Research paper " A Doll's House" By Henrik Ibsen

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- I chose the first topic which is to analyze Nora character's

- I attached the 4 secondary articles we have to use for the research paper, i attached also my annotated bibliography paper. But I replaced one article to another because she said it was too short this is the Ibsen's a Doll's House by Rosefeldt Paul I replaced it with the How old is Dr. Rank ? by Otten Terry

- It should be a minimum of 1000 words, double spaced, MLA font.

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The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen Templeton, Joan PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America; Jan 1989; 104, 1; Research Library pg. 28 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 South Central Review Portal to Forgiveness: A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora Vicki Mahaffey, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana Any examination of the idea of forgiveness must acknowledge that forgiveness is one possible way of responding—perhaps with time—to a prior transgression. Harm was done to someone or something; a wound was inflicted. What is to be done with the pain and suffering that resulted from that transgression? Unexpectedly, this is a “literary” problem, because both the victim and the perpetrator respond by telling a story about what happened. The question is, what kinds of stories get told? What presuppositions authorize the different possible ways of telling them, and what are the implications of the various narrative configurations? Forgiveness is usually understood as one possible response of a victim to someone who has offended him or her, as a decision to grant absolution rather than to blame. Such a view turns the question of forgiveness into a moral (or even moralistic) issue. I am arguing, on the contrary, that in order to understand the significance of forgiveness, we must take it out of the realm of morality altogether. When we do so, forgiveness emerges not as a response to someone else’s action, but is instead an internal move—a change of attitude within the self—that has no necessary relation to the question of whether or not the victim has decided to absolve the other party. Forgiveness, then, need not be defined as an indulgent or selfless generosity toward the perpetrator: a gift that displaces and annuls the rage of retribution. The offender’s culpability is actually irrelevant to the most immediate problem at hand, the problem of how to move forward after having received a wound. The first step towards a forgiveness associated with healing cannot take place as long as the victim is blaming (or excusing) the person who has done wrong. The reason for this has to do with the similar psychology at work in both blame and defense: power is being attributed to the perpetrator. Where the blame is, that’s where the power is. To blame is to continue to attribute power to the other; it sustains the victim’s feeling of helplessness. It is often to expunge such helplessness that a victim engages in retribution. But forgiveness (defined as a conscious decision to refocus attention from past damage to what remains in the present and possibly even the future, without minimizing the severity of the damage) can be conceptualized as an alternative to both blame and absolution. More specifically, forgiveness is a decision © South Central Review 27.3 (Fall 2010): 54–73. A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 55 to avoid conflict, whether emotional or physical, in order to create a calm space in which fuller self-realization may become possible. The kind of story that victims typically tell in reaction against having been wronged is a grievance story, a story of blame. The main character of a grievance story is the perpetrator: the person who caused the harm. Fred Luskin, who defines grievances as painful episodes that the narrator has endured but not healed from, summarizes research findings that offenders and victims give significantly different accounts about who was responsible for the hurt; both offenders and victims blame the other, whether directly or indirectly, for the offense: “subjects who responded from the point of view of the offended minimized their responsibility for what happened and put blame on the offender. . . . they themselves were relatively blameless.” On the other hand, “Subjects writing from the point of view of the offender . . . placed more responsibility for what happened with the offended and minimized the damage done by their actions. In their stories the hurt was more accidental.”1 The idea of accidental injury is worth pausing over, because the offender’s insistence that he or she did not intend to hurt the victim, that the victim provoked the offender in such a way that in reacting, the offender accidentally did harm, highlights the asymmetry between the accounts of the offender and the victim. The victim accuses; the offender disavows and deflects the charge by making a counter-accusation that is indirect, but nonetheless antagonistic. The unwillingness or inability to forgive—either one’s victim or one’s abuser—amounts to a sustained refusal to permit healing, often for what seem to be very good reasons. Neither party will let the wrong or the conflict with the perpetrator go, whether that wrong was perceived or actual. Why hold on to a grievance that continues to cause suffering? The answer is complicated, because it needs to take into account something that is going on beneath the surface. Both “blamers” often cling to their reciprocally accusatory positions because they presume that they know or understand what was happening in the mind of the other. This presumption offers the solace of certainty, and uncertainty can seem more threatening than (justifiable) suffering. To blame is to hold on to an offence, whereas to forgive is to “lose” it, to give it away; the word “give” is nestled in “forgive.” Often, when someone feels he or she has lost something already, it becomes difficult to “lose” anything else, even if what one is losing is a grievance and the “loss” results from a deliberate choice, a kind of gift to oneself and (perhaps secondarily) to another. Forgiveness is the result of learning how to retell the story of hurt so as to interweave one’s objections to having been harmed, having one’s 56 South Central Review legitimate boundaries violated, with acceptance of the fact that unless the wound was traumatic (incapable of being healed), the pain that was inflicted need not be permanent. Perhaps what makes forgiveness more difficult, though, is that in order to do it the victim must let the offender go, along with the agon that keeps victim and offender intimately connected through “passion” (here understood with its secondary erotic meaning heard through its original, etymological one: suffering). In order to forgive, one must be willing to stand alone to do the slow and exploratory work of healing. The psychology behind accusation and (self) defense is oddly similar: both parties (blamer and blamed) strive to preserve an illusion of innocence, of having been in the right when they performed (or endured) a given action. Each side can only sustain the illusion of innocence if the other side is exposed as culpable. The two sides compete for the prize of seeming justified in their hostility. This competition simultaneously sustains and denies any intimacy in the connection between victim and perpetrator, the consummation of which is likely to be destructive. Sigmund Freud offered insight into the dangers of agon when he asked H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who was one of his patients and adherents, never to defend him or his works when she heard him being attacked. H.D., in Tribute to Freud, her account of having undergone psychoanalytic treatment with Freud that she recorded retrospectively during the blitz in London, recounts Freud’s reasons for making this strange request. He explained