The Play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen expresses many social conventions through the play’s dramatic conventions. Ibsen makes a commentary on the convention of marriage in the 1800’s as well as the conventions of the relationship between a husband and wife in relation to expected roles and duties of each. Not only is Ibsen changing the conventions of relationships within his play, but is also changing how the plays are staged and written when compared to the drama that existed prior to A Doll’s House. Ibsen changes the focus of the dialogue, and begins to explore how the play can be a social commentary. He began to make his prose reflective of real human emotion, conflict, and struggle, disregarding that this was previously not done in the writing or performing of plays.
Before Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, there were only a few, finely tailored types of drama, molds by which every play was to follow in the 1800’s. These forms of drama did not allow for true to life human interaction, but rather a common and over-used recipe for producing an assembly line play for companies to perform. With A Doll’s House, Ibsen changed the standard conventions which were used to write plays. He began to look deeper in to the characters that he created, making them have inner conflict and emotion that would be apparent to the viewer.
The action in A Doll’s House revolves around three central characters. Nora, who is Torvold’s wife and is mainly a house-maker who wishes nothing other than to please her husband. Torvold, also known as Helmer, who is Nora’s Husband and works at a bank, and lastly, Krogstad, a man who Nora had secretly borrowed money from in order to fund a trip for Helmer and herself under the false pretense that it was her father’s death money. When Krogstad is informed that Helmer will be working at the bank, he knows his job is in danger. So he tries to convince Nora, through blackmail, to help him keep his position. Nora is not able to convince her husband to keep Krog on at the bank, and begins to fear that she will have to run away due to the fact that Krog is going to reveal her big secret to Hel.
In the end, Hel finds out about the borrowed money, and is at first angered by it and how it will damage his reputation. He claims that because Nora is a deceptive liar that she is not fit to raise the children. When Hel receives a letter from Krog his sentiment changes towards Nora, “Listen to me, Nora. You don’t seem to realize that it is all over…you don’t feel as if you believe that I have forgiven you. But it is true, Nora.” (3.64). It is only after he receives a letter from Krog stating that he will forget about the entire affair, that he forgives Nora and pleads for her to stay. He was quick to label her a liar and an unfit mother, even though what she did was out of love and duty for him.
The social convention that the play is criticizing here is how a woman is simply pushed along from one man, her father, to the next, her husband. Her loyalties and duties are shifted from man to man, and this duty becomes her most important task as a woman. Ibsen is challenging this concept of marital loyalty of the 1800’s. When Nora chooses to leave her home and search for her own happiness she was breaking the social conventions of marriage in the 1800’s. She abandons her position as wife and mother in order to search for her true self, something which was considered secondary to the duties as a wife and mother in the 17th century.
Another important dramatic convention that Ibsen is modifying is the dialogue between the characters in the play. Before this revolution in playwriting, the characters did not have any substantive interaction between one another. Each play was type-cast and created from the same mold as every other play, containing no real dialogue between the characters. The characters did not exchange thoughts or ideas on anything that was of real importance. In A Doll’s House this convention is broken down when Nora states, “In all these eight years – longer than that – from the very beginning of our acquaintance we have never exchanged a word on any serious subject.” (3.66). When Nora makes this comment, she is not only speaking about the conversation between herself and Helmer. Ibsen is making the statement, through her, that every play that was written up to A Doll’s House has had a shallow exchange of dialogue and emotion from all of the characters. That none of the plays prior to A Doll’s House displayed serious subjects, subjects that directly affected the society or time that they were created in.
The reader is aware that the marriage between Nora and Hel is not as perfect as it seems, but Hel does not have any inclination that there is anything wrong with their marriage. He sees Nora as fulfilling her role as wife and mother, doing no wrong other than being somewhat of a spend-thrift. He is very controlling over her and even tells her that she is not allowed to eat sweets such as macaroons. Throughout the story Nora is silently defying the rules that Hel has set for her with out his knowledge, but the true demonstration of independence is when she actually leaves in Act III. When she decides to leave her family, not for the reason of fleeing from her shame and disgrace, but rather because she is longing to become independent and discover who she truly is, this is when she has gained respectability and independence not as a mother or wife, but as a woman.
By challenging the social conventions of the 1800’s, Ibsen successfully changed the theater forever. He took the well-made play and infused it with the true-to-life human emotions that people have. He exposed real life circumstances and did not veil them by having shallow conversation throughout his play. The characters, for the first time ever, had moral and emotional depth. They had real issues to be dealt with, and had real conversations not only with each other but also with the audience.
The social conventions of marriage were also under full attack in A Doll’s House. A wife in the 1800’s was supposed to be completely devoted to her husband, but instead Nora was deceitful and withheld information from her husband. While Nora had the best of intentions when borrowing the money deceitfully, she still did so by lying to her husband who she is supposed to remain completely truthful with at all times. She then found herself subject to the circumstances that this deceit created for her later on in her life. She was forced to view her life differently, to view her dependence on Hel.
When Nora thought that she was going to have to leave her family and start again on her own, it opened her eyes to what life could be like if she was only to depend on herself and no one else. Through her struggles with what to do over the danger of her secret being discovered, Nora has grown up, become an independent thinker, she states; “I have fought a hard fight for the last three days.” (3.64). The “fight” that she speaks of is not only one of trying to figure out how to save herself from the danger of her secret, but the fight that she had to become an independent thinker, a woman who wants to be on her own and discover life. Nora grows in the three days that the play takes place in, she becomes a different person, a person no longer dependent on her husband. She becomes a woman who has a longing to discover life on her own, to learn, and to find out who she truly is.
Ibsen not only defied the dramatic conventions of the 1800’s with his creation of A Doll’s House, be he also offered an inciteful and long-overdue commentary on the social conventions of marriage. He displays to the reader that even though there was a strict social sentiment that a woman should be a loyal wife and mother, that the women of the 1800’s were not simply slaves to their family. He displayed that there could be women who dared to defy this limiting role and venture off to discover a world without duty, where they would be free to seek knowledge, independence, and a sense of self.
