586924

research-article2015
JES0010.1177/0047244115586924Journal of European StudiesWang

Journal of European Studies

The movement of the letter 2015, Vol. 45(3) 173­–188

© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0047244115586924
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Quan Wang
Beihang University

Abstract
The letter plays a decisive role in A Doll House. Condensing the triple meanings of a signifier, an
epistle, and the Law into the letter, Ibsen has shown how the movement of the letter decides the
subjectivity of the characters. Nora’s life first is determined by a forged signature (‘the Name of
the Father’), then its later metamorphosis into the letters, and finally the whole Symbolic Order.
The itinerary of the letter also shapes the identities of other protagonists who have adopted a
concordant negative attitude towards the letter. These frustrated responses towards the letter
reveal Ibsen’s postmodernist scepticism about language: the ontological uncertainty over linguistic
determination of human subjectivity.

Keywords
A Doll House, the Imaginary, Jacques Lacan, the letter, miracle, postmodernism, the Real,
subjectivity, the Symbolic

Nora: (A letter falls in the mailbox; then Krogstad’s footsteps are heard, dying away down
a flight of stairs. Nora gives a muffled cry and runs over toward the sofa table. A short
pause.) ‘In the mailbox. (Slips warily over to the hall door.) It’s lying there. Torvald,
Torvald – now we’re lost!’ (Ibsen, 1965)

It is that the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their
destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts
and social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex, and that
willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and
caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier. (Lacan, 1988: 43–4)

Corresponding author:
Quan Wang, English Department, Beihang University, Xueyuan Road 37, Haidian District, Beijing,
100191, China.
Email: wangquanheming@126.com
174 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House has eternal artistic appeal, and even the letters in the play
have stimulated increasing critical attention. Cary M. Mazer’s ‘Ibsen and the well-made
play’ maintains that Ibsen writes ‘the obligatory scene’ first, then ‘prepares his situations’;
the drama plot ‘hinges on the timing of the delivery of Krogstad’s letter and on the moment
when Torvald reads its contents’ (1985: 72). Likewise, Daniel Plung holds that A Doll
House meets the major criteria of well-made plays: contrivance, secrets, conflict. Ibsen
relies on ‘the most routinely employed contrivance’ of letters to propel actions (2006:
125) and manipulates access to the letters (When will the letters be discovered? By whom?
At what place?) to build up the climatic tension of Helmer’s drastic responses precipitated
by Krogstad’s two letters. Ross Shideler (1997) broadens the topic. Shideler reads the
signature as the Lacanian ‘Name of the Father’, and interprets it as the symbol of ‘dying
or dead patriarchal figures’ (1997: 284) against whom Nora’s father and husband fail to
provide any protection. The dead Captain Alving in Ghosts, with ‘his text, his language’,
plagues and lives within Mrs Alving and the children (1997: 291). And Oswald’s final call
to the sun vaguely suggests ‘a gynocentric tradition, a new discourse’ in which women
can express their subjectivity (1997: 294). Shideler’s reading is debatable for two reasons:
first, the Lacanian concept of ‘the Name of the Father,’ which is synonymous with lan-
guage, is not anti-patriarchal and thus incompatible with being ‘a symbol for the destruc-
tive elements of the current patriarchal society’ (1997: 279); second, Shideler’s
‘gynocentric’ solution to patriarchal dilemmas is far-fetched and unnecessary in Ibsen’s
problem plays, whose open endings compel us to ponder problems rather than solutions.
In this respect, Anne Marie Rekdal (2002) provides a more convincing Lacanian interpre-
tation of the play. First, Nora finds her subjectivity in ‘Helmer’s mirror as a playful, chat-
tering subject, as bird, squirrel and seductress’ (2002: 156); then, Mrs Linde, who functions
as a Lacanian psychoanalyst in ‘the therapeutic conversations’, enables Nora to acknowl-
edge her pleasure in transgressing patriarchal laws (2002: 162); finally, Nora’s subjectiv-
ity is expressed in the ‘female jouissance’ of the tarantella, which is a sublimation of death
from the Lacanian Real. Despite her new contribution to Ibsen scholarship, Rekdal’s read-
ing calls for critical re-examination. Theoretically, the Lacanian mirror image, reserved
for the dual (M)other relations between mother and infant in the Imaginary, is not appli-
cable to Rekdal’s interpretation of Helmer and Nora, the husband and wife relationship in
the Symbolic. Besides, the purpose of a Lacanian therapeutic dialogue is to restore nor-
malized (Oedipalized) patriarchal subjectivity to the analysand and reintegrate him into
the Symbolic, which is incongruent with Rekdal’s establishment of Nora as a subject who
‘articulates’ her patriarchal transgression and ‘challenge[s] the Law and the Name-of-the-
Father’ (2002: 160). Thematically, Rekdal has not touched the influence of the letter and
the language on characters’ subjectivity. Toril Moi (2006) has made a fruitful investigation
into this aspect. The idealist scripts of ‘female sacrifice and male rescue’ (2006: 257)
constitute Nora’s subjectivity, and the critique of idealism entwined with everyday theat-
ricality and gender analysis establishes Ibsen’s modernism. Moi narrows language down
to romantic stereotypes and fails to see Ibsen’s postmodernism. This paper argues that the
movement of the letter determines the subjectivity of the characters and reveals Ibsen’s
postmodernism.
The article employs ‘the letter’ to cover its triple senses. A letter, apart from its ordi-
nary sense of a signifier and an epistle, is also woven into the connotations of ‘the Law’
Wang 175

