Libby Emmons: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen | The Book Club

Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles, here to perform My Most Sacred Duty. This is actually not My Most Sacred Duty, but Sacred Duty is a very important theme of this month's book, A Dollhouse, by Henrik Ibsen. I am joined by Libby Emmons, the editor-in-chief of the Postmillennial, and even more impressively, a survivor of New York of the most left-wing educational institutions in the country, where she trained to work in New York theater. Libby, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Michael. You love Ibsen. I do love Ibsen. I like him. I like Ibsen in the way that G.K. Chesterton liked Shaw. Okay. You know, I think he's a great man. Maybe his heart's in a little bit in the wrong place, but you love him in no small part, I assume, because this man basically invented modern theater. He did invent modern theater, yes. I also love him because he is a Norwegian playwright. I have Norwegian ancestors. He really spearheaded the creation of modern Norwegian culture. Norway had been essentially culturally occupied by Denmark, and so Ibsen, when he started coming up, he worked in the National Theater of Bergen as a stage manager, and he really just broke through and brought national pride in culture to the fore, and his plays reflect that as well. Before we get too far into Ibsen and what he means for the theater and all the rest of his work, can you give a 60-second summary of A Dollhouse? I can give it a shot. A Dollhouse is a play. 1879 is when it premiered in Copenhagen. It's about Nora and her husband Torvald, and they live what appears to be a rather charmed life, but as with so many Ibsen plays, a troll comes into the picture in the form of a man called Krogstad, who works at the bank where Nora's husband is about to be the manager. It's a very big promotion, and we realize that there are some skeletons in Nora's past, namely that in her early marriage, she had forged documents to obtain a loan, which was a crime for sure at the time, in no small part because she was a woman. A double crime. She's a woman, and she forged a signature. She forged a signature of her father to obtain money to take her husband to Italy so that he could recuperate from some sort of respiratory ailment, which he did then do. They came back to Norway. She proceeded to be paying off this loan. She was paying it back to Krogstad, who then seeks to pressure her to get her husband to give him a better post at the bank. This all comes out rather spectacularly. Nora tries to cover it up. She's unable to do that. Her husband gets very angry with her, says that he is going to prevent her from being involved really in their marriage at that point, and he says that he will make it right with Krogstad and will essentially cover up this crime. For Nora, this is a horrific thing because she had expected her husband to take the blame of her crime on himself. She declares that he thinks of her as nothing more than a child, and she leaves. She walks out of the marriage, and she walks out on their three children. This is a climactic moment at the end of the play. The entire play is leading up to this, and it is the reason we remember this play today. Sounds very feminist. It sure does, and that is the way it was interpreted for the entirety of the 20th century. I disagree in large part with that interpretation, and so too did Henrik Ibsen, who said as much during his lifetime. So Ibsen, after this play, which at the time was seen as not only confronting the woman question and these issues of feminism, women getting the right to vote, women having divorce rights, women being on an equal footing and an identical footing in public affairs as men, Ibsen would be invited to all these feminist dinners and galas, and as you point out, he would go to the dinners and he would say, hey, just so you know, my intention is not to write a feminist polemic. Thank you for the award, but you're misreading me, basically. Yeah, he did say that. He was particularly interested in honesty and truth. This is true in all of his plays. This is what you see. In a play of his called The Wild Duck, he even discusses it as the life lie, which is just this fascinating concept that there is a that some people need to believe in in order to just get to the next day. For Ibsen, the key thing was blowing up the life lie, facing reality, facing truth, facing the difficulty of that, and still surviving, still persevering, which you can sort of picture in a very Norse way, right? The cold and the wind, and you just stand there and face it. And that's something that Ibsen had experienced himself when he was a child. In fact, his family went from being lower class to his father got a promotion. He made a lot of money. They moved to a big house in town. His parents entertained a lot, really leaned into this extravagant lifestyle. They lost it all. They lost the house. They had to move out to the countryside. Ibsen grew up in poverty. So he knew that. He could see that from what his own parents went through. They believed this lie. They were not frugal. They did not take care of the wealth they had come into. They instead just depleted it so rashly. And you can imagine the way that he must have felt looking at his father with the cold, hard eyes of reality and saying, we wouldn't have to be living like this, if you hadn't been so stupid and squanderous of what you had earned. I like that