Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris
Nora begins to think of suicide as soon as Krogstad threatens to reveal that she has obtained a loan from him by forging her father’s signature. She becomes panic-stricken when, ignoring her pleas, Torvald dismisses Krogstad, saying that he will bear “the whole burden” of any retaliation. “He’d do it too! He’d do it—in spite of anything!” she exclaims to Dr. Rank. “But he mustn’t—never, never! Anything but that!” (act 2). Nora is convinced that Torvald loves her so “deeply” and “intensely” that “he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to give up his life for [her] sake.” She thinks that one way of saving him would be to pay off her debt, thereby securing the incriminating papers. She considers asking Dr. Rank for the money, but when Rank declares his love, she can accept nothing from him, even though the alternative is so terrible. Apparently, her romanticism is so intense that she would rather commit suicide than taint her devotion to Torvald. She is afraid to kill herself, however, until Krogstad boasts that within a year he will be Torvald’s “right hand man. It’ll be Nils Krogstad, not Torvald Helmer, who’ll run the Joint Stock Bank.” “I have the courage for it now,” Nora declares (act 2).
Nora’s relationship with her husband is based on a bargain she has made in her own mind. She will be a charming, obliging, self-sacrificing wife, and Torvald will love and protect her. Nora delights in being babied, coddled, and indulged. Everything Torvald does for her shows how valuable she is to him and assures her that she will be taken care of. She does not mind being weak as long as his strength is at her service. She controls him through her dependency. When he becomes director of the bank, she does not regret the fact that she will no longer have to earn money secretly but is overjoyed that there will be “no more trouble! No more worry! I’ll be able to play and romp about with the children” (act 1). She does expect to be rewarded for her years of devotion, however. Some day, somehow, Torvald is going to make a magnificent sacrifice for her, and then she will see how strong and noble he is and how much he loves her. This is the “wonderful thing” that will validate her bargain and make her dream of glory come true.
Nora is certain that when Torvald opens Krogstad’s threatening letter, the wonderful thing will happen. Torvald is too brave, too noble to submit to Krogstad’s demands. In order to protect her from prosecution, he will take responsibility for the forgery on himself. In Nora’s romantic fantasy Torvald is her knight and she is his lady. Just before he reads the letter, he tells her: “Do you know something, Nora. I often wish you were in some great danger—so I could risk body and soul—my whole life—everything, everything for your sake” (act 3). Torvald’s equally romantic version of their relationship reinforces Nora’s. She believes his professions and is convinced that he will sacrifice himself for her. Nora wants the wonderful thing to happen, but she is terrified of it as well, for Torvald will become a social outcast, like Krogstad. He will lose his power and position, and life will become unbearably bleak and mean. A ruined Torvald could satisfy neither Nora’s compliant needs for care and protection nor her expansive needs for power and glory.
The severity of Nora’s neurosis is clearly revealed by her determination to kill herself. By committing suicide she will prevent Torvald from taking the blame on himself. Her heroic sacrifice will forestall his. Instead of having to endure guilt and self-hate for having ruined Torvald, she will save his career as she had earlier saved his life. The reward will be his undying gratitude and devotion. She will be enshrined forever in his memory and will not have to fear the loss of his love when she is no longer so attractive. Her suicide will secure Nora from the ravages of time and the vicissitudes of fortune. She will die in full possession of the two things she values most, Torvald’s love and his glory.
In a relationship of morbid dependency, such as that between Nora and Torvald, there is a turning point, says Horney, for the self-effacing partner, “as the stake she is gambling for fails to materialize” (1950, 252). The turning point for Nora comes with Torvald’s reactions to Krogstad’s letter. He neither praises her for having earned so much money and saved his life nor offers to take the blame for her forgery on himself. Instead he calls her a hypocrite, a liar, and a criminal and tells her that she “won’t be allowed to bring up the children” (act 3). “All thought of happiness” between them is over. She has put him in Krogstad’s power, and he “must find some way to appease him.” If we have understood what has been going on in Nora up to this moment, we can see why Torvald’s reactions have such a tremendous impact upon her. Her dream has been shattered; her image of Torvald, her bargain, her hopes are all exploded illusions. Her sense of injustice is overwhelming, since she has been ready to die for him, and he is thinking only of himself. Enraged, she feels now that she does not love Torvald and that he has never loved her. Nothing he says could possibly repair the relationship; she has lost all faith in his assurances and regards him with contempt.
With the collapse of her self-effacing solution, hitherto repressed trends in Nora’s personality begin to emerge. All the time she was submitting to Torvald and her father, she was unconsciously resenting their constraints and hating them for making her self-abandonment the price of their love. She rebelled in small ways, such as sneaking macaroons, and was aware of a desire to say, in front of Torvald, “Damn! —damn! —damn it all!” (act 1). Now that there is no prize to be won by compliance, she cannot bear the thought of continuing to be treated in degrading, patronizing ways. Nor can she repress her resentment any longer. She accuses both Torvald and her father of having grievously wronged her and seems to want Torvald to suffer. When he says that he “can’t endure the thought” of parting with her, she replies: “All the more reason it should happen” (act 3).
Torvald is not the only object of Nora’s rage; she is angry with herself and full of self-hate. Her self-effacing side is horrified at the thought that she has been “living here for eight years with a stranger” and that she has “borne him three children”: “I can’t bear to think about it! I could tear myself to pieces!” (act 3). By leaving immediately she removes herself from sexual temptation and restores her pride in herself as a woman who is intimate only with a man she loves. She sees her bargain in a new light, and now, to avoid feeling that she has sold herself, she must reject Torvald’s help: “I can’t accept anything from strangers.” Torvald’s attack on her moral character exacerbates her doubts about her fitness as a mother.
A good deal of self-hate is generated also by Nora’s emerging aggressive trends. She perceives that in many ways Torvald is right when he calls her a child and tells her that she has “no understanding of the society we live in” (act 3). She had been content to be a pampered darling who was unfit to cope with the world, but now she hates her weakness and is determined to stand on her own feet. Here, too, the defense of her pride requires that she leave home. She feels that she is of no use to her children partly because she is so childlike herself. Nora defends herself against her self-hate by putting the whole blame on Torvald and her father and by resolving to become different. Anything that stands in the way of her determination to change, any claim of love or duty, she ruthlessly rejects: “This is something I must do.”
It seems likely that Nora becomes aggressive, rather than wallowing in self-pity and despair, because her earlier experience of working has given her a feeling that she can earn money like a man. Without this in her background, she might have reacted quite differently to the collapse of her romance. As it is, she gives up her belief in the miraculous power of love and transfers her expansive pride from Torvald to herself. She is going to prove that she is as good as a man and does not need anybody to take care of her! She has very little sense of what she is going to do, but she must escape the dependency she now so despises. Her belief in Torvald seems to have been replaced by a faith in the magic power of her will.
Aggressive trends are not the only hitherto suppressed components of Nora’s personality to surface at the end. A person living in a suffocating environment like Nora’s is bound to develop tendencies toward detachment, to have strong urges to run away, to get free of the constant pressure on her thoughts and feelings. Nora insists that she must be alone if she is to “think things out” for herself. She rejects all responsibility toward others and refuses Torvald’s help partly because she is afraid of anything that will interfere with her independence: “You mustn’t feel yourself bound any more than I shall. There must be complete freedom on both sides” (act 3).