and ‘what’s written in books’. All together there are six letters in A Doll House: ‘two
calling cards’ from Dr Rank, a dismissal letter from Helmer, and three letters from
Krogstad which orient the pivotal development of the play and consequently become the
focus of this paper. Among these three letters, the first letter, the ‘legal paper’ containing
Nora’s imitation of her father’s signature, is a signifier symbolizing the law of ‘the Name
of the Father’. ‘It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the
Symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the
figure of the law’ (Lacan, 1968: 41). The second letter, an explanation of the blackmail
demand, represents an epistle. The third letter, a combination of the two previous letters,
has triple meanings: a signifier, a letter and the law. The threefold representation, towards
the end of the play, is condensed into ‘what’s written in books’. In other words, there is
a close association between God the Father, the Word of God, and fathers and their
words; therefore fathers exemplify the authority of social laws and patriarchal texts. Our
culture, built on patriarchal systems and expressed in language, covers every aspect of
our lives and shapes our subjectivity. A Doll House vividly demonstrates the shaping
power of language on our identity. Krogstad’s first presentation of the signature ‘note’
propels the second letter to arrive in the Helmers’ mailbox, and culminates in the burning
of the third letter. The letter is the linchpin of the drama and its movement has put the
characters into different positions and constituted their subjectivity. Ibsen explores the
efficacy of a signifier upon the determination of the protagonists’ identity: how does the
movement of the letter decide their positions? Can they transcend linguistic determina-
tion? To his uneasiness, the anti-humanism nature of signifiers deprives subjects of their
corporeality. Paradoxically, language enables us to represent our general humanity but it
also cancels out our humanity. Ibsen lays bare his honest confrontation with the eternal
plight of ‘mankind in general’. The ontological uncertainty over the incompatibility
between linguistic expressions and human subjectivity is Ibsen’s postmodernity, his met-
aphysical problem of ‘the description of humanity’ (Ibsen, 2004b [1898]: 437).
Ibsen investigates the relationship between language and subjectivity in A Doll House
in an artistic way, but Jacques Lacan discusses the issue in a scientific way, and his psy-
choanalytical reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The purloined letter’ sheds much light on
our understanding of this murky point. In the first scene of Poe’s story, the Queen is sud-
denly interrupted by the entry of the King from whom she wishes to conceal an implicat-
ing letter. In her improvisation, the Queen puts the letter on the table, which escapes the
King’s attention, but not the eyes of the Minister who replaces it with a facsimile. In the
second scene, the Prefect of Police has ferreted about in the Minister’s house for the
stolen letter and in his futile efforts, he turns to Dupin the Detective. Arriving at the
Minister’s abode, the Detective immediately heeds an inadvertently placed letter on the
mantelpiece and skilfully regains it. Lacan discovers three positions in each scene. The
first glance sees nothing, like the King and Prefect. The subject in the second position
notices the blindness of the first glance, but imagines himself ‘invisible’ to others: the
Queen, then the Minister. ‘The third sees the first two glances leave what should be hid-
den exposed to whomever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin’ (Lacan, 1988:
32). These three positions, corresponding to the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic,
represent three different stages of the growing process of subjects. To put it in a reductive
way, the Real is associated with infants in their first few months who do not yet have any
 176

1. Signature 2. Death 3. Miracle

Real: Father Real: Nora Real: Krogstad

ė ė
Imaginary: Nora Symbolic: Krogstad Imaginary: Krogstad Symbolic: Kristine Imaginary: Kristine Symbolic: Nora

The movement of the letter

Journal of European Studies 45(3) 
Wang 177

concept of self, the Imaginary is about children between six and 18 months whose blur-
ring concept of self is locked in the imaginary duality of (M)other, and the Symbolic is
about the subjects who acquire binary structures of language. These three key concepts,
the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, constitute not only the Lacanian theory of
subjectivity but also the core of his philosophical edifice. Without exaggeration, Lacan’s
major works, Écrits and Le Séminaire, are an extended explanation of these three con-
cepts and their complicated relationships. Lacan’s analysis of the movement of the letter
in ‘The purloined letter’ demonstrates that language, in its metamorphosis of the letter,
has determined human subjectivity by putting subjects in different positions. Thus,
Lacan’s theory can greatly enrich our understanding of Ibsen’s postmodern investigation
into the linguistic determination of human subjectivity.
In a similar way, the letter, as the thematic backbone of A Doll House, has orches-
trated all the significant elements together. The first letter about Nora’s forged signature
naturally leads to her obsession with death, which seems to be her only alternative to
dealing with the exposure of the second letter to Helmer. The third letter, the continuation
of the second letter, shatters her long-cherished miracle, and gives rise to her finally leav-
ing home. In short, the displacement of the signifier has determined the subjectivity of
each participant, as is demonstrated in the following diagrams.

