3. First and Foremost An Ideal American Woman? A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, Thanhouser, 1911) Ali Yalgın
The gender politics of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) have been subject to recent reconsideration, which has led to thought-provoking discoveries regarding the iconic play’s role in the women’s rights movement. This includes enquiries as to whether Ibsen was a feminist or not and how the play raises feminist questions regardless of that conundrum (Moi 2021), and the implications of the globalisation of those questions thanks to the actresses who have played Nora over the course of more than a century (Holledge et al. 2016). The Thanhouser Company’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, 1911) gives us important clues as to how the play’s gender politics were perceived and reformulated in the framework of its early globalisation within a Western culture, more specifically the American Progressive Era. Recently re-discovered, this one-reel film is known to be the first stage-to-screen adaptation of the play, with Julia M. Taylor as Nora, Edward Genung as Torvald, and William Russell as Krogstad. On the one hand, the Thanhouser film was not advertised as an adaptation of a “problem play” on the women’s cause, unlike the 1918 adaptation featuring Elsie Ferguson or the 1922 adaptation featuring
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