that at the moment when she began to mount a defense of her doctor and teacher, she would only drive the attacker’s anger and prejudice deeper; she could do no good for Freud by defending him: “antagonism cannot be rooted out from above the surface, and it thrives, in a way, on heated argument.” Moreover, Freud asserted that her effort to defend him would not benefit her, either; she would simply expose her feelings. Instead, he recommended that she simply ignore whatever she happens to hear: “If the matter is ignored, the attacker may forgo his anger – or in time, even, his unconscious mind may find another object on which to fix its tentacles.”2 Freud isn’t telling H.D. to give up her values, convictions, or principles, nor is he saying that argument itself is always useless. His advice concerns the best response to emotional (rather than rational) objections: when someone is angry, the best response is not to engage but to move on, to bypass what we might call the “intimacy of agon.” He is reminding her of her limits as a conscious agent as well as underscoring her autonomy of mind, which may well be affected by an antagonistically charged “bonding” with one of Freud’s detractors. To ignore a hate-filled challenge is a kind of “forgiveness”: you don’t A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 57 condone or confirm the other’s opinions or feelings, but you give him or her permission to express them freely, without bonding with that hate. When accusations are rooted in emotion rather than reason, and when they are motivated by a hunger for conflict, it is destructive, not constructive, for a listener to enter into partnership with the accuser by arguing against him or her. Henrik Ibsen’s famous (or infamous) nineteenth-century play, A Doll’s House (1879), provides readers or viewers with a particularly complex and powerful set of stories about transgression and forgiveness, and about the emotional need to assert and defend one’s own heroic “rightness” that often subtends accusation.3 Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora “play” at marriage and parenting, but Nora discovers at the end of the play that they were playing by very different rules. Nora thought that each of them would do anything to promote the well-being of the other, that each would sacrifice the self for the other. She saw herself and her husband as sharing a secret, reciprocal bond, and it was the underlying security provided by this bond that allowed them to enjoy themselves in superficial but nonetheless delightful ways the rest of the time. She had privately sacrificed herself to save her husband’s life when he was ill, and she was certain that he would do the same for her if her well-being was ever threatened. Torvald, in contrast, was playing a hierarchical game in which the thing that mattered most was his honor and reputation. Nora was his “doll wife” (as she had been her Daddy’s “doll child” before she left home), a delightful toy that he cared for and that gave him much entertainment and pleasure in return. As she explains, “the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them.”4 The heroism Torvald prided himself on was predicated, not on a willingness to sacrifice himself for those he loved, but on his ability to protect them (and himself), which he does by creating an artificial domestic world in which they are “safe” from harm, but also from reality. In Torvald’s world, neither his wife nor children have the power of autonomous movement, which makes it impossible not only for them to take risks, but also to change or grow. Ibsen’s play is relevant to my discussion here because it stages a conflict between two different models of forgiveness: Torvald’s understanding of what it means to forgive (and transgress) is pitted against the new (and radically amoral) conception of forgiveness that Nora forms as a result of what has happened in the course of the play. Torvald’s understanding of transgression is the normative one: one must avoid doing or being wronged because both states threaten the preservation of 58 South Central Review one’s integrity. One can “forgive” and “forget” only if there is no longer any threat to the status quo. In that case, nothing will have changed, and everything can go on as it did before the threat occurred. Nora’s view of forgiveness has less to do with transgression, because she had always been operating by a different code of ethics that was not predicated on right or wrong. Instead of protecting her self-interest, she valued something almost diametrically opposed to such self-protection: the willingness to sacrifice the self out of love. She and Torvald had been able to play house so pleasurably because although neither had a clear view of what was really happening, her self-sacrifice worked to promote his stability of being, and they felt “happy.” When she finally apprehends the two different codes under which she and her husband had been living, her “forgiveness,” unlike his, is not a forgiveness of the other person; the “gift” is not a gift to the spouse or offender, but to the self. What she gives herself is temporary freedom from bondage, if we understand bondage neutrally, not just as slavery, but as engagement in any bond with another person, whether of intimacy or conflict. Nora gives herself space, and specifically the space to achieve a new self-realization.5 Torvald’s model of forgiveness is apparent at two different points in the play, in Act Two and again in Act Three. Both instances emphasize his readiness to blame Nora for violating his rules and precepts, a reaction shockingly at variance from what Nora expects: that he will want to sacrifice himself to save her (as she sacrificed herself for him: by forging her father’s signature to borrow money to take him to Italy, thereby restoring his health). In Act II, Nora tries to dissuade Torvald from terminating Krogstad’s employment, the man who has power over her because he lent her money without her husband’s knowledge. She cajoles, “If a little squirrel were to ask ever so nicely . . . Would you do something for it.” She then implores Torvald to let Krogstad keep his job at the bank. Torvald replies, “The more you plead for him, the more impossible you make it for me to keep him on,”6 and he dismisses Krogstad immediately. Torvald’s response to her anxiety is to “forgive” her for it, while refusing to do what she asks: My dear Nora, I forgive you this anxiety of yours, although it is actually a bit of an insult. Oh, but it is, I tell you! It’s hardly flattering to suppose that anything this miserable pen-pusher wrote could frighten me! But I forgive you all the same, because it is rather a sweet way of showing how much you love me. [He takes her in his arms] This is how things must be, my own darling Nora. When it comes to the point, I’ve enough strength A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 59 and enough courage, believe me, for whatever happens. You’ll find I’m man enough to take everything on myself.7 Nora’s response is terror and an assertion that she will never allow him to do that, at which point Torvald compromises, saying, “All right, then we’ll share it, Nora—as man and wife.” In the light of what eventually happens—Torvald’s unwillingness, despite his earlier assurance to the contrary, to take any imputation of wrongdoing at all upon himself—his reassurance here, while probably sincere, is revealed as more of a placation than a commitment. When his integrity feels threatened, he will not be able to demonstrate the loving willingness to assume responsibility he calls “manliness,” although by this definition Nora, his female doll-wife, had been “man” enough to take the responsibility for her husband’s illness and cure upon herself. The first point to notice about Torvald’s forgiveness of Nora here is that she hasn’t done anything wrong, except perhaps to interfere in matters of business by asking him to reconsider a decision he has made. He calms his wife by telling her a story, one that is true only under