Godfather of Women's Lib

By * T.E. Kalem

A strong, scrupulous and thoroughly rewarding revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House now graces off-Broadway. Matching the exquisite delicacy of her features, Claire Bloom moves with emotional assurance from the early phase of the wife as kept puppet to the later phase of the woman who issues an emancipation proclamation to her husband. The larky girlishness of the early Nora is always a bit of a problem, but Miss Bloom manages to be a trifle giddy without appearing inane. As the later Nora, her performance is informed with a grave clarity.

As Nora's husband, Torvald Helmer, Donald Madden is an excellent foil. His blond Scandinavian looks, his slightly mannered stuffiness, arrogance and condescension all contribute to a solid and coherent character. He conveys just the inflexible sense of property and propriety that is so necessary to the role. There is no falling off in the rest of the cast--in Nora's worldly wise friend (Patricia Elliott) or in the doctor (Roy Shuman), who is paying mortally for the sins of his father, or in the unscrupulous moneylender (Robert Gerringer), who is trying to keep a slippery foot on the frayed bottom rung of the social ladder. All do the right things rightly.

Seductively Powerful. As everyone probably knows, Nora Helmer has saved her husband's life with a convalescent trip financed by an indiscreet secret loan from the moneylender, who writes a letter exposing her to her husband. Torvald plays a cravenly abusive blame game with Nora, then, when the threat lifts, wants to go on together as if nothing had happened. But Nora sees her idealistic love shattered. She feels that she has been treated like a doll-child in her father's house and a doll-woman in her husband's. She opts to leave him and her three children in order to forge an independent soul and consciousness in the outer world. The children are inexplicably reduced to two in this production, perhaps as a sign of the faltering G.N.P. or as propaganda for Z.P.G.

Without violating the text, which has been rendered into fluently idiomatic English by Christopher Hampton, the sure and subtle inflection of Patrick Garland's direction makes Ibsen appear as the godfather of Women's Lib. If it counts as an imprimatur, Betty Friedan was in the opening-night audience. Since Ibsen is a seductively powerful dramatist and the evening's didactic thrust is something like "Go thou and do likewise," it is important to examine Ibsen's intent and Nora's behavior.

The world's view of Ibsen has too often been filtered through the bristling eyebrows of Bernard Shaw, who foisted upon Ibsen all of his own social-reformist instincts and his penchant for exposing economically motivated hypocrisy in all of man's social institutions. But Ibsen was not like that. He was Lucifer's child, a moral rebel with a lone eagle complex who believed that the master spirit soars above the common herd of slaves, who mill about in their social bondage of marriages, families, businesses, religions, political parties and national allegiances. A friend who heard Ibsen fulminating at the playwright BjO/rnson's home in 1883 said of him: "He is an absolute anarchist, wants to make a tabula rasa, put a torpedo under the whole Ark; mankind must begin again at the beginning of the world . . . the great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions--to destroy."

Ibsen's teen-age disciple, James Joyce, understood him much better than Shaw. As Ibsen had slammed the door on a claustrophobic Norway, Joyce slammed the door on Ireland and uttered his non serviam: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe." Nora's door slam is a crisis of belief, her non serviarn. But is she saving herself or indulging herself? To judge her act, one must imagine the alternatives. In that final scene in which Nora accuses Torvald of never having talked to her seriously about serious things, man and wife are, in fact, doing just that. Torvald is changing, seeing his wife as a person in her own right, and forgiving her. If she were really maturing, as Ibsen claims, she would forgive him and try to make a wiser go of things. Instead, she abdicates in the way that a child leaves a game in which he cannot dictate the rules.

In a different ending, Torvald might say, "O.K., Nora. I agree it's been a bad marriage. I'm leaving, too. Let the children fend for themselves." Viewed in that light, the cost Nora is inflicting on others by her abandonment is clearer. She is being selfishly irresponsible. The logic of her act is that one no longer honors a commitment as soon as it displeases one to do so.

There are several glaring fallacies in Ibsen's reasoning. One is that a woman who has been married for eight years and borne three children knows absolutely nothing about life. On the contrary, she has learned an enormous amount, precisely about life.

A more serious fallacy is Ibsen's assumption that doing one's own thing takes priority over everything else. True, in his own day he was battling the late 19th century's cant about honor, duty, the family, patriotism and God. Into a stiflingly confining atmosphere, he brought the courageous spirit of free inquiry. Still, in any era, society is a web of which the family forms the central strands. Children must be safeguarded and reared, and a continuity of values preserved. This is what society is about, and it provides order and sustenance for the vast community of men and women who cannot fly, breathe, or even live in the ego-rarefied air of the master artists and the lone eagles. Daedalus flew but Icarus fell--so it is with Ibsen and his Nora.

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