AUTHOR: John V. Knapp

Since its premiere in Copenhagen in 1879, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House has provoked impassioned debate about the nature of the marriage relationship, the duties of a wife and mother, Nora Helmer’s function and moral bearing as a character, and Ibsen’s reasons for ending the play so ambiguously.1 Many in society, and especially the church, have considered the play an open attack on marriage (Zucker 167). Other discussions have addressed the play’s dramatic and thematic credibility because Nora and Torvald Helmer seem so thoroughly mismatched in marriage and because Nora undergoes an extraordinary emotional transformation in the space of a few acts (Marker and Marker 85; Durbach 16). Indeed, in act 1 she appears to be a silly, frivolous, and yet loveable woman, but by the time she walks out of and slams the door to her home in act 3, she appears to have thoroughly transformed into someone self-centered and defiant. Given the dramatic intensity of Nora’s character, one well-regarded early twentieth-century scholar considered A Doll’s House a comedy and argued that Nora would in time return to her husband, children, and home, all in keeping with conventions of the genre (Weigand 52–53).

After more than a century of debate, there seem to be few satisfying conclusions about A Doll’s House, and primarily about Nora. She has been considered a monstrous child, a lying manipulator, an irresponsible cheat, a hysterical neurotic,2 and a woman without principle for walking away from her husband and children3 (Coontz 169–70). Alternately, she has been sympathetically considered a creative problem solver and a woman willing to sacrifice her own reputation for the sake of her family. Feminist scholars and proponents, even contemporary with Ibsen, have considered her a heroine and responded strongly to the diminution of her character and her womanhood (Finney; Garton 11, 48). Some critics contend that Ibsen is not writing about the women’s issue at all (Meyer 266; Templeton 30–31; Neserius 35–37), while others believe that Nora’s character has been reduced to a metaphor of oppression. However, speaking at the Banquet of the Norwegian League for Women’s Rights on May 26, 1898, Ibsen did not claim to focus upon women’s issues, but rather upon issues of humanity (“Speech” 437; Sprinchorn 337).

Of the other characters in the play, Torvald has been criticized for his ignorance of his wife’s goodness to him and is described as a “boob” who has no sense of why he faces the situation he is in (Clurman 110). His authenticity and credibility as a character and good husband have been questioned, even in the earliest years of the twentieth century (Roberts); further, Torvald is despised for his harsh and hypocritical judgment of his wife, but then others have admired him for his strong sense of duty. Besides Nora and Torvald, the characters Kristine Linde, Nils Krogstad, and Dr. Rank complicate the plot of the play, and therefore the Helmer home, but seem to suffer far less notoriety than Nora and Torvald for their own vulnerabilities. Through the lens of family systems theory (FST), however, these three become essential characters, not incidental or minor ones, and paradoxically they will affirm Nora. Nora’s children, undeveloped characters as they may be in and of themselves, still carry great dramatic and thematic weight both because their mother chooses to leave them and because Torvald convinces Nora that she is an inadequate mother.

Those who have discussed A Doll’s House have long relied upon important questions to understand what has happened in Ibsen’s play: What should Nora have done?4 Was she right in doing what she did?5 Why are Mrs. Linde, Krogstad, and Dr. Rank relevant characters? What is Ibsen telling his audiences through and beyond the play?6 Traditional approaches to the play have helped address these questions. For example, biographical and historical approaches have helped explain Ibsen’s cultural perspective in writing the play. A formal approach helps identify how specific literary and dramatic elements like plot, character, point of view, setting, irony, mood, tone, and theme help define the play’s structure and meaning. Another approach, FST, can help explain how dynamic interactions within the family, either holistically, or interdependently, construct a literary work7; a family systems approach can also help illumine the influence of the play’s structure, characters, and themes.

Considering Nora and Torvald’s interactions with each other—and with other characters—from a family systems perspective can also help readers to better understand the deeper dramatic structures in A Doll’s House and express a more coherent, truthful explanation of how and why Ibsen introduced the Helmer household, and especially Nora, to the world. This essay will show that the family system in A Doll’s House is rich with complexities of character and situation that evoke consideration of the emotional processes, actions, and impacts of human relationship.

