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

Abstract

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.

Gender and Literature – Is Gender Gendered? Female Protagonists in Macbeth (1606), Thelma and Louise (1991) and A Doll’s House (1879) – Three Different Genres of Literature across Centuries

“…The romantic marriage ideal, in short, can no longer be the template for their life narrative, and the marriage must consequently either be dissolved or continue on some other models. Torvald, priding himself on his upright respectability, can envision no alternative but a retreat behind the marital proscenium in a hollow limitation of their old ideal married life [7].…”