certain circumstances: that he is committed to protecting Nora and their children at any cost to himself. What he doesn’t specify is that he can only do this if it doesn’t compromise his public reputation, what he calls his honor. Moreover, his claim that he will assume responsibility for whatever happens rests on the presupposition that Nora is helpless and innocent; in other words, that she is a helpless victim and Krogstad a ruthless offender. In Act I, Torvald had already condemned Krogstad for the same act of wrongdoing that Nora also committed: forgery.8 A forgery, to him, is a particularly pernicious form of lie, and he prides himself on an abhorrence of lies. Although he begins by deploring the forgery of Krogstad, he goes on to denounce the danger of other lies, especially those of a woman and mother. He describes liars as contaminating the whole domestic space: Just think how a man with a thing like that on his conscience will always be having to lie and cheat and dissemble; he can never drop the mask, not even with his own wife and children. And the children—that’s the most terrible part of it, Nora. . . . A fog of lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs.9 At this point he jumps from Krogstad to women, claiming, “Practically all juvenile delinquents come from homes where the mother is dishonest.” Nora questions this, since he began with the example of a dishonest father 60 South Central Review (Krogstad). Torvald brushes her question aside, conceding that although fathers can have the same poisonous effect, “it’s generally traceable to the mothers.”10 The act ends with Nora imagining herself as poisoning her home, and then rejecting such a thing as even possible. In this scene, Torvald dramatizes the psychology that makes forgiveness possible only in a moral sense: he has blamed a man for deception and asserted his own inviolable honesty (and that of his family) in contrast to it. Torvald is strongly defended against the notion that he or anyone he loved could ever do anything wrong, borrow money, or keep secrets. As Nora tells her friend Kristine in Act I, “he refuses to take on anything that’s the least bit shady.”11 Of course his high ethical standard is not the problem; the problem is his oversimplification of the difference between right and wrong, his conviction—perhaps his determination—that there can never be an overlap between them. That is what makes Torvald judgmental: he can never contemplate the possibility that a person could run foul of the law through love, or compassion, or consideration, or even innocence, which are the qualities that motivated Nora’s two deceptions: her forgery of her father’s name, and her act of borrowing money (and working to pay it off) without her husband’s knowledge. Torvald’s inability to forgive is a sign of his inflexibility, his determination to create what cannot be created: a perfect “world” in the home that he might call his castle, although Nora (like Ibsen) comes to see it as much smaller: a doll’s house. He treats his wife as a pet, a wild bird or a squirrel who frolics for his amusement, and he refuses to tolerate or contemplate anything ugly. Nora confesses to Torvald’s friend Dr. Rank that although she is very happy, there is one little thing she’d like to do, but dare not try because “It’s not very nice.” When Rank presses her to reveal what it is, she confesses that she would love to say “Damn” in front of her upright husband, and Rank accuses her of being mad for even contemplating it.12 In Act II, Rank not only acknowledges but defends Torvald’s intolerance for unpleasantness when he tells Nora that he intends to break off communication with Torvald once his own “final horrible disintegration” has begun (due to a syphilitic infection inherited from his father). He explains, “[Torvald] Helmer is a sensitive soul; he loathes anything that is ugly. I don’t want him visiting me . . .”13 Dr. Rank’s fatal illness is a kind of punishment for a transgression he did not even commit, but he knows and accepts that Torvald would recoil from apprehending the final stages of his pain and suffering. There is something Christlike about Rank’s suffering “for another man’s sins,”14 but Torvald’s morality is not that of Jesus. Rank’s final “passion” will be signified when he sends Nora a visiting card with a black cross on it. The A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 61 implicit identification of Rank’s suffering with that of Jesus on the cross signals that there is another, self-sacrificial model of forgiveness at work in the play, one linked with Christianity as it is most often understood, the one that Nora has been using as her guide.15 It might be worthwhile to pause for a moment over the “crime” that both Krogstad and Nora committed—forgery—in order to understand its symbolic importance in the play. Forgery is the act of pretending to be someone you aren’t, and to profit from that deception. It is a kind of art, a form of “play-acting,” except that a forger’s deception is motivated by a conscious objective: to impersonate someone else. Torvald, too, could be described as impersonating someone else for his own profit, but his deception isn’t conscious or deliberate. His disguise is that of a perfect man, who has a perfect wife and perfect children, who never do any wrong and are rewarded for their tractability. His inability to forgive Krogstad (or Nora, at least until he discovers that no one will know what she did) is motivated by a self-interest that he disavows. Ironically, playing house with a family of “dolls” could be described as dishonest in a different sense, because Torvald is dishonest with himself. He believes that his miniaturized domestic world has none of the imperfections that can help human beings come to realize themselves more fully; he mistakes living, changing, loving individuals for dolls, and his own smallness of mind for honorable integrity. The setting of the play, on the two days that surround Christmas, frames Nora’s ethos of forgiveness in relation to the way forgiveness is most often understood through Christianity: as Jesus’s loving and agonizing gift of his life for the salvation of others. He consciously and deliberately offers his life—that of a perfect sacrificial lamb—for theirs, taking all the suffering of the world upon himself in order to “forgive” or protect them for suffering for their wrongdoings. According to this view, Jesus gives his life as one huge payment to cancel the debts of others by bearing all the costs of what they’ve done on his own body; he gives for others, an act that thereafter defines for-giving. His giving for others is pitted against acts aimed at “getting” material advantages “for” the self, acts that are represented as forgetting both human mortality and the eternity associated with the world of the spirit. When Jesus throws the moneychangers out of the Temple, he announces his advocacy of a new ethos for Judaism, an ethos in which giving will displace getting. However, what is not generally acknowledged about Jesus’ sacrifice is how its meaning is affected by his resurrection and transfiguration. The resurrection suggests that his act of supreme giving is not what it may seem to be: a selfless abandonment of his own needs and desires in 62 South Central Review favor of the needs of others. On the contrary, the resurrection suggests that Jesus’ gift, his for-giveness, produced an almost unprecedented transformation, or new realization, of the self. He reappears transfigured by his gift, and his transfiguration is represented as his transcendence of his former limitations, even the limitation of mortality. According to this argument, Jesus’ sacrifice is not selfless; it is instead a model for changing the self, for facilitating its evolution. If we plot Nora’s changing ethics over the course of the play against those of Jesus, whose birth they are celebrating with their family, it becomes apparent that she moves from an understanding of forgiveness as loving self-sacrifice to an experience of