Just as some elements of fiction particularly stand out in a literary work—for example, irony in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, setting and point of view in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” or theme in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—certain dynamics of the family system get foregrounded in a given literary and/or dramatic work. In A Doll’s House, six prominent family systems concepts are addressed—parentification, triangulation, homeostasis, transgenerational processes, differentiation, and morphogenesis. For example, the homeostatic balance8—the default assumptions of power and control of the Helmer family system—has relied upon Torvald’s assuming the role of parent to Nora, who acts like a child and thus helps turn her husband into a kind of parent (Papero 51–60; Finney 58). Even so, Nora fundamentally influences the balance in the family because she has long hidden her secret of securing a loan without her husband’s approval and of forging her father’s signature on the note for the loan. As Nora protects and exploits these secrets within and beyond the Helmer family system, she will establish multiple and shifting relational triangles in an attempt to control, diminish, and redistribute the distress she feels.

Another systemic phenomenon can be seen as Ibsen incorporates the relationship between Nora and her father into the dramatic structure of the play. The relationship Nora has shared with her father reveals a powerful intergenerational influence upon the Helmer family system. When Nora realizes how her father’s behavior toward her has influenced Torvald’s treatment of her, and when she realizes that she has in turn treated her children the same way, 9 she sets boundaries to protect herself from a family system that is dysfunctional. This transgenerational phenomenon may be seen also in Ibsen’s portrayal of Dr. Rank, who suffers ill health and ultimately death because of his own father’s wantonness.

A family systems approach would suggest that when Nora makes the momentous decision to leave her husband and children, she affords herself the positive distance from her family that she needs in order to experience autonomy and maturity. However, in differentiating herself from the family’s dysfunction, Nora risks all. Perhaps her willingness to do so is what audiences and critics most likely do not understand about the play or her character. Thus, Nora’s final action in the play, the “door slam heard around the world” (Heiberg 208),10 offers a focal point for discussing both the Helmer family system and the decision she makes to leave home.

Parentification and Intergenerational Influences

In the earliest actions and dialogue of the play, the family systems concept of parentification can be observed. Parentification is a dynamic in which a family member is systemically, rather than biologically, designated to fulfill a parental role. Commonly, an older child is required by a family to function emotionally as a parent to siblings. In the case of A Doll’s House, a husband systemically behaves as a parent would to his wife instead of as a spouse.11 Readers immediately sense this departure from the marital norm in the first scene of act 1, where Torvald speaks more like a father than a husband to Nora. His first words to his wife are “Is that my little sky-lark chirruping out there?” (Doll’s House 1), 12 an endearment that, spoken by itself, could be considered an expression of simple affection by a husband for his wife. However, Torvald calls his wife such names repeatedly in subsequent lines, and indeed throughout the play. The excess in just the first scene of the play is notable as he calls her “my little squirrel,” “the little spendthrift,” “my little singing bird,” and “my pretty little pet” (2–4).

From a relational point of view, and in their unusually repetitive use, Torvald’s silly, childish names for his wife throughout the play do not establish her as an equal partner in the marriage; rather, they are diminutives and reveal her dependent and childish status in the family. His use of these names also reveals his inability to respond seriously to his wife (Jakovljevic 437). Even when he correctly reads Nora’s guilt for sneaking macaroons, Torvald is directed by Ibsen to wag his finger at his wife as he interrogates her: “My little sweet-tooth surely didn’t forget herself in town today?” (Doll’s House 5). It is no surprise when Nora lies to him, a natural response to a simpering parental figure who dresses such an accusation in the form of a playful question.

Nora’s interaction with Torvald reveals her own complicity in positioning herself emotionally as a child within the family. Just as she will through most of the play, Nora entertains Torvald as she justifies her need for money. She begs, pouts, plays with his buttons, and cajoles like a child who is determined to have what she wants. As Torvald has done to her, she has also placed her spouse in a position of inequality. Rather than interacting with him in a relationship where there is equity between two mature individuals (cf. Yarhouse and Sells 348), Nora manipulates Torvald to get what she wants. Thus, Torvald’s parental treatment of Nora and her childish responses to him reveal the lack of intimate, mutually edifying interaction within their relationship. Although the relationship they share is symbiotic, it is a dysfunctional association contrasted to a healthy family system where the biological parent or legal guardian functions to nurture, protect, teach, discipline, and encourage his or her child.

