A doll’s house 인형의 집

                                                      

Thanks to the benefactors of our sister who lived as a missionary in Russia long ago, I watched a Korean version of “A Doll’s House” produced by promising Russian director Yury Butusov in November. “A Doll’s House” was performed in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Seoul Arts Center in Korea.

Even though “A Doll’s House” was written by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) in Norway in 1879, this three-act play is still significant. It was the most frequently performed play in the year 2006 marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Henrik Ibsen. 

Manuscripts signed by Ibsen were registered to UNESCO in 2001 because of his plays’ historical significance as the beginning of modern theater.

“A Doll’s House” questions the traditional roles of men and women in 19th-century marriage. The protagonist of this play, Nora undergoes the process of self-realization in search of the true identity of women. 

The image of a woman coming out of the house to be independent was scandalous in the 19th century, but the play as a whole implies a spiritual transformation from a passive doll-like person to a positive and creative person.

Nora, the wife of Torvald Helmer and mother of three children, lived the ideal life and did her best to dedicate herself to the love of her husband. This love even led her to forge a signature on a loan application to help her sick husband.

Torvald, a newly promoted bank manager, is fond of calling his wife “my little skylark” or “my little squirrel.” The image of a skylark or of a squirrel reveals a patriarchal sense of authority in a male-dominated world. The moral and perfect husband regards Nora’s habits of shopping and eating cookies as being shallow-minded.

Going through an internal conflict due to her false signature on the promissory note, Nora realizes her father treated her as a doll. Looking back, she wasn’t able to assert herself or argue about anything in front of her father. Furthermore, her husband also regarded her as a doll without any opinion or will at all. She just needed the presence of men near her and followed them without question.
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As a result, Helmers’ married life turned out to be a prison where strangers lived together without true love. This dynamic is revealed through Torvald’s criticism of his wife’s mistake. Instead of understanding the intention of his wife, he just condemned her, and his act of understanding and forgiveness came too late. 

-“I have waited so patiently for eight years; for, goodness knows, I knew very well those wonderful things don’t happen every day. Then this horrible misfortune came upon me… Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.”
-“Tell me what that would be!”
-“Both you and I would have to be so changed that… Oh, Torvald, I don’t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.”
-“But I will believe in it. Tell me! So changed that…?”
-“That our life together would be a real wedlock. Goodbye.”
-“Nora! Nora! … Empty. She is gone… The most wonderful thing of all…?”

On the other hand, Nora’s friends, Kristine Linde and Nils Krogstad, could recover their relationship after ups and downs, but Nora needs some quality time desperately to calm herself down. 

This contemporary era is quite different from the times of Nora, but it would be worth questioning if we live in another form of dollhouse surrounded by cybots and artificial intelligence that bring the most convenient but dehumanized benefits of ultra-tech, which will lose power during a blackout.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2018/12/162_259989.html

Dec 11 online/ offline on Dec 12, 2018