By recovering the prolific yet unrecognized work of Victorian women for the home theatre, both as playwrights and actresses, scholarship can begin new discussions about how gender, speech, and acting work in any culturally-potent space. In particular, the influence of private theatre on fin-de-siècle public drama illuminates the unique force of the parlour play; as part of a feminine counterpublic, the private theatre acts on a more broad social level that expands to include what is seen as the more legitimate public theatre. In this context, the magnetism of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for nineteenth-century British women can be understood on a previously unacknowledged continuum with earlier female-authored parlour plays of the later decades of the nineteenth century. I will situate the reception of Ibsen by British women within the context of the similarly transgressive female-authored parlour plays which preceded and surrounded his work. Like Ibsen, the authors and actresses of these earlier home plays capitalized on their unique relation to the domestic space and the actress’s body to argue persuasively for a more empowered female role whether she has exited from the home or not.

Home theatre, just as the women-dominated audiences of Ibsen’s plays, uniquely brings about a woman-centric theatre space, where woman’s position in the home is both the foremost concern and able to be evaluated by women themselves. In both cases, this reflective and theatrical mirror provides an outlet otherwise unavailable in late nineteenth century society. While Ibsen is usually credited with first placing the domestic under evaluative surveillance, within nineteenth century British culture, I argue that women cultivated their own means of escaping or exiting the home pre-Ibsen—by acting in private theatricals, middle-class women used the acting process to suggest that acting itself could activate a more independent female identity, and become an important means of revising social codes. By analyzing the similarity of Ibsen’s themes to those in home theatricals, one can more thoroughly understand how the parlour play set the stage for Ibsen’s championing by Victorian women. Ibsen and the home dramatists share a malleable view of social mores, and use the not-so-rigid borders of self/body and parlour/stage to reconstruct a new order through theatrical realism. In this context, Nora’s “door slam heard ‘round the world’” is a cumulative thunderclap of many previous exits by amateur actresses within their own homes.

Firstly, one must realize the development of the home theatrical as an increasingly middle-class entertainment dominated by women, as both playwrights and actresses. The parlour play, a primarily aristocratic entertainment in the 1700s, evolved throughout the nineteenth century into a form of social gathering essential to the middle class. As Sarah Annie Frost wrote in her own preface to her plays in 1868:

Women made up a large contingent of the home theatrical market—both as writers and as important consumers of home theatre in the niche markets for just women or girl performers. Victorian women capitalized on the home theatre’s reputation as an arena in which women could act and not compromise respectability their femininity or dignity by appearing on a public stage.@. While some (mostly male) critics still protested about the respectability of the parlour play, popular opinion, especially by the late decades of the nineteenth century, overwhelmingly supported the parlour play as a legitimate and safe form of entertainment fully in line with the rules of propriety. At a time during which the appearance of women on public stage was still viewed with suspicion, the private theatrical became an accepted and entrenched component of popular culture.

Likewise, Ibsen’s plays, particularly A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, are associated with the overwhelming support of Victorian middle-class women, in their translations of his work, enthusiastic support through acting and putting on his plays, and in greatly outnumbering men among the seats of any theatre’s Ibsen production. Victorian scholarship—if widely hesitant to move beyond connecting women to the theatricality of the novel—has especially emphasized Ibsen’s somewhat phenomenal reception amongst women in Victorian England. As Sally Ledger explains, “[i]t would be an exaggeration—but only a small one—to claim that Ibsen invented the ‘New Woman’ in 1890s London.”@. Sally Ledger, “Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress.” From The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. Ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 79.

