A reflection from A Dollhouse - the female loss of time

 ”But so have thousands of women done”

That is my favourite line from Ibsens Dollhouse. It is Nora´s reply to Torvald as he explains to her that he would gladly do anything for her but not give up his honour.

But beyond honour, and more importantly, what Nora and all the thousands of women before her had given up was their time.

The Nora I came to know through our recent local play has like every human being, a rich and complex inner life that is however out of reach. Because between the domestic life, the sociable chores and putting on a happy face for her husband, how could she ever find the time and space to dig deeper?

Nora is far from alone in her desperate need for contemplative solitude. And she is far from the first.

The history is filled with big male philosophers and artists. Women on the other hand have, for centuries, simply not had the possibilities to develop independent, creative thinking. I cannot help but agree with writer Brigid Schulte, who argues that a woman's greatest enemy is a lack of time to herself. “Pure leisure, making time just for oneself, is nothing short of a courageous act of radical and subversive resistance”, she writes.

Virginia Woolf entertains a thought experiment in her book “A room of one’s own”, published in 1929. What if Shakespeare would have had an equally talented sister? Her fate would most like not have been to become a celebrated poet and writer.

Woolf writes:
“She was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. (…) Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler.”

Sadly, the history books are brimming with loss of female potential. Loss of female leisure.

“There is something at works in my soul”. The line is the feminist writer Mary Shelley who died merely 30 years before Ibsens Nora took the stage at the Royal Theatre in Denmark. Shelley, who stole time to read and write as a young girl, was fortunate enough to live a more unconventional life where she was able to tend to that which scratched her soul. She wrote the literary success Frankenstein, mere 19 years old. A mythical tale about human hubris, the need to be loved and the heartbreak of being ostracized. Many sceptics believe, to this day, however that Shelley was not the real author. Her husband has all too often been praised in the absence of general female credibility.

In the last scene of Dollhouse, Nora replies to Torvalds adamant reminders of her duties as a wife and mother with “I don’t believe that anymore to be true. I believe I am first and foremost a human being, just like you”. She tells him she needs to leave in order to make space for what she has lacked the most: time. Time to think, time to unravel her thoughts and time to find out what truth means to her. 

What Nora did was perceived as a very radical act at the time. In some ways it is still considered radical, just as Schulte writes. We just speak of it differently. Nora was thought to throw away her honour along with her quest for time. Today a woman might be deemed lazy or self-obsessed for wanting to spend her hours simply with herself, perhaps doing absolutely nothing. 

The historical loss of female time is a tragedy. But by the thousands, women are taking back what is a deeply human need and want. To scratch at that which is at works in our souls. To take back time. 

Photo: Stefan Öhberg /Nya Åland