Back in 1879, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen shocked society with his play "A Doll's House," in which one of the chief characters, Nora Helmer, walks out not just on her husband, but on their three young children as well.
The idea that a woman could do such a thing provoked what James McFarlane, in an introduction to four of Ibsen's plays, described as "a storm of outraged controversy that penetrated far beyond the confines of the theater proper into the leader (opinion) columns of the Western press and the drawing rooms of polite society."
What prompted Nora's exit? The realization that her husband, Torvald, had put his "honor," which is to say his standing in society, above his love for her. And by implication, since her children are the product of a union that was in her view not a real marriage, they are not hers.
This was so transgressive that, much to his disgust, Ibsen was forced to provide a different ending for German theaters. In that ending, while Nora wants to leave her husband, she realizes she can't leave her children and the play ends with Torvald apparently then believing reconciliation is possible.
Over 100 years later, Zadie Smith's much-praised first novel, "White Teeth," opens with one of her main characters, Archie Jones, attempting suicide because his wife Ophelia recently divorced him.
Why is this such a humiliation for Archie?
"Generally," Smith's unnamed narrator tells us, "women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past."
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