However, scholarship has still only reluctantly historicized his reception among the communities of women with which he found the most unequivocal support. Katherine Newey notes “it is rare for historians to comment that it was largely the work of three women which introduced Ibsen to English audiences … it was the otherwise obscure writers Catherine Ray, and Henrietta Frances Lord […] who provided the first translations, and Eleanor Marx organized the first performance of an Ibsen play as a home theatrical in Britain, as well as providing early translations of several Ibsen plays” (my emphasis).@. Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 127. Likewise, only recently has criticism recognized that to the contemporaries of actress Elizabeth Robbins, her life and work exemplified Ibsenite individualism.@. Elin Diamond, “Realism’s Hysteria,” Unmaking Mimesis, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 7. Robbins, an American-born London actress, was known for her commitment to women’s rights throughout her life, especially as shown through her theatre-writing efforts: she wrote Votes for Women!, a 1907 suffrage play, and collaboratively wrote Alan’s Wife with Florence Bell, one of the most productive parlour playwrights ever. To generalize, the formation of collectives of women around Ibsen’s work operates as a similar coalition as the type of female community formed around home theatre.

More specifically, both Ibsen and home theatre create a theatre in which women are spectators of themselves in society. Usefully among current criticism, Susan Torrey Barstow draws out the importance of the matinee performance of Ibsen’s plays in forming a reflective female community, as “a space in which female spectators could reflect on their own situation. In public, in the company of other women, matinee spectators were able to observe domestic, middle-class femininity as it was performed and critiqued”; in doing so, she provides support to what I see as the shared mission of both home theatre and Ibsen in reworking the social bonds of women with one another and their respective spaces.@. Susan Torrey Barstow, “‘Hedda is All of Us’: Late Victorian Women at the Matinee.” Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001), 387-411.. This idea, that the matinee was above all a women-centered communal space built around women’s own reflections on domesticity, but also an entertaining reprieve from domesticity’s potential banalities—are still stronger when applied to the case of the home theatricals’ relationship to Ibsen and fin-de-siecle drama. While less potentially mob-like than the matinee (and mobs certainly have a swaying social power), the more intimate, personal, and perhaps convenient nature of home performance works similarly to cultivate an environment in which theatre was an activity that hinged on the activity of women in all aspects, through its performers, writers, and audience members, and which often occurred among friends. Not only did home theatre set up Ibsen’s reception, but it made the large percentage of women at a matinee more familiar, because this was not the first time women had been brought together for a theatrical attempt at shifting gender or domestic codes. If the historicization of Ibsen’s reception is generally lacking, a logical step towards remedying this gap in knowledge is more thoroughly historicizing the women-centric theatre practices which preceded the late 1890s Ibsen explosion.

In home theatricals—which, remember, were written primarily by women—a few overwhelming trends emerge. Most theatricals writers, whether progressive or not, are clearly very interested in using the parlour play as a way to comment on appropriate social codes for women. Many times, an exaggerated Angel in the House type figure is pitted against a more independent woman; women could not only gain a sense of empowerment from the acting process itself, but this acting was clearly oriented towards getting its performers to have a belief in the New Woman as an ideal which they should adopt post-curtain. What becomes especially interesting, especially in comparing home theatricals to A Doll’s House, is the insistence of female home dramatists on using metatheatrical acting within their plays. In Ibsen’s play, as Nora explains to Mrs. Linde, (speaking of herself in the third person) “little Nora isn’t as stupid as everyone thinks.”@. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House in Four Major Plays, Ed. James MacFarlane, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. Nora is a type of actress, going in and out of her character as Helmer’s little spendthrift and “squirrel,” secretly keeping her copying job from him, but also reaching a sort of hysteria, an out-of-bodily acting through her dancing of the tarantella just before the play’s famous concluding scenes. It is almost as if the acting (especially in the release of the tarantella, an acting more controlled –or not controlled—by her rather than Helmer) is what enables the final, rational Nora, in her discussion and final exit from the home.

Similarly, in home theatricals, meta-acting occurs most often as characters within the play decide very clearly put on an act, as more aggressive and independent women, in order to get what they want. Not only does met-acting suggest something about the power of the most basic acting in any theatrical for Victorian women, but it poses acting as a useful tool to be deployed outside of the theatre. For example, in Sarah Annie Frost’s play “A Young Amazon,” the character Kate’s cousin intends to marry her, in order to secure a fortune as dictated by her uncle’s will.@. Sarah Annie Frost, “A Young Amazon,” In Amateur Theatricals and Fairy-Tale Dramas: a collection of original plays, expressly designed for drawing room performance. (New York: Dick and Fitgerald, Publishers, 1868), 38-54. Hereafter, the work is cited parenthetically in the text. To thwart this proposal, Kate strikes upon what she calls a “tip-top scheme!” and calls to Flora, her best friend, and Harry Graham, her true beloved, for “a black wig, some walnut dye, a pair of green spectacles for Flo, an immense riding whip, a pistol, a French horn” (42), upon which Flora inquires as to her sanity:

While many theatricals have female characters who act in order to gain a husband, the character Kate’s use of her devised drama for the opposite effect shows the versatility of acting as woman’s weapon—especially as it asserts her independent right of choice and action. Acting provides a means of taking back control of the courtship situation, especially presented as an escape from a more docile domesticity here; when cousin Walter is less than enthusiastic about his hair being singed off by gun-toting Kate, Kate as the young Amazon does not allow her real lover of Harry (disguised as her Irishman best friend) to stand up for her, but again takes charge:

Throughout the theatrical, Kate’s character is given the most assertive, intelligent, and aggressive lines; she clearly coordinates and directs the meta-play occurring to take back control from what otherwise would be the preordained match.

In other theatricals, women more directly have discussions with men which prefigure Nora and Helmer’s. Even the children’s theatrical At Cross Purposes is a particularly illustrative display of feminine power, when a misunderstanding arises between newlyweds: the bride Lucy sees a woman following her husband Edward and crying at her wedding ceremony. Lucy believes her husband has a lover—though the woman is really her future maid—and refuses to remain trapped in the confines of such a marriage. Slipping away unaided during their honeymoon travels, Lucy declares “I’ll get a divorce,” and stays alone in a hotel awaiting a return home.@. Carleton Britton Case, Friday afternoon dramas [Fun for Friday afternoons]: help over the hard places of the usual Friday afternoon rhetoricals: dramatic dialogues of known excellence, adapted to presentation by school boys and girls. (Chicago: Shrewesbury Publishing Co., 1917), 63. Her husband Edward assumes she cannot have run off alone: “somebody has carried her off — she was simple and innocent — somebody has made her believe I sent him for her.”@. Ibid., 64. The confrontation scene, before the truth is discovered, emphasizes Lucy’s independence. To Edward’s suggestion that she meekly followed a stranger, she replies: “What? I follow? — are you crazy? … No, sir — listen to me — It was I — myself — that left you — of my own free will.”@. Ibid., 66. Within home theatricals, the independent woman replaces the submissive follower as the ideal wife. The home theatre’s frequent use of reasoning and dialogue-oriented scenes which conclude in the New Woman’s favor, as well as the use of meta-acting as a clear womanly tool, strengthen this genre’s relationship to the Ibsenite drama.

Convincingly for my argument, Eleanor Marx, the woman who in addition to Elizabeth Robins, most maximized the effect of A Doll’s House in Britain, began her engagement with the playwright through her own home theatrical, a staged reading of the Henrietta Frances Lord translation of A Doll’s House, known as Nora. Marx, interestingly, provides more support for the easy translation of home theatre into the real woman’s life, through the parallels between her life and Nora’s, which play out even further following her acting of her home play. Eleanor Marx, best known as the beloved youngest daughter of Karl, fell in love with a man twice her age before spending most of her life in a free union with the political activist Edward Aveling; in many ways, Marx’s position as woman bound and manipulated by her ties to men parallels that of Nora, who was also the pet of her father, is involved in an intrigue with the older Dr. Rank, and is in a less-than-mutual marriage to husband Helmer. Rather than this overestimating the importance of Ibsen’s work within Marx’s life, the exceptional nature of her commitment to his work in a life otherwise dominated by political causes, as well as the eventual end result of her unraveling relationship with Aveling, testify to Ibsen’s heroine’s relatability and the extent to which the private acting of his work (or work from a similar vein as in the home theatre) can entrench itself into a woman’s real life.