forgiveness as self-realization, and that this change in her, that all the world deplored as “scandalous,” mirrors that of Jesus as he moved from the agony of the Passion to the despair of the crucifixion to the self-realization figured by the resurrection. It is ironic, then, that the world decried Nora as a “monster.”16 For most of the play, we see Nora taking pride and joy in the secret self-sacrifice she made to save her husband’s life. Not only did Nora herself do whatever was necessary to restore her husband’s well-being, regardless of what it cost her, but she also expected that Torvald would return the favor if he found out, taking all responsibility for what she did upon himself, out of love for her. She refers to what she knows he will do for her as the “miracle.”17 Her romantic if melodramatic plan is to have the last word in this Liebestod by killing herself, thereby making the ultimate sacrifice, in order to save his reputation. After Torvald has read Krogstad’s letter in Act III, Nora’s first exclamation is “You mustn’t try to save me, Torvald!”18 It is only after he makes it clear that he has no intention of “saving” her—in fact, he will cut her off in everything but name from himself and the children—that she realizes he is living by a different story. Like the offenders that were studied in the research Luskin cites, Torvald minimizes his own responsibility for the family dishonor and treats Nora as fully deserving his punishment of her, disregarding her loving motives. If Nora’s conception of loving self-sacrifice reflects a shallow—albeit widespread—understanding of the Christian ethos, Torvald, as a man of the world, merely paid lip service to that ethos. Unlike Nora, he knows that self-preservation is a necessary precondition to loving, so he, too, has half of the truth. As long as the two live in harmony, Nora and Torvald can balance each other, but a conflict will be irreconcilable. The conflict between the perspectives of man and wife is embodied in a frenzied dance: the tarantella that Nora is to perform at the main social event of the Christmas season: a masquerade party which Nora will attend A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 63 in the costume of a Neapolitan fisher lass. The tarantella provides Ibsen with a physical and artistic metaphor of Nora’s internal struggle19— between her love of life and her desire to prove her love for her husband by sacrificing herself for him—as well as an emblem of the excitement and poison of their marital relationship. Nora’s dancing is her Passion, her agony and ecstasy, and watching it kindles a different kind of passion in her husband, who cannot wait to get her alone afterwards.20 The conflict between the two different stories of the Helmers’ marriage—the story of the family’s inhuman perfection, that must be protected at any cost, versus the story of self-sacrifice for the greater good of all—is something that Nora first performs, without words, with her body when she practices the Tarantella so wildly at the end of Act II. It is appropriate that the dilemma Nora has found herself in ends up being expressed physically, coached by Torvald, through a dance she learned on the island of Capri. She asks Torvald to help her rehearse it in an effort to distract him from opening the letterbox, which contains the letter outlining her deception, her debt, and her forgery. She asks Torvald to play for her, and to tell her “what to do, [to] keep me right—as you always do.”21 When she grabs her tambourine and a bright shawl and begins to dance to his accompaniment, he complains that she is dancing too fast and too wildly, but she insists, “This is how it has to be.” Dr. Rank suggests that he replace Torvald as the accompanist, so that Torvald can better direct her, but even when she is not dancing to her husband’s tune Nora dances “more and more wildly,” and “she does not seem to hear” his repeated directions, until Torvald orders everyone to “Stop,” saying “This is sheer madness.” Nora insists that he coach her right up until the performance the following night, postponing all of his business, and he indulges her, saying, “The child must have her way.”22 The Tarantella is perfectly chosen as a wordless, physical expression of desire laced with poison. It allows Nora to express her fear that she might “go mad,”23 as well as her conviction that once her dance performance is over, she must die. At the same time, the dance enacts the eroticism of her relationship with her husband and the agony produced by her willingness to die for him. Traditionally, the principal theme of the dance is the passion between men and women.24 In Capri, the dance is performed yearly on January 1 and 6 in costume, which for a woman is a long red skirt trimmed with colored ribbon, a white apron and blouse, a black bustier, and a colored headscarf. By some accounts, the dance is ancient, but other histories trace it to the early 18th century, when the candidates for an arranged marriage were allowed to meet but not touch. Dancing the tarantella apparently gave couples the opportunity 64 South Central Review to exchange eye contact and express desire without violating the rules of prenuptial interaction.25 But there is also a less jubilant interpretation of the accelerating dance; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the tarantella is so named because it was supposed to be a remedy for the disease of tarantism, which was attributed to the bite of a tarantula. The OED cites a quotation from Engel in 1866: “According to popular belief, a person bitten by the venomous spider Tarantula can be recovered from the state of nervous disorder which the poison produces, only by dancing the Tarantella until complete exhaustion compels him to desist from the vehement exercise.” Cure or poison? The dance represents the central question about the Helmers’ marriage. It expresses with immediacy and feeling the two meanings of the word “passion”—desire and suffering. Nora uses her frantic dance to prolong life and to stave off what she believes to be her need to kill herself to prove her love. In her mind, she is anticipating a struggle with her husband over which of them will be allowed to make the greatest sacrifice for the other. She thinks that the act of taking responsibility for the one you love is glorious, a “miracle.” Yet her dance, through its suggestion that she has been poisoned, also implicitly recognizes that her husband lives by a different story than the one he tells her in moments of fondness and desire. He does not take her seriously; she is for his amusement and pleasure only, and so he must regard her as “helpless” and “childlike,” dependent upon him for everything. These two different stories are presented as characteristic of women and men, respectively, as Krogstad emphasizes when he dismisses Mrs. Linde’s desire to live for him and his children as “a woman’s hysteria, wanting to be all magnanimous and self-sacrificing.”26 The tarantella wraps up in one accelerating dance all the excitement and dis-ease that is created by the mating of men and women who live by such different values in western society. The play climaxes in a masquerade (held offstage) that draws attention to the masquerade of the Helmers’ marriage. Ibsen’s great drive was to unmask social hypocrisy, to reveal the poison as well as the longing that motivates the marital “dance,” a tarantella that balances agony, eroticism, discipline, and joyful wildness. He articulated his conviction that society forces women into a disguise when he made what is possibly the most often-quoted statement about A Doll’s 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.”27 Mrs. Linde hopes to see the deception end: “it’s quite incredible the things I’ve witnessed in this A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 65 house in the last twenty-four hours. . .This unhappy secret must come out. These two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on.”28 What I want to argue here, however, is that when Nora slams