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Housekeeping:
Agenda:
Drama of Changing Worlds:
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is known as the father of Scandinavian Realism in theater. He is the most performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare (and really, who can compete with someone called The Bard). Ibsen's life and work map the movement from the Victorian to the Modern world.
Biographical Reading of "A Doll's House"
Although Ibsen's own family life has often been identified as an inspiration for this play, I believe that (one of) the most important impetus is Ibsen's relationship with Laura Kieler.
Laura was a friend and student of Ibsen and her life parallels that of Ibsen's Nora. Her husband Victor contracted tuberculosis and she took out a loan to pay for his health care, including a trip to Italy. She tried to sell a novel to cover her debt, even asking Ibsen's help, but failed. Ibsen encouraged her to tell her husband, trusting that he would understand and take care of her. When her husband found out he had her committed to an insane asylum and did not allow her near the children again for another two years.
Ibsen began writing this play while Laura was at the asylum.
Discussion Questions: Writing Wrongs
- Do you think Ibsen is trying to right the wrong he did to Laura through this text?
- How does this drama revise or reinvent Laura's fate?
- The play was considered too dark to play in Germany. Ibsen was forced to write a new conclusions where Nora comes back to Tovald and offers him a second chance.
Defining Genre: What is Drama?
We've looked at genre through the lens of ekphrasis (transforming one art form into another - i.e. transforming Mrs. Dalloway into Tweets). Now let's take a more direct look at issues of genre through drama.
Discussion Questions: Defining Drama
- What is drama?
- What are its formal characteristics?
- How does drama compare to the other genres we've studied.
- Why does genre matter?
- How does Ibsen's play use the genre and reshape it?
- How does Ibsen compare with novelists like Woolf (who also pushes genre boundaries).
- How would this be different as a novel? As a poem? Why does genre matter in "A Doll's House"?
The Plot: Who, What, When, Where and Why?
Group Work:
What is the plot of "A Doll's House"? Could you map it on the Freytag Pyramid? Break into groups and discuss the mapping of "A Doll's House" onto the pyramid of dramatic plot structure and then put your ideas on the board (with chalk). Don't know what a Freytag Pyramid is? Check out our Online Resources page.
Discussion Questions:
- Based on your pyramids here, what is the plot of "A Doll's House"?
- What motivates each character's actions?
- Nora Helmer
- Torvald Helmer
- Mrs. Kristine Linde
- Nils Krogstad
- Dr. Rank
- How does this plot and these motivations make this realism?
- How is realism differ from romanticism (modeled in Frankenstein)?
All art can be positioned between the realistic and the imaginative. How would we position the texts we've read so far on this continuum?
Retrieved from Encyclopedia Britanica.
At the conclusion of the play, Nora dances the tarantella, a dance she learned in Italy with her husband where he was convalescing. How does this dance play into the genre? What is the symbolic meaning of this dance? How does this dance illustrate an increasingly global world at the end of the nineteenth-century?
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