What is the setting for A Doll's House?

Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House in 1879, and it was a contemporary drama at that time. All three acts of the play take place with the same set, which is the living area of the Helmer home. The home is situated in an unspecified village in Norway. The room is decorated tastefully but not ostentatiously, consistent with the middle-class lifestyle of the Helmer family. As act 1 opens, it is Christmas week. Nora has been Christmas shopping, and a porter brings the Christmas tree into the home. Act 2 occurs on Christmas Day in the same home. The confined setting of the play reinforces the theme of Nora's restricted lifestyle. She feels as if she is her husband's doll, and she realizes that her children have been her dolls. The setting, then, is the "dollhouse," which is a better translation for Americans of Ibsen's title than the British English equivalent "doll's house." Nora's slamming the door of her house when she walks out on her husband at the end of the play signifies her moving on to a broader setting for her life where she, presumably, will be able to find out who she really is.


The setting of A Doll's House is a typical, middle-class household in a city in Norway, during the winter season. Keep in mind that the location is not indicative of the play being exclusively "Norwegian," as nothing that takes place is unique to that country, or even to the Scandinavian culture. In fact, that was the purpose of the play. Ibsen presented the audience with a picture of society that showed the inequalities that take place against women every day and everywhere. Ibsen said

A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, which is an exclusively male society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a male point of view.

Hence, the setting should reflect a universal place that could be replicated anywhere in the world. After all, inequality is a rampant issue that still affects us today. 
The time period is the Victorian Era, which takes place from 1837, when Queen Victoria rises to the throne of the British Empire, until her death in 1901. Even though Norway is not part of the British Empire, the influence of the latter was felt all over Europe, and beyond. As such, everything from fashion to traditions would recreate the Victorian essence of sanctimonious morality, gender separation, and class division. All of these are evident in the play, as well. 
Therefore, the setting is a Victorian, middle-class household in Norway. It is interesting how a seemingly simple and generic setting can hold up so much within, such as it was with the case of the shallow relationship between Nora and Torvald.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

Bilbo’s increase in confidence and courage is the defining aspect of his character arc. At the beginning of the novel, he is shut away content in his Hobbit hole, happy to remain separate and coddled from the rest of the world. In the movie, Bilbo chooses to join the dwarves on their quest out of a sense for adventure. In the book, however, Bilbo wants nothing to do with them and only joins because he had been duped into signing a contract. Despite being on the adventure somewhat against his will, Bilbo still proves himself time and again, saving the dwarves from the spiders, the trolls, and a number of other dangers they encounter along the way. Bilbo’s character arc has even been cited as a sort of Christian metaphor for the growth of the soul, though how much Tolkien intended on this front is up for debate. From a thematic standpoint, the ring of invisibility also plays into Bilbo’s brand of bravery. If Hobbits are the overlooked creatures of Middle Earth, then it is noteworthy that...
Read more

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

In this classic essay, Didion describes moving to New York City from her native Sacramento at the age of twenty-one, and, as she freely admits, a somewhat naive twenty-one, her mind, "programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York," with the typical feeling, at that age, that, "nothing like this...has ever happened to anyone before." Intending to stay for only six months, she falls in love with the city. As she says, "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again." This initial love led her to prolong her residency, since, "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month." But as the next years roll past, and the "new faces" she encounters...
Read more

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?

It's one of the most famous lines in literature: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players . . . This famous saying comes from Shakespeare's play As You Like It, and it's spoken by Jacques. What he's saying here is that simply going about our daily lives is a type of performance. Just like actors on a stage, we all have roles to perform: Daughter. Student. Sister. Captain of the soccer team. The fact that Shakespeare writes that men and women are merely players suggests that the roles are preordained and that a person's choice in being a mother, for example, or a doctor or starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nets is out of their hands. What roles a person performs over the course of their lifetime is up to fate. The notion that "all the world's a stage" has entered pop culture, but within the context of the play, this idea does not sit well with Jacques. He's a pessimist, and the idea that everything is up to fate makes...
Read more