The play unfolds as she gets tied up more and more in trying to keep the matter hidden from Torvald, the husband, and tries to resolve the issue by herself, which, one would think, should have been resolved by them talking and working it through rather than her bearing the weight of that decision alone. But then, we wouldn’t be reading about how she eventually realises that she lives, as if, in a doll’s world.
There are a few other themes detailed in the play but the one that raises most questions in my mind is about a couple as a unit or the couple as Torvald, the husband and master of their household and Nora as a subject.
From the point of view of today’s time and age, the question bothers, grates and provokes. But I try to remember that the play is from the times of a century and half ago. I perhaps need to read more from that time to be able to properly compare and contextualise where Nora and Mrs Linde stand vis-a-vis other women of that time. Searching in my own understanding of history (from growing up context in India) or from my limited reading of those times, I feel that they seem to fare better in independence. Elsewhere in the world, perhaps Nora would not even have been able to buy macaroons on her own, forget taking a debt in her own name or Mrs Linde working and running an independent household. From limited contexts, I think of Isabel Archer, and her need to get married. I think of Carol Milford from Main Street of 1920s. Compared to them, I felt that Nora, when she eventually sits down to have her chat with her husband was quite ahead of her times.
So, although, reading it in 2020, one can get quickly bothered by the way Torvald Helmer seems to pin down boundaries for Nora, but I think it is not fair to colour my views on the play in that emotion.
Devoid of historical contexts, plays or stories like these, about seemingly real people in seemingly average times need some sort of extremes or stretching away from the routine behaviour or situation to bring out the reactions from its characters, and make some sort of lasting impression that 140 years away too, one can feel for Nora when she gasps for air, struggling for a room of her own equivalent when she has one of her final conversations with Torvald:
“It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with father, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.
I mean that I was simply transferred from father’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your taste, and so I got the same tastes as you – or else I pretended to, I am not really sure which – I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman – just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you wanted it like that. You and father have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.”Nora speaks not only for her, but perhaps for a lot of people who, while living in relatively comfortable situations, tend to lack that space - not for the lack of means but for the lack of some sort of permission. Why should they seek permission for this space? One would think that beyond the requirements of a well-functioning family unit where members tend to subdue parts of their selves to make a home and family life enjoyable, which is perhaps a choice and offering of the members, not a demand on only one member of the unit. And because of this, if she still struggles for that space, the reason perhaps sits at the root of how families, societies are set up.
Separate from dynamics of a family and the question of physical time and space for individual pursuits, there’s the deeper question of thoughts and independence of those thoughts. With Torvald sharing views and directing thought from larger matters, such as his belief that root of all evil in people is a fault of their mothers, not something that perhaps both parents need to wonder about, to things like embroidery, where he thinks women should embroider rather than knit because it is more graceful. Although a small detail, but sometimes, philosophies are laid bare in details like these. Prejudiced thought space exists across times and places in different forms and perhaps biases can never be fully taken away – just the way we are programmed. But the freedom to stick to and hold their own independent prejudices as a partner in a unit, and not blanket buy into the ones set by the ‘head’ of the unit is a freedom that sometimes goes missing in different set-ups (be it family, societies, nations), and leads to the kind of strife and an unfulfilled sense which is what Nora seems to grapple with.
About the fault though, I try to believe that fault lies not in our stars, ‘but in ourselves, that we are underlings’. It would have been nicer to have her eventual conclusion something stronger, something other than her believing herself to be a victim of her circumstances. I feel it is somehow empowering to believe that what we make of our lives is a person’s responsibility irrespective of the boundaries that are randomly pinned around them.
**
I have not read many plays. And being new, I am brimming with observations on the genre – I realise that plays provide little buffer or softening to the author in terms of a narrator or commentary. The characters are shown live, and to help the reader contextualise them, they must carry all their prejudices, views of the world on their sleeve, and it may not be pretty at times. Plays also seem to demand a more active engagement on the part of the audience or the reader since you need to build the character sketch & historical narrative through following their conversation, and they cannot be too obvious or forthcoming, so you need to let imagination play an active role in meaning making.
Another aspect is the way the drama unfolds. In this play itself, even as one gets a little miffed with the opening conversation, you realise that your focus was drawn to one end of the stage while the author has been busy setting up and illuminating the action that unravels at the centre of the stage, just like the way illusionists and magicians work, and shuffling between the trivial and the patronising nature of that opening, you suddenly come head to head with the deep undercurrent of despair & ‘life is elsewhere’ feeling that runs at the core of this drama. And you humbly realise that you should not judge too soon, and you begin to understand what Salman Rushdie meant while talking about Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-five, “It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye” - the need for another emotion to lighten the load of the deeper current.
Another thought is that sometimes, real-like people behaving in unreal ways people can strangely draw oblique mirrors to things we confront within ourselves, and soften the conversation a bit with their seeming unreality.
**
Henrik Ibsen grew up in Norway. His father’s bankruptcy when he was a child and the related growing up hardships and the neglect of the relatively richer relatives informed his social dramas. In the intro note on the author, we are told that “The ground was thus prepared for the future writer who was to castigate the false respectability and complacency of the middle classes.” and that “Life had to wound his soul till it bled before his writing could proceed from bitter need, from an inner strife which demanded dramatic expression.”
It seems that the very poor seem to treat the realities around them differently than the middle classes, which, once settled and anchored with their small worlds, mediocre possessions, find themselves too invested in their little kingdoms to risk or toss it all for any kind of movement away from their limited/ non-extreme worldviews towards any kind of majorly radical idea. I read somewhere that when it is too easy, the will weakens – not just at a personal level, but whole societies can fall ill. Abundance being harder for us to handle than scarcity. (Something to perhaps think of as we consider the larger discussion on universal basic income, and the invigorating power of the ‘want’ rather than the ‘have’.)
Where complacency or comfort tends to dull us and induces solipsistic thinking, change or movement, from one extreme to another, or times of flux or chaos or the unsettled and uncertain nature of things seems to make the moments of passing so much richer - deepening and stretching the same moments, livening & layering them with imagined certainties buzzing around the uncertainties. Same moments which seem to blink by when things get comfortable can be unimaginable gifts of experience and thought.
And yet, the way we seem to have set up this world and our lives, the middle, the mediocre, the centre, the average becomes the end and the bind. Perhaps it should not be.
And yet again, how to live and what is the objective is a much larger question to think about and handled easier by working out from an individual level. Whether to seek stability, peace in the middle, or the flux and richness and intensity of moments - which objective function to maximise is a problem with the constants themselves colored in variables of individual preferences over time. Trying to get to a society level answer is pretty complicated.
**
I try to turn the question to myself. And with all these general realisations, comes crashing the personal realisation that sometimes things are easier said than done. With all the knowledge and wisdom, which we all seem to have access to and loads of, the commitment to action on that derived, personal wisdom is still so difficult to consistently live upto. One still automatically seeks peace. Chaos, flux and uncertainties can be lived with as if passing through a tunnel, but it doesn’t come naturally - this seeking of the flux.
So, after all this journey of reading and then writing about it, one just comes home to a more nuanced understanding of one’s own motives, desires and eventual actions. What more can one ask for?