iety with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view” (Ibsen 90). In order for Ibsen to create a modern hero out of a Victorian housewife he had to rely on all the tools of the trade. One of these tools that he employed in this and in other plays was symbolism.
Mining symbolism in Ibsen can be a difficult task indeed. Ibsen is first and foremost a poet; to the point where even his prose sounds like poetry. Every line and every phrase comes across as packed full of meaning and symbolism. It has been observed about A Doll’s House, “that literally not a phrase is without its direct contribution to the structure” (Bradbrook 85), and that “One of the marvels of Ibsen’s craft is that he hardly wastes a word” (Clurman 112). Symbolism in Ibsen is not limited to the set devices, such as the Christmas tree. But because we are dealing with realism, even phrases that come across just as ordinary every day speech are symbolic: “In Ibsen’s theatre the symbolic is always the real seen from another perspective--often a perspective a play’s characters try to evade...Such symbolism...permeates Ibsen’s dramatic method because, to the ‘awakened’ imagination, it permeates reality” (Johnson xiii). This paper will discuss symbolism in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. But one must keep in mind that every phrase and every nuance can be mined for symbolism. After all, what are words if they aren’t symbols? A word can never be anything but a symbol, as Nietzsche said: “What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds” (Kaufmann 45). A word is not the thing it represents and we are forced as individual human beings to express ourselves with words. But this is the beauty of drama and poetry. The writer plays with the words in order that they may convey to the reader what meanings they may symbolize.
The first words that the reader confr...