Sighs and Dolls

PICTURE a wealthy suburb of Detroit--sprawling Georgian housefronts set on man-made rolls of lawns smooth as golf greens. Except for the maids and gardeners, the houses are empty during the day--husbands off at work, kids chauffered out of sight. Meantime, the wives play ladies doubles, attend benefit teas, Junior League meetings, fund raising planning sessions, art patrons gatherings, reading groups. The women spend much busy time together, most of it talk time. They talk about the kids, the husbands, the movies in town, in deprecating tones of the latest divorces, in defensive tones of the headlines they don't understand (their turned off kids, their shaky economy, their President who lies through his teeth). The talk rocks back and forth all day like a see-saw gone haywire. Everybody gets off on everybody else and together they screen out the world.

They talked about McGovern in order to discredit him, and they talk about their kids in order to convince themselves that they haven't lost touch. They pigeonhole the headlines to fit their peace loving visions. McGovern or radical student revolt threatened the life styles they needed so badly, to protect--so they blocked the real issues from their field of vision. But they could like, hesitantly, over iced lemonade after tennis, Last Tango in Paris. They only like, you see, what lets them feel "with it" without asking them to change too much. They could watch the movie and never feel obliged to relate themselves to the vision that propelled it. The movie's convention (girl shoots lover when love becomes threatening) protected them from that.

WHAT they've liked a great deal lately is the movie A Doll's House (the Patrick Garland directed version). Tennis placed a sorry second the week the movie hit Detroit. Middle-aged women in laced panties and tasselled socks scurried around the court as if they had just added 'Liberated' to the "Ladies Tennis League." The movie must have been made for them.

Certainly the Women's Movement had never before made it big among the ladies. It had made a brief run through the gauntlet of talk and come out, like all of the other left wing happenings, a safer, milder mannered form of the real thing. The kids would come home starving and the mother would tell them to leave her alone, she was now liberated. Or she would hire an extra maid to set her even freer. For this, A Doll's House was just liberated enough.

The movie retells the story of one of the theatre's (Ibsen's) first angry women. Or at least the first to slam the door on her husband and children and on the Victorian respectability that buttressed a lifetime of security. Having been educated to believe that men were better, Nora is unconscious of her oppression. It is so built into her head that it takes her the whole movie to see it, much less to summon the guts to rebel against it.

ON THE surface Nora is happy with her life. You see her first as the doting wife and ravishing matron of a quite proper bourgeois household. She flutters about as if domesticity were giving her a giddy high. She coos over her babies, she makes a delighted to-do about dressing the Christmas tree and saving pennies when she shops. Set up by her husband, Torvald, as queen of his private life, she manages his home with charm of a born peacemaker. She doesn't question the rightness of the fact that she has to steal sweets behind her husband's back because he disapproves of candy-eating women. And she never questions his need to feel masterful; she does her best to feed it. Nor does she mind being categorized by him as flighty and irresponsible, deficient in the basic equipment of level-headed logic with which men run her world. Her entire existence is cramped in a closet to which Torvald holds a jealous key. But Nora considers herself lucky to be so taken care of.

She is, on the whole, a model prisoner. She tames her will in obedience to her husband's just as she squeezes the extra flesh on her figure into a corset too tight. She practices unnatural posture to fluff out her husband's public pride, and she compromises the sticky edges of her personality to fit into his mold of ideal femininity. To wheedle money out of him, (she lacks, of course, an income of her own) she performs a child's trick of jumping up and down squealing like a partridge distraught. It is a disturbing picture--a woman denied her womanhood cannot grow up. So she resorts to the tactics of the little girl who flatters her father when she craves a new toy.

BUT as Nora continues to chirrup about like a gay lark, you feel anxiety whooshing through her chatter. The smile on her china doll face is somehow out of joint. You begin to see that she is clinging desperately to her innocence, (like an invalid making the best of a sorry confinement.

It takes catastrophe to shake her out of it. In ignorance of the law Nora had committed forgery when she faked her dying father's signature (to save him pain) on a sum of money she borrowed to pay her husband's rest cure bills. It had never occurred to her that the action might be illegal--to her it was a human duty as daughter and wife. But when Torvald discovers her crime, he is blind to its noble aspects. To him, the damage done his honor counts for more than the love that prompted it. Only when he works himself into an apoplectic fit over the prospect of disgrace, only when he screams at Nora for scarring his name, when he banishes her from his children lest her wickedness poison them, only then does Nora feel the contempt which had for so long passed for love between them.

