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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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begun the scene by boasting to Krogstad of her influence, and telling him that people in a subordinate position ought to be careful how they offend such influential persons as herself; so that her subsequent denial that he has any influence becomes a notable dramatic effect. The final scene of the act, between Nora and Helmer, is not materially altered in the final version; but the first version contains no hint of the business of decorating the Christmas-tree or of Nora’s wheedling Helmer by pretending to need his aid in devising her costume for the fancy dress ball. Indeed, this ball has not yet entered Ibsen’s mind. He thinks of it first as a children’s party in the flat overhead, to which Helmer’s family are invited. In the opening scene of the second act there are one of two traits that might perhaps have been preserved, such as Nora’s prayer: “Oh, God! Oh, God! do something to Torvald’s mind to prevent him from enraging that terrible man! Oh, God! Oh, God! I have three little children! Do it for my children’s sake.” Very natural and touching, too, is her exclamation, “Oh, how glorious it would be if I could only wake up, and come to my senses, and cry, ‘It was a dream! It was a dream!’” A week, by the way, has passed, instead of a single night, as in the finished play; and Nora has been wearing herself out by going to parties every evening. Helmer enters immediately on the nurse’s exit; there is no scene with Mrs. Linden in which she remonstrates with Nora for having (as she thinks) borrowed money from Dr. Rank, and so suggests to her the idea of applying to him for aid. In the scene with Helmer, we miss, among many other characteristic traits, his confession that the ultimate reason why he cannot keep Krogstad in the bank is that Krogstad, an old schoolfellow, is so tactless as to tutoyer him. There is a curious little touch in the passage where Helmer draws a contrast between his own strict rectitude and the doubtful character of Nora’s father. “I can give you proof of it,” he says. “I never cared to mention it before-but the twelve hundred dollars he gave you when you were set on going to Italy he never entered in his books: we have been quite unable to discover where he got them from.” When Dr. Rank enters, he speaks to Helmer and Nora together of his failing health; it is an enormous improvement which transfers this passage, in a carefully polished form, to his scene with Nora alone. That scene, in the draft, is almost insignificant. It consists mainly of somewhat melodramatic forecasts of disaster on Nora’s part, and the doctor’s alarm as to her health. Of the famous silk- stocking scene-that invaluable sidelight on Nora’s relation with Helmer there is not a trace. There is no hint of Nora’s appeal to Rank for help, nipped in the bud by his declaration of love for her. All these elements we find in a second draft of the scene which has been preserved. In this second draft, Rank says, “Helmer himself might quite well know every thought I have ever had of you; he shall know when I am gone.” It might have been better, so far as England is concerned, if Ibsen had retained this speech; it might have prevented much critical misunderstanding of a perfectly harmless and really beautiful episode. Between the scene with Rank and the scene with Krogstad there intervenes, in the draft, a discussion between Nora and Mrs. Linden, containing this curious passage: NORA |
