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The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joan Templeton
Joan Templeton*
Affiliation:
Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
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Abstract

One of modern feminism's most crucial literary texts has incited a systematic backlash that would save its author from feminism, denying that mere gender can have a place in Ibsen's universal art or claiming that Nora Helmer is too inconsistent, frivolous, dishonest, abnormal, or unwomanly to be a feminist heroine. The argument that Nora represents not Woman but Everyman is a gender-based tautology in itself; applied to the play's thoroughgoing feminist text it becomes doubly nonsense. The confused notions that Nora's critics have about feminism and its relation to art lead them to uphold equally illogical positions, and their charges against Nora, which repeat those of her foil and husband, constitute both a serious misreading and, unintentionally, a kind of spurious deconstruction that denies the play's coherence and worth. Finally, research on Ibsen's life proves that, all claims to the contrary, his intentions in A Doll House were thoroughly feminist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 28 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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