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‘Home is where the heart is’: A consideration of the relationship between
emotional states and stage spaces in A Doll’s House and A Streetcar Named Desire.
The communal domestic space represented on the stages of Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire greatly
influence the emotional states of the characters who occupy them. Similarly, the
emotional states of the characters, namely Nora Helmer and Blanche Dubois of
the respective plays, in turn influence the stage spaces that they occupy; Nora’s
final exit and Blanche’s hallucinations engage the set design, the lighting, and the
music. There is therefore an inextricable relationship between emotional states –
namely feelings of claustrophobia and exposure – and stage space – the home.
Ibsen’s 1879 naturalist play will be considered here first, with a view to
examining the relationship between the Helmers’ comfortable drawing room
onstage and Nora’s sense of claustrophobia. The impact upon Blanche of her lack
of personal space in the Kowalski home in William’s subjective realism play, first
performed in New York in 1947, will then be considered. These two stage spaces
confine and distort the traditionally positive attributes of a home; security and
companionship become entrapment and over-familiarity. By evoking a range of
other playwrights and authors who also write a domestic space, this essay will
show how for Nora and for Blanche, home is not in fact ‘where the heart is’, or
ever could be.
To consider first the stage space Ibsen’s creates in his stage direction;
Nora lives in Torvald’s home – a comfortable and tastefully decorated upper
floor apartment in Norway – with their children. As became commonplace in
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naturalist theatre, real furniture was used on stage; multiple chairs, a table, a
piano, a stove. There is one window stage left. There are numerous doors
onstage that lead to, among others, Nora’s bedroom, Torvald’s study, the kitchen,
the nursery and the stairs to the front door. These details contribute to making
the stage recognisable to the audience; they can “take a genuinely sympathetic
interest”1 in Nora when they recognise her life. By investing this interest, the
ending of the play will hold more resonance: Nora will abandon what the
audience will most likely be returning to after the play. This shared domestic
space is the setting for all three acts of the play. The aspects of the set design that
this essay will be focused upon are the one window and the multiple doors.
This comfortable and tasteful living room affords Nora no privacy
throughout the play. Nora, eating the macaroons that her husband forbade,
worries about being caught. In her dealings with Krogstad, she is again anxious
that her husband might catch her. When they return from a party in the
apartment upstairs, Nora has nowhere to hide from Torvald as he tries to kiss
her. The set design contributes to, and physically creates, this sense of
entrapment. Émile Zola, in his Naturalism in the Theatre, describes the theatre
before naturalism as “so confining, like a cave that lacks air and light”2. While this
is the claustrophobia that he finds in dramatic art of the late nineteenth century,
the same could be said of the Helmers’ apartment. Given that there is only one
window stage left, there would be a lack of natural light in the room, creating the
atmosphere of artificiality suggested in the title. The effect that this has on Nora’s
1
2
Hauser, The Theory of the Modern Stage, p. 407.
Zola, The Theory of the Modern Stage, p. 351.
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mental state is claustrophobic. If the inner and outer worlds can have so little
interaction, the home is stagnant, again evoking the artificiality of a doll’s house.
This inner/outer, artificial/natural dichotomy is complicated however by
Torvald’s use of ‘pet’ names for his wife; he compares her to a range of small
creatures such as larks, squirrels and doves. Torvald is, inadvertently, signalling
Nora’s displacement and unbelonging. If she were one of these woodland
animals, what would she be doing in the living room of a middle class Norwegian
family? Torvald uses these names to assert his power over her, but in fact the use
of these names points out to the audience that she does not belong here.
Obviously, she is neither lark nor squirrel and the comparison is derisory, but it
serves the purpose of signalling from the outset that she is out of place, even
though she does not yet realize it.
The doors onstage further complicate this sense of displacement. The
doors are constantly being opened by others, which leaves Nora with little
control over who enters the living room. Nora cannot escape this sense of
intrusion as most of the spaces to which the doors lead are out of bounds to her.
Torvald’s study, for example, is a space forbidden to Nora. Of the two plays, he is
the only character who owns a room of entirely his own. The kitchen, too, is the
servants’ domain, not Nora’s. She has her own bedroom but it too is not
represented within the stage space, and it appears to be Torvald’s decision as to
where they sleep; “I want to stay with you, dearest”3. The only time that Nora
was permitted some privacy, she had to lie for it; she “locked [herself] in and sat
3
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 92.
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writing every evening till late in the night […] It was almost like being a man”4.
Nora associates personal privacy with masculinity, when in fact it is a human
desire to which she is entirely entitled.
