I don’t know if a spoiler warning for a nearly 150-year-old play is necessary – but I will be revealing significant plot points when writing about this historical drama, so if you want to remain unspoiled, go read the play (it’s only three acts, it’s a relatively quick read) or watch a dramatisation, and come back when you’re done.
Nora and Torvald Helmer are a middle-class couple living in Christiania (what Oslo was named for a few centuries in the before times) in the late 1800s. They have three children, and some servants (a nanny and a parlour maid). The play takes place around Christmas and in the days following. This was a time when women didn’t have any legal rights and the central conflict of this play comes about because Nora, in the past, took out a loan (forging her father’s name on the contract to do so). She did it to save her husband’s health but has always had to keep her illegal act a secret. Now her past is coming back to haunt her, with the man she borrowed money from, Krogstad, blackmailing her to keep his job. Nora needs to ensure Krogstad isn’t fired, or he will tell her husband the truth, and the ensuing scandal could mean Torvald loses his new advantageous job as a bank manager.
I honestly don’t remember how many times I’ve read this play by now. I first read it in high school, with a Norwegian teacher who showed absolutely zero enthusiasm about the work, and as a result, I wasn’t exactly impressed by it and remembered it as boring and pointless. Et dukkehjem/A Doll’s House is now part of the curriculum in Norwegian for our tenth-graders at the school where I work and I myself have taught the play at least four times now. Unlike my high school teacher, who really just assigned us all the play to read with some accompanying work tasks (if I recall correctly), my colleagues and I read through the play act by act with the students, who take turns reading out the various parts, and we watch different dramatisations for the kids to compare and contrast. The last time I taught tenth grade, and again this time, we also showed them the first season of the Norwegian web series Skam as another comparison point, which they seemed to really like. I have no illusions that I’m instilling a great love of 19th Century realist literature in my pupils, but I’m hoping that some of them find their introduction and work with this play less off-putting than I did in school.