The Watch
It is Christmas Day, five o’clock. She looks at the time and does the sums out loud: seven hours to midnight, twenty-four more to the next one. Thirty-one hours to live. That is a line from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and this is the full summary, act by act, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
I will follow the clock, because the whole play is three days squeezed into one room, and every scene is Nora Helmer running out of time.
The Text
I read the Project Gutenberg text of A Doll’s House, ebook number twenty-five forty-two, in R. Farquharson Sharp’s English translation. It is a play in three acts, and the whole thing happens in the Helmers’ sitting room. The play text, stage directions included, is about twenty-seven thousand words, so this is a short read.
As of November twenty twenty-six, the play is reported to have been published in Copenhagen in December of eighteen seventy-nine. I could not check that against the ebook itself, so treat the date as reported.
Act One: Christmas Eve
Nora comes in humming, arms full of parcels, with a Christmas tree behind her. Her husband Torvald calls from his study. He calls her his lark, his squirrel, his spendthrift. She sneaks a macaroon, which he has forbidden, and lies to him about it.
Then the doorbell. It is Christine Linde, Nora’s old school friend, a widow, who has not seen her in nine or ten years and has come to town for work. Nora is delighted. Torvald is about to become manager of a bank, and she is sure he will find Christine a job.
Then Nora tells Christine her secret. Years ago, Torvald fell ill, and the doctors said he needed a year in the south. Nora got the money, two hundred and fifty pounds, and let everyone think it came from her father. In truth she borrowed it, and has been paying it back in secret, out of her housekeeping and from copying work at night.
The Bond
The lender is Nils Krogstad, a man with a small post at the bank, and he arrives to say the new manager means to fire him. He wants Nora to talk Torvald out of it. She says she has no influence, and he tells her exactly what he knows.
When Nora needed a signature from her father on the loan, her father was dying. Krogstad notes that her father died on the twenty-ninth of September. The signature on the bond is dated the second of October. Three days after his death.
Nora admits it. She wrote her father’s name herself. Krogstad says that his own long-ago disgrace was nothing worse, and that the law does not care about motives. Torvald comes home, tells Nora that a man who lies poisons his own children, and she is left alone with the tree, afraid that she is harming her own children.
Act Two: Christmas Day
The tree is stripped, and Nora is jumpy at every ring of the bell. She begs Torvald to keep Krogstad in the bank. He refuses. She calls his reasons narrow-minded, which stings, and he sends the dismissal letter at once.
Then Doctor Rank, the family friend, tells her he is dying, and that a black cross on a visiting card will be his signal. He also tells her that he loves her. Nora, who was about to ask him for a big favour, says she can no longer ask him for anything.
Krogstad returns, furious. He will not take the bond back, even if she pays. He wants a better job than before, and the letter that tells Torvald everything is in his pocket. He drops it in the letter-box. Nora asks Christine to be her witness if anything happens to her, because she means to take all the blame.
The Clock
Christine goes to ask Krogstad to take the letter back. He is out of town, so she leaves a note. Torvald keeps the key to the letter-box, and he wants to see his post.
So Nora stops him the only way she can. She plays the first notes of the Tarantella on the piano, then dances it as a practice, so wildly that her hair comes down. She makes Torvald promise to think of nothing else until the ball is over, not even to open the letter-box. The word letter-box appears seven times in the play, four in Act Two and three in Act Three.
Then, as Act Two ends, comes the line from the start. At five o’clock, she counts thirty-one hours to live.
Act Three: The Ball
It is night, after the ball upstairs. Christine meets Krogstad in the Helmers’ sitting room. She once broke with him, and she explains why: a bedridden mother and two small brothers. Now she offers him a partnership, two shipwrecked people on one piece of wreckage. He is ready to ask for his letter back. She says no. Torvald must know the truth.
Torvald brings Nora in almost by force, pleased with himself. Rank calls by, says goodnight, and leaves two cards with a black cross. Torvald, at last, takes his letters to his study, and reads Krogstad’s.
His reaction is the play’s turning point. He calls Nora a hypocrite, a liar, a criminal. He says all her father’s lack of principle has come out in her, and that she will not raise the children. Then a second letter arrives from Krogstad. Torvald reads it and shouts that he is saved. Krogstad sends the bond back. Torvald tears it up and burns it, and says he forgives her.
The Settling
But Nora has changed out of her costume. She tells him to sit down, because this is a settling of accounts.
In eight years they have never had a serious conversation, she says. She tells him her father called her his doll-child, and that she has been Torvald’s doll-wife. She had expected a wonderful thing: that Torvald would take the blame himself. He did not. And what he told her once the danger passed convinced her she had lived for eight years with a stranger.
She puts back his ring, leaves her keys, and takes her cloak and a small bag. He asks whether anything could ever change. She says the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen. The play ends with a door shutting below.
The Counts
Three counts. By my count of the spoken words, Nora says about forty-five percent of them, and speaks five hundred and sixty-six times to Torvald’s two hundred and seventy-one.
In Act Three, until she tells him to sit down, Torvald speaks about twenty-five hundred words to her five hundred. After that, she speaks about seventeen hundred to his six hundred and fifty.
And the word doll, with its forms, is used eleven times, all by Nora. In Act One it is a toy. In Act Three, it is her.
If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments what you think Nora does next.
