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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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children and kin. Now and then a womanlike shaking off of cares. Then a sudden return of apprehension and dread. She must bear it all alone. The catastrophe approaches, inexorably, inevitably. Despair, struggle, and disaster. In reading Ibsen’s statement of the conflict he meant to portray between the male and female conscience, one cannot but feel that he somewhat shirked the issue in making Nora’s crime a formal rather than a real one. She had no intention of defrauding Krogstad; and though it is an interesting point of casuistry to determine whether, under the stated circumstances, she had a moral right to sign her father’s name, opinion on the point would scarcely be divided along the line of sex. One feels that, in order to illustrate the “two kinds of conscience,” Ibsen ought to have made his play turn upon some point of conduct (if such there be) which would sharply divide masculine from feminine sympathies. The fact that such a point would be extremely hard to find seems to cast doubt on the ultimate validity of the thesis. If, for instance, Nora had deliberately stolen the money from Krogstad, with no intention of repaying it, that would certainly have revealed a great gulf between her morality and Helmer’s; but would any considerable number of her sex have sympathised with her? I am not denying a marked difference between the average man and the average woman in the development of such characteristics as the sense of justice; but I doubt whether, when women have their full share in legislation, the laws relating to forgery will be seriously altered. A parallel-text edition of the provisional and the final forms of A Doll’s House would be intensely interesting. For the present, I can note only a few of the most salient differences between the two versions. Helmer is at first called “Stenborg”; 3 it is not till the scene with Krogstad in the second act that the name Helmer makes its first appearance. Ibsen was constantly changing his characters’ names in the course of composition-trying them on, as it were, until he found one that was a perfect fit. The first scene, down to the entrance of Mrs. Linden, though it contains all that is necessary for the mere development of the plot, runs to only twenty-three speeches, as compared with eighty-one in the completed text. The business of the macaroons is not even indicated; there is none of the charming talk about the Christmas-tree and the children’s presents; no request on Nora’s part that her present may take the form of money, no indication on Helmer’s part that he regards her supposed extravagance as an inheritance from her father. Helmer knows that 3 This name seems to have haunted Ibsen. It was also the original name of Stensgard in The League of Youth. she toils at copying far into the night in order to earn a few crowns, though of course he has no suspicion as to how she employs the money. Ibsen evidently felt it inconsistent with his character that he should permit this, so in the completed version we learn that Nora, in order to do her copying, locked herself in under the pretext of making decorations for the Christmas-tree, and, when no result appeared, declared that the cat had destroyed her handiwork. The first version, in short, is like a stained glass window seen from without, the second like the same window seen from within. The long scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden is more fully worked out, though many small touches of character are lacking, such as Nora’s remark that some day “when |
