Reading, Writing, and Authority in Ibsen's "Women's Plays"

Reading, Writing, and Authority in Ibsen's "Women's Plays" PENNY FARFAN In the opening chapter of their now-classic work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar cite Edward Said's meditation on the etymology of the word "author," "with which writer, deity, and paterfamilias are identified" (4), in order to establish a deep linkage between writing and patriarchal authority in Western culture. This critical insight pervades Ibsen's "women's plays,"1 for though it has commonly been suggested that the door-slam at the end of A Doll House signalled the advent of both modern drama and the women's movement (see, for example, Fjelde xxiv; Gassner ix; Meyer 17; Finney 149-[50), Nora's forgery of her father's signature is in fact the act of transgression that sets the drama in motion; indeed, authorship and authority are linked throughout Ibsen's "women's plays," so that acts of writing. reading, or - in Hedda's case manuscript -burning serve to signify the female protagonists' respective degrees of critical engagement with hegemonic cultural texts that deny women status as authoritative subjects. In his early realist prose play Pillars of Society ([877) Ibsen introduced a crucial dichotomy by counterposing the conservative gender ideology articulated by the schoolmaster, Rl1Irlund, as he reads aloud to a group of ladies from a gilt-edged book ([5) entitled Woman as the Servant of Society (80), with the challenge to that text represented by the figure of the "new woman," Lana Hessel, who is remarkable not only for her short hair and men's boots, but for the fact that she has authored a book of her own and returns from America to her old hometown to "air [...1out" (39) its outmoded moral values. Yet while Lana, in certain respects, resists the prevailing view of women as supports for men rather than as independent subjects in and of themselves, she at the same time exemplifies that ideal in that she has selflessly devoted her life to her younger half-brother, Johan, and describes raising him as "the one thing [she's] done in this world" and as that which "gives [her] at least some kind of Modem Drama. 45: I (Spring 2002) 2 PENNY FARFAN right to exist" (50). Thus the challenge to conventional gender inscriptions that Ibsen introduces through Lona as author-figure is to a considerable extent defused as Pillars a/Society moves toward its somewhat ambiguous ending of comic reconciliation. A Doll House (1879) is more categorical in its rejection of the notion of "woman as the servant of society," using tropes of writing and reading as indicators of the female protagonist's movement toward feminist subjectivity. Nora's act of forging her father's signature to borrow money in acontext where "[a] wife can't borrow without her husband's consent" (A Doll House t3S) is a crime in the legal sense that Ibsen referred to when he wrote in his notes on the play, "A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view" ("Notes for the Modem Tragedy" tst). This forgery, however, is perhaps a greater crime in the less literal sense of being a usurpation of the masculine privilege of authority. Indeed, though Nora repays the money she owes by doing copywork rather than by functioning as an author in her own right, the act of taking up the pen, which, as Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate, has often been represented as analogous to the male sexual organ as icon of patriarchal authority (3-7), is in itself transgressive and eventually leads to Nora's questioning and ultimate rejection of the hegemonic gender ideology that inheres in the pre-existing legal codes and moral values to which she is referred by Krogstad and her husband. Thus as early as Act I, she defies Krogstad's reminder of the letter of the law by stating, "I don't know much about laws, but I'm sure that somewhere in the books...