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How Old Is Dr. Rank? TERRY OTTEN Although virtually no Ibsen scholar would claim A Doll House' as Ibsen 's best work, the play has stubbornly remained a staple on the modem stage; it is in all likelihood his most performed and anthologized drama. One reason for its frequent revivals is unquestionably its historical significance. Theatre historians have long used the cliche that when Nora slams the door at the end of the play, she announces the beginning of modem drama. Furthermore, from its beginning it has been defined as a feminist document, despite Ibsen's often quoted remarks to the Norwegian League for Women's Rights that "Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda .... [ am not even quite clear as to just what this women's rights movement really is.'" In disregard of Ibsen's disclaimer, feminists have long laid claim to the work; and the influence of feminist theory since the late 1960s has secured its prominence as a feminist text. The challenging problem faced by every would-be Nora from Betty Hennings in 1879 to the 1997 Tony Award winner Janet McTeer has been how to make an audience believe in her character's strength at the end of the play when she seems so much a victim of her own triviality and weakness at the beginning of the work. Egil Tornqvist has observed that whereas early portrayals of Nora tended to show her as "genuine[ly naive]" in the first part of the play, more recent performances, no doubt influenced by the feminist movement, depict her as consciously playing a role in the first two acts which she ultimately "drops at the end" of the drama.3 The plot, many have claimed, may well work itself out in the fashion of a well-made play, but the essential drama of self seems unresolved orunconvincing. Ibsen's artistic dilemma was no better defined than by his older contemporary Robert Browning, who - not without some irony, given the failure of his own dramas -: announced his intention in writing Strafford as a play "which is one of Action in Character rather than Character in Action.'" Like all Browning's stage plays, Strafford Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 509 510 TERRY OTTEN could not solve the conflict between the well-made play fonnula and "the development of a soul" in action, which was his true interest.s Anyone who watches A Doll House runs up against the same problem. Although I have long thought that the real "villain" in the work is not Helmer, or even the patriarchal system he represents, but Nora herself, and that she must shatterher own "mind-forg'd manacles..6 before she can gain a measure of freedom, I have found it difficult to convince students, especially those reading the play for the first time. Like most viewers, perhaps they tend to see drama as exactly what Ibsen claims it not to be - propaganda. Somewhat ironically, this belief has been furthered by the tendency of much feminist criticism to make Nora a symbol of female rebellion against the sexist attitudes of the culture generally and Helmer in particular. Of course, this is the external conflict Nora faces. The aesthetic problem stems from confusion not about whether the patriarchal belief system is at the center of the conflict but rather about where the conflict is centrally placed. In short, Nora, not Helmer, embodies the authority of the same sexist views that enslave her. If we do not see this as audience, we misread Ibsen'5 announced pUlpose to write about human emancipation in general, ratherthan exclusively about women's rights; ironically, we reduce Nora as a"feminist"heroine. That is, ifhervictory is not over herself, it becomes inherently superficial, as though by changing all the laws that restrain women we could secure for them the same freedom that Nora gains at the end of the.drama. Nothing could more quickly condemn the play to a dusty bookshelf. My title is intended to suggest how Ibsen weaves the subtlety of the real conflict in a play that seems superficially a drama of plot. To be sure, the footwork about the secret loan...

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