Model vs. Artist: The Question of Artistic Responsibility in Three Plays

Laura Kieler (1849 – 1932) was a novelist, playwright and campaigner for social justice who published more than twenty works over the course of a long and prolific writing career. Nevertheless, she is best remembered as a footnote in Ibsen studies as the real-life model for Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). The tumultuous events in the early years of Kieler’s marriage – from her husband’s tuberculosis diagnosis to the secret loan she took out to finance a recuperative trip to Italy that saved his life – were made public by Ibsen in A Doll’s House without her prior knowledge or consent. To the end of her life, the perpetual link in the public imagination between her and the character of Nora remained a source of deep distress.

Kieler’s struggle to set the record straight about how Ibsen used her life story as his raw material and capitalized on her anguish found expression in her play Men of Honour (written 1888, premiere 1890). This was a scathing intervention in the ‘sexual purity debate’ then raging in Scandinavia and also pointedly criticised writers who profited from the use of other people’s personal circumstances for their artistic material. Kieler’s powerfully subversive play invites renewed attention as a provocative challenge to the male-dominated literary establishment and a deeply moving meditation on artistic responsibility and the ethics of storytelling.

The controversy excited by the publication and productions of Men of Honour in both Denmark and Norway forced old rumours about Kieler back into circulation; in 1891, this culminated in a pivotal confrontation between Kieler and Ibsen in his home, where they spoke for four hours – with Ibsen breaking down in tears. Though the two writers never saw each other again, there is strong evidence that this final meeting informs his last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), in which the sculptor Arnold Rubek is confronted by Irene, the model for his early masterpiece which made his name and fortune, who seeks a final reckoning with him about his exploitation of her for his art. The story of Laura Kieler illuminates the dynamics of this last, elusive play of Ibsen’s and, we argue, gives it new meaning when placed in this context.

This paper presents the complex, ongoing dialogue between Ibsen and Kieler that was conducted over several decades and, intriguingly, through these three plays in which they speak to each other. The research on which this paper builds is culminating this year in a new Oxford World’s Classics volume featuring these three plays—the two Ibsen plays in new translations, and Kieler’s play for the first time in English translation, all by Gaye Kynoch—co-edited by Sam, Shepherd, and Kynoch. Our research is also generating a new devised play by Breach Theatre, funded in part by the University of Oxford through our collaboration and in part by an Ibsen Scope award. In addition, new research by Jorunn Hareide has helped raised awareness of Laura Kieler and her work. Altogether, we are helping to shine a spotlight, belatedly, on a woman writer who deserves wider attention not just for her role in Ibsen’s life but in her own right, and for the compelling ways in which her life and her work speak to many issues we are dealing with today: the ‘bad art friend’ debates, the MeToo movement, the question of consent, and the ongoing recovery of neglected women writers.

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