Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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). Torvald wants to write to her, but Nora anxiously pleads with him not to. She expresses no interest in hearing about the children and makes no effort to see them before she departs.

      Nora’s detachment is not only a response to past oppression but also a defense against present conflicts. She has to be callous toward her husband and children, she has to run away from them, because they threaten to rouse up her self-effacing side, of which she is now afraid. There is something decidedly cold-blooded about Nora at the end. She is not allowing herself to be aware of the complexities of her situation, to feel a sense of loss, or to experience tender emotions.

      Although part of Nora’s transformation involves the adoption of new defenses, there are signs of genuine growth. Nora has seen the severity of her self-alienation and has understood some of its causes. She wants to find herself, to discover her own thoughts and feelings, and to grow from this authentic center of her being. She sees that her humanity has been stunted and is determined to become a capable, functioning, fully responsible person. Her insistence that she has a sacred duty to herself is healthy self-assertion.

      How far Nora can grow is a question on which we can only speculate. In the absence of a supportive environment, her prospects do not seem promising. It will be very difficult for her to arrive at a true knowledge of herself and the world around her. She has made contact with previously repressed feelings, such as rage and the desire to throw off her bonds, but this is not the same thing as getting in touch with her real self. Her discovery of her self-alienation is an essential first step, but it is difficult to see how she can recognize and relinquish her defenses without help, and none is available. At the end of the play Nora is like a person in an early stage of therapy who is so afraid of losing contact with her new perceptions and so determined that nothing shall interfere with her growth that she cannot be worried about doing justice to others or caring about their feelings. It is at this stage, of course, that many marriages break up.

      If Nora continued to grow, there might be a chance for her marriage, for she would come to see both Torvald and herself more clearly. She would relinquish her over-simple perception of him as a detestable tyrant or a contemptible weakling and recognize that his defenses had complemented hers in many ways but had also been in conflict with them. Nora and Torvald have had such an intensely romantic relationship because they have satisfied each other’s neurotic needs. Nora needed to merge with a powerful, dominant male, and Torvald loved being master. She was excited by his strength and he by her weakness and dependency. She wished to be possessed and Torvald was extremely possessive. She dreamt of being cherished and protected and he of rescuing her from peril. Each was the center of the other’s existence. Torvald was as emotionally dependent on Nora as she on him; at the end, it is he who cannot bear the thought of their separation. Each was “in love” with an idealization of the other rather than with the real person.

      When Torvald’s illusory version of Nora is shattered, he cries out, “God! What an awakening!” (act 3). The play has been building toward this moment. We see from the beginning that Nora and Torvald have different attitudes toward borrowing money, social responsibility, and scrupulousness in the management of their affairs. Although she knows that Torvald is opposed to being in debt, Nora proposes that they borrow on the promise of his new job in order to splurge for Christmas. When Torvald asks what would happen if “on New Year’s Eve a tile blew off the roof and knocked my brains out,” Nora replies that under such circumstances it would not matter if she owed money (act 1). “But,” Torvald asks, “what about the people I’d borrowed from?” “Who cares about them?” replies Nora. “After all they’re just strangers.” Torvald dismisses her response as a joke, but Nora is serious. When Krogstad asks if it had not occurred to her that she was not being honest with him when he lent her money on the basis of her father’s signature, Nora answers: “I really couldn’t concern myself with that. You meant nothing to me.”

      The Helmers have not had a great deal of money because as a lawyer Torvald has refused “to handle any cases that are in the least bit—shady” (act 1). Nora tells Mrs. Linde that СКАЧАТЬ