Her privacy is not invaded and controlled only by Torvald however, but
also by the numerous visitors who enter the apartment. Mrs Linde, Dr Rank and
Krogstad – uninvited – all enter the home in Act One of the play. Nora feels
obliged to impress Mrs Linde, entertain Dr Rank and conceal threats from
Krogstad. It is almost a game of musical rooms; Krogstad lets himself in through
the front door, the children exit via another, Krogstad exits through the front
door, and Torvald appears at his study door as his wife calls to the maid through
yet another door. There simply are too many doors. But this living room is at the
heart of the home; it is through which all of the family members and guests and
servants travel to get to wherever they are going. It is not a place in which
anyone but Nora stays; they all have somewhere else to go. However, for Nora,
these other doors are off limits to her and she must remain in the living room,
dealing with intrusions. She is “interrupted repeatedly by the doorbell ringing, or
someone knocking”5. Desperate for time alone following Krogstad’s initial
threatening visit, she tells her children to “[g]o away, my darlings, go away”6 as
she ushers them offstage and closes the door behind them. But then, alone on the
stage, she seems uncomfortable, throwing her embroidery aside and asking for
the Christmas tree to be brought in for decorating. She is in a similar state as Act
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 37.
Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds, p. 92.
6 Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 50.
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5
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Two opens, “alone in the room, walking restlessly to and fro”7. She is
undoubtedly anxious, but it is also possible that she is bored, though she has not
yet recognized this.
It is interesting to note too that while she must remain in the living room
– she has nowhere else to go – she must also remain onstage. Nora’s character is,
for most of the play, rather dramatic and she is a performer. A sense of
metatheatricality results from this; Nora – the fictional character – must remain
onstage, constantly performing for her husband and others. But also an actor
must perform for the audience. This results in a total loss of privacy for Nora
who has nowhere to go but the living room – it would hardly do to go to bed
during the day – and at any moment, anyone could enter this space. The very
nature of drama then implies that there is nowhere to hide, and while an actor
may feel ‘at home on the stage’, this home on the stage offers no relief from her
performance. One can therefore consider two types of stage space; the space that
the audience and actors occupy, and that of the set design created to represent
the home. The relationship between these two stage spaces was changing when
Ibsen wrote this play at the dawn of naturalism and the fourth wall convention,
which marked, according to Hauser, “the beginning of the reign of total illusion in
the theatre – the displacement of the play-element and the concealment of the
fictitious nature of representation”8. The more accurate the representation, the
more invested the audience in the drama, and the greater the catharsis.
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8
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 55.
Hauser, The Origins of Domestic Drama, p. 409.
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To return briefly to the window stage left, one notes more dangerous
connotations. It is symptomatic of a prison cell, evoking the following quote from
Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; “I’m not your jailor.
This isn’t a prison”9. But this home is a prison; Nora is trapped, under constant
surveillance – both fictionally and literally – and has no privacy. Also, given that
the apartment is not on the ground floor, the window would be a possible way
out, though not a safe one. Ibsen may have chosen to represent only one window
onstage, out of the direct line of sight of the audience, for multiple reasons, but
this one more sinister than simply creating an artificial environment. The threat
of suicide remains constant in Ibsen’s play, and is echoed in 1966 by Esther, the
protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. Esther makes the following
harrowing observation in the psychiatrist’s waiting room that resonates here for
Nora; “At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was
because there were no windows”10. The narrator here is acutely aware of the fact
that if there were a window, she may want to jump out of it. And the removal of
this possibility makes her feel safe. The risk however is still present on Ibsen’s
stage; Nora still has that option.
The danger seen here is also heard in Ibsen’s choice of music that fills the
apartment, and therefore the stage space. In Act Two, Nora uses the music and
dance of the Tarantella to distract Torvald from checking his letters, in a bid to
delay the reveal by Krogstad of her forgery. She plays up to Torvald, begging him
to help her with her dance for the costume party. This reinforces her role as a
9
O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, p. 65.
Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 122.
