Recently I visited the excellent museum in Ibsen’s appartmemnt in Oslo https://ibsenmt.no/en/henrik-ibsen-home. This is the appartment in which he lived the last 10 years or so of his life, reacquaniting himself with his wife and the city which he had left behind when he began his European travels, living in Italy and Munich. Old habits die hard and he was known throughout the city for his morning beer break when at 11.00 each day he would walk down the hill from this appartment and sit in the Grand Cafe to drink a specially imported Gemran beer and read a newspaper. So regular was he, that tourists and locals alike would make a point of coming out to watch his performance.
Anyway, what struck me was the resemblance of this appartment to that of the Helmers, created in his mind’s eye in Munich. We were told tha the had chosen all the furniture and decor himself, with no reference to his wife, who was installed, very much on his terms, rather as Nora is in Doll’s House.
The tour began in a dark entrance hall -plenty big enough to shift one’s outdoor clothes before netering a sequence of interconnected rooms which can flow around one into another with no need to return to the hall.
The furnishing is heavy and smothering as we move from study into a reception room for guests. The study opens into the hall and into this reception room. 
It is a light and airy room looking over a park in which sits the Norwegian Royal Palace. The reception room, however is perhaps more interesting, in terms of the play: 
There’s even a chaise longue for the stocking scene. The door to the study can be locked from this side, as in the play and it is easy to visualise Nora and ranke in here while Helmer sits working… And there’s a great stove: 
Through a pair of sliding door, we enter the othe rroom with a door to the entrance hall, In here there is a piano, not played by Ibsen but probably plated by his friend the composer Edvard Grieg who was known to visit. The point is that all good bourgeois homes had pianos, and this appartment is a bourgeois as they come. 
The flooring is hand poainted linoleum rahte rthan carpet – absolutely state of the art in 1890s Oslo.
Then the dining room and a library – his wife’s favourite room and the room in which she died. Her bedroom is sparsely furnished and a little sad, His has a balcony and is the smaller of the two – it was good to hear tha this famous last words: ‘on the contrary…’ were spoken when apparently in a coma as a response to a nurse suggesting tha the was looking a little better. He died the next day. 
There was a small bedroom for the live in servant, who otherwise made do with the kitchen, and most modern of all, a bathroom with bathtub and running water! The lavatory was outside the flat in the close. 
My overwhelming feeling was the degree to which this appartment mirrored that of the Helmers. Over-furnished by a dominant male figure and having the fluid movement which is apparent in the play. It made me question my assumptions about Ibsne and his writing in the play. If he were really so criticasl of the bourgeois patriarchy, why did he recreate it to this extent when he returned to Norway a famous writer? It;s not to say that his apparent support for the rights of the indivdual to determine their own outcomes is false, but it did seem to support his assertion that he was not writing a play about the women’s movement in itself.
There was a cracking little video in the attached museum:
English Teaching Resources 