How many couples do you know who have split up in the last year? Now, how many celebrity couples? What about divorces?
Shortly after news broke that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn had split up after six years together, I saw a TikTok comment saying something to the effect of ‘surely, I can’t be the child of another divorce”. Despite never having engaged in Swifty content before, my For You Page was flooded with speculation of when the break-up album was dropping, or if Midnights was the break-up album? Let us not forget the separation of Phoebe Bridgers and Paul Mescal, followed in quick succession by theories of Mescal’s unrequited love for his Normal People co-star, Daisy Edgar Jones. Then, a couple of months later, Blake Shelton accidentally ‘hard launched’ Bridgers’ new relationship with comedian Bo Burnham while trying to film himself and his wife on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
My point is: break-ups, separations and crumbling relationships are an integral element of gossip culture. Everyone is guilty of trying to figure out if X is still following Y even though they deleted all their pictures together, or running to their mates to see if they know someone who knows someone who knows what went down. Where does this nosiness come from?
Of course, we’ve known for a while (to say the least) that the media's approach to celebrity women, wives and mothers is vastly different to that of men (irrespective of whether or not they’re embroiled in some sort of separation drama.) In addition, we’ve also known that life imitates art and, accordingly, historical cultural attitudes surrounding break-up drama can be found in literature and theatrical works. Or, as I like to call it, ‘Leave Ur Man’ fiction.
Before The Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, a divorce in the United Kingdom could only be granted on the grounds of adultery. A man could claim adultery with no questions asked, but a woman had to prove that her husband had been unfaithful. And in Norway - the setting of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House - divorce law wasn’t liberalised until 1909 when it established a no-fault principle, therefore entitling wives to the same rights as their soon-to-be-ex-husbands.
But that’s 1909. Let’s rewind thirty years to 1879, when A Doll’s House was first performed.
If you’re not familiar with the play, the final act concludes with protagonist Nora Helmer becoming enlightened to the constraints of her dispassionate, insincere marriage to Torvald. She recalls passing from her father’s hands into Torvald’s, and how everything was arranged according to her husband’s taste. Nora is and has always been the titular ‘Doll,’ and she leaves the marital ‘doll’s house’ in search of herself outside of the patriarchal influence she’s always been subjected to.
The ending caused significant outrage when it was performed across Europe. German adaptations went as far as rewriting the ending in 1880 (more on this later). However, Ibsen never outrightly described his work as feminist, instead attaching the label ‘humanist’. After all, a husband would surely not think twice about leaving his family and sham marriage, especially if his wife had berated him in the way Torvald Helmer berated his wife for making a crucial financial decision. The shift in tone between the Helmers’ marriage in act one and act three is unmissable: in Torvald’s eyes, Nora goes from being ‘[his] little lark’ and ‘[his] own sweet, little songbird’ to ‘wretched woman’.
Paying closer attention to the change in language, we can see that Nora’s alleged wrongdoing - the ‘sin’ of disobeying her husband - presents an unintentional sense of agency. She is no longer ‘his little’ X, Y, or Z, she is a wretched woman in her own right. This doll that has been living in his house, mothering his children and sleeping in his bed is more conscious and clever than he could’ve ever imagined. And, just like that, ‘wretched woman’ becomes the highest of compliments.
The play ends with Nora leaving the family home and her dispassionate marriage, as she should. At the time, The Social Demokraten newspaper had this to say: 'This play touches the lives of thousands of families; oh yes there are thousands of such doll-homes, where the husband treats his wife as a child he amuses himself with, and so that is what the wives become’, therefore acknowledging the naturalistic origins of the play and the obvious gender dynamic it seeks to criticise. However, 19th century European audiences weren’t as pleased with Nora’s girlbossery as I am.
As mentioned, there was a German rewrite where an empowered Nora is disemboldened by the sight of her children and the realisation that she cannot abandon them. Ultimately, this is to naturalist theatre what Anna Todd’s After is to One Direction (its fanfiction!). It intends to keep any female audience-goers in their place by convincing them that leaving your patronising arsehole of your husband equates to completely abandoning your children. It's not the truth, has never been the truth, and the German rewrite by someone other than Ibsen is demonstrative of the societal priority of order over art.