the door of her doll’s house on the way out, leaving her husband and children behind in her determination to figure out who she is by educating herself and learning “to stand alone,”29 she is demonstrating a redefinition of forgiveness. This forgiveness does not absolve anyone of blame, but creates a space for future self-realization by refocusing the attention from the past to the present and future. Nora determines to broaden her inquiry, looking not only at who or what may have been wrong (herself, Torvald, Krogstad, the law), but also at the socio-legal contexts in which such wrongs could occur. Although the attention of the world focused on Nora’s slamming of the door as she left her home and children, I want to put equal emphasis on Nora’s opening of a door. That opening of the door is a gift for herself and for her husband, and in that strict sense she has for-given both of them. Angela Carter’s narrator, in her novel Love, asks, “To forgive is only to obliterate and what good does that do?”30 That view of forgiveness—as forgetting—characterizes Torvald, but not Nora; she assures her husband that she will not forget them; she will “often think about you and the children and this house.”31 To “forgive” in the sense Nora comes to practice it is to honor—not abandon—a “sacred duty”: the duty to oneself.32 It is to unify the divergent codes by which she and Torvald once lived: she will learn to preserve her integrity and to act compassionately to ensure the well-being of others; she will learn to create a home that is neither a miniature, artificial playhouse nor a site of secret, heroic self-abnegation. Remarkably, even after her disillusionment with her husband’s angry, contemptuous reaction, Nora never tells what Luskin calls a “grievance story”; she doesn’t accuse her husband (as he accused her) or complain about his fond (but hardly respectful) habit of playing with her. Instead, she tells a “hero’s story,” which Luskin describes as a story told from the point of view of the good she intended to accomplish: to save her husband’s life and avoid distressing her dying father. It is often difficult to tell such stories because to do so, the teller has to acknowledge that his or her positive intention has been lost or tarnished.33 In Nora’s case, she has to admit—and the admission is heroic because it is so difficult—that the years of secret work and sacrifice that she devoted to repaying the money she borrowed for the sake of her husband’s health are wasted: not only did he fail to appreciate her sacrifice, but he regards her actions as both stupid and culpable. She has to give up her idealistic views of him 66 South Central Review and herself, and she does so, which literally allows her to move out the door to a new set of goals centered on self-realization. This attitude of changing focus, of letting go, after a disappointment is something that Jesus counseled his disciples to adopt when he was preparing them for ministry: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.”34 The hero’s story “starts with the desire for a loving family. It does not deny pain and suffering. [It] does not imagine a world filled only with beauty and goodness; it does put hurt into a perspective that promotes healing.”35 Forgiveness, then, sets the stage for a possible transfiguration of the self; it offers an opening through which we may learn “to manage the effect of other people’s hurtful actions in our lives.”36 That is what Nora is attempting to do when she so emphatically leaves the diminutive house where she has been kept in a state of arrested development. Her gift to herself is a kind of rebirth or resurrection in which she reclaims the only control she can exercise in a state of grief: control over herself. Torvald’s “forgiveness” of her, in contrast, is closer to most people’s understanding of what the word means. Instead of being a way of moving forward into a new future with greater sensitivity and awareness, it reflects a desire to return to a past that was conceived as “innocent” because it was based on denial: the denial of responsibility, growth, sickness, and pain. Before he learns Nora’s secret, Torvald is amorously proud of “his capricious little Capri girl,” his “most treasured possession,” and he anticipates enjoying her that very evening.37 He confesses, “as I watched you darting and swaying in the tarantella, my blood was on fire . . . and that’s why I brought you down here so early.”38 Nora refuses him, however; and so he reads the letter and discovers what she has done. His first response is incredulity, but Nora assures him that it is all true, asserting the positive intention that motivated her actions: “It is true. I loved you more than anything else in the world.” But Torvald dismisses her explanation as “a lot of paltry excuses,” and when she anticipates that he will want to take the blame for her, he tells her to “Stop play-acting!” and begins a lament for his “terrible awakening” to the fact that his “pride and joy” is actually “a hypocrite, a liar, worse than that, a criminal!”39 He accuses her of ruining his “entire happiness” and “jeopardizing [his] whole future,” when from her point of view, she had saved his life. She goes in a short moment from being his pretty sky-lark to a faulty “feather-brained woman.”40 After accusing his wife of having committed a crime against him, their children, and the law, Torvald tells her his solution, that “The thing must be hushed up at all costs.” He essentially proposes that they perform a A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 67 different masquerade. This time, the motivation for the deception will be a determination to “preserve appearances,” but the reality behind those appearances will be far different: “as far as you and I are concerned, things must appear to go on exactly as before. But only in the eyes of the world, of course. In other words you’ll go on living here; that’s understood. But you will not be allowed to bring up the children, I can’t trust you with them.”41 Torvald’s tirade is interrupted by the ringing of the front door-bell, and a maid appears with an apologetic letter from Krogstad retracting his threats to expose Nora. Torvald responds by shouting, “I am saved! Nora, I am saved!” Nora wonders about the fact that he does not include her in this salvation and he replies, “You too, of course, we are both saved.” He proposes to forget the whole thing, announcing, “I’ve forgiven you. But I have, Nora, I swear it. I forgive you everything. I know you did what you did because you loved me.”42 This is the popular conception of forgiveness as a magnanimous willingness to overlook or forget a wrong (note that Torvald here thinks he has been hurt by Nora’s actions, rather than the beneficiary of them). Twice more he rejoices in the generosity of his own willingness to forgive, finding her “doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless” and calling himself a “real man” for having “forgiven her, completely and genuinely,” from the depths of his heart. It’s as though it made her his property in a double sense: he has, as it were, given her a new life, and she becomes in a way both his wife and at the same time his child.43 When Torvald claims that he has given new life to his wife, allowing her to be reborn to him, he mirrors Nora’s earlier belief that she had done the same for him by finding the means to cure his illness. Forgiveness does presage a possibility for new life, but it is not something that one person can give to another; one misconception that both Nora and Torvald shared is the idea that they had this power to give new life to the person they loved. In congratulating himself for having given her new life by forgiving her, Torvald not only destroys her pride in having “saved” him, but he denies that she had any power at all, being “so obviously helpless.” While he is busy “forgiving” her, though, she is in another room changing her clothes and preparing to leave. The final scene of the play clarifies just how different Nora’s