Jacob Rice

Acting III

Richard Niles

A Doll House

The date is December 24th, 1879 in Christiana, Norway.

Norway at the time of Ibsens birth was monumentally different than how it was at the

time of his writing A Doll House. In 1828, the year Ibsen was born, the Napoleonic wars was

coming to an end, the monarch Karl IV of Sweden was at the throne, and Parliament was fighting

for independence. Norway had also just become independent in 1814. The language of cultured

Norwegians was Danish. At the time, the majority, about 90% of Norwegians worked in

Agriculture. (Dagre)

However, by the time Ibsen began penning A Doll House things in Norway were very

different. In addition to the population more than doubling, even with large immigration to

America, a new and very important class was created by the industrial revolution that flourished

in Norway in the Mid-1800s. With the industrial revolution came the upper middle class, one

that would be the focus of most of Ibsens characters. Before the large economic boom, which

can be largely attributed to success in foreign trade, mining, and growth in agriculture

production, the majority of the people with wealth were the aristocracy, and it was money they

were born into. The industrial revolution brought about the major expansion of the railroad

which allowed people to travel more freely. The first railway line in Norway was in 1959, and

connected Eidsvoll and Olso, which used to be named Christiana. The economic boom that

occurred from 1843 to about 1875 was so important, to the rising upper middle class because

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they suddenly were able to afford things they never could before and they were living debt free.

This prosperity eventually brought about a materialistic lifestyle and also an obsession and over-

awareness to money, as we see very evident in A Doll House. (Dagre) (Mazzeno)(Baker)

There was a movement during the late 1800s that involved the middle class and their

jobs. There was a large movement towards unionization and the problem of class conflict was

growing more and more. There was a large call for democratic reform. The industrialization of

Norway brought many textile factories and engineering workshops that had not yet been

regulated and much of the working class was being taken advantage of. (Lambert) (Dagre)

With the rising upper middle class gaining prosperity, they also gained respectability,

which required a different social expectations than before. The bourgeois respectability

included the upper middle class to have financial success without any debt, good morals, and a

stable patriarchal family. In Krogstads case, his great mistake caused him to be viewed as

having no morals. Along with his wifes death, which worked against the stable patriarchal

family. So it was very hard, at the time, for Krogstad to gain back his respect in the town with

so much working against him. He mustve been working extremely hard to change the publics

view of him in order to provide a better life with better opportunities for his children. Krogstad

also obviously has benefitted from the economic boom that had happened in Norway because he

had four thousand eight hundred crowns to loan Nora, which was a lot of money at the time,

around five to seven thousand dollars nowadays. (Cron) (Dagre)(Hollywood)

Krogstad takes advantage of the fact that the society in Norway at the time favored his

gender almost entirely. He takes advantage of the fact that Nora is a woman and he is a man. In

Krogstads case, his crime was forgery. In Noras case, her crime was not only forgery, but at the

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time women were not allowed to borrow money without a male guarantor, usually the husband

or the father. Ibsen was writing Nora against the social norms of the time, her behavior, including

leaving her husband, was completely unprecedented in the 1870s. There was an immense strong

ideology put forth during that time period that shocked audiences. However, Ibsens view on it

was very different, he states in his notes for A Doll House A woman cannot be herself in

contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with

counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view. Ibsen was directly

commenting on the society he was living in at the time, pointing out its flaws, and saying that

something had to be done. Mazzeno, a writer for Enotes, argues Ibsen was neither a feminist nor

a social reformer. Indeed, Ibsen personally deplored the kind of emancipation and self-

development that brought women out of the domestic sphere into the larger world; he saw

womens proper role exclusively as motherhood. His feminist sympathies were but a facet of his

realism. He did no more than try to describe the problems as he saw them; he did not attempt to

solve them. Nevertheless, he had a sharp eye and many sharp words for injustice. (Mazzeno)

(Dagre)

One of the social norms in Norway at the time that I feel Ibsen comments on way was

that women had no power on their own. So they were marrying for money and politics, rather

than love. We can see this clearly with Mrs. Lindes decision to abandon Krogstad for a rich

man. Although the Victorian Era brought a large romanticism to marriage, it was still indeed a

financial transaction. The courtship during this time consisted of supervised meetings by a parent

or largely through communication via letters. (Larsen)

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 Women at the time could not get a higher education. It wasnt until 1903 when a woman

got her doctorate from the University of Oslo. By this time women had already joined the work

force and were pushing for more rights. Although their lives were very hard, extremely long

hours, a poor working environment and very low wages, they could independently live in cities,

a major change from the bourgeois perspective of the mid to late 1800s. (Cron)(Mazzeno)

Major musicians during the 1800s in Norway were Agathe Backer Grndahl, Ole Bull,

Edvard Grieg, Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, Halfdan Kjerulf, and Rikard Nordraak. Rikard

Nordraak penned the Norwegian National Anthem in 1864, at the height of Norways economic

boom. The music gives a great sense of beauty to Norway. The music is rugged beauty, and many

of the lyrics speak of the land and the conditions and how it has made the Norwegians strong.

(Tommasini)

<-1873 (Germany) Courtesy of the New York Picture Collection

1867 - Courtesy

of the New York Picture Collection->

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 1882 - Courtesy of the New York Picture

Collection

Back of a 5 Dollar Kroner Note (1877)

500 Kroner Note (1877)

Town in Norway (1830s)

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 Women in Norway (1850)

Railway in Norway 1877

("Pihl holtaalen 1877" by Carl Abraham Pihl - Pihl's own photographic collection. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

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 Works Cited

Baker, Lawrence W. "Scandinavian Immigration." U.S. Immigration and Migration

Reference Library. Ed. Vol. 1: Vol. 1: Almanac. Detroit: UXL, 2004. 283-313. U.S.

History in Context. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.

Cron, Shannon. "Background of "A Doll's House"" St. Olaf College. Wordpress, Web. 07 Oct.

2015.

Dagre, Tor. "The History of Norway." The History of Norway. Norinform, Web. 07 Oct. 2015.

Hollywood, B. C. "Nils Krogstad: A Man Misunderstood (Ibsen's 'A Doll's House')." HubPages.

17 Dec. 2010. Web. 07 Oct. 2015.

Lambert, Tim. "A SHORT HISTORY OF NORWAY." A Brief History of Norway. N.p., 2015.

Web. 07 Oct. 2015.

Larsen, Karen. A History of Norway. Princeton: Princeton U for the American-Scandinavian

Foundation, 1948. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.

Laurence W. Mazzeno."Critical Evaluation" Critical Survey of Literature for Students Ed.

eNotes.com, Inc. 2010 eNotes.com 7 Oct, 2015

Tommasini, Anthony. "A Sampling of Norway's Composers Old and New." The New York

Times. The New York Times Company, 8 Nov. 2005. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.