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performer, now not only a woman performing the role of ‘dutiful’ wife, and an
actor performing Nora’s role onstage, but also a woman performing this dance
for both a real and a fictional audience. The Tarantella is a dance that supposedly
mimics the reaction of the body following a fatal bite from a particular type of
spider11, and this sense of danger is not lost on Nora. Her whole world – as
restrictive as it is – is on the brink of collapse, and she uses the dance as a delay
tactic. With Torvald and then Dr Rank playing the piano, she plays the
tambourine and dances violently, with the eyes of Torvald, Dr Rank and Mrs
Linde on her, as well as the audience. They create the music onstage, which is in
contrast to the music of A Streetcar Named Desire (hereinafter Streetcar), which
is provided by a small offstage group of musicians. Nora’s reaction to the music
can be described well using Brian Friel’s stage directions in The Mason’s Apron
dance of Dancing at Lughnasa; “there is a sense of order being consciously
subverted, of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves,
indeed of near-hysteria being induced”12. The difference between this home on
the stage and Ibsen’s, however, is the fact that Nora dances alone. Mrs Linde
stands, gaping, watching her with the men. Nora does not have the support of
friends or sisters; in fact she has the support of no one onstage.
Much like Blanche in Streetcar, this stage space provides Nora with no
respite, no space in which to simply be. She is constantly interacting with others,
performing for each of them. Along with the constant stream of lies that she tells,
ranging from denying having eaten any macaroons to forging her father’s
11
12
Worthen, The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, p. 553.
Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, p. 22.
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signature for the loan, she builds up a persona onstage. Were she allowed to
simply be in this stage space, the audience may – without meaning to
sentimentalize her – find a different Nora under the character she has created.
This woman onstage is complicit in her husband’s belittling of her, she panders
to him, she has lied to the bank and she toys with Dr Rank’s love for her. The
common denominator to these lies and the constructed persona in the living
room is a love of Torvald. But when the illusion she had of her husband is
dashed, it is not he that she blames. “I cannot go on living here any longer”13
implies that the problem is not simply Torvald, but the space in which they
inhabit. Nora recognises that this home environment has created the quasipaternal dynamic between the couple, and to escape the relationship is to leave
the home. Much like Una Chaudhuri’s theory of “‘spatial intelligibility’”14, the
location of the characters and the drama goes a long way to explaining both
themselves and it. This reinforces the observation that the stage space and
emotional states are inextricably linked. The claustrophobia and artificiality of
the home they both constructed around themselves becomes clear to Nora when
her husband exposes himself as a hypocrite. From this point onwards, Nora no
longer knows him, and cannot go on living with him, a stranger.
The stage space therefore has an enormous impact on the emotional
states of both Nora and Torvald, and the reverse relationship is also evident. The
home represented on the stage has adequately served neither of them; it has
stifled Nora and exaggerated Torvald’s sense of self-importance. The converse
13
14
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 101.
Chaudhuri, Staging Place, p. 6.
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relationship is demonstrated when Nora’s emotional state has an impact on the
stage space; she vacates it. Her absence is perhaps the most powerful aspect of
the relationship between stage space and emotional states; it ruins Torvald,
could save her, and inspires an audience. She choses herself over all those who
invaded her space throughout the three acts of the play. Her door-slamming exit
of the family home is more dramatic than that of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s
1899 The Awakening, but the sentiment is the same. The line, “I would give up
the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give my life for my children;
but I wouldn’t give myself”,15 could be either of these women. Twenty years
previous to the publishing of Chopin’s novel, Nora had claimed, “I believe that I
am first and foremost a human being”16. Chopin echoes this belief when Edna
ignores a friend’s plea to “[t]hink of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children!
Remember them!”17. Like Edna, Nora chose not to listen and she leaves the
apartment a free agent. She may not survive the harsh Scandinavian winter
having grown accustomed to the comfortable doll’s house, but it is an alternative
preferable to suffocating in a bell jar.
To consider then the stage space envisioned by Williams for Streetcar,
there is an entire home represented onstage. It is unusual – and logistically
complicated – to portray more than one room onstage, but it is here possible and
essential given the size of the Kowalski apartment and the impact of the outside
world on the inner domestic space. The stage directions open by describing the
outside of a building in the French Quarter of New Orleans that “contains two
Chopin, The Awakening, p. 53.
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, p. 100.
17 Chopin, The Awakening, p. 122.
15
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flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both”18.
The set designer of the original Broadway production of 1947, Jo Mielziner,
employed the use of a ‘scrim’, a semi-transparent backing onto which the back
wall of the apartment was painted. “Appliquéd windows, shutters and a
skylight”19 painted onto the material gave the illusion of a wall, while allowing
the audience to see through the home and onto the street behind. Breaking away
from Hauser’s theory of total illusion in the theatre, the painting was not made to
conceal its fictitious nature; “no attempt is made to suggest that the walls and
windows are real”20. The audience is aware of the illusion, the dream-like quality,
to the stage space, as the space is representing not the building as it is, but as it
felt to Blanche.