A signifier: the forged signature

First of all, the forged signature plunged the characters into action. At the opening of the
play, Nora basks in the material prospect of her husband’s promotion to the position of
bank manager, with ‘stacks and stacks of money’ (Ibsen, 1965: 50).1 Her enthralled
sense of a ‘light and happy’ life is further amplified by the bitter experience of ‘ship-
wrecked’ Kristine who has struggled for survival for years. The smooth unfolding of the
plot is altered by a letter, which initiates a peripeteia, and ushers us into a series of
dramatic conflicts. ‘Krogstad: And now we come to a curious thing – (Taking out a
paper) which I simply cannot comprehend’ (65). A clarification of the background is
much needed. To save her ‘deathly ill’ husband, Nora turns to Krogstad for a loan, who
demands that her father’s sign as guarantor. Her father is dying, so Nora counterfeits her
father’s signature, although the father knows nothing about it. However, it is ‘his’ signi-
fier that situates the ignorant father into the blind position of the Lacanian triad: like the
inadvertent King in Poe’s story, the father sees nothing. Moreover, the same signifier
also violently inserts Nora into the Imaginary and deceives her into believing her own
invisibility. At the Imaginary stage, a child still regards himself as part of his mother
whose occasional absence makes him feel that the mother is (M)other. The chief feature
of the Imaginary is the subject’s self-delusion, like ‘the ostrich attempting to shield
itself from danger’ by burying its head in the sand (Lacan, 1988: 32). Nora has forged
the signature and borrowed the money, and it has become her secret bliss during the past
eight years. However, Krogstad, at the bottom of the loan note, set a trap for her. Nora’s
father ‘was supposed to sign down there. / Nora: Supposed to? He did sign’ (Ibsen,
1965: 65). Nora thought she has concealed the forgery so well that nobody would dis-
cover the truth, so she purposefully stresses the distinction between the hypothetical
‘supposed to?’ and the emphatic ‘He did sign’. Her self-delusion is further accentuated
178 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

by the following dialogue. ‘Krogstad: Your father would have dated his signature him-
self. Do you remember that? / Nora: Yes, I think – ’ The blackmailer goes one step fur-
ther. ‘Then I gave you the note for you to mail to your father. Isn’t that so? / Nora: Yes’
(65). All these affirmative replies suggest her clinging to her imaginary secrecy, confi-
dent in her unexposed concealment.
In addition to Nora’s Imaginary position, the letter also places Krogstad in the
Symbolic in the first scene. The Symbolic position in Lacan’s theory is often assigned to
psychoanalysts, who not only read the imaginations of their patients but also analyse
their thinking patterns. ‘Taking out a paper,’ Krogstad reveals his psychological penetra-
tion of Nora’s mind. He first points out the inconsistency of dates between the father’s
death and the signature date: ‘Isn’t that curious, Mrs Helmer? (Nora is silent.) Can you
explain it to me? (Nora remains silent)’ (66). Krogstad, in his tactful disclosure, observes
Nora’s responses very closely: first Nora is silent, then he pushes a little more, and Nora
remains silent. From the static ‘is’ to the dynamic ‘remains’, he ascertains her forgery.
Like Dupin in Lacan’s analysis, Krogstad is not only a keen observer but also a discern-
ing analyst in the first scene. If he had pointed out Nora’s counterfeit straightforwardly,
she would have denied the falsification and made his blackmail much more difficult.
Thus, Krogstad has manipulated Nora into gradual confrontations, first with the incon-
gruence of the dates, then with the signature. ‘Krogstad: It really was your father who
signed his own name here, wasn’t it? / Nora: No, it wasn’t. I signed Papa’s name’ (66).
Furthermore, Krogstad’s profession as a lawyer also contributes to his Symbolic position
in the first scene. In the Lacanian scheme, language is often associated with patriarchal
institutions and laws. ‘This law therefore, is revealed clearly enough as identical to an
order of language’ (Lacan, 1968: 40). As the one ‘who practice[s] the law’, Krogstad
spends most of his time dealing with words and rules. So in the scene of ‘A Signifier: the
Forged Signature’, he assumes the Symbolic position. In addition, he is fully aware of the
legal consequences of forgery – a linguistic signifier. ‘This was a fraud against me.’ And
the movement of the signifier will determine interpersonal relationships and their corre-
sponding subjectivity. ‘If I introduce this paper in court, you’ll be judged according to
law’ (Ibsen, 1965: 67). Compared with his clear and objective comprehension of words
and rules, Nora is emotionally carried away by her own libidinal investments, without
‘the vaguest idea of’ the aftermath of her illegitimate signature (67). In her mind, as long
as she ‘did it out of love’, her unlawful deeds could be pardoned. To sum up, the letter
has put the ignorant father into the blind spot of the trio, deluded Nora into her secrecy,
and established Krogstad’s Symbolic position in the first scene, who sees the ignorance
of the father and imagination of Nora.

The agent of death: the gaze of the other

The letter, in its continuous displacement, has produced certain effects upon the partici-
pants involved and remodelled their identity in different scenes. ‘It is the symbolic order
which is constitutive for the subject’, Lacan states in ‘Seminar on “The purloined letter”’
(1988: 29). In the second scene, the letter moves from Krogstad’s hand to Helmer’s mail-
box and reshuffles the characters into different positions. ‘Nora: (A letter falls in the
mailbox.) In the mailbox. It’s lying there. Torvald, Torvald – now we’re lost!’ (Ibsen,
Wang 179

