LOVE/TRUTH/HAPPINESS IN HENRIK IBSEN’S PLAY A DOLL’S HOUSE: AXIOLOGICAL, EPISTEMOLOGICAL, SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE DRAMATIC CONFLICT

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of the dramatic conflict in A Doll’s House, a play by the Norwegian playwright H. Ibsen, which initiates the tradition of "new drama" in European dramaturgy in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The playwright’s innovation, revealed at the level of conflict organisation, is defined in the context of an attempt to read/interpret the play holistically. A Doll’s House is described as an analytical drama designed to reveal the hidden contradictions of personal and social life at their most relevant for audience intersection through artistic exploration of the institution of marriage. The play’s innovative poetics (internal action, subtext, symbolic images, discussion, paradoxical character and plot development) is aimed at analysing the peculiarities of the unfolding "emancipation" of human consciousness, its liberation from the stereotypes of feeling, thinking, and behaviour, prevailing in the society. The localisation of the conflict in the protagonist’s mind allows the author to emphasise its axiological, epistemological, spiritual and emotional aspects. Axiologically, the conflict involves a clash between the Christian system of values based on love and the values of bourgeois society, among which the most important is money, the opportunities to obtain it, and the goods it buys, such as comfort, coziness, pleasure, and the aesthetic appeal of private life. The epistemological aspect of the conflict is revealed through the paradoxical correlation of truth and lie in the minds and relationships of the characters. Nora Helmer, who repeatedly deceives her husband by keeping the truth about some details of their life together from him in Act One, develops the ability to fully understand the unattractive realities of her marriage and to change the tactics and strategy of her life behaviour, based on the truth revealed. Spiritually and emotionally, the development of the conflict leads to a change in the psychological markers of existence – the transitions from happiness to unhappiness and vice versa, which become the subject of dialogic reflection carried out by the characters.