Historical Context A Dolls House i2973

Historical Context •A Doll's House was published in Norway in 1879. The play caused an immediate sensation and sparked debate and controversy. •It was highly provoking: People tended to respond strongly to it, whether in praise or censure. •The play has less shock-value today, but in the late-nineteenth century, performing it was often, as one critic puts it, "a revolutionary action, a daring defiance of the cultural norms of the time."

What were these cultural norms?There are the ideals and values represented by Torvald Helmer and his doll-wife Nora, before her great change. These were the ideals that defined what is commonly termed "bourgeois respectability": financial success, upward social mobility, freedom from financial debt and moral guilt (or at least the appearance thereof), and a stable, secure family organized along traditional patriarchal lines. The patriarchal ideal was ed and reinforced by a social structure wherein women had little overt political or economic power, wherein they were economically, socially, and psychologically dependent on men and especially on the institutions of marriage and motherhood. The ideal of bourgeois respectability prevailed in the nineteenth century, but it never went unchallenged, and by the time Ibsen wrote his own challenge to it, at the end of the century, a new era of crisis and uncertainty regarding all things conventional had already begun. The position of women was an especially volatile issue because

the patriarchal ideology underlay the entire social, political, and economic structure. If women were to have autonomy, then the whole structure of society would have to be re-imagined and three quarters of the world would have to be remade. It was an apocalyptic idea that thrilled many intellectuals but terrified the ruling and middle classes, so that each move in the direction of autonomy, women's suffrage, revised marriage laws and advances in women's education, felt like the end of the world. The last decades of the nineteenth century had already begun to feel like the end of the world, anyway. The Western world was about to enter a period of unprecedented change-revolutions social, political, economic, cultural, and scientific. No one knew exactly what was coming, but a great many looked toward it with a mixture of hope and dread. When Nora slams the door of her doll's-house, shutting herself out of the only world she has known she is stepping into a future that is unknown and therefore both promising and threatening.

Cultural Context

The background of this play is urban middle class society in the nineteenth century. In the figure of Helmer we see the embodiment of patriarchy who manages to dominate his wife and assert his authority consistently. Money plays an important part in this social world and it is a means through which Helmer manages to sustain his power over his wife and keep her subservient to him.

Genre

This play is a drama of social realism in three acts