Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

      3

      A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler

      The first person to look at literature from a Horneyan perspective was Karen Horney herself. She taught courses at the New School for Social Research that were focused on literary works, and she frequently used literature for illustrative purposes in her writings. An admirer of Henrik Ibsen, she cited his works more often than those of any other author. This is not surprising, for Ibsen is the greatest psychological dramatist next to Shakespeare, and there is a remarkable congruence between his plays and her theory. Many of Ibsen’s characters seem to have stepped from the pages of Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. I could easily devote a book to a Horneyan study of Ibsen, but I shall confine myself here to two of his most famous and enigmatic characters, Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler. At the center of Ibsen’s plays, there is often a relationship, the psychodynamics of which are portrayed with remarkable subtlety. I shall analyze Nora’s relationship with her husband, Torvald, and Hedda’s with Ejlert Lövborg.

      Although Horney initially devoted herself to the study of feminine psychology, she stopped writing on this topic in the mid-1930s and developed a theory that she regarded as gender-neutral. She did not see any defensive strategies as essentially masculine or feminine but felt that all were employed by members of both sexes. The greater incidence of self-effacement in women and aggression in men is a product, she felt, of culture. Horney’s position is borne out by the study of literature. Self-effacement is more common in female characters and aggression in males, but there are many aggressive women and self-effacing men.

      One of the major objectives of women’s liberation movements has been to free women from the cultural demand for self-effacement and to establish their right to full human development. At the thematic level, this seems to be what A Doll’s House is about. In the first two acts of the play, Nora Helmer is a striking example of feminine compliance, while in the last act she rebels against her doll-like role and asserts her claim to full humanity.

      Indeed, the most difficult thing to understand about Nora is the speed of her transformation from a submissive, self-sacrificing woman who lives only for love and family into a self-assertive person who rejects all responsibility to her husband and children in the name of her duty to herself. At the end Nora seems so different from her earlier self that some have felt that Ibsen sacrificed consistent characterization to his thematic concerns. Nora learns that she has been unjustly treated by a male-dominated society and that she must rebel against the conventional view of her nature if she is to realize herself. “You and Father have done me a great wrong,” she tells Torvald. “You’ve prevented me from becoming a real person” (act 3).¹ She decides that she must leave home if she is to have a chance of discovering what she really thinks and who she really is. Nora’s speeches are stirring, but has Ibsen put words into her mouth that are inconsistent with her previously drawn character? Is her transformation psychologically plausible? How, exactly, does her disillusionment with Torvald produce her amazing turnabout? Can a woman who intended to drown herself near the beginning of the last act become as strong a person as Nora seems to be at the end?

      I believe that Nora is a well-drawn mimetic character whose transformation is intelligible if we understand her defensive strategies and the nature of her relationship with her husband. She never becomes a mere mouthpiece but remains an inwardly motivated character, full of inconsistencies and blind spots that are psychologically realistic. Her transformation is plausible when we recognize that with the collapse of her predominant solution, her previously repressed tendencies emerge.

      Nora experiences genuine growth at the end of the play, but she is not as clear-headed as she thinks she is. She fails to see, for example, that she has also participated in the creation of her destructive relationship with her husband and that Torvald has been no more of a real person for her than she has been for him. She informs Torvald that she must leave home because he has not treated her as a real person, but she also says that she stopped loving him when the wonderful thing did not happen. If Torvald had behaved heroically on the receipt of Krogstad’s letter, Nora would have been delighted, but such behavior on his part would not have shown respect for her as a person. Nora seems unaware of this, and of much else besides. She says that she has never been more sure of herself, but she is full of self-doubt, and her flight from Torvald and her children is compulsive. Turning against her failed self-effacing solution, Nora is now driven by defensive needs for aggression and withdrawal, as well as by her newly awakened desire for self-actualization.

      Nora initially develops into a predominantly self-effacing person not only because of the attitudes toward women in her society but also because of the particular conditions of her childhood. She has no mother, and her father is a domineering man who wants her to remain a “doll-child” and who would be “displeased” if she expressed any ideas contrary to his own (act 3). Nora cannot afford to rebel; she is strongly attached to her father and does her utmost to please him. She retains the childlike playfulness and docility that he finds so charming and either adopts his opinions or remains silent. It seems likely that the absence of a mother increases her dependence on her father; she has no one else to turn to for love and protection. Moreover, she has no model of mature womanhood to emulate, and she acquires few skills on which to base her self-esteem. When she becomes a mother herself, she depends on her old nurse, Anne-Marie, to care for her children, whom she treats as playmates. Nora’s father rewards her compliance with fondness and indulgence, and she grows up feeling that the way to gain safety, love, and approval is to please a powerful male.

      In Torvald Helmer, Nora finds a man who is much like her father, and she relates to him in a similar way. She is content to be his “lark,” his “squirrel,” his “doll-baby,” his “little featherbrain,” his “crazy little thing” (act 1). Nora does not feel demeaned by these epithets, as we feel her to be, although at an unconscious level they are destructive. She lives, as she says, “by performing tricks” for Torvald, and she is proud of her ability to keep him charmed. For Torvald there is “something very endearing about a woman’s helplessness” (act 3), and Nora is at great pains to conceal the fact that she has saved his life and almost paid off a large loan by her own efforts: “Torvald could never bear to think of owing anything to me! It would hurt his self-respect—wound his pride. It would ruin everything between us.” It is important to Nora to preserve Torvald’s feeling of mastery, for this is the price of his love and protection. She is keeping her heroic effort “in reserve,” however, for the day when she is “no longer so pretty and attractive . . . when it no longer amuses him to see [her] dance and dress-up and act for him” (act 1).

      In the meantime, it gives her “something to be proud and happy about.” She is proud partly because “working like that and earning money” has given her a feeling of strength, has made her “feel almost like a man” (act 1), but mostly because it fulfills her need to be good and loving. Like Mrs. Linde, and most women in her culture, Nora glorifies sacrificing self for others, and she reveals her secret only when Mrs. Linde makes her feel inferior by contrasting Nora’s easy life with her own noble suffering.

      Nora also has needs for power and mastery, which she fulfills in a typically self-effacing way by identifying with Torvald. She exults in the fact that “all the employees at the Bank [will] be dependent on Torvald now”: “What fun to think that we—that Torvald—has such power over so many people” (act 1). She bristles when Krogstad speaks disrespectfully of her husband because she participates