observation because it reminds me that every time you think you pin Ibsen down on one point of view, one perspective from life, one social station, he kind of evades you a little bit. I've read this play a dozen times, two dozen times. I don't know. I've read this play a lot, maybe more than any other play. And in fact, on the hundred-year anniversary of his death, 2006, this play was the most performed play in the world. Even still, this play is second only to Shakespeare in the number of times that it is performed. So if you have any interest in the theater whatsoever, you have almost certainly read this play. And the first time I read it, we lad, growing up in a liberal environment, I was on Team Nora. I thought, this woman, this husband is a brute, and this woman absolutely has every right to walk out on him and her children. And the second time I read it, I said, well, you know, she's got some problems. Third time I read it, oh, that Torvald's not so bad. Now I read it and I think this woman is totally wrong. She's totally wrong. But she's not the only person who's wrong in the book. Right. And I guess this gets to something that you and I have both been demonstrating, which is we keep calling it a dollhouse. Right. But if you read the names in the books, on your copy and my copy, it says a doll's house. Not on my copy. Yours is a dollhouse. Mine is a dollhouse. You've got the better copy. Yeah. And what's interesting about this, the translator is Rolf Field, and he speaks about this. In fact, he's written about this translation. Ibsen was writing in Dano Norwegian. It was not modern Norwegian as we think of it today. So if you do the translation of the original title in modern Norwegian, it is the possessive. It is a doll's house. But if you do the translation in Danish or the language that he was writing in, which is this Dano Norwegian, it is a dollhouse. And I think that is actually really key difference and leads in part to the massive confusion over this play. If it's a doll's house, right, then we could say, oh, Nora is the doll and this is her house. But it is a dollhouse in that the entire house is a play thing. Everyone in it is a doll. Everyone in it is beholden to social norms, is beholden to, you know, specific ways that relationships are conceived and played out. But it's all a fantasy. The whole thing is a fantasy. It's not Nora is a doll. She's being treated like a doll in this house. Each one of the characters in this play is, you know, manipulated by the social circumstances of the time. And we can even see that in the production history. So the play went up Copenhagen, 1879. Just a year later, it was done in Germany. And the actress who performed the play in Germany, I think Ibsen was living in Germany at the time, but like that was a much bigger venue. So the actress and the producers in Germany in 1880, they were like, I would never leave my children, you know, is what the actress. So they went to Ibsen and they said, we can't do it with this ending. We can't have Nora just walk out like this. She can't walk out on her children. And Ibsen was like, you know, you can't change the ending. They argued over it. Playwrights are like that. They don't take kindly to people changing endings. So Ibsen rewrote the ending to appease the actress and the producers. And the ending that he came up with, there's a point at the end of the play where Torvald, the husband, says to Nora, you can't possibly walk out on your family. You can't walk out on your children. This is just crazy. He demands that she face her children one last time before she walks out, knowing that likely after looking at her kids, she would not be able to walk out the door on them. So what Ibsen rewrote was he had her go to the door of the nursery and collapse. There's some really interesting things about that ending. They only performed it a couple of times before they reverted to the original, which I think was like the audience was saying, hey, let's see the real thing, which must have pleased Ibsen to no end, realist that he was. But you have the actress steeped in the social norms of her time, understanding a maternal instinct, right? Saying, how could I leave my children? I couldn't. That's just unfathomable to me, the actress, right? So she says, Nora would never leave her children. You have Ibsen changing the ending so that she still doesn't face the children and doesn't walk out physically, even though she escapes mentally by simply passing out. And you have the original, which is where she won't look at the children and does walk out. I think for Ibsen, Nora walking out makes her something of a monster. She walks out on her children. She tells her husband at the end, never contact me again. Don't even write me letters. He makes an overture to save the marriage, which is this beautiful gesture where she says, I could only stay if we were to have a real marriage. And he says, basically, okay, great. Like, let's do, what does that look like? Let's do that. I'm not mad at you anymore. You know, let's work it out. And she walks out anyway. Monstrous move to leave your children. Horrific. The actress could not fathom that a woman would be that horrific to walk out on her children. Now, Ibsen based the play on a real life woman that he knew. And that woman was a writer. She committed a similar kind of financial crime. She walked out on her kids and her family. She ended up in a mental hospital and then came back and then had years of