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A Doll’s House - southern Italian influence – an alternate key interpretation.
First of all; is it possible in 2006, the year of celebrating our great Henrik Ibsen, to establish an alternate interpretation of A Doll’s House, beside the mainstream interpretation that stresses the question; “emancipation for middle class women in 19th Century modernity”? My contribution to an alternate reading is not meant to be a reactionary revenge against females all around world that have used Nora in their struggle for their equal rights in patriarchic family spheres . But I would rather presume to establish an inter-textual thematic reading between A Doll’s House and common features to confirmed southern Italian socio-cultural traditions at Ibsen’s time.
My first thesis in this presentation is to point out that Henrik Ibsen probable got in touch with this cultural distinct feature of southern Italy during his summer trips to the coast of Mediterranean from 1867 to 1881. Nevertheless I will point out that this theme is clearly mirrored as a central theme in A Doll’s House. Both Helmer and Krogstad as males, fight for their honors, while Nora, as a female, struggles with her shame, similar to actual gender issues at places like Amalfi where Ibsen selected to complete the play in 1879.
Music and dance were expressions of female identity and values as symbolic forms of communications for women in southern Italy, women felling shame like Nora.
Already when Ibsen wrote on his preliminary notes of A Doll’s House in Rome in 1878, we can see connections of this gender topic: “There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience; it is exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with council and judges who judge feminine conduct from male point of view.” (p. 436)
Secondly, I will point out that this area was at Ibsen’s time well known as the land of Tarantism: Ibsen’s friend from 1866, Vilhelm Bergsøe, author of a treatise on Tarantism in 1864, recommended Ibsen to go southern Italy and we know that they stayed together all summer at Ischia and later in Sorrento in 1867. The fact that Bergsøe was an expert on Tarantism, and that Ibsen, pursuant to Paulsen, found this book very interesting; have up to our time, of some unknown reason, been neglected by Ibsen scholars. But if we do a close comparing reading of the book of Bergsøe and A Doll’s House, it is possible to se close links to these two texts. My task is then to do a displacement of a contextual placing and reading of A doll’s house towards tarantism, at the sacrifice of a radical middle class dominant reading that soon were established when the play was published in 1879. My thesis is that A doll’s house in the reception history, more than Ibsen liked to agree with his audience and critics, has focused on “modern” emancipation as the main theme in the play. The main focus has been that Nora liberates herself from a tyrant of a husband by leaving him at the end of the play.
My thesis is that Ibsen had another inter-text in mind, a mythological one, than Georg Brandes believed in; Laura Kieler the Norwegian middle class woman, unluckily married with her Danish tyrant as husband. Despite Ibsen’s resistance on interpreting A Doll’s House as narrowing to just women’s emancipation and the Kieler case in late 19th century, the audience and critics of his time turned the deaf ear to the author’s affirmation of what this wasn’t about.
But in my opinion, Nora (derived from the Italian name Elenora), Helmer and Krogstad as characters represent in a way the history and culture from the land of Tarantism. Nora as suffering, confused Italian tarantata, while Helmer and Krogstad as southern Italian patriarchic men fighting for their honor, without honor they know that they deserve no respect from their community they belong to. But is this a passé question in 2006? Not at all, I think we all agree!
