was passed, the second failed by a single vote, causing an outraged response from the playwright.)
He eventually started writing in early May 1879 and once the work was begun, it progressed swiftly. He completed the play on 3 August while on holiday in Amalfi. It came out in book form in Copenhagen on 4 December and met with immediate success. The first edition of eight thousand copies sold out within a month, an unprecedented response to any play published in Scandinavia.
The unconventional ending was deemed a major technical advance on his previous play, Pillars of Society. The directness of the language was also praised: simple and straightforward, it had virtually none of the symbolism that had previously been such a distinctive feature of Ibsen’s literary method. And the play made its points with a startling economy of means: Pillars of Society had a cast of nineteen, A Doll’s House required only five. This was the play that was to make Ibsen internationally famous – eventually. It was known in Germany and Scandinavia for ten years before the first English or American versions were seen.
Not that Ibsen reaped as huge a financial reward as he legitimately had a right to expect. The authorised German translation was being sold in Copenhagen at a price lower than the original language edition, and was snapped up by an educated public for whom German was a natural second language. Equally galling was the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe’s call for a traditional ‘happy’ ending. She would play Nora, she said, but only up to a point: “I would never leave my children!” Rather than have the ending bowdlerised by another hand, Ibsen provided an alternative conclusion himself, in which the Helmers decide to stay together, albeit with a seriously weakened relationship. This was the version that toured Germany in 1880, but when it reached Berlin there was a public outcry against such narrow-minded distortion of the author’s intentions. The revised ending had never been very successful anyway, so from that point on, the temperamental star agreed to play Ibsen’s original version.
Unfortunately, the play did little to help the Kielers’ relationship. Once the source of the plot had become common knowledge, it only caused further friction between them, and Laura in particular was indignant that Ibsen should have made use of her dilemma in this way, even though Nora Helmer is presented as a sympathetic and courageous character. It is indeed ironic, as Ibsen’s great English translator and biographer Michael Meyer points out, “that the play which established Ibsen as the champion of women should have been so deeply resented by the woman who had inspired it.”