Ibsen and the Doll's House dictator: how Francoism Curbed Nora

摘要

This essay presents and studies Francoist state censorship of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) from 1940 until 1966. It argues that A Doll's House is a paradigm case to understand, first, how Francoism dealt with emancipatory foreign high culture, and second, how Francoism operated its radical rupture with values and practices of the Spanish Second Republic. Under Franco, Ibsen's play was banned, or rewritten, or contained in several other ways, and Nora's behavior was de-normalized as madness. From the mid-1960s onward, conversely, there are signs that prominent opponents of Francoism, such as Alfonso Sastre and Carmen Martin Gaite, made efforts to rehabilitate Ibsen as a counterfigure to Francoist culture.