Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: A Forgotten Christmas Classic
Whether we’re crowding around a TV to watch It’s A Wonderful Life or Love Actually, gathering in the living room for a reading of ‘Twas the Night before Christmas or A Christmas Carol, or singing carols, like Mendelssohn’s “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” or Holst’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” so many of our Christmas traditions consist of enjoying familiar works of art—many of which we’ve known from childhood. The same music, movies, songs, and food all in an astounding variety. From the highbrow to the lowbrow, from Handel’s Messiah to Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” these familiarities serve the same purpose of getting us into the “holiday mood” or the “Christmas spirit.” The Christmas spirit is decidedly a mood of “good cheer” where we can “throw cares away,” as the carol goes. As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, it’s natural to gather around the fire in search of warmth, safety, and comfort.
Nevertheless, not all Christmas traditions are comfortable or joyful—sometimes they are painful. Think of the suicide scene in It’s a Wonderful Life or Scrooge coming face-to-face with his own grave in A Christmas Carol. Sometimes they are also tedious or burdensome. With runtimes of over two and a half hours, I find it inevitable that my attention lags at certain points during a performance of Handel’s Messiah or The Nutcracker. And who has not dreaded their great aunt’s annual fruitcake? Yet, this is not to say that these traditions—in spite of being sometimes painful, tedious, or burdensome—aren’t worthwhile experiences. As I have written about before, many of the best works of art not only entertain but also challenge us. This should be no less true of our Christmas entertainments, for the spirit of Christmas demands something more of us.
From a 1904 production of A Doll’s House
In addition to Christmas cookies, and comforting Christmas music, I want to put another holiday tradition on the table, one that I’ve been trying to incorporate into my recent Christmases because it runs counter to the easy comforts of the holidays. Many works of art are set at Christmas or include powerful Christmas scenes—think of Little Women, whose film adaptations are often included on lists of Christmas movies for this reason. Another powerful, but less well-known, example is Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House—a work of art I loved from the first time I read it, and which I have read every December since.
The play, which premiered on December 21 in 1879 at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, is set on Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after Christmas. It centers on Nora Helmer and her husband Torvald, whose secrets from each other cause their marriage to unravel. As the curtain rises, Torvald teases Nora with charming pet names and playfully pokes fun at her. Their relationship seems happy, and yet we soon learn that years ago, to save her sick husband’s life, Nora forged a signature to borrow an enormous amount of money. For years she has stayed up late working hard to pay it all back, and her husband still doesn’t know about the loan or his wife’s fraud. When Nora is blackmailed by her creditor, she is forced to reevaluate her role in the household and the lives of her husband and children. Against the backdrop of Christmas, this family drama plays out, and Nora famously walks out on her family in the final scene of the play. But not all in the play is so bleak: a subplot where two friends of the family, Kristine Linde and Nils Krogstad, both down on their luck, discover a new love for each other and embark on a relationship that contrasts with the Helmers’s by being comparatively free from secrets, delusions, and fantasies.
Between its reputation as a feminist classic and its notorious ending, A Doll’s House might not seem like an obvious Christmas classic. Yet, on closer inspection, we can see that its Christmas setting is not merely incidental. Take, for instance, the names Ibsen chose for his characters. Nora is a diminutive of Eleanora, which is a form of the Greek name Helen. And her husband Torvald’s name is derived from the god Thor. Standing in contrast to the pagan Helmers is Kristine Linde, whose name is, of course, derived from “Christ.” She marries a man named “Krogstad” which, although not etymologically related, nevertheless evokes northern European words for "cross,” such as Danish’s kryds (pronounced kroods) or German’s kreuzen. By setting the play around Christmas and choosing pagan names for the couple whose marriage falls apart and Christian names for the new union, Ibsen dramatizes in miniature the tragic passing of the old pagan world and the coming of the new world through the birth of Christ and His Incarnation.
