Kieler, Laura (fl. 1860s)

views updated

Kieler, Laura (fl. 1860s)

German writer who served as the inspiration for Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. Flourished in the 1860s; married a schoolteacher.

Beginning in 1877, Norwegian poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) wrote a series of social or thesis plays that were instrumental in changing the course of written drama. These works, including The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882), were departures from traditional drama not only in their treatment of serious social issues, but in their use of ordinary language and realistic settings. A Doll's House, first performed at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879, was written in response to the growing movement for the emancipation of women and explores through plot and character women's dependent status in society. In the groundbreaking drama, Ibsen for the first time applied the concept of individuality to women as well as to men. "Women also shall be themselves, be human beings, and not merely their husbands' wives, and their children's mothers," wrote Henrik Jaeger, explaining Ibsen's theme in a critical biography of the playwright. In the course of the drama, Nora, a doll-like creature completely dependent on her husband, is forced into a moral conflict which she solves in the end by walking out on her marriage.

While historians frequently credit the Norwegian novelist Camilla Collett with influencing Ibsen in the writing of A Doll's House, few mention that the character of Nora was based on another woman known to the playwright, a writer by the name of Laura Kieler whom he met in Dresden in the late 1860s. Kieler had written a sequel to one of Ibsen's plays and sent it to him, after which the two met and stayed in touch for several years. The events in Kieler's life during those interim years became Nora's experiences in A Doll's House, although Ibsen some-what altered characters and events and also manipulated the outcome to support his theme.

Sometime after her meeting with the playwright, Kieler's schoolteacher husband contracted tuberculosis and was told by his doctors that a warmer climate might be the only thing to prolong his life. Without consulting her husband, but with the assistance of a friend, Kieler took out a loan to finance the necessary trip. The couple then traveled to Italy where Kieler's husband made a full recovery. Sometime later, Kieler related these events to Ibsen and his wife Susannah Thoresen Ibsen during a visit in Munich, at which time Ibsen noticed that the young woman seemed mentally burdened. Early in 1878, Kieler sent Ibsen the manuscript of her newest novel with a letter asking him to submit the book to his publisher. Ibsen, who was unimpressed by the work, wrote back to Kieler telling her that he felt the book did not warrant publication.

What Ibsen did not know was that Kieler was now being forced to pay back the loan she had negotiated and that the manuscript was her last hope of raising the money without involving her husband. When she received Ibsen's letter rejecting her work, she became desperate and forged a check to pay back the debt. The forgery was eventually discovered, and Kieler was forced to confess everything to her husband, who was less than sympathetic. He accused her of a criminal act and sought a legal separation to keep her from her children. As a result, Kieler suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a mental institution for a month. Upon her release, her husband took her back, but only after a considerable amount of pleading on her part.

When A Doll's House was published and produced in 1879, starring Betty Hennings , Laura Kieler was recognized as the inspiration for the play, but little is known of her after that time. The play, as might be expected, unleashed a flurry of protest. Ibsen's departure from the classic rules governing tragedy (elevated characters and poetic language), to say nothing of his radical ending, angered the critics and outraged the audience. The moral outcry over Nora's flagrant disregard of her duties as a wife and mother was such that some theaters refused to produce the play. When it reached Germany two years later, one actress decided to change the ending herself, proclaiming, "I would never leave my children." (Copyright laws between countries did not then protect the playwright.) Ibsen, backed into a corner, grudgingly wrote an alternative ending in which Nora does not leave, but called it "a barbaric outrage on the play."

While Laura Kieler slipped into obscurity, the work she inspired became one of the most important plays in the history of the theater. A Doll's House was first performed in America as early as 1882, by an amateur group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; a year later, Helena Modjeska presented an adaptation of the play in Louisville, Kentucky, but it closed after only one performance. Minnie Maddern Fiske revived the play in 1894, 1895, and 1902, and the Russian actress Alla Nazimova provided a riveting performance of her own in 1907, although by that time Ibsen had been embraced by most of the country's literary critics. A Doll's House, along with the entire body of Ibsen's work, has since become a standard in American theater repertory.