Henrik Ibsen's play was revolutionary at its time in its provoking subversiveness and interrogation of the heterosexual family unit and indeed, gender roles. It has even greater resonances today with the academic interests of feminist and critical theory academics who examine performativity of gender. This article explores the performance of gender in Ibsen's A Doll House.
Significance of the title, A Doll's House, in gendered terms?
The title presents to the audience with connotations of girlhood, playtime and domesticity. One might conjure a doll’s house as literally a female child’s choice of play . In also considering a doll’s house in relation to the dramatic text, it is also Nora’s domestic world.
The image of a doll represents, and supplants, the real woman, suggesting the objectifying gaze in which women’s bodies and selves are perceived.
Thus, the insidiousness of gendered constructions of self are revealed to us from the very beginning: They appear to us as an innocent, childish plaything. Or perhaps, they are just models and images of femininity. The first impressions of innocence and playfulness however, belies insidious, subtle ways in which gender constructs are disseminated and subconsciously consumed, then performed.
Acting like a man? Significance of Nora's loan.
Nora takes up a loan in order to go to Italy with her husband, Torvald Helmer, to aid his recovery from a serious illness. As she is a married woman of her times, she is not legally permitted to conduct this kind of financial transaction. Legally and morally transgressive, her revelation of the loan invites Mrs Linde’s judgement and shock over her financial genius.
Nora’s own understanding of her financial activities collides brutally with the attitudes that are slowly but surely brought to light in the dialogues with the other characters. In her eyes, she has conducted a heroic rescue project for the sake of her husband’s health:
‘‘I’ve got something to be proud and pleased about too,’’ she tells Mrs. Linde: ‘‘I saved Torvald’s life."
To this end, she has not only acted as an autonomous person with her own business affairs but she has also saved money and taken on some copying in order to pay the loan back. Indeed, we are also reminded of a woman’s pivotal role in the patriarchal domestic space: She is a pillar of strength behind the patriarch and women are not weaker than men. In fact, Ibsen shows us it is quite the opposite!
This enterprise has given her self-esteem and a taste of self-determination, because, as she puts it:
‘‘It was almost like being a man.”
Ibsen provides a provocative insight into Nora’s financial genius: In assuming this role, she acquires a masculine autonomy beyond the constraints of her gendered self.
This also explains why she cannot tell Helmer about her loan, for it would emasculate him thoroughly :
‘‘– Torvald and his masculine pride, – it would be so embarrassing for him – and humiliating to know he owed anything to me.”
Reason being, Nora’s financial genius and courage directly affronts and undermines the fragile masculinity and bravado that defines Torvald Helmer’s existence, and exposes the essential hollowness of gender conventions: The archetype of the masculine, patriarchal provider for the family that Helmer clings to.
The Tarantella Practice: Who is the director? Who is the object of observation and control?
The tarantella rehearsal in Act 2 fleshes out the gendered dynamics of A Doll’s House in a much more nuanced way. Let's consider the following extract:
NORA [shouts]: Now play for me! Now I’ll dance. [HELMER plays and NORA dances; DR. RANK stands at the piano behind HELMER and looks on.]
Here, Nora’s command to Torvald in this tarantella practice is a significant exercise of agency for two reasons. First, she manipulates Torvald into thinking that she needs more practice by dancing badly (to buy more time away from the letterbox and the revelation of her loan). Second, she acts as an artistic director here, commanding the commencement and accompaniment of her male musician.
Yet, we are also acutely aware of Dr Rank’s lingering gaze, watching her performance and bodily movements, reminding the audience of its own position (and perhaps complicity) in contributing to Nora’s need to perform the tarantella and indeed, perform her feminised act of false helplessness.
Besides, the piano melody which Torvald plays reminds the audience of the musical rhythms that demand the compliance of the female dancer to its ebbs and flows, not unlike Torvald (and patriarchal society’s) masculine demands on Nora’s performance of a coy, servile femininity. Therein lies the complexity of gender relations: While Nora exercises her agency in commanding the commencement of this performance, it is performed in a context of patriarchal social structures, in rhythms of music and conformity.
Indeed, Ibsen invokes the desire for aesthetic unity in this performance of traditional femininity: a cohesiveness and harmony to the larger whole of the performance. This is particularly seen in Torvald’s aversion to the "wild "vigour of Nora’s corporeal movements,
“Not so wild, Nora!”
dictating the way in which she must perform the tarantella, manipulate her corporeal body and visually present her femininity according to patriarchal standards of aesthetics.
Yet, this is not to downplay Nora’s agency either. Let's consider her insistence and assertion of her chosen mode of performance: “This is how it has to be”. Here, the tone of confident determination delivers an unfazed self-assertion: In eluding the rhythms of the tarantella, she effectively resists the rhythms and orders dictated by patriarchal society within the safety of art (dancing) and by exploiting its subversive, liberating potential.
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