Considering then the various locations represented onstage at once, light
is extremely important, not only given Blanche’s obsession with it, but also its
stylistic and practical use onstage to highlight to the audience where the action is
taking place. Music too is vital in the translation of emotional states onto the
stage space and is used from the outset and throughout, opening with a tinny
‘blue piano’. In Streetcar, the relationship between stage space and emotional
state is more intricate than that of A Doll’s House as it involves a third space. As in
A Doll’s House, there are the two stage spaces; the real theatre, and the fictitious
set. However, in Streetcar, there is also a third; Blanche’s own inner space, and
the translation of her inner world onto the stage space shall be examined.
Williams, Streetcar, p. 1.
Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 13.
20 Ibid., p. 13.
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19
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As well as the exterior of the building, the set design depicts the interior
of the small apartment. The front door leads straight into the kitchen/dining
room/Blanche’s bedroom. A curtain marks the divide between this ‘room’ and
Stella and Stanley’s bedroom. The one interior door marks the bathroom; the
only place one is afforded any privacy, both within the plot and literally, as it is
the only room of the home not represented onstage. This privacy is only an
illusion however, for Stanley continually disturbs Blanche as she bathes to calm
her nerves. To enter the bathroom too, one must walk through the couple’s
bedroom, resulting in constant traffic in a space considered reasonably intimate.
Blanche and Mitch first meet in this bedroom, Blanche changes here with Stanley
close by, Stanley rapes Blanche in his and Stella’s bed. There is therefore
permeability to this home that ranges from being able to hear voices on the
street and Eunice having keys to the front door to an openness that leaves
Blanche vulnerable. This contrasts greatly with the sense of enclosure in the
Helmers’ apartment, but neither home affords the protagonists any space to
hide. Despite this physical open-plan and generally more tolerant atmosphere
that apparently flows through New Orleans, this representation of the home on
the stage is no more positive than Ibsen’s.
Upon entering the apartment in Scene One, there is an immediate contrast
between it and Belle Reve, which Eunice asks Blanche about once inside the
small apartment that is “sort of messed up right now but when it’s clean it’s real
sweet”21. Belle Reve, Blanche and Stella’s ancestral colonial home – “a great big
21
Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 4.
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place with white columns”22 – is physically in opposition to this apartment. But
the age-old grandeur that Blanche holds in such high regard should not give the
illusion of a happy home. Blanche compares Stella’s home to that of a gothic Poe
tale, but in fact, Belle Reve, was a place of death and ruin. Blanche is surprised by
the conditions she finds her sister in, but she has been living in worse. She tells
Stella, “You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are
pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but death – not always”23. To
again apply Chaudhuri’s theory of ‘spatial intelligibility’, it was the pressure of
this house – as a financial burden and an embodiment of death and out-dated
traditional values – that contributed to Blanche’s breakdown. The impact of that
space upon Blanche was great, and the stage space she now occupies with
Stanley pushes her emotional state to its limits.
The lighting works in tandem with the set design to further establish that
the drama onstage is filtered through Blanche’s subjectivity. The original
performance on Mielziner’s set required “sixty light cues with five electricians in
front and behind the stage”24. One electrician was even assigned specifically to
Blanche, as Mielziner kept her in the light, “not as an obvious ‘follow-spot’”25 but
to highlight her. This is somewhat ironic given that Blanche’s character is
obsessed with keeping her face out of direct light to conceal her age, which, she
believes, inhibits her search for a husband. She associates a husband with safety,
and considering the precarious life she has led between Alan’s suicide and now –
Williams, Streetcar, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 12.
24 Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 14.
25 Ibid., p. 15.
22
23
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without a husband – this belief is justified. Hoping to secure Mitch as this
protector, she too plays up to the male ego. She is a different type of performer to
Nora, more subtle perhaps, but no less effective. And while light is an important
part of this masquerade, it also helps in depicting Blanche’s emotional state on
the stage. The dimming of lights to conceal the interior of the house and
illuminate the outside wall is used often in conjunction with music. When she
discovers that Stella is pregnant in Scene Two, Blanche exits the apartment while
Stanley remains inside. The light stays with Blanche – this is her world – and the
front path is revealed as the two sisters embrace. Given that the action is now
taking place outside, the ‘blue piano’ plays louder, seeping onto the stage. This
allows the audience and reader to follow Blanche from inside to outside; the light
allows the audience to experience what Blanche’s eyes see, it is through her ears
the audience experience music and it is through her emotions that the audience
experience the stage space.