Readers also need to consider how Nora’s relationship with her father during her childhood influenced her present behavior. Significantly, because Nora has been treated and behaved like a doll-child in her father’s home, she acts like a doll-child with Torvald. It is also significant that Nora and her husband give their daughter Emmy “a doll and doll’s cot” (Doll’s House 3) for Christmas; in this action, Emmy’s parents have, in effect, passed down a significant emblem of family dysfunction. In these contexts, a clear picture is shown of how a particular role or expectation of behavior within a family is transmitted from one generation to the next.

The effect of Nora’s relationship with her father can be fully felt in act 3 when she and Torvald finally sit together to discuss what has happened in their relationship. Here, Nora’s sense of her father’s influence upon on her is keen:

Astonished, Torvald asks Nora if she’s ever been happy with him, and she responds:

When Nora realizes the generational impact that her family has had on her, and the impact that she will have on her children, she is finally able to articulate what has happened to her. Also, she is better able to decide about how to release herself from the constraints both her father and husband have placed upon her by making her their doll.

Family Secrets, and Triangulations, and Homeostatic Imbalance

Another significant influence upon the Helmer family system is Nora’s secret. Toril Moi explains that Nora’s secret is her substance (232). Systemically, however, it is the central point of dysfunction in the family, driving the dramatic progression of the play and the primary reason Nora has co-opted her husband to act as a parent. Further, the secret is the fundamental source of tension within the Helmer family and what draws others into the family’s anxiety.

When such secrets are brought into the family system, family members interact with one another, and also with others outside the family system, without the essential information they need to participate fully and authentically within it (Knapp 18). Consequently, the secret that is kept to preserve both the appearance and the homeostatic balance of a family system can cause great dysfunction within that family. To protect her secret and maintain her family’s appearance of propriety, then, Nora participates in multiple relational triangles. In doing so, she works to maintain the family’s equilibrium, dysfunctional as it is.

Nora plants the secret early in her marriage. When her husband became ill and needed to move to Italy for a period of time to recover, she secured a loan. However, because a wife needed her husband’s permission to take out a loan at that time (Durbach 29), because Torvald would not agree to taking out a loan himself, and because Nora knew that her husband’s life was at risk, she arranged to take out a note for 4,800 crowns (kroner) with Nils Krogstad, an unscrupulous lawyer (Doll’s House 10). This act alone was sufficient to affect the Helmer family negatively; Nora tells Kristine that it would be “terribly embarrassing and humiliating for Torvald if he thought he owed anything to me” for saving his life (15).

The greater impact of Nora’s secret comes to light when Krogstad, who was willing to draft the note as long as Nora’s father countersigned the loan (27), reveals to Nora that he knows of a further deception in the matter: when Nora’s father died before she could get his signature, she forged it and dated the document three days after his death (27–28). Thus, Krogstad threatens to expose Nora’s original deception and what he claims is her own fraudulent treatment of him if she does not use her influence to help him keep his job at the bank (28–29). Ironically, Krogstad himself had been caught forging documents when he was younger and lost his job and his reputation. Now employed in a low-level position at Torvald’s bank, he knows that Torvald will be ethically and morally compromised if Nora’s dishonesty is revealed. Torvald will also lose his work and reputation.

Hence, in an ironic shift of Nora’s triangulation with Krogstad against Torvald, Krogstad has aligned with Torvald against Nora to achieve his own ends: “if I am pitched out a second time, you are going to keep me company” (29). Now triangulated by Krogstad through the act of blackmail, Nora stands decorating her Christmas tree, chanting: “Candles here . . . and flowers here.—Revolting man! It’s all nonsense! There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll have a lovely Christmas tree. And I’ll do anything you want me to, Torvald; I’ll sing for you, dance for you. . . .” (30). In what becomes one of the most disheartening scenes in the play, it is apparent that just as Nora will ultimately sing and dance for Torvald to protect him from her secret and herself from his disapproval, Nora must sing and dance for Krogstad for the same reasons.