The agent of death: the gaze of the other

1. Signature 2. Death
Real: Father Real: Nora

ė
Imaginary: Nora Symbolic: Krogstad Imaginary: Krogstad Symbolic: Kristine

1965: 88) The route of the letter has determined the characters’ subjectivity in an irresist-
ible manner. It jeopardizes Nora’s life, suspends Krogstad’s hope, and empowers
Kristine’s manipulation, demonstrating what Lacan terms ‘the decisive orientation which
the subject receives from the itinerary of the signifier’ (1988: 29). First of all, Nora is
threatened by the exposure of the letter and the only seemingly available access to coun-
teract its torment is to deprive herself of the most fundamental need of life: to die.
‘Krogstad: If you’ve been thinking of taking some desperate step – / Nora: I have …
How could you guess I was thinking of that?’ (Ibsen, 1965: 87). Her death will be fruit-
less in terms of offsetting the overwhelming effects of the forged signifier because
Krogstad still has Nora’s husband in his control. However, Nora fails to see the point:
‘afterwards? When I’m no longer – ?’ (88). And her naive blindness to the futility of
using suicide to influence the Law places her on the blank spot of the observation trian-
gle: seeing nothing.
Likewise, the itinerary of the letter also puts Krogstad in the Imaginary. His past was
decreed by a signifier – his forgery. He once counterfeited a signature and ‘it wrecked my
whole reputation’ (67) and ‘every door was closed in my face’ (64). Then, he worked
very hard to cleanse his past. ‘For a year and a half I’ve kept myself clean of anything
disreputable – all that time struggling with the worst conditions.’ Next, his presence is
also evaluated by signifiers. ‘Now I’ve been written right off, and I’m just not in the
mood to come crawling back’ (87). In other words, Krogstad works very hard in order to
rewrite his past and to create a new record and earn a good name. But Helmer, the new
manager, will dismiss him from the bank. The only way to hold on to his current position,
it seems to Krogstad, is to employ Nora’s letter to blackmail Helmer. Thus his future will
also be decided by a letter. In Krogstad’s mind, blackmail becomes the means to regain
social respect while retaining his job. ‘I’ll have to win back as much respect as possible
here in town’ (64). Krogstad in his desperate delusion, deems the illegal letter to be his
last hope, oblivious to the impossibility of earning social esteem by criminal deeds.
180 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

Seeing through the absurdity of his self-deceptive demand, Kristine reveals that she will
not ‘step aside’ from Krogstad’s previous job post in the bank (95). Furthermore,
Krogstad’s Imaginary position in the trio model is also demonstrated in his fantasy of
secrecy. His underhand dealings ‘can stay just among us’, that is, Nora and himself, and
‘there’s no outsider who’ll even get wind of it’ (86–7). As a matter of fact, Kristine
already knows about Krogstad’s surreptitious dealings and has turned the events to her
own advantage. In short, threatened by the letter, Nora decides to deny the essential need
of life to protect her husband’s reputation, but she does not see the uselessness of her
death. Krogstad notices her blindness to death and demands to exchange the letter for his
job, but he is trapped in his own illusion of blackmailing Nora in exchange for his job
and consequent social standing.
The letter not only traverses the life of Nora and Krogstad, but also announces Kristine’s
Symbolic position in the second scene. The motion of the letter has entitled her to authority.
If she withdraws the letter, she can confer on Nora the most basic need of life, the foreclo-
sure of her suicide; if she does not withdraw the letter, she can ensure that Krogstad’s
blackmail demand goes unchecked. In other words, she agrees with Nora on the protection
of Helmer’s social standing upon which her newly acquired job depends, but disagrees
with Nora on her suicide. Similarly, she approves of Krogstad’s efforts to prevent Nora’s
death while disapproving of his stubborn fantasy of clinging to his job. Kristine neither
withdraws nor delivers the letter; rather she postpones its movement. For her, Nora’s life
must be saved, but from the deferring of the letter, Nora has to confront the fact with open-
ness; then Kristine designs her scheme carefully so that Krogstad’s blackmail demand can
be thwarted, and in compensation he receives her affection. By deducting Nora’s most
fundamental need from Krogstad’s demand, Kristine put forward her desire: from widow
to would-be Mrs Krogstad with a secure job. In the nineteenth century, a woman was
denied independent legal status and she had to use a male name to conduct her public
affairs. William Blackstone sums up couple relationships: ‘by marriage, the husband and
wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is sus-
pended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the
husband’ (1859: 441). Thus the shift from Kristine to Mrs Krogstad enables her to gain a
legal position in patriarchal institutions and laws, a signifier in the Symbolic order.
Finally, the spectacle of Nora’s obsession with death reinforces her position in the Real.
Why are the scenes of Nora’s imaginary death constantly put under the gaze? When Helmer
is reading the letter, Nora feels her imminent doom: ‘Oh, the freezing black water! The
depths – down – ’ (Ibsen, 1965: 105). Her death is visualized from the perspective of the
bottom of the lake. Then her tarantella, the ‘dance of death’, is also displayed as an eye-
catching spectacle. Gaze, different from seeing which originates from an observing sub-
ject, comes from the perspective of things, from the Other. Gaze makes the subject feel that
‘we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world’ (Lacan, 1979: 75). Lacan
continues his explanation of the omnipresent power of gaze: ‘It is no doubt this seeing, to
which I am subjected in an original way’ (72). Under the gaze of things, the subject becomes
aware of ‘primordial passivity’, the lack, the loss of self, and even ‘the annihilation of sub-
ject’. This leads to an overwhelming question: ‘What does the Other want from me?’ It
becomes the subject’s obsessed psychological anxiety. ‘The offering to obscure gods of an
object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under
some monstrous spell’. Lacan proposes his psychological answer in The Four Fundamental
Wang 181

Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1979: 275). The feeling of being ‘subjected to’ the gaze has
provoked, on the one hand, psychological anxiety, a sense of loss, culminating in ‘the anni-
hilation of subject’, as is vividly demonstrated by Nora’s consternation at being ‘down in
the freezing, cold black water’ (Ibsen, 1965: 88), and on the other hand, mysterious jouis-
sance elicited from the subject’s complete identification with the Real, as is exhibited in
Nora’s excitedly wild dance. This is why the subject offers himself as ‘an object of sacri-
fice’ to the gaze of the Real ‘as if under some monstrous spell’.
It also accounts for Nora’s dizzying tarantella, which is ‘a frenzied dance’ after the lethal
bite by ‘a large and hairy venomous’ spider (Evans, 1990: 1083). ‘Nora dances more and
more wildly’ as if she was under the magic of some mysterious alien power. ‘[I] can’t
change it’ and the uncontrollable tarantella ‘has to be just like this’ (Ibsen, 1965: 91). Nora’s
crazy dance ‘under some monstrous spell’ is called ‘pure madness’ by Helmer because her
life is ‘at stake’. In short, the gaze in the Lacanian theory is located at ‘the very limit of the
symbolic order’ so it ‘belongs to the category of the real’ (Shepherdson, 1997: 73).
Therefore, Nora’s death under the gaze is an indication of her position in the Real.
Nora is ready for her sacrifice. After a series of negations (‘Never see him again.
Never, never’), Nora declares that ‘Oh, I wish it were over – ’ (Ibsen, 1965: 105). ‘At the
very instant of the sacrificial cut, at the very limit of the Law’ (Shepherdson, 1997: 84),
the third letter arrives, pulls Nora out of the Real, and redefines her subjectivity in a new
series of movements.

Miracles as miracles: A Doll House

The letter continues its journey, creates a new series of dramatic conflicts, reshuffles
interpersonal relationships, and constitutes their new subjectivity. When the letter reaches
Helmer, he is driven mad. In his eyes, Nora, previously a ‘twittering lark’ and lovely
‘squirrel’, is suddenly transformed by the letter into ‘a hypocrite, a liar – worse, worse

Miracles as miracles: A Doll House

2. Death 3. Miracle
Real: Nora Real: Krogstad

ė
Imaginary: Krogstad Symbolic: Kristine Imaginary: Kristine Symbolic: Nora
182 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

– a criminal!’ (Ibsen, 1965: 105). The letter has also devastated Helmer’s prosperous life
and rendered the capable bank manager a manipulated robot because Krogstad ‘can do
anything he wants with me, ask for anything, play with me like a puppet’ (106). The letter
not only elicits his rage, but also commands him to act against his will. During his rage,
the third letter arrives, and precipitates his emotional reversal. ‘I’m saved, Nora, I’m
saved!’ Within a second, the letter initiates a spectrum of human emotions. The puppet
Helmer is immediately transformed into a masculine knight, ‘I’ve got wide wings to
shelter you with’, like a sacred bird (107). And Nora, ‘a hypocrite, a liar, a criminal’ a
moment ago, is redefined as the ‘little, bewildered, helpless thing’ (108). Lacan accu-
rately captures the determination of the ‘path of the signifier’ upon the subjects, as quoted
in the epigraph.
In a similar way, the letter is also constitutive of Krogstad’s position in the Real at this
stage. Krogstad assumes that the return of Nora’s forgery will erase ‘domestic unpleas-
antness’ and restore the family to its original harmony. In Krogstad’s belief, ‘after that
first storm at home blows out’ (Ibsen, 1965: 87), the ‘spoiled lady like’ Nora will still be
‘a doll’ in the house: a dutiful daughter, a submissive wife, a caring mother. But he is
blind to the deep rift left by the letter: the family will no longer be the same and Nora will
never be a doll again. That is the very insight of Kristine.
Centred on the letter, Kristine comes to occupy the second glance in the Lacanian
triangle this time. She has noticed ‘such incredible things in this house’, and insisted on
Nora’s revealing the truth to Helmer: ‘you must tell your husband everything.’ Upon
Nora’s refusal, Kristine answers that ‘then the letter will’ (99). As she expects, the letter
has ‘aired this dreadful secret’ and destroyed the familial happiness. Nora is painfully
educated by this bitter experience: she is no longer a doll. But in Kristine’s delusion,
Nora still lives within the bondage of marriage under the same roof with Helmer, in ‘a
doll’s house’. ‘Mrs Linde: Helmer’s got to learn everything; those two have to come to a
full understanding’ (97). Her illusion soon crumples: ‘those two’ fall apart and Nora
walks out of the confinement of family, slamming the door on the ‘doll’s house’.
At last, the letter drives Nora out of the domestic world and into patriarchal society,
and she enters the Symbolic. One of Nora’s critical experiences during her Symbolic
stage is the shattering of her miracle. A miracle does not happen frequently, but it is the
pillar of her hope, the meaning of her life. When blackmail occurs, Nora feels sure that
‘this crisis broke over me, and such a certainty filled me: now the miraculous event
would occur’ (112). As for the content of the miracle, Nora secretly wishes her husband
would take the blame for Krogstad’s blackmail to protect her. A courageous knight fights
against a villain to rescue a helpless princess – that romantic story ‘was the miracle I was
waiting for, in terror and hope’. But there is more to it. ‘And to stave that off, I would
have taken my life’ (112). In short, Nora’s miracle consists of two parts: first Helmer will
lay down his life to save her, then she in turn will make a more poignant and noble ges-
ture by sacrificing her own life to rescue her husband.
More than a romantic fantasy, the miracle functions as a turning point in Nora’s sub-
jectivity: before the crisis, she is trapped in the Lacanian Imaginary and fancies the mira-
cle to be everything in her life; after the crisis, she sees ‘miracles as miracles’, and enters
the Symbolic. At the stage of the Imaginary, an infant has a blurred concept of self: either
it devastatingly cancels itself out for the other’s existence or it narcissistically employs
Wang 183