Marx was so invested in Ibsen’s message for the middle-class woman, that she learned Norwegian to translate his work, and—in her only work of fiction, despite producing countless political tracts—co-wrote A Doll’s House Revisited with Israel Zangwill.@. See Branislaw Jakovljevic’s “Shattered Back Wall: Performative Utterance of A Doll’s House” for a thorough treatment of Marx’s translations of Ibsen. This parody corrected A Doll’s House based on the comments of the play’s detractors, to show the true absurdity of a version in which his play “adhered to English commonsense,” but unlike the earlier well known Breaking a Butterfly by Herman and Jones, professed to stay true to Ibsen’s intention. Unlike the Herman and Jones revision, which substitutes entirely new characters to change the play almost beyond recognition, Marx and Zangwill’s play largely works by reversing the position of Nora and Helmer in their dialogue—Marx’s Revisited Nora becomes more and more melodramatic when Helmer confronts her; she “sobs more and more hysterically” and “rises and stands with clasped hands” and reluctantly obeying her husband’s command to stay away from “leans her head against door of the children’s room, then rushes hurriedly into the study.” Helmer, meanwhile, pays off Krogstad to ensure his silence about the forgery, in a gesture of manliness (“we’re men—not a couple of hysterical women”), and convinces Krogstad to subdue Mrs. Linde: “Of course I shall stop Christina working. I will make her my true helpmate by making her dependent upon me.” When Krogstad reveals Nora’s copying for money to her husband, she again reverts to the sensational and melodramatic: “peeping in at the door” to exclaims asides of “Saved!” or “Heavens! Lost!” Marx’s reworking or sequel, one of many spawned from Ibsen’s original, was published in the March 1891 edition of Time, a London socialist monthly, as well as sold separately as a pamphlet.@. Bernard Dukore, “Karl Marx’s Youngest Daughter and “A Doll’s House.” Theatre Journal 42.3 (Oct. 1990), 309. This version, so devoted to the juxtaposition of melodramatic and realistic, the passive housewife and independent woman, is presented similarly to the manner in which parlour plays were distributed to the British public, as they were often, besides existing in their own volumes, produced as pamphlets or in periodicals. Additionally, the presentation of the overdone domestic and melodramatic woman as a way to mockingly show her opposite, the working New Woman as more viable, is a common tactic of the parlour play. Thus, Marx’s and Zangwill’s Revisited is not only a critique of Ibsen’s criticizers, but also a format suggestive of home theatrical’s most common method of advancing a more independent conception of womanhood. While this is demonstrative of just how closely allied Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and its resulting ripple-effect sequels are to women’s home theatre, Marx herself also put on A Doll’s House as a home theatrical in her own home eight years earlier.

Marx and her common-law husband Edward Aveling held a theatrical party in their home to perform A Doll’s House in 1883, with invitees ranging among the most important social reformers of London.@. Ibid., 109. To Newey, Marx’s letter to Havelock Ellis, inviting him to her production, “is often cited as one of the defining moments of Ibsen’s cultural translation into the English theatre.”@. Newey, 131. In the home theatre production itself, Eleanor played Nora, Aveling played Helmer, William Morris’s daughter May was Mrs. Linde, and George Bernard Shaw was Krogstad.@. Cited in Ledger, 80, and Newey, 131, and Branislaw Jakovljevic, “Shattered Back Wall: Performative Utterance of A Doll’s House.” Theatre Journal 54 (2002), 447. For Marx, the play had a very real reference to her own life. Newey has noted that Victorian “critics have commented on the irony of Marx and Aveling playing opposite each other, ‘ convinced that Ibsen’s ‘miracle of miracles’ had already happened in their domestic Eden.’”@. Newey, 132, quote is from ’Drury-Lane Theatre,’ The Times, 7 October 1834, 2. Yet, Branislaw Jakovljevic, in his argument for the performative effect of Ibsen’s play, realizes that a sort of horrific ‘door slamming’ follows this acting. The couple co-authored The Woman Question, which denounces the hypocrisy of English marriages. Meanwhile, Aveling, still keeping up his free union with Marx, married an actress under his playwright pseudonym, a secret which he kept for two years. After receiving a letter exposing Aveling’s secret life, Marx, according to Jakovlevic, “summoned him home, and a ‘stormy interview’ followed. He left. Eleanor did not drown: she had a bath, dressed in white, retired to bed, and drank chloroform mixed with prussic acid. Eleanor, the reversed Nora, left a note: ‘Dear, it will soon all be over now. My last word to you is the same that I have said during all these long, sad years – love.’”@. Jakovljevic, 448. Marx demonstrates not only the applicability of A Doll’s House to home plays through that first reading in her own home, but also the intense effect of the play in relation to and as relevant to its audience’s lives.