depression. But for Ibsen, the true thing, the honest thing, was that Nora would give in to these most selfish impulses, not because she's a woman trapped, but because she's a human being. And human beings are, to a certain extent, monsters. This gets to, just before the end of the play, Nora's assertion of her most sacred duty. Her husband, Torvald, says, if you walk out on me and these kids, you are betraying your most sacred duty. She says, what do you consider to be my most sacred duty? He tells her. She says, I have another duty equally sacred, my duty to myself. Her husband says, first and foremost, you're a wife and mother. She says, that I don't believe anymore. I believe that first and foremost, I am an individual, just as much as you are, or at least I'm going to try to be. I have to think things out for myself and get things clear. So the political context here is, you've got Ibsen, who is, in his political writings, basically an anarchist. This is a guy who writes vehemently against the state. He's enamored of the revolutions of 1848. He's supportive of the Paris Commune. He's really infatuated with these radical political ideas. But he'll push back on people who say, you're a feminist, or you're a thisist, or thatist. I think in Ibsen's view, he says, I'm an individualist. I'm for liberation. I think he once wrote that even in the liberation movements, the thing he loved most about them was the fight for the liberation, the struggle for the liberation. So what I have trouble understanding, and maybe that's what makes him a great playwright, is how he could be enamored of this individualism and yet express, depict beautifully the enormity, the monstrosity of that individualism taken to its logical conclusion. Yeah, and I think that's because he was likely at odds with his political ideas. You can look at truth, and truth does not match political ideals. They're not really the same thing at all. And in this play, you have Nora complaining that her husband treats her like a child, that her father treated her like a child. And in the end, what makes her the most angry is that her husband will not treat her like a child. She commits this crime. It's at risk of being exposed. Her husband says, we're not going to expose the crime. I will fix it with the blackmailer, the troll, Krogstad. I will fix it. I will cover this up. I will do what he says. I will give him the position that he wants at the bank. And Nora is just like, well, shouldn't we expose the crime and you should take responsibility for the bad thing I did? Isn't that what you should do? And he's like, no, girl, why would I do that? And that's what she wants. She wants to be treated like a child. And then she cannot stand it when he will not treat her like a child. He treats her more like an equal than she's ever been treated. He refuses to let her crime destroy their life, his livelihood, their marriage, their home. He refuses to let that happen. He speaks to her and says, we're not going to have a normal marriage after this because you are clearly this criminal and I can't trust you. You stole essentially. You forged a document. Who even are you? He looks at her for the first time as an individual, as a separate person, as a person who can make her own choices. And that's what she can't stand. I mean, it's absurd. And I think, yeah, I find that so ridiculous. As soon as he doesn't treat her like a little doll, a little play thing, she can't even raise her own children. She has to destroy three lives, three young lives who are completely innocent. I mean, it's a huge issue when a mom walks out on a family. You don't really recover. Yeah. A child doesn't really recover. Right. Ever. Bad enough when a father walks out on family. That's bad. But it seems even worse. Your mom is supposed to love you totally unconditionally and stick by you no matter what. You know, like that's that's the deal. Even that's the deal. To your point, he ends up kind of being right about everything. Even earlier on, he's talking. He is actually having a serious conversation with her, though she later says we've never once had a serious conversation. But he is. He's talking about the the evils of fraud and deception and how lies in a household can permeate the whole household like a poison and poison the whole family. And that, of course, is what comes to pass. But we see it from the very beginning of the play when Nora goes out and she's trying to sock away money and she's sneaking around her husband and she buys macaroons, tasty little macaroons. And she pops one in and hides the rest in her dress. And he says, honey, have you been eating macaroons again? And she says, no. Who me? Who me? And she keeps lying. And I don't know, maybe I've become more prudish in my old age, but it had never shocked and offended me quite so much, maybe because I'm married now. I open, I read, I say, this woman from page one is lying to her husband. The foundation of everything they have built is because of her lies. Yeah. It's her lies. And when her lies are exposed and she's treated with honesty, with the dignity and respect that comes from being seen as who you are and having, you know, being full of flaws, that's what she can't stand. But there's never, there's never a good reason to lie like this in a marriage. If you take yourself seriously as an individual, then you know lies are not there to, lies don't deceive the other person. They only deceive yourself. And she has been deceiving herself for the