The View of Marriage in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House
In his analysis of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, Janrek Lavrin asserts that the plays A Doll's House and Ghosts made Henrik Ibsen famous and notorious all over Europe (Lavrin 77). The primary uproar over the plays centered around what was viewed as Ibsen's attack on marriage. Lavrin argues, however, that the problems Ibsen was attempting to address in A Doll's House were not the problems caused by marriage in general but rather the problems caused by modern marriage (77).
Ibsen's initial idea behind the play that eventually became A Doll's House was for a central female character whose dramatic dilemma would arise from the disparity between her innate sense of right and society's laws (Saari 41). He was primarily concerned with the conflict between what he saw to be two kinds of moral law and conscience: the feminine, with love as its highest value, and the masculine, with its social and legal moorings. Sandra Saari argues that in the end, however, Ibsen retained the female protagonist but created a play based on the premise that, though they traditionally inhabit different realms of the social and legal world, males and females demonstrate no essential difference in their spiritual make-up (Saari 42). The issue surrounding marriage, therefore, is whether it serves to accentuate each partner's humanity.
In A Doll's House, Nora's husband is a lawyer by profession and a model family man as far as appearances go. To himself, his wife, and the rest of the world he portrays himself to be honest, conscientious, hard-working and fond of his wife and children. Lavrin refers to him as "a walking encyclopedia of bourgeois virtues" (Lavrin 77). Torvald seems to attempt deliberately and consciously attempt to establish his respectability and adherence to middle-class values. As Lavrin states, "he basks with relish in the halo of his respectability--an unconscious hypocrite...