Nora’s interactions with Kristine Linde are also dramatically and systemically important. As a foil to Nora’s already strong characterization, Kristine is characterized through her own depressive, but highly rational, demeanor and dialogue. She is a widow who has moved back home and needs work. As soon as Nora shares the good news of Torvald’s new position with Kristine, Kristine seizes upon the opportunity and then upon Nora’s offer of help (12). When Kristine meets Torvald, Nora manipulates the introduction sufficiently to secure the probability of Kristine’s employment at the bank (20–21). This progression of the plot, which is systemically developed through the triangulation between Nora and Kristine against Torvald, becomes dramatically important because Kristine’s employment at the bank will cause Krogstad to lose his position. It also creates the conflict establishing the turning point of the dramatic action, the moment when Krogstad gives Torvald the letter exposing Nora’s actions. And, ultimately, it will be Kristine’s pursuit of a new relationship with Krogstad that will help bring Krogstad to his senses.

Kristine’s presence also allows Nora to distribute the distress she has experienced within the imbalance of her relationship with Torvald. Often, when married couples experience conflict, a third party is triangulated into the relationship to stabilize the marriage (Klever 244). Subsequently, Nora tantalizes Kristine with the “big thing” (Doll’s House 12), her secret in her taking out a note by herself. Nora tells Kristine that “nobody must know about it [ . . . ] nobody but you” (13), and then she leads Kristine through a child’s guessing game about how she got the money to take care of Torvald when he was so ill. In this confession, Nora renegotiates some level of psychological and emotional status in her family by proving that she could make money, that what she had done “was almost like being a man” (16). And while Nora lies to Kristine about how she got the money, she is honest and perceptive in one point: she tells Kristine that paying the money back to Krogstad has been “a lot of worry” (15). Indeed, Nora’s secret is a worry that has driven the Helmer family system now for eight years.

A third significant triangulation can be identified in act 2. Just after Torvald tells Nora that he has sent Krogstad his dismissal, and as Nora psychologically spirals deeper into her fearful conflict with Krogstad and husband, Dr. Rank walks on stage. Nora welcomes her friend, who is terminally ill, only to learn of his worsening health. Even so, Nora demands that the mood of Dr. Rank’s conversation should change, whereupon Dr. Rank acquiesces with banter. Nora flirts back, with humorous comments about asparagus, paté de foie gras, truffles, oysters, port, and champagne—all sensual, seductive foods. Seductively taunting the doctor with her silk stockings (Durbach 46–47), Nora tells him that she will dance for him—and her husband (Doll’s House 47).

When Nora then intimates that she needs something from Dr. Rank, he tells her that he is in love with her, keeping a promise to himself that she should know of his love before he dies. Just as Krogstad has reversed a triangle Nora constructed with him against Torvald, Dr. Rank reverses the triangle Nora engineered with him against her husband. In response to his revelation, Nora authentically responds, “Oh, my dear Dr. Rank, that really was rather horrid of you” (49). She has realized that Dr. Rank cannot help her and understands that she is now very much on her own. Her words reveal her disappointment, confusion, and sense of loss: “Oh, how could you be so clumsy, Doctor Rank! When everything was so nice!” (49). Her words also reflect her own clumsiness and regret both about her conduct toward him and the impending changes in her own life (Meyer 49–50).

Differentiation and Morphogenesis

Ibsen was sensitive to the possibility of positive change in the Helmer family. At the same time that the playwright recognized his individual character’s need for freedom, he did not forget that the individual was a part of society (Hageberg 15–16; Cambridge Companion 76). Ibsen also intensely focused his writing upon ideas of individual freedom and human will (Jacobs 425). From a family systems perspective, it is understood that neither an individual nor a family can enjoy optimal freedom or expression of will within the constraints of a dysfunctional family system. However, through the process of differentiating from such a system, an individual gains the opportunity to search for his or her authentic self. This process, called morphogenesis, occurs when an individual changes the way he or she functions within a family system to achieve freedom from that system’s dysfunctionality. Through morphogenesis, an individual and a family may pursue systemic change despite the difficulty of the process, and that individual and family have a greater chance of becoming more functional (Napier and Whitaker 184).

