A Doll House Quotes

“In 1908, the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova played Nora in New York in performances that became legendary. In the audience was Halvdan Koht, who describes Nazimova in the last scene acting “with a passionate intensity that made Nora’s transformation at the end completely an inner reality, conveyed in low-pitched, emotion-laden words” (K 323). Koht recalls his horror when members of the audience, mistaking “the work of art” for “a collection of ideas,” began to applaud Nora’s every line “as though it were a political harangue” (K 323). But while not a harangue, Nora’s words are nevertheless resoundingly political, for in representing the “inner reality” of an obscure Norwegian housewife, they constitute a discourse of recognition for every woman who has ever lived her life for a man, and by Nora’s count, there are “millions.” Displaying what the modern theatre condemns as bad manners, the 1908 audience was responding to Ibsen’s powerful feminist poetry, the exhilarating promise that on the other side of the doll house, women, no less then men, could learn to take themselves seriously: “I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you — or anyway, I ought to try to become one” (193). The universality of A Doll House does not come from “its demand for truth in every human relation” (K 323), but in its demand for equality in the relation between women and men.”
― Joan Templeton, Ibsen's Women