ultimate conception of forgiveness is from his forgiveness of her; her new forgiveness also differs significantly from her earlier self-sacrifice for him. Unlike him, she does not indulge in a grievance story, a “tale of helplessness and frustration based on taking something too personally and blaming someone else” for how she felt.44 We see that when Torvald 68 South Central Review expressed a grievance against her, it caused him “to lose flexibility” in how we respond,45 but Nora’s capacity to respond—her “responseability”—increases when she bypasses accusation in favor of inviting him to engage in their first “serious talk.”46 The forgiveness she exhibits is not moral, and it is not therefore defined in relation to blame or absolution; instead, it is a choice to release her past in order to heal herself in the present. Even though she has been wounded by her husband’s response to the revelation of her secret, she does not waste energy blaming him. Instead, she leaves in an effort to figure out how to hurt and suffer less; she turns her attention to her own desire to change, and to heal.47 Instead of trying to change Torvald, she focuses her attention on how best to change the way she thinks.48 Her objective, in a sense, is personal resurrection, which will not come without sacrifice (she must leave her children, at least temporarily), but what she will no longer sacrifice is her own potential for growth. In the final scene, Nora states that for the first time in their eight years of marriage, she and her husband “are going to have things out,”49 to talk to each other honestly and respectfully. She tells him that neither he nor her father ever loved her; moreover, when she learned that her husband “wasn’t the man [she] thought he [was],” she discovered that she doesn’t love him either.50 When she expresses her determination to learn more about herself and the world, he offers to teach her, but she tells him “you are not the man to teach me to be a good wife for you”; education is something she must do on her own. Her independence is manifested in her declaration that she’s “not content any more with what most people say, or with what it says in books.”51 She also explains that she has doubts about the law, especially a law against forgery that does not take the motive into account: “I simply can’t get it into my head that that particular law is right. Apparently a woman has no right to spare her old father on his death-bed, or to save her husband’s life, even.” She is determined to find out for herself who is right, herself or society.52 And she is certain that Torvald “neither think[s] nor talk[s] like the man I would want to share my life with.”53 Although Torvald remonstrates with Nora, reproves her for “talking like a child,” and accuses her of hysteria and madness, he finally comes to believe her declaration that she now sees him as a “stranger.” He finally admits that “There is a tremendous gulf dividing us.”54 That gulf is not just a difference of privilege authorized by a society with a different standard for men and women; it is also, at least by the end, a psychological difference that concerns two—or perhaps three—different understandings of forgiveness. Torvald’s forgiveness is an extension of A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 69 his own self-interest. He forgives Nora once the threat to his self-interest is no longer present, but for him, nothing has changed. Nora’s original understanding of forgiveness was indistinguishable from Christian selfsacrifice; she endured admittedly minor hardships to obtain the means whereby they could cure his illness by getting away. Once she sees that this model of love and forgiveness was not one that they shared, though, she “forgives” differently; this time, her giving is not for him. After he threatened to cut her off in all but name and then retracted his threat, she doesn’t forgive him because she never made the mistake of accusing him. While someone else might have accused Torvald of ingratitude or intolerance, or even of insufficient love and understanding, Nora simply sees him as being different from what she had imagined. Forgiveness for her is a gift of freedom for herself, the freedom to reevaluate her way of thinking about both of them and their relation to one another. It recognizes that a change has already occurred—she has learned to see him differently—and that other changes will ensue from that first one. Unlike her husband, she accepts responsibility for her contributions to the situation that she now sees as damaging: if her husband treated her like a doll, she played along. Finally, she comes to terms with her own tendency to idealize her husband, an idealization that helped her tolerate his fond trivialization (and objectification) of her. Forgiveness, for Nora, is the willingness to look at a changed situation carefully, with enough distance on the situation to re-evaluate it carefully and accurately. What I have proposed is nothing less than a shift in our collective understanding of forgiveness from an arguably abject willingness to sacrifice oneself for love to a willingness to let go of grievances, however painful that release may be, for purposes of self-transformation and self-realization. This shift brings with it a fundamental rereading of Christian doctrine, according to which Jesus’s forgiveness is not seen as embodied in the crucifixion alone, an agonizing if voluntary self-sacrifice, but is instead found in the connection between the crucifixion and the resurrection. If we regard the resurrection as that which was produced by the crucifixion, then Jesus’s actions no longer represent abject selfdenial. Instead, Jesus preserved his integrity through his willingness not to engage in conflict; he was willing to give himself completely, and that “giving” of himself for love produced a miraculous change in him. Together, the crucifixion and the resurrection show that Jesus was modeling a program of metamorphosis; he simultaneously revealed the costliness and the “miracle” of self-transformation through forgiveness: the refusal to engage in the self-limiting (because polarizing) “intimacy” of conflict and violence. According to this view, Jesus integrated what the 70 South Central Review Church has interpreted as forgiveness—loving self-sacrifice—with what Friedrich Nietzsche later attributed only to the Antichrist: the courage to realize and thereby transform the self by letting go of both grievance and illusion. He not only preserves but exponentially magnifies his spirit by not trying to defend himself, but by letting go of everything he held most dear without resentment. This provides us with a demanding formula for self growth.55 The problem with the opposing positions of both Nora and Torvald at the beginning of A Doll’s House is that neither partner can change or evolve. Nora, Torvald, and their friend Rank have all been “poisoned” in one way or another, whether by inherited syphilis or by the bite of a metaphorical tarantula. The ideas we inherit keep us from growing, and in some cases from living, as Mrs. Alving explains in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881): I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. . . . Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.56 The hardest thing for a doll or a ghost to do is to take decisive steps to endure the pain of becoming human, of becoming real, by letting go of the past. It can only be done by engaging in battles not with others but with oneself, battles that James Joyce, in a 1901 letter to Ibsen that he wrote in Dano-Norwegian, referred to as those “fought and won behind [one’s] forehead.”57 Joyce paid homage to Ibsen for “open[ing] the way” to spiritual truth, and to emancipation from “public canons of art, friends and shibboleths.” Ibsen’s double in this respect is Nora, who has the courage to open a door and walk away from all that is the familiar (“familiar” shares a root with “family”). The door Nora opens is a “portal of discovery” into a larger, more animated world.58 Notes 1. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002), 35–6. 2. H.D., Tribute to Freud (1956; New York: New Directions, 1974), 86–7. 3. A Doll’s House was the second of Ibsen’s twelve “investigative dramas of contemporary life.” See James McFarlane, “Introduction.” In Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays, trans. Mcfarlane and Jens Arup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), vii–xiv. vii. A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 71 4. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, 1–88. 80–81. 5. The alternative, “conciliatory” ending that Ibsen was pressured to write for German audiences, a revision he calls a “barbaric outrage” (McFarlane’s note at the end of A Doll’s House, 88) in his letters, is outrageous precisely because it shows Nora returning to her ethos of self-sacrifice by discovering that she cannot leave her children. The alternative ending changes the meaning of the play, restoring the status quo, when it depicts Nora abandoning her newfound determination to give herself the freedom to learn more about who she is and what she values, which she can only do by herself. 6. Ibsen A Doll’s House, 42. 7. Ibid., 43–44. 8. Ibid., 32. 9. Ibid., 33. 10. Interestingly, Rank’s degenerative sickness is due to the dishonesty of his father, not his mother. 11. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 9. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. Ibid., 45. 14. Ibid. 15. As Hannah Arendt argues in The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Jesus was the “discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.” She points out that this is an important moment in political thought; moreover, “The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a secular sense” (238). 16. MacFarlane, “Introduction,” ix. Now we are in a position to understand what Henry James meant when he saw in another Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler) a “state of the soul” underlying the action (Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun called it the “unconscious life of the soul”). James averred that there was an “Ibsen within an Ibsen” that takes viewers from the life of the individual into the “history of the human spirit.” As Roy Fuller wrote, “Ibsen revealed that the symbol had a past,/ That crude interpretation could be stripped/ Of rings of time, to find/ Inside the foliate five/ Acts the small pulsing germ.” Cited by Errol Durbach, “A Century of Ibsen Criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. James MacFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 237–238. Both the article by Henry James (from the Pall Mall Gazette, February 1891) and the Fuller poem are reprinted in James MacFarlane, ed., Henrik Ibsen, Penguin Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth, 1970), 149–50 and 272. 17. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 56, 60. 18. Ibid., 73. 19. My argument is designed to amplify Toril Moi’s proposal—derived from an idea in Wittgenstein—that Nora’s dance constitutes an image of her soul. See Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 226 and 236–242. The one scene that Ibsen added after completing the first draft in October 1878, according to Michael Meyer, is the one at the end of act II when Nora dances the tarantella. According to Alastair MacAulay, the actress who was playing Nora in the opening production in Copenhagen (December 21, 1879), Betty Hennings, was a dancer who had performed in choreographer August Bournonville’s Valdemar. Bournonville’s Napoli concluded with a famous tarantella. See The Times Literary Supplement (July 15, 2005). I am indebted to Tania Lown-Hecht for this reference. 72 South Central Review 20. The tension between Nora and Torvald, which for her concerns life and death and for him is about sex, anticipates the similar tension between Gretta and Gabriel after another Christmas party, the one in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” 21. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 58. 22. Ibid., 59–60. 23. Ibid., 55. 24. See www.capri.com/en/tradizioni, “The Tarantella,” and Erich Schwandt, “Tarantella.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 13 May 2010. 25. See http://www.scialapopolocapri.com/en/tarantella.html, as well as “Tarantella,” International Encyclopedia of Dance: a Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., ed. Selma Jean Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 26. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 64. 27. From Ibsen’s notes and jottings in the autumn of 1878, cited by James MacFarlane, “Introduction,” xviii. 28. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 66. 29. Ibid., 81. 30. Angela Carter, Love (New York, Penguin, 1971, 1987), 52. 31. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 86. 32. Ibid., 82. 33. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 141. 34. Matthew 10:14, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 35. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 148. 36. Ibid., 160. 37. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 67, 69. 38. Ibid., 70. 39. Ibid., 75. 40. Ibid., 76. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 77. 43. Ibid., 78. 44. Luskin, Forgive For Good, 39. 45. Ibid., 40. 46. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 79. 47. Luskin, Forgive for Good, 63. 48. Which is what Luskin says one must do in order to forgive. See, for example, p. 130. 49. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 79. 50. Ibid., 83–84. 51. Ibid., 81, 82. 52. Ibid. 83. 53. Ibid., 84. 54. Ibid., 85. 55. Arendt sees forgiveness as that which makes it possible to continue to act, given that actions are irreversible and we often act in ignorance of what we are doing (or what the implications of a given action might be). Her focus is on the importance for the individual of being forgiven by other people, because forgiveness liberates people from the “chain reaction” of revenge and retaliation (240). Unlike revenge, “the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected A Tribute to Ibsen’s Nora / Mahaffey 73 way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven” (241). I am wholeheartedly in agreement with Arendt’s claim here that forgiveness is an autonomous and even creative act that liberates the forgiver from bondage to a repetitive tennis match of ongoing reprisal. My divergence from Arendt is rooted in her claim that “Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it” (241). Forgiveness can, of course, be inspired by love for another, but Arendt contends that “nobody can forgive himself” (243). I would disagree: although some external stimulus is required for the individual to gain distance on his or her own prior actions, the creative, unpredictable, “anti-political” power of forgiveness can indeed be applied to the self. The dialogue that Arendt sees as necessary to forgiveness can be internal, as we see when Nora begins her slow, non-judgmental process of self-questioning. For women, in particular, this internal dialogue is crucial, because women are socialized to see themselves as dependent, and therefore inadequate. Of course, forgiveness can be understood in different registers, and Arendt’s discussion is most valuable as an understanding of forgiveness as a social phenomenon. Her view that a transgressing individual must be forgiven by other people in order to continue to act constructively in the world is illustrated by the case of Krogstad in A Doll’s House: after having been accused of forgery, Krogstad is unable to shed the reputation of dishonesty, which in turn makes it difficult to support his dependent children in socially acceptable ways. People like Torvald, in particular, are unwilling to give him a second chance, which keeps him bound to a transgression that he would not be eager to commit again, now that he understands its consequences. 56. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts. In Ibsen, Four Major Plays, 89–164. 