The seduction scene between Nora and Dr. Rank, then, stands as a psychological turning point in Nora’s life. In professing his love for Nora, in claiming that she can trust him in a way she can trust no one else, and in offering to do for her whatever a man can do, Dr. Rank has sounded the death knell of Nora’s willingness to continue in her role as the family doll. By this time, Nora has become emotionally aware of the entanglements she has participated in with the men in her house—her father, her husband, Dr. Rank, and even Krogstad—and from this point on, she will begin to assert her independence from them all.

Over the next several scenes, and because of her desperation, Nora even considers suicide to free herself from suffering once the secret is exposed, at least until she realizes that there is another option. To keep her husband from discovering her secret, she begs him to play the tarantella for her on the piano so that she can practice and then dances “as though [her] life depended on it” (59). Her hair is wild, her actions are wild, and her soul is on display (Moi 238). Thus, the dance may be seen as a reflection of the distress of Nora’s soul, the disarray and dysfunction of the Helmer family,13 and Nora’s need to free herself from it.

Her need for freedom is fully revealed when Torvald finally retrieves Krogstad’s letter from the mailbox and also Dr. Rank’s cards. When Nora explains the meaning of Dr. Rank’s cards, Torvald declares, “Now there’s just the two of us” (Doll’s House 74). That statement ultimately motivates Nora to act against the dysfunction of which she is now fully aware. Thus, when Torvald tells her that he will never be able to hold his darling wife close enough (74), Nora “[tears herself free and says firmly and decisively] Now you must read your letters, Torvald” (74). Upon reading Krogstad’s letter, Torvald, like Nora, dances:

And just as Nora has been frantic to cover up her secret, Torvald demands that “the thing has to be hushed up at all costs” so that “things must appear to go on exactly as before” (76). Indeed, once change occurs in a system, the first response by many is, all too often, to change back to maintain homeostasis.

Paradoxically, the secret that has kept Nora entangled within her family system is what will release her from it. As soon as Torvald verbally attacks her, Nora is fully able to articulate her father’s and her husband’s limiting influence upon her. She calls Torvald to sit down at the table and talk with her, something they have never done in their marriage: “We have now been married eight years. Hasn’t it struck you this is the first time you and I, man and wife, have had a serious talk together?” (79). When she comes to realize that she and her husband have never shared a truly equitable marital relationship, that Torvald has wanted only to preserve his honor, Nora understands that she is not the wife for him: “When you had got over your fright—and you weren’t concerned about me but only about what might happen to you—and when all danger was past, you acted as though nothing had happened. I was your little sky-lark again, your little doll, exactly as before” (84). Soon thereafter, she leaves, slamming the door.

Audiences can only speculate about whether or not Nora will return to her family. Certainly the cultural and legal constraints of the time could have placed her in a double bind and kept her from any opportunity to free herself from her husband. Both her conduct and the action of divorce would have been scandalous and resisted by the community and the law. But contemporary critics dismissing this possibility as a kind of presentism, or an anachronistic approach to the text, should note that social mores and legal practices regarding divorce and separation were also actively in flux at the time Ibsen wrote the play. In 1883, Theodore Woolsey and John A. Jameson described the variety of legal considerations and treatments of divorce that were debated throughout America and Europe at the time. Woolsey, writing separately, specifically reported that separations and divorces were on the increase in populations throughout America and Europe as marriages were declining. In either case, he attributed these phenomena to the decline of morality in the community (310–11). Further, Jameson, again separately, pointed out that one of the reasons immigrants from Europe, including Scandinavia, came to the United States was to seek a divorce where it was easier to dissolve a marriage. In coming to America, these individuals could preserve their social and business integrity, which would have been suspect had they pursued divorce in their countries of origin (320). Jameson then reported that because of the social consequences, couples who were quite well-off rarely divorced (320). Finally, he explained that many divorces resulted when a wife or husband in a poorer home became tired of the marriage and simply left. In these instances, the wife would take what she could materially and the husband would take what he could monetarily, and neither would return (320). Lawrence Stone, discussing divorce reform between 1857 and 1987, identifies the shift of opinion on divorce and separation that took place during the last half of the nineteenth century as a result of people’s and the court’s recognition that some marriages were “disastrously failed” and that equitable legal remedy was needed even for cases of incompatibility (391). That remedy would come in the Royal Commission of 1912 (392). Hence, A Doll’s House reflects Ibsen’s awareness that marriages were not only devastated by infidelity, but also by a couple’s inability to establish a mutually satisfying marital relationship.