entire marriage. Even when she talks to her close friend, Ms. Lind, who comes into the play, and she talks with pride about having committed this forgery, having undertaken this fraud. She sees herself as this hero for having done that. She doesn't see her crime for what it is. You can make all kinds of excuses. You know, women at the time weren't allowed to own credit cards, which they didn't have. But you see my point. That whole thing, you could say, oh, women were blah, blah, blah. They were oppressed and what have you. But she's still a liar. Right. She's still a liar. And she says, look, I only forged the signature and borrowed the money illegally to save my husband's life because my husband was ill. The doctor didn't even tell him he was ill. He didn't want to tell him he was ill. He just told me, and I wanted to get one over on him. So even before the macaroons, you see there's this just core of dishonesty and deception, which is always going to have terrible effects. You mentioned Mrs. Lind, this old friend of Nora's. She comes back in and she cuts a deal with the troll, basically. She's going to try to intervene and save everything. And when she does actually cut a deal with the troll and say, look, I've been working for myself for a long time and working for yourself, it's not that fulfilling. It's actually kind of sad. And you come home at the end of the day and I want even you, even you troll, I'd like to care for you. Another line that cuts against a feminist reading of the play. And the troll says, OK, well, you're only buttering me up because you want me to stop blackmailing Torvald. And she says no. Like, yes, I mean, you should stop doing that, of course. But this needs to come out. This all needs to be exposed. This house is so full of lies that they need to face themselves and what their marriage is full, full steam ahead. Yeah. And this is something that's foundational throughout Ibsen. This is always what he's driving at. Can you survive truth? Can you face reality? Can you exist with the harshness of that? And if you can, then you're essentially a worthy human being. And if you can't, you know, then he doesn't have much respect for you. And what are we right as human beings? What are we, if not the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves individually, about our families, about our history, about humanity? What are we, if not our stories? It becomes very important that we tell ourselves an honest story. Right. Nora can't tell herself an honest story about herself. She can't tell herself an honest story about her husband or her family or any of that. And she never could. And so she runs away from it, not in a sign of feminist triumph, not because women are going to be better off alone. Right. Not because society will be better if all the families get destroyed. You know, that's not what it's about. She runs off because she can't face truth. She can't face reality. And she can't face that she's this criminal liar. Right. You know? Talk to me right before she runs off. She has a whole kind of frantic moment where she's running in place, I guess. This key moment in the play where she dances the tarantella. What's the tarantella about? Right. Her husband dresses her up in this silly costume and she starts frantically dancing the tarantella. Yeah. So she's just trying to, she's trying to please him. She's trying to recall their days in Italy, which is presumably, you know, she learned this dance there during what was this beautiful time in their marriage. He was recuperating. They had enough money because she had made up, she had lied, she had committed this crime. It was not exposed. She felt so great about herself then. It's like she's just trying to recapture these early days where he put her on a pedestal and she put her own crimes on a pedestal. You know, it's this beautiful early days where none of this, where none of this was even at risk of being realized ever. All they had ahead of them at that point was a beautiful future and now they just have this torrid past. The three guys that I think of when I think of the modern theater are Chekhov, Strindberg, and Ibsen. And they all crop up right here at the end of the 19th century. They gain a lot of steam in the early 20th century. And it's a big break from the previous theatrical tradition. What do they do that's so different? They take the concept of drama and they make it a psychological drama, you know? This is right around the time of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud. Not just a mere coincidence. Right, it's not a coincidence. And that is what such a huge difference is. They're not retelling historical things. They're not, you know, putting all the violence and action off stage. It's so much of these plays and Chekhov is such a brilliant example. I mean, my goodness. So much of it is about what happens inside the characters and what happens in their relationships. And that's what makes it, that's what we see in the 20th century, right? I mean, it's no accident either that the kind of acting style that develops with these plays is the method, right? The method acting, this Russian Stanislavski method where what you do is you internalize the character, you inhabit the character, you feel what they feel, even to the point of using your own emotions and grafting those over the character so that, you know, and I studied method acting myself for a while. Condolences. I know. Thank you. But where you really inhabit the