When Nora Stops Being a Little Skylark

In this article

In A Doll’s House, the cheerful wife starts questioning the personality her household has assigned her. The argument proved harder to settle than a happy ending might suggest.

Nora Helmer’s husband has a small menagerie of names for her: a lark, a squirrel, a singing-bird. None sounds especially alarming beside a Christmas tree. But listen to who does the naming. Torvald can make Nora charming, irresponsible or helpless in a few affectionate syllables. She has rather more work to do before she can explain herself.

That is what makes Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) such an interesting stop in the history of familiar characters. Nora does not arrive announcing herself as the independent heroine. We have to revise our understanding of her, and eventually she has to revise her own. The little skylark has been doing the accounts.

Spoilers follow for the play’s ending and the reported ending of Casa de muñecas (1943).

The spendthrift with a repayment plan

In the play’s first act, Nora comes home with Christmas shopping and secretly eats macaroons. Torvald teases her about spending. It is an efficient introduction to a woman who appears to need supervision over both money and biscuits.

Then she talks to Mrs Linde. Nora has secretly borrowed money to finance the journey taken for Torvald’s health. She has economised on her own clothes and earned money by copying documents late at night. The work exhausted her; earning the money also gave her pleasure.

The apparent spendthrift has been managing a debt. That does not make her an infallible financial genius: she has forged her father’s signature, and Krogstad can use it against her. But it changes what her cheerfulness conceals. Torvald’s picture of his wife is much smaller than the activity required to keep their lives going.

Nora helps maintain that picture. She knows how to wheedle, flatter and offer little performances. Her affection need not be counterfeit for her behaviour to serve a purpose. The unsettling possibility is that a personality can develop around what another person rewards, until even its owner has trouble separating preference from performance.

The crisis ends. The conversation begins

The decisive turn comes after the immediate danger recedes.

When Torvald learns of the forgery, he condemns Nora and worries about his reputation. When a second letter removes Krogstad’s threat, he feels saved. He can forgive her. He can protect her. He can restore the familiar arrangement, with himself in charge of its improved management.

Nora has heard enough to reconsider that arrangement. The man who imagined rescuing her from danger has shown her what he fears losing. His relief cannot undo the discovery.

She changes out of her fancy dress and asks him to sit down. The stage direction is wonderfully practical. There is a conversation to have, and the costume has finished its shift.

Her account reaches back beyond this evening. She says that her father supplied her opinions, then Torvald supplied her tastes. Sometimes she adopted them; sometimes she pretended to. She is unsure which happened when. That uncertainty matters. A perfectly complete, authentic Nora has not been waiting behind a curtain for permission to step forward.

She must find out what she thinks. When Torvald appeals to her identity as wife and mother, she insists that she also has duties to herself. The play gives her a departure without supplying a settled portrait of the woman she will become.

A heroine with predecessors, and an ending people tried to change

Calling Nora the first independent woman in literature would make history far too obliging. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre appeared in 1847. In chapter 27, Jane insists on respecting herself and leaves Rochester rather than abandon principles she holds dear.

The comparison sharpens Nora’s particular difficulty. Jane’s principles help her resist an arrangement. Nora has begun to question the authorities from which her principles came. These are different dramatic situations, not successive rungs on a ladder towards the properly modern heroine.

There is concrete evidence that Nora’s departure disturbed the expectations surrounding her. In a letter of 17 February 1880, Ibsen explained why he had supplied an alternative ending for possible use in German theatres. His agent feared an unauthorised adaptation with a changed conclusion. Ibsen preferred to make the damaging alteration himself rather than leave it to other hands, while making clear that its use was against his wishes.

In that alternative, Nora is brought to the children’s bedroom door and collapses there; she does not leave the house. The dispute had become a decision about what action the heroine could be allowed to complete.

A black-and-white Nora, with another answer

The argument has a direct cinema connection. Ernesto Arancibia’s Argentine Casa de muñecas (1943), adapted by Alejandro Casona and starring Delia Garcés, is documented as a black-and-white production.

Its ending needs its own label. Film scholar John H. Sinnigen records that the adaptation brings Nora back, while Paraná Sendrós, writing in a Mar del Plata festival tribute, describes a happy ending whose politics are open to a rather less happy reading.

Those accounts establish a useful complication without telling us how every look or pause works in the film. These reports should not be taken as evidence that the film simply reproduces Ibsen’s 1880 alternative, in which Nora never leaves the house. An adaptation can preserve Nora’s name and predicament while changing where her self-discovery is allowed to land.

The familiar independent heroine has no single birthday, and her history does not move steadily towards greater freedom. With Nora, the revealing question is who gets to finish defining her. Torvald has his answer. The original play lets her leave before she has worked out hers.

Sources & further reading

1. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, translated by R. Farquharson SharpActs I and III: names, concealed work, letters and the final conversation. Primary literary source.
2. Library of Congress / National Library of Norway, A Doll’s House manuscript record1879 completion, publication and Copenhagen premiere; historical reception.
3. Henrik Ibsen to Nationaltidende, 17 February 1880Contemporaneous letter in the University of Oslo scholarly edition. The paragraph in this article paraphrases the original-language transcription.
4. Charlotte Brontë, Jane EyreChapter 27: Jane’s argument for self-respect and adherence to her principles.
5. The Morgan Library & Museum, Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will1847 publication and manuscript context.
6. Comunidad de Madrid, Cine y teatro: Guía de largometrajes adaptados de obras teatralesPrinted p. 257, PDF index 232: Casa de muñecas (1943), Arancibia, Casona, cast and black-and-white production.
7. John H. Sinnigen, “Benito Pérez Galdós en el cine argentino: El abuelo salteño”, Olivar 12 (15), 2011Printed p. 91, footnote 26, PDF index 17: secondary account of the 1943 adaptation’s changed conclusion.
8. Paraná Sendrós, Mar del Plata festival Homenajes IIPrinted p. 51: critical assessment of the changed ending. The account is attributed; no direct viewing is claimed.