Contextual Understanding (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Context involves facts and details about the author’s life and the socio-, political, historical and cultural realities of a given time and place. In each of these realities, you can consider how culture and identity influence the author’s choices in how they produce their text and the audience’s perspective and interpretation of those texts. 

Knowing and understanding contextual details can also provide insight into the themes and purposes of texts and allow you to make informed and convincing analytical claims. 

Authorial context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Readers, Writers, Texts asks you to reflect on how meaning is constructed and interpreted. In your Theory of Knowledge (ToK) class, you will likely have had discussions on how meaning in the Arts is formed through a dialogue between the artist and the audience. As such, it can be useful to know details of the author’s life to infer reasons for their artistic choices as readers interpret their work years after their death.

• Ibsen was raised in a middle-class town in Norway:

  • He grew up witnessing the social and working lives of the professional elite and bourgeoisie in 19th-century Norway

  • His father experienced financial problems and damage to his professional reputation later in life

• Ibsen spent almost 30 years living in Italy and Germany:

  • However, he set his plays in Norway and explored it from an insider-outsider perspective 

• Ibsen supported the individual over the state and declared himself a humanist 

Social and historical context

The social and historical context is the events, changes, mores and values of the time and place in which the text was written. A Doll’s House was published in Norway in 1879. Some key details of that time and place are explored below to help aid our analysis of how Ibsen represented and challenged the society in which his audience lived.

Victorian societal norms

Norway had gained independence from Britain in 1814, but the Victorian norms and values remained.

• Reputation and decorum were highly valued:

  • We see this when Torvald chooses reputation over loyalty to Nora; he adheres to the social norms rather than his own feelings

• There was an ethos of separate spheres for men and women:

  • Nora’s attempts to have agency in financial and legal spheres are a transgression that is the source of all tension and obstacles in the play

• The family was deemed an institution of morality and decency:

  • Nora’s decision to reject this institution in favour of her independence and discovery of the self is monumental

Gender

Gender roles were rigid, clearly defined and widespread, however, change was on the horizon.

• Under Norwegian law and the Napoleonic Code, women were subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands:

  • A married woman’s wealth belonged to her husband, she could not work outside the home, her husband (or father before she married) controlled assets and decisions about her and the children

• Gender roles are clearly defined and rigid:

  • Torvald’s anger at Nora’s forgery is more than anger at her dishonesty; it is anger at her rejection and misunderstanding of his authority and control over financial transactions

  • Through Nora’s questioning of the law that punishes her for doing something “good”, Ibsen asks the audience to reflect on embedded social and legal norms and who they punish and why

• Women were valued for docility, obedience and beauty, but were denied agency and assumed to be ignorant of issues beyond the domestic sphere: 

  • Kristine shows Nora alternate ways of being a woman and navigating society

  • Her prioritising of truth over peace (exemplified by her decision to allow the forgery to be revealed) reflects Ibsen’s desire to make art that represented reality and spoke truth

• Men were valued for being breadwinners, responsible for the protection and well-being of their family and upholding their reputation:

  • Ibsen’s portrayal of the Helmers’ failure to uphold these norms is important as the audience is invited to sympathise with both protagonists

  • Ibsen critiques not the individuals who fail, but the society that demands they deny their true selves to conform

Darwinism

Charles Darwin had published his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Darwinism challenged established religious thinking and argued that species evolve through adaptation to their environment.

• The audience understand the characters’ environment through the details of the setting and the characterisation of the protagonists within these settings:

  • The house and office are detailed through stage directions: furnishings, decor and the motif of open and closed doors suggest spheres of control and gender roles

  • The characters (e.g., Nora and Kristine) are influenced by this environment and must adapt to survive within it

Literary context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Intertextuality asks us to think about how texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types and how conventions evolve. Ibsen’s play is an interesting text with which to think about these questions. It is classed as a realist and a naturalist drama and Ibsen made important authorial choices to deviate from dramatic genre norms at the time, leading to him being known as “the father of modern realism”.

Realism

Naturalism

Context of reception

In the AoE Time and Space, questions revolve around how audiences “then and now” or “there and here” might read and interpret texts differently. Paper 2 questions may ask you to compare texts that make you think about this and in the IO, you might compare how two different texts in different contexts explore the same global issue; therefore, it is useful to know and understand how the audience of the time reacted to Ibsen’s work. 

Audience reception

• The play was first performed in Copenhagen in 1879 and received a mixture of praise and criticism

• When it was first performed in Germany in 1880, the actress playing Nora found the ending so shocking that she refused to perform it: 

  • Ibsen had to write an alternative ending in which Nora does not leave 

• Ibsen’s implicit criticism of marriage and his choice to write the ending as he did went against the religious and moral values of the time, making the play scandalous and controversial

• Nora’s reason for leaving, i.e., “to find herself”, was an unheard-of notion, especially for women: 

  • The shock was heightened by the fact that Nora is a mother, so she not only leaves her husband, but she leaves her children 

  • This went against beliefs that women were instinctually and genetically made for the roles of wife and mother 

• However, there was a growing movement for women’s rights and suffrage over the following decades and Ibsen’s play became increasingly popular

Exploring critics

Below are two notable critics who have commented on A Doll’s House:

Ronald Gray: “Ronald Gray’s Ibsen: A Dissenting View” (1977) 

• Ronald Gray, dramatist and literary critic, argues that A Doll’s House “cynically” exploits “popular drama”

• Gray believes Ibsen’s presentation of Torvald is “grotesque” and reduces the pathos of the tragedy inherent in his characterisation

• Gray’s criticisms centre around the invasive themes depicted in each scene and through each character:

  • He argues that the play’s themes are presented too obviously, which takes away from a subtler portrayal of domestic life

• He suggests Nora’s character lacks substance and is a villainous portrayal of a melodramatic female:

  • He says of Nora’s departure, “Her leave-taking” is “too theatrical”

• He argues that Nora shows “no sign of having seen the kind of man Helmer is”:

  • He suggests Torvald’s character is too exaggerated to be taken seriously

• Gray argues that Nora’s flirtation with Dr Rank, something her friend notices immediately, hints at the evident façade of a happy marriage:

  • He says that it hides a wilder nature beneath her demure obedience

Joan Templeton: “The Doll House Backlash” (1989)

• Jean Templeton’s critique explores the play as a feminist work

• Specifically, she considers it in terms of what she believes is a reductionist interpretation of the play as only a feminist work

• Templeton considers whether Ibsen “meant to write a play about the highly topical subject of women’s rights”:

  • She believes, instead, it is a play that speaks a “truth of the human soul”

• As part of a modern backlash to feminism, Templeton’s research suggests the play was used as a form of “propaganda” for feminists

• In her work, Ibsen’s Women, written in 2015, she says that the play can be considered as universal and canonical, as well as feminist:

  • She states that the “power of A Doll’s House lies not beyond but in its feminism”

  • She goes on to suggest that the play can be considered universal through its themes of “equality in the relation between women and men”

• Templeton praises the characterisation of Nora as one who “embodies the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life”:

  • In this way, she views her as relatable and likeable

Sources:

Ibsen (H.), A Doll’s House, Project Gutenberg (no date)

Kearns (M.) and Goldman, (E.), (1988) 'The social significance of modern drama,' The Antioch Review, 46(1), p. 118