The Lark’s Lonely Twittering: An Analysis of the Monologues in A Doll’s House

Ibsen’s use and rejection of the monologue in his modern, realistic dramas is an old and bewildering narrative. Maybe Ibsen himself is partly responsible for this bewildering. Already in 1869, he wrote to Georg Brandes that he had finished a play (De unges forbund/League of Youth) in which he had worked hard with the form, and proudly proclaimed that he had “gjort det Kunststykke at hjaelpe mig uden en eneste Monolog, ja, uden en eneste ‘afsides’ Replik/done that piece of an art to make it without a single monologue, yes, without a single aside” (Fulsås 2005, 352; our italics). This statement has later been quoted and commented on, and several scholars see this removal of the monologues as an important part of Ibsen’s modernizing of the drama genre (Northam 1953, 15; Geis 1993, 18). R. Farquharson Sharp claims that A Doll’s House marks a turning point in the history of European drama: “Naturalness of dialogue and situation [... ] and the disappearance of such artificialities as the soliloquy” (Sharp 1949, x; our italics). Alisa Solomon draws this somewhat ironic picture of this topic: