Disease, Corruption, and Contempt for Weakness: Rereading a Doll's House

Abstract

The reason why Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) went to the extent of forging her father’s signature in order to take out a large loan was that her husband, Torvald Helmer, was “dangerously ill” (Ibsen 2016, 117, hereafter referred to by page numbers only) and needed a longer stay in the south in order to recover. And he recovers, is “[f]it as a fiddle,” and has no relapses; he “hasn’t had one hour of illness since” (118). But what did he suffer from? We get – as is often pointed out in the research literature – scant information about his illness beyond the fact that Nora says that he was “dangerously ill” and explains the illness as a type of work-related overexertion: “he exhausted himself dreadfully in that first year. He had to seek out all kinds of extra income […] and to work from morning till night. But it was more than he could take, and he became dangerously ill” (117). However, the text also offers, as I will show here, completely different, but hitherto neglected, indications of what Helmer suffered from. In the following, I will argue that these indications and their interpretive consequences open up a new understanding of the status and function of not only Torvald Helmer, but also his doctor and close friend, Dr. Rank. This is, in so far as it foregrounds textual hints and allusions that are overlooked or not paid much attention to in the literature, a deliberately symptomatic reading that also sheds new light on the drama’s social criticism. Part of what this reading shows is that this social criticism is not only directed at bourgeois society’s view of marriage and women, or, more generally, at conservative and patriarchal bourgeois society; it is also directed at dishonesty, cynicism and corruption in society and the civil service state, as well as at some of the emerging ideas, values and ideals of the time. These include the cultivation of the strong and “pure”, contempt for weakness, as well as the idea of the individual’s responsibility for their own well-being.