Economic Extensions in Space and Time: Mediating Value in Pillars of the Community and A Doll’s House

Abstract

When Henrik Ibsen initiated his series of contemporary prose plays, he did so with a stage design where people are ‘doing their shopping at a little shop on the corner’ in the street behind Karsten Bernick’s stately house and garden, while the plot in Pillars of the Community revolves around the consul’s engagement in more complex and speculative business ventures (Ibsen 2016, 3). Next, Ibsen establishes A Doll’s House by describing it as a ‘comfortable and tastefully, though not expensively, furnished room,’ where Nora from the outset squanders the porter’s gratuity while her banker husband, Helmer, cautions her about careful spending (NPI, 107). These examples indicate how economic motifs are launched early on in Ibsen’s problem plays, and throughout the plays the motifs are further developed and added to. Pillars of the Community revolves around investments and speculation, insurance, and business ethics, and it depicts a globalized economy based on steam power, electric communication, and daily printed news. At the heart of the gender and family issues in A Doll’s House, we find questions of economic responsibility and dependency, financial law, forgery, and modern banking. Hence, one might claim that in all of the institutional, ideological, and relational problems raised, the common denominator of the plays is motifs of economy and money. Ibsen’s dealings with economic matters are hardly surprising, as the ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature certainly