From my twenty-first century perspective (2001 babies rise up) I also don’t think the rewritten ending undermines the meaning of the play the way it intended to because it also takes a significant amount of maternal strength to stick out a sham marriage for the sake of your children. Don’t get me wrong, this is not me legitimising this version of the play. Ultimately, it highlights how, above all, nineteenth century men were afraid of the fallout Ibsen would catalyse by introducing a woman who took control of her own marital fate into the mainstream. Ibsen was doing what Britney Spears did when she wore that baby tee with ‘Dump Him’ on it:
The structure and subject matter of A Doll’s House lends itself to some interesting staging concepts. Of course, it’s not a book, so you’re not meant to sit there, read it, think about it a bit, then put your copy back on the shelf (I’m hoping neither of my A Level English teachers see this). This is a play that demands to be staged, and I think these creative interpretations of A Doll’s House are spawned solely off the back of Nora’s character arc and nothing else.
One performance I’m particularly intrigued by is the 2007 Mabou Mines adaptation with Mark Povinelli cast as Torvald and Maude Mitchell as Nora. It is conceptually brilliant: Lee Breuer casted the three-foot-nine Povinelli and builds the set to his proportions, meaning Maude Mitchell (Nora) is constantly squeezing into the set to explicate her growth and empowerment. Through this, you could argue that there’s a layer of physical comedy added to an otherwise serious play which demonstrates how much audiences have changed since the original A Doll’s House performances. If Ibsen or any director he’d been collaborating with at the time had introduced even an inkling of comedy or farce, the whole purpose of the play would have been undermined and ultimately rather done the job of that sad German rewrite. But, nonetheless, I do think this is an interesting interpretation and if everyone were to perform plays the same, they might as well just stay on the page.
I want to quickly touch on the contrast between Nora Helmer and the ‘protagonist’ of another Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler in Hedda Gabler. Obviously, Hedda is the titular character, but the play’s title refers to her by her maiden name rather than her married one which severs her character into two definitive binaries - the married Hedda Tesman, and the singular, hedonistic, anti-hero Hedda Gabler. I guess, in some respects, you can look at Hedda as the alternative reality version of Nora if she had stayed in her marital dolls’ house. Hedda is stuck in a loveless marriage but damns the Angel of the House - she is nowhere close to the archetypal wife and mother figure we see kicking around in other nineteenth century work. A 1898 New York Times critic described her as ‘selfish, morbid, cruel, bitter, jealous, something of a visionary, something of a wanton, something of a lunatic’ (side note: put those last three on my headstone). Hedda is Nora, Nora is Hedda, and in the words of Khaled Hosseini, ‘Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman.’
Regarding the title choice, Ibsen himself said: 'My intention in giving it this name [Hedda Gabler, rather than Hedda Tesman] was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife.’If you’re anything like me, your response to this is “cool, why’d you have to bring her dad into this?” I believe this is a key bit of evidence in the argument that Ibsen isn’t a feminist playwright, or even sympathetic to a feminist cause in his work. He is at best neutral. Yes, he puts women in the centre of his works more than other playwrights before and during his lifetime, but he brutalises them and flings them before a nineteenth century audience that wanted to criticise and bully women.
So, here we are. Maybe Ibsen’s naturalist intentions were noble in depicting women with the agency to leave their husbands, or maybe he knew that with his words he would be turning his female characters (and, more importantly, those who resonated with them) over to the so-called morality mob. Is that not what happens every time the Daily Mail posts some he-said-she-said gossip about the latest celebrity breakup?
Ibsen had a long way to go, and we shouldn’t get into the habit of applauding fish for swimming, but he crucially depicts Nora and Hedda taking one small step for women leaving their bad marriages, one giant leap for womankind in pre-1900s theatre.