From what Woolsey and Jameson report, Torvald Helmer could have had grounds for separation or possibly divorce, but, unless she left the country, Nora would have had no legal remedy at the time for her distress within the marriage. Thus, readers are still unable to determine what Nora would have done. She was neither poor nor rich. She was independent enough to desire new experiences, and she left asking nothing from the marital estate. Clearly, Nora’s strength in refusing to participate in the Helmer family system gives readers reason to believe that she would not return to the family as it was. But just as clearly, Torvald has sat down and talked with her.

Conclusion

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House illuminates how individuals in a family system work within and against relationships as they try to establish, preserve, or limit power and prominence in a family. Specifically, the play dramatizes a woman’s recognition of the emotionally limiting boundaries of her own family system and her willingness to move beyond it. Nora Helmer’s desire to resist, and even walk out of, the position she has assumed within her family, as well as her ability to resist her husband’s and father’s limiting influences upon her, exemplify the dynamics of a family system in which one of its members becomes unwilling to tolerate its systemic forces.14 Because Nora lived during an age that considered marrying only for love and happiness wrong-minded, marriage was often considered a familial and corporate obligation. People feared that if a marriage were based in love rather than family and gender roles, then a couple would have every reason to separate if the love was not sustained (Coontz 174–75).Throughout the play, then, Nora’s actions reveal her attempts to recalibrate the unlivable imbalance in her relationship with her husband and family to find some measure of freedom in living. In doing so, she resists the Helmer family system to the point that even Torvald is freed enough to consider the need for change.

A Doll’s House shook European society in 1879 when it was first performed in Copenhagen. The play and its slammed door continue to shake even contemporary sensibilities. While there has been a sea change in regard to the cultural concept of marriage since this play was first performed, there is something still commonly held to be sacred about the relationship between a woman and her young children. But Nora needed to leave.15 She desired a marriage based in mutual respect and emotional intimacy between equal individuals, not convenience or utilitarian purposes, in her relationships with Torvald and her family. Given the constraints of her society, her final action may be argued by some as more genuine and moral than if she had stayed in the home and passively participated in, or resented, the destructiveness of the Helmer family system. Nora’s action, fully removed from the sentimental, comic ending Ibsen’s contemporary audience desired, allows her to remove herself from damaging social forces that inhibited her personal freedom (Lord 59) and would affect her children. Like other Ibsen characters, Nora is “destroyed [as she affirms] something special about the potential of the human spirit” (Northam 226).

From a systemic view, Nora’s ability to differentiate herself from the Helmer family system affords her at least the possibility of reestablishing a functioning marital relationship with her husband and becoming her children’s psychological mother, rather than their emotional sibling. David Gaunt and Louise Nyström note that because of the changing Nordic society at that time, some “people hoped that the traditional bonds uniting husbands and wives, parents and children, would disappear to allow the whole person to flourish” (485). But the authors also note that “the family is not a thing but a network of human relations, which survive even when their forms change” (486). With Nora’s departure and Torvald’s willingness to acknowledge his wife’s influence upon him, Ibsen offers his audiences some small hope. In fact, a family systems perspective would suggest that, for the Helmers and the play, Nora’s departure is the turning point.16 Paradoxically, when an individual rejects his or her role in the family system, as Nora has done in refusing to be or perpetuate the role of the family doll (Thomas 72), a family has already gained a potential for functioning more effectively. Thus, while FST cannot finally put Nora back into her home,17 it can help illuminate why she felt compelled to leave it, and it can suggest that the hope Ibsen incorporates in his stage directions to Torvald just before Nora slams the door is not empty.

