“Millions of women…”

Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen

by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Norwegian playwright, theater director, and poet

The Modern Library, New York  1957

Translated and with introduction by Eva Le Gallienne

In this volume, for your delectation:

A Doll’s House

Ghosts

An Enemy of the People

Rosmersholm

Hedda Gabler

The Master Builder

Ibsen is OK for beach reading whenever the sun disappears and you have to scooch down in your chair with a blanket and a hoodie to keep warm.

Of course it’s possible to argue with the notion that this is a collection of Ibsen’s best—for my taste, just about any half dozen of Ibsen’s plays is worth putting in the beach bag.

My favorite in Six Plays is “A Doll’s House.” It’s Ibsen’s stark, unforgiving play about men and women, with a dreadful undercurrent of desperation. Torvald Helmer offers only bland, devastating condescension to Nora, whose despair grows ever more public as she realizes that she has drowned herself in the domestic dead end of being Torvald’s “doll-wife.”

If you ache, like me, to bash Torvald and comfort Nora as you experience the pervasive and thinly veiled brutality in the Helmer household, then you, like me, must realize how much you wish it could be unimaginable in any way…but in vain…

Nora tells her husband that she had hoped he would take the blame for her transgression, and the disdainful Torvald rebukes her: “…one doesn’t sacrifice one’s honor for love’s sake.”

Nora replies with quiet thunder: “Millions of women have done so.”

Enfin, we understand how Nora could be too hurt to cry, and too happy to remain in a doll’s house…

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

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