Henrik Ibsen

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Henrik Ibsen with lifetime years 1828–1906 and credits R. Farquharson Sharp for the English translation of A Doll’s House. Martin Adamson and David Widger receive digital credits. The text is a play, so character names and replies are essential to interpretation. The selected passages are spoken by Nora in Act III. This catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the electronic translation; the underlying print publisher is not specified.

Nora’s claim to be a reasonable human being answers Helmer’s insistence on her duties as wife and mother. She also argues that she has duties to herself and must learn to think independently. In the other selected speech, she says Torvald arranged their life according to his tastes and compares her marriage with being treated as a doll-child by her father. Her uncertainty about whether she shared those tastes exposes the difficulty of separating preference from performance. These are connected dramatic speeches, not Ibsen’s personal account of marriage. Both complete extracts match the checked translation.

Reading this voice

Read the final exchange with both Nora’s and Helmer’s replies visible. Ask how duties, self-education and chosen tastes interact. Preserve Nora as the speaker when using either extract outside the play.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.
• You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you - or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which - I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.