The season of Advent is about preparing for the arrival of this new world, which Ibsen captures in the play by creating an atmosphere of suspense and anticipation. The characters repeatedly comment on their sense that a vague “marvelous thing” is about to happen:
NORA: A wonderful thing is about to happen.
MRS. LINDE: Wonderful?
NORA: Yes, a wonderful thing. But also terrible, Kristine, and it just can’t happen, not for all the world.
The choice of the word “wonderful,” or vidunderlig in the original, is remarkable for its ambiguity—an ambiguity that usually is lost in our ordinary use of the word. When we say something is “wonderful,” we often just intend to express our simple delight or approval. But when Nora says, “a wonderful thing. But also terrible,” she is using the word in its fullest and most powerful sense: wonder is a close cousin to terror, a sense of disorienting and profound astonishment in the face of the strange and unknown. Think of the shepherds in the Gospels standing in terrified wonder before the angels, or the angel Gabriel telling Mary at the Annunciation, “Do not be afraid.” The Christmas narrative in the Gospels is so familiar to us that it’s easy to lose a sense for how radically strange and disconcerting the miracle of the Incarnation truly is.
Portrait of Ibsen by Henrik Olrik, 1879
Ibsen himself was not a Christian, and was often critical of Christianity in his other plays and writings. But like other nonbelievers—Nietzsche and George Eliot, to name a couple—Ibsen is a perceptive observer of Christianity, perhaps in part because he doesn’t take it for granted. A Doll’s House is powerful for the way it employs Christian symbols and narratives, defamiliarizing them so that they can be experienced with wonder in all their original strangeness and terror. Let’s take one more example of this from the play: Ibsen’s reworking of Christ’s sacrifice in Nora’s story. As I mentioned earlier, Ibsen slowly reveals that Nora, unbeknownst to her husband, had years ago borrowed a large sum of money to save his life. Since then, she has been working nights in order to pay her creditor back, and Ibsen emphasizes the enormity of her self-sacrifice. But as Nora’s financial situation becomes more complicated and desperate over the course of the play, she’s eventually forced to ask almost every major character to sacrifice something—sometimes money, pride, or clout—by asking them to make potentially socially humiliating requests to others on her behalf. For example, her friend Kristine wants a job at the bank, so Nora implores her husband to create a job for her there. But when he fires Krogstad in order to make the position for Kristine, Nora is forced to beg her husband to go back on what she asked earlier. It’s painful but also thrilling to witness Nora scrambling to manage these various interests. One sympathizes with her and recognizes something Christ-like, especially when she is misunderstood and forsaken by the very people she has sacrificed everything to help. Nora’s departure at the end of the play seems final and irrevocable. But read in light of the Christmas story, perhaps there’s something to the “hope [that] flashes across [Torvald’s] mind,” the chance of return—a second coming. That would be, to use the final words of the play, “the most wonderful thing of all.”
I know many young adults, who, like me, try every year to recover some of that Christmas joy we experienced as children. It all just felt more magical then. Perhaps this is because, as small children, all of our family’s Christmas traditions were new to us. As wonderful as traditions are, they can easily become comfortable or rote. Familiar things, even beloved familiar things, need to be made anew. I humbly challenge those who feel they are going through the motions of the season, or who are even disillusioned with Christmas, to eat a whole slice of fruitcake, put on a scratchy Christmas sweater, and sit through an entire Messiah performance. Or sit down and read A Doll’s House—a marvelous work of art, which, while painful at times, remarkably rewrites and renews the Christmas story. A Doll’s House richly depicts aspects of the Christmas story we might take for granted: its anxiety, feverish anticipation, sacrifice, and the reality that the historical moment the Incarnation represents, a juncture at once terrible and “wonderful,” and at which December 26 and every day thereafter is an entirely new and radically different world.
Jacob Martin is the principal oboe of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra in Northern Israel. He enjoys writing about the history of art, music, and literature.