A Post-feminist and Evolutionist Reading of A Doll’s House

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House has spawned a wealth of differing interpretations over the 130 years since its first performance, being analyzed from feminist, anti-feminist, Marxist, Freudian, post-structuralist and realist perspectives, among others. This paper, while acknowledging the play’s original impact and significance in terms of women’s rights and social restrictions in general, attempts to place Ibsen’s play in a contemporary context by re-reading it from a postfeminist, evolutionist perspective. This dual approach redefines Nora as an individual who has adapted to a strict, hierarchical, male-dominated society by devising survival strategies such as flattery, control, deception and denial. Rather than praising her as a martyr for womankind or condemning her as a selfish hysteric, this approach documents and comments on the interactions of the play’s human subjects with the physical environment in which they find themselves, seeing them all as organisms adapting to their environments in order to achieve the basic evolutionary needs of survival, reproduction, parenting and kinship, and group living. While Helmer, Mrs. Linde and Krogstad prove reasonably successful in achieving these goals however, it is suggested that Nora’s ‘life-lie’ strategies prove ineffective when she is faced with exposure, and that her denial and refusal to compromise in the final scene (as well as wishing for a ’miracle’) are new, untried strategies which are potentially unsuccessful, since they frustrate the evolutionary needs of Nora and the people around her and contradict the post-feminist need to rehabilitate the woman as a homemaker.