A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen (1879)
“The most consequential door-slam in literary history — a woman walks out on her husband and changes the theater forever.”
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Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
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Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's other great trapped woman — where Nora exits, Hedda destroys. The comparison reveals the full range of what is available to women with no sanctioned exit
The Awakening
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Published twenty years after A Doll's House, Edna Pontellier faces the same recognition as Nora — with no door to walk through
Mrs Dalloway
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Clarissa Dalloway's inner life versus her performed surface — the doll's house as stream of consciousness, the performance persisting because the door never opens
The Yellow Wallpaper
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What happens when there is no door: the domestic space as trap, the husband as warden, the self that cannot survive the confinement
The House of Bernarda Alba
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The domestic space as absolute enclosure — Ibsen's argument taken to its logical extreme, the door welded shut
Death of a Salesman
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The problem play Ibsen invented applied to masculine performance — Willy Loman trapped in his own doll's house, the role of Provider as suffocating as the role of Wife