Baby, Bunny, Crumb

A friend of mine, when seeing my Four Major Plays by Henrik Ibsen on my desk, said “Oh! I hope you’ll get to read “A Doll’s House.” It’s a very cute play. I beg to differ from her opinion. When starting to read the play, I expected cute things as I was told. I enjoyed reading this play but have formed an opinion of it different from hers. I thought “A Doll’s House” was a saddening play despite of Ibsen’s cheerful diction.
I thought it was interesting that betrayal had begun in the first couple pages of the play. Nora was secretly munching on macaroons and lied to her husband about it later. This sets the tone for the entire play, I think. It is considered betrayal in the story but in contemporary life it would just have been considered a woman doing what she wants in an abusive relationship. Helmer uses names for his wife that make her seem as if she was her child. “Is that my little sky-lark chirping out there?” “Is that my little squirrel frisking about?” This, to me, was not so unfamiliar. In our culture and several others, do we not use such terms toward our loved ones and especially our spouses? In the United States, couples frequently refer to each other as “baby.” Certainly that is not a sign of respect. In Russian culture, loved ones refer to each other as “крошка,” meaning “[bread] crumb,” “кролик,” meaning bunny, or any infinite number of other animals. These terms are not considered demeaning in our societies; I know I use them. In “A Doll’s House,” however, they are given that connotation. Is there a difference between what Ibsen wrote and what people in modern-day life say?