character in a psychological sense. You take on their physicality, but it's not just, it's not from the outside in. Whereas like the British style would be taking on mannerisms, you know, and you graft the character over top of yourself. This one, you know, you, the character comes into you, you become the character and you're essentially embodying that. That really is what the 20th century of acting is all about. The group theater, the Stanislavski guys, they came to New York, huge impact on Hollywood. You know, all of our great actors of the 20th century in America, they were these method guys, you know, that was their whole deal. And that's what influenced so much of American performance that changed really drastically in the 21st century. Hugely, hugely different. We started the 2000s with method acting, with psychological drama. And while I was in grad school, it changed so quickly that at the beginning of my program, we were talking about how plays are Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg. This is what we looked at. By the end of grad school, we were talking about how the best plays are political. And we came up with this ridiculously horrible thing called art activism, where the idea was that if you were not, if you were not using your art to be politically activist, then it was not good art. And that is in large part, I think, how we end up with such a huge misinterpretation of Ibsen as a feminist drama, because we can't understand art at this point without the political ramifications of that art. Whereas previously, art was about finding truth, revering beauty, to a great degree, I think, was part of it. Understanding or at least witnessing the beautiful. And now it's only about this very base thing that we call politics. Right. When you read a play like A Dollhouse, or really any of Ibsen or Chekhov or Strindberg, there's not a lot that happens. There's no big sword fight that you're waiting for. It's about what's going on in the psyche. You see, even beyond these guys, Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, the socialist playwright who, he was a socialist. Ibsen was essentially an anarchist. It's not like these guys didn't have political views. But something I love so much about A Dollhouse is you're never satisfied with anyone. Everything's kind of just a little bit messy, and there's something that everyone's not quite getting, and it leaves you just feeling kind of meh. And agitprop and political propaganda, there's no meh. There's no ambiguity. There is no, I can see this from two points of view, which is really the hallmark and the triumph of someone like Ibsen and the other guys, too. Yeah, I totally agree with you. When I was studying method acting, I was in New York, and I went to a play by the Living Theater on the Christopher Street Pier. And basically, it was a bunch of people carrying signs, walking around, singing Solidarity Forever in the rain. And the extension cords for the lights were plugged into the street lamps. It was like hijacked power. And I remember it was fun. We had a fun time dancing around in the rain on the Christopher Street Pier in July. I mean, why not? What's not fun about that? But there was no beauty to it. There was no truth. It was only propaganda. Ibsen is never propaganda. And I think that's why, in part, he spoke out so vehemently against the way that he was being perceived. And pigeonholed. And pigeonholed. It's just not accurate. And if you look at his career, when he went to... He was broke. He was in Christiania, which is now Oslo, studying. He was writing pamphlets. It turns out that he never had any money. And at dinnertime, he would go out dressed up nice. And then he would come back and tell his landlady he'd already eaten so that he didn't have to pay for dinner at the house. And when he was at the National Theater, it was a very difficult time. But he looked at his work as not just truth and honesty, but reestablishing a Norwegian national character, which I think is amazing. I don't think there would be modern Norwegian culture without Ibsen. And there were so many other amazing Norwegian writers that came out. Right. So his work is political in that sense, but not in this narrow... In practice, but not in narrative. Yes, right. Yeah, it's funny. I'm reminded of Theresa Helburn from the New York Theater Guild, who went up to visit the group theater, who were the ones very influenced by the Stanislavski system. All these guys, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman. She goes up and she says, you know, they're all rolling around on the floor like animals. You know, they're all communists and they're all completely insane. And they were all communists and completely insane, or at least had that inclination. But at least they produced good art. They did. Whatever the political views of Ibsen, at least they could produce art that was complex. And if that is passing out of fashion in the last 10 or 20 years, then maybe this would be a good time to revisit some of that art to try to recover it. I think that's a great idea. Lee Strasberg also was great in The Godfather. That's right. That was one of his few acting roles. Bringing the Bizanga Brothers in for a piece. I love that. I love him in that. And this is the show that you've chosen, The Book Club. Libby, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Michael. We will see you next month. I'm Michael Knowles. In the meantime, happy reading. Thank you very much.