126. 57. Reproduced in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 86–7. 58. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus argues that “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random-Vintage, 1986) episode 9, lines 238–9. 176 South Central Review CLAIRE KATZ is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent footsteps of Rebecca (Indiana 2003) and the editor, with Lara Trout, of Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments (Routledge 2005). She has published articles in the areas of phenomenology, feminist theory, ethics, philosophy of religion, Jewish philosophy, and philosophy of education. She is currently working on a book length manuscript which reads Levinas’s philosophical project against the backdrop of his writings on Jewish education. VICKI MAHAFFEY is the Thelma and Clayton Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. She is on the editorial board of the James Joyce Quarterly. She is the author of Reauthorizing Joyce (1988), States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (1998), and Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (2007). She is currently completing a book called The Joyce of Everyday Life. KAREN PAGANI received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2008. She is an assistant professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current book project, Marginal Prophet Figures: Forgiveness in the Age of Reason, investigates a discursive crisis provoked by the secular understandings of forgiveness (le pardon; pardonner) that developed in early modern France, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the founders and executive directors of Slought Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include Lacan Literario, Siglo 21 (2007), 1913: The cradle of modernism, Blackwell (2007) and The Ethic of the Lie, The Other Press (2008), Etant Donnes: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (Presses du Reel, 2010). LINDA RADZIK is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M. In addition to Making Amends (New York: Oxford, 2009), she is the author of a number of articles on forgiveness, responsibility, and punishment. CHARLOTTE HEMENWAY TAYLOR received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2004 and her J.D. from New York University School of Law in 2008. She is currently a law clerk to the Honorable Robert A. Katzmann of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In the fall of 2010, she will become an Academic Fellow at Columbia University School of Law. Her previous publications include “Hate Speech and Government Speech,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 12 (2010), and “Free Expression and Expressness,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change, vol. 33 (2009). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The female jouissance: An analysis of Ibsen's Et dukkehjem Rekdal, Anne Marie Scandinavian Studies; Summer 2002; 74, 2; Research Library pg. 149 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. 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Otten, Terry Modern Drama; Winter 1998; 41, 4; Research Library pg. 509 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. English 1302: Research Paper Assignment The Assignment: Write on one of the topics below dealing with A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen: 1. Write a paper in which you analyze the character of Nora. In terms of your thesis, can you develop three aspects of Nora’s character? Think of what defines Nora as a person. What do the critics say about Nora? 2. Write a paper in which you analyze the character of Torvald. Does he love Nora? Is his behavior reasonable or not? What do the critics say about him? In terms of your thesis, can you develop three aspects of Torvald’s character? What defines Torvald as a person? 3. Write a paper that argues that A Doll’s House is or is not still relevant today. Use the complete PMLA essay by Joan Templeton in your essay (“The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen”), plus three other articles from scholarly journals. Format/Length: Your paper should be at least 1,000 words: double-spaced, 12-pt. font, MLA documentation. Save your file in Word (.docx or .doc) or as a .PDF file. Sources: Use at least FOUR critical articles from the library as additional sources (the play will be a fifth source). The articles may come from professional journals, and they may be found at the HCCS Library Databases (ProQuest, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete). Remember that all quotations, paraphrases, and summaries MUST be cited in-text. The last page of your paper should be a works cited page. Finding Articles: • • • In the HCCS Library website, look at databases such as ProQuest, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, and Wilson OmniFile. These are great databases in which to conduct a search for articles. Remember that you are looking for articles in .PDF files. In doing your search, type in these search terms: Henrik Ibsen AND A Doll’s House. When browsing through the articles, look at as many as possible. And don’t overlook articles that might seem, at first glance, too general; A Doll’s House might not be in the article title, yet the article might deal with the play significantly. Additionally, articles may be found in collections (bound in an edited collection as a book, with a title page that reveals each article by a different author). AVOID performance reviews, book reviews, magazine articles, versions of the play, or summaries of the play. Do NOT use encyclopedias or abstracts. You may NOT use sources such as encyclopedias, abstracts of articles, Cliff’s Notes, Monarch Notes, or series such as British Authors. Do NOT search for sources by using Yahoo or Google. (Needless to say, blogs and sites with student papers are TOTALLY unacceptable.) • • Articles should come from journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, The Explicator, Scandinavian Studies, The Theatre Journal, and College English. Points will be deducted if you have used unacceptable, unscholarly sources. Plagiarism Policy: Any plagiarism, any failure to document quotations, summaries, and paraphrases (MLA documentation) will result in a zero on the assignment. Turnitin will provide a report as to the originality of the paper. You should be aware of the Honesty Policy stated on the Syllabus; it is expected that this paper is TOTALLY your own work of analysis and writing—do NOT consult information on the Internet in any fashion, and do NOT collaborate with friends/classmates. Submission: Submit your file in the Assignment link in Eagle Online Canvas. Beginning the Writing Process: • • • • • • • Once you have found your sources, take notes and highlight important passages. As you write your rough draft, include quotations, paraphrases, and summaries from the articles and from A Doll’s House—cite on a sentence-by-sentence basis as you write the rough draft. Remember that you need a thesis statement which lists the three major points you are going to develop in your paper. When citing quotes from A Doll’s House, cite the act number and the page parenthetically: (919; act 2). When quoting a brief passage from one character in the play, identify the speaker in your introduction to the quote. (Remember that long quotes should be blocked.) IF you quote conversation between two characters, that quote should be BLOCKED—and then character names would be in all caps before speeches (just as displayed in your text). If you quote stage directions, note that they should be in italics. You may use ellipses to omit any part of a speech (or stage directions). The last page of your final draft should consist of the required works cited page. Editing: • Make certain you proofread carefully! You will be graded on quality of sources, soundness of content, thoroughness of documentation, plus grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
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