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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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When an unhappy wife is separated from her husband she is not allowed to keep her children? Is that really so? MRS. LINDEN Yes, I think so. That’s to say, if she is guilty. NORA Oh, guilty, guilty; what does it mean to be guilty? Has a wife no right to love her husband? MRS. LINDEN Yes, precisely, her husband-and him only. NORA Why, of course; who was thinking of anything else? But that law is unjust, Kristina. You can see clearly that it is the men that have made it. MRS. LINDEN Aha-so you have begun to take up the woman question? NORA No, I don’t care a bit about it. The scene with Krogstad is essentially the same as in the final form, though sharpened, so to speak, at many points. The question of suicide was originally discussed in a somewhat melodramatic tone: NORA I have been thinking of nothing else all these days. KROGSTAD Perhaps. But how to do it? Poison? Not so easy to get hold of. Shooting? It needs some skill, Mrs. Helmer. Hanging? Bah-there’s something ugly in that.... NORA Do you hear that rushing sound? KROGSTAD The river? Yes, of course you have thought of that. But you haven’t pictured the thing to yourself. And he proceeds to do so for her. After he has gone, leaving the letter in the box, Helmer and Rank enter, and Nora implores Helmer to do no work till New Year’s Day (the next day) is over. He agrees, but says, “I will just see if any letters have come ”; whereupon she rushes to the piano and strikes a few chords. He stops to listen, and she sits down and plays and sings Anitra’s song from Peer Gynt. When Mrs. Linden presently enters, Nora makes her take her place at the piano, drapes a shawl around her, and dances Anitra’s dance. It must be owned that Ibsen has immensely improved this very strained and arbitrary incident by devising the fancy dress ball and the necessity of rehearsing the tarantella for it; but at the best it remains a piece of theatricalism. As a study in technique, the re-handling of the last act is immensely interesting. At the beginning, in the earlier form, Nora rushes down from the children’s party overhead, and takes a significant farewell of Mrs. Linden, whom she finds awaiting her. Helmer almost forces her to return to the party; and thus the stage is cleared for the scene between Mrs. Linden and Krogstad, which, in the final version, opens the act. Then Nora enters with the two elder children, whom she sends to bed. Helmer immediately follows, and on his heels Dr. Rank, who announces in plain terms that his disease has entered on its last stage, that he is going home to die, and that he will not have Helmer or any one else hanging around his sick-room. In the final version, he says all this to Nora alone in the second act; while in the last act, coming in upon Helmer flushed with wine, and Nora pale and trembling in her masquerade dress, he has a parting scene with them, the significance of which she alone understands. In the earlier version, Rank has several long and heavy speeches in place of the light, swift dialogue of the final form, with its different significance for Helmer and for Nora. There is no trace of the wonderful passage which precedes Rank’s exit. To compare the draft with the finished scene is to see a perfect instance of the transmutation of dramatic prose into dramatic poetry. There is in the draft no indication of Helmer’s being warmed with wine, or of the excitement of the senses which gives the final touch of tragedy to Nora’s despair. The |
