Seduction and Betrayal (6 page)

What can
A Doll's House
be for us? Nora's leaving her husband can scarcely rivet our attention. The only thing more common and unremarkable would be her husband's leaving her. The last line, the historic “speech,” is in the famous stage direction that ends the play. “From below is heard the reverberations of a heavy door closing.” The door is the door of self-determination. We have some idea why it is at last opened, but why had it, before, been closed?

A Doll's House
is about money, about the way it turns locks. Here is the plot once more. Nora Helmer is the charming young mother of three children. She has been married for eight years. When we first meet her she is full of claims to happiness, but it is rather swiftly revealed that strenuous days and nights lie in the past. Still the marriage has life in it and Nora thinks she is happy. Indeed she is on the brink of being happier — things have taken a good turn. Nora's husband, Helmer, has been a struggling lawyer, but it is typical of his character that the courage and aggressiveness needed to survive as a solitary professional are not quite suitable to his temperament. He requires the corporate frame. Helmer has just been named manager of the Joint Stock Bank. It is a promotion in self-esteem, in social position, best of all in money.

It is Christmas Eve, the tree is brought in by a porter and almost the first line of the play is, “How much?” Nora gives the man a crown and in her first exclamation of liberation says, “Keep the change!” This gratuity, this enlargement of possibility and personal expansiveness are the very sweetness of life to Nora. Her money worries have been overwhelming; natural generosity, pleasant extravagance have had to be sacrificed. True, the new money is still maddeningly not quite there. Helmer's increased salary will not begin for three months. No matter, Nora has bought presents for the family instead of, as in previous years, sitting up all night making the trimmings and the gifts herself. In a mood of hope and indulgence she nibbles some sweets her husband, true to our own dental beliefs, has “forbidden” her in the interest of sound teeth.

In his first exchanges with Nora, Helmer calls her “his twittering lark,” and his “squirrel,” his little “spend-thrift,” his “featherbrain.” These are not insults — far from it. The words represent the coins of affection they have been living on in the lean days. But still we see right off that Helmer is prudent and Nora is eager for room in life, for spontaneity. “No debts! No borrowing!” the husband announces. But he loosens up a bit with the prodigal demands of the holiday season and counts out some bills for Nora. “Money!” she says, sounding the thundering chord. When she is asked what she wants for Christmas, she declares that she would like cash. Helmer finds the occasion to frown over her likeness to her father when it comes to spending; the husband believes in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and while he adores his little wife, he can see she is not entirely free of genetic imperfection.

At this point a visitor is announced. The social world of Ibsen's plays is greatly restricted, enclosed in a narrow frame, cut off by the very geography of Norway; the long, dark winters make for social repetition, and there is a kind of solitude at the center of everything. When the bell rings and the eyebrows lift at the unexpected caller, it is, unless it be that odd member of the triangular mystery, almost sure to be an old school friend of either the wife or the husband. Everyone else you know is right there, so to speak. This small-town life has moral consequences always; the players live with the threat of trouble over the most petty matters. When Rosmer changes some of his theological ideas it is a scandal. Error or past dissipation casts a long, long shadow. Small towns always remember you when you were young; they seldom believe all the good things they hear you have done later, since you went off someplace else.

The visitor in
A Doll's House
is Mrs. Linde. She has arrived on Christmas Eve. Those who call upon school friends they haven't seen for years are in a state of emergency. Something awful has happened out there. But in Ibsen's plays they receive a rather guarded welcome. No one has much to give; money, love, friendship come at a high price. This is a bourgeois world just hanging on, even petty bourgeois in the amount of money on hand. Most of the characters can claim only education and profession, not riches. Nora's husband has been made manager of the bank in the nick of time; Hedda Gabler's husband, Tesman, is a professor with very little money; her father was a military man who left nothing; Eilert Lövborg is poor; his mistress, Thea, is poor; Rebecca West in
Rosmersholm
is poor. Mrs. Alving in
Ghosts
has enough money, but disasters such as she has known are worse than poverty.

Mrs. Linde is a confidante, a device, rather thinly sketched, but in her outlines of practicality and heavy duties she is an interesting contrast to Nora. Mrs. Linde has come to town to get a job. Money has had its way with her since birth. Her father died and she gradually had to look after her mother and her younger brothers. She married at last, seeking minimal security, forgoing love. But ill luck dogged her still. Her husband died but not before his business fell into trouble. He left her without money and even without “a sorrow or a longing to remember.” It had been a complete blank — and no pension at the end of it. She survived. Mrs. Linde is steadfast if somewhat depressed. She has always worked.

At this point Nora starts to reveal the real plot of the play. Hearing of Mrs. Linde's troubles, of her lifelong sacrifices, Nora cannot resist admitting the troubles she, the happy, lucky young wife, has known. She has got herself into a mess on behalf of those she loves and she is proud of her steady, if unconventional, efforts to extricate herself. Nora too has made decisions, borne burdensome consequences. Yes, she has a husband and “three of the loveliest children,” but she has had to find ways, she has had to work — “light fancy work ...crochet and embroidery and things of that sort” — and copying late at night. Her secret is that she took on nothing less than the responsibility of saving her husband's life.

Helmer, when they were first married, had lost his health in the struggle to survive in the harsh commercial climate of Norway. We have no reason to doubt that he might have died without a trip south, to the sun. The bitter Norwegian winters, the coughs, the lung disease, the bronchial threats are perfectly convincing. “How lucky you had the money to spend,” the penny-worn Mrs. Linde says about their year in Italy.

Of course they hadn't the money to spend. Nora, without telling her husband, who would have certainly refused or vetoed the idea, had borrowed the money from the disgraced moneylender, Krogstad. This man had been a schoolmate of Helmer's, an admirer of Mrs. Linde's, a small-town embarrassment to himself and his family because he had at some time been guilty of forgery, had not actually been sentenced, but had lived on — forced into usury — with a small post in Helmer's bank and no position in society. Nora turned to Krogstad for her secret negotiations on the money for the year in Italy; she also forged her dying father's name to the note because she didn't know what else to do. But they had their year in the sun, her husband is well, and she has been scrupulously paying back the loan with interest all these years, doing “fancy work,” and saving pennies from her household money.

Lies had to be told, but Nora never doubted that she had done something both necessary and honorable. Also, the trip to Italy was one of those necessities that happily coincided with the heart's desire. When she gets out her pretty costume and dances the tarantella in a Mediterranean celebration of joy, we see that in saving her husband's life she has had the best year of her own. “I seem the fool I am not,” said Cleopatra.

Mrs. Linde speaks of being alone and childless and Nora cries out, “So utterly alone. How dreadful that must be!” And yet when Mrs. Linde faces her present situation, her mother dead, the boys raised and on their own, Nora suddenly says, “How free you must feel!” Mrs. Linde finds only “an inexpressable emptiness.” She has no one to live for and yet “you have to be always on the strain.” This woman has had a hard life of lonely work. She is thoroughly capable, even shows a talent for business, and Helmer is easily able to offer her a job in his bank.

Still, Mrs. Linde is a paradox, the sort of puzzle at the very heart of this play. She is capable and hard-working, but
she is not independent
. Nora is impractical and inexperienced, loves “beautiful gloves,” and wants the house to be nice — she is also
intrinsically independent
and free-spirited. In the end she leaves her husband and her children in order to find herself, but it is not the final gesture that makes her free. Anna Karenina left her husband and her son, but she was tragically dependent, driven finally by the torments of love to a devastating jealousy and to suicide.

Mrs. Linde, with her business experience, is prudent and conventional 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 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.