The Quiet Feminist: Rational Agency in Mrs. Linde and the Critical Overvaluation of Nora’s Awakening in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Abstract

This paper revisits the long held critical assumption in literature that Nora Helmer is the only genuine feminist protagonist in A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (first performed in 1879). Critics and scholars have, on one hand, been too enchanted by Nora's sudden leap of feminist consciousness, and particularly her breathtaking door-slamming gesture at the end of the play. On the other hand, they have overlooked the more solid and positive feminist act of agency displayed by Kristine Linde (Mrs. Linde). This paper argues that Nora's door-slamming gesture, although thrillingly theatrical and iconographic, is a negative, reactive type of feminist act, a gesture of repudiation without a concrete, proactive vision for the future. In contrast, Mrs. Linde's agency throughout the play signifies a positive, constructive type of feminism. She achieves economic self-sufficiency independently, practices rational and cautious calculation, and re-establishes her interpersonal relationship (particularly with Krogstad) on an equal footing. This paper employs materialist feminist theory which concerns with women's material conditions and circumstances, performs speech act analysis on the characters' utterances, and engages with the history of critical reception and interpretation. Through the above-mentioned critical approaches, this paper indicates that the preference for Nora by the critics is rooted in the deeply embedded cultural predilection in society for appreciating more spectacular, radical, and radicalized signification of liberation, and overlooking laborious, banal, and painstaking work for solid and sustained autonomy. This paper does not intend to diminish the significance of Nora or downplay her role in the play. Instead, this paper attempts to strengthen the critical debate, arguing that Mrs. Linde offers a more radically material, potentially transformative and more materially grounded feminist agency in the play. The implications of this paper include furthering the recent re-assessment of Ibsen's attitudes toward gender and women and intervening into feminist literary critical debates by problematizing a distinction between symbolic liberation and material emancipation.