The World of the Play - Statement

Firstly, I have to take the time to say that researching the world of A Doll’s House proved to much more challenging--and exhausting than I ever thought it would be. Norway was only beginning to interact with English-speaking peoples of the world during the period in which Ibsen wrote this classic. Most of the information I sifted through was still in its original Norwegian and, due to it not being easily translated into English, was practically unreadable. What I did find was a nation changing along with all the others in the face of the Industrial Revolution. proved to be much more challenging—and

Norway was a small farming nation pre-revolution. It was owned by Denmark until 1814, when Sweden invaded and Denmark ceded Norway to the Swedes. The Industrial Revolution combined with the new, arguably less restrictive Swedish regime led to a surge of nationalism in Norway and the development of a culture unique to the Norwegian people. However, by 1874 the initial boom of the Revolution had faded, and the world sank into the first global economic depression that would last until 1896.

This production is set in 1879 in Christiania (now called Oslo), Ibsen’s hometown. Norway has been growing rapidly, tripling its population since the beginning of the century and Christiania has just annexed five new “counties” into its township. City life is not easy: it’s crowded, and noisy. Diseases like Smallpox, typhus and tuberculosis and cholera run rampant among the populace like it never has before. Louis Pasteur has only introduced his theory of bacterium and has trouble getting his fellow doctors on board with the idea. As the masses move in, so does prostitution and venereal disease. With little to no explanation as to treatment or cause, sex itself is blamed and suppressed. It is labeled dirty and a strong moral contraband is put on it outside of marriage. Marital sex is to be done only for reproduction. The moral codes put in place in this time are not intended to keep people down, but to keep them alive—such is the importance.

Not everything is too gloomy, however. The Church of Norway, which is of Lutheran Christian faith, has started as series of assemblies in order to democratize the formal proceedings of the Church.  Previously banned, Atheism and Judaism were made legal in the middle of the century. Our play takes place on Christmas Eve. Christmas, called Jul (pronounced like “yool”) was introduced to Norway in the 900s, when King Haakon I decided that the heathen custom of drinking Jul was to be moved to December 25th, in honor of the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a tradition in Norway to gather the family and make baskets of colorful paper to hang on the Christmas tree.

 The birth of Norwegian art is also picking up steam: landscapes of the beautiful Norwegian scenery painted by Johan Christian Dahl pave the way for other Norwegian artists such as Kitty Kielland, Harriet Backer, Frits Thaulow, and Christian Krohg. Norwegian men are also well-educated, as all men were taught to read and write. It was very expensive for men to go to University. At University, there were a lot of tests for the students to take. Geography and history were emphasized in higher-level learning, though the English decided they were lacking in “gentlemanly bearing.” Women, of course, did not receive higher education until years after A Doll’s House was written.

Norwegian women, like most women around the world at the time, experience second-class status. Ibsen himself said that a woman “cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and whit a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view,” and that she is expected to “like certain insects…go away and die when she has done her duty in the propagation of the race.” Indeed, women were only just starting to fight for their rights: only single women were considered “independent adults” who could take care of their own assets. Married women, like Nora, surrendered all to their husbands. Nora borrowed today’s equivalent of $56,969 from Nils Krogstad. To put that into perspective, The average man in Norway in 1879  the equivalent of $7, 751 a year. Even after his promotion, Torvald would only have made around $15,311 per year!

By better knowing the world in which the events of A Doll’s House, the audience can better understand the implications of Nora’s plight, the society she’s up against, and just how loudly that slamming door resonates at the end of the play.