the other to reinforce its own idealized mirror image (Lacan, 2001: 6). To get unstuck
from the ‘imaginary duality’, Lacan has introduced the Symbolic to differentiate subjec-
tivity from mirror image. The prerequisite is to see through one’s own imagination. That
is Nora’s exact situation: she comes to understand that her miracle is just her own illu-
sionary projection, not in congruence with reality. Jane Gallop has an illuminating
expression for the issue. ‘It is the imaginary as imaginary which constitutes the sym-
bolic’ (1985: 62). Nora, in this phase, learns to see through her own delusion: Helmer is
not what she imagines him to be. ‘There’s a gulf that’s opened between us – that’s clear’
(Ibsen, 1965:113). Here comes her enlightenment. Torvald is not an idealized mirror
image, but a stranger with whom ‘for eight years I’ve been living here’ (113). After the
fracture of the miracle, she slams the door of the house, walks into patriarchal society,
and enters the Symbolic.

Ibsen’s postmodernity: linguistic determination of human

subjectivity
The final fate of the letter deserves our scrutiny. Ross Shideler makes an insightful inter-
pretation of the returned letter. The father’s name invalidates ‘Nora’s female signature’
and ‘will be reinstated’ as the male authority principle (1997: 288). But he fails to notice
the contradictory subsequence: the letter is destroyed. How can a burnt letter restore
patriarchal authority? Helmer ‘(Tears the note and both letters to pieces, throws them
into the stove and watches them burn.) There – now there’s nothing left’ (Ibsen, 1965:
107). Does the burnt letter really disappear, with ‘nothing left’? In other words, where
does the letter with the ‘father’s signature’ exist? ‘Cut a letter in small pieces, and it
remains the letter it is’ (Lacan, 1988: 39). In fact, the Name of the Father, in its metamor-
phosis of the letter, is a key signifier of the Symbolic, and represents language and Law
in general. The letter is not only a substance, but also a difference, a trace in a chain of
signifiers. ‘But as for the letter – be it taken as typographical character, epistle, or what
makes a man of letters – we will say what is said is to be understood to the letter’ (Lacan,
1988: 39). Thus despite its forms of existence, a signifier still has its integrity and the
paternal authority of the Law. The triple meanings of the letter, namely, an epistle, lan-
guage and the Law, find their full expression in the play. What Nora has confronted is not
only the forged ‘Name of the Father’/signature and its later metamorphosis into the let-
ters but also the whole Symbolic Order woven by signifiers. ‘Nora: I can’t go on believ-
ing what the majority says, or what’s written in books’ (Ibsen, 1965: 111). And ‘what the
majority says, or what’s written in books’ is also synonymous with language and the
Law. ‘I don’t know much about laws, but I’m sure that somewhere in the books these
things are allowed’ (67).
From ‘what’s written in books’, Toril Moi discovers Ibsen’s modernism. The crisis of
idealism written in patriarchal texts leads to everyday life as an alternative, and the the-
atricality of daily life indicates Ibsen’s modernism. Nora’s scepticism of the ‘idealist
scripts’ of ‘sacrificing woman and rescuing man’ and her consequent self-theatricaliza-
tion of the tarantella witnesses Ibsen’s modernism: his ‘meta-aesthetic self-conscious-
ness’ (8) of the ‘exploration of the artistic medium of theater’ (Moi, 2006: 30). In fact,
Ibsen’s exploration is more than modernist scepticism about language’s capacity for
184 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

expression, it is about his postmodernist ontological uncertainty regarding the linguistic