And suddenly, the caged look of animal fear drops from her face as it goes grimly taut. She changes into a severe formless suit and walks out on her husband looking like a nun at war.

WHAT is so objectionable about this filmed version of such a thoroughly non-objectionable play is that the potential feminist points are dragged bodily into plain view and there abused beyond recognition.

When Torvald tells her that he could not, as man, sacrifice his honor for love, there is a silence as if the shot fired at Sarajevo had just been heard the world round. Then Nora turns to the camera with a real smash below the belt, "Millions of women have." She looks like a continental Uncle Sam jabbing his recruiting "We Want You" finger straight into your stomach. Imagine how this fired the moral fervor of the ladies in the suburbs of Detroit.

Somebody here knows how seductive movies are. He knows how their emotional immediacy can inject the message into your bloodstream before you have time to consider the issues raised. And this somebody is laying it extra heavy on the 'liberation' in the movie. It is as if he had just discovered dynamite in Ibsen's ending and blasted it off for real.

But the movie admits no more than a turn of the century secret: Nora's education in a system of sexual power that admitted no equality has cast her identity in a mold of submission. But in conceding this so generously, the movie attaches a seventies' relevance to a decades' old truism.

Torvald, for instance, is limned as the stuffed-shirt the more to accent Nora's radicalism. Torvald is the petty bourgeois straight arrow with no doubts about his superior sex role. But her rejection of empty role-playing is primitive and barely conscious. Her rebellion against what she knows to be wrong does not give her a clue as to what else is right. She sees no farther than the either-or choice confronting her directly: either she submits to the futile prospect of a life spent fortifying the egoism of her man, or she rejects men. Never does she question the system they represent.

CONTEMPORARY feminists are not faced with Nora's dilemma at all, because there have been other routes carved out. From the twenties suffragette reformists to the sixties radical collectivists the consciousness of female deprivation has steadily deepened. Marxist thinking revealed the socio-political contradictions inherent in patriarchal oppression; psychoanalysis uncovered the neurosis wrought by male domination; and recent feminists have recognized that the oppression of women is traceable to a particular form of society.

Unlike Nora, a contemporary feminist realizes the larger dimensions of her rebellion. Unlike Nora, she is not alone in her struggle and not an individualist idealist. She has the force of a history of public outcry to fire her collective faith. And because of this, she can dismiss Nora's dilemma without too much agonizing.

The movie, of course, ignores all this. And in doing so, it obfuscates the radical lesson of the seventies: that the women's problem is rooted in the most profound structures of the social order. The movie appeases the national trauma about women with a sophisticated sleight-of-hand. Not only does it couch its message in 19th century terms, but it refuses even to define Nora in relation to them. It thus disguises the problem and allays it by spreading a veneer of euphoria over it. The ending of the movie is an affirmation of individual female liberation that denies collective liberation. It overlooks the fact that the fight for human equality in the face of a sexist system threatens the substructure of that system. Denying this insight, the movie denies the grounds for women's rejection of the dominant vision of society. Whatever potential bombshells germinate in Nora are hidden when she slips away without ever defining her relationship to her society. And the audience who identifies with her denies decades of change.

The movie conceals more than it reveals. It solicits your empathy with a predicament that most feminists have long since understood as superficial. And then it congratulates your dated insight upon its universality. It indulges in a form of fingerpointing liberalism that stops short of doing anything about the state of being it describes.

The audience who applauds the movie claps for a world which their own situation has rendered irrelevant. It is finally a highly conservative applause. For the message that romanticizes the female rebel, but balks before the women's rebellion, is anathema to any committed feminist. It feeds nothing but a counter-revolutionary fervor, one barren of relevance, one that lowers rather than raises consciousness.

The movie about a woman worth imitating in 1973, a movie that begins to examine the oppression it advertises by showing someone actively dealing with it, the movie that lays bare the nature of the feminist choices that are to be made has yet to appear.