In an age of mandarin critical theory, Joan Templeton ignores the basic principle of literary discussion: keep your eye on the text. In her essay on A Doll House (“The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen,” 104 [1989]: 28–40), she tells us much about Ibsen and his critics but little about his play. She should have followed, at the very least, the advice she enjoins on others and examined ‘“the hierarchical oppositions on which … [the work] relies‘” (34). Since “the moral center of A Doll House” in her view is the “conflict … between masculine and feminine,” Templeton should herself have “risen to … [the] challenge” (35, 34) and explained the many forms that the conflict takes.

Having weathered many a “barbaric outrage,” as he called the first rewriting of A Doll House, Ibsen doubtless did not turn over in his grave at the news that in 1989 another angry man is crusading to make Nora relove Torvald. Still, his eyes must have sparkled with their celebrated mischief to see his defenseless spirit forced into the same holy procession with a Catholic poet, a saint, and a pope, all four of them solemnly decrying feminism as they hymn “the moral dignity of womankind.” And if the inventor of this happy, ahistorical quartet thinks that on the subject of women he can place with impunity the great Italian poet alongside the father of the Church, I suggest that he read Joan Ferrante's Woman as Image in Medieval Literature and then take a look at De Civitate Dei, where, in what Elaine Pagels has called “the politics of paradise,” Augustine makes Genesis the proof of God's “placing divine sanction upon the social, legal, and economic machinery of male domination” (Adam, Eve, and the Serpent), the demeaning doctrine that John Paul ii, the fourth member of this motley unit, would continue to force on the world's women. The “moral dignity of womankind” indeed.