The title of this chapter is not intended to roll off the tongue. The idiom in English should read “house and home,” so phrasing it differently here goes against the grain of verbal habit. The point in reversing the terms is to reflect the process at work in Ibsen's later plays: the dislodging of home from its privileged association with domestic ideals and the testing of “house” as a modern alternative, a more temporary and contingent form of inhabitation. As his dramatic characters and their commentators bandy these two terms about, “home” in Ibsen's plays slides in connotation from the ideal to the trivial. His strategic contamination of the term “home” would strip away its redemptive associations with hearth, origin, and authenticity, gradually elaborating it as the idea of a copy without vitality or substance, the process that Nora began with the insight about her “doll home.” This kind of rhetorical reversal creates the possibility that the home might be confining, squelching, or in other ways detrimental to individual freedom.

Many of Ibsen's dramatic characters seem unusually interested in the linguistic distinction between house and home; they both discuss it openly and convey their interest indirectly in their use of domestic metaphor. One might not think that debating the semantics of domesticity would make for compelling dramatic material, but Ibsen's characters do just that. The talk of house and home clearly struck a chord with many of Ibsen's commentators as well, because they continued to dig into the linguistic resonance of “home” in their reviews and discussions of his plays. Along the way, their accounts reveal much about the attitudes and assumptions that propped up those terms. In one sense, the dogged support of the old domestic ideals by some commentators provides a useful corrective to those who would overestimate the efficacy of Ibsen's domestic deconstruction.