SOURCE: Doloff, Steven. “Ibsen's A Doll's House and ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 2 (winter 1994): 111-14.

In the following essay, Doloff finds similarities in setting, plot, symbol, and character between Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Joyce's story, “The Dead.”

Richard Ellmann notes in passing in James Joyce, that while Joyce seemed to think little of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House,¹ he may have transposed into “The Dead” the play's plot device of a husband discovering that his doll-like wife has a consciousness of her own (JJII [James Joyce, 1982] 135n). Ellmann later offers biographical data from the lives of Joyce and Nora as the primary source material for the couple and the setting in Joyce's story (JJII 243-53). He also cites as a source for the final scene in “The Dead” a specific episode in the George Moore novel Vain Fortune (JJII 250). Ellmann, however, may have overlooked the...