Notes

1. See Archer 212; Meyer 263–68; Rosenberg and Templeton; Templeton; Marker and Marker; and especially Durbach 13–23. Importantly, the woman about whom Ibsen developed his idea for A Doll’s House, Laura Kieler, was most unhappy that he had written about her life, even though his play vindicated her actions on behalf of her husband (Meyer 266).

2. See Showalter 5; Kaufmann 237; and Finney 98.

3. See McCarthy; Crawford; and Zucker.

4. See Roberts.

5. See Lee.

6. See Shaw; Hageberg; and Lee.

7. See Knapp, Striking; and Knapp and Womack.

8. In FST, homeostasis is the systemic dynamic by which a family preserves its patterns of behavior. When the family undergoes change, its members may not adapt to the change (negative feedback loop); consequently, the family system functions less efficiently and effectively. If members of the family are willing to make changes to accommodate change (positive feedback loop), the family system functions more efficiently and effectively.

9. Yarhouse and Sells provide a helpful summary of the Bowenian Family Therapy approach, which places significant emphasis on understanding the generational influences of the family. Specifically, they refer to Murray Bowen’s study of the intergenerational influences of alcoholism, in which Bowen explains how anxiety in a family influences a family member’s drinking. Theodore Jorgenson explains that Ibsen understood that “hereditary implications and the restrictions of a mass society seemed to drive every man and woman into the herd” (347). George B. Bryan, in An Ibsen Companion: A Dictionary-Guide to the Life, Works, and Critical Reception of Henrik Ibsen, also notes the significance of “heredity and environment as determinants of character” (79).

10. When A Doll’s House was first performed in 1879, the audience’s shock at Nora’s leaving was so great that her slamming the door was described as “the door slam heard around the world.”

11. Phillip Klever explains that individuals can be extraordinarily immature in marriage and develop patterns that distress a relationship. In addition to acting immaturely, these individuals will often triangulate with others to alleviate their distress (243), i.e., as Nora has done with her friends, Kristine and Dr. Rank. In this immaturity and social expectation, we find irony in that Torvald is as self-centered as Nora is accused of being by her audiences. Ronald Gray points out that Torvald’s conduct helps justify Nora’s departure (58).

12. While a number of translated texts may be used reliably to cite lines and passages from A Doll’s House, including those by Archer (authorized translation), Fjelde, Le Galienne, McFarlane, Meyer, and Watts, this essay uses the 1998 McFarlane and Arup translation of the play found in the Oxford World’s Classics Four Major Plays. For direction in this matter, we referred to Egil Törnqvist’s bibliography in Ibsen: A Doll’s House (196) and then noted McFarlane and Arup’s collaboration in revising McFarlane’s earlier translation.

13. John V. Knapp reiterates the metaphor of the family dance in Reading the Family Dance as he defines and describes the dynamics of the family system (1–25). Also, Durbach explains that the impact of the Norwegian words expressing Nora’s curse in front of Kristine and Dr. Rank (Doll’s House 20), død og pine, the death and pain she felt in her home, were dramatically translated through her dance (Durbach 38).

14.John Gottman et al., in their study of marital happiness and stability in newlyweds, explain that when husbands refuse to share power with their wives and also refuse their wives’ influence, the marriage is more likely to be unhappy. The men who are willing to be influenced by their wives, on the other hand, are more likely to live in happy and stable marriages (18).

15.In writing this play, Ibsen did not seek to give individuals an excuse for divorce. In one instance, a woman who had left her husband for another man approached the playwright to tell him that she had done what Nora had done. Ibsen reminded her that his “Nora went alone” (Meyer 471).

16.This ambivalence is in keeping with Ibsen’s ability to impose a sense of contradiction and opposition, or tvertimod, into what he wrote (Durbach 6).

17.Ibsen wrote a second ending to A Doll’s House that kept Nora in the home; however, the play with this ending did not run for very long (Meyer 266–70; Ibsen: Letters and Speeches 183–84, 301; Letters 325–26).

Works Cited