Abstract

This chapter analyses Ibsen's A Doll's House as an example of the aesthetics of dependency. Ibsen in this work stages the contradiction between two dominant representational systems: the plot structure of the nineteenth-century well-made play and the allegorical deferral of meaning into a past that eludes all causal determinations. Nora's infamous departure at the end of the play, however, not only breaks with these two textual logics but also retroactively provides them with a new standard of meaning. The proper relation between the two representational systems that structure the main part of the text is in this way made to depend on their shared relationship to a set of meanings embodied by Nora that they do not themselves have the means to motivate or understand. Like Kierkegaard's notion of God, Nora's final invocation of marriage, love, honor, and so on, simultaneously negates the use these concepts were given up until that point, by drawing on meanings incompatible with them, and provides a new standard for judging how the structures underlying those previous uses should be understood instead. The play thus makes the process of negotiating that gap itself the focus of the work.

Share