The music, however, is not always simply audible when Blanche enters
the street. Music is also used to audibly represent Blanche’s mind. She associates
certain music with the death of her young husband, and this music is heard by
the audience with Blanche, but not by the other characters. Scene Nine opens
with the following stage direction; “[t]he rapid, feverish polka tune, the
‘Varsouviana’, is heard. The music is in her mind”26. Similar again to Friel’s use of
music, it allows the audience to gain an insight into the chaos, perhaps beyond
linguistic representation, which now preoccupies Blanche’s psyche. The use of
light with this haunting music allows the stage space to represent Blanche’s
26
Williams, Streetcar, p. 83.
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hallucinations. Scene Ten sees the culmination of not only the plot, but also the
subjective realist representative of Blanche’s mind. In the bedroom, as Stanley
advances towards her, Blanche’s knowing reaction suggests it is not the first time
this has happened to her. She is no fool; Stanley is desperate to re-assert his
power as the head of the home. This fear induces hallucinations that have
haunted her for quite some time; “[l]urid reflections appear on the walls around
Blanche. The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form.”27 These
hallucinations mark the most prominent and complex impact of Blanche’s
emotional state on the stage space. Stanley’s anger induced interaction with the
stage space – the smashing of the radio, Blanche’s luggage, and the plates – also
demonstrates this relationship, but with brutish simplicity. These hallucinations,
however, are coupled with “inhuman voices like the cries in a jungle”28, changes
to lighting to highlight a struggling prostitute behind the house, and changes to
the music. The ‘blue piano’ rises, and falls quiet again, until the “hot trumpet and
drums from the Four Deuces sound loudly”29.
Looking for protection, a fugitive of sorts, Blanche in fact ends up in a
home that is “both shelter and prison, security and entrapment”30. Having ‘lost’
Belle Reve, dismissed from her job, kicked out of a low class hotel; Blanche had
nowhere else to go. She is displaced – and trapped – from the outset. The concept
of home for Blanche is less to do with a family and love, but protection and a
desperate desire not to be alone. This home, however, does not protect her. It
Williams, Streetcar, p. 94.
Ibid., p. 95.
29 Ibid., p. 97.
30 Chaudhuri, Staging Place, p. 8.
27
28
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puts her in the line of fire of Stanley, who ultimately destroys her. Blanche’s
dynamic within the stage space in relation to Stanley demonstrates a power
struggle similar to that of Nora and Torvald. The gender roles are the same, but
exaggerated. The heat of the summer in New Orleans – the same city Chopin
based her novel in – has soaked into the apartment and magnified the conflict as
the two challenge each other’s caricatured performances of femininity and
masculinity. The confined stage space and conflicting values force them to act out
their sexuality with excess, propelling them both emotionally apart but
physically towards each other.
The stage spaces of A Doll’s House and Streetcar represent homes that are
a caricature of the very idea of ‘home’; it is suffocating and stifling rather than a
place that offers protection and intimacy. These stage spaces – through the set
design, the lighting and use of music – create a constant sense of surveillance.
This sensation of being watched creates a metatheatricality on stage; the
characters that they play have nowhere to hide from others onstage, but also the
actors on stage have nowhere to hide from the audience. The spaces represented
on the stage – the homes – impact negatively upon the emotional states of both
women, stifling Nora and exposing Blanche, and ultimately forcing them out of
the home. Neither is in the home on the stage as the final curtain closes.
The happiness associated with the marital home is “a decoy to secure
mothers for the race”31. It is an illusion that both Nora and Blanche are deceived
by. However, the alternative is dangerous. From the works cited in this essay,
31
Chopin, The Awakening, p. 123.
16
from Chopin and Plath, to O’Neill and Friel, there seems no plausible positive
alternative to the home. Judging by these works used to illuminate Ibsen and
Williams’s plays, suicide and madness seem to be the only two options for Nora
and Blanche after the doors close behind them. Their endings are inconclusive,
but neither bodes well. Both women were broken by the home, the very space
associated with protection. Nora may leave triumphant, but where will she go
and how will she survive? The river still seems a viable option. And as for
Blanche, it is Stanley’s crime that forces her out of the apartment and into an
asylum and she does not even get to slam the door behind her. The stage space is
therefore an enormous aspect of the drama itself, and also of the characters
themselves, adversely influencing their emotional states to such an extent that
the only viable option is to leave it behind.
17
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Friel, Brian. Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
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Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
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Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. London, Penguin Group,
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Worthen, W.B. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. Ed. W.B. Worthen. 4th
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