THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
105 
of depicting in her own ener¬ 
getic, soulful likeness the modern 
woman of that time as seen in 
Henrik Ibsen’s child-wife Nora 
in A Doll’s House. Two years 
before this event she had married 
Henrik Hennings, and had her¬ 
self become a mother. 
Fru Betty Hennings has 
impersonated eight of Ibsen’s 
women characters, and her name 
will always be connected with the 
history of his plays. Other 
Northern and European ac¬ 
tresses have acted the parts later 
with great success, but in three of 
them, as Nora in A Doll’s House, 
as Hedvig in The Wild Duck, 
and as Fru Alving in Ghosts ■, she 
is unapproachable. 
I he first Ibsen role under- Betty Henxings as Hedvig ix “The Wild 
taken by her was, curiously Duck” 
enough, the poet’s earliest proto¬ 
type of Nora, Selma in The League of Youth, 1876. In spite 
of the smallness of the part — it consists, in fact, of but one 
single outburst — she portrayed a very emancipated personality. 
This figure became indeed Fru Hennings’s own prototype for the Nora 
which she created three years later, 1879. This character marked a 
reaction in Northern literature against a former ideal. In it we find 
the poet enlarging his field of personal freedom to include woman. 
She, too, should be an independent being, no longer the plaything of 
man, but his wife, standing on an equal footing with himself. In 
other words, Nora epitomized the entire programme of the future. 
What joy for an artist to be the first to embody a figure which was 
soon to be known all over the world! She concentrated all her best 
energies on this part. Nature had endowed Fru Hennings with 
Nora’s slight physique, and soon behind the foot-lights all the traits 
of her character were made visible; the spoiled child, “my little song¬ 
bird,” as her husband calls her, the mother, and the emancipated wife, 
fighting for her honor. She changes the tempo in the dialogue con¬ 
stantly; the lines come by fits and starts and vibrating, but 
in the scene in which she becomes a judge of herself and her husband, 
she speaks quietly and with very deep feeling. For Fru 
Hennings this part was the prologue to a large repertoire of 
questioning women, and the nervous fever of life that character- 
