Why We Are Reading A Doll's House

I was always attracted to Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), ever since I came upon his famous line "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.."(1843). Though he never identified with the term, he is thrown into the philosophical category of the Existentialists, holding a belief that our existence or presence in this world precedes our perceived purpose or essence. He was writing in an exciting time in Europe as the thirst for more democratic governance, constitutionalism, individualism, industrialism and equality had dramatically altered the fabric of society. It is the era that began in the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the overthrow of the myth of Monarchy, the despotic Napoleonic Era (1799-1815), The Decemberist Revolt in Russia (1825) and the many Revolutions of 1848 -  brining in new republican possibilities across Europe, Russia and the world. That freedom was creating a lot of anxiety, discord, uncertainty and violence. It is out of this era we are brought the brooding Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) with his 1882 aphorism The Madman proclaiming, 

God is dead.
God remains dead.

And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

The anxiety of the aphorism weighed heavy on the shoulders of the day. Do we not also feel it on ours. How often have I heard that we are living in an era of The Crisis of Meaning? That crisis has deep roots that bore deep into epochs that predate the internet.

 

This brings us to 1879, with Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House. 

We have been in 1879 before, the year Fyodor Dostoyevsky began publishing his novel The Brothers Karamazov in the newspaper, The Russian Messenger. Our book club began in that text, where Fyodor directly tackles this crisis of meaning, delivering a personal/communal Orthodox Christian resolution to it. It's beautiful. 

Ibsen doesn't put the same neat solution together for us, he comes closer to Steinbeck's "Thou mayest..". Though he doesn't really get that far. 

This is our first play, and while shorter than any of the novels we have read it seems to have more facets to it.  For, unlike a novel it was written to be performed, to be interpreted by actors and directors. Every performance giving the work a slightly different interpretation. 

The idea to read A Doll's House started oddly enough with a podcast about another play, the ancient Greek play The Oresteia (420BC). In Our Time hosted a discussion on the ancient play where Professor Edith Hall said, 

(The Oresteia) is the charter myth of male domination, justified by Athena. It slams the door on women in western culture, literature, and art in society until Nora storms out of the house in A Doll's House...

 We were in the middle of our journey through East of Eden, a beautiful though very male centric novel and I was hunting for stories with stronger female leads and this play really fits the bill.

I'm going to hold back on my thoughts on the play, but I think its important that when we read the play we keep in mind that the play was meant to be preformed, and that the actors would be searching for character motivation. And, while our main character Nora is having a crisis of meaning, the others are also. The four other characters are at different stages of crisis, and Nora sees them and herself differently through them. 

This is a journey of finding who we are, not only the play itself but also the book club. I think the answers we find matter, and so do the questions.