Recasting A Doll House: Narcissism As Character Motivation in Ibsen's Play

Abstract

Recasting A Doll House: Narcissism As Character Motivation in Ibsen's Play Carol Strongin Tufts I am not a member of the Women's Rights League. Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe. ... To me it has seemed a problem of mankind in general. And if you read my books carefully you will understand this. . . . My task has been the description of humanity. To be sure, whenever such a description is felt to be reasonably true, the reader will read his own feelings and sentiments into the work of the poet. These are then attributed to the poet; but incorrectly so. Every reader remolds the work beautifully and neatly, each according to his own personality. Not only those who write but also those who read are poets. They are collaborators.! To look again at Ibsen's famous and often-quoted words— his assertion that A Doll House was not intended as propaganda to promote the cause of women's rights—is to realize the sarcasm aimed by the playwright at those nineteenth-century "collaborators" who insisted on viewing his play as a treatise and Nora, his heroine, as the romantic standard-bearer for the feminist cause. Yet there is also a certain irony implicit in such a realization, for directors, actors, audiences, and critics turning to this play a Utile over one hundred years after its first performance bring with them the historical, cultural, and psychological experience which itself places them in the role of Ibsen's collaborators. Because it is a theatrical inevitability that each dramatic work which survives its time and place of first perCAROL STRONGIN TUFTS is Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College. She has published on Chekhov, and an article on Shakespeare's Macbeth is forthcoming . She is currently at work on an extended study of Chekhov's major plays. 140 Carol Strongin Tufts141 formance does so to be recast in productions mounted in succeeding times and different places, A Doll House can never so much be simply reproduced as it must always be re-envisioned . And if the spectacle of a woman walking out on her husband and children in order to fulfill her "duties to [herjself' is no longer the shock for us today that it was for audiences at the end of the nineteenth century, a production of A Doll House which resonates with as much immediacy and power for us as it did for its first audiences may do so through the discovery within Ibsen's text of something of our own time and place. For in A Doll House, as Rolf Fjelde has written, "[i]t is the entire house . . . which is on trial, the total complex of relationships, including husband, wife, children, servants, upstairs and downstairs, that is tested by the visitors that come and go, embodying aspects of the inescapable reality outside."2 And a production which approaches that reality through the experience of Western culture in the last quarter of the twentieth century may not only discover how uneasy was Ibsen's relationship to certain aspects of the forces of Romanticism at work in his own society, but, in so doing, may also come to fashion a Doll House which shifts emphasis away from the celebration of the Romantic belief in the sovereignty of the individual to the revelation of an isolating narcissism—a narcissism that has become all too familiar to us today.3 The characters of A Doll House are, to be sure, not alone in dramatic literature in being self-preoccupied, for self-preoccupation is a quality shared by characters from Oedipus to Hamlet and on into modern drama. Yet if a contemporary production is to suggest the narcissistic self-absorption of Ibsen's characters, it must do so in such a way as to imply motivations for their actions and delineate their relationships with one another. Thus it is important to establish a conceptual framework which will provide a degree of precision for the use of the term 'narcissism' in this discussion so as to distinguish it from the...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.