A
Doll’s House presents real human relationships – turbulent and complex.
There are friendships, romances, and maternal (also paternal, though distant)
relationships.
The most immediate relationship in
the text is between Nora and Torvald. This relationship varies – from being
highly sexualised to childlike, with both characters flirting and avoiding the
truth of their slowly collapsing ‘romance’. The two characters use their
sexuality to get their own way – with Nora teasing her husband (and Dr Rank)
with the promise of dancing.
This means that Nora is sexualised
– often of her own accord – but her husband is predatory towards her, which is
why, I think, he uses birds as a term of endearment – he likes his wife to be
weaker than him, smaller than him, and beautiful. She is something pretty to
look at. Even Nora picks up on this when she is talking to Christine –
commenting on her own beauty.
Christine and Krogstad’s
relationship transforms the superficial villain of the play into someone human
with a past riddled with heartbreak and loss. Krogstad says: “When I lost you,
it was just as though all solid ground had been swept from under my feet. Look
at me. Now I’m a shipwrecked man, clinging onto a spar.” This exclamation of
feeling is very different from the threatening individual who visited Nora
dressed in shadows
Ibsen also addresses relationships
between friends – Nora’s relationship with Christine, Torvald’s with Dr Rank. However,
in these relationships, there is an aspect of cost-benefit analysis – using
people for personal gain. This raises the question of whether or not the
friendships, or indeed relationships as a whole, are more than merely for the
benefit of individuals: Christine mends Nora’s dress and plays to her need to
be complemented, yet has this relationship with her in order to get a job with
Torvald; Torvald pities Dr Rank, but really Dr Rank is there to see Nora. It is
this cycle of need upon which the text revolves.
The children are not cared for by
their mother, but by her own childhood-nurse, Anne-Marie, and Torvald is only
fleetingly seen as interacting with them. This means that the ultimate impact
of Nora’s epiphany is not as devastating as it would have been, perhaps, in
modern day Norway. Other people do the majority of childcare – she played with
her children just as her father did with her (dolls) but no more than that. She
uses her children to appear motherly – almost all of Nora’s acts are to keep up
appearances. She is the doting child-wife, child-mother, beautiful and demure
and able to dance at a party. Torvald considers her to be a prized possession.
He disciplines her more than his children because this dominance is attractive
to him. When she leaves, he reacts because of the impact upon him, and his
life, as opposed to what this means to Nora. Maybe this is telling of humanity –
are we all intrinsically selfish?
Therefore, the play represents families and
relationships as being means to achieve personal goals, as opposed to being
honest. This is, in my opinion, why Nora’s departing words are so poignant –
she is doing something for herself without using others to achieve it for the
first time in the play.
