A collection of quotes from a range of literary critics about A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, covering all the main themes.
These are the critics I used to revise for my a-level, for which I got an A.
• It is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others; but that has not
been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity.
• I might honestly say that it was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was
written.
• None of us can escape the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which we
belong.
• The illusion I wanted to create, is that of reality.
Errol Durbach
(‘Bird and Birdcatcher’ – Nora and Torvald. From ‘Ibsen’s Myth of transformation’)
• The nature of dollydom in the play involves role-playing that becomes so habitual it
belies the reality beneath the fabricated structure.
• Nora has in fact been “man enough’ to take everything on herself in a crisis.
• The stability of her marriage and the security of her home depend on the nursing of
the lie […] she accepts deception as the basis of her marriage.
Evert Sprinchorn
• Like Nora, he [Torvald] has been conditioned by social conventions and attitudes and
made to play a part that by nature he is perhaps not well suited for… Torvald turns out
to have been the doll all along.
Joan Templeton
(‘The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen’)
• [When Nora talks of her ‘duties to herself’] she is voicing the most basic of feminist
principles: that women no less than men possess a moral and intellectual nature and
have not only a right but a duty to develop it.
• Ibsen was inspired to write A Doll House by the terrible events in the life of his protégé
Laura Petersen Kieler, a Norwegian journalist of whom he was extremely fond.
• In 1884, ve years after A Doll House [Ibsen signed] a petition to the Storting, the
Norwegian parliament, urging the passage of a bill establishing separate property
rights for married women.
• The power of A Doll’s House lies not beyond but in its feminism.
M. Meyer
• [The play] was not about women’s rights but human rights, the need for every being,
be he man or be she women, to nd out who he or she really is and to become that
person.
fi fi
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