Torvald's Question: Italo Svevo and James Joyce Stage Modern Masculinity

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• Torvald's Question:Italo Svevo and James Joyce Stage Modern Masculinity
• Christine Froula (bio)

Nora! Nora! … Empty. She's gone. (A sudden hope leaps in him.) The greatest miracle—?!

Torvald in Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House (1879)

I have peeped into a great many doll's houses; and I have found that the dolls are not all female.

Nora in George Bernard Shaw, "Still After the Doll's House" (1890)

The Doll's House … has caused the greatest revolution in our time in the most important relationship there is—that between men and women. … Ibsen has been the greatest influence on the present generation. … His ideas have become part of our lives.

James Joyce to Arthur Power, Conversations with Joyce (1920s)

When Nora Helmer departs Torvald's doll house to educate herself as an adult human being, she leaves behind a paragon of nineteenth-century masculine "honor" whose questions as to what he must do, how he must change, she cannot answer.¹ Whereas most commentary on A Doll House assumes that Ibsen leaves Torvald no escape,² this essay highlights Torvald's echo of Nora's word "miracle" in his hopeful question at the play's open end and argues that two of Ibsen's heirs— the Triestine writer Italo Svevo (1861–1928) and his English tutor and literary soulmate the Irish James Joyce (1882–1941)—pursue Torvald's question in plays that stage crises of modern masculinity in parallel with Nora's awakening. Read comparatively, Ibsen's A Doll House (1879), [End Page 229] Svevo's A Husband (1895/1903), and Joyce's Exiles (1913–1915) embody a dramatic dialogue on freeing all the characters—Torvalds and Noras alike—from an antiquated socio-economic sex/gender system. Taking Ibsen's critical-realist dramaturgy into daring new territory, Svevo and Joyce stage avant-garde psychodramas in social worlds that put traditional masculinity—formed by man-made laws, rights, values, freedom, conscious and unconscious assumptions, prerogatives, and motives—in tension with Ibsen's revolutionary modernity. Their diagnostic dramas of toxic-masculinity-with-a-good-prognosis distill from Torvald's question a Shavian quintessence of post-Ibsenism that illuminates Ibsen's subsumption of feminism within the dialectical vision of human possibility that Nora's departure opens.

Ibsen's Pharmakon: "the greatest miracle—?!"

The shock waves sent through Europe and the world by the 1879 Copenhagen premiere of Ibsen's A Doll House (Et Dukkehjem) reverberate in innumerable debates and interpretations, from the play's first reviews to its 2023 Broadway adaptation.³ In "Ibsen's first fully modernist play," Nora catches the light as an enduring touchstone for women's struggles to claim full humanity in the private and public realms.⁴ Yet she exists with "other people in the great dolls' house of the social world," where all the characters interact in "painful change, creative accommodation, or apathetic resignation."⁵ In the 1890 story "Still After the Doll's House" by Ibsen's great champion George Bernard Shaw (who "turned playwright in order to carry on Ibsen's work"),⁶ a future Nora observes that "it is not always the woman who is sacrificed"; "I have peeped into a great many doll's houses; and I have found that the dolls are not all female."⁷ Shaw lauded Courtenay Thorpe's 1897 Torvald, played with unprecedented "passion" to "overwhelming" effect as no longer "an object lesson in lord-of-creationism" but a "fellow-creature blindly wrecking his happiness."⁸ The next year, addressing the Norwegian Association for the Cause of Women, Ibsen resisted the reduction of his play's world to one character or one sex. More "poet" than "social philosopher," he felt he "must decline the honor consciously to have worked for the cause of women. I am not even quite clear what the cause of women really is. For me it has appeared [End Page 230] to be the cause of human beings. … My task has been to portray human beings."⁹

The play's long reception and Nora's many eponymous adaptations¹⁰ tend to obscure the fact that Torvald speaks last: "Nora! Nora! … Empty. She's gone. (A sudden hope leaps in him.) The greatest miracle...