Marx was not the only woman to feel direct effects from Ibsen’s work; both parlour plays and A Doll’s House manipulate the potential of realistic theatre in order to cultivate a shift in the cultural codes surrounding women. The most common setting of the parlour play is the parlour itself; the ease of spatially transitioning from the real to acting moments potentially enables more real-life carryover of “lessons taught” by the theatrical, as it makes the theatrical itself more likely to deal with issues that would actually arise in a parlour-type social arena. This realistic setting is crucial to Elin Diamond’s argument that Ibsen’s realism positions the spectator to verify the truths of the realistic drama: “Hedda Gabler produces a subject who sees, and reproduces, a real relation between the signifier-signified-referent.”@. Diamond, 7. However, these truths are only available to be verified if they have some referent in the spectator’s life; as Diamond quotes the actress Elizabeth Robbins, “How should men understand Hedda when they didn’t understand her in the person of their wives, their daughters, their woman friends. One lady of our acquaintance, married and not noticeably unhappy, said … ‘Hedda is all of us.’”@. Ibid., 6. By permitting real middleclass women a chance to actually act as Heddas in their own plays, the parlour drama expands and deepens this feeling of theatrical reflection.

The home as a setting clearly activates the real power of A Doll’s House as well, which like the parlour play similarly conflates traditional separations of space. Una Chaudhuri explains the home as both site of compulsion and site of difference; “this contradictory conditionality of the figure of the home—its status as both shelter and prison, security and entrapment—is crucial to its dramatic meaning.”@. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 8. Certainly this was a factor in home theatricals, whose dramatic signification was forced to shape itself around the home as a setting, and which one could ‘exit’ but yet ‘not exit.’ When a character exits the “home” within the home play, the amateur actor was still confined to the actual home in which the play was occurring. This is quite unlike the stage, in which the “home” is confined and limited to the actual space on the stage. In some ways then, the home seems never more a prison, but in others, this presents ever new possibilities for redefining cultural norms to carry into the “real” home (because of the lack of exit). This affects the relationship between the home theatrical setting and the stage on which Nora performs. Home theatre—in which actors could become regular spectators after the conclusion of their part—allowed middle class British women to bring their non-exit mentality to A Doll’s House, a parallel reinforced through the shared home setting. Nora does not leave the theatre of action, but continues to be ‘out there’ somewhere.

                                                                     Works Cited

Barstow, Susan Torrey. “Hedda is All of Us”: Late Victorian Women at the Matinee.” Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001): 387-411

Case, Carleton Britton. Friday afternoon dramas [Fun for Friday afternoons]: help over the hard places of the usual Friday afternoon rhetoricals: dramatic dialogues of known excellence, adapted to presentation by school boys and girls. Chicago: Shrewesbury Publishing Co., 1917.

Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Diamond, Elin. “Realism’s Hysteria.” In Unmaking Mimesis. New York: Routledge, 1997: 3-39.

Dukore, Bernard F. “Karl Marx’s Youngest Daughter and “A Doll’s House.” Theatre Journal 42.3 (Oct. 1990): 308-321.

Frost, Sarah Annie. Amateur Theatricals and Fairy-Tale Dramas. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, Publishers, 1868.

Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. In Four Major Plays, Ed. James MacFarlane. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998: 1-88.

Jakovljevic, Branislav. “Shattered Back Wall: Performative Utterance of A Doll’s House.” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 431-448.

Ledger, Sally. “Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress.” The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002: 79-94.

McLellan, David. “Marx , (Jenny Julia) Eleanor (1855–1898).” David McLellan In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP.

Newey, Katherine. Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.