determination of human subjectivity. Postmodernism, instead of reflecting referents in
reality, is the decentring of language and the consequent playful, self-reflexive meta-
fiction. According to Jean Baudrillard (1998: 489), there is an ‘explosion of image and
reality’; thus signs ‘instituted upon the death of reference’ no longer correspond to ‘real
life’ referents but to a world of autonomous ‘floating signifiers’. In A Doll House, Ibsen
has demonstrated the irresistible power of the letter/language upon the determination of
the subjectivity of protagonists, who become ‘virtual reality’ to fit into linguistic catego-
ries. For postmodernism, language has cocooned every aspect of our life, and has dynam-
ically shaped and reshaped our subjectivity. ‘Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in
a network so total that’ no part of his life is spared. Even ‘before he comes into the
world’, an infant is already the bearer of a signifier, a name given by his family. At his
death in his grave, a human subject becomes a void expressed in signifiers, the epitaph
on his tomb. ‘The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its vestigial traces is
the sepulture, and the intermediary of death can be recognized in every relation where
man comes to the life of his history’ (Lacan, 1968: 84). During his life, his identity is
constantly being punctuated and constructed by language and culture, and ‘his history’,
the metamorphosis of ‘the intermediary of death’, is also written by words.
Can we transcend the linguistic determination of our subjectivity? Ibsen’s quest for the
problem can be analysed from two different sides: self and other. The first perspective is
from self: can language express our identity? As the most ingenious creatures on the earth,
human beings have created language to express subjectivity; however, to their surprise,
the language of their creation turns out to dominate its masters. Language helps human
beings represent their subjectivity but simultaneously frustrates their sense of self by con-
stantly cancelling their subjectivity. ‘Now, aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical
way at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement of disappearance
that I have described as lethal’ (Lacan, 1979: 207–8). That is, when a human expresses
himself in a signifier, his subjectivity is socially acknowledged in linguistic symbols;
however, paradoxically, his subjectivity, represented by language for other human beings,
is just a signifier which denotes only a categorical meaning and erases his own individual-
ity. Thus, the moment of a man’s representation is also the moment of his disappearance,
his ‘aphanisis’. This is also an accurate account of Nora. To put it in a simplistic way, the
whole of A Doll House is about Nora’s understanding of the miracle: her fantasy of self-
sacrifice and Helmer’s rescue, which constitutes her idealized self-image: ‘her identity,
the foundation of her sense of worth’. But this fantasy is just a product of pure signifiers:
‘cliché idealist scripts’ in melodramas (Moi, 2006: 263). Ironically, the catalyst leading to
the avalanche of ‘the miracle’ is also a signifier: the counterfeit signature of ‘the Name of
the Father’ which mercilessly obliterates her subjectivity. To borrow Lacan’s terms, the
subjectivity of Nora ‘appears’ in romantic stories, but at the same time, her subjectivity is
also cancelled by the signifier of her fake signature. Nora’s perplexity towards Janus-like
language (appearance and disappearance of one’s subjectivity) is also indicative of Ibsen’s
uncertainty. To continue Nora’s analogue of the miracle, human beings themselves are a
miracle in the world. Then ‘the greatest miracle of all’ (Ibsen, 1965: 114) occurs: the anti-
human language confers identity upon and simultaneously erases humanity from human
beings. ‘When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as
“fading”, as disappearance’ (Lacan, 1979: 218).
Wang 185

The frustration towards the gap between the self and its linguistic signification is
termed ‘desire’ by Lacan, who regards the discrepancy as normal. But Ibsen, who per-
ceived this dilemma in the nineteenth century, feels very frustrated. Careful readers
notice that the protagonists in A Doll House have adopted a surprisingly concordant
attitude towards the letter. Nora expresses her hatred towards it: ‘And [I] can rip it into a
million pieces and burn it up – that filthy scrap of paper!’ (76). Similarly, Helmer shows
his hostility in the destruction of the letters because he ‘tears the note and both letters to
pieces, throws them into the stove and watches them burn’ (107). Likewise, Krogstad
feels guilty about his use of the letter, ashamed of ‘the move I made against the Helmers’
(97), and the abandonment of the letter would make him feel ‘positive of’ the fact that ‘I
can win back a place in their eyes’ (96). In a similar vein, Kristine regards the letter as an
embodiment of ‘lies and evasions’, a ‘dreadful secret [which] has to be aired’ (97).
Therefore rather than a ‘possessor’ of the letter, she is only a temporary ‘beholder’ and
then persuades Krogstad into returning the letter to Nora. The worst of all, Dr Rank, like
‘a wounded animal’, has simply erased his name. ‘I’ll send you my calling card marked
with a black cross, and you’ll know then the wreck has started to come apart’ (81). The
orchestration of all these relevant thematic elements crystallizes into a message: these
frustrated responses from the characters towards the letter reveal Ibsen’s postmodernist
scepticism about the prison-house of language.
Apart from expressing oneself, there is the other side of the issue: can language enable
us to understand others? Lacan distinguishes ‘the subject of enunciation’ and ‘the subject
of the statement’: the former refers to the actual person who utters the sentences while
the latter designates the ‘I’ expressed by language in discourse. In our communications
with others, we are always reduced to ‘the statement I’, a signifier in the Symbolic.

The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its
signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no
more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject
to function, to speak, as subject. (Lacan, 1979: 207)

That is to say, in order to make oneself understood by others, one has to be reduced to a
signifier, which is an agreed-upon word by a linguistic community. ‘The signifier is what
represents a subject for another signifier.’ On the other hand, the interlocutor is also
reduced to be ‘another signifier’ in the discourse: ‘The subject is what the signifier rep-
resents, and it is not able to represent anything but for another signifier’ (1979: 207). Full
flesh and blood human beings are flattened into categorical signifiers and complete
understanding of others is negated. Like Lacan, Ibsen also intuitively perceives the
dilemma. He casts ontological scepticism on human control over linguistic determina-
tion of our subjectivity, and expresses this uncertainty in vivid symbols of dolls, sculp-
tures and hats. In A Doll House, human beings are presented as manipulated dolls,
without their own emotions and independent thinking. Rolf Fjelde underscores that Et
dukkehjem should be translated as A Doll House ‘without the possessive’ because Torvald
is ‘as humanly underdeveloped, as much as a doll, as Nora’ (2004: 476). The idea is
further reinforced in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Irene is captured and perpetuated
in a sculpture: a full flesh-and-blood human being is idealized into a frozen statue, a
186 Journal of European Studies 45(3) 

tableau devoid of emotions and depths. In his autobiographical ‘Sketch of childhood’,

