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Performing Marriage: A Doll's House and Its Reconstructions in Fin-de-Siècle London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2015

Mary Christian
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Extract

Actress Elizabeth Robins, encountering Ibsen's Doll's House for the first time in a Novelty Theatre performance in June 1889, was thrilled by both the boldness of the play's ideology and the emotional power of the characters and the acting. The one element with which she found fault in the production, however, was Nora's tarantella, which she described nearly forty years later as “a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen's one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from.” William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker concurred with Robins's assessment, criticizing Nora's dance as the play's “flawed streak,” as “a theatrical effect, of an obvious, unmistakable kind” and “Ibsen's last concession to … the theatrical orthodoxy of his earlier years.” The tarantella, they agreed, was an embarrassing irrelevance, a crowd-pleasing distraction from the play's serious brainwork, simply an opportunity for the lead actress to display her agility and her well-shaped legs.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 43 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

Endnotes

1. Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen and the Actress (New York: Haskell House, [1928] 1973), 13.

2. Harley Granville-Barker, “The Coming of Ibsen,” in The Eighteen-Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, ed. Walter de la Mare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 159–96, at 167.

3. William Archer, preface to A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen, in William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889–1919, ed. Thomas Postlewait (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 213–14.

4. Robins, 9–10, quote on 10.

5. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 72.

6. Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill & Wang, 1963), 57–8.

7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999). I am indebted for this idea to the comments of my anonymous reader and to Unni Langås's observations regarding Judith Butler's concept of performed gender and its relevance to Nora. See Langås, , “What Did Nora Do? Thinking Gender with A Doll's House,” Ibsen Studies 5.2 (2005): 148–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. F. Anstey was the pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie.

9. Errol Durbach, A Doll's House: Ibsen's Myth of Transformation (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 70.

10. Archer's Anglicization of “Kristine Linde.” Since I am primarily concerned with the play as it was performed and received in London in the 1880s and 1890s, all quotations and names are as they appeared in Archer's translation, which was the English version most readily available to the English dramatists and critics whose writings I discuss here. It is also identical to the text used by Janet Achurch and Charles Charrington with the company at the Novelty Theatre production in 1889, with the exception of a few passages that were removed to shorten the performance and afterward restored by Archer.

11. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House, trans. William Archer (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), 95. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

12. See Archer, “Ibsen and English Criticism,” in William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889–1919, ed. Thomas Postlewait (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 13–22, at 16; and Austin E. Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (New York: Methuen, 1985), 103.

13. As Bernard Ince has documented, Janet Achurch's longest-running and most frequently played roles in her early acting years included ingénues in adapted French dramas and sentimental fallen-woman characters such as Lady Isabel Carlyle in Ellen Wood's East Lynne, Rachel Dunbar in Sydney Grundy's Rachel, and Mercy Merrick in Wilkie Collins's New Magdalen. Ince, “Before Ibsen: The Early Stage Career of Janet Achurch, 1883–89,” Theatre Notebook 67.2 (2013): 66–102Google Scholar.

14. Durbach has made a similar point, arguing for a link between dramatic conventions, Nora's romantic expectations, and her position as a middle-class wife: “[Nora] would probably have spent her free evenings at the theater, immersed in what Shaw called ‘Sardoodledom,’ the repertoire of Sardou and Scribe and their Danish imitators who could be relied upon to endorse all the sentimental romantic clichés of contemporary social thought. Nora's every assumption is shaped by the values of popular culture.” Durbach, 65.

15. John Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method: A Study of the Prose Dramas (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, [1953] 1971), 15.

16. Archer, preface to A Doll's House, 214.

17. Templeton, Joan, “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen,” PMLA 104.1 (1989): 28–40, at 33Google Scholar.

18. Sedgwick, 72.

19. George Bernard Shaw, preface to Three Plays for Puritans, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, 7 vols., ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: The Bodley Head, 1970–4), 2 (1970): 26–7.

20. Durbach, 65.

21. Quoted in Richard Cordell, Henry Arthur Jones and the Modern Drama (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, [1932] 1968), 52.

22. Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly (privately printed, n.d.), 64–6.

23. Ibid., 76.

24. Archer, preface to A Doll's House, 214.

25. Shaw, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” in Major Critical Essays (London: Constable, 1955), 1–150, at 138.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 138–9.

28. Ibid., 146.

29. P. F. D. Tennant, reviewing the French plays that figured prominently in Ibsen's repertoire during his years as stage manager and artistic director in Bergen and Christiania, concludes that “it is in fact only the natural fluency of the dialogues which distinguishes [Ibsen's ‘discussion’ scenes] from the scenes we find with Augier and Dumas fils”; Tennant, Ibsen's Dramatic Technique (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), 84.

30. Ørjasæter, Kristin, “Mother, Wife, and Role Model: A Contextual Perspective on Feminism in A Doll's House,” Ibsen Studies 5.1 (2005): 19–47, at 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Templeton, 32.

32. Ørjasæter, 29.

33. Ørjasæter is an exception, presenting the Krogstad–Linden union as a possible example of the “ideal marriage” for which Nora hopes; ibid., 33.

34. See Durbach, 44; Northam, 27; Quigley, 106; and Langås, 158.

35. Ørjasæter, 33.

36. Archer, preface to A Doll's House, 214.

37. Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77.

38. In addition to the Doll's House rewritings discussed below, a partial list of Ibsen-based English pieces includes Mrs. Hugh Bell's Jerry-Builder Solness (1893), J. M. Barrie's Ibsen's Ghost (1891), and Beata (1892), Austin Fryers's tragic prequel to Rosmersholm. Some more widely known original plays of the decade—in particular Shaw's Candida and Wilde's Ideal Husband—also contain significant reworkings of Ibsenian ideas. See Powell, 77; J. L. Wisenthal, introduction to Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw's “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” and Related Writings, ed. J. L. Wisenthal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

39. Shaw to Charles Charrington, 7 March 1890, in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965), 239.

40. See Dukore, Bernard F., “Karl Marx's Youngest Daughter and A Doll's House,” Theatre Journal 42.3 (1990): 308–21, at 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 334–7.

41. Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill, “A Doll's House Repaired,” Time: A Monthly Miscellany of Interesting and Amusing Literature, March 1891, 239–53, at 251.

42. Dukore, 321.

43. Marx and Zangwill, 248.

44. Ibid., 250.

45. Ibid., 239.

46. In her recent biography of Eleanor Marx, Rachel Holmes notes parallels between Nora's marriage and Marx's own ultimately destructive relationship with Edward Aveling, suggesting that these resemblances may help account for Marx's strong personal and political investment in Ibsen's work; Holmes, 335–6.

47. Marx and Zangwill, 243.

48. Ibid., 252.

49. Dukore, 313.

50. F. Anstey [Thomas Anstey Guthrie], “Prefatory Note” in Mr. Punch's Pocket Ibsen (New York: Macmillan, 1893), n.p.

51. Ibid., 85.

52. Ibid., 86–7.

53. Ibid., 31.

54. Ibid., 164.

55. Walter Besant, “The Doll's House—and After,” English Illustrated Magazine 76 (January 1890): 315–25, at 321.

56. Ibid., 320.

57. Henry Arthur Jones, The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), in Representative Plays by Henry Arthur Jones, ed. Clayton Hamilton (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1925), vol. 2, 271–363, at 295.

58. Shaw to Charles Charrington, 7 March, 1890, in Laurence, 239.

59. Shaw, “Still After the Doll's House,” Time: A Monthly Miscellany of Interesting and Amusing Literature, February 1890, 197–208; repr. in Standard Edition of the Works of Bernard Shaw, 37 vols. (London: Constable, 1931–52), 6 (Short Stories, Scraps & Shavings, 1932): 125–38, at 134.

60. Ibid., 137.

61. In a letter to the Evening Standard in 1944, Shaw described Candida as “a counterblast to Ibsen's Doll's House, showing that in the real typical doll's house it is the man who is the doll”; “Shaw Reveals Who Was Candida,” in Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, 1 (1970): 601–3, at 603.

62. Shaw, preface to Mrs Warren's Profession, in ibid., 236.

63. Shaw, “Quintessence of Ibsenism,” 123.