Ibsen also recalls childhood memories of his observation from the window of a high
church tower. ‘I remember distinctly how it struck me to see the crowns of the people’s
hats’ (2004a [1888]: 443). In other words, individualistic human beings, observed from
that high perspective, have been erased of their uniqueness and become undifferentiated
hats.2 This simplistic reduction of human beings into flattened symbols makes Ibsen feel
uneasy, so he amplifies the situation, highlights our awareness, and ponders over discur-
sive representations of human beings. This uneasiness with the representation of human
beings becomes his eternal impression. ‘But the tower-window in question has stood
prominently in my memory since I was a child, because from it I got my first deep and
lasting impression’ (Ibsen, 2004 [1888]: 443). Likewise, postmodernism, Jean-François
Lyotard informs us, is to destabilize the flattening closure of modernism. In Discours,
figure, Lyotard (1971) defines modernism as the rendering of the visual, the three-dimen-
sional, the figural into the textual, two-dimensional, the discursive; and postmodernism,
‘as incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1998 [1984]: 509), is to challenge the flatness of
text, to resist the categorical understanding and totalizing reason, and, more importantly,
to liberate ‘the figural’ and its flow and intensities of desire and libidinal effects. In the
sense of challenging the flatness of linguistic determination of human subjectivity, Ibsen
is a postmodernist.
Language is such an ensnaring web that our identity is constantly being punctuated
by signifiers without our being conscious of it. Is it possible for men to find a way of
escaping from the web of signifiers? This is Ibsen’s ontological uncertainty, his meta-
physical problem. Bernard Shaw regards Ibsen’s works as ‘social problem plays’
because Ibsen ‘gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situations’
(Wisenthal, 1979: 218). A play, Shaw continues, usually contains ‘an exposition in the
first act, a situation in the second, and unravelling in the third’. However, Ibsen has
made some ‘technical novelty’ in A Doll House: ‘Now you have exposition, situation,
and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright’ (1964: 171). The discus-
sion of the social problem raised in the play leaves an open ending, disrupts our expected
resolution, and highlights the question. Thus A Doll House is a social problem play.
However, Brian Johnston (2004) disagrees. Ibsen does not just air some questions to be
put right; rather his plays uncover ‘an abyss concealed beneath the reality we think we
inhabit’ (2004: xvii). Johnston is justified in his protest; however, he does not reveal
what the abyss is. Shaw is right in shifting the focus from plots to linguistic discussions
of social problems, but he misses Ibsen the philosopher behind the façade of Ibsen the
social reformer. Integrating these two critics, this paper would contend that A Doll
House is a metaphysical problem play and the abyss is the overwhelming power of the
linguistic determination of human subjectivity. This is a more justified way of under-
standing ‘the problem of mankind in general’ when Ibsen declares that ‘my task has
been the description of humanity’ (2004b [1898]: 437). In a reductive way, the play
could be summarized as the effects of the letter. In Act I the precipitation of a signifier
perplexes Nora, who is forced to understand the consequences of her forgery of ‘the
Name of the Father’. Then the itinerary of the letter in Act II reveals its nature as the
‘agency of death’ and turns Nora into a criminal forger. Finally the arrival of the letter
at its destination in Act III reverses her fate back to being a doll in the house, but,
Wang 187

disappointed with the miracle, Nora slams the door to enter society to test her under-
standing of ‘what’s in books’ – the Symbolic centred on ‘the Name of the Father’.
If we situate the play in Ibsen’s overall production, the theme of his ontological uncer-
tainty of linguistic determination is revealed in a more coherent manner. The last phase
of his dramatic works, Ibsen declared in December 1899, ‘begins with A Doll’s House
and now comes to an end with When We Dead Awaken’ (quoted in Moi, 2006: 321). Nora
in A Doll House leaves the domestic world and tries to explore her subjectivity from
‘what’s written in books’. Ghosts shows the inescapable influence of a patriarchal legacy
upon the determination of the life of those living people. Rosmersholm suggests that the
fantasy of the perfect communication of souls without language only results in the final
extinction of the protagonists. The titular heroine in Hedda Gabler burns the manuscript
of Løvborg, a scholar of cultural history, and finally shoots herself. Symbolically, the
deliberate destruction and negation of language and culture is equal to death. When we
dead awaken (also the title of Ibsen’s last play), which is itself an impossible miracle, we
will find that we, each dead person lying in a separate grave, ‘recognize [that] humanity
in its vestigial traces is the sepulture’ (Lacan, 1968: 84), and we become signifiers on the
tombs, indicating our past existence in the world and our present death in the grave. The
very theme in the epilogue of When We Dead Awaken reverberates with that of A Doll
House: our subjectivity is decided by language, distinctively articulated by the key issues
in three acts of the play: Signifier, Death, Miracle.

Acknowledgements
I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewer for his insightful comments and Professor John Flower
for his encouragement and patience which enabled me to focus on the quality of the paper. This
work was supported by the National Project for Research and Teaching of Foreign Languages
(2014BJ0009A]); and the 2015–16 US–China Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar Programme.

Notes
1. All quotations from A Doll House are from the 1965 edition translated by Rolf Fjelde; there-
fore only page numbers are indicated.
2. René Descartes also expresses a similar idea. When Descartes looked down from his window,
he was not sure what he had seen: were they really people walking around the street below or
were they just ‘hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be
determined by springs?’ (quoted in Moi, 2006: 266).

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Author biography
Quan Wang is Associate Professor of English at Beihang University, Beijing. His recent publica-
tions include ‘A Lacanian reading of RIP’ (Explicator), ‘The lack of lack’ (Women’s Studies),
‘New historicism in RIP’ (Explicator), and a book on Jacques Lacan, A Lacanian Reading of Toni
Morrison’s Three Novels. He specializes in critical theory and comparative literature. He holds a
PhD in